How to be Less Wrong More Often: Is Critical Thinking Dead?

 

Economists had a dreadful 2023

From The Economist 

Spare a thought for economists. Last Christmas they were an unusually pessimistic lot: the growth they expected in America over the next calendar year was the fourth-lowest in 55 years of fourth-quarter surveys. Many expected recession; The Economist added to the prognostications of doom and gloom. This year economists must swap figgy pudding for humble pie, because America has probably grown by an above-trend 3%—about the same as in boomy 2005. Adding to the impression of befuddlement, most analysts were caught out on December 13th by a doveish turn by the Federal Reserve, which sent them scrambling to rewrite their outlooks for the new year.

It is not just forecasters who have had a bad year. Economists who deal in sober empirical work have also had their conclusions challenged. Consider research on inequality. Perhaps the most famous economic studies of the past 20 years have been those by Thomas Piketty and his co-authors, who have found a rising gap between rich and poor. But in November a paper finding that after taxes and transfers American incomes are barely less equal than in the 1960s was accepted for publication by one of the discipline’s top journals. Now Mr Piketty’s faction is on the defensive, accusing its critics of “inequality denial”.

Economists have long agreed that America would be richer if it allowed more homes to be built around popular cities. There is lots of evidence to that effect. But the best-known estimate of the costs of restricting construction has been called into question. Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley, found that easing building rules in New York, San Francisco and San Jose would have boosted American gdp in 2009 by 3.7%. Now Brian Greaney of the University of Washington claims that after correcting for mistakes the true estimated effect is just 0.02%. If builders disagreed as wildly about roof measurements, the house would collapse.

Think social mobility in America is lower than it was in the freewheeling 19th century, when young men could go West? Think again, according to research by Zachary Ward of Baylor University. He has updated estimates of intergenerational mobility between 1850 and 1940 to account for the fact that past studies tended to look only at white people, as well as correcting other measurement errors. It now looks as if there is more equality of opportunity today than in the past (albeit only because the past was worse than was thought).

A rise in suicides, overdoses and liver disease has reduced life expectancy for white Americans. Angus Deaton and Anne Case of Princeton University popularised the idea that these are “deaths of despair”, rooted in grimmer life prospects for those without college degrees. But economists have been losing faith in the idea that overdoses, which are probably the biggest killer of Americans aged 18-49, have much to do with changes in the labour market. New research has instead blamed the carnage on simple proximity to smuggled fentanyl, a powerful opioid.

Other findings are also looking shaky. The long decline in the prestige of the once-faddish field of behavioural economics, which studies irrationality, continued in 2023. In June Harvard Business School said it believed, after an investigation, that some of the results in four papers co-written by Francesca Gino, a behavioural scientist and phd economist, were “invalid”, owing to “alterations of the data”. (Ms Gino, who has written a book about why it pays to break rules, is suing for defamation the university and the bloggers who exposed the alleged fiddling.)

What lessons should be drawn from economists’ tumultuous year? One is that for all their intellectual discipline they are still human. Replicating existing studies and checking them for errors is crucial work.

Another lesson is that disdain for economic theory in favour of the supposed realism of empirical studies may have gone too far. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09, commentators heaped opprobrium on theorists’ common assumption that people make rational predictions about the world; gibes about an unrealistic, utility-maximising Homo economicus helped raise the status of behavioural economics. Yet rational-expectations models allow for the possibility that inflation can fall rapidly without a recession—exactly the scenario that caught out forecasters in 2023.

A last lesson is that economists should cheer up. The research that has been called into question this year inspired much pessimism about the state of modern capitalism. But a dodged recession, flatter inequality trends and less despair would all be good news. Perhaps the dismal science should be a little less so. ■

Is Modi Govt Planning To Colour-Code Journalists?

 

Thinking in Bets – Making smarter decisions when you don’t have all the facts – by Annie Duke

Some Excerpts


CHESS V POKER

- Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn’t a great model for decision making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck.



- Poker, in contrast, is a game of incomplete information. It is a game of decision making under conditions of uncertainty over time. Valuable information remains hidden. There is always an element of luck in any outcome. You could make the best possible decision at every point and still lose the hand; because you don’t know what new cards will be dealt and revealed. Once the game is finished and you try to learn from the results, separating the quality of your decisions from the influence of luck is difficult.



- Incomplete information poses a challenge not just for split second decision making, but also for learning from past decisions. Imagine my difficulty in trying to figure out if I played my hand correctly when my opponents cards were never revealed for e.g. if the hand concluded after I made a bet and my opponents folded. All I know is that I won the chips. Did I play poorly and get lucky? Or did I play well?



- Life resembles poker, where all the uncertainty gives us the room to deceive ourselves and misinterpret the data.

- Poker gives us the leeway to make mistakes that we never spot because we win the hand anyway and so don’t go looking for them or

- The leeway to do everything right, still lose and treat the losing result as proof that we made a mistake. 

REDEFINING Wrong

- When we think in advance about the chances of alternative outcomes and make a decision based on those chances, it doesn’t automatically make us wrong when things don’t work out. It just means that one event in a set of possible futures occurred.



BACKCASTING AND PRE MORTEM



- Backcasting means working backwards from a positive future.

- When it comes to thinking about the future – stand at the end (the outcome) and look backwards. This is more effective than looking forwards from the beginning.

- i.e. by working backwards from the goal, we plan our decision tree in more depth.

- We imagine we’ve already achieved a positive outcome, holding up a newspaper headline “We’ve Achieved our Goal” Then we think about how we got there.

- Identify the reasons they got there, what events occurred, what decisions were made, what went their way to get to the goal.

- It makes it possible to identify low probability events that must occur to reach the goal You then develop strategies to increase the chances of such events occurring or recognizing the goal is too ambitious.

- You can also develop responses to developments that interfere with reaching the goal and identify inflection points for re-evaluating the plan as the future unfolds.



- Pre mortem means working backwards from a negative future.



- Pre mortem is an investigation into something awful but before it happens.



- Imagine a headline “We failed to reach our Goals” challenges us to think about ways in which things could go wrong.



- People who imagine obstacles in the way of reaching their goals are more likely to achieve success (Research p223)



- A pre mortem helps us to anticipate potential obstacles.



- Come up with ways things can go wrong so that you can plan for them



- The exercise forces everyone to identify potential points of failure without fear of being viewed as a naysayer.





- Imagining both positive and negative futures helps us to build a realistic plan to achieve our goals.

We need democracy because people can be wrong

It’s the only political system that allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make, bloodlessly, and correct them


Tabish Khair in The Hindu


The people are always right. No? Ah, but then they vote for leaders like Donald Trump and… Oh well, we can add to the list, internationally and nationally!

Does this mean that democracy is a mistake? No, quite the contrary! But we have to hack away at some stubborn centuries-old shrubbery in order to see the foundation of this clearly enough.

One of the greatest myths about democracy — started largely by the Left in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and continued with a twist by the Right into the 21st — relates to the most common rationale behind it. The people are always right, claimed the Left in the past. The market, or the consumer, is always right, claims the capitalist Right today, tweaking the Leftist argument cleverly.

Between them, they justify democracy as a form of political organisation based on human beings being basically ‘always right’. Very little in the past — from the picnics at public hangings outside London jails to the genocides of colonisation and Nazism — justifies such confidence in people being always right. Over centuries, people have been horribly wrong at times.

Majority’s mistrust

Way back in 1882, Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian playwright, wrote An Enemy of the People (adapted into a film, Ganashatru, by Satyajit Ray in his last years) around one aspect of this perception, arguing that one needs to be morally and intellectually ahead of ‘people’ in order to be right. Ideas and ‘truths’, Ibsen suggests in this play, get dated, habitual and platitudinous, and hence the majority, which lives habitually by grasping on to platitudes, tends to mistrust the truly ethical and intellectual individual. In other words, if you are Jesus, you risk getting crucified.

But even this argument is faulty: a lot of intelligent people can go horribly wrong. Cleverness does not necessarily save you from mistakes, and even ethics can be twisted in painful ways: there are many in the U.S. who claim to be ‘pro-life’ and hence will criminalise abortions, but they spare little thought (and no money) for the plight of women forced into unhappy pregnancies or the future of poor, abandoned and unwanted children.

History is full of brilliant people — ‘great’ leaders, scientists, thinkers, planners — who helped destroy a village, a nation or an age. Sometimes it appears that intelligence, on its own, merely provides a person with an easier ability to make excuses for his or her mistakes, and hoodwink others in the process.

So if people — whether as individual or group, entrepreneur or consumer, tribe or republic, nation or political party, king or voter — seem to make horrible mistakes much of the time, what hope is there for democracy? Why believe in democracy at all?

Actually, one can argue that the main justification of democracy is exactly this: that anyone — ordinary voter or monarch — can be wrong about any given matter. The ability to make mistakes is human — neither power nor riches nor education can eradicate it, though self-awareness might help. A king or dictator can make a mistake as well as the majority of voters in an election who vote in a party or a leader with bad plans. But in a democracy, after a period, during the next elections, such mistakes can be corrected.

A democracy, in other words, allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make — bloodlessly — and correct them when their disastrous consequences become finally clear to us. This is far more difficult, and costly, to do in any other kind of (autocratic) regime, whether justified in worldly or ‘divine’ terms.

Living with one’s opponents

Democracies are not necessary because people are always right: if we were certain of being right all the time, we would not need any political organisation at all, let alone a democracy. We would be gods. Democracy is necessary because people — groups and individuals — can be wrong. Hence, in a democracy one learns to live with one’s opponents, not exile or murder them. This is a political version of the fact that in life we always live with others — or with the Other, the self who is not and cannot be (by definition) entirely yourself.

Democracy is the only political option that allows us to mitigate the effects of our own mistakes, and the mistakes of others. Democracy is necessary not because the people are always right, but because human beings are often wrong. We forget this only at great peril to ourselves and others.

How to keep your resolutions (clue: it's not all about willpower)

Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian

The only way is up.  

It’s hard to think of a situation in which it wouldn’t be extremely useful to have more willpower. For a start, your New Year’s resolutions would no longer be laughably short-lived. You could stop yourself spending all day on social media, spiralling into despair at the state of the world, yet also summon the self-discipline to do something about it by volunteering or donating to charity. And with more “political will”, which is really just willpower writ large, we could forestall the worst consequences of climate change, or stop quasi-fascist confidence tricksters from getting elected president. In short, if psychologists could figure out how to reliably build and sustain willpower, we’d be laughing.

Unfortunately, though, 2016 was the year in which psychologists had to admit they’d figured out no such thing, and that much of what they thought they knew about willpower was probably wrong. Changing your habits is certainly doable, but “more willpower” may not be the answer after all.

The received wisdom, for nearly two decades, was that willpower is like a muscle. That means you can strengthen it through regular use, but also that you can tire it out, so that expending willpower in one way (for example, by forcing yourself to work when you’d rather be checking Facebook) means there’ll be less left over for other purposes (such as resisting the lure of a third pint after work). In a landmark 1998 study, the social psychologist Roy Bauermeister and his colleagues baked a batch of chocolate cookies and served them alongside a bowl of radishes. They brought two groups of subjects into the lab, instructing each to eat only cookies or only radishes; their reasoning was that it would take self-discipline for the radish-eaters to resist the cookies. In the second stage of the experiment, participants were given puzzles to solve, not realising that they were actually unsolvable. The cookie-eaters plugged away at the puzzles for an average of 19 minutes each, while the radish-eaters gave up after eight, their willpower presumably already eroded by resisting the cookies.

Thus was born the theory of “ego depletion”, which holds that willpower is a limited resource. Pick your New Year resolutions sparingly, otherwise they’ll undermine each other. Your plan to meditate for 20 minutes each morning may actively obstruct your plan to learn Spanish, and vice versa, so you end up achieving neither.

Except willpower probably isn’t like a muscle after all: in recent years, attempts to reproduce the original results have failed, part of a wider credibility crisis in psychology. Meanwhile, a new consensus has begun to gain ground: that willpower isn’t a limited resource, but believing that it is makes you less likely to follow through on your plans.

Some scholars argue that willpower is better understood as being like an emotion: a feeling that comes and goes, rather unpredictably, and that you shouldn’t expect to be able to force, just as you can’t force yourself to feel happy. And, like happiness, its chronic absence may be a warning that you’re on the wrong track. If a relationship reliably made you miserable, you might conclude that it wasn’t the relationship for you. Likewise, if you repeatedly fail to summon the willpower for a certain behaviour, it may be time to accept the fact: perhaps getting better at cooking, or learning to enjoy yoga, just isn’t on the cards for you, and you’d be better advised to focus on changes that truly inspire you. “If you decide you’re going to fight cravings, fight thoughts, fight emotions, you put all your energy and attention into trying to change the inner experiences,” the willpower researcher Kelly McGonigal has argued. And people who do that “tend to become more stuck, and more overwhelmed.” Instead, ask what changes you’d genuinely enjoy having made a year from now, as opposed to those you feel you ought to make.

Lurking behind all this, though, is a more unsettling question: does willpower even exist? McGonigal defines people with willpower as those who demonstrate “the ability to do what matters most, even when it’s difficult, or when some part of [them] doesn’t want to”. Willpower, then, is a word ascribed to people who manage to do what they said they were going to do: it’s a judgment about their behaviour. But it doesn’t follow that willpower is a thing in itself, a substance or resource you either possess or you don’t, like money or muscle strength. Rather than “How can I build my willpower?”, it may be better to ask: “How can I make it more likely that I’ll do what I plan to do?”

One tactic is to manipulate your environment in such a way that willpower becomes less important. If you don’t keep your credit card in your wallet or handbag, it’ll be difficult to use it for unwise impulse purchases; if money is automatically transferred from your current account to a savings account the day you’re paid, your goal of saving won’t rely exclusively on strength of character. Then there’s a technique known as “strategic pre-commitment”: tell a friend about your plan, and the risk of mild public shame may help keep you on track. (Better yet, give them a cheque made out to an organisation you hate, and make them promise to donate it if you fail.) Use whatever tricks happen to fit your personality: the comedian Jerry Seinfeld famously marked an X on a wallchart for every day he managed to write, and soon became unwilling to break the chain of Xs. And exploit the power of “if-then plans”, which are backed by numerous research studies: think through the day ahead, envisaging the specific scenarios in which you might find yourself, and the specific ways you intend to respond when you do. (For example, you might decide that as soon as you feel sleepy after 10pm, you’ll go directly to bed; or that you’ll always put on your running shoes the moment you get home from work.)

The most important boost to your habit-changing plans, though, may lie not in any individual strategy, but in letting go of the idea of “willpower” altogether. If the word doesn’t really refer to an identifiable thing, there’s no need to devote energy to fretting over your lack of it. Behaviour change becomes a far more straightforward matter of assembling a toolbox of tricks that, in combination, should steer you well. Best of all, you’ll no longer be engaged in a battle with your own psyche: you can stop trying to “find the willpower” to live a healthier/kinder/less stressful/more high-achieving life – and just focus on living it instead.

If economists want to be useful again they need to redeem themselves

Allister Heath in The Telegraph

Imagine that you kept getting it wrong, not just a little, but completely and utterly.

When times were bad you thought they were good, and when they were good you thought they were bad. You argued against successful solutions, and in favour of failed ones. You predicted a rise when in fact a fall materialised; to add insult to injury, you clung to your old ways of thinking, refusing to change apart from in the most trivial of ways. In normal industries you would be finished: your collection of P45s would fill half a drawer, and you would long since have been forced to retrain into somebody of more value to society.

But not in one profession. Yes, dear readers, I’m referring to the systemic, cultural problems of modern, applied macroeconomics, in the public as well as private sectors, where failure continues to be rewarded.

Economists who make all the wrong calls keep their jobs and big paychecks, as long as their faulty views echo the mainstream, received wisdom of the moment. I spent five years studying economics, and I still love the subject. At its best, economics is the answer to myriad problems, the prism through which to view the vast majority of decisions.

But I’m deeply frustrated with some of its practitioners: all those folk who predicted that the third quarter would see very little or negative growth, when in fact the economy grew by a remarkable 0.5pc, the most important statistic of recent times.

For political and psychological reasons, one small and rather unreliable snapshot had become all-important. Had that (preliminary and approximate number) been in negative territory, or close to zero, the outcry would have been deafening and reverberated around the world. The markets would either have slumped or more likely, bounced back, on the assumption that Brexit would be reversed. Yet the opposite happened, and the economy did well (France grew by just 0.2pc during the same time).

Combined with the news that Nissan will be sticking with the UK, it was a great week for Brexit, made all the better by the announcement of Heathrow expansion. Brexit won the referendum, lost the immediate aftermath, won the next few months and has now won again.

Of course, the war continues, and will do so for years. There are huge challenges looming. But this was the week that the economics profession was further discredited. The forecasts were not just completely wrong – my guess is that they were actually downright harmful, shaving growth in areas where elites that are most likely to be swayed by economists decisions.

Economists have form: most backed the euro, failed to see the financial crisis coming, missed the dot.com bubble and the Asian crisis, loved the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and never understood the Thatcherite revolution.
Previous generations failed just as badly: the vast majority loved Keynesian economics during the 1970s, read and recommended a textbook that thought that the USSR would eventually overtake America, backed corporatism, failed to predict the 1929 crash and provided all of the wrong answers in the 1930s.

One problem is groupthink, another is the inability to be objective. But the biggest problem is a faulty paradigm: a fundamental flaw at the heart of the models and assumptions of the economic mainstream, aided and abated by an academic establishment which excludes dissenters from its journals and top faculties.
So if economists want to be useful again, they should do two things.

First, we need a proper Parliamentary inquiry into the failures of the Treasury model and official forecasting before and after Brexit. There is an argument for this to be extended to the Bank of England and even to the private sector. Economists need to cooperate, if even anonymously: are some under pressure to toe various lines? If not, what is the real reason for such a succession of flawed consensuses?

Second, the real threat to the economy is absurd decisions such as the ruling that Uber drivers should be treated like employees (on the basis that the US firm exerts too much control and direction over drivers, even though they are free to choose their hours and commitment).

If not reversed, this judicial activism will destroy jobs and push up prices; it is a shame that such a good week ended on such a sour note. The Government may need to legislate to make it clear that Uber and other similar enterprises are platforms, not employers. If economists want to redeem themselves, they should explain why flexible markets are good and why it would be a genuine disaster if we kill off the sharing economy with red tape.

The question of forgiveness

Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu



On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident. File Photo


Canadian leader Justin Trudeau is to tender a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. It should trigger similar repentance elsewhere for other sins of the past.

History rarely produces moments of epiphany, where politics appears as a creative act of redemption and the future becomes a collective act of healing. Each society carries its wounds like a burden, a perpetual reminder that justice works fragmentarily. Suddenly out of the crassness, the crudity of everyday politics, comes a moment to treasure. On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for theKomagata Maru incident.

The drama of the ritual, the act of owning up to a wrong and voluntarily asking for forgiveness is rare in history. One immediately thinks of Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, kneeling down during his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and apologising to the Jews. The act was moving. For once instead of the mere word, the body spoke in utter humility as Brandt knelt before the monument. It was a sheer act of courage, responsibility and humility, an admission of a politics gone wrong, a statement of a colossal mistake that needed redemption.

Hundred years to atonement

This movement for forgiveness is important. Forgiveness adds a different world to the idea of justice. To the standard legal idea of justice as retaliation, compensation, forgiveness adds the sense of healing, of restoration, of reconciliation. Society faces up to an act of ethical repair and attempts to heal itself. Memory becomes critical here because it is memory that keeps scars alive, and memory often waits like a phantom limb more real than the event itself.

The Komagata Maru incident is over a hundred years old. But like the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity, it is a memory that refuses to die easily. It is a journey that remains perpetually incomplete, recycled in memory as Canada would not allow the homecoming.

Komagata Maru was a ship hired by Gurdit Singh, a Hong Kong/Singapore-based Sikh businessman, a follower of the Ghadar Party, who wanted to circumvent Canadian laws of immigration. The journey of 376 Indians, 340 of them Sikhs, began from Hong Kong. They finally reached Vancouver where a new drama of attrition began. British Columbia refused to let the passengers disembark, while Indians in Canada fought a rearguard struggle of legal battles and protest meetings to delay the departure. Passengers even mounted an attack on the police showering them with lumps of coal and bricks.

The ship was forced to return to Calcutta, 19 of the passengers were killed by the British and many placed under arrest. Komagata Maru was a symbol of racism, of exclusionary laws, a protest to highlight the injustice of Canadian laws. When Mr. Trudeau apologises, he will perform an act of healing where Canada apologises not only to India but to its own citizens, many of whom are proud Sikhs. The index of change is not just the ritual apology but another small fact. The British Columbia Regiment involved in the expulsion of the Komagata Maru was commanded between 2011 and 2014 by Harjit Sajjan, now Canada’s Minister of National Defence.

Apology and forgiveness

This incident echoes the need for similar apologies, acts of dignity which can repair political rupture. Imagine the U.S. apologising to Japanese prisoners imprisoned in World War II. Imagine Japan apologising for war atrocities. Think of the U.S. apologising for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Press even further and dream of Narendra Modi apologising to the victims of the Gujarat riots of 2002. One senses some of these dreams are remote and realises that, after nearly two years in office as Prime Minister, Mr. Modi does not have the makings of a Willy Brandt. Truth and healing are still remote to the politics of the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party.

The very act of apologising and forgiveness reiterates the importance of memory and the vitality of the community as a link between past, present and future. It raises the question of the responsibility for the past and its injustices. Somehow for many politicians, the past is a different country for which they have no responsibility. Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologise to the Aborigines, contending that present generations cannot be responsible for the past. Tony Blair was ready to apologise for the mid-19th century Irish potato famine but refused to apologise for the depredations of colonial rule. One is not asking for facile or convenient apologies, one is asking for a rethinking of politics. David Cameron, in February 2013, came close to an apology for Jallianwala Bagh. More than that, I think what one needs is a British apology for the Bengal famine of the 1940s which eliminated over three million people. It is a pity that it has not received a Nuremberg or a Truth Commission. I realise apology is a mere moral act without the materiality of reparation, but apology returns to the victim and the community the acknowledgement of human worth and dignity. Without the axiomatics of dignity, no human rights project makes any sense.

One must emphasise that forgiveness and apology are not sentimental acts constructing melodramatic spaces creating what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “the grand scenes of repentance and theatricality”. Here, as Derrida claimed, is that rare moment where the human race shaken against itself examines its own humanity. Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu is even more hard-headed when he says, “In almost every language, the most difficult words are ‘I am sorry’.” Mr. Tutu adds that spurious reconciliations can only lead to spurious healing. For him forgiveness is a wager, an ethical wager on the future of a relationship. This is why the few events of apology which stand up to critical scrutiny deserve to be treasured.

India’s own chequered past

One must realise the past haunts India. Truth-telling, truth-seeking and the dignity and the courage of rituals of apology and forgiveness may do a lot to redeem the current impasses of Indian politics. Indians have not forgiven history or what they call history for its injustices. Yet, the language, the philosophy of forgiveness adds to the many dialects of democracy. I am merely listing moments of apology which could change the face of Indian politics. I am not demanding a census of atrocity but a set of ethical scripts whose political possibilities could be played out. The effort is not to provoke or score points, but to help create a deeper reflection and reflexivity about the growing impact of violence in the Indian polity.

First, I would like Narendra Modi to apologise to the Muslim community and to India for the horror of the 2002 riots. The genocide of 2002 froze Gujarat and India at a point, and the thaw can only be an ethical one demanding the humility of truth and forgiveness. A lot has been written about the unfinished nature of the 1984 riots in which over 5,000 Sikhs lost their lives. I know Manmohan Singh did offer an apology, but the Congress’s behaviour has turned this into an impotent mumbling. In the rightness of things, the Gandhi family owes an apology to the Sikhs, something it has not had the ethical courage to venture. Third, as an Indian, I think one not only has to withdraw the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act but also apologise to the people of Kashmir and Manipur for the decades of suffering. One must request Irom Sharmila to end her 15-year-long fast demanding the withdrawal of the Act with dignity. There has been enough violence here, and it is time that we as a nation think beyond the egotism and brittleness of the national security state.

Each reader can add to the list and to the possibilities of a new ethical and moral politics which requires a Gandhian inventiveness of ritual and politics. What I wish to add is a caveat. The rituals of apology and the question of justice, reconciliation and ethical repair are not easy. They require a rigour and an inventiveness of ethical thinking which necessitate new experiments with the idea of truth and healing in India.

Mr. Tutu makes this point beautifully and wisely. He talks of the man known as the Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. In his book, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Wiesenthal spoke of a Nazi soldier who had burnt a group of Jews to death. As the Nazi lay dying in his deathbed, he confessed and asked for absolution from Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal found he could not forgive him. In the end, he asks the reader, “What would you have done?” — and The Sunflower is an anthropology of various responses.

We need an equivalence of The Sunflower experiment to ask Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmiri Muslims, Manipuris, Dalits, tribals, women what it would take for forgiveness after an act of atrocity. In fact, each one of us is a potential citizen, as perpetrator, spectator and victim, in that anthology. Is forgiveness and healing possible in the history of our lives? Democracy needs to think out the answers.

The difficulty in saying sorry

When we are criticised it hurts our feelings, but the pain goes much deeper than that, says Paul Randolph

 

Breaking point: Michael Douglas stars in 1993’s Falling Down. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock


Paul Randolph in The Guardian


Why do sensible and rational people seem to lose the ability to act sensibly and rationally when they are in conflict? What makes some families tear themselves apart in a variety of squabbles which to outsiders may seem petty but which result in family members not speaking to each other for years? What drives neighbours to blight their daily lives with unpleasant, bitter and confrontational disputes? And how can otherwise placid and restrained people become almost unrecognisable when involved in road rage incidents – or even trolley rage in supermarkets?

The answer may be distilled down to one psychological phenomenon: self-esteem. It is one of the strongest motivating factors in conflict and generates powerful emotions. We all have self-esteem, whether corporate or individual; we all have a need to think well of ourselves, and for others to think well of us. Self-esteem governs many of the decisions we make daily, as we expend huge amounts of time and effort constantly maintaining and protecting our self-image.

The flipside of our desire for approval is our aversion to disapproval – or worse still, our dread of humiliation. An example of this is the fear of public speaking – a dread that can be greater than that of flying or even of death. It is explained by the fact that the disapproval of each person in the audience constitutes a potentially significant attack on our self-image. The larger the audience, the more overwhelming is the prospect of humiliation.

There is now neurological evidence demonstrating the effect that attacks on our self-esteem have on the brain. One study showed that “social pain” activated the same circuits of the brain as physical pain. Consequently any attack on our self-image is interpreted by the brain as physical pain. When we speak of “hurt” feelings, we acknowledge that any form of censure, from slight criticism to outright condemnation or rejection, affects our self-esteem and is felt as physical pain – hence our aversion to admitting fault or to accepting liability. The word “sorry” is one of the most difficult to express, despite it being the quickest, cheapest and most effective form of resolving a dispute. But our brain seems to indicate to us that saying sorry will be as painful as putting our hand into a fire.

The ability to monitor neural pathways helps us to see how our brain functions in conflict situations. For example, we now have a neurological explanation of our “fight or flight” instinct. This reflex is governed by the amygdala, two small structures in the brain that control our instinctive responses. Originally needed as a part of our evolutionary development, they enabled us to act swiftly and instinctively in the face of physical attacks in the wild.

Today the amygdala can be triggered by any attack on our self-esteem. When the brain perceives a threat, whether physical or on our self-image, the amygdala “takes control”, diverting the signals away from the cortex, the “thinking” part of the brain. This “amygdala hijack” prevents us from engaging in logical or analytical thought, instead creating instant defensive reactions.

That is why we recoil at any allegation of fault, whether in business, within the family, behind the wheel of a car – or in the supermarket. It is an assault on our self-esteem, and it is painful. It is at these moments that we need to shrink our egos, to tell ourselves that our self-esteem is unnecessarily getting in the way, and that it is far more productive to try to see things from the other’s perspective.

Why eyewitnesses get it wrong?

Another balanced perspective on the global economic crisis

By Chan Akya

The trick to flying is to fall ... and miss. Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams should have been around now, but tragically died a few years ago aged in his late forties (rather than at '42'). If he had been around, perhaps he would have given some wise counsel to world leaders who all seem out at sea in attempting to handle a crisis that wasn't necessarily of their making but almost seems certain to be their undoing.

The weekend saw political parties in the United States failing to agree on a program to adjust let alone cut sharply the country's yawning budget deficit. Alongside, the seventh regime change since the beginning of 2010 in Europe after this week's booting out of Spain's prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero marks yet another chapter of voters throwing not just the baby out with the bathwater, but in this case also the midwife and the entire bedroom. (See The men without qualities, Asia Times Online, October 29, 2011).

Cue the markets pushing Spanish and Italian yields to record levels this week, and even "reassuring" statements from rating agencies about US creditworthiness being shrugged off. The talk in Europe is now when, not if, Italy and Greece leave the euro; speculation has even mounted about the tenability of the French fiscal position.

Meanwhile banks on both sides of the Atlantic are being pummeled into submission with eye-watering declines in share price which the banks are attempting to correct by shedding thousands of employees. The count this year so far is that over 200,000 banking jobs will be lost in the major financial centers of the West - in effect reversing the entire marginal hiring by the industry since 2008. Alongside business sentiment continues to fall, and as companies postpone indefinitely their plans to invest, the job market isn't going to bounce back anytime soon.

Then there is the economic data. European data is no surprise except to those who have been sleeping for a while, but the ugly numbers from US gross domestic product on Tuesday showed declining inventories - exactly the kind of multiplier effect on the negative end of the spectrum that predicts further and sharper economic pain.

Game theory
Politicians in the US and Europe need to be aware of two basic tenets of government:
a. If you are going to bluff, do it big and do it early;
b. If you are going to panic, do it early and do it big.

The unsaid supplemental rule here is: don't do both. This is the reason for the opening quote from Douglas Adams.

Suspension of disbelief is an art form but apparently also broadly applicable to various aspects of modern life ranging from market sentiment to voter angst. There is very little certainty about any initiative, which basically calls for strong confidence in one's ability to achieve something and more importantly in one's ability to convince the other side of one's confidence in respect to the same. For the markets, the common thread is really one of credibility, not of credit worthiness.

Think about this broadly - if the European Union had stepped out and initiated a broad program to buy every unsubscribed bond from Greece, Italy, Spain et al in the beginning of 2010, would any of the problems really have gotten out of hand since then? Instead, they embarked on a series of "limited" interventions, which have been fruitless precisely because everyone knows they are limited.

It's a bit like walking into battle carrying a single revolver - everyone knows you only have six bullets, and once they dodge those you are the one in serious trouble. If on the other hand the other side has no clue about your weapons and ammunition, the battle is most likely won without firing a single shot.

In the end, this is the primary reason for the Keynesian policies of the past three years to have failed utterly. They were simply insufficient, vastly under-estimating the true economic damage wrought by the 2007-8 financial crisis (I really shouldn't be dating this financial crisis, given that it very much continues to this day). This was then a case of bluffing late and bluffing small time. I am of course happy with this failure because, as I argued before, the demographic necessity of the West was to embrace poverty either broadly through inflation or narrowly through significant write-offs in savings and investments.

So much about the Keynesian failures, but how did the Austrian School followers do in their neck of the woods? Not too well I am afraid. Austrian principles such as credit tightening in a crisis, allowing banks and companies to go bust without hesitation were observed in the exception (Lehman Brothers) rather than the rule (countless US and European banks).

Even in the case of sovereign debt, the demands for austerity (Greece) were trivial and the penalties for noncompliance, laughable ("You veel resign Mr Papanderou, ja?"). This isn't the way that free markets work.

If you really wanted to stem the moral hazard tide, the best way would have been to rescue depositors but let the banks go into administration. That would have ended up costing Ireland a fraction of what the country has spent on its banks since the beginning of 2008, primarily to mollify German bankers who had made incredibly stupid lending decisions (see (F)Ire and Ice", Asia Times Online, November 20, 2010) in the first place.

Even in the US, research has shown that in situations where private institutions purchased mortgages at deep discounts from the banks (or more likely from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which rescued the banks), the turnaround has been palpable. Mortgages have been quickly modified, some useless tenants kicked out while a majority see their payments adjusted to more affordable levels along which they also have upside participation. In contrast, the government-rescued banks still carry billions of zombie mortgages and have simply failed to address them adequately if at all.

This isn't a surprise as the banks invested government bailouts not into their decrepit operations but rather in punting across their fixed-income books, essentially loading up on a whole bunch of underpriced assets. Some of these assets rose in price, but some others have since fallen back over the course of this year.

"Those damn Europeans sold from summer," exclaimed an American banker by way of explanation of his horrific trading losses in the second half of this year. "Yes, but what were you doing with a 30x leverage position on your books in the first place?" I countered, to no avail. "What else could I do - everyone else was hiring in 2009 and management asked me why I wasn't" he replied. That is moral hazard in practice for you. A game of passing the parcel where everyone knows that the parcel contains an explosive device that may be set off by movement, time or just randomly.

The way forward
How do I expect this all to be resolved? This presupposes that I do expect this situation to be resolved in the first place, which I really can't see at this stage. Among all the worst body of options out there, it is my belief that the following combination is likely to produce the most acceptable solution from here on:
1. An unpopular Obama administration attempts to reverse the mollycoddling of US banks going toward the elections. This means a crackdown on banking system leverage, proprietary trading and a long look at jailing a bunch of bankers. This would also involve taking a couple of US banks (you know who you are) to the proverbial cleaners, in essence allowing a controlled bankruptcy of those institutions.
2. Meanwhile the Europeans simply go ahead and commit big time to Keynesian solutions, essentially overruling the German opposition. The European Central Bank indulges in significant and unlimited quantitative easing, while European governments turn their back on austerity.

In this combination, the following market impacts come through:
a. A significant decline in the value of the euro against the US dollar, perhaps approaching parity or worse;
b. A sharp decline in global stock prices followed by a sharp rally next year;
c. Rampant inflation in the Western world that helps to push up commodity prices after the initial decline;
d. Recovery in European sovereign bonds for the short-term.

In every possible way of looking at all this though, I cannot help but admit to a strong whiff of wishful thinking in all this. Oh well, it is Thanksgiving after all.

An Influential Economist admits the wrongness of economic dogma

Stephen King




Monday, 21 November 2011

This week I'm going to take a step back and offer my "Top 10 Beliefs Strongly Held in 2007 Which Now Turn Out to Have Been Hopelessly Wrong".







Belief No 1: Inflation targeting delivers prosperity and stability.



In the late 1980s, central bankers the world over became enamoured with inflation targeting. Scarred from the inflationary excesses of the 1970s, price stability seemed eminently desirable. Yet the single-minded pursuit of low inflation also revealed a remarkable ignorance of earlier periods of economic instability which didn't involve very much inflation, at least not of the conventional kind.



Japan had an almighty financial bubble in the late 1980s yet, relative to other nations, enjoyed a remarkably low inflation rate. The US had extraordinarily low inflation in the 1920s but, funnily enough, the decade ended with the Wall Street Crash.







Belief No 2: Japan screwed up but the West knows better



As an argument reflecting cultural and national supremacy, this takes some beating. The Japanese supposedly failed to do the right things. In particular, they didn't loosen monetary or fiscal policy until it was too late. The US wasn't going to make the same mistake. The collapse in stock prices in 2000 thus brought on a dose of the monetary vapours. US interest rates dropped dramatically as the Federal Reserve tried to prevent "another Japan". The policy worked, but only by ramping up house prices, household debt and the mortgage-backed securities market.



The US now faces a situation perhaps even worse than Japan's. The economy has stagnated, risk aversion has increased, government bond yields have plunged, the budget deficit is out of control, government debt has been downgraded, deleveraging is rife and long-term unemployment has soared.







Belief No 3: Governments don't default



Everyone knew that the emerging nations defaulted like clockwork but that developed nations were somehow different. Surely they would never treat their creditors with such disdain. It just wasn't cricket.



Yet cross-border holdings of capital had risen to unprecedented levels. And, within the eurozone, nations had lost the option of printing money. So we now have a situation where, within the eurozone, southern debtors owe money to northern creditors yet, as a consequence of the financial crisis, don't have a lot of spare cash. No surprise, then, that default has suddenly become a – previously unlikely – option.







Belief No 4: Globalisation is good for everyone



The idea was simple. As economies became ever-more integrated – through the opening up of trade and capital flows – resources would be allocated more efficiently, the global economic pie would get bigger and everyone, potentially, would become richer.



Now that western economies have stagnated, household incomes have declined and pension pots are dwindling, the argument doesn't look quite so clever. The pie has indeed become bigger – largely the result of persistent growth in the emerging world – but it's been sliced up in unexpected ways. Not everyone's a winner after all.







Belief No 5: Equities are a good long term investment



This all went wrong at the beginning of the Millennium. The FTSE 100 peaked just shy of 7,000 at the very end of 1999. That now seems a long time ago. While there's been the occasional big rally since then, the falls have been even larger. Despite the extraordinary deterioration in government fiscal positions across the world, risk-averse investors have preferred to buy Treasuries, gilts and Bunds than equities.







Belief No 6: The emerging world cannot decouple



Oh yes it can. While economic activity in the Western world is no higher than it was at the end of 2007, before the world suffered the full force of the financial meltdown, activity in the emerging world is dramatically higher. Chinese GDP, for example, is about 40 per cent higher than it was in 2007.







Belief No 7: Markets work



Some markets work, others don't. Monopolies and oligopolies can't always be broken up but anyone who's bothered to open an economics textbook knows they don't always deliver the best outcomes for society as a whole.







Belief No 8: Global markets trump national states



This was an extension of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History and the Last Man", the idea that western liberal democracies and market-driven economies had triumphed, paving the way for a new era of commonly shared values and beliefs. Yet, as we've lurched from one crisis to the next, the return of national self-interest has been remarkable, not least in the eurozone.







Belief No 9: House prices always rise



No they don't. This discovery lies at the heart of the problems now dragging down western economic activity through a process of persistent deleveraging.







Belief No 10: Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light



My defence of economists. Yes, we got a lot of things wrong. My profession hardly covered itself in glory. But if the boffins at Cern are proved right, our most fundamental beliefs about the universe may also be wrong. If Einstein couldn't get it right, it merely shows that even the cleverest human is fallible.



Stephen King is the group chief economist at HSBC

We can all learn from Gwyneth Paltrow

Terence Blacker in The Independent Friday, 9 September 2011





The scavengers who live off the scraps of celebrity scandal will be paying particular attention to the marriage of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin over the next few weeks. Not only are the couple blessed with talent, looks and success – provocation in itself – but she has just made a statement which has caused considerable outrage in some quarters.





Prepare to be shocked. "The more I live my life, the more I learn not to judge people for what they do," Gwyneth has said, quite openly and without apology. "I think we're all trying to do our best but life is complicated." As if that were not controversial enough, she added: "I know people I respect and admire and look up to who have had extra-marital affairs."



The response to these dangerous and reckless remarks has been predictable. There has been clammy speculation about the state of Paltrow's marriage. Seven years of married life, and suddenly she's relaxed about infidelity. What could be going on there? Then, naturally, there have been gusts of moral disapproval from the media. Famous people who express sane, reasonable views are instinctively mistrusted – we expect our celebrities to be out of touch and entertaining – and sneering reference has been made to Paltrow's "latest flirtation with controversy", not to mention her "superhuman compassion".



Paltrow is, though, making a worthwhile point. It is a very contemporary habit, the need to stand in judgment over every little muddle in which a public figure finds herself or himself and draw sorrowful conclusions from them, as a vicar does in a sermon. Scandal and misadventure have always been part of the media, but the busy drawing of moral lessons, the pious scolding from the sidelines, is something new. Disapproval is to the 21st century what primness was to the Victorians.



Both, to a large extent, are propelled by sexual frustration. Prurience, today as over a century ago, tends to disguise itself as moral concern – we need to know every excitingly shocking little detail, in order to condemn it. When a photograph was published recently of a uniformed American cop having sex with a woman on the hood of her car, it was published around the world – it was funny and played to some well-worn erotic fantasies. The story accompanying the picture, though, was the scandal, the abuse of power, the controversy. The randy cop was quickly fired.



It is worth remembering who is doing the judging on these occasions. Unlike the Victorians, today's wet-lipped moralists are not eminent politicians or churchmen. They are journalists.



Such is the hypocrisy when it comes to public misbehaviour that it is now taken for granted. When MPs were being pilloried for taking liberties with their allowances, the moral outrage was orchestrated by those who belonged to a profession in which, over the previous decades, the large-scale fiddling of expenses was a matter of competitive pride. Nor, for all their shrill moralising when a celebrity is caught in the wrong bed, are those who work in the media famous for their high standards of sobriety or sexual fidelity.



Here, perhaps, is the truth behind the new need to judge. Commentators scold, and readers allow themselves to be whipped into a state of excited disapproval, for reasons of guilt about their own less-than-perfect lives.



As Gwyneth Paltrow says, life can indeed be complicated. Taking the high moral ground is only worthwhile when something truly bad has been done. It is fine to be interested and excited by scandal, but why do we have to condemn quite so much? Since when have we all become so sanctimonious?



Few lives would bear the closest scrutiny day by day. Indeed, in a world more full of temptation and dodgy role-models than ever before, a bit of complication along the way may simply be a sign that you are living it to the full.

Medical Errors - Eighth Leading Cause of Death in the US

According to the Institute of Medicine, between 690,000 and 748,000 patients are affected by medical errors in the US every year and between 44,000 and 98,000 die from them. Even this low ball estimate makes medical mistakes the eighth leading cause of death worse than breast cancer, AIDS and motor vehicles accidents. It also makes medicine far more error prone than high-risk fields. For commercial aviation to take the same toll in the US as medical errors do, a full-up 747 would have to crash every three days, killing everyone on board.

More troubling is the medical profession's traditional response to these disturbing statistics, which has largely involved evasion, obfuscation, minimisation, defensiveness and denial....

"Observing more senior physicians, students learn that their mentors and supervisors believe in, practice and reward the concealment of errors. They learn to talk about unanticipated outcomes until a mistake morphs into a complication. Above all they learn not to tell the patient anything."  - Nancy Berlinger in After Harm.

Extracted from Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz

Desire: A dangerous flame

We think of it as an irresistible force – yet we are so in thrall to it that we have ceased to respect it. Jeanette Winterson looks at the power of desire

Thursday, 18 September 2008

Why is the measure of love loss? In between those two words – love, loss, and standing on either side of them, is how all this happened in the first place. Another word: desire.

While I can't have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I'd take a taxi across town to see you for 10 minutes. I'd wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say "Will you..." my answer is "Yes", before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Desire is always a kind of invention. By which I mean that the two of us are re-invented by this powerful emotion. Well, sometimes it is the two of us, sometimes it might just be me, and then I am your stalker, your psychopath, the one whose fantasy is out of control.

Desiring someone who has no desire for you is a clue to the nature of this all-consuming feeling; it has much more to do with me than it has to do with you. You are the object of my desire. I am the subject. I am the I.

When we are the object of each other's desire it is easy to see nothing negative in this glorious state. We become icons of romance, we fulfil all the slush-fantasies. This is how it is meant to be. You walked into the room... Our eyes met... From the first moment... and so on.

It is safe to say that overwhelming desire for another person involves a good deal of projection. I don't believe in love at first sight, but I do believe in desire at first sight. Sometimes it is as simple as sexual desire, and perhaps men are more straightforward there, but usually desire is complex; a constellation of wants and needs, hopes and dreams, a whole universe of uninhabited stars looking for life.

And nothing feels more like life than desire. Everyone knows it; the surge in the blood, cocaine-highs without the white powder. Desire is shamanistic, trance-like, ecstatic. When people say, as they often do, "I'd love to fall in love again – that first month, six months, year...", they are not talking about love at all – it's desire they mean.

And who can blame us? Desiring you allows me to feel intensely, makes my body alert as a fox. Desire for you allows me to live outside normal time, conjures me into a conversation with my soul when I never thought I had one, tricks me into behaving better than I ever did, like someone else, someone good.

Desire for you fills my mind and thus becomes a space-clearing exercise. In this jumbled, packed, bloated, noisy world, you become my point of meditation. I think of you and little else, and so I realise how absurd and wasteful are most of the things that I do. Body, mind, effort, are concentrated in your image. The fragmented state of ordinary life at last becomes coherent. No longer scattered through time and space, I am collected in one place, and that place is you.

Simple. Perfect.

Until it goes wrong.

The truth is that unless desire is transformed into love, desire fails us; it fails to do what it once did; the highs, the thrills. Our transports of delight disappear. We stop walking on air. We find ourselves back on the commuter train and on our own two feet. Language gives it away; we talk about coming back down to earth.

For many people, this is a huge disappointment. When desire is gone, so is love, and so is the relationship. I doubt, though, that love is so easy to shift. Loving shies away from leaving, and can cope with the slow understanding that the beloved is not Superman or Miss World.

We live in an "upgrade" culture. I think this has infected relationships. Why keep last year's model when the new one will be sleeker and more fun? People, like stuff, are throwaways in our society; we don't do job security and we don't offer security in relationships. We mouth platitudes about time to move on, as though we were doing something new-age and wise, when all we really want is to get rid of the girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife.

I don't want a return to the 1950s, when couples stayed together whatever the hell, but whoever said that relationships are easy?

Advertising always promises that the new model will be easier to use. And of course when you "upgrade" to the next relationship, it is also easier – for a while.

If you are pretty or personable, handsome or rich, serial relationships offer all the desire and none of the commitment. As sexual desire calms, and as the early fantasies dissolve, we begin to see the other person in real life, and not as our goddess or rescuer. We turn critical. We have doubts.

We begin to see ourselves, too, and as most of us spend our entire lives hiding from any confrontation with the self, this sudden sighting is unpleasant, and we blame the other person for our panicky wish to bolt. It is less painful to change your partner than it is to confront yourself, but one of the many strange things about love is that it asks that we do confront ourselves, while giving us the strength of character to make that difficult task possible. If desire is a magic potion, with instant effect (see Tristan and Isolde), then love is a miracle whose effects become apparent only in time. Love is the long-haul. Desire is now.

An upgrade culture, a now culture, and a celebrity culture, where the endless partner-swapping of the rich and famous is staple fare, doesn't give much heft to the long-haul. We are the new Don Giovannis, whose seductions need to be faster and more frequent, and we hide these crimes of the heart under the sexy headline of "desire".

Don Giovanni – with his celebrated 1,003 women, is of course dragged off to Hell for his sins. Desire has never been a favourite of religion. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, Christianity sees desire as the road to the sins of the flesh and as a distraction from God. Islam has its women cover themselves in public lest any man should be inflamed, and jeopardise his soul. In Jewish tradition, desire ruins King David and Samson, just as surely as modern-day Delilah's are still shearing their men into submission. Yet it would be misleading to forget the love poem in the Bible that is the "Song of Solomon"; a poem as romantic as any written since, that gives desire a legitimate place in the palace of love.

And quite right too. Desire is wonderful. Magic potions are sometimes exactly what is needed. You can love me and leave me if you like, and anybody under 30 should do quite a lot of loving and leaving. I don't mean that desire belongs to youth – certainly it does not – but there are good reasons to fall in love often when you are growing up, even if only to discover that it wasn't love at all.

The problems start when desire is no longer about discovery, but just a cheap way of avoiding love.

It is a mistake to see desire as an end in itself. Lust is an end in itself, and if that is all you want, then fine. Desire is trickier, because I suspect that its real role is towards love, not an excuse in the other direction.

There is a science-based argument that understands desire as a move towards love, but a love that is necessary for a stable society. Love is a way of making people stay together, desire is a way of making people love each other, goes the argument. This theory reads our highest emotional value as species protection. Unsurprisingly, I detest this reading, and much prefer what poets have to say. When Dante talks about the love that moves the sun and the lesser stars, I believe him. He didn't know as much as we do about the arrangement of the heavens, but he knew about the complexity of the heart.

My feeling is that love led by desire, desire deepening into love, is much more than selfish gene-led social stability and survival of the species. Loving someone is the closest we can get to knowing what it is like to be another person. Love blasts through our habitual sclerotic selfishness, the narrow "me first" that gradually closes us down, the dead-end of the loveless life.

There are different kinds of love, and not all of them are prefaced by desire, yet desire keeps its potent place in our affections. Its releasing force has no regard for conventions of any kind, and it crosses genders, age, social classes, religion, common sense and good manners with seemingly equal ease.

This is bracing and necessary. It is addictive. Like all powerful substances, desire needs careful handling, which by its nature is almost impossible to do.

Almost, but not quite. Jung, drawing on alchemy, talked about desire as the white bird, which should always be followed when it appears, but not always brought down to earth. Simply, we cannot always act on our desire, nor should we, but repressing it tells us nothing. Following the white bird is a courageous way of acknowledging that something explosive is happening. Perhaps that will blow up our entire world, or perhaps it will detonate a secret chamber in the heart. For certain, things will change.

I don't suppose that the white bird of desire is nearly as attractive to most of us as the white powder substitute with natural highs. Desire as a drug is racier than desire as a messenger. Yet most things in life have a prosaic meaning and a poetic meaning, and there are times when only poetry will answer.

For me, when I have trusted my desire, whether or not I have acted on it, life has become much more difficult, but strangely more illuminated. When I have not trusted my desire, out of cowardice or common sense, slowly I have gone into shadow. I cannot explain this, but I find it to be true.

Desire deserves respect. It is worth the chaos. But it is not love, and only love is worth everything.