Jordan Peterson on the Israel-Hamas war

 

You’ll Find an Unicorn Before You Find a Free Market

Syed Bakhtiyar Kazmi in The Dawn

THE realisation that conventional economic wisdom, seeped in the myth of the free market, will be extremely antagonistic towards any solution based on protectionism and planned industrialisation, stipulates a bit of digression.

Scope limitation: the discussion here under is based on pure common sense sans any political bearing, with the simple objective of discussing alternative options for economic growth; those who know it all already need not read any further.

Whilst conspiracy theories may explain the ‘why’, it is indeed mind-boggling ‘how’ the world was sold an idea, ie free markets, which has nothing to do with reality. Essentially, you need the long arm of the government to even enforce the rules of the market, including breaking cartels for countering undesirable social outcomes.

My personal favourite from the net is, “You’ll find a unicorn before you find a free market”!

Perfect competition in free markets, even in theory, inevitably eventually results in an oligopoly or monopoly, as in the case of Coke and Pepsi.

More to the point, how many genuinely believe that any domestic cola manufacturer has any chance of ever taking market share from Coke and Pepsi in Pakistan; and this has nothing to do with quality or free markets!

Capturing the market for coloured aerated water has only to do with deep pockets!

This example is easily applicable to our case study, the imported can opener. To recap my observations in another article, because of free markets, Pakistan had started importing can openers which were cheaper and shinier than the domestically manufactured can opener. However, with the rupee depreciating, the Pakistani can opener might have become cheaper, but the domestic facilities have closed down and we probably have lost the skills to manufacture a can opener during this time.

At this point, foreign manufacturers will go to any lengths to scuttle any new initiative for the domestic manufacturing of can openers; dumping and price war are just the tip of the iceberg. The home country of our foreign manufacturer of can openers may probably even oppose Pakistan in the UN Security Council, just to apply pressure to protect their manufacturer’s interests!

Is that voluntary trade?

Here the free market proponents argue that voluntary trade is beneficial for both parties. They argue that purchasing, say, a Coke, demonstrates that the purchaser values a fizzy drink more than the money in his pocket, and hence should have the right, and the choice, to spend his money as he wants.

There is nothing wrong with that statement. However, no person, with even a tiny bit of common sense, is expected to borrow every day to drink a Coke, if he cannot afford to pay back that debt.

In the case of a nation, government is the repository of common sense of the populace; so how does borrowing in dollars to pay for Cokes every day for 207 million people make any sense? How is getting burdened with external debt mutually beneficial trade?

And here we come to comparative advantage theory which basically argues that nations should only produce and export items where they have a comparative advantage. Notwithstanding that most developing nations can only have a comparative advantage in raw materials or basic manufacture, let us for a minute be practical.

Under this fantastic ‘all else being held constant two-nation-two-products comparative advantage’ theory, Portuguese winemakers would be re­­quired to stop making wine, since London’s winemakers have some sort of advantage over them. But why would Portuguese winemakers, who can still make cheaper wine, and perhaps better tasting wine, stop producing wine, which they can easily sell in Portugal, and start making cloth when they are clueless about the cloth trade ab initio?

The Portuguese government could force them out of the wine business, but then we really are not talking about a free market, are we? And where is the guarantee that after a few years, when the last of the Portuguese winemaker has passed away, London winemakers will not suddenly start charging double? After all it is a free market. Portugal both now pays double and borrows to drink wine, or it does not drink wine since it cannot afford it. What in your opinion should Portugal do?

Here the free trade theory argues that free floating currency will increase the competitiveness of Portuguese wine; but the last winemaker is already dead!

As in our can opener example, we have forgotten how to make can openers; the problem is that if all our food is in cans, then we will be forced to borrow and buy more expensive can openers.

But the music will eventually stop! It always does. So where do we get the can openers from?

Technology and the amateur cricketer

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo


The professional cricketer lives an examined life, with feedback from various corners © Getty Images



Every journalist knows the horror of their own voice. The realisation comes early, when you begin recording interviews. There, on the tape or in the bytes or the VT, is not the voice you thought that you had, the one that's been echoing in your ears for your whole life, but the one that the rest of the world hears - reedy, nasal, pitched entirely differently.

It takes a while to get over the discovery and to become acquainted with the notion that self-image overlaps only slightly with the objective view of the rest of the world.

Cricket is deep into its age of analysis. Kartikeya Date's lovely piece in the current Cricket Monthly illuminates the depth of it: every ball in every major match is logged, filed, deconstructed. It means that the professional cricketer lives an examined life, and its information comes at them from all angles: their coaches, their laptops, the television, the internet, YouTube, Twitter… a bombardment of feedback that can leave them in no doubt as to what they look like in the eyes of the world. Reality here is absolute, self-image challenged from an early age.

It has a purpose, of course; all of this stuff, and in a sport that exacts a high psychological price, strong self-knowledge can be an important anchor. It's why the analysed player speaks constantly of "knowing my game", "executing my skills" and so on. There is no longer any mystery to how they do what they do and so they take refuge in the empirical evidence of their talents.

The amateur cricketer (apart from the serious, higher-level one) is the polar opposite, a player who relies almost totally on the powers of delusion. In our heads we are younger, stronger, faster and better than ever. Fleeting successes sustain the vision.

The classic response to failure is not to practise more but to buy a new bat or try a new grip or take up a new place in the order. Bowlers gaze at the television and imagine that their pace is up there at the dibbly-dobbly end of the pro game - Paul Collingwood maybe, or David Warner.

Does analysis have a role to play here, where the idea of preparation is a few taps on the boundary edge when you're next in? Can an encounter with the awful reality of your game offer the way towards the radical and constant self-improvement sought and often attained by the professional cricketer?

As with all technologies, the machinery required for analysing cricket is becoming more available as the hardware becomes affordable. As a joint birthday present (and maybe a not-so-subtle hint) our team-mates bought me and my fellow senior player Big Tone a session at the indoor school at Lord's, where they have installed a lane with Pitch Vision technology and another with Hawk-Eye. Pitch Vision ("Come face to face with your own performance outcomes") utilises sensors and cameras to offer immediate video playback and analysis of every delivery on both a big screen behind the net and via downloadable post-session data for perusal at your leisure.



A bowling action in pixels © Getty Images


Disconcertingly, it also measures the speed of each delivery. Accompanying me and Big Tone (ostensibly both batsmen) is our captain Charlie, who is an opening bowler and as such has more invested in the unyielding outcome of the speed gun.

I watch a playback as a stooped, shuffling figure advances slowly - really slowly - towards the crease before hopping into a round-arm, bent-backed delivery that progresses at a stately 50mph towards the batsman. "Ha!" I think. "Who's that old man…" before the dreaded realisation that, of course, it is me.

In my mind, I have a jaunty and rapid run-up and quite a high arm. The screen before me shatters that illusion forever. Sybil Fawlty's withering description of the hapless Basil as "a brillianteened stick-insect" flashes into my head as I watch myself replayed in super slo-mo. I briefly salvage some self-esteem with a delivery recorded at 62mph before realising that the screen is still showing Charlie's last ball.

The batting was a little better, or at least a little more familiar. I'd seen myself on camera years ago and so my psyche had absorbed the fact that I wasn't exactly King Viv, more of a taller Boycott type, whose defence was nonetheless far more permeable than the great man's. I had, though, an idea that my backlift was high and that I had a dynamic stance ready to push forward or back with coiled power. Sadly it was all more of a non-committed shuffle. Although my bat speed was something of a triumph, especially watching in normal time after a period of slow motion.

The Hawk-Eye session was equally revelatory. Its on-screen analysis is identical to its televisual output - the beehive, the pitch map, the strike zones and so on - except with very different, and reduced, figures. The finest moment was the side-on ball-tracker of one of Big Tone's medium-pacers. Stopping the gun at 42mph, it ascribed two long and looping parabolas and was actually descending as it hit the stumps. The ball's pathway resembled a 22-yard letter "m".

It was a lot of fun, and illuminated the gulf between the world of the pro cricketer, who must worry and fret about this sort of stuff, and the amateur, who, like me, watched Glenn Maxwell bowl the next day at 57mph with renewed admiration for his pace. In the blinding light of technology's glare, your game is laid bare. It will take me a while to retreat back into the land of comfortable and happily deluded fantasy.

Liberal Constipation

 George Monbiot

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker(1), we have been too polite to mention the study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence(2). Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail which brought it to the attention of British readers last week(3). It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood(4). Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others—particularly “different” others—requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence, but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the “critical pathway” from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to “right-wing ideologies that promote coherence and order” and “emphasize the maintenance of the status quo”(5). Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.

This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks, writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.

But what we now see among their parties—however intelligent their guiding spirits may be—is the abandonment of any pretence of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won’t drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that manmade climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that “conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.”(6) The result is a “shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology” which has “ominous real-world consequences for American society.”

Lofgren complains that “the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today”(7). The Republican party, with its “prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” is appealing to what he calls the “low-information voter” or the “misinformation voter.” While most office holders probably don’t believe the “reactionary and paranoid claptrap” they peddle, “they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.

The madness hasn’t gone as far in the UK, but the effects of the Conservative appeal to stupidity are already making themselves felt. Yesterday the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits, scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and threats from other people(8).

These are the perfect conditions for a billionaires’ feeding frenzy. Any party elected by misinformed, suggestible voters becomes a vehicle for undisclosed interests. A tax break for the 1% is dressed up as freedom for the 99%. The regulation that prevents big banks and corporations from exploiting us becomes an assault on the working man and woman. Those of us who discuss manmade climate change are cast as elitists by people who happily embrace the claims of Lord Monckton, Lord Lawson or thinktanks funded by ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers: now the authentic voices of the working class.

But when I survey this wreckage I wonder who the real idiots are. Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls “terminal niceness”(9). They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.

Yes, conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information. But the liberals in politics on both sides of the Atlantic continue to back off, yielding to the supremacy of the stupid. It’s turkeys all the way down.