Gingery Australian politics

Australia has a new Prime Minister, the very competent Julia Gillard.  She is the first Australian PM since 1923 not to have been born in Australia.  Gillard was born in Wales, and is Australia’s second ethnically-Welsh PM.  The first, Billy Hughes, was born in London, but grew up in Wales speaking Welsh as his mother tongue (as did his  contemporary, David Lloyd-George).

No other country, apart from Britain and Australia, has had a Welsh prime minister, and Australia has now had two.   Clearly being Welsh is no bar to political success in Australia.  A greater obstacle might be hair-colour:  I believe Ms Gillard is Australia’s first red-headed prime minister.

Australia has had one other PM born in England (Joseph Cook), two born in Scotland (George Reid, Andrew Fisher) and one born in Chile (Chris Watson, although he thought he had been born in New Zealand).  It should be noted that, despite Australia’s historical links with Britain, the Australian High Court has ruled that Britain is a foreign power under the Australian Constitution, which prohibits members of parliament being citizens of foreign powers.

Australia’s very first PM, Edmund Barton, was born in Australia, indeed in the inner-city suburb of Glebe,  Sydney.  A person living in Glebe would now find themselves represented by women at every level of government:

Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney:  Clover Moore
Member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for the Electorate of Balmain:  Verity Firth
Deputy Premier of NSW: Carmel Tebbutt
Premier of NSW: Kristina Keneally
Governor of NSW:  Marie Bashir
Member of the Commonwealth House of Representatives for the Federal Division of Sydney: Tanya Plibersek
Prime Minister:  Julia Gillard
Governor-General of Australia:  Quentin Bryce
Queen of Australia and Head of State:  Queen Elizabeth II.

And in this list, the Premier of NSW, Kristina Keneally was born in the USA, while Marie Bashir is of Lebanese descent and Tanya Plibersek of Slovenian. Only in America! as Yogi Berra would say.

Silicon millenarianism

Here we go again! We have another blogger predicting the end of the office.   Funny how it’s almost always bloggers and journalists and thinktank-swimmers doing this – always people whose work, most of the time, is by themselves, and who therefore fail to understand the nature of actual work in modern organizations.   As I’ve argued before, workplace interactions are primarily about the co-ordination of actions and the assessment of people’s intentions concerning these actions, not (or not merely) about sharing information.  Why did Barack Obama summon the Chairman and CEO of BP to the Oval Office earlier this week?  Why was the CEO also called to testify before Congress?   Why didn’t the President or the Congressional Committee simply place a conference call?  Because it is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to accurately assess another person’s intentions without immediate physical proximity and face-to-face interaction with said person.
If all you are doing is writing a blog or researching a story, perhaps you don’t ever appreciate this fact about work.  But anyone tasked with doing something other than writing knows it.   Seth Goodin thinks that within 10 years TV programs about office work will seem to be “quaint antiques”.  I bet him they will not at all.  Moreover, I bet the people in those offices will still be using paper, still having meetings, and still talking by the water-cooler.   In fact, while you’re placing my bets, put me down for 100 years, not 10.

Hey, Economics! Meet Politics!

Economists are fond of simplistic generalizations, which they refer to as “laws” (in imitation of Physics, itself showing its links to Theology), or as stylized facts.   Most such are, at best, default conclusions, since there are always exceptions.  Here are several generalizations, linked in a chain of inferences:

  • A successful single European currency requires a single European monetary policy.
  • A successful single European monetary policy requires a single European fiscal policy.
  • A successful single European fiscal policy requires fiscal transfers from one part of the European Union to another.
  • Fiscal transfers from one part of the European Union to another can only be undertaken over the long term by European institutions having democratic legitimacy.
  • To achieve democratic legitimacy for European institutions, the nations of Europe will require full political union.

This is not a new argument.  I first heard it put by Zambian economist Chiselebwe Ng’andwe in a paper read to a meeting of the African Association of Political Science in Salisbury (later Harare), Zimbabwe, in May 1981, talking about regional economic unions in Africa.   Dr Ng’andwe was subsequently a Board Member of the Zambian Central Bank and is currently Chairman of the state-owned National Savings and Credit Bank of Zambia. In today’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins refers back to a book about European integration by Larry Seidentop, published in 2000, which apparently makes a similar case about Europe.  Here is Ng’andwe in 1981:

Central banks play a pivotal role in the harmonization of fiscal, monetary and general economic policies.  Hence, separate central banks make it difficult to harmonize even those policy areas where joint arrangements exist such as a common tariff.
The Central bank is such an important institution for economic policy control that a joint central bank [in an economic union of states] needs total political harmony to function.  The necessary political harmony is not possible without political union.  Hence, a joint central bank and its potential benefits are simply not possible in a grouping of political[ly] independent states.  If one state wants some specific monetary policy to deal with an internal problem, a joint central bank will [op]pose some problems [policies?] unless the desired action is completely consistent with the economic and (or) political mood of the other countries.  The loss of some territorial capacity for fiscal and monetary manoeuvre entailed by a joint central bank may involve a greater loss in territorial economic growth than the territorial gain from joint economic actions. This possibility of net economic loss does not augur well for a joint central bank.  But even more important to the territorial political leaders is the loss of control over the key instruments of economic policy.  This loss can create frustrations in the internal economic and political policies of individual countries.
. . .
Another signifance of joint policy instruments lie in the capacity of these instruments to reduce imbalances in the distribution of economic benefits.   .  .  .  Even in the U.S.A. where there is practically no government industrial and commercial activities, the availability of common fiscal and monetary policies enable[s] the central government to redistribute income throughout the federal states.
This redistribution may not be enough to remove inequalities completely, but it does remove the rough edges from any regional economic imbalances.”  (pp. 13-14)

Why is this argument not, then, widely understood?  Is it that some ideas are too comprehensible – in other words, apparently lacking in complexity or subtlety – to be understood by intelligent people? Or is that the political forces which benefit from the non-democratic European status quo are so strong as to prevent the adoption of democratic structures, and to muzzle the arguments for them?  As I recall, Ng’andwe’s talk was received very coldly by his audience, most of whom were keen on economic unions (between African countries), while maintaining national sovereignty in all other respects.
POSTSCRIPT (2014-12-07):  Another aspect of the failure of economic union without political union is revealed in George Packer’s profile of Angela Merkel, a bland woman seemingly arisen without trace:  her insistence on austerity policies for southern Eurozone countries in crisis is a play to her own, intensely financially conservative, voters.  Without an over-arching federal political structure no politician in Europe has an electoral incentive to consider the good governance of the global whole, rather than just their own, local or national part.  When historical accounts are eventually drawn up for responsibility for prolongation of the Great Global Recession of 2008-?, the small-minded, economically illiterate Mrs Merkel will be one of those most culpable.
 
References:

Chiselebwe Ng’andwe[1981]:  Problems of Economic Integration in Africa.  Paper presented to the Fourth Bi-Annual Meeting of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS 1981).  Salisbury, Zimbabwe:  23-27 May 1981.
George Parker [2014]: The quiet German.  The New Yorker, 1 December 2014.
Larry Seidentop [2000]:  Democracy in Europe.  London, UK: Penguin.

Verligte Economics

Nobel  laureate economist, Paul Krugman, has a blogpost summarizing his (and some of Brad DeLong’s) arguments against imposing fiscal austerity in the short-term.   I realize that the verkrampte wing of the economic commentariat seem to be in the majority at present, so unfortunately the wise good sense of Krugman and DeLong seems unlikely to prevail.  But I want to note their arguments for the record so that, 2 or 5 years from now, when we are again (or still) in recession, we can look back and weep.

So, one more time: here’s an attempt to put together some key arguments about why the rush to fiscal austerity is deeply misguided.
Let me start with the budget arithmetic, borrowing an approach from Brad DeLong. Consider the long-run budget implications for the United States of spending $1 trillion on stimulus at a time when the economy is suffering from severe unemployment.
That sounds like a lot of money. But the US Treasury can currently issue long-term inflation-protected securities at an interest rate of 1.75%. So the long-term cost of servicing an extra trillion dollars of borrowing is $17.5 billion, or around 0.13 percent of GDP.
And bear in mind that additional stimulus would lead to at least a somewhat stronger economy, and hence higher revenues. Almost surely, the true budget cost of $1 trillion in stimulus would be less than one-tenth of one percent of GDP – not much cost to pay for generating jobs when they’re badly needed and avoiding disastrous cuts in government services.
But we can’t afford it, say the advocates of austerity. Why? Because we must impose pain to appease the markets.
There are three problems with this claim.
First, it assumes that markets are irrational – that they will be spooked by stimulus spending and/or encouraged by austerity even though the long-run budget implications of such spending and/or austerity are trivial.
Second, we’re talking about punishing the real economy to satisfy demands that markets are not, in fact, making. It’s truly amazing to see so many people urging immediate infliction of pain when the US government remains able to borrow at remarkably low interest rates, simply because Very Serious People believe, in their wisdom, that the markets might change their mind any day now.
Third, all this presumes that if the markets were to lose faith in the US government, they would be reassured by short-term fiscal austerity. The available facts suggest otherwise: markets continue to treat Ireland, which has accepted savage austerity with little resistance, as being somewhat riskier than Spain, which has accepted austerity slowly and reluctantly.
In short: the demand for immediate austerity is based on the assertion that markets will demand such austerity in the future, even though they shouldn’t, and show no sign of making any such demand now; and that if markets do lose faith in us, self-flagellation would restore that faith, even though that hasn’t actually worked anywhere else.

Spiderwoman RIP

The death has occurred of artist Louise Bourgeois, aged 98.   I can’t say I liked or appreciated her art at all, most of which I found unsettling, sinister and off-putting.   Her art did not communicate anything pleasant or subtle, at least not to me, but perhaps that was her intention, or else I was not in her target audience.   Her art was also obsessive (all those spiders, for goodness sake!) and very literal-minded (every one of them with exactly 8 legs).  Somehow we expect our artists, of all people, to have more imagination than this.    Bourgeois appears to have been true to her own vision and to her own self, but that does not mean she was someone I would want to spend any time with.
Perhaps I was not the only person repelled by her art and the personality it revealed.   In gallery Dia: Beacon, upriver from New York City,  Bourgeois’ art is placed in a small upstairs room on its own, hidden away from the other work like some Mrs Rochester of the art world.  Perhaps the curators thought her work would infect the wonderful minimalist and conceptual art for which the gallery is rightly known; her work certainly seems out of place in this gallery.  As elsewhere, I found her art there unpleasant, and a whole room full was overwhelmingly repellent.  Indeed, the one great work in that room you only see as you descend the steps to leave, and is not by her or by any artist.  In this former printing factory, the wall next to the steps is the original external red-brick factory wall, covered in some places with a white dust, and left as it presumably was when the gallery took over the building.  This subtle, spiritual wall with its geometric pattern of red bricks overlaid with random splotches of white is the only interesting or pleasant artwork in the Bourgeois room at Dia:Beacon.  It says something about Bourgeois’ art (or perhaps about my taste) that the packaging here is much better art than any of the objects inside it.

Vale: Martin Gardner: Defending the honor of the human mind!

The death has just occurred of Martin Gardner (1914-2010), for 25 years (1956-1981) the writer of the superb Mathematical Games column of Scientific American.   I remember eagerly seeking each new copy of SciAm in my local public library to read Gardner’s column each month,  and devouring all of his books that I could find.  His articles interested me despite my general contempt for games and competitions, and for ad hoc approaches to mathematical reasoning.
Scientific American’s tribute page is here, and here is a just-posted transcript of a February 1979 conversation between Gardner and other mathematicians.   This transcript contains a wonderful statement by mathematician Stan Ulam:

In fact, you know, yesterday Ron Graham gave a marvelous, really interesting lecture about some esoteric question; and I was wondering during it, Well, the question sounds very complicated, why devote so much ingenuity? Then I remember what, I think, Fourier or Laplace wrote: That mathematics—one reason for its being—is to defend the honor of the human mind.”

Poem: Rectius Vives

It has been some time since we had any Horace, so here is Ode X from Book II (translated by David West):

Rectius Vives
You will take a better course, Licinius
if you do not always thrust over the deep sea,
or hug the dangerous coast too close,
shivering at the prospect of squalls.
Whoever loves the Golden Mean
is safe (no squalor for him in a filthy garret),
and temperate (for him no mansion
that men will envy).
The huge pine is more cruelly tossed
by the winds, the loftiest towers
have the heaviest fall and lightning strikes
the tops of mountains.
The heart well prepared hopes in adversity
for a change in fortune, and fears it in prosperity.
Jupiter brings back ugly winters
and Jupiter
removes them. If all goes badly now, some day
it will not be so. Sometimes Apollo rouses
the silent Muse with his lyre. He does not always
stretch his bow.
In a difficult strait show spirit
and courage, and when the wind
is too strong at your back, be wise
and shorten the bulging sail.

Reference:
Horace [1997 AD/23 BCE]: The Complete Odes and Epodes. Translation by David West. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Previous poems by Horace:  Tu ne quaesieris (Ode I: XI) and Vides ut alta (Ode I: IX).

Is there a writer-presenter in the House?

Rory Stewart, new British MP for Penrith and the Border, is not the only accomplished writer to enter the House of Commons in the May 2010 elections.   Joining him is fellow Conservative, Zac Goldsmith, an environmentalist journalist and now MP for Richmond Park and North Kingston, and, for Labour, historian Tristam Hunt, now MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central.  As surely befits an MP representing The Potteries, Hunt is an historian of Britain’s great industrialisation of the nineteenth century and wrote a superb life of Friedrich Engels.
Given their diverse backgrounds, it would be fascinating to hear Stewart and Hunt debate the legacies of empire on modern Britain, and how their respective constituencies – at opposite extremes of the rural-city divide – can both prosper.  Personally, I believe that commercial development of the environmental and energy sector is the only way that manufacturing in the old-world will survive this century, and this is also a sector with the potential to better connect city and country (eg, through the deployment of small-scale power-generating plants).    A web-dialog or a joint TV series, anyone?
References:
Tristam Hunt[2009]: The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. (London, UK;  Allen Lane).  I reviewed this book briefly here.
Previous posts on books and articles by Rory Stewart here, here and here.

Vale: Mike Zwerin

This is a belated farewell to Mike Zwerin (1930-2010), jazz trombonist and jazz correspondent for the International Herald Tribune.   An American in Paris, he was open in his musical tastes and usually generous in his criticisms; his IHT writings personally sustained many a long journey across far meridians, and helped reinforce the urbane, cosmopolitan, expatriate feel that the IHT had last century (now sadly lost, since the NYT bought out the Washington Post and brought it home to Manhattan).  Obits:  London Times and The Guardian.

Carpenter in Cottonopolis

Being a traveling organ recitalist has its own challenges. All pipe and most electric organs are unique. A recitalist needs to practice beforehand on the organ he or she will perform on, to get a feel for the instrument’s capabilities, to know its sounds and colours, to choose the stops (the sounds) for the works to be played, and to become familiar with its physical layout. Thus, deciding what music best fits a particular organ and how best to voice that music on that organ requires the organist to spend some time alone with the organ. Organs are one of the last remaining examples in modern Western life of the primacy of the local, the particular, the here-and-now, over the universal and general and eternal (in the analysis of Stephen Toulmin). It is not surprising that the art of improvisation remains alive in organ recitals, alone among current classical music performance practices.

For this reason, American organist Cameron Carpenter tries his best not to decide recital programs in advance of seeing the organ. Last night in Manchester, playing on a large cinema-style organ in the Bridgewater Hall (not the Hall Organ), he gave an outstanding performance of the following works (as best I can recall):

  • Bach’s Toccata in F minor (though played in F#)
  • One of his own Three Intermezzi for Cinema Organ
  • Bach’s Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, in C minor, C# minor and D major
  • Schubert’s Erl-King, in Carpenter’s transcription for organ
  • Two Chopin Etudes for piano, in Carpenter’s transcription for organ.
  • Bach’s Prelude and Fugue for Organ in G major (with an inserted cadenza improvisation, cinema-organ style)
  • He ended the concert with two improvisations.
  • The audience then recalled him three times for encores, which including a cinema-organ version of Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turk (famous as the usual music for the chase scenes in silent films) and (I think) a Prelude and Fugue by Mendelssohn.

What a wonderful, thought-provoking performance this was! Before the concert even began, Carpenter spent 20 minutes in the lobby, greeting members of the audience as they arrived, something unknown in classical music (at least since Franz Liszt, who, in addition, chatted to the audience between pieces and even while playing).

Carpenter’s performances then likewise played masterful havoc with the fusty organ recital tradition! But not arbitrarily – the guy had thought intelligently about the music and knew what he was doing. For instance, in Bach’s proto-minimalist Prelude in C minor (WTC, Book I), the left-hand part was taken by the feet, and the subtle melody which emerges from the leading notes of the right-hand part was played on a different keyboard (and thus with different tone colours) to the notes from which it emerges.  Pianists often foreground the leading melody notes while pushing the other right-hand notes into the background; Carpenter did not do this, which I think better matches the minimalist tenor of the music – ie, it is the background here that is really the foreground. His was an intelligent and reflective treatment, and showed an understanding of the ideas in this music. (In case the mention of Bach and minimalism in the same breath surprises you, I think there is a close connection between Minimalism and Pietism, a relationship which deserves its own post.)

Would old JS have liked this treatment of his music? Of course, he would have! The man who imported colorful Italian and French musical styles into the moribund North German church music tradition and wrote a cantata in praise of coffee would surely have loved it. And one only has to listen to Bach’s Piano Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052), with its humorous flourishes and its repeated notes (more minimalism!), to know that this was a man who liked to play the keyboard.

And Carpenter’s delight and enthusiasm at playing the organ was evident throughout. Hands stretched across two, three and even four keyboards, or jumping back and forth between them, along with feet playing 4-note chords or impossible contrapuntal parts (such as the opening voice of the D Major Fugue) or imitating the wild horses in the Erl-King, all showed a man enjoying himself immensely. Even when a technical problem caused one keyboard not to sound, he remained enthusiastic. The hall was only about half full, and all of us who heard him were lucky to have experienced this superb combination of enthusiasm, black-belt technical mastery, and intelligent musicianship. Life has been better ever since!

POSTSCRIPT (2010-08-10): Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Carpenter’s organ-playing.  I note that the writer and reviewers quoted in that review are themselves organists (or the children of), and wonder if Carpenter’s messing with tradition is what really upsets these folk. For some reason I think of Karl Marx’s dictum that tradition comprises the collected errors of past generations.

References:

Cameron Carpenter web-site.  Edition Peters page.

Guardian preview here. Pre-concert interview with BBC In Tune here (limited time only).