Every Decision is a Bet : Life is poker not chess - 2

Abridged and adapted from Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

 

Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary defines ‘bet’ as ‘a choice made by thinking about what will probably happen’. ‘To risk losing (something) when you try to do or achieve something’ and ‘to make decisions that are based on the belief that something will happen or is true’.

These definitions often overlooked the border aspects of betting: choice, probability, risk, decision, belief. By this definition betting doesn’t have to take place only in a casino or against somebody else.

We routinely decide among alternatives, put resources at risk, assess the likelihood of different outcomes and consider what it is that we value. Every decision commits us to some course of action that, by definition, eliminates acting on other alternatives. All such decisions are bets. Not placing a bet on something is, itself a bet.

Choosing to go to the movies means that we are choosing to not do all other things with our time. If we accept a job offer, we are also choosing to foreclose all other alternatives.  There is always an opportunity cost in choosing one path over others. This is betting in action.

The betting elements of decisions - choice, probability, risk etc. are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold..) involves a choice about the best use of our financial resources.

We don’t think of our parenting choices as bets but they are. We want our children to be happy, productive adults when we send them out into the world. Whenever we make a parenting choice (about discipline, nutrition, parenting philosophy, where to live etc.), we are betting that our choice will achieve the future we want for our children.

Job and relocation decisions are bets. Sales negotiations and contracts are bets. Buying a house is a bet. Ordering the chicken instead of vegetables is a bet. Everything is a bet.

Most bets are bets against ourselves

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. We are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. Whenever we make a choice we are betting on a potential future. We are betting that the future version of us that results from the decisions we make will be better off. At stake in a decision is that the return to us (measured in money, time, happiness, health or whatever we value) will be greater than what we are giving up by betting against the other alternative future versions of us.

But, how can we be sure that we are choosing the alternative that is best for us? What if another alternative would bring us more happiness, satisfaction or money? The answer, of course, is we can’t be sure. Things outside our control (luck) can influence the result. The futures we imagine are merely possible. They haven’t happened yet. We can only make our best guess, given what we know and don’t know, at what the future will look like. When we decide, we are betting whatever we value on one set of possible and uncertain futures. That is where the risk is.

Poker players live in a world where that risk is made explicit. They can get comfortable with uncertainty because they put it up front in their decisions. Ignoring the risk and uncertainty in every decision might make us feel better in the short run, but the cost to the quality of our decision making can be immense. If we can find ways to be more comfortable with uncertainty, we can see the world more accurately and be better for it. 

The limits of using GDP

Keya Acharya in The Wire.In


Most countries swear by it. It is cited by newspapers, banks and business. Almost all prominent world political leaders have used the GDP (gross domestic product) to show their countries’ well-being. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and finance minister Arun Jaitley repeatedly use India’s apparently rising GDP to point to the country’s progress and as a defence tool against criticism.

GDP measures the monetary value of goods and services produced by a country, mostly for sale in markets. Though the concept had earlier beginnings, national income and a nation’s products were first created by American Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets of the US Department of Commerce in 1934, born due to the information gaps that led to the Great Depression.

By the 1940s, wartime planning led John Maynard Keynes of the British Treasury and Henry Morgenthau Jr. of the US Treasury to go further and develop the metric of measurement we now know as GDP.

The question now is, is the concept still relevant in today’s situation? There have been criticisms for decades, from prominent economists and academics, that GDP is inadequate in measuring development, not least of all by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz together with Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi in their 2010 report Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up.

Stiglitz, Sen et al say that statistical concepts in GDP may be correct, but the system is fundamentally flawed in that is does not measure a country’s income distribution or the well-being of its citizens. They take the case of traffic jams (page 3 of their book’s summary) as an example: GDP may rise because of increased sale of cars and gasoline but does not take into account the impact of the overuse of these on the quality of life.

The case of Delhi’s air pollution, and its major connection to its use of diesel could well be an example for us. Six years ago, a World Bank report put India’s costs of air pollution and environmental destruction at $80 billion per year; the costs could well have increased in the intervening years. Stiglitz, Sen themselves have said that statistical measures which ignore air pollution will be an inaccurate estimate of citizen’s well-being.

Indeed, even Simon Kuznets, the original founder, had said over fifty years ago that to assess a nation’s welfare, economists need to ask not how much the economy is growing, but what is growing and for whom, points out Canadian political scientist Ronald Colman (co-architect of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index).

Robert Costanza of Australian National University says GDP ignores social costs, environmental degradation, income-inequality, something even the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) head of national accounts, Francois Lequiller concurs.

The WEF has a new term called inclusive development index, to measure a country’s progress. In January 2018, India ranked 62nd out of 74 emerging economies in its development index, beaten by Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan in its region for development progress.

Colman outlines the enormous failure of the GDP to account for the accelerating trends of resource depletion, species extinctions and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The last 12 years have been the hottest in millennia; sea-levels will rise by a metre by 2100; forests have been decimated and overhunted, disappearing by 1% per year whilst 40% of the world’s tropical forests have already disappeared, he says. The impacts of these existing threats do not reflect in the GDP.

And yet, in spite of this wide array of prominent criticism by noted scholars, an alternative index of economic and overall well-being has not become mainstream. Stiglitz and Sen’s economic critique was commissioned by French President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2009; yet the 2015 Paris Agreement, signed in France and deemed a milestone in the global agreement on climate change mitigation measures by 195 countries, has no inclusion of anything that offers an alternative GDP system.

At an international gathering of journalists in Italy, late November 2017, which saw a panel of economic experts from around the world discussing alternative GDP issues, I asked American physicist Fritjof Capra, director of the Centre for Ecoliteracy at Berkeley, US, why there was such a gaping lack of the inclusion of alternative GDP measures in the Paris Agreement. Capra believed that the lack of civil society participation in this particular field was a major reason for its absence. Costanza said that the habit was hard to kick, equating the GDP system to an ‘addiction’, difficult to erase.

Colman believes the fundamental reason for an alternative measurement system not finding its rightful place is that it ‘threatens the short-term economic base’: “This is unpalatable in the political arena; who is willing to challenge this?” he asks. He does agree that civil society needs to be far more engaged to displace GDP as fundamental to measuring a country’s progress.

Costanza has looked at the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an alternative system. The SDGs however, are not compulsory policy practice, merely a persuasion for nations to follow. They are also complex in their interrelatedness, making it all the more difficult to present as a binding guideline. Integrating some of these development measures into the current GDP system is not possible, says Colman.

The complexity is indeed enormous, which is one reason for there not being any unity amongst economists in pushing what should be a crucial system for gauging development.

Obviously then, we need to make ecological and development economics a compulsory, system for nations to follow. Some have already done it (New Zealand, Bhutan, UK; China has re-started green growth research). It needs political will and push.

Governments might well find their own interests served in moving to an alternative GDP and striking out on a new path.

The Age of Perversion

Tabish Khair 

 

We exist in a world where capital has become an obsession. And we are the perverts of free-floating ‘god-like’ capital

The period we are living through has been dubbed an Age of Fundamentalism, of Extremism, of Intolerance, etc. These are all appropriate descriptions. But if I had to choose a tag, I would call it the Age of Perversion.


An overbearing perversion

I do not use ‘perversion’ in its ordinary sense of ‘deviation from normal or accepted behaviour’. Simple deviation is not sufficient (and not necessarily bad) if it is not of an obsessive nature. What characterises a pervert is not the choice of a different option, but an obsession with only that option. The hallmark of an overbearing perversion is that no matter what one says, the pervert sees it only in terms of his/her obsession. Examples? Here you go.

A Muslim girl is raped in a Hindu temple, which causes justified outrage in many Hindu circles, but seems to leave some circles untouched. These miraculously untouched people not only make excuses but even point a finger (without any evidence) at Muslims, or, what they associate with Muslims, Pakistan. A post on Facebook states that Muslim clerics rape with impunity in their institutions. Apart from the wide sweep of its xenophobic purview — and I say so without denying that there can be serious problems in all male-controlled institutions, whether Hindu, Muslim or non-religious — I am shaken by the obsession of the person. No matter what the evidence, such a person can only blame ‘Muslims’. This is a perversion.

Versions of this exist elsewhere too. Go online and look at what many Islamists — who form only a small percentage of Muslims, just as Bhakts form only a small percentage of Hindus — have to say about the U.S., the Central Intelligence Agency, or Israel. No matter what happens, they point a finger at one or all of these three usual suspects. As their easy accusation is far in excess of any evidence, what this indicates is a perversion. Or look at hardcore Republicans: they are capable of blaming even the sinking of the Titanic on either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or both! This too is a perversion.

What has happened to so many people in our age? Why has there been a decided increase in what can only be seen as obsessive perversions?

One can point to the nature of the Internet — the easy circulation of ‘alternative facts’, unmediated by any real expertise and effective counterchecking. But this is more symptom than explanation. Surely, there is something in us as an age that predisposes us towards such obsessive perversions, so that we seek on the Internet (and elsewhere) only ‘facts’ that suit our singular version of the complex reality out there? What is this ‘something’? Why has it become so extensive that it is changing the political character of entire countries?


The nature of capital

The main explanation is the nature of capital, especially now, when capital is no longer embedded, as it was under classical capitalism, in production and labour. The ‘freer’ capital gets from human labour, the more of an obsession it becomes. If 19th century critics (and even some conservative defenders) of capitalism had warned against the tendency of capital to impoverish other human values and relations, then, today, we have crossed that threshold. Everything has been ‘capitalised’, and capital, unlike money, is no longer just a medium of exchange or a social relation. It seems to be all there is under neo-liberalism. It seems to exist on its own. It is everywhere and nowhere. It reproduces itself. It dominates everything else. It obsesses.

This fact lurks under the surface of governmental actions in all countries, ranging from the U.S. and India to China. Governments defend, primarily, the interests of capital, even by cutting services and causing problems to citizens. Donald Trump’s government is currently being accused of running up trillions in deficit by providing huge tax cuts to the top 5%, and then trying to balance that deficit by cutting necessary services available to the other 95%. But versions of this ‘balancing’ act exist in almost every country in the world: as long as free-floating ‘capital’ is happy, governments can live with their (dirty) consciences, and probably win the next election!

We exist in a world where capital — diminishingly connected to labour and production and no longer primarily a medium of exchange — has become an obsession. It has reduced everything else, usurped the world. We are the perverts of free-floating ‘god-like’ capital. And this is our ‘natural’ state; we cannot really question it. We internalise its structures — and transpose them. Is it a surprise, then, that so many of us succumb to placebo perversions?

The other, smaller explanation is the nature of politics today. Given the kind of world we live in, politicians, operating on quasi-democratic platforms, prefer to cater to the perversions of their voters, which are easier to use as enticement: offer the pervert a titillating picture of his perversion, and you can lead him by the nose. Hence, we have politicians who put all the blame on one obsession – the CIA, Israel, Iran, Russia, Nehru, the Pope, immigrants, Muslims.

Tony Blair on Brexit

Tony Blair


2018 will be the year when the fate of Brexit and thus of Britain will be decided. 2017 was too early in the negotiation. By 2019, it will be too late.

Realistically, 2018 will be the last chance to secure a say on whether the new relationship proposed with Europe is better than the existing one. And to insist that the ‘deal’ contains the necessary detail to make the say meaningful.

Today we publish ‘What We Now Know’, what we have learnt about Brexit since 23rd June 2016.

I make no secret of my desire that Britain stays in the European Union. This is the most important decision we have taken as a nation since the Second World War. It decides the destiny and fortunes of our children for years to come. And I believe passionately that by exiting the powerful regional bloc of countries on our doorstep, to whom we are linked physically by the Channel Tunnel, commercially by the Single Market, historically by myriad ancient ties of culture and civilisation, and politically by the necessity of alliance in an era which will be dominated by the USA in the West and China and India in the East, we are making an error the contemporary world cannot understand and the generations of the future will not forgive.

But the campaign in the first instance is not to reverse the decision; but to claim the right to change our minds once we see the terms of the new relationship.

No one disputes the 2016 vote. And no one disputes that if it stands as the expression of British opinion, we will leave.

The issue is whether as facts emerge, as the negotiation proceeds and we have clarity over the alternative to present membership of the EU, we have the right to change our mind; whether the ‘will of the people’ – this much abused phrase - is deemed immutable or is permitted to mutate as our perception of reality becomes better informed. 

When we voted in 2016, we knew we were voting against our present membership of the European Union, but not what the future relationship with Europe would be.

It was like having a General Election in which the question is ‘Do You Like the Government’? If that were the question, few incumbent Governments would be re-elected.

Once we know the alternative, we should be entitled to think again, either through Parliament or an election or through a fresh referendum, which will, of course, not be a re-run of the first because it will involve this time a choice based on knowledge of the alternative to existing EU membership.

Over the past months the Brexit landscape – hitherto obscured in the fog of claim and counter claim – is being illuminated.

We have now had the Budget prediction that, due to Brexit, economic growth is going to be below expectation not just this year but averaging 1.5% for the next 5 years in a row. This has not happened for over 30 years. This is in addition to the fall in our currency, fall in living standards and now the first falls in employment.

Concomitant with that was the admission that we would have less and not more to spend on the NHS and that, for the next years at least, we will not be getting money back from Europe but, rather, giving a large sum to it.

Then there was the Northern Ireland negotiation. The claim the issue is now ‘resolved’ is risible. It is merely postponed. Instead, the negotiation revealed the nature of the real choices we face and the tension at the heart of the Government’s negotiating position.

In essence, there are 4 options in approaching the Brexit negotiation:

To re-think and stay, best done in a reformed Europe, where we use the Brexit vote as leverage to achieve reform.

To exit the political structures of the EU, but stay in the economic structures ie the Single Market and Customs Union.

To exit both the political and the economic structures of Europe but try to negotiate a bespoke deal which recreates the existing economic benefits and keeps us close to Europe politically.

To exit both structures, to make a virtue of leaving, to negotiate a basic Free Trade Agreement and market ourselves as ‘Not Europe’.

Here is the rub: all the last three options are Brexit. But they have vastly different impacts and outcomes.

The Government has ruled out option 2, is seeking to negotiate option 3, but a substantial part of the Tory Party is prepared to go for option 4.

The problem with option 3 is that this is simply not negotiable without major concessions which make a mockery of the case for leaving.

The problem with option 4 is that it would involve significant economic pain as we adjust our economy to the new terms of trade.

It is absurd to say that it is undemocratic to demand that the people be free to have a say on what the final deal is, given the wide disparity in the forms of Brexit and their consequences.

How can we assess the true ‘will of the people’ before we know what the alternative to present EU membership looks like given that the alternatives have such different effects?

Northern Ireland is a metaphor for the central Dilemma of this negotiation: we are either in the Single Market and Customs Union; or we will have a Hard Border and Hard Brexit.

It is the difference between the status of Norway and that of Canada. In the Norway case, there is full access to the Single Market but with its obligations, including freedom of movement.

In the case of Canada, there is a standard FTA with considerable easing of trade in goods but with border checks and without anything like the services access of the Single Market.

This really is a zero sum game: the nearer the Norway option, the more the obligations; the nearer the Canada option, the less the access.

It is not a matter of who is the toughest negotiator. The Dilemma flows naturally from the way the Single Market was created. It is a unique trading area with a single system of regulation and a single system of arbitration namely the ECJ.

The whole point of it is that it is not a FTA. It is qualitatively different.

So there is no way you can say I want to be out of its rules, but in its advantages.

The Single Market is one game; a FTA is another.

Think of it in this way. Suppose the English FA wants to arrange a football match with France. There are many things to negotiate about: the venue, the timing, the price of the tickets etc.

But suppose the FA then said to their French counterparts, we also want to negotiate whether we have 15 players on our team not 11. The French would say sorry but you have the wrong address, talk to the Rugby Federation.

Yet this seems to be the negotiating position of the Government.

David Davis asserts we will leave the Single Market and Customs Union but replicate ‘the exact same benefits’ in a new FTA.

Boris Johnson talks of diverging from Europe’s regulation but having frictionless border trade and full access to Europe’s services market.

The PM insists we will have the most comprehensive trade deal ever, weirdly forgetting we already have it.

Philip Hammond is arguing for close alignment to Europe after Brexit.

Meanwhile Liam Fox is cheerfully talking up the trade deals we will make once we are out of the Customs Union and away from that alignment.

Of course the FTA can be far reaching, though the more it covers the more complicated the negotiation and the greater the regulatory alignment.

But it can never replicate the ‘exact same benefits’ of the Single Market; not without obedience to its obligations and regulation.

The concessions we were rightly forced to make in respect of Northern Ireland express and expose the Dilemma.

If we want freedom of movement of people across the border on the island of Ireland, we can do it but only by effectively abandoning border controls on migration. So someone could move from mainland Europe to Dublin to Belfast to Liverpool without any check.

It is often said by Brexiteers that Norway and Sweden don't have a hard border for the movement of people. It is true. But that is because Norway is part of the Single Market; and so accepts freedom of movement.

In any event, it is now virtually conceded that Britain needs the majority of the European migrant workers and as our study shows, Brexit is already seriously harming recruitment in vital sectors, including the NHS.

If we want free movement of goods, then Northern Ireland will have to be in a relationship with the EU where the rules of the Customs Union still apply.

But if we do that, then how can the UK be out of it?

This is the conundrum we will face across the board. How will financial services and other sectors be able to trade freely in Europe without regulatory alignment?

Suppose Europe even agrees to do this on a ‘pick and choose’ basis, the ‘alignment’ they will demand will be alignment with Europe’s rules.

And how will disputes in these circumstances be arbitrated other than through the involvement of the ECJ?

Once this central Dilemma becomes manifest during the negotiation, the split in the Government will re-emerge.

The PM will still be in favour of Option 3, making the concessions and trying to present them as consistent with ‘taking back control’.

The true-believer Leavers will recognise the concessions contradict the essential reasons for leaving and will be in favour of then moving to option 4.

The British Civil Service is – or at least was in my time- probably the best in Europe. The problem isn't with the negotiators but with the negotiation.

The risk is that we end up with the worst of all worlds. We muddle along, alternating between options 3 and 4, depending on what part of the Tory Party is in the ascendency, try to ‘leave’ without really leaving, with a patchwork of arrangements which allows the Government to claim Brexit has been done; but which in reality only mean we have lost our seat at the table of rule-making.

This would be a grim outcome for the country.

And it is where the Labour Party faces its own challenge.

I would like the Labour Party to be on the high ground of progressive politics, explaining why membership of the European Union is right as a matter of principle, for profound political as well as economic reasons.

I disagree with our present position strategically.

But even tactically, it is mistaken.

First, because the Labour Party is saying that we too would do Brexit, we cannot attack its vast distractive impact. Labour could mount such a powerful assault on the Government’s record from the appalling state of the NHS to crime, which through neglect and failure to support the police is on the rise again, if we were saying to the country: here's the agenda which could be delivered for the people were not for the fact that all the energies of Government and substantial amounts of cash are devoted to Brexit.

And, second, it puts us in a vulnerable position when the Government concludes ‘the deal’ some time in 2018.

My bet is that the Government will try to negotiate an agreement which leaves much detail still to negotiate, because there is no way round the Dilemma. They will bank some low hanging fruit possibly e.g. tariff free access for goods (leaving for later non tariff issues). For Europe since they have a whacking great surplus with Britain on goods, this is a no-brainer.

But on access for services, which have driven most of our export growth over the last 20 years, are 70% of our economy, and where we have the surplus, we will be blocked without major concessions. Unless the Government has found some miraculous way round the Dilemma, they will probably try to emulate the December Northern Ireland ‘agreement’ and have some general headings – more aspiration than detail - with a lot to negotiate after March 2019 during the transitional period where Britain will continue to abide by the rules of the Single Market.

The Government will then say it is this deal or no deal and Labour will be left arguing that they would be better negotiators. This isn't credible.

And here Labour has its own ‘cake and eat it’ phrases. The Shadow Chancellor says we will not be in ‘the’ Single Market but ‘a’ Single Market.

The Shadow Industry Minister talks of keeping the benefits of the Customs Union agreements but still being free to negotiate our own trade deals.

This is confusing terrain on which to fight.

Far better to fight for the right for the country to re-think, demand that we know the full details of the new relationship before we quit the old one, go to the high ground on opposing Brexit and go after the Tories for their failures to tackle the country’s real challenges.

Make Brexit the Tory Brexit.

Make them own it 100%.

Show people why Brexit isn't and never was the answer.

Open up the dialogue with European leaders about reforming Europe, a dialogue they're more than willing to have now because they realise Brexit also damages Europe economically and politically.

At every PMQs nail each myth of the Brexit campaign, say why the Tory divisions are weakening our country - something only credible if we are opposed to Brexit not advocating a different Brexit, and challenge the whole farce head on of a Prime Minister leading our nation in a direction which even today she can't bring herself to say she would vote for.

If we do leave Europe, the governing mind will have been that of the Tory right. But, if Labour continues to go along with Brexit and insists on leaving the Single Market, the handmaiden of Brexit will have been the timidity of Labour.

It's not Paul Nuttall's fault he made a mistake about Hillsborough

Mark Steel in The Independent


Some people have criticised the Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, as his website claimed he lost a “personal friend” at Hillsborough, but now he accepts that isn’t true. But we should be understanding, as life can be deeply unsettling for sufferers of “Deceased Close Personal Friend/Someone I Vaguely Knew Back-to-Front Syndrome”.

It must be an awful ordeal as he breaks down every time he reads an obituary, crying, “oh no, Gabriel Santana Lopez has died, he was a close personal friend”, until it’s pointed out he was a 93-year-old Chilean jazz clarinettist who Paul had never heard of, then he calms down for a while.

We should hope he never risks seeing a Shakespeare play. He’ll be devastated for weeks, writing, “I can’t believe Tiberius has been poisoned”, on his website until he’s reminded it was a play and he had no idea who that is.

Walking through graveyards must be a dreadful trial, as he stops by each gravestone, sobbing “oh no, not Beloved Amy Chadwick 1843-1911, she was a close personal friend. Why, why, why?”

Paul’s explanation for the false claim of personal friendship is he never said it in the first place, it was just on his website. This seems reasonable, as you can hardly be expected to keep track of things you say on your own website.

My one probably says I played in the water polo final at the Olympics and I’ve got a license to pilot rockets – I’m too busy to check.

This is an exciting development in the art of responding to a suspicion you’ve said something untrue. Instead of apologising or saying you were under stress, you claim it wasn’t really you who said it. The next stage will be for a politician to say “I reject the charge that I lied because those words I said weren’t mine. They were actually someone else’s words and they were in my mouth, and I had no idea they were being said by me at the time I said them.”

Or maybe Ukip allow people to write stuff on websites by guesswork, without the person whose website it is having any say, so a random person may write “Douglas Carswell speaks Portuguese and keeps llamas” because there’s always a chance they’ll be right.

It’s also possible that when the person who writes Paul’s website applied for the job, they claimed they were well qualified as they were his close personal friend, even though they’d only met him once, in a queue at a tweed jacket store in Bootle.

Paul also claims he was at Hillsborough on the day of the tragedy, and maybe he was. But teachers, friends and colleagues of his say they can’t recall him ever mentioning he was there at the time. The most likely explanation is he must have been at other places as well that day, and he can’t be expected to have recalled being in a major tragedy and popping to the Co-op for some milk.

Another reason Paul wouldn’t have been keen to mention his presence there that day is Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor, has said he’s “sick to death” of hearing about Hillsborough. So the last thing Paul would want is to annoy his party’s donor by mentioning he’d been there.

The reason the Ukip donor was fed up of Hillsborough, he said, is “It was a disaster and that’s it” and “milking a tragedy forever is sick”.

It’s possible the reason Arron Banks is sick of hearing about disasters is that Paul Nuttall tells him every day about all the close personal friends he lost on the Titanic and poor Arron has finally had enough.

But even though we can’t know whether Paul was there, it might not matter any more. Because this is the age of the alternative fact, when there’s no embarrassment about getting caught having lied. Farage can claim the Health Service is crippled by Aids tourists, Boris can claim leaving the EU will bring £350m a week to the NHS, and when they’re told this isn’t true, they’ll say “Well no, the reason the records show the opposite is true to what I claimed, is I lied. But that doesn’t alter the truth about the thing I made up.”

In this new world, if you disprove nonsense that’s been made up, that goes to show you’re part of the elite, with your fancy facts and la-di-da evidence.

So down-to-earth types like Paul Nuttall are at last free to put forward the working man’s case. Now, if he likes, he can write on his website that the Prime Minister of Bulgaria has been creeping round Hampshire, encouraging Bulgarians to shave British cats and smoke their fur as a legal high, or that a study has proved Muslims are thirty per cent gelignite which is why they feel the need to explode.

Or that unicorns died out because they were banned by the EU on grounds of health and safety for being too pointy.

He can clarify his outlook by writing “I object strongly to the charge that my views are in any way racist, as I was a black man for six years while I was a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, including three months as a Rastafarian until my dreadlocks got caught in the propellers.”

None of it matters, because we’re at last liberated from the stifling constraints of truth. Rather than apologise, Paul Nuttall should make the most of this new situation, and before the election in Stoke claim he’s always felt connected to the area, since he was at the great Stoke pottery disaster of 1809, in which he lost a personal friend whose head got stuck in a Wedgwood vase.

Brexit - An Alternative Narrative

 John Pilger in The Hindu

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.

This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the “remain” campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.


Nothing but blackmail

A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain’s ancien regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.
 
Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East — first Iraq, now Syria — are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the European Union and NATO. Before that, there was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

The pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A nineteenth century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centrepiece of modern “globalisation”, with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor: its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour; its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants. All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On 23 June, the British said no more.

The London class

The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even “cool”. What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as “neoliberalism”.

The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor. In Britain today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families where one member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than 600,000 residents of Britain’s second city, Greater Manchester, are, reports a study, “experiencing the effects of extreme poverty” and 1.6 million are slipping into penury.

Little of this social catastrophe is acknowledged in the bourgeois controlled media, notably the Oxbridge dominated BBC. During the referendum campaign, almost no insightful analysis was allowed to intrude upon the clichéd hysteria about “leaving Europe”, as if Britain was about to be towed in hostile currents somewhere north of Iceland.

On the morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed politicians to his studio as old chums. “Well,” he said to “Lord” Peter Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, “why do these people want it so badly?” The “these people” are the majority of Britons.

The wealthy war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson “European” class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian once described Mr. Blair as “mystical” and has been true to his “project” of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses. “Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain”, said the headline over his full-page piece. The “we” was unexplained but understood — just as “these people” is understood. “The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more,” wrote Mr. Kettle. “…the verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again.”

The kind of ruthlessness Mr. Kettle longs for is found in Greece, a country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of post-modernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought “better terms” with a venal status quo in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.

Perpetual forgetfulness

On Friday, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the BBC if he would pay tribute to the departed Mr. Cameron, his comrade in the “remain” campaign. Mr. Corbyn fulsomely praised Mr. Cameron’s “dignity” and noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology to the Irish families of the dead of Bloody Sunday. He said nothing about Mr. Cameron’s divisiveness, his brutal austerity policies, his lies about “protecting” the Health Service. Neither did he remind people of the war mongering of the Cameron government: the dispatch of British special forces to Libya and British bomb aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the beckoning of world war three.

In the week of the referendum vote, no British politician and, to my knowledge, no journalist referred to Vladimir Putin’s speech in St. Petersburg commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. The Soviet victory — at a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German forces — won the Second World War.

Mr. Putin likened the current frenzied build up of NATO troops and war material on Russia’s western borders to the Third Reich’s Operation Barbarossa. NATO’s exercises in Poland were the biggest since the Nazi invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia, presumably with nuclear weapons. On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering “peace and security” if they voted to leave the EU. The millions who ignored him and Mr. Cameron, Mr. Osborne, Mr. Corbyn, Mr. Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.

From football to steel, we don’t have to be slaves to the market

Will Hutton in The Guardian


The southern corner of Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, reserved for fans from visiting teams, was eerily empty as the game against the Bundesliga champions, Bayern Munich, began last week. Instead, there was a banner. “£64 for a ticket. But without fans football is not worth a penny,” it read. After five minutes, the Bayern Munich fans cascaded into the stands to loud applause from the 60,000-strong home crowd. Everyone knew a powerful point had been made.

Except Arsenal do have a huge fan base and they do pay £64 a ticket because that is the price the market will bear. The clapping against blind market forces came as much from the management consultants, newspaper columnists, media multimillionaires, ex-central bankers and university vice-chancellors who now constitute Arsenal’s home base, as much as painters, plumbers and assembly line workers.

Yet everyone was united in understanding the Germans’ protest. Football has to be more than a money machine. Passion for a club is part of an idea of “we” – a collective identity rooted in place, culture and history – that defines us as men and women. £64 tickets redefine the Arsenal or Bayern Munich “we” as those with the capacity to pay.

Britain in 2015 is in a crisis about who the British “we” are at every level. Decades of being told that there is nothing to be done about the march of global market forces has denuded us of the possibility of acting together to shape a world that we want, whether it’s the character of our football clubs or our manufacturing base.

The same day that the Arsenal crowd was clapping the Bayern Munich fans, Tata Steel announced it was mothballing its steel plants in Scotland and Teesside. Over the last fortnight, Redcar’s steel mill has been shut as Thai owner SSI has gone into receivership, while manufacturing company Caparo is liquidating its foundry division in Scunthorpe. A pivotal component of our manufacturing sector, with incalculable effects across the supply chain, is being shut.

Yet when questioned, business secretary Sajid Javid’s trump answer is that the British government does not control the world steel price. He will, of course, do everything he can to soften the blow and help unemployed steel workers retrain or start their own businesses. But the message is unambiguous. Vast, uncontrollable market forces are at work. The government will not even raise the matter of how China exports steel to Britain at below the cost of production and intensifies the crisis.

It becomes purposeless to talk about what “we” might do because there are no tools for “us” to use. The new world is one in which each individual must look after her or himself. Even the trade unions and new Labour leadership, aghast at the scale of the job losses, do not have a plausible alternative – except to plead that the £9m proposed support package for unemployed steel workers in Scunthorpe is paltry.

There could have been, and still are, alternatives, but they are predicated on a conception of “we” resisted by right and left. A stronger steel industry, more capable of riding out this crisis, could have been created by more engagement with Europe and refashioning the ecosystem in which production takes place.

But since the collapse of Britain’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, governments of all hues have abjured any attempt to keep the pound stable and competitive, either pegging sterling against the euro and dollar or even – perish the thought – joining the euro. The pound, except for a short period after the banking crisis, has been systematically overvalued for a generation. Manufacturing production has stagnated as imports have soared. The trade deficit in goods in 2014 was a stunning £120bn, or some 7% of GDP. Yet dissociating Britain from all European attempts to manage currency movements and keeping the independent pound floating is as widely praised by John McDonnell on the left as John Redwood on the right. A devastated manufacturing sector, and now the crisis in the steel industry, is too rarely mentioned as part of the price. Alongside pegging the exchange rate should have been a determined effort to develop areas of industrial strength, with government and business working closely as co-creators. Yet even such a relationship – close to unthinkable in a British context – would have needed business keen on creating value rather than a high share price and a government setting some ambitious targets backed by spending the necessary billions.

Britain, for example, could have had a brilliant civil nuclear industry, a vibrant aerospace sector, the fastest growing windfarm industry, clusters of hi-tech business all over the country – and a hi-tech steel industry. Instead it is no better than a mendicant subcontractor. It does not have a share stake in Airbus, while France and China are building our nuclear power stations. Our green industries, once the fastest growing in Europe, are shutting. Only banks and hedge funds are protected and nurtured in a vigorous, uncompromising industrial policy, but they don’t buy much steel. They are the “we” behind which even ultra-libertarian Sajid Javid will throw the awesome weight of the state. Scunthorpe, Redcar, Teesside and the West Midlands are not; they can go hang.

And yet. Part of the reason the “northern powerhouse” is such a powerful idea is that it redefines the “we” so that the priorities and aspirations of the north are as valid as those of a hedge fund manager or the pampered board of HSBC. It is also obvious that newly empowered public authorities will have to co-create the vision with private partners and work with a Conservative government and the EU. There will be no “northern powerhouse” if it is locked out of European markets, nor is much progress likely with a third-rate transport and training infrastructure. It also needs a prolonged period of exchange rate stability.

Little of this easily fits the categories in which either Javid on the right or McDonnell and Corbyn on the left think. There is a powerful role for public agency and public spending, but it is much less directive, statist and top-down than traditional left thinking. Equally, the driver of any growth has to be vigorous, purposeful capitalism, but one co-created between private and public in a manner foreign to the traditional libertarian right. And there should be no place for hostility to Europe, also part of this reformulated “we”.

In this sense, there is a golden thread between the applause of the crowd in the Emirates and the way the “northern powerhouse” is taking shape, along with dismay at our dependence on China to build our nuclear power stations. There has been too much of a surrender to supply and demand. It is time to shape markets and football leagues alike. There is a “we”. It could be different.

Economic Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased

The blind pursuit of economic exapansion stokes a cycle of financial crisis, and is wrecking our world. Time for an alternative

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 18 November 2014 19.41 GMT

'Perhaps it’s inaccurate to describe this as another crash. Perhaps it’s a continuation of the last one, the latest phase in a permanent cycle of crisis.' Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Another crash is coming. We all know it, now even David Cameron acknowledges it. The only questions are what the immediate catalyst will be, and when it begins.

You can take your pick. The Financial Times reported yesterday that China now resembles the US in 2007. Domestic bank loans have risen 40% since 2008, while “the ability to repay that debt has deteriorated dramatically”. Property prices are falling and the companies that run China’s shadow banking system provide “virtually no disclosure” of their liabilities. Just two days ago the G20 leaders announced that growth in China “is robust and is becoming more sustainable”. You can judge the value of their assurances for yourself.

Housing bubbles in several countries, including Britain, could pop any time. A report in September revealed that total world debt (public and private) is 212% of GDP. In 2008, when it helped cause the last crash, it stood at 174%. The Telegraph notes that this threatens to cause “renewed financial crisis … and eventual mass default”. Shadow banking has gone beserk, stocks appear to be wildly overvalued, the eurozone is bust again. Which will blow first?

Or perhaps it’s inaccurate to describe this as another crash. Perhaps it’s a continuation of the last one, the latest phase in a permanent cycle of crisis exacerbated by the measures (credit bubbles, deregulation, the curtailment of state spending) that were supposed to deliver uninterrupted growth. The system the world’s governments have sought to stabilise is inherently unstable; built on debt, fuelled by speculation, run by sharks.

If it goes down soon, as Cameron fears, in a world of empty coffers and hobbled public services it will precipitate an ideological crisis graver than the blow to Keynesianism in the 1970s. The problem that then arises – and which explains the longevity of the discredited ideology that caused the last crash – is that there is no alternative policy, accepted by mainstream political parties, with which to replace it. They will keep making the same mistakes, while expecting a different outcome.

To try to stabilise this system, governments behave like soldiers billeted in an ancient manor, burning the furniture, the paintings and the stairs to keep themselves warm for a night. They are breaking up the postwar settlement, our public health services and social safety nets, above all the living world, to produce ephemeral spurts of growth. Magnificent habitats, the benign and fragile climate in which we have prospered, species that have lived on earth for millions of years – all are being stacked on to the fire, their protection characterised as an impediment to growth.

Cameron boasted on Monday that he will revive the economy by “scrapping red tape”. This “red tape” consists in many cases of the safeguards defending both people and places from predatory corporations. The small business, enterprise and employment bill is now passing through the House of Commons – spinelessly supported, as ever, by Labour. The bill seeks to pull down our protective rules to “reduce costs for business”, even if that means increasing costs for everyone else, while threatening our health and happiness. But why? As the government boasted last week, the UK already has “the least restrictive product market regulation and the most supportive regulatory and institutional environment for business across the G20.” And it still doesn’t work. So let’s burn what remains.

This bonfire of regulation is accompanied by a reckless abandonment of democratic principles. In the Commons on Monday, Cameron spoke for the first time about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If this treaty between the EU and the US goes ahead, it will grant corporations a separate legal system to which no one else has access, through which they can sue governments passing laws that might affect their profits. Cameron insisted that “it does not in any way have to affect our national health service”. (Note those words “have to”.) Pressed to explain this, he cited the former EU trade commissioner, who claimed that “public services are always exempted”.

But I have read the EU’s negotiating mandate, and it contains no such exemption, just plenty of waffle and ambiguity on this issue. When the Scottish government asked Cameron’s officials for an “unequivocal assurance” that the NHS would not be exposed to such litigation, they refused to provide it. This treaty could rip our public services to shreds for the sake of a short and (studies suggest) insignificant fizzle of economic growth.

Is it not time to think again? To stop sacrificing our working lives, our prospects, our surroundings to an insatiable God? To consider a different economic model, which does not demand endless pain while generating repeated crises?

Amazingly, this consideration begins on Thursday. For the first time in 170 years, parliament will debate one aspect of the problem: the creation of money. Few people know that 97% of our money supply is created not by the government (or the central bank), but by commercial banks in the form of loans. At no point was a democratic decision made to allow them to do this. So why do we let it happen? This, as Martin Wolf has explained in the Financial Times, “is the source of much of the instability of our economies”. The debate won’t stop the practice, but it represents the raising of a long-neglected question.

This, though, is just the beginning. Is it not also time for a government commission on post-growth economics? Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Herman Daly, Tim Jackson, Peter Victor, Kate Raworth, Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill, it would look at the possibility of moving towards a steady state economy: one that seeks distribution rather than blind expansion; that does not demand infinite growth on a finite planet.

It would ask the question that never gets asked: why? Why are we wrecking the natural world and public services to generate growth, when that growth is not delivering contentment, security or even, for most of us, greater prosperity? Why have we enthroned growth, regardless of its utility, above all other outcomes? Why, despite failures so great and so frequent, have we not changed the model? When the next crash comes, these questions will be inescapable.

University economics teaching isn't an education: it's a £9,000 lobotomy

Economics took a battering after the financial crisis, but faculties are refusing to teach alternative views. It's as if there's only one way to run an economy

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Friday 9 May 2014

The Post-Crash Economics Society at Manchester University has arranged an evening class on bubbles, panics and crashes. Photograph: Jon Super for the Guardian

"I don't care who writes a nation's laws – or crafts its treatises – if I can write its economics textbooks," said Paul Samuelson. The Nobel prizewinner grasped that what was true of gadgets was also true for economies: he who produces the instruction manual defines how the object will be used, and to what ends.

Samuelson's axiom held good until the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which triggered both an economic crisis and a crisis in economics. In the six years since, the reputations of those high priests of capitalism, academic economists, have taken a battering.

The Queen herself asked why hardly any of them saw the crash coming, while the Bank of England's Andy Haldane has noted how it rendered his colleagues' enchantingly neat models as good as useless: "The economy in crisis behaved more like slime descending a warehouse wall than Newton's pendulum." And this week, economics students from Kolkata to Manchester have gone on the warpath demanding radical changes in what they're taught.

In a manifesto signed by 42 university economics associations from 19 countries, the students decry a "dramatic narrowing of the curriculum" that presents the economy "in a vacuum". The result is that the generation next in line to run our economy, from Whitehall departments or corporate corner-offices, discuss policy without touching on "broader social impacts and moral implications of economic decisions".

The problem is summed up by one of the manifesto's coordinators, Faheem Rokadiya, at the University of Glasgow: "Whenever I sit an economics exam, I have to turn myself into a robot." But he and his fellow reformers aren't seeking to skimp on algebra, or calling for a bonfire of the works of the Chicago school. They simply object to the notion that there is one true way to do economics, especially after that apparently scientific method has been found so badly wanting.

In their battle to open up economics, Rokadiya et al have one hell of a fight on their hands, for the same reason that it has proved so hard to democratise so many aspects of the post-crash order: the forces of conservatism are just too powerful. To see how fiercely the academics fight back, take a look at the University of Manchester.

Since last autumn, members of the university's Post-Crash Economics Society have been campaigning for reform of their narrow syllabus. They've put on their own lectures from non-mainstream, heterodox economists, even organising evening classes on bubbles, panics and crashes. You might think academics would be delighted to see such undergraduate engagement, or that economists would be swift to respond to the market.

Not a bit of it. Manchester's economics faculty recently announced that it wouldn't renew the contract of the temporary lecturer of the bubbles course, and that students who wanted to learn about the crash would have to go to the business school.

The most significant economics event of our lifetime isn't being taught in any depth at one of the largest economics faculties in the country. So what exactly is a Russell Group university teaching our future economists? Last month the Post-Crash members published a report on the deficiencies of the teaching they receive. It is thorough and thoughtful, and reports: "Tutorials consist of copying problem sets off the board rather than discussing economic ideas, and 18 out of 48 modules have 50% or more marks given by multiple choice." Students point out that they are trained to digest economic theory and regurgitate it in exams, but never to question the assumptions that underpin it. This isn't an education: it's a nine-grand lobotomy.

The Manchester example is part of a much broader trend in which non-mainstream economists have been evicted from economics faculties and now hole up in geography departments or business schools. "Intellectual talibanisation" is how one renowned economist describes it in private. This isn't just bad for academia: the logical extension of the argument that you can only study economics in one way is that you can only run the economy in one way.

Mainstream economics still has debates, but they tend to be technical in nature. The Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman has pointed to the recent work of Thomas Piketty as proof that mainstream economics is plenty wide-ranging enough. Yet when Piketty visited the Guardian last week, he complained that economists generate "sophisticated models with very little or no empirical basis … there's a lot of ideology and self-interest".

Like so many other parts of the post-crash order, mainstream economists are liberal in theory but can be authoritarian in practice. The reason for that is brilliantly summed up by that non-economist Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Economics lecturers accused of clinging to pre-crash fallacies

Academic says courses changed little since 2008 and students taught 'theories now known to be untrue'

• Phillip Inman, economics correspondent
• The Guardian, Sunday 10 November 2013 22.28 GMT

Economics departments have been accused of ignoring critics of the free market such as Karl Marx. Photograph: Alamy

Economics teaching at Britain's universities has come under fire from a leading academic who accused lecturers of presenting "things that are known to be untrue" to preserve theories that claim to show how the economy works.

The Treasury is hosting a conference in London on Monday to discuss the crisis in economics teaching, which critics say has remained largely unchanged since the 2008 financial crash despite the failure of many in the profession to spot the looming credit crunch and worst recession for 100 years.

Michael Joffe, professor of economics at Imperial College, London, said he was disturbed by the way economics textbooks continued to discuss concepts and models as facts when they were debunked decades ago.

He said: "What if economics was based more on empirical studies and empirical evidence? There are lots of studies and economists are often very good at finding the evidence for how things work, but it does not feed into or challenge what's in the textbooks.

"I asked a textbook author recently why a theory that is known to be wrong is still appearing in his book he said to me that his publisher would expect it to be there."

Joffe, a former biologist, called for more evidence in economic teaching in the October edition of the Royal Economic Society newsletter. He said many reformers had called for economics courses to embrace the teachings of Marx and Keynes to undermine the dominance of neoclassical free-market theories, but the aim should be to provide students with analysis based on the way the world works, not the way theories argue it ought to work.

"There is a lot that is taught on economics courses that bears little relation to the way things work in the real world," he said.

The Treasury-hosted conference will debate the state of economics teaching, with leading figures from the profession invited to speak, including Bank of England director Andy Haldane. Sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), it aims to highlight reforms to address the shortcomings of the core economics curriculum.

Headed by economics professor Eric Beinhocker of Oxford University, the INET has grown into a large international lobby group with the aim of reforming mainstream economic teaching in the world's leading colleges.

The conference comes only a fortnight after Manchester University economics students criticised orthodox free-market teaching on their course, arguing that alternative ways of thinking have been pushed to the margins.

Members of the Post-Crash Economics Society said their course was dominated by models and equations that trained undergraduates for City jobs without a broader understanding of the way economies and businesses work.

Joe Earle, a spokesman for the society and a final-year undergraduate, said academic departments were ignoring the crisis in the profession and that, by neglecting global developments and critics of the free market such as Keynes and Marx, the study of economics was "in danger of losing its broader relevance".

The profession has been criticised for its adherence to models of a free market that claim to show demand and supply continually rebalancing over relatively short periods of time – in contrast to the decade-long mismatches that came ahead of the banking crash in key markets such as housing and exotic derivatives, where asset bubbles ballooned.

Joffe said university economics department were continuing to teach concepts that had been disproved. In one example he said the idea that companies suffer "dis-economies of scale" when they increase production beyond certain capacity was true in only a small number of firms.

The U-shaped curve shows that unit costs are high when production begins and become cheaper as economies of scale allow a company to spread costs over more units. Units become more expensive to produce after a factory reaches capacity.

Joffe said: "We ought to stop teaching the U shape as the typical relationship between costs and scale, for the simple reason that it is false."