Pavlos's Thoughts

Oh come on, gay marriage… not again!

I grudgingly support gay marriage. Gay people obviously want it, so we should have it. That much is a clear-cut civil rights issue. But it makes me sad that gay people should want to get married, of find it important.

Christian marriage is a rotten contract where a man buys a woman from her father for some price – usually land or farm animals. The man has to feed and “protect” the woman, and in exchange she has to be a sex slave, domestic slave, and reproductive beast. Adultery carries severe penalties, always for the woman because she might produce the wrong offspring, and sometimes for the man because he interferes with another man’s woman. Believe it or not, that was an attempt at feminism, a deal to share the burdens and benefits of mating between men and women sort of fairly.

It worked OK, I guess, for ancient agrarian societies. Actually it didn’t. Women hated the deal pretty much constantly for all of recorded history. A few generations ago, as in Juliet, women were fighting fiercely to have any say in whom they married, and in many places they still don’t. Only a couple of generations ago women stopped being bought (with dowry) and were no longer severely punished for adultery. Just a few years ago feminists managed to remove the sex slavery clause from the deal, so that now marriage is almost completely meaningless. Hooray for that!

It would be difficult to find an institution whose heritage is more heinous than that of marriage. Only slavery is close. If we had treated slavery like we did marriage, slave unions would have gradually won reforms so that slaves were no longer owned by their slavemasters and could no longer be bought or sold but had to sign slavery contracts willingly. In fact they would compete in the slave market to do so. There would be slaves’ rights and health & safety at slavery. Slaves with tenure would be paid off when freed, rather than the other way round. When the economy tanked and the unenslavement rate went high, unenslaved people would clamor to be enslaved. “Slavery Now” would win votes. Comical at best. In the case of slavery we recognised a rotten thing, almost universally, and abolished it. Marriage we reformed. Why one and not the other? Go figure!

So marriage is this religious custom with horrible, horrible history and yet modern people, joyfully and with the best intentions, rush to get married. Now gay people want to do it too. I understand the equality, of course, but I wish they’d go instead for a different type of equality. What about the equality of unmarried and married people? I’m not actually married with my partner and mother of my son. Perhaps selfishly, I want us to have equal rights to married couples. Which we do. We haven’t yet ran into an actual reason to be married. So why do gay people want it so?

There are a few things that marriage does. It’s a legal act to nominate another person for certain civil rights such as inheritance or citizenship. But for that there should be a legal act to nominate another person for certain civil rights such as inheritance or… you get the idea. What’s it got to do with religions and marriage?

Marriage is also, perhaps, a request for the state to come and police your relationship. That… sounds like a really bad idea. I’m usually much in favor of the state, but I don’t want it in our bedroom, because the choices that the state will want to enforce aren’t likely to match ours. Then again marriage may be a signal to get the state out of your relationship. If a man beats a random woman he may likely get arrested. If he beats his wife, much less likely. That’s not right either. Human rights shouldn’t change in either direction just because you’ve entered some kind of relationship.

Now, of course, what marriage does and the reason people want it is that it’s a stamp of approval on a relationship. Obviously people demand it as such. But hang on, the approval of whom?

If marriage is the approval of the church, then surely it’s a matter of the church to decide what relationships to approve or disapprove. It’s not fair to ask the christians, or the muslims, or any religion to approve a relationship they don’t like. Or rather it’s fair to ask them, and maybe convince them or else go and find a more accepting faith. It’s not fair to have the state coerce them to grant their blessings, make available their churches, or provide ceremonies. If people want a commitment ceremony, by all means show some imagination and create one!

Perhaps marriage is a signal that your relationship is approved by society, that it is OK. I guess it was not OK before you got married, so I’m happy for you that you’ve finally fixed it (I’m not invited to many weddings, which is another advantage of this attitude). The relationship of a man and a woman can be OK, so gay couples want their relationship to be OK too. It makes me so sad.

Why is this very small relationship OK, and others are “not OK”? Is it because a couple is OK for raising kids? Hardly so. Nuclear families, realistically wives, have a hell of a job raising kids because the parenting group is so small. A village does a better job raising kids, and so does a tribe. Or a network. But these relationships are not OK. Only a couple is OK because when it comes to parenting we have to be as selfish as possible. That’s what makes me sad.

There are three activities that a capitalist firm does. Every firm engages in all three at different times, but the balance and the timing bring about radically different outcomes: Financially, in immediate human welfare, for development, and morally. I therefore call these the three faces of capitalism.

• Capital formation:In capital formation the firm consumes financial assets (usually cash) and builds real assets that it will later use for production or extraction. Capital formation thus takes two forms:
  • Productive capital formation, such as technical innovation, the building of customer relationships and goodwill, channels to market, facilities or machinery, organizational and human capital.
  • Extractive capital formation, such as the acquisition of monopoly licenses or exclusivities, financial muscle, commodity stocks, control over suppliers or distributors, land, and all IP assets.
• Production: Production is what an industrial, agricultural, or service firm does. Resources come in, labor and and devices are applied, and goods or services come out. The goal of production is to sell the goods or services at a profit, while minimising the share paid to suppliers and labor, and the running cost of devices.
• Extraction: Extraction is what a landlord, bank, media company, utility, mining company, or retailer does. These firms have a productive function, but their dominant mode of business is to extract rents from assets that they own, while rationing those assets so as to command the maximum price.

The companies that people admire, Google, Apple, the great electrical and electronic firms, the venerable auto and aviation firms, the computer companies, the large and small software houses, big infrastructure, big science, universities, and medicine are all admired because of their productive capital formation: R&D, innovation, bright ideas, making what previously didn’t exist or wasn’t possible. Productive capital is seen as a beacon of hope and progress for humanity, and great store is set by it wittingly or unwittingly.

[...]

The purpose of feminism is not to treat men and women the same. The core problem of feminism is to redress the natural imbalance of reproductive costs and decisions, which biologically fall almost entirely on women. As such, feminism has to be an “affirmative action”, not an “equal opportunity” movement.

For a woman, a chance at reproduction is as good as assured. For practical purposes, she can make her offspring herself. However, on her own she would face the entire cost of bearing and raising young, which is enormous. A man’s reproduction is not assured. He has to find or make a woman willing to have his young. Beyond that, only social and emotional factors motivate the man to share into the costs of raising the offspring, and the man needs high confidence of fatherhood before competing on their behalf for resources and power in the world. This is the natural situation, devoid of any value judgments. Nature lumps all the costs, but also the decisions, on women. Feminism is the attempt, throughout history, to balance the costs with men.

[...]

The countries in Europe have different productivity. Germany is large and near the top, Greece has a lot of debt and is near the bottom in productivity. With an open market and easy credit, the mismatch in productivity produces a trade imbalance within the EU, and that accumulates as debt. Poor Europe buys goods from rich Europe partly on credit.

Assuming things remain constant, this credit is nominal only – it’s to keep trade flowing and will never be repaid. This is usually OK. Sovereign debt is usually permanent, and it’s really a monetary instrument (bonds are a kind of slow money) rather than a cashflow debt that’s expected to be repaid. The market will sustain the debt if it matches the pace of growth, so that the debt to GDP ratio is roughly constant. If debt grows much faster than GDP the market gets jumpy and starts perceiving sovereign debt as ordinary cashflow debt, and we get the current mess.

What, then, is to be done? Europe as a whole has three options:

[...]

Here’s what I learned about requirements management after more than 15 years in the medical software industry.

Stop! Before you invest any time or money on requirements management, or any tools for that, you must solve these three problems. No, really! Don’t work on processes or tools until you fix these:

• Give your dev team a very clear, straightforward, down to earth picture of what you’re trying to build. You should be able to explain it in an hour and write it in a few pages. This must come from marketing, but everyone in the team should be able to relay it faithfully enough.
• Make sure everyone in the team actually believes this is happening! Check that they believe the project is going to take place, the time scale is sensible, it’s going to succeed, and that they personally are going to do it. If they don’t really believe some of that they’ll keep working, but won’t achieve success.
• Make it so that your people care personally about the product and its quality. If you’re building a consumer app like a game or website, make sure they use it. If it’s a profesional tool make sure they empathise with the specialist who is going to use it, and what the specialist is trying to achieve in the world.

The good news is, once you solve these three issues thoroughly, requirements management will be very easy. All you need is descriptions and categories. A document with chapters will do. If your project is large or has a long future (and not otherwise) use a database that gives you at least one level of nesting, so you can group related specs (user interface, back end, service & support, etc) together. That’s all you need. Write specs as simple facts about what the product does.

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It’s time to have one operating system, and it will be Android. Yes, on everything. Google’s world domination will succeed.

There are two sets of things an OS does. It’s a user interface, app sandbox, and hardware abstraction. Android does these really, really well. It’s a fresh UI for fingers rather than mice. It’s the first to offer proper sandboxed security, so we can install apps written by random strangers, like we wanted to do since the 80s. It runs on everything and it’s free.

The other job of an OS is to be a deployment target for apps. A few years ago, the bulk and complexity of these APIs ensured the dominance of Windows. Now, the lock is breaking. Software is becoming a service. You don’t buy software, you download the app to access the service, or it’s just a Web page. Legacy software like Microsoft Office can run in VMs, or in the cloud.

[...]

Note, this is a fairly superficial rant. Don’t tell me that it isn’t an in-depth analysis of the transport industry, I know!

Air travel is stuck in the 1960s. Not the planes. The planes have evolved greatly but the airlines, the service offering, and the experience are stuck in the ’60s

The airlines
Why do airlines still exist? Or rather why are the plane operators still so visible to the customer? Buying travel from an airline is like buying energy directly from a company that runs power stations.

Running planes is, for all practical purposes, a commodity service. Safety is governed by regulations and the economics are better the fewer and larger the planes. Aviation would be better run by commodity carriers.

[...]

The first observation about the riots is that they’re a failure of government. Any government whose people revolt has failed in some way. It hasn’t failed totally or everywhere but it is responsible for a failure – a significant one in this case. The first thing that Cameron has to do is bow down to Britain and admit failure. That’s true from any political perspective. Whether you’re a fluffy nurturing liberal or a tough personal responsibility conservative, Cameron’s government has failed to govern effectively.

Calling the looters criminals is self-serving hypocrisy to avoid admitting failure. All kinds of people commit crimes, but the category “criminal” is rarely helpful for the purpose of explanation. A “criminal” is someone who has freedom of choice and chooses to do something harmful for self-serving reasons. Say Bernie Maddoff, he was a “criminal”. A madman, terrorist, or rioter cannot be explained away as a “criminal”. You may wish to treat them harshly, but you have to ask further questions if you want to explain their behaviour. You should ask these questions so that you can reach and stop other people who may be on the same path. We don’t analyse “criminals” because we’ve accepted that greed, materialism, and selfishness are normal – we just expect people to control them. We do analyse abusers, extremists, and rioters because there may be something useful society could do to change their motives.

To dismiss rioters as “criminals” is to assume that their motivation has been to acquire trainers or PlayStations without paying, and that there has been a remarkably unlikely concentration of these “criminals” in poor UK suburbs over a particular week. Or else it is to assume that the anger, or whatever, they were feeling is normal, that it’s normal they would want to burn stores and break things, but they should just control themselves like normal people. These are not helpful explanations, so let’s please not call them criminals.

So, after admitting and apologising for failure, Cameron needs to start failing less. Then the question opens, what kind of failure was this?

[...]

A public good isn’t one that’s made by the state’s enterprises. There are excellent, and not so good, reasons for the state to hold a large fraction of the productive capital in the economy. The state may also turn out to be the best provider for some public goods, but that’s a consequence, not the source, of their definition.

A public good is also not the same as a good whose provision is a moral necessity. Sometimes the two are aligned, but they’re not the same. Providing food is a moral necessity, but usually it’s handled as a private good. Public transport isn’t a pressing moral necessity, but I argue it is best handled as a public good.

At a certain point on its demand curve, a good is marginally public if the net benefit to society increases when the price, or other barrier to consumption, decreases. It is marginally private if the converse happens. Colloquially we can say a good is public if it’s marginally public for all realistic price points, and we can call a good private in the converse case.

Here are some examples:

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In any closed economy, be it people in a village or countries on the planet, there will always be trade imbalances. For any number of reasons, some people will be more productive than others. Let’s say in one place it rains a lot and that makes people boring and hard-working. In another place it’s sunny and the inhabitants are lazy. The boring people manage to make twice as much stuff each month than the lazy ones. What happens when they try to trade? There are two main options:

1. They trade at fair prices and even balance (no borrowing). That’s stable and arguably fair, but overall trade is limited by how much the lazy people can produce. Even though the boring people could produce more to sell, the lazy ones can’t produce enough to afford it.
2. They trade at skewed prices. Everyone produces as much as they can. The boring people essentially barter their suff with the lazy people, so there’s a net transfer of value from boring-land to lazy-land while the money balance stays even.

These are the two overall options. For the first option, which we’l call “fiscally responsible” there are two variants:

[...]

Here’s an update as to what is happening with Greece. First, some numbers from the 2011 Greek budget:

• Total revenue: €128 billion

• Real revenues from taxes etc. €55 billion
• Aid from the EU €3 billion
• Borrowing from the market, including rollover €70 billion

• Real expenses such as pensions, health etc. €63 billion
• Debt rollover and interest payments €65 billion

And another pair of interesting numbers

• Interest rate charged by the market for German bonds, 2 year maturity: 2%
• And for Greek bonds: Around 25%, rising

So, what does all this mean?

Real deficit

In summary the Greek state is like a business that takes in €55 bn in sales but pays €63 bn in salaries and what have you, so it makes a real loss of €8 bn, or 14%. To recover, the state needs to increase revenue by extracting more taxes or running profitable businesses, or it must cut the amount that it pays to the Greek people, or some combination thereof. If it doesn’t the Greek state will run bankrupt anyway, abruptly cut expenses to €55 bn, and go on living in a hand-to-mouth way.

[...]

All leadership involves a kind of lying. Attack and we’ll prevail over our enemies. Work hard on this product and we’ll succeed. Join our growing community. When the leader says these things, success does not yet exist. The act of leading produces an image of success and of a path to it. The many enthusiastic acts of following create the success. If too few people follow, or follow in a very half-hearted manner, there will be defeat, failure, or no community.

Selling is not like this. To sell is to convince someone of the value of a thing that you have, so that you can exchange it favorably. You have to have the thing, and it has to deliver the value readily by itself. Great selling acknowledges this. Buy a Mac, it can do these things out of the box. The cardinal sin of selling is to sell things that don’t deliver the value that is claimed. Drink Coke and you’ll feel happy. Really? That could only be honest selling for drugs. Otherwise it’s very uninspiring leadership. If you’re active and outgoing, do fun things with others, and also drink Coke, you’ll feel happiness.

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I’m not happy with this post. I tried to mix some rather speculative economic thinking with an attempt to explain to a wide audience, and it doesn’t work. I’ll rewrite it as geeky economic article.

The asset bubble that started in the late 1990s and exploded in 2007 as the financial crisis was caused, in my opinion, by our monetary system. In particular, the following cycle took place:

1. The general public in western, mainly Anglo-Saxon, economies started using real estate as hard money, profiting from its parasitic appreciation linked to GDP growth. The real economy deflated against housing.
2. Banks issued new money backed by the rising real estate. This broke monetary policy by expanding the money supply first as intended but then beyond, as banks used securitized debt to evade regulation and recycle their license to create money and use it as their capital.
3. A positive feedback loop developed, where appreciating houses led to banks issuing more money, which led to inflation of money against housing. The market responded by raising house prices further, until both housing and housing-backed money crashed.

The system of money used by western economies, although no secret, is not widely understood by the public. I’ll explain how our monetary system works, how it caused the crisis, and how it ought to be reformed in principle. Obviously I have no tried and tested new system to propose, but I’ll try to articulate what new conditions it should meet.

Hard money and its parasitic appreciation on GDP

The traditional conception of money is as a fixed quantity, such as a ton of gold. It changes hands, and some people hoard it, but it doesn’t grow or shrink. That way the value of goods can settle against gold through the market. This “hard money” concept served well for most of history because the size of the real economy didn’t change much either. In a static economy, a gold coin buys a sack of wheat, say, now or in a hundred years. Using gold does nothing to erode inequality, but doesn’t amplify it either. Sitting on gold yields zero return, so any productive investment whose risk-adjusted real return is above zero beats that, and will probably get funded.

[...]

We’re in the third phase of the financial crisis that peaked in 2008. The events of 2007-2009, which are generally called “The Crisis”, were only phase two. The three phases are:

• Phase One: Creation of false assets by private speculators, mostly banks and individuals who play the property market. These assets have a nominal value way in excess of their real earnings potential, and that gap is hidden.
• Phase Two: Transfer of the deficit of those assets to state budgets under emergency conditions. Private insolvency becomes state liability, while the gap between nominal and real wealth remains open and is now visible.
• Phase Three: Closing of the gap by a transfer of real funds from the public to states. This is achieved by means such as austerity, taxation, default, or inflation. These different options hurt or benefit different groups.

We’re in phase three, and the reason we have austerity in most of the West is that austerity is the method capital wants to see used to resolve the gap. Using austerity in this phase serves to consolidate the gains that speculators made in phase one, such that the whole cycle is a net transfer of funds from the general public to the speculators. Austerity is the “hard money” way to finish the cycle.

Using inflation (by printing money), taxation of capital gains, or controlled default would allow the gap to close by eroding rather than consolidating the false gains made in phase one. These options wouldn’t be clean but they would be fairer and less destructive of the real economy. These options are very unfriendly to capital, so they’re mostly absent from politics. The US Fed is using a small amount of inflation, presumably to reduce damage to the real economy, while the fabulously independent European Central Bank insists on a hard Euro and austerity. The ECB is working as intended, since the whole point of an independent central bank is to avoid stealth taxation of capital in situations like this. On the whole, current monetary policy is strongly in favor of wealth and against social cohesion or development.

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Why WikiLeaks is important
The WikiLeaks intelligence documents have started appearing in the papers. There’s no earth-shattering revelation, yet this disclosure to the public is extremely important because it brings to light our two alternative conceptions of democracy. In the classic idea of democracy, the one you learn at school and the one reflected in the structure of electoral institutions, participatory democracy is the ideal and representation is merely a device to make democracy practical at large scale. In classic democracy, the public is at all times the source of authority and arbiter of decisions. Openness is essential, and the role of the media is to keep the representatives in line with the wishes of the public. In classic democracy there is no question that the information recently released by WikiLeaks should be routinely open. While that might make the work of government at times inconvenient, this type of democracy is the safest and least oppressive form of government we have so far discovered.

The alternative view of democracy, now prevalent de facto, is the democracy of the management firm. The state is governed like a large public firm. Political parties are management consultancies bidding for contracts to run the firm for a number of years. Elections are the general meeting, where citizens vote one share but large investors (businesses) vote according to their share of the economy. The role of the media, if it’s not the firm’s own newsletter, is to carry advertising. In this kind of democracy, the management firm, once hired, is allowed and expected to work behind closed doors. Their performance is judged only by aggregates, such as economic growth. Citizens are certainly not routinely informed, and have no say unless some investor lobby (large business interest) feels that the management performs poorly and calls for an early general meeting. If that is the democracy we have, WikiLeaks is wholly irresponsible and out of place.

Which type of democracy do you think we should have?

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Racism is seen as a violation of minorities. Allegedly, it has defined perpetrators and victims. Two categories. That people are rigidly divided into categories is taken as given, and fighting racism is supposed to be about limiting and maybe one day reversing one category’s depredations on the other. It’s not supposed to be about universal rights but about protecting black people and other minorities from whites.

That’s wrong. It’s an unhelpful and misleading conception of racial conflict. Seeing it as a category conflict serves the wrong agendas. In fact, the crime of racism is about denying rights that are universal. That white people are the perpetrators and blacks usually the victims is of no bearing on the nature of the injustice. The correct formulation of racism is that people form groups based on arbitrary identifying traits, the groups fight, and it happens that certain groups become habitually victimized. The correct course of action is to frown upon loyalty to arbitrary groups and instead embrace all people as moral beings. The response to racism is to be universal.

Feminism is supposed to be a violation of universal human rights. Respectable formulations of feminism are not gendered. In law, rape is about people forcing sex upon other people. It could be two men, and from that viewpoint the crime could only be defined in terms of fuzzy universal rights. Emancipation of women is uncool. Equal opportunity is polite. Equality is supposed to mean the same access to some abstract rights that no-one is going to get too worked up about.

That’s also wrong. It is a massive appropriation and dilution of the movement. Feminism is not about universal good behaviour. It’s brutally gendered. Violence is being perpetrated by men upon women, because of the different reproductive biology that defines the categories “men” and “women”. Men wish to claim control and extract reproductive benefits from women while dumping reproductive costs on them, or rather evading their share. Everything about feminism is about redressing this gendered crime. Visions of the solution are not symmetric, and to say that they are is complicit. Credible feminism isn’t about defining universal abstract rights. It’s about rebalancing the benefits and costs of reproduction to be more just, specifically between men and women.

Property means several things to people. It has at least three meanings:

• Personal safety and dignity: My clothes, my house, my money, my computer. These are mine in the sense that I need them to go through life and I need reassurance nobody will take them away from me. Actually I don’t own my house; I prefer to invest on my skills. But it’s the same idea.
• Control over resources: My project, my team, my blog, my plan. I want to control these things. If I had a business it could be my business in this sense of controlling what the business does. These things are controlled by me and I want them free from interference so that I can pursue my goals.
• The right to exploit: My shares, my invention, my song, my contract, my land. These are artificial rights that let me exploit resources, or the activities of others. If the thing is mine I can take any profit I can extract from it as mine to keep. This type of property is an exemption from the duty to share.

Only the first two are natural. The first is needed to have a society with human rights, although the boundary could vary. For example some people feel a strong need to own their house, and some don’t. But a desire for security of your immediate needs is universal.

The second right, right to control resources and keep them free from interference, is needed to form an advanced economy. You can’t build any kind of elaborate production or a complex technological product like a plane if you can’t control the resources and the activities that bring it about. This type of property is the necessary foundation for firms. Even things that appear to be free are based on property as control. Google services are free, but they control the site and it’s designed so that you keep visiting it rather than take the data from it and go your own way. Linux is free in the sense that someone could copy the bits and start a rival project, but the actual Linux project is well controlled.

Property as the right to exploit is different. There’s nothing intuitive or natural about it, except perhaps that it formalizes feelings like “survival of the fittest”. Normally, if you have an idea that is successful or as a group you produce valuable things, you share. When nature yields oil or fish again the normal thing is to share. Perhaps in these cases we have yet to discover how to do so in a controlled and equitable way. To these productive activities, property is an overlord. Property claims what would otherwise be shared among the people directly involved, on behalf of one or a few people who are distant. It’s no accident that most property of this type is indeed derived from lordship over land.

[...]

I don’t believe this idea that a firm exists to maximize shareholder returns. If the entire economy was structured on that principle, the world would be dominated by exploitative, rent-seeking organizations even more than it is.

The reason for a firm to exist, primarily and sufficiently, is to produce goods and services that are needed or desirable in the world. There are several ways of judging and directing the firm according to this principle.

• The market is a very good indicator of what the world needs or wants, especially when it comes to the detailed and diverse wishes of individuals. It’s not sufficient, and certainly not right by definition, because the market is prone to manipulation, irrationality, and social injustice making the difference between true wishes and buying power.
• Critical opinion, commentary, or goodwill towards a firm and its activities. It’s no accident that quality consumer goods firms are held in higher regard than most banks.
• An objective analysis of the firm’s product and activities with respect to life, well-being, human fulfillment, and the environment.
• Policy. Companies need to be comissioned to create large-scale infrastructure where the market would yield lower-investment, higher use cost solutions

A second reason for a firm to exist is to provide comfortable and fulfilling employment to the people directly involved in the firm. Balance is the measure here. The firm is not a vehicle to get rich, nor is crushing, subsistence-level employment a goal.

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A good manager is someone who takes decisions that carry cost before the right decisions become obvious.

Anyone can take precautions if they have zero cost, of if they appear to have zero marginal cost. There is therefore a tendency to reduce the marginal cost of various precautions, processes, regular forums, documents, and the like by turning them into a running waste. That’s an attempt to make management easier, or more precisely to make bad management less distinguishable from good while sacrificing any efficiency.

Also, any vaguely competent functionary or committee can make tough decisions once the costs and benefits are unequivocally obvious. I once had a manager who, when faced with any important decision, asked his reports to gather all relevant information and present it in a table. He would only accept analysis that made the choice obvious, which is equivalent to saying he only made decisions of zero risk and zero marginal value.

The valuable work is to take decisions that are costly now to gain benefits or avoid risks that are as yet unseen in the future. The good manager is alone, or at least needs to have peers who are above the daily affairs of their team and are able to look into the longer horizon. Effective management has to be empowered, like business, so that risks and gains can be balamced and foresight applied.

The way that the state of Israel conducts itself would be perfectly reasonable, for the year 1910.

Israel was formed by people who shared enough of a language, culture, and religion to see themselves as a nation even though they were a diaspora, or an ethnic group living in imperial lands. They revived or manufactured a national ideal on dubious claims of historical continuity. They created their state through sheer determination and no small amount of treachery and underground support. They defended and grew their state against destruction using ardent, incontestable violence.

That’s how every other nation state in the old world came to be. Greece did exactly the same things in the 1820s, as did the Balkan countries. The nation states of Europe had formed in similarly violent ways, justified on similarly new and artificial national identities, only a century earlier. This behaviour was thought normal of nations until the 1920s. If Israel had been formed in the 1840s, say, and it was still extinguishing its Arab minority in 1910 by interning them and blockading their supplies, no-one would protest. That’s what nations did, back then.

Unfortunately the world’s experiments with ethically pure nation states are over. This idea burned with the houses of Dresden and Tokyo, and in two large explosions over Japan. By the time the war was over it was clear to all technically advanced societies that another round of tribal warfare between nation states would negate them, if not all life on the planet. In a world of six billion people, half of them commanding nuclear arms, the unfettered nation state is practically untenable.

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Where’s the pressure on Thailand?
Thailand is a relatively modern developing country. It’s a coherent state, rather than a colonial mash-up of the type found in Africa or the Middle East, with a rich history and reasonably friendly to the West. There’s no indication that Thailand may be heading towards a different ideology, such as totalitarian communism or an islamic theocracy. Thailand is much more open and closer to the West than China. Why, then, do we sit idle while its government is using its army to shoot and kill protesters who are occupying the streets of central Bangkok asking for democracy? It’s a clear enough and understandable (to us) demand. The protesters feel that the ruling regime is illegitimate and want open elections whose outcome is honored. What could they ask for that’s more in line with our highest values, in the West, when it comes to governance? Why aren’t our governments sanctioning the Thai regime already? Why aren’t American and European leaders making it absolutely clear to the Thai elite that from our point of view their time is up, and they must accept a UN-run election if they want constructive engagement with the world?

[...]

The concept of a state that we’re carrying into the 21st century is out of date. We need to examine what a state is today and, to the extent that we need governance, what form a state should take in a globally connected world.

The state that we think we have, the nation state, has only had a short and brutish existence. European nation states took their present form in the 18th or 19th century. Before this there were other forms of governance — empires, city states, feudalism — with varying degrees of size, ethnic cohesion, strict or lax laws, open or closed borders, etc. The most striking difference though has been the relationship of people with government, ranging from equal partnership to open exploitation. The nation state brought three centuries of coercive policy making coupled with paternalistic welfare.

Today the nation state is in crisis, not so much because of open borders or because the clan wars that it caused threaten to tear the world apart, but because its social contract is in crisis. The modern state can neither enforce policy nor provide welfare with credibility, and we’re not collectively sure if it should. We need a clear model of the state and its role.

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Where’s the $100 million a day fine?
BP makes about $250 billion in sales per year, of which $25-$35 billion is profit before tax. Currently it spends $10 million a day trying to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. For some reason it’s not achieving very quick results. Obama said that they would “pay the price” but so far the price is at least an order of magnitude too low! If BP were fined $100 million a day, minus whatever they actually spend on containment of course, then you might see some action. That amount would wipe out the year’s profits if they did nothing at all to fix the spill for about a year, so it’s a very conservative number. Fines should be high enough to make BP consider options that seal the well permanently, forfeiting its value.

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You may have heard that there were huge protests in Greece over the financial measures, basically pay cuts, that the government put in place to get its finances under control. A minority of the protesters were violent. Someone set fire to a bank, there were staff inside, and three people died.

This must seem like tragic madness to outsiders, and even to many who live in Greece. When societies fail, it’s easy to conclude that people are irrational, that therefore there’s no prospect for improvement, and that imposing a basic plan or order upon them might be a good idea. Let me try and allay these notions.

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We in the west tend to think that myth is a naive attempt to understand nature. That’s untrue and not sufficiently generous to those who came before us. Myth is not a failed theory of the universe; it’s a brilliantly successful technology for changing it.

What is the world? It is of course the stars, the Earth, the weather, life, and all the things that are out there. But we do not perceive these things directly, nor do they affect us. What affects us comes through our senses, and the way we perceive is as much a product of our embodied senses and our mind as it is a representation of the true disposition of things. Our perceptions are shaped by the ideas we already hold.

As soon as our ancestral apes became intelligent enough to affect the world, seeking to make it more hospitable to their vulnerable existence, two paths were open. They could make tools, draw predictions, and try to alter the physical world immediately around them, or they could alter their own minds so that their experience would be less harsh, more hopeful, more meaningful, fanciful and interesting, and even less bound to the actual sensations of cold and hunger that the body sometimes offered. The ability to alter the human experience of the world through the communication of ideas is myth.

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