Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
Does anyone have any idea what might be done about the pointless blob of white space above this paragraph? It seems to be resistant to all my efforts. Update haha, it succumbed.
Thursday, November 07, 2002
Why Formula One this year is going to suck, and other philosophical topics
Or, subtitled, "Descent Into Self-Parody". Apologies in advance, readers; this is a long one. Basically, I spent five years of my life, eighteen and a half thousand pounds of my own money, and probably the same again of the British taxpayers and more from my parents, on being educated by the British university system. And by God are you lot going to suffer for it. The current post is intended to discuss sports psychology, ergodicity, broadcasting rights, the von Neumann/Morgenstern axioms in economics, Turing Machine incomputability, the Rand Corporation, medieval alchemists and option pricing. Although it may end up digressing ....
I have slightly unusual taste in sports, because I basically like boring sports (I find them interesting) and dislike interesting sports (I find them boring). Football, basketball, etc: forget it. I really can't be bothered watching any competition of pure athleticism which lasts longer than the 100 metres final. Sure, there's a lot of physical skill and grace involved, but you can get that at the ballet, and I don't like ballet either. There's always action going on, thrills of excitement and disappointment and all that, but it just doesn't do anything for me.
Give me a good darts match on the TV, on the other hand, and I'm as happy as a pig in a nice clean sty (the preferred environment for pigs). Snooker is good too, as is crown green bowling. When the Scots started doing well in the Olympics and we had curling on the tele every night, I was enthralled. I even enjoy watching golf when I'm drunk enough to forget how much I hate the game (for social and political reasons, natch).
It took me a while to work out why my taste in sports runs this way ... in fact, it's pretty hard to see why anyone bothers with these sports at all. Fair enough, there is quite a lot of skill involved in being able to play snooker or darts -- I'm complete shit at both -- but the actual physical skill involved is an utterly derisory one. Being able to poke a ball with a stick really accurately? Rolling a counterbalanced ball in a reasonably straight line? Sliding things on ice and sweeping the ice with a fcking broom? I think it's pretty safe to say that these sports are products of an advanced society; one wouldn't want to categorically say that Steven Pinker couldn't come up with a story about how taking iron shots over water hazards is a skill developed from instincts that were vital to our survival on the African veld, but it would surely take him at least a couple of coffee breaks. These skills suffer to a great extent from the "juggler paradox"; the principle that juggling is such a stupid fcking skill that the better someone is at it, the stupider they are, because they've wasted more time on that pointless, stupid skill. (NB to any jugglers reading: D-Squared Digest does not propose to enter into any correspondence on this point. Having offended hobbyists in the past with some pointed remarks about Linux, I know how passionate they can be. But the fact remains; Catherine Zeta Jones is an international megastar, whereas the greatest juggler in the world is a geek act. Deal with it.)
But the point is, precisely because the physical skill is so risible, that the sport itself has to take place on a higher level. At the top levels of snooker, darts, bowling etc, all the people present have the physical skills to win, as long as they maintain their concentration and focus. Or in other words, the winner is the guy whose nerve cracks second.
And, human psychology being what it is, beginning to lose a bit is a self-reinforcing process; a player's performance in sequential vists to the table or the oche will tend to have positive, destabilising feedback. Regular readers will recall my discussion a few weeks ago of nonergodic processes; well, darts scores would be a great example of a real world nonergodic process. In principle, both players in an evenly matched game of darts will have about the same expected points score from every visit to the oche, so you would expect that both players scores would follow a random walk, with the winner beg the player whose random walk drifts across the winning line first. In amateur and low-level games, based on my casual empiricism of watching pub teams, this is close to being the case. At the professional level, however, you will tend to find that as a long match goes on, the player who started off losing will get worse, while the player who started off winning will hit his 180s more often. The statistical properties of darts scores at the professional level give a decent picture of nonergodicity; the average scores taken from the first 50 sets of arrows will most likely be completely misleading as to the result of the match.
So anyway, basically, the thing which makes boring sports more interesting is that you watch, over the course of a couple of hours, the complete psychological destruction of a human being. Which, in all honesty, probably means that Pinker the Thinker might have had a point in coming up with an evolutionary pop-psychology explanation of the putting green. This also fits as a psychological explanation of what I like about boring sports, because it fits an out-of-sample data point; the only exciting and physical sport I like is boxing, a sport which is also entirely about the destruction of one human being by another for the entertainment of third parties. This would rather tend to have the conclusion that I'm not a very nice person, but that information has always been free for the asking.
Cricket and Formula One have always been rather marginal sports for me. Clearly, both of them have this psychological edge to them, but it isn't quite as pure; it's tainted by elements other than pure mental attrition. I love cricket, but if I were being honest, the main reason I watch it is that you can have a drink and a chat during the boring bits. It doesn't have that gripping quality that the boring sports have; often, it's just boring.
With Formula One, however, it's a bit different. The psychological game is utterly swamped by the fact that, up to a first approximation, the championship is won by the guy who signs the biggest cheque for engine development and chassis testing. If things were rushed, or cars became illegal or something, you could continue to simulate the Formula One season by just persuading ten motor manufacturers to burn a suitcase full of $100 bills and smash a crate of champagne. There are a lot of people who prefer going to motor shows to sports competitions, but I'm not one of them, and in general, they're not a monetisable audience to advertisers.
Which is why the Formula One boys have a whole load of tricks up their sleeve for changing the face of motor racing this year. They want to break into the North American market, which is currently dominated by NASCAR. And, to their way of thinking, that means that they've got to have MORE ACTION! More overtaking, more uncertainty about the outcome of a race, more personalities and so on. They're basically pondering a whole set of rule changes relating to design restrictions, all of which are more or less explicitly designed to a) stop Ferrari and Michael Schumacher from winning and b) make the sport look a bit more like NASCAR.
It sounds horrendous because it is. In principle, reducing the element of technological differentiation could (although probably won't) make it more of a psychological battle, appealing to people like me. It could (although probably won't) make it more of a contest of driving skill, appealing to people not like me. In actual fact, the rule changes are much more likely to make Formula One into a complete lottery, appealing to absolutely nobody, since you can't even bet on it at any decent odds. But even if they were per impossibile to design the absolute perfect set of restrictions on the design specs, balanced perfectly to give the most even and fair chance to every team, this would still be a bad idea.
The reason it would be a bad idea is that the appeal of Formula One is qualitatively different from that of any of the other kinds of sports we've discussed so far. The reason that people care passionately about Formula One is that when you are watching it, even though the actual racing is usually dull as sht, you can be absolutely, totally, one hundred per cent sure, that the cars you are watching are the fastest possible cars that could be racing on that circuit. This is a qualitative difference between F1 and most other sports because what the spectators care about is the actual *facts* of what is going on in front of them, not the experience that they're having themselves. If F1 are going to try to make the experience better, at the expence of making it no longer the case that the cars are as fast as they can be, then we might as well fuck off and watch NASCAR. After all, NASCAR's much more exciting, it's more dangerous and quite visually spectacular. The only reason why NASCAR is not as good as Formula One is as follows; NASCAR cars aren't as fast as Formula One cars, therefore NASCAR is sht. End of argument. Anyone who tries to pretend that, when the topic is car racing, any criteria are relevant other than the fastness of the cars on offer, is kidding themselves and on some level or other knows it. As you can tell, I started to go off F1 when they banned turbochargers.
With sickening inevitability, like the one-issue bore I am, this whole discussion set off in my mind a train of thought relating to (go on, close your eyes and guess) some serious problems with the logical underpinnings of neoclassical economics (yup, well done). Fundamentally, preferences of the kind which I was describing in relation to Formula One motor racing, can't be described at all well in the terms of utility theory, and you get into some pretty bad logical tangles if you try to force them to fit.
The problem is the one I hinted at above; what's valuable about the experience of watching Formula One is not something intrinsic to that experience, but a fact about the cars; something about the relationship between that experience and the rest of the world. For example, let's assume that someone starts up, on the other side of the world, a new auto racing league in which turbos aren't banned, electronic braking systems are allowed, and various other design items ruled "unfair" by the F1 committees are let back in. Such a league would be pretty similar to Formula One, but the cars would be faster.
Although this would not alter the intrinsic qualities of watching a Grand Prix in the slightest, it would utterly devalue the experience. Rather than watching the pinnacle of man and machine operating together in harmony, you'd be watching the best that engineers could do under some rather arbitrary constraints put together by a committee of jobsworths led by a man in silly glasses. Rather than watching the fastest cars in the world, you'd be watching a bunch of random autos that were pretty damn fast, but not the fastest in the world. In other words, you might as well be watching NASCAR.
This seems like a pretty trivial and dull philosophical point, the sort of discussion of "intrinsic" and "nonintrinsic" properties of things that excites people writing dissertations on the subject of "Locke's Theory of Primary and Secondary Qaulities", but nobody else. Actually, it's incredibly important, and the reason it's important lies in the innocent-looking phrase "you might as well be watching NASCAR".
I hate NASCAR and think it's completely pointless. But I have to admit it's quite a spectacle. The reason I don't like it is that I don't like motor racing per se all that much, and therefore if I'm going to watch motor racing, I want it to be the top end of motor racing; Formula One. But the only good thing about Formula One is that the cars are the fastest that there are. If someone were to launch the hypothetical Formula Minus One superleague I was talking about, then there would be absolutely no point in F1 as she currently is. In fact, if the option of F Minus-1 were to be offered, I'd prefer NASCAR to F1.
This still seems pretty trifling, but actually, it's deadly to utility theory. One of the mathematical conditions that have to hold if my preferences are going to give the right kind of ordering necessary to get a consistent utility map, is that it must be the case that my preferences are "independent of irrelevant alternatives". In other words, that my choice between A and B is not affected by anything other than A and B. If this isn't satisfied, we can't prove that there is a definable optimum outcome for me; there might be points in my utility map in which consumption bundle X is not preferred to Y, Y is not preferred to X and I am not indifferent between X and Y. That sounds like a psychologically implausible situation, and it is, but remember that we're not talking about my actual preferences here, we're talking about mathematical representations of my preferences. Specifically, we're talking about whether certain kinds of mathematical representations of my preferences are possible, and the conclusion is that if preferences of the kind outlined by my NASCAR/F1 example above are possible, the kinds of representations usually assumed by economists, aren't possible.
This is a general problem with the current state of mathematical economics; that the mathematical conditions needed to prove any of its theorems are too strong, and it's insoluble. Not insoluble in the sense of being very difficult, but insoluble in the sense that the pair of equations 5x=4 and 2x=3 are insoluble. J. Barkley Rosser has a load of great papers on this subject on his website; I'm not going to link directly because you'll enjoy (no really) browsing around, but there is one called "All That I Have To Say Has Already Crossed Your Mind" (based on a Sherlock Holmes quotation) which proves that, so long as there are at least two individuals in an economy, there will be some situations in which equilibrium is not achievable. This is basically because, at the highest level of abstraction, the decision-making processes of economic agents as modelled by economists, can be represented as Turing Machines. And, for common economic situations, the problem of constrained optimisation by one individual conditional on the other's response (which in turn has to be conditional on the other's expectation of one's own action -- it is here that we get the sort of "I think you think I think" sentences which give this branch of mathematics its Alice In Wonderland quality) can be shown to be analogous to the Halting problem for those Turing machines.
(As with all Goedelian arguments, the easiest way to understand this is to just do what I did and spend six months being taught formal logic, but think about it this way; if you're deciding what to do, and you're interacting strategically with another player, then your decision is going to depend on what he thinks you're going to do. Unless you're going to attribute systematic error to him, what he thinks you're going to do ought to be the same as what you're actually going to do. But if one of the inputs to your calculation of what you ought to do, is what you're going to do, then it's quite clear that you've got a problem on your hands. This is hopelessly unrigorous and hand-waving, but gives you a flavour of the argument).
Now most economists tend to think that this problem (in its game-theoretic incarnation, anyway) was solved by John Nash, and that for this reason he deserved his Nobel Prize and that godawful Russell Crowe film. Not so and not so. As Philip Mirowski's excellent (by which I mean, I literally can't recommendit highly enough) book "Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes A Cyborg Science" shows, Nash's equilibrium concept won over because of internal politics in the American military's "operations-research" community which provided the foundations of the modern economics profession after the Second World War. Nash's equilibrium concept is actually not all that great; Nash equilibria don't always exist, and there is no centripetal force which draws you toward one, so even if one does exist, there's no guarantee that anyone will find it, particularly if calculating the Nash equilibrium of a particular game is actually formally impossible. This should be contrasted with that other great achievement of postwar economics; the development by Fischer Black and Robert Merton (Myron Scholes helped) of "arbitrage-free" models.
Rather than making unwarranted assumptions about fixed points in undecidable calculations, or by assuming putative auctioneers that don't exist, the Black & Merton approach builds up solutions by taking cases where, at every point, if the economic agents don't follow the equilibrium path, one of them can make theoretically unlimited amounts of money at the expense of the other. This approach, combined with the old gambler's principle of the "martingale" (basically the principle that if you double your bets every time you lose, you can guarantee to at least break even ... so long as your bankroll holds out), allows one to recast a surprisngly large portion of economics in its own terms, as anyone masochistic enough to struggle through Merton's "Continuous Time Finance" will have repressed memories of. Merton et al. don't get as much respect as they used to ever since the Long Term Capital Management shenanigan, but I think that's unfair; when it comes to the application of economic theory to the real world, we should take a leaf out of Dr Johson's book and wonder not that it was done badly, but that it was done at all.
The von Neumann/Morgenstern equilibrium concept, which takes coalition-forming and co-operative behaviour as a fact of nature rather than a subject of analysis, would have made a better foundation for game theory in my view; less susceptible to wholly rigorous proof through topological fixed-point theorems, but for this reason more dependent on specific application to real-world institutions and all the better for that. A succint way of putting across the point I am trying to make here might be that the well-known question of the "Prisoners' Dilemma" is a question that needs to be unasked; it's a red herring. Nash's proof that the optimal solution to a one-period noncommunicative Prisoner's Dilemma is the strategy pair (default, default) is only persuasive if we accept Nash's solution-concept as being a good definition of an equilibrium and we shouldn't. It's much better for our thinking if we just accept that Prisoner's Dilemma as being an intrinsically insoluble problem, and deal with real-life situations which resemble the Prisoner's Dilemma (nuclear deterrence, overfishing, etc) by looking more closely at the actual dynamics of the situation -- the power relationships and the decision making processes -- and modelling those, rather than pretending that we can flatten everything down into a one-period model with a "well-defined" solution.
You won't learn any of this on an undergraduate economics course, of course, which in my humble opinion is why economics is in such a bloody awful state these days as a discipline. The trouble with current economic theory is partly that we don't have the right mathematical tools (we don't have tractable ways to model dynamic systems), partly that we can't have the right mathematical tools (some important things about choice and social interaction are formally undecidable), and partly that we aren't even asking the right questions. I don't pretend to have a solution to this problem by the way; I'd just suggest that the current state of economics looks to me to be much more like medieval alchemy than any real science. Which is not to say too much of a bad thing about modern economics; the alchemists did real, good work, and most of them were very clever men (about 20% of Charles MacKay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" is about the alchemists if you get the proper version and not the crap expensive abridged one with a foreword by Warren Buffet, and it's surprisng how few genuine charlatans there were). I personally think that the Black/Merton/Scholes approach is the right way forward, and that it is at its heart a quite philosophically radical way of thinking about the discipline of economics -- not as the science of what people choose to do, but of what they can be forced to do, through fear of loss. But I think it is time to end here, as I have an appointment to play snooker at four 'o'clock.
posted by the management 11/07/2002 07:46:00 AM
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Si no vera ...
This one probably falls into the "moral truth" category; it seems a little bit too convenient to be literally true, but it damn well ought to be true, because it expresses a much more important wider truth. Two lefty academics blagged their way into an "American Enterprise Institute" seminar on "The New European Anti-Semitism" and heard Larry Summers "anti-Semitic in effect if not intent" construction brought to its logical conclusion ...
[....] a questioner in the audience asked Wisse about Billy Graham's 1972 conversation with Richard Nixon, memorialized on the White House tapes, and made public earlier this year by the National Archives.
In the conversation, Graham says to Nixon that "a lot of Jews are great friends of mine."
"They swarm around me and are friendly to me," Graham says. "Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country."
And how does he feel?
Graham tells Nixon that the Jews have a "stranglehold" on the country, and "this stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain."
"You believe that?" Nixon says.
"Yes, sir," Graham replies.
"Oh boy," Nixon says. "So do I. I can't ever say that but I believe it."
So, the questioner wanted to know whether Professor Wisse considered these sentiments, as expressed by Graham, and widely publicized earlier this year, to be anti-semitic.
No, they are not anti-semitic, Professor Wisse says.
Not anti-semitic?
No, anti-semitism exists today in the form of "political organization" against Israel.
posted by the management 11/05/2002 07:44:00 AM
Bring in the vote
On this sacred day of democracy, a few points to ponder for my American friends:
- Unless your local race is utterly atypical, the chance that your vote will make any difference at all is microscopic.
- The two main parties are virtually indistinguishable from each other, and the third party stands no chance of election
- Despite what other websites tell you, you can complain if you don't vote; the American constitution and the European Declaration on Human rights both protect your right to do so. The editorial staff of D-Squared Digest has not cast a vote for the last eight years, and we complain all the time.
- The polling station is most likely inconveniently located, poorly appointed, and doesn't serve drinks. At any time today which might be convenient for you, the queues will be long.
- By casting a vote in this election, you are implicitly endorsing its outcome, which is likely to include several policies which were repugnant to you.
- Clinton was not any better.
- Gore would not have handled this any better.
- Abortion rights are safe, the economy is most likely outside the control of any politician and American foreign policy will always be stupid and cruel until another Empire takes over.
- Voting's for saps
- If you don't vote, you don't feel so bad when your side loses.
Thank you, we now return you to scheduled programming. God Bless Armenia.
edit: Let me never be accused of consistency.
posted by the management 11/05/2002 05:41:00 AM
Monday, November 04, 2002
Not "bad" meaning "bad" but "bad" meaning "crap"
Still on reduced service at the moment, I'm afraid ... but one for my American friends who got terribly wound up by the whole flap over Anne Coulter's book suggesting that if you didn't give suitable front-cover honours to the death of Dale Earnhardt (for my core Brit readers; sort of the poor man's Michael Schumacher), you were an elitist liberal who hates America.
Just thought it might be fun to have a look around some of the publications which Ms. Coulter inhabits, see whether in your opinion they were suitably fawning in their eulogies to Jam Master Jay, and if not, to ask them why they hate black people so much ... in my experience, nothing annoys a racist more than being called a racist.
posted by the management 11/04/2002 06:32:00 AM
Thursday, October 31, 2002
Hypocrisy!
Sorry and all that, but it's been a hell of a busy week. I'd just like to make this point however. Whatever you think about this weblog, remember that there are dozens of far worse morons on the Internet than me. If you single me out for condemnation without first pointing out that I am by no means as ignorant or ill-informed as these other bloggers, you are clearly guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy. Or something.
posted by the management 10/31/2002 06:59:00 AM
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Free, as a bird
I'm a profound believer in free speech. I believe that everyone should be able to speak their mind, unencumbered by fear of persecution, the intimidation of social ostracism or the slow poison of indoctrination. I think it's fundamental to the progress of humanity that ideas should be tested out through public debate, with each person giving his own views. And I think it's vital to human flourishing that we should be able to express our being without regard to constraints or social norms.
I'm also a profound beliver in human flight. I believe that everyone should be able to fly like Superman, unencumbered by the surly bonds of gravity, swooping and wheeling in the updrafts and downdrafts, soaring through the air at the greatest of speeds, causing no pollution, each in a cubic mile of free space, breathing the high free air and exulting in weightless splendour.
Of the two, I think that human flight is somewhat more likely to be a reality during my lifetime.
This is a real belief; I happen to think that "free speech", in the sense in which most people use the term, is about as possible for people living in any social group larger than two people (which is to say, "people"; I have no idea what great apes of the species homo sapiens might be like if living a non-social existence, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be very much like human beings), as Superman's flight. The version of free speech which I'm exulting in the first paragraph above is a condensed and most likely parodic version of what John Stuart Mill attempts to advocate in On Liberty. It's certainly, and pretty near provably through direct lineage, the ideal to which the First Amendment of the United States Constitution is appealing. And it's a much, much stronger concept than the vast majority of people who invoke it believe. Mill understood, as vast numbers of people don't (mainly because they are interested in pushing tendentious and legalistic theories of political morality), that laws passed by governments are about the ninetieth most important restriction on our freedom of speech. He also understood that the most savage restriction on people's freedom to say what they want is the simple social urge to conformity; people don't like to say things which they know people will disagree with. I get but scant pleasure from doing so myself.
posted by the management 10/29/2002 08:57:00 AM
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Dial 419 for fun
Along with shrill accusations of anti-Semitism and fan mail, the major component of my email inbox these days is Nigerian "419" advance fee fraud letters. I get about one every couple of days; some day I may be bored enough to add up all the ill-gotten gains I've been offered a share of over the last year and compare it to Nigerian GDP. But for the time, being, let's note that according to the 419 coalition, over $5 billion had been extracted from hapless mugs by 1996, and according to Howard Jeter, by 2000, Americans alone were losing $2 billion a year to "white collar crime syndicates based in Nigeria". Pretty big business.
Let's also note, however, that I think that both of those estimates are bullshit. Unless industrial economics works completely differently in the criminal world from the way in which I learned it by reading Tirole (and Steven Levitt seems pretty convinced that it doesn't), the observed facts of the 419 fraud industry are not consistent with its being hugely profitable, or for that matter profitable at all.
What am I talking about? Well, let's look at it this way. If 419 really were taking in $2bn (from Americans alone!), it would be an incredibly profitable criminal industry. Two billion dollars a year roughly two-thirds of the size of the UK heroin market measured by turnover, and one would have imagined that white-collar fraud was a higher-margin and less capital-intensive industry than heroin smuggling. It's not true that sending spam emails is "basically costless"; the logistics costs of more usual spam are quite a significant component of the spammer's cost base, particularly as one needs to invest in a continual software development expense to keep pace with developments in anti-spam technology. But even so, I don't see how sending 419 emails can be more costly than manufacturing and smuggling heroin.
So what do we know about profitable criminal industries? Well, we know that they tend toward monopoly, or at least oligopoly. But, we can be absolutely sure that the 419 email scam industry is not dominated by a monopolist. How?
Basically, think about the number of Nigerian fraud emails you receive in a year. Does their credibility grow with repetition? I insinuated something along these lines when I suggested comparing the total amounts in a year's worth of 419 email to Nigerian GDP. The fact that these scam letters are so common makes it much more likely that any individual one will be ignored.
This is an "externality". Each spammer is considering the potential guesstimated return to himself from his own 419 operation, but ignoring the cost he imposes on other spammers by marginally decreasing the credibility of 419 spam in general. If 419 were the work of a monopoly, or of a small number of gangs, this cost would be internalised; the monopolist would prefer to have fewer, more effective scam letters. The proliferation of advance fee fraud letters from Nigeria looks much more to me like the output of a competitive industry characterised by small producers.
But even if we accept that 419 fraud is a cottage industry rather than the work of organised gangs, it might still be profitable. The French wine trade is made up of lots of small producers, and that's pretty profitable (though nowhere near as profitable as the Californian industry, dominated by fewer but larger producers). I don't even accept that this is the case.
Why not? Well, basically, the language. There are plenty of Nigerians who can write coherent, elegant English prose. Apparently, the 419 industry isn't profitable enough for them to get involved. Not only that, but it isn't worth anyone's while to invest the capital in producing a convincing-sounding form letter for use by the spammers. This doesn't fit the profile of a profitable industry to me. People make capital investments in profitable industries.
So what's going on here? Well, my guess is that the figure of "$6bn by 1996" is a lot more likely than the figure of "$2bn/year by 2000". In the early 1990s, before email, the vehicle of distribution for 419 scams was the fax machine. Sending faxes is a lot more expensive than sending emails. Since retail use of fax machines is less widespread than retail use of email, most of the targets were businesses rather than individuals. Businesses tend to have larger sums of money in their bank accounts to be emptied than private individuals (people who didn't read the first link about "419s"; this is what happens after you give the guy your account details). So we're looking here at a business with large unit sums and significant overheads; that looks a lot more like the kind of business in which you might get organised gangs operating.
But then email hit the market, and with it, 419 scammery fell within the price range of the common man (or at least, the common man who could write some semblance of English). At about the same time, the Nigerian economy suffered the entirely predictable consequences of its IMF programme, and a large number of middle-class people, with diploma-level English literacy, became unemployed, with some fraction of them entering the criminal class. They started adapting the 419 scam for their own ends; because there were so many of them, the old fax-using gangs couldn't keep a lid on them, and now the profitability of the 419 industry is gutted.
In all honesty, my guess is that the real "419 scam" is these days perpretrated on gullible Nigerians. I'm pretty sure that there are people selling lists of email addresses (and perhaps even poorly written form letters) to greedy but none-too-bright Nigerian chancers, presumably using the fantastic claims of wealth generation implied by the 419 coalition and Jeter by way of bait. As far as one can tell, most 419 scammers aren't very bright, and many of them don't even seem to know what to do with responses when they get them (don't appear to have follow up letters written, don't have bank accounts in which to deposit the stolen cash etc). To me, this just looks like a kind of pop culture multilevel marketing scheme, which may explain why it doesn't seem to have caught on anywhere else in the world. Maybe one in a thousand gets lucky and finds a mug, but I don't think so.
posted by the management 10/24/2002 08:40:00 AM
Bad tree with bad roots, never bore no good fruits
James Lileks, whose "Gallery of Regrettable Food" has amused us all at one time or another, apparently has a line in unthinking political commentary. Fair enough; I certainly wouldn't want to risk the blowback from saying that people should be castigated for that. But today, he's thrown down a challenge, and that's something I can never resist.
If it is Islamic terrorism, it will be delightful to watch the root-causers explain this one
As far as I can tell, "root-causers" refers to people whose reaction to the news that someone is trying to kill them does not include immediately shutting off all thought about why that might be the case. Since I'm not stupid, or even usually suicidal, I suppose that means that I'm a root-causer, and James Lileks will be delighted to watch me explain it. Which is good, because I was delighted with his collection of recipes for cooking with 7-Up from the 1950s, so it's sort of an opportunity to do something in return.
Here goes, the "root cause" explanation of the Washington sniper shootings, if they turn out to be Islamic terrorism, and if they turn out to be the work of the guy mentioned in the news reports. If not, I calculate that I am approximately 603rd in line among webloggers to make an apology.
The US Army, like the British Army and most other armies, does a reprehensibly bad job of looking after its people. It recruits them, largely from broken homes, keeps them on low wages for a short while, all the while making it unconscionably difficult for them to get or stay married, and then dumps them back on the labour market with surprisingly few marketable skills to show for several years of their life. It has various programs to deal with this problem, but, judging by the results, those programs are badly administered. As Norman Dixon pointed out in his classic "On the Psychology of Military Incompetence", western armies systematically attract people with psychological problems with respect to violence, provide them with a means of coping with these problems while they are in service and often reinforce personality traits through training which can prove to be disastrous when these people are put under stress.
The American economy is very bad at providing steady jobs for black men with low educational qualifications. The American economy has many strengths, but this is not one of them.
American culture strongly stigmatises young male unemployment, and makes young unemployed people feel ashamed of themselves. People who feel shame often develop a psychological self-defence mechanism which involves blaming others for their predicament.
The Muslim religion has almost exclusively nonwhite figureheads, and as a result has a magnetic effect on black Americans who have developed a grudge against what they see as a white-dominated synstem which has pushed them to the bottom of the heap.
Because of this, particularly at a time when the national mood is more than slightly conducive to paranoia, a black man with psychological problems and a military background decided to follow the figurehead of Osama Bin Laden and murder people in order to support the cause of Islamic terrorism.
There are the root causes. Delighted?
You may note that the vast majority of these root causes have nothing to do with anything outside America.
posted by the management 10/24/2002 05:59:00 AM
Monday, October 21, 2002
Foreign Policy
Updates to the official foreign policy of D-squared Digest coming in ...
First, a clarification on the issue of the State of Israel. Since giving Thomas Friedman that award for saying something silly about divestment (which got me a lot of criticism on weblogs I don't read), I've been worrying that people might see me as an anti-Semite of some sort. If people were disposed in that direction, I get the uneasy feeling that they might take my description of Michael Hardt's hair as an "Isro" in something other than the spirit of fun in which it was intended. I don't think there are any other racial slurs on this weblog at the moment, unless you count my reference to Ann Coulter as "Bog Irish rather than Mick Irish", but even so, some clarification of my Middle East policy would appear to be in order.
Basically, I regard the Palestinian Authority, or whatever it's called, as the moral equivalent of the IRA. In other words:
- I think they have a genuine grievance and a genuine right to have their claims taken seriously
- I think that their grievance, and their case, is by no means as strong as their more vocal supporters think it is
- I think that the population that they claim to represent is being made the victim of unacceptable governmental repression and are the chief victims of an unconscionable political situation
- I think that their chosen method of warfare is cowardly and disgusting, and not to be tolerated or apologised for
- I deeply doubt that they really represent the people they claim to represent
- They are, on balance, the villains of the piece, but the cause that they support in their villainous manner is at bottom, just.
You will have to take my word for this since it predates my appearance on the Internet, but I was never, unlike a lot of the British Left (Paul McCartney, I'm looking at you. And John Lennon too), an apologist for the IRA. I always thought that it was possible to believe in the case for a united Ireland without simultaneously thinking that the Protestant Ulstermen should be driven into the sea, or that it was ever acceptable to put bombs in shopping centres. However, the time comes when one realises that if what you care about is stopping the senseless killing, you have to hold your nose and negotiate with people who you regard as slightly worse than serial killers, and accept that they quite likely think the same about you. Like the Israelis, the Protestant Irish have a sincerely held belief, which is not at all unreasonable to hold given the evidence, that the people they were until recently forced to deal with at Stormont fundamentally want to eradicate them from the face of their homeland. But still they negotiated. I think that what this brings home to me is that a) what a bloody shame it is that there does not appear to be any Palestinian equivalent of John Hume and b) that when you extend this analogy to judge the Israeli forces by the standards of the RUC and the B-Specials during the worst periods of the Troubles, they still appear to have behaved bloody badly. Actually, in all honesty, I do understand why sensible English people supported the IRA despite knowing about the carnage; most of the people lined up against them were so transparently arguing in bad faith, which is also the case these days ...
Now, on to war ...
A further development in my Iraq policy as well. I am now, after comments from Brad DeLong and others, revising my opinion of the murderousness of the sanctions policy and concluding that it might not be as terrible as a number of quite possibly interested parties have portrayed it. On the other hand, I am also convinced by Max Sawicky's argument that Iraq is likely to be the first excursion of an American policy of empire-building in the Middle East, which is likely to be disastrous under any possible performance metric.
But, I retain my original belief that improvement in Iraq is politically impossible unless there is some sort of shooting war in the area culminating in the removal of Saddam Hussein. I don't set much score by "national-building", and don't really believe that what the Gulf needs is more US client states, and I never believed any of the scare stories related to the "WMD" acronym which is currently doing such sterling duty in picking out weblog authors who don't have a fucking clue what they're talking about. I just think that Saddam needs to go, because it's just one of those Damned Things which Has To Happen. I'm a fatalist, not a moralist.
So, how can we square these beliefs a) that something has to be done and b) that if something is done, it will be a disastrous imperial adventure by George Bush. Here's how, and it's so simple it's beautiful:
The official policy of D-Squared Digest with respect to Iraq is now that we support a policy of containment until after the 2004 Presidential elections, and after that, we will support immediate war with Iraq if and only if someone other than George W Bush is elected
I could dress that up by going "WHEREAS" a lot and turning it into a manifesto, but I've never really had any problems with thinking of new ways to call anyone who disagrees with me an idiot, so it seems a bit pointless to bother. Basically, the idea is that I'll support a war just so long as that idiot currently in charge has nothing whatever to do with it. Thinking about it, I don't want to sign up to a different figurehead for the Perle/Wolfowitz Axis of Idiocy, so maybe I should just tell the truth and shame the devil; I'll only support a war if it's the Democrats fighting it. I would like to find some warblogger with a decent argument against this view; strikes me that I can accept all the arguments about containment, inspection, risk, etc, etc and still hold the statement in bold italics just above. Nobody believes that Saddam will have nukes by 2004 ....
posted by the management 10/21/2002 10:28:00 AM
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