Chris Bertram

Brad DeLong has just posted “a couple of links”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/rebound-redux-have-we-moved-past-jevons-on-efficiency-the-great-energy-challenge.html to articles that attack “an article by David Owen in the New Yorker [subscription required]”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_owen. Owen’s article relied heavily on the claim that increased energy efficiency doesn’t really deliver the hoped-for environmental benefits, because of something called the “rebound effect”. Here’s an explanation of that effect “by James Barrett”:http://www.greatenergychallengeblog.com/2010/12/rebounds-gone-wild/ in one of the linked pieces:

bq. In essence the rebound effect is the fact that as energy efficiency goes up, using energy consuming products becomes less expensive, which in turn leads us to consume more energy. Jevons’ claim was that this rebound effect would be so large that increasing energy efficiency would not decrease energy use….

Owen’s critics say that although the rebound effect is real, whether it is large enough to have the effects Owen claims is an empirical matter, and they are sceptical. Basically, they argue that the increase in energy consumption is not just down to lower prices but also to greater wealth, house size, etc. and so without greater efficiency, we might be consuming a whole lot more energy than we actually are. Basically: it all depends on the facts, and the jury’s out.

Ok, so now let’s do a little substitution in that sentence quoted earlier.
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The ever-ludicrous home of the British “decent left”, _Harry’s Place_ , carries the motto on its banner “Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” No surprise then that they’ve devoted much of their recent coverage to increasingly hysterical guilt-by-association denunciations of Wikileaks. One of their marginally saner bloggers, “Gene”, has now posted “a long comparison”:http://hurryupharry.org/2010/12/10/historical-echoes/ between Chinese Nobel-prizewinner Liu Xiaobo and his German predecessor Carl von Ossietzky. Von Ossietzky was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 for publishing details of German rearmament in contravention of the Versailles treaty, a verdict that was upheld in 1992 by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice. The 1992 ruling, “according to Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Ossietzky , reads:

bq. According to the case law of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, the illegality of covertly conducted actions did not cancel out the principle of secrecy. According to the opinion of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, every citizen owes his Fatherland a duty of allegiance regarding information, and endeavours towards the enforcement of existing laws may be implemented only through the utilization of responsible domestic state organs, and never by appealing to foreign governments.

Carl von Ossietzky, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange ….?

So, the vote to triple university tuition fees in the UK was won by the government, albeit with a reduced majority (21), thousands of young people demonstrated outside Parliament, and the Prince of Wales’s car got bricked as people chanted “off with their heads!” What now? People seem to be anticipating three things: more disorder on the streets as the coalition pushes though its cuts programme; the destruction of the Liberal Democrats; and a massive slump in popularity for the Coalition. Good news for the left then? I’m not so sure.
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I’ve been reading Doug Saunders’s excellent _Arrival City_ this week. Full of interesting and enlightening facts about migration, about how cities work, about international development. One page, however, brought me up short, so this is a bleg aimed at economists and especially at labour-market economists. Saunders argues (pp.88-9 for those who have a copy) that increased migration of unskilled labour will be a persistent feature in Western economies “during this decade and throughout the century” because of the demographic pressures in those ageing societies. With reproduction rates falling below 2.1 and the proportion of elderly people in the population rising, immigrants can compensate for labour shortages. “… while immigration is not a mandatory solution to labour shortages, the combination of cash-starved governments and higher demographic costs will make it the least painful and most voter-friendly solution.” He then reels off a series of labour-shortage estimates (US to require 35 million extra workers by 2030, Japan 17 million by 2050, the EU 80 million be 2050, Canada 1 million short “by the end of this decade.”)
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If you aren’t reading “Glenn Greenwald”:http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html on this, you should be. The latest turn of the screw is that “Visa have said”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11938320 they are suspending payments. The good news is that, at least for Europe, this will take time to implement. The Wikileaks donations page is currently “here”:http://213.251.145.96/support.html

Tomorrow sees a vote in the House of Commons on the principle of whether to triple the fees charged to undergraduate students at UK universities and to completely withdraw state funding from all subjects except science, medicine and engineering. That’s the headline proposal, the reality is somewhat more complex since the changes are accompanied by a government-sponsored student loan scheme under which those who fail to secure reasonably paid jobs will not be required to pay and will eventually be forgiven their debt (so some of the cost will end up falling to the taxpayer). The other uncertainty surrounds the level of the permitted fee: government has said that it will only allow a £9000 charge if universities do certain as-yet unspecified things to widen access, but £6000 will usually be inadequate to cover costs.

Whether the changes are distributively regressive or progressive (compared to the status quo) is a matter of some controversy, but the assumption that is is progressive depends on assumptions about future government behaviour (around the adjustment of thresholds for repayment) that are perhaps optimistic. Most of the early evidence suggests that prospective students from low-income figures will be deterred from higher education by the headline figure of the debt they will face (perhaps many many times their current family income) even though the reality is not as scary as that scary scary figure. I’ve been arguing with some other philosophers on “a comments thread at Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/yet-more-on-student-unrest-in-the-uk-over-the-attack-on-higher-education-funding.html , some of what is below recapitulates that, and some of it is a bit rantish. Apologies for that.
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Frank Field, the Joe Lieberman of British politics, “has been advising the ConDem government”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/03/frank-field-welfare-sacred-cows on welfare reform. Here’s a sentence to contemplate:

bq. This goal of changing the distribution of income will be achieved by ensuring that poorer children in the future have the range of abilities necessary to secure better paid, higher skilled jobs.

Of course, I can see a way in which that might work. The newly educated poorer children, frustrated at the stultifying low-wage jobs on offer to them, rise up and change the income distribution by expropriating the expropriators. I doubt that’s the mechanism that Field has in mind though.

Via @leninology

One method of getting a psychological assessment of the national character of potential antagonists would be to go to a local bar and ask people, any people. A few glasses of scotch would be a lot cheaper than the cost of intelligence and diplomatic services, and would doubtless come up with similar “results”:http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/1979/08/79TEHRAN8980.html .

Windsor and Maidenhead Council (UK) “is planning a reward scheme”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/31/council-plans-big-society-reward (supermarket tokens and the like) for volunteers to help implement David Cameron’s “Big Society”:

bq. it is likely residents would get a loyalty card similar to those available in shops. Points would be added by organisers when cardholders had completed good works such as litter-picking or holding tea parties for isolated pensioners. The council says the idea is based on “nudge theory” – the thought that people don’t automatically do the right thing but will respond if the best option is highlighted. Points would be awarded according to the value given to each activity. Users could then trade in their points for vouchers giving discounts on the internet or high street.

Maybe the Council should have read more widely, since according to another body of literature (Bruno Frey, “Sam Bowles”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5883/1605 ), they risk sending out a signal that only a mug performs good works for no reward. An interesting natural experiment, to be sure, but not one that I’d wish on the residents of Windsor and Maidenhead.

Thanks to some FB comments by Marc Mulholland, I see that there’s an interesting bit of rhetorical back-and-forth going on in British politics today. Labour claims that ConDem plans to cap housing (and other) benefit payments will have the effect of forcing poor people out of London and therefore amount to “social cleansing”. Useful idiot Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg “pretends to be outraged”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9125000/9125499.stm :

bq. To refer to cleansing would be deeply offensive to people who have witnessed ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world.

Unfortunately, for him, in a flanking manoeuvre from the right, London mayor Boris Johnson (Tory) then “repeats the charge”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/28/boris-johnson-kosovo-style-cleansing-housing-benefit , making it more explicit and destroying its metaphorical character:

bq. What we will not see, and will not accept, is any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London.

None of this, including the faux-outrage from Clegg, would surprise anyone who has hung around the blogosphere since 2001, since charges of “moral relativism”, “moral equivalence” and “you are implicitly comparing X to Y how dare you!” are the common currency of wingnuts and “decents” alike. This one is mildly interesting, though, because it is a complaint about the adaptation of what was originally a piece of “unspeak”: a euphemism. The complaint depends for its force entirely on the euphemism being understood non-euphemistically, if you see what I mean. I see from some discussion at the Unspeak site, that Steven Pinker has a name for this: the “euphemism treadmill”.

bq. People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations. ( _Blank Slate_ p.212).

It has become commonplace for self-styled leftist erstwhile advocates of the Iraq War to whine that their critics have been unkind to them. Can’t those critics accept, they wheedle, that there were reasons on both sides and that the crimes against humanity of the Saddam regime supported at least a prima facie case for intervention? During an earlier phase of discussion, when those advocates were still unapologetic, but whilst the slaughter was well underway, we were treated to numerous disquisitions on moral responsibility: yes there is slaughter, but _we_ are not responsible, it is Al Qaida/the Sunni “insurgents”/Al-Sadr/Iran ….

Well “the latest Wikileaks disclosures”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks ought to shut them up for good (it won’t, of course). “Our” side has both committed war crimes directly and has acquiesced, enabled, and covered up for the commission of such crimes by others. The incidents are not isolated episodes: rather we have systematic policy. The US government has a duty to investigate and to bring those of its own officials and military responsible to justice. Of course, this won’t happen and the Pentagon will pursue the whistle-blowers instead. So it goes.

Karl Marx in the Preface to vol. 1 of _Capital_ : “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. ”

Here’s “part of an interview from IHE”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/20/schrecker with Ellen Schrecker, author of _The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University_ :

bq. Reduced support from state legislatures and the federal government’s decision to aid higher education through grants and loans to students rather than through the direct funding of individual institutions forced those institutions to look for other sources of income, while seeking to cut costs. In the process, academic administrators adapted themselves to the neoliberal ethos of the time. They reoriented their institutions toward the market at the expense of those elements of their educational missions that served no immediate economic function.

bq. As they came to rely ever more heavily on tuition payments, they diverted resources to whatever would attract and retain students — elaborate recreational facilities, gourmet dining halls, state-of-the-art computer centers, and winning football teams. At the same time, they slashed library budgets, deferred building maintenance, and – most deleteriously – replaced full-time tenure-track faculty members with part-time and temporary instructors who have no academic freedom and may be too stressed out by their inadequate salaries and poor working conditions to provide their students with the education they deserve. Meanwhile, rising tuitions are making a college degree increasingly unaffordable to the millions of potential students who most need that credential to make it into the middle class.

bq. Unfortunately, the competitive atmosphere produced by the academic community’s long-term obsession with status and its more recent devotion to the market makes it hard for its members to collaborate in solving its problems. Institutions compete for tuition-paying undergraduates and celebrity professors who can boost their institutions’ U.S. News & World Report ratings. Faculty members compete for tenure and research grants. And students compete for grades after having competed for admission to the highly ranked schools that will provide them with the credentials for a position within the American elite.

490,000 public sector jobs to go, and just wait for the multiplier effects.

“Here’s Joe Stiglitz”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/19/no-confidence-fairy-for-austerity-britain :

bq. Thanks to the IMF, multiple experiments have been conducted – for instance, in east Asia in 1997-98 and a little later in Argentina – and almost all come to the same conclusion: the Keynesian prescription works. Austerity converts downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions. The confidence fairy that the austerity advocates claim will appear never does, partly perhaps because the downturns mean that the deficit reductions are always smaller than was hoped. Consumers and investors, knowing this and seeing the deteriorating competitive position, the depreciation of human capital and infrastructure, the country’s worsening balance sheet, increasing social tensions, and recognising the inevitability of future tax increases to make up for losses as the economy stagnates, may even cut back on their consumption and investment, worsening the downward spiral.