Category: Politics

Data geeks rule OK

Buzzards mew (see last post) and data geeks buzzz….

The Economist’s Lexington column talks about the surfeit of data and data geeks buzzing around Washington DC. Data it seems is the truth, or truths, because data can be made to say a lot of things, depending on which way you twist it. Unless you’re Nate Silver, who wishes to be judged on his outcomes. That would and should be the real test for data geeks.

CP Scott: ‘facts are sacred, opinion is free.’ But if facts are merely data then – is nothing sacred?

‘Washington’s passion…for data does not signal the start of a new Socratic age, in which political classes jointly search for truth.’ (Lexington) Each of us brings his or her own ‘tribal instinct’ to weighing the facts. So maybe that’s another rider to CP Scott’s dictum. Keep your tribal instincts in check, and when judging facts put your mind in neutral…

Over here we’ve had the Civitas report, arguing there has been no insider advantage from joining the Common Market all those years ago. Our trade with the EU represents no greater percentage than it did in 1973. The government’s response: ‘the EU’s share of UK trade has remained consistent because of the huge growth in other markets in the same period.’ Now I’d need to re-read Richard Lambert’s article in Prospect a few months back, check out the recent CBI report arguing a different case from Civitas, and the Civitas report itself. Then form my own view. My tribal instinct backs the CBI. Civitas are a right-of-centre think tank, so we’d expect their instinct to be more critical of the EU. Surprise surprise, that’s just what they are.

Damned hard being neutral, and a whole lot less fun.

Banning books – a prison library story

For anyone with any involvement is book publishing, and anyone with a sense of the redemptive power of books, the government’s recently introduced changes to the IEP (Incentives and Earned Privileges) scheme for prisoners cause alarm bells to ring.

Anyone who tampers with the availability of books risks evoking thoughts of Savonarola in Florence in 1505, or Fahrenheit 451. But you don’t need to burn books. You just place them off-limits.

The changes claim to be ‘about making (prisoners) work towards their rehabilitation. Poor behaviour and refusal to engage in the prison regime will result in a loss of privileges.’ One key change:

‘A ban on all sentenced prisoners receiving parcels including books and other basic items, except for a one-off parcel at the start of their sentence and in exceptional circumstances.’ Television access is severely restricted. (The issue is not of course restriction itself – it’s how tight that restriction is. There are good reasons for restricting TV access.)

To progress IEP status, prisoners must ‘demonstrate a commitment towards their rehabilitation’ by engaging in purposeful activity, behaving well and helping other prisoners’. It seems that ‘knitting wool, embroidery silks as well as books are banned and indeed the parcel is returned to the sender who has to pay’. (Again, wool implies needles, and you can see why needles are restricted – if not outright banned.)

The effect would seem to be to make purposeful activity harder. The changes appear to run directly counter to both rehabilitation, by helping prisoners stay connected to the outside world, and better re-connect when they get out, and to their personal welfare. You build confidence and self-esteem, you don’t undermine it by denying opportunities for self-improvement.

Reading the Prison Reform Trust’s document ‘Prison Without Purpose’ is disturbing. Compounding matters is the failure of many prisons to comply with the statutory duty of prisons to have a library, with all prisoners allowed access for a minimum of thirty minutes every two weeks. Book stock, points out the Society of Authors, ‘in many prisons is poor, often damaged or out-of-date and that inter-library loan requests are often slow or not actioned at all.’

Note: existing regulations allow access for a minimum of thirty minutes every two weeks. That is bad in itself.

Humanity and compassion are at the heart of what I write about in this blog. On the evidence I’m aware of (from the PRT’s report, the book publishing trade press and the wider press) the current changes runs counter to both.

The dry bones of a thousand empires

Also from the Mark Twain quote:

(Damascus) has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.

When we talk of being part of a Christian tradition, we do need to widen that to encompass Judaic, Greek, Roman, Arab. Talk of a thousand empires may be a little exaggerated … but our spiritual and cultural traditions have been nurtured and fashioned over many millennia, and they’ve come down to us interpreted and recreated through (for the UK) a fifteen-hundred-year Christian history. When we try and conjure value systems without that spiritual content we are doing simply that – conjuring. Belief is one thing, faith is another, they can be disavowed, but to disavow our Christian tradition, to imagine that our values have simply an evolutionary explanation, is to deny history. I italicise simply. Scientific and cultural evolution work together. The former doesn’t have the conceptual framework remotely to encompass the latter, any more than the latter can explain the former (not that anti-evolution and intelligent design protagonists haven’t tried).

To get back to Damascus – ‘will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies’. Thing long, think in terms of centuries, even millennia. Every generation thinks it has solutions, and every generation comes up short. Put the rights of man and democracy in that context: if there is a promised land it will not come out a eureka democratic moment, it will evolve over historic time.

For Syria, as for all of us.

 

Collaborative commons – a new era dawns?

Are we about to enter a new post-capitalist era?

A few thoughts on the ‘zero marginal cost society’, after hearing Jeremy Rifkin speak at the RSA London, 29th April.

Jeremy Rifkin argues that the zero-marginal-cost era is almost upon us, where there will be no longer any significant extra cost in bringing a product or service to market. No marginal cost means no profit, and there are some big implications there!

It will be the era of ‘collaborative commons’ (a hefty term), with social media blazing the trail. The next stage will be an internet of things when we can create what we want online – create our own apps, develop our own private algorithms, and more. We’ll not only communicate online, we’ll make our journeys in driverless cars, depend on green energy. Beyond that we’ll 3D print our own products: the first printed car (do I believe it?) is already on the roads. All American schools are to have their own 3D printers. Our natural instinct to share will be reborn, already have been in social media. We’ll share cars, find rooms to stay through community websites, children will realise that toys are not to be possessed but to be played with for a while, and then passed on. (Have the children been told?) The millennial generation, under thirty, already have a different more collaborative mindset. And this is only the beginning.

Rifkin is not arguing a political case, not is he anti-capitalist. This he argues is a development even Karl Marx failed to foresee, though Keynes with his concept of technology replacement came close in 1930.

Rifkin was asked at the RCA talk why was that people in the UK still thought in terms of the old categories of private, state and charity. With the millennial generation Rifkin believes that that will change. But I’d argue that as of now there’s no new paradigm, collaborative commons isn’t remotely part of the language or understanding. And without a big idea which people connect to, sharing as an economic driver will be much harder to establish.

Rifkin senses the change is inevitable. It doesn’t need protagonists. It will happen. In a collaborative world future generations will naturally revert to a sharing paradigm. They may not know it. But… without protagonists change will be much easier to resist. The music industry was swamped by free downloads before it knew what was happening. We’re all much wiser now.

Everyday products and services will inevitably be cheaper. Businesses will make less money. Pay lower wages. If we can 3D print and costs come tumbling, industries will go under. Rifkin argues there will be a long transition period. But could the result still be economic collapse? Will we be able to afford mortgages? To argue that in a collaborative world we will be sharing property rather misses the point. We may all, without explicitly realising it, decide it’s better to stay with inequitable old world A rather than leap of a cliff hoping that we’ll parachute happily into a promised collaborative land. I predict a hard landing. Or maybe we won’t even jump.