Boyd Tonkin in the Independent
As it sometimes does, last October the Nobel Committee for the prize in physiology or medicine split its award. Half the pot (of eight million Swedish kronor in all) went to the British-American neuroscientist John O’Keefe, the other to the Norwegian couple who have charted the grid cells in the brain that enable our pathfinding and positioning skills via a sort of “internal GPS”.
May-Britt Moser and Edvard I Moser first met at high school and have worked together over 30 years. Professor Moser (May-Britt) said after the Nobel nod: “It’s easy for us because we can have breakfast meetings almost every day.” Professor Moser (Edvard) stated: “We have a common project and a common goal … And we depend on each other for succeeding.”
“There were a lot of things that made me decide to marry Edvard,” the other Professor Moser has recalled. Not all had to do with neurological breakthroughs. Once, Edvard gave her a huge umbrella. Open it, he said. “So I opened it above my head, and it rained down small beautiful pieces of paper with little poems on about me.”
This week, another Nobel laureate in the same discipline – Sir Tim Hunt, 2001 – found himself in need of a titanium umbrella in order to fend off the media flak. The 72-year-old biochemist told a conference in South Korea that “girls” caused mayhem in the lab. “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.” Cue the avalanche of outrage that has now driven Sir Tim – married, by the way, to the distinguished immunologist Professor Mary Collins – out of his honorary post at University College, London. In Britain, where only 13 per cent of scientific and engineering professionals are female, his off-the-cuff “banter” has gone down like a tungsten (denser than lead) balloon.
So it should. Yet the champions of equality in science who have justly hooted at Sir Tim’s antique ditty might spare a thought for the Mosers’ partnership. The Norwegian pair are not alone in fusing personal commitment with top-grade scientific collaboration. Last year, in a fascinating study for Nature, Kerri Smith reported that, according to the US National Science Foundation, “just over one-quarter of married people with doctorates had a spouse working in science or engineering”. A 2008 survey found that the proportion of research posts that went to couples had risen from 3 per cent in the 1970s to 13 per cent.
Smith consulted a range of high-flying scientific double acts. They included the Taiwanese cell biologists Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan, who have collaborated since 1967. Lily Jan praised the joint progress made possible by a “very consistent long-term camaraderie”. After years of long-distance romance and research, physicists Claudia Felser and Stuart Parkin now live together in Germany with plum posts at the Max Planck Institutes in (respectively) Dresden and Halle. “Lufthansa and United Airlines will be very unhappy,” said Parkin.
These partnerships in life and lab follow a different, far more equal, pattern to the liaison of master and muse, once common in the arts. Scientists tend not to bother much with history. But the rising number of collaborating duos will know that they can hail as their forerunners the most intellectually fertile pairing of all: between Marie Sklodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie.
Marie had plentiful Hunts of her own to vanquish. In 1903, only a late objection by a Swedish mathematician with feminist sympathies prevented her first Nobel Prize, in physics, from going to Pierre and Henri Becquerel alone. Not that the Nobel selectors learned their lesson. Lise Meitner, who first explained the significance of nuclear fission, never got the call. When Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel for their work on DNA in 1962, no mention was made of Rosalind Franklin (who had died in 1958). Her research into the double‑helix structure had made their triumph possible.
As any woman scientist will tell you, such neglect and condescension die hard and slow. Yet the atavistic Hunt and his denouncers share a common position. Both would banish Eros from the bench. Cases such as the Mosers suggest that, in some conditions, intimate bonds may even seed creativity. Expel love from the lab, and who knows what angels of deliverance might flee as well?
Besides, in science or any other pursuit, the same seeker can benefit at different stages both from solitary striving and intimate collaboration. You will find moving proof of this in the “autobiographical notes” that Marie Curie appended to her 1923 memoir of her husband. As a lonely Polish student in 1890s Paris, she relished her independence, even at the cost of cold, hunger and isolation in a freezing garret. She wrote: “I shall always consider one of the best memories of my life that period of solitary years exclusively devoted to the studies, finally within my reach, for which I had waited so long.”
Later, as she and Pierre experimented to isolate radium and investigate its properties in a tumbledown hut on the Paris School of Physics site, another kind of bliss took hold: “It was in this miserable old shed that we passed the best and happiest years of our life, devoting our entire days to our work.” Marie and Pierre’s shared quest embraced rapture as well as reason: “One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.”
Note the poetry. Sir Tim, in contrast, reveals himself as a strict dualist. Love and tears will ruin your results. On the one hand lies intellect, on the other emotion. As always, the female serves as proxy for the latter. Yet the binary mind in which Hunt believes no more exists in physics than in painting. Investigate the history of scientific discovery and you plunge into a wild labyrinth of Curie-style ecstasies, hunches, chances, blunders, windfalls, visions, guesses, serendipities and unsought “Eureka!” moments.
However, at the entrance to this theme park of happy accidents one statement should stand. Louis Pasteur said: “Chance favours only the prepared mind.” The intuitive breakthrough that rewrites all the rules happens to people who have toiled and failed, toiled again and failed better. Vision blesses the hardest workers. “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination,” Einstein said in 1929. “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” But he could get away with such New Agey bromides only because he was Albert Einstein.
Still, the scientific evidence in favour of intuitions, dreams and visions is strikingly widespread. In 1865, August Kekulé slumps in front of the fire and, in a reverie, sees the atoms of the benzene molecule “twisting and moving around in a snake-like manner”. Then, “one of the snakes got hold of its own tail, and tauntingly the whole structure whirled before my eyes”.
In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev grasps the structure of the periodic table in another dream. In a Budapest park in 1882, Nikola Tesla recites Goethe’s Faust and then imagines the electrical induction motor. “The idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed… The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear.”
More recently, the Nobel-winning biochemist Kary Mullis has written a Thomas Pynchon-like account of the day in 1983 when during a nocturnal drive in California he “saw” the pattern of the DNA polymerase chain reaction that kick-started genetic medicine. With his girlfriend (a chemist in the same lab), he had left for a weekend in the woods. “My little silver Honda’s front tyres pulled us through the mountains… My mind drifted back into the laboratory. DNA chains coiled and floated. Lurid blue and pink images of electric molecules injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes…”
A self-mythologising tinge colours many such memoirs of inspiration. They uncannily tend to resemble one another. All the same, these “Eureka!” narratives have a consistent theme, of a break or rest after thwarted labour. The pioneer of quantum mechanics Paul Dirac wrote that “I found the best ideas usually came, not when one was actively striving for them, but when one was in a more relaxed state”; in his case, via “long solitary walks on Sundays”. In science, the unconscious can work hardest when the intellect has downed tools.
In which case, the flight from emotion – from Tim Hunt’s dreaded tears and love – may sterilise more than fertilise. Shun “girls”, by which he seems to mean all subjectivity, and the seeker risks falling into an antiseptic void.
But enough: it feels unscientific, to say the least, to pillory a bloke for a gaffe that shows up a culture and an epoch more than an individual man. Perhaps Sir Tim, and the Royal Society that clumsily rushed to distance itself from him despite its own distinctly patriarchal history, could lay the matter to rest with a suitable donation. It ought to go to the Marie Curie charity for terminal care, which since 1948 has enlisted science and research to strengthen love – and to dry tears.
Sunday, 14 June 2015
George Osborne got away with his Big Lie.
William Keegan in the Guardian
What's now in the box? Osborne outside 11 Downing Street before delivering his last budget speech ahead of May's general election. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
The inquest on Labour’s electoral defeat will run and run, and the recriminations will no doubt persist throughout the party’s inordinately long timetable for selecting a new leader. But there is a limit to which candidates should surrender to the Big Lie that George Osborne, more than anyone else, has managed to get away with.
Take a report in the Times’s recent “investigation” into Labour’s “disastrous campaign”. We are told that “as early as 2010, Labour’s pollsters sent a memo saying the party should argue ‘the deficit is the number one challenge facing the country’ and back ‘tough spending cuts’.”
The truth is that the deficit was not the problem: it was the solution. What the much-maligned government of Gordon Brown did was to recognise this, and act accordingly. One of the principal beneficiaries of this sensible Keynesian response was George Osborne, who inherited the economy in which the prospect of a 1930s depression had been warded off. He proceeded to make wholly misleading analogies with the state of the benighted Greek economy and embark on a programme of austerity which Ed Balls rightly warned would stop the recovery in its tracks.
It is not for me to join the chorus maintaining that Labour should have admitted that all the extra spending on schools and hospitals was a mistake. The most serious mistake was not to get across with sufficient emphasis that by far the biggest contribution to a rise in public sector debt was caused by the banking crisis. Moreover, as my old mentor, the Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen, pointed out recently in a lecture reproduced in the New Statesman: “Even if we want to reduce public debt quickly, austerity is not a particularly effective way of achieving this (which the European and British experiences confirm)”.
It is tragic that the Big Lie was not dealt with by Ed Miliband. Apparently he dismissed advice from Alastair Campbell, way back, that he should commission an independent report, by a respected figure, on Labour’s past spending plans – plans that had been supported at the time by Messrs Cameron and Osborne. Even the Times reflects that such a report “would almost certainly have cleared Labour of blame, with a minor dispute around whether the party could have spent less in 2007”.
But the deficit story was allowed to run and run, and poor Miliband failed to scotch it on at least two prominent occasions. Yet, as Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the Treasury’s top civil servant, has stated: “The 2008 crisis was a banking crisis pure and simple.”
That crisis was a cataclysm. It demanded a short-term approach to warding off catastrophic consequences, and a long-term approach to reducing a national debt that, notwithstanding the impact of the crisis, remained, as Sen emphasises, remarkably low by historical standards. As he says, put quite simply, for reducing the debt, “we need economic growth; and austerity, as Keynes noted, is essentially anti-growth”.
But such wisdom will cut no ice with a cocky chancellor who can hardly believe his luck at how Labour played into his hands. By winning a mere 37% of votes cast, he thinks he now has the support of the country for a renewal of austerity. He plans a budget which – by not treating capital expenditure as something to be financed over the lifetime of the project, but from a single year’s revenue – is going to place huge burdens on the public services. Just brace yourselves for the real cuts.
Osborne’s first austerity programme brought us reductions in capital expenditure when borrowing costs for much-needed projects were negligible. In the past year or so, he has finally woken up to this country’s infrastructure problems and – who knows? – before long may even find himself reinventing the National Economic Development Office.
As Sen points out, had the British public been frightened after the second world war by the debt ratio, which was more than twice what it has been in recent years, “the NHS would never have been born, and the great experiment of having a welfare state in Europe (from which the whole world from China, Korea and Singapore to Brazil and Mexico would learn) would not have found a foothold”.
Take a report in the Times’s recent “investigation” into Labour’s “disastrous campaign”. We are told that “as early as 2010, Labour’s pollsters sent a memo saying the party should argue ‘the deficit is the number one challenge facing the country’ and back ‘tough spending cuts’.”
The truth is that the deficit was not the problem: it was the solution. What the much-maligned government of Gordon Brown did was to recognise this, and act accordingly. One of the principal beneficiaries of this sensible Keynesian response was George Osborne, who inherited the economy in which the prospect of a 1930s depression had been warded off. He proceeded to make wholly misleading analogies with the state of the benighted Greek economy and embark on a programme of austerity which Ed Balls rightly warned would stop the recovery in its tracks.
It is not for me to join the chorus maintaining that Labour should have admitted that all the extra spending on schools and hospitals was a mistake. The most serious mistake was not to get across with sufficient emphasis that by far the biggest contribution to a rise in public sector debt was caused by the banking crisis. Moreover, as my old mentor, the Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen, pointed out recently in a lecture reproduced in the New Statesman: “Even if we want to reduce public debt quickly, austerity is not a particularly effective way of achieving this (which the European and British experiences confirm)”.
It is tragic that the Big Lie was not dealt with by Ed Miliband. Apparently he dismissed advice from Alastair Campbell, way back, that he should commission an independent report, by a respected figure, on Labour’s past spending plans – plans that had been supported at the time by Messrs Cameron and Osborne. Even the Times reflects that such a report “would almost certainly have cleared Labour of blame, with a minor dispute around whether the party could have spent less in 2007”.
But the deficit story was allowed to run and run, and poor Miliband failed to scotch it on at least two prominent occasions. Yet, as Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the Treasury’s top civil servant, has stated: “The 2008 crisis was a banking crisis pure and simple.”
That crisis was a cataclysm. It demanded a short-term approach to warding off catastrophic consequences, and a long-term approach to reducing a national debt that, notwithstanding the impact of the crisis, remained, as Sen emphasises, remarkably low by historical standards. As he says, put quite simply, for reducing the debt, “we need economic growth; and austerity, as Keynes noted, is essentially anti-growth”.
But such wisdom will cut no ice with a cocky chancellor who can hardly believe his luck at how Labour played into his hands. By winning a mere 37% of votes cast, he thinks he now has the support of the country for a renewal of austerity. He plans a budget which – by not treating capital expenditure as something to be financed over the lifetime of the project, but from a single year’s revenue – is going to place huge burdens on the public services. Just brace yourselves for the real cuts.
Osborne’s first austerity programme brought us reductions in capital expenditure when borrowing costs for much-needed projects were negligible. In the past year or so, he has finally woken up to this country’s infrastructure problems and – who knows? – before long may even find himself reinventing the National Economic Development Office.
As Sen points out, had the British public been frightened after the second world war by the debt ratio, which was more than twice what it has been in recent years, “the NHS would never have been born, and the great experiment of having a welfare state in Europe (from which the whole world from China, Korea and Singapore to Brazil and Mexico would learn) would not have found a foothold”.
We were helped after the war by a loan from the US (mainly) and Canada, which was finally paid off in 2006. And a war loan dating from the first world war was finally redeemed earlier this year!
Osborne has rightly attracted ridicule, even from friendly commentators, for his absurd plan to try to bind all future governments to a law that demands not just budget balance but budget surpluses during “normal times” – a phrase that opens up great scope for debate. Apart from anything else, it is evident from the frequent revisions to statistics, and therefore analysis made by the Office for National Statistics and the Office for Budget Responsibility, that it is often not obvious at the time whether one is indeed living in “normal times”.
Rather like his distinguished predecessor, Lord Lawson, Osborne has become obsessed by “rules”. But as one of Macpherson’s distinguished predecessors, Sir Douglas Allen, used to say, what matters is not budget balance, let alone budget surplus, but a balanced economy. That is not what is on offer from the present chancellor.
Saturday, 13 June 2015
Marking exam papers exposes the flaws in teaching
It is staggering how many teaching staff I know that do not read examiners’ reports or even the exam specification and so their class often misses out on marks. Photograph: Alamy
The Secret Teacher in The Guardian
A detailed but incorrect answer appears beside every question on an exam sheet. The answers are peppered with technical language but their ideas make little sense. This is one of the most frustrating errors I see as an exam marker.
I took the position up a few years ago after some persuasion from a colleague and the lure of some extra holiday money. I was told that it would be excellent training and help me to become a more effective classroom teacher as I would understand the demands of the exam boards more closely.
Yes it is true that I understand the application of mark schemes better than before, and it definitely looks good on my CV. But I don’t think I can do it much longer.
Each year, I clear my diary for June and plan my time carefully to ensure that I can mark to a strict timetable, giving the papers my highest level of focus. And every year I become more and more depressed by the standard of the responses and the restrictive nature of the mark schemes.
The most saddening answers are simply left blank, or there could be a crossed out sentence. This may be understandable at GCSE for a short answer, but I have seen full essay questions left blank in A-level exams. I cannot help but picture the student sat in the exam hall, pen in hand and nothing to write. I wonder how they feel; it makes me sad and angry that maybe they’ve not had all the help they deserve from their teacher.
On another occasion a GCSE student covered a whole page in calculations trying to work out a simple percentage change question. They drew a box and arrows pointing to their eventual (wrong) answer, but they must have spent at least 20 minutes on a question that should take no more than two.
The Secret Teacher in The Guardian
A detailed but incorrect answer appears beside every question on an exam sheet. The answers are peppered with technical language but their ideas make little sense. This is one of the most frustrating errors I see as an exam marker.
I took the position up a few years ago after some persuasion from a colleague and the lure of some extra holiday money. I was told that it would be excellent training and help me to become a more effective classroom teacher as I would understand the demands of the exam boards more closely.
Yes it is true that I understand the application of mark schemes better than before, and it definitely looks good on my CV. But I don’t think I can do it much longer.
Each year, I clear my diary for June and plan my time carefully to ensure that I can mark to a strict timetable, giving the papers my highest level of focus. And every year I become more and more depressed by the standard of the responses and the restrictive nature of the mark schemes.
The most saddening answers are simply left blank, or there could be a crossed out sentence. This may be understandable at GCSE for a short answer, but I have seen full essay questions left blank in A-level exams. I cannot help but picture the student sat in the exam hall, pen in hand and nothing to write. I wonder how they feel; it makes me sad and angry that maybe they’ve not had all the help they deserve from their teacher.
On another occasion a GCSE student covered a whole page in calculations trying to work out a simple percentage change question. They drew a box and arrows pointing to their eventual (wrong) answer, but they must have spent at least 20 minutes on a question that should take no more than two.
Some students miss out on recognition because they lack the simple skill of clear handwriting; we cannot award the marks if we can’t read the answer. If it is illegible, there is no choice but to only credit the parts I can read.
Then there’s the other side of the scale: some essays are magnificent and show understanding of a topic that goes far beyond the requirements of the course. These are beautifully written and include complex analysis worthy of an undergraduate. But many of these responses go uncredited if they do not fit the exacting standard of the mark scheme.
I have seen some students get marks “capped” because they haven’t included a certain phrase or diagram, even though their overall work was of a high standard. This is reflected in the classroom and I have students asking how many sentences of analysis they need, and how many evaluation points. Whatever happened to writing a good essay and answering the question to the best of your ability?
I understand that exams are necessary to be able to award qualifications to students, and that mark schemes can ensure that grades are fair and consistent – perhaps this is something that cannot be changed. But I just cannot stop picturing the students sat in the exam halls, some with nothing to write at all, some writing illegibly, and others writing brilliantly but not being rewarded.
It’s clear something isn’t working if a student is enrolled on a course, but ends up without anything to show for it.
Some students do not engage – perhaps because they are not supported emotionally at home and in school – and cannot cope with the demands of study. Others are simply not on the right course. Even more worryingly, too many students fail to achieve because of poor teaching.
It is staggering how many teaching staff I know that do not read examiners’ reports or even the exam specification and so their class often misses out on marks.
It all boils down to time. We don’t need another initiative or want the system to change again but teachers need support to deliver well-designed courses and give detailed feedback to students. This would happen if class sizes were more manageable, reducing the level of marking we have to get through. It really is that simple.
Education and exams should not be the final stage for young people, but the start of their life. Yet, too many are beginning this journey far behind their peers. Let’s not let students down. We are measured by their results for that one year; but they may be measured by these grades for life.
Stop using China as an excuse for inaction on climate change
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Workers walk near wind turbines for generating electricity, at a wind farm in Guazhou, 950km (590 miles) northwest of Lanzhou in China. Photograph: CARLOS BARRIA/Reuters
China is the world’s excuse for cruelty and barbarism. If we don’t behave atrociously, politicians and columnists assure us, China will, so we had better do it first, before we are outcompeted.
You want holidays, collective bargaining rights and fair conditions in the workplace? Forget it. When Chinese workers have none, such fripperies would “hamper British/US/Australian/Canadian industry”, making it uncompetitive.
Columnists like Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, gleefully regaling us with tales of Chinese workers being turfed out of their dormitories at midnight, marched to a workstation and obliged to perform a 12-hour shift to meet a last-minute order from Apple, insist that we either compete on these terms or perish. France, he once claimed, is doomed if it seeks to preserve a 35-hour week, while people in Asia “are ready to work a 35-hour day.”
In fact French workers are doing fine: it turns out that European countries with shorter working hours (France, the Netherlands and Denmark for example) have higher productivity per hour than those whose workers have to spend longer at their desks (such as Germany and Britain). And a country whose people have both decent wages and time to relax can support millions of jobs – in leisure and pleasure – that don’t exist where workers are treated as little more than slaves.
You want your rivers, air and wildlife protected? What planet are you on? China, we are told, doesn’t give a damn for such luxuries, with the result that if we don’t abandon our own regulations, it will take over the world.
On no topic are these claims made more often than on climate change. What is the point of limiting our greenhouse gas emissions, a thousand bloggers (and a fair few politicians) insist, if China is building a new power station every two weeks (or days or minutes or whatever the latest hyperbole suggests)? Taking action on climate change is useless and stupid in the face of the Chinese threat.
China is not just a country. It is whatever powerful interests want us to be. It is, they suggest, a remorseless, faceless, insuperable threat to civilisation, to which the only rational response is to abandon civilisation. So often is the threat invoked to justify the latest round of inhumane proposals that it needs a name. Perhaps we could hijack one: China Syndrome.
China Syndrome is the 21st century extension of the Yellow Peril myth. First formulated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose extreme militarism, racism and anti-Semitism prefigured the rise of Nazism in Germany, the term reflects a long-standing apprehension about the people of Asia, dating back perhaps to the Mongol invasions of eastern Europe. It invokes an uncaring, undifferentiated horde of philistines, possessed perhaps with supernatural powers, but without moral limits or human qualities like empathy, pity, love or self-restraint. Unless we took extreme measures to defend ourselves against this threat, Wilhelm and others insisted, this human swarm would outbreed and overrun the nations of the west.
The myth became a staple of schlock literature and films, spawning such characters as Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless. The idea that the people of China might “steal our jobs” is also deep-rooted. It triggered a number of pogroms in the United States during the later decades of the 19thcentury, during which many Chinese immigrant workers were murdered.
It is, of course, true that China contributes substantially to the threat of climate breakdown: it is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It is also true that its diplomats often prove to be a hindrance during international negotiations on the subject. That was certainly the case at the UN climate conference in Bonn that ended on Thursday, where they refused even to discussthe crucial issue: how much global warming the policies adopted by each nation will cause.
This stands in apparent contrast to the agreement struck this week, as a result of Angela Merkel’s diplomacy, at the G7 meeting, calling for “a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century”.
But to suggest that China is an inherent and insuperable threat, as many of my correspondents do (mostly those who alternate between insisting that man-made climate change isn’t happening and insisting that we can’t do anything about it anyway), is grievously to misrepresent the people of that nation.
First, of course, much of its energy use is commissioned by other nations. As manufacturing has declined in countries like the US and Britain, and the workforce is mostly engaged in other activities, the fossil fuel burning caused by our consumption of stuff has shifted overseas, along with the blame. Even so, when China’s total greenhouse gas production is divided by its population, you discover that it is still producing much less per head than we are.
Partly as a result of a massive investment in renewables, the Chinese demand for coal dropped for the first time last year, and is likely to drop again this year. Perhaps because of the bureaucratic chaos of China’s centralised, unwieldy government, there is a gulf between the energy transition rapidly taking place within China and its negotiating positions in international meetings, which are “in the hands of completely different sets of bureaucrats.”
But perhaps the biggest surprise for those who unwittingly invoke the old Yellow Peril tropes is that the Chinese people care more about climate change than we do. A survey released on Monday reveals that 26% of respondents in the UK and 32% in the US believe that climate change is “not a serious problem”, while in China the figure is only 4%. In the UK, 7% don’t want their government to endorse any international agreement addressing climate change. In the US the proportion rises to 17%. But in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, only 1% want no action taken.
Of course, the question that arises in undemocratic countries like China is the extent to which public desires can shape government policy. But what’s clear is that China’s failure to act decisively on climate change does not arise from any national characteristic.
The paternalistic assumption that only the rich nations can afford to care is also based on myth: a myth that – like the Yellow Peril story – dates back to the colonial era. As the Greendex survey of consumer attitudes shows, people in poorer countries tend to feel much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in rich countries, even though those impacts might be far smaller. Of the nations surveyed, the people of Germany, the US, Australia and Britain felt the least consumer guilt; while the people of India, China, Mexico and Brazil felt the most. The more we consume, the less we feel.
There is no scope for moral superiority in the climate talks, least of all a moral superiority based on unfounded national stereotypes. Collectively, we are wrecking the delicate atmospheric balance that has allowed human civilisation to flourish. Collectively, we have to sort this out. And it will happen only by taking responsibility for our impacts, rather than by blaming other nations for what we don’t want to do.
China is the world’s excuse for cruelty and barbarism. If we don’t behave atrociously, politicians and columnists assure us, China will, so we had better do it first, before we are outcompeted.
You want holidays, collective bargaining rights and fair conditions in the workplace? Forget it. When Chinese workers have none, such fripperies would “hamper British/US/Australian/Canadian industry”, making it uncompetitive.
Columnists like Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, gleefully regaling us with tales of Chinese workers being turfed out of their dormitories at midnight, marched to a workstation and obliged to perform a 12-hour shift to meet a last-minute order from Apple, insist that we either compete on these terms or perish. France, he once claimed, is doomed if it seeks to preserve a 35-hour week, while people in Asia “are ready to work a 35-hour day.”
In fact French workers are doing fine: it turns out that European countries with shorter working hours (France, the Netherlands and Denmark for example) have higher productivity per hour than those whose workers have to spend longer at their desks (such as Germany and Britain). And a country whose people have both decent wages and time to relax can support millions of jobs – in leisure and pleasure – that don’t exist where workers are treated as little more than slaves.
You want your rivers, air and wildlife protected? What planet are you on? China, we are told, doesn’t give a damn for such luxuries, with the result that if we don’t abandon our own regulations, it will take over the world.
On no topic are these claims made more often than on climate change. What is the point of limiting our greenhouse gas emissions, a thousand bloggers (and a fair few politicians) insist, if China is building a new power station every two weeks (or days or minutes or whatever the latest hyperbole suggests)? Taking action on climate change is useless and stupid in the face of the Chinese threat.
China is not just a country. It is whatever powerful interests want us to be. It is, they suggest, a remorseless, faceless, insuperable threat to civilisation, to which the only rational response is to abandon civilisation. So often is the threat invoked to justify the latest round of inhumane proposals that it needs a name. Perhaps we could hijack one: China Syndrome.
China Syndrome is the 21st century extension of the Yellow Peril myth. First formulated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose extreme militarism, racism and anti-Semitism prefigured the rise of Nazism in Germany, the term reflects a long-standing apprehension about the people of Asia, dating back perhaps to the Mongol invasions of eastern Europe. It invokes an uncaring, undifferentiated horde of philistines, possessed perhaps with supernatural powers, but without moral limits or human qualities like empathy, pity, love or self-restraint. Unless we took extreme measures to defend ourselves against this threat, Wilhelm and others insisted, this human swarm would outbreed and overrun the nations of the west.
The myth became a staple of schlock literature and films, spawning such characters as Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless. The idea that the people of China might “steal our jobs” is also deep-rooted. It triggered a number of pogroms in the United States during the later decades of the 19thcentury, during which many Chinese immigrant workers were murdered.
It is, of course, true that China contributes substantially to the threat of climate breakdown: it is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It is also true that its diplomats often prove to be a hindrance during international negotiations on the subject. That was certainly the case at the UN climate conference in Bonn that ended on Thursday, where they refused even to discussthe crucial issue: how much global warming the policies adopted by each nation will cause.
This stands in apparent contrast to the agreement struck this week, as a result of Angela Merkel’s diplomacy, at the G7 meeting, calling for “a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century”.
But to suggest that China is an inherent and insuperable threat, as many of my correspondents do (mostly those who alternate between insisting that man-made climate change isn’t happening and insisting that we can’t do anything about it anyway), is grievously to misrepresent the people of that nation.
First, of course, much of its energy use is commissioned by other nations. As manufacturing has declined in countries like the US and Britain, and the workforce is mostly engaged in other activities, the fossil fuel burning caused by our consumption of stuff has shifted overseas, along with the blame. Even so, when China’s total greenhouse gas production is divided by its population, you discover that it is still producing much less per head than we are.
Partly as a result of a massive investment in renewables, the Chinese demand for coal dropped for the first time last year, and is likely to drop again this year. Perhaps because of the bureaucratic chaos of China’s centralised, unwieldy government, there is a gulf between the energy transition rapidly taking place within China and its negotiating positions in international meetings, which are “in the hands of completely different sets of bureaucrats.”
But perhaps the biggest surprise for those who unwittingly invoke the old Yellow Peril tropes is that the Chinese people care more about climate change than we do. A survey released on Monday reveals that 26% of respondents in the UK and 32% in the US believe that climate change is “not a serious problem”, while in China the figure is only 4%. In the UK, 7% don’t want their government to endorse any international agreement addressing climate change. In the US the proportion rises to 17%. But in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, only 1% want no action taken.
Of course, the question that arises in undemocratic countries like China is the extent to which public desires can shape government policy. But what’s clear is that China’s failure to act decisively on climate change does not arise from any national characteristic.
The paternalistic assumption that only the rich nations can afford to care is also based on myth: a myth that – like the Yellow Peril story – dates back to the colonial era. As the Greendex survey of consumer attitudes shows, people in poorer countries tend to feel much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in rich countries, even though those impacts might be far smaller. Of the nations surveyed, the people of Germany, the US, Australia and Britain felt the least consumer guilt; while the people of India, China, Mexico and Brazil felt the most. The more we consume, the less we feel.
There is no scope for moral superiority in the climate talks, least of all a moral superiority based on unfounded national stereotypes. Collectively, we are wrecking the delicate atmospheric balance that has allowed human civilisation to flourish. Collectively, we have to sort this out. And it will happen only by taking responsibility for our impacts, rather than by blaming other nations for what we don’t want to do.
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