Daniel

Alex at The Yorkshire Ranter and I have been having an ongoing debate over the last couple of months on the general subject of capital to labour ratios in British terrorism. The motivating question’s a quite important one, with a lot of implications for what sort of public policy one might want to support; how much of a danger to us all are radical Muslim organisations and internet bulletin boards? If we take as given[1] the popularly held belief that there are organisations at work in British society which radicalise disaffected youths from the Asian community and persuade them to become supporters of jihadism and terrorism, then well, obviously that’s bad. But how much actual harm does it do – given that the only way of doing anything about these organisations is to impose some quite draconian reductions in overall civil liberties, what’s the trade-off between liberty and security that we’re looking at here?

As I say, I think this question basically comes down to capital/labour ratios.
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I’ve just noticed that the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which got royal asset yesterday (btw, enthusiasts of necrophiliac porn, better hide it under the mattress[1]), contains provisions to make it an offence to incite hatred on grounds of sexual orientation. I am in general in favour of this, in the same qualified way in which I was in favour of the parallel provisions of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006[2]. The reason being that the specific laws in question aren’t really particularly material restrictions on free speech (as with the 2006 Act, the current law on homophobia has an explicit clause explaining that merely critical or mocking speech is not incitement to hatred), and that the UK really doesn’t need any of the antisocial behaviour that is an inevitable consequence of incitements to hatred.

It does strike me, however, that two years ago, there was an awful lot of public protest against the RRHA06. Not the least of this came from comedians like Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson, who were making the point that mockery and criticism of religion were an important part of comedy and that they felt their right to free expression was under threat[3].

One doesn’t have to be an aficionado of Mr Humphries or Larry Grayson to be aware that British comedians have at least as much of a professional interest in the mockery of gays as they do in the mockery of religions, but if there was a big comedians’ protest against this one I missed it. In fact, I don’t recall the free speech lobby really raising much of a stir at all; Index on Censorship didn’t so much as mention it (Update: thanks Padraig Reidy in comments, they did mention it, once, last year), though they did take an interest in the religious hatred bill, and they are aware of the current Criminal Justice Bill.

This sort of thing is unfortunate; I’m sure nobody involved intended it this way[5], but to an outsider it would certainly look as if the 2006 kerfuffle had very little to do with freedom of speech, except in as much as it could be picked up as a handy stick to beat the Muslims with. And given that, I bet it looks that way to British Muslims too. Every time we try to have a sensible discussion of the subject of hate speech, it gets much more heated than it has any reason to be, and a lot of the reason for this, in my opinion, is that the free speech issue has got tangled up with a whole load of other questions about security and immigration, to nobody’s benefit.

[1] Also bestiality porn, and as far as I can see Plaid Cymru didn’t so much as raise an objection.
[2] In comments to that thread, my view of calls from the gay lobby for parallel protection was something along the lines of “tough luck”, because I didn’t think that violent homophobia was enough of a social problem to warrant a restriction on free speech. I now think this was a mistake, partly because when you put the point as bluntly as that it’s obviously callous, and partly because the overwhelming evidence of the experience of the 2006 Act is that the restriction on free speech is trivial.
[3] Ben Elton, the noted author, former comedian and disappointment[4], apparently still believes that jokes about Islam are too near the knuckle for the politically correct world of modern British comedy. He has perhaps not noticed that they more or less form Shazia Mirza or Omid Djalili’s entire act. I suspect that what he means is that you’re not seeing white comedians making fun of Islamic minorities, in which case I rather think he owes an apology to Jim Davidson and the late Bernard Manning for more or less everything he said in the 80s.
[4] For example, as Alexei Sayle noted when Elton collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on a musical: “It’s really quite tough, you know, when you see someone whose work you’ve been familiar with for years, you don’t agree with them on politics but you recognise that they’ve got a genuine talent – and then they go and write a musical with Ben Elton”.
[5] Not true, obviously; one of the Freedom of Speech marches that year very nearly had to be called off because of the amount of involvement from the BNP and similar groups. I’m referring to Rowan Atkinson and Stephen Fry here – I am sure their concern over free speech was sincere at the time.

Synopsis: yes.

I promised this post in comments to Chris’s on Blackburn’s myths below, where I took my life in my hands and disagreed with John. I think that actually, there probably is “a general skill called management which works in any and all domains”, and, just to raise the tariff and secure gold medal position for myself in the Steven Landsburg Memorial Mindless Contrariolympiad, I’ll also defend the proposition that this skill is pretty closely related to what they teach on MBA courses. But first a couple of remarks on Blackburn’s own “Myth of Management“.

In his very definition, Blackburn pretty much gives it away; he says that “[the myth of management] claims that people can be managed like warehouses and airports”. What does this even mean? How do you manage a warehouse or an airport if it’s impossible to manage people? If he had said “like machines” or even “like factories”, then it might have been comprehensible, but a warehouse which doesn’t have any people working in it is just a shed full of stuff and doesn’t require any management because no deliveries or shipments are being made. And an airport without people is just a warehouse for planes. Warehousing and transport are two very labour-intensive industries.
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One for the junior-birdman Hayekians, Coasians and such like:

Consider a finite quantity of a consumption good G, which is to be divided into two allocations G1 and G2 for two different agents with utility functions over G described as U1(G1) and U2(G2).

What would be the minimum information that a central planner would need to have about U1 and U2 in order to be able to calculate a Pareto efficient allocation G1/G2?

Answer after the jump – I just asked three economists this question and they all got it wrong.
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I have a post up at the Guardian blog noting that with no activity on its weblog on the last six weeks, the manifesto itself closed to new signatures and nobody so much as remarking its second anniversary, the Euston Manifesto appears to have gone the way of all flesh and most leftwing political tendencies. I suggest, perhaps a little uncharitably, that the cause of death (which I suppose I might be premature in announcing, but really, it doesn’t seem to have much life in it) was the Manifesto Group’s consistent refusal to ever move on from their platforms and slogans to having any concrete program at all[1] (and that this was in its turn probably due to the need to keep together a coalition which, in as much as it extended beyond a very small clique of pro-war ex-Trots, had very little to hold it together other than a personal dislike of George Galloway). If I had the piece to write again, I suspect I might have given more airtime to the other big psychological impetus behind the Paul Berman/Euston/”Decent” tendency, which was genuine trauma at the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks. But I certainly wouldn’t walk away from my assessment of the central motivation – a desire on the part of people who had been wrong for decades during the Cold War to be on the right side of history for once.

In terms of their contribution to British political debate, my epitaph for the Euston Manifesto is basically Byron’s on Castlereagh. For whatever reasons, as a political movement it was never able to get over the personality issues involved, and chose to promote its views by the same tactics of condemnation, excommunication and inflated rhetoric which had served it so badly during its past on the left[2]. But the current of political thought that Euston represented in the UK was not entirely bad or even entirely wrong. What would their legacy be?
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I am responsible for the Ayn Rand/charity beat at Crooked Timber and here’s another story on the subject. This really doesn’t look like it’s going to end up well. A large charitable foundation attached to a bank has given the University of North Carolina Charlotte, among others a donation in return for making “Atlas Shrugged” compulsory reading. Most tragic rationalisation:

BB&T donated $500,000 last year to Johnson C. Smith University to help endow a professorship on capitalism and free markets, with lessons including “Atlas Shrugged.’’ It’s the fourth endowed chair at the historically black college in Charlotte.

“I don’t believe I have to advocate that people accept Ayn Rand’s philosophy,’’ said Patricia Roberson-Saunders, who holds the chair. Roberson-Saunders, who will present Rand with other texts, said students will benefit from reading about a world view held by “people with whom they will have to work and for whom they will have to work.’’

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My assessment of the battle for Basra has changed significantly. I still think that, in the subjunctive conditional tense, it was a reasonable piece of analysis – al-Maliki needed to do something[1] to start to establish his monopoly on violence within Iraq and I put material weight on his own seeming subjective assessment that he was politically and militarily strong enough to pull it off. But in the actual present tense, things are going the other way. (A disclaimer should certainly be appended at this point that this is all rather toward the punditry end of the spectrum rather than analysis so if that winds you up then skip it, but having picked that ball up I’m sort of committed to running with it).
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From the armchair general department … Back when the surge began, I suggested that one of the ways in which things could go wrong (and of course, there are loads of ways things can go wrong and only one way they can go right) would be:

d) Al-Sadr demonstrates his political nous once more, and calms down his operations, carrying out only enough hit-and-run attacks on US troops to keep his popularity up. Then he forms a nationalist bloc with one or more of the Sunni parties. Political collapse of the Maliki government.

Which was looking rather awfully close to how things were shaping up; while the level of violence was falling, the Maliki government was going nowhere fast politically and the anti-government forces were gathering strength. Furthermore, nobody seemed to really be doing much about this, apart from sitting round congratulating themselves that “the surge is working”.

Now, (and I would be very glad to be proved wrong on this one, as I have very little personal credibility at stake having been right on nearly every other important point about Iraq, and contrary to supposition I would very much like to see a world in which far fewer innocent people were in danger of horrible death on a daily basis), it’s all kicking off, apparently (via Chicken Yoghurt).

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Greg Mankiw, in the New York Times, demonstrating the deft common touch for which Harvard economists are famous:

No issue divides economists and mere Muggles more than the debate over globalization and international trade. Where the high priests of the dismal science see opportunity through the magic of the market’s invisible hand, Joe Sixpack sees a threat to his livelihood.

Next week, presumably, Greg Mankiw writes on the subject of “Why is it that economists have so little influence in politics?”
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We’ve been consciously trying to dial down the amount of horse-race coverage of the US presidential nominations (it will probably inevitably get intolerable during the actual race, but that’s the policy), but I don’t think that no coverage at all is the aim. And one thing looks quite interesting to me at the moment; although the general buzz of the news cycle has Hillary Clinton level-pegging or even regaining “momentum”, the Electronic Markets have her, post a small Texas/Ohio bounce, still way out of the money with Obama looking like the favourite at around 75.

As far as I can tell, the tracking polls are telling more or less the same story at present. As far as I can see, the punditosphere seems to have got rather ahead of the data here; there’s a potential test of whether they have any actual predictive ability.

Via Roger in comments to Chris’s post below, Michael Walzer mounts what can only be regarded as an unprovoked dawn raid on his own reputation.

The topic is the ethics of using mercenaries (or at least, that is the formal topic; at a deeper level, the topic is the same as the topic of everything Walzer’s written in the last ten years; that sadly, oh so sadly, “the left” simply doesn’t believe in its principles with the same seriousness and intellectual depth which Walzer does. It’s frankly the philosophical equivalent of “I was into your favourite band before they started to suck”, and it’s frankly becoming tedious).
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