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Source: http://www.clubtroppo.com.au/feed/

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<title>The world of bullshit we’ve built: Reflections on a scene from Utopia</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/03/03/the-strange-alchemy-by-which-we-built-a-menacing-world-of-bullshit/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/03/03/the-strange-alchemy-by-which-we-built-a-menacing-world-of-bullshit/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 03 Mar 2024 05:47:23 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Political theory]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=37016</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I recently took my son to the stage play of Yes, Prime Minister. … The decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production … . The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/03/03/the-strange-alchemy-by-which-we-built-a-menacing-world-of-bullshit/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
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<blockquote>I recently took my son to the stage play of Yes, Prime Minister. … The decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production … . The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that contained its share of tumult. … But somehow the dramas were genteel, reflecting battles between those privileged enough to be in the system. Waste in government continued, powerful people and time-servers were protected when they should have been exposed and dealt with. But one could be forgiven for thinking, at the end of an episode, ‘it was ever thus’. <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/03/03/the-strange-alchemy-by-which-we-built-a-menacing-world-of-bullshit/#footnote_0_37016" id="identifier_0_37016" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="A generation">1</a> on, as the moral dilemmas piled up in the stage-play, the governors conspired against the governed.
<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/03/12/secrecy-by-default-how-performing-government-is-trumping-transparency/">Me at Troppo, 2012</a></blockquote>
It’s hard to put one’s finger on it, but to speak loosely, I’d say that when I joined the workforce fifty-odd years ago, life inside that workforce was about 80% the lifeworld — just getting on with people, doing one’s job whatever it was. I was in Canberra and got a holiday ‘bridging’ job in the ACT over the summer hols. I was part of a small team administering rebates to people on their public housing rent for various reasons of need. (Rosemary who I was assisting was a very nice person and had loved being a nurse. She didn’t love this, but it was OK and it paid better.) In any event, although it was administrative, it was still a concrete system, not unlike running public transport or a newsagent. At least inside the beast, you could tell whether anything too silly was being done.
The other 20% was, if you like ‘the system of the system’ which hierarchies are preoccupied with. Reports to superiors and so on, though given how concrete what one was doing was, this worked reasonably well. I guess it wouldn’t be hard to find stories of fairly comprehensive waste to protect some superior’s view of things. But there was little high farce of the kind so beautifully sent up in Utopia.
I’d never accuse this world of being ‘high performing’. It was quite mediocre, but it was human, it muddled through, one wasn’t encouraged to have tickets on yourself. There was a tea lady of some standing who came round every morning and afternoon. Nor do I want to suggest that such an office wouldn’t contain antagonisms — perhaps quite deep ones. But there was quite an ethic of getting on and helping out. And that contributed to a deep kind of egalitarianism. Seniority was respected but not fawned over. And commonsense was a strong anchor in life.
Fast forward to today and the degree of farce is just off the charts. At the tail end of the world I’m describing, we did away with national anthems beginning movies and toasts to the Queen at the very most pompous events. Now everything is populated with new pieties. Each meeting — often each speech given at a function — is preceded by an acknowledgement of country. People are constantly involved in farcical activities — of the kind satirised in Utopia.
Almost certainly their workplace operates with a whole anti-thinking apparatus up in lights — mission and vision statements and ‘values’ statements. If you’re at one of these events it is not a good move, for your blood pressure, your self-respect or your career to say that you don’t think that the values of an organisation can be written in a list hung in the foyer — that values aren’t like that. That values might have names in our language, but they are present <a href="http://clubtroppo.com.au/2013/02/26/22584/">in our lives as choices</a>.
Now even after fifty years of development such things still don’t take up that much time. But they are central to the official governance of the organisation. I don’t think of them as causes so much as symptoms of something much deeper. They’re the tip of a large iceberg in which;
<ul>
<li>What is said and what is done within and by organisations are able to float pretty much freely away from each other;</li>
<li>There was always plenty to object to in the worlds of mainstream politics and media, but today they are mostly infantile — including most ‘quality’ media coverage of politics which is glorified racecalling.</li>
<li>Government reports are full of bland-out — pleasing words “improve”, “reform”, “sustainable”, “accountable”, “transparent” and on and on, and only someone who wasn’t paying attention thinks those words mean what they say. They could mean what they say, they could mean the opposite. Unless I’m deep in some issue, I don’t read government reports because they can’t be understood without being an insider. The same goes for corporate reports. And come to think of it, would you get much more than a fairly predictable schtick from the annual report of a major NGO?</li>
<li>Back then, discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation could live a fairly robust existence within the ‘commonsense’ of the workplace and this was obviously a very bad thing. So in major respects things are better than that today. We also go after things like bullying in the workplace. And there’s a lot of it about. So going after it is certainly a laudable goal. But it’s a very difficult goal and we don’t proceed as if it were. The upshot is that we’re giving lots of power to people who can game such systems — bullies in fact. Should we give up on anti-bullying? I’d hope we wouldn’t need to, but I think it’s quite likely that — perhaps after a few years where the new arrangements help a little — the systems become gamed by bullies so badly that they do more harm than good. Have we set these systems up to help us know if things are going awry? Nope. We’ve set them up as we always do — as elaborate role plays with accountability theatre to the higher-ups. What could possibly go wrong?</li>
<li>These dot points are just that — a few scattered thoughts. Many more phenomena could be itemised — perhaps I’ll do that as they occur to me.</li>
</ul>
I won’t claim to be able to articulate it much beyond what I’ve said here. It’s bugged me that I can’t do better for ages, but watching the Utopia clip above spured me to note it, because, it’s trying to make a similar point.
<ol class="footnotes"><li id="footnote_0_37016" class="footnote">A generation</li></ol>]]></content:encoded>
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<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">37016</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Figuring out the strange new rules of resource constraint</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/02/13/figuring-out-the-strange-new-rules-of-resource-constraint/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/02/13/figuring-out-the-strange-new-rules-of-resource-constraint/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Walker]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 13 Feb 2024 04:48:17 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Economics and public policy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Employment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Immigration and refugees]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Politics - national]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36983</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Just a decade ago, Australian labour was easy to find and infrastructure projects were often no-brainers. Now our economic times seem to have changed – and policymakers may need to adjust to a new set of rules. The world is … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2024/02/13/figuring-out-the-strange-new-rules-of-resource-constraint/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h3><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-36994" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/twister-1.jpg" alt="Change is coming?" width="793" height="446" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/twister-1.jpg 793w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/twister-1-300x169.jpg 300w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/twister-1-768x432.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 793px) 100vw, 793px" />Just a decade ago, Australian labour was easy to find and infrastructure projects were often no-brainers. Now our economic times seem to have changed – and policymakers may need to adjust to a new set of rules.</h3>
<hr />
The world is always changing, but sometimes parts of it change uncharacteristically fast.
Take the 1970s. Anyone under 60 has little memory of the economic world before 1973. But in that year, oil prices soared, unemployment started to rise, the Bretton Woods agreement continued unravelling – in short, the rules changed substantially, and forever. Most of us have spent most of our lives in this world.
In the 2020s, it seems arguable that the rules are moving again. The challenge of this era is to manage changing resources constraints. We struggle with an emerging scarcities of human resources, but also scarcities of labour-related resources, such as housing, and possibly of capital. But we also have emerging new abundance in important areas.
Not surprisingly, governments seem reluctant to move away from the thinking that served them pretty well just a decade ago. Most politicians grew up in that world, its strategies seemed to work, and so those politicians are mostly reluctant to drop those strategies now. It’s not just generals who want to fight the last war.
<h2>Reining in the 2010s infrastructure spending</h2>
A paradigm case of 2010s strategy is the Victorian government’s Melbourne Suburban Rail Loop, an underground railway line through the middle suburbs of Melbourne, for which it currently plans to borrow more than $100 billion dollars. Most urban transport experts say these suburbs don’t warrant such facilities, but the government has stuck to its loopiness even after the departure of the loop’s chief backer, <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/what-drives-daniel-andrews/">former premier Dan Andrews</a>.
But now rising debt costs mean Victoria’s state Budget is suddenly looking … um, “pressured”. Though it might be too late for the Victorian government to stop now without losing face, it’s increasingly obvious that this project should never have been started.
I’ve written <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2021/08/15/the-strange-origins-of-melbournes-suburban-rail-loop/">plenty about the Loop project</a>. But the same pattern seems to apply to the energy transition, mostly overseen by an LNP government.
Australia is committed to sharp emissions reductions over the next quarter-century. That means reconfiguring our electricity transmission system. It also means replacing much of our existing energy infrastructure with solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other systems, such as what is called “pumped hydroelectric storage”. In such a system you take water from the bottom of your hydroelectric system and pump it back uphill, using cheap power that might come from people’s rooftops on a sunny day – and run that water back through your hydro plant when it’s needed on an overcast day or a hot night.
If current projects are anything to judge by, the task of replacing Australia’s electricity infrastructure is going to be messy. The example par excellence is what began life as “Snowy 2.0”, back in the days when “2.0” was the sort of snazzy modern name you gave to a building project to make it seem more sexy.
When Malcolm Turnbull announced this project in 2017, it was a “visionary $2 billion expansion of the iconic Snowy Hydro scheme”. Declared Turnbull: “I am a nation-building Prime Minister and this is a nation-building project.” He might have been less enthusiastic if he’d known the expansion would cost at least $12 billion and take at least 11 years to complete, but those are the latest projections.
Some of this was the normal, well-documented, politically-induced stupidity that surrounds such megaprojects. Some of it was the discovery – apparently completely unexpected, if you can believe it – that parts of the Snowy Mountains are made of quite soft rock. And some it was labour constraints. The case seems strong that this project, too, should simply never have been started.
Australia actually has institutions designed to assess these projects rigorously, but governments keep finding ways to go around them.
<ul>
<li>Infrastructure Australia was set up by Kevin Rudd in 2008 to, in the words of Rudd government infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese, “develop a strategic blueprint for the nation’s future infrastructure needs”. It has not so much presided over an orgy of badly-planned infrastructure as been sidelined by it.</li>
<li>The same is true of Infrastructure Victoria, which Dan Andrews established to “take short-term politics out of infrastructure planning … ensuring Victoria’s immediate and long-term infrastructure needs are identified and prioritised based on objective, transparent analysis and evidence”. Andrews cut Infrastructure Victoria out of the Melbourne Suburban Rail Loop debate by simply making the Loop official government policy, at which point his object infrastructure analysis body was legally unable to look at it any more.</li>
</ul>
It’s possible that 10 years from now, a chastened Australia will understand better the need to take these institutions seriously.
Australia has also had a really good policy for helping the private sector to make the necessary energy infrastructure decisions here – carbon pricing. But in 2014 we scrapped that policy. And the second-best measures we turned to were pretty poor (and we dodged most of them anyway). So for the past decade we’ve been stuck in an environment that was likely to produce poor long-term outcomes.
That’s another structure we need to fix. And given the lousy outcomes from second-best solutions, we might want to resurrect carbon pricing again. There’s some evidence that it’s much more popular than it was a decade ago.
<h2>Building labour</h2>
Consider the problems of building more generally, because that’s one place this new reality seems to be showing up early. Australia right now is trying to build a lot more transport infrastructure and a lot more energy infrastructure, all at the same time, and making bad decisions in both places.
But on top of this, we have realised we need a lot more homes for people. That’s a problem because infrastructure and housing take up closely related sorts of labour – to the point where people talk about the infrastructure boom making it harder to get a house built. (We don’t actually know for sure how true this is. But anecdotally, plenty of builders trying to hire labour believe it’s true.)
This means the next decade is a great time to be an engineer, or an electrician, or a masonry specialist, or a rigger, or a house painter. These are all trades jobs, not the desk jobs which we’ve spent the last 60 years telling people to train for.
We haven’t really thought of Australian trades labour as being in short supply over the past 50 years. But now it is, and it will probably stay that way for at least a little while that’s unlikely to change for a little while.
Take a look at the graph below, which signals a developing shortage of young people, and you may see what I mean.
<img decoding="async" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEkRjk5aIAAQ-V5?format=jpg&name=small" alt="Image" />
The federal government seems slow to wake up to this. It has put out exciting new targets for the number of homes it wants built. And then … everyone with any command of the resources needed to build these homes has looked at these numbers and smiled sadly, because there’s almost no chance of reaching those figures. Australia literally lacks enough skilled trades workers to build that many homes in this time-frame. And homebuilding isn’t attracting many of the best workers anyway. If you’re in the building trades, you might be awfully tempted to see if you can get a job on a big long-term project such as Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop project, where pay promises to be spectacular.
<h2>A training gap</h2>
A closely-related problem is the training of building labour.
You might think that Australian governments would be going flat-out to provide the training needed for building jobs. In reality, you don’t hear Anthony Albanese – or any other federal or state minister – going on about this very much. Most politicians devote surprisingly little time to focusing Australia on raising the skills base needed to supply labour for the current level of building. They mostly act as if trades were still low-income jobs, while most of the tradies I know (including some members of my extended family) are doing very nicely, thanks.
TAFE’s shortcomings were well documented in a 2021 review by Peter Shergold and David Gonski. The chart below shows part of the problem.
<img decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-36997" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TAFE-1024x486.png" alt="" width="640" height="304" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TAFE-1024x486.png 1024w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TAFE-300x143.png 300w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TAFE-768x365.png 768w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TAFE.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />
You might think the building trades are an ideal topic for Albanese, who like other left-wing politicians around the world is trying to stop the former ALP base – working-class men – from drifting off to parties on his right. But if Albanese has made trades a big part of his platform, I haven’t heard about it.
Could someone remind me of the last time a politician said, loudly: “trades jobs are great, and here’s my plan to train a lot more skilled tradies”?
Maybe we can find an AI entity to say it.
Other Australian governments are starting to realise that they’ve mismanaged their cities by locking up large areas of inner and middle suburbia in one-storey houses that are now over-zealously protected by heritage rules. (I live in one such area.) The new NSW Labor government, in particular, now seems committed to easing the regulatory constraints on new home-building close to Sydney.
But it turns out that removing the constraints directly imposed by governments is not enough to solve the short-term problem. Not matter how many homes we plan to build next year, we just don’t have the skilled workers.
Australian building labour and training needs are not really co-ordinated by any institution of note, and it’s possible they should be. Setting up some body isn’t enough, though; it needs to be imbued with real authority, which usually takes time.
Even if we start working harder tomorrow to fix this problem, it will takes many years to solve.
<h2>Immigration</h2>
All this probably means the current nascent debate about immigration will continue. My instinct is that this debate is only peripherally about ethnicity, as it was in the 1990s. Instead, today’s immigration debate has most of its roots in uncertainty about whether we should prioritise bringing in more labour or housing the people we already have.
This debate has a long way to go, but it is already drawing in some interesting players. The Grattan Institute put out a surprisingly <a href="https://grattan.edu.au/news/slow-migration-to-help-renters/">little-noticed report</a> at the end of 2023 arguing that the government should slow overseas student visa applications by raising their price, and limit work visas for both holidaymakers and overseas students who’ve finished their course.
<h2>Capital for governments</h2>
The same story may or may not apply to the capital needed to build all this stuff.
Over the 2010s in particular, as the price of capital descended for a while to truly spectacular lows, governments figured out that they could borrow cheaply. And cheap borrowing got them through the COVID crisis too. Indeed, in 2020 the states were egged on by none other than Reserve Bank governor Phil Lowe. He was one of many telling them that interest rates would remain low for years.
But since COVID, real interest rates have been returning to something closer to their long-term norm – and governments are only now starting to notice. They’re borrowing more and more for big projects, getting less and less in return, as rates have risen and risen. (The rate rises killed Lowe’s chances of a second term in the governorship, arguably making him one of the first highest-profile victims of this changing resource picture.)
I’m reluctant to make predictions about the future of capital prices. Chinese investment patterns are changing, and it’s hard to tell what that will mean for the price of money in coming years. But it seems at least possible that the recent boom in western governments’ investment spending won’t end well for all of the players.
<h2>Cheap energy</h2>
Yet while some resource constraints are growing, some are easing. One case in particular stands out – an important resource which is becoming cheaper. That resource is a particular kind of energy, for which we don’t really yet have a common term, although I bet we will. It’s energy whose customers don’t care when they get it. It’s the energy you’re happy to use just for a few hours in the middle of sunny days. That energy seems likely to become almost costless.
Put aside all the many short-term costs of reconfiguring our electricity grid, mentioned above. We are just not used to thinking about how our economies might change when we sometimes have a lot of energy available for almost nothing in the middle of many (but not all) days. But that’s the world we’re going into – a world full of solar panels that at some times of the day can pump out so much energy that the price goes almost to zero.
You may be tempted to say that such power is not that useful, and you may be right. But we’ve never before lived in a world where this powerful commodity – electricity – varied so much in price. My guess is that we will soon find interesting new uses for that sort of intermittently dirt-cheap power, beyond just running our washing machines at midday.
Of course, cheaper solar makes the bundle of solar and batteries more attractive, which will drive more investment in battery storage technologies. There’s a good chance this will continue to drive a virtuous circle as both technologies keep getting cheaper for some years to come. If that happens, the shape of the energy challenge may eventually change again. Years from now, long after power become radically cheaper for part of the day, storage advances may make it cheap for large parts of the year. I’ll be interested to see what that brings.
<h2>Cheap brainpower</h2>
The last resource whose availability is changing is probably the most important of all: brainpower. Two trends of the past 30 years come together here: in an astonishingly short time, the rise of a global middle class (made possible largely by western promotion of open global trade) has doubled, tripled, and then quadrupled the quantity of educated minds in the world. Simultaneously, the Internet has allowed us to connect to all of them.
I suspect this is very bad news for parts of the western middle class, whose pay premium is disappearing. But for anyone who can figure out how to take advantage of it, this is very good news indeed.
<h2>Time to change mindset</h2>
I’m not that sure about any of this. But the recent record does suggest that Australia has been slow to adjust to changing resource constraints. Time to think about change?
Now use the comments to explain what I’m missing, why this is trite, why I’m an idiot, etc. If possible, cite sources.
 
]]></content:encoded>
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<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36983</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>William Hague gets on board</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/12/27/william-hague-gets-on-board/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/12/27/william-hague-gets-on-board/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 27 Dec 2023 08:28:06 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sortition and citizens’ juries]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36959</guid>
<description><![CDATA[William Hague has caught the bug for democratic lottery. And he writes about it well. This simple sentence is a nice little microcosm. “Social media companies are poisoning the democratic world with the addictive spread of narrow and intemperate opinions.” … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/12/27/william-hague-gets-on-board/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-19342 alignright" src="https://equalitybylot.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/176f2153-9614-43a7-aeda-57a4acd7cebb_300x300.png" alt="176f2153-9614-43a7-aeda-57a4acd7cebb_300x300" width="300" height="300" />William Hague has caught the bug for democratic lottery. And he writes about it well. This simple sentence is a nice little microcosm. “Social media companies are poisoning the democratic world with the addictive spread of narrow and intemperate opinions.” Hear hear.
Writing about the proposal of sortition in Ireland seven years ago, Hague takes up the story.
<blockquote>This idea was met by considerable scepticism. The Irish opposition party of the time, Fianna Fail, thought that “an issue of such sensitivity and complexity” could not be dealt with adequately in this way. The chosen citizens would just reflect the existing deep divisions in society. They would not be sufficiently expert. A judge-led commission would have more expertise and carry more weight. That would be more “intellectually coherent”.
Yet the citizens’ assembly was established nonetheless, and over the following six months something fascinating and inspiring occurred. An appointed chairwoman and 99 “ordinary” people, chosen at random and therefore completely varied in age, gender, regionality and socioeconomic status, did a remarkable job. They adopted some commendable principles for their debates, including respect, efficiency and collegiality. They listened to 25 experts and read 300 submissions. They heard each other out and compromised more effectively than elected representatives.
The result was an overwhelming recommendation that the constitution should be changed, and a clear majority view that the relevant section of it should be deleted and replaced, permitting their parliament to legislate on abortion in any way it saw fit. This was later endorsed in a historic referendum. One of the country’s most intractable issues had been resolved clearly and decisively, in a way the political parties could not have managed and would not have dared. …
<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/12/27/william-hague-gets-on-board/#footnote_0_36959" id="identifier_0_36959" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Then after summarising some of the ways in which democracy is coming apart, Hague continues.">1</a> At a time when all these trends are turning people against their own compatriots and reducing debate to simplistic and unsubstantiated assertions, it has to be a source of hope that if you put 100 random people in a room with an important question and plenty of real information, they will often prove that democracy isn’t yet finished. They will listen patiently, think clearly and find solutions. Somewhere, in this gathering darkness of hatred, lies and opposing cultural identities, there are open-minded and constructive citizens willing to turn on a light.</blockquote>
He also notes how many of his fellow parliamentarians are against the idea. It’s easy to say that that would reduce their power, but in my experience it’s not nearly so simple. Politicians think their job is to come up with good policy. They do try, but the whole fabric of political life is keeping powerful people happy. But they live in hope. Perhaps one day more of them will realise that to actually do good policy you need allies. And a citizen assembly is a useful ally for a positive centrist government (from either the left or right), just as the accord was a very powerful ally for the Hawke and Keating Governments.
My one disappointment is that, Hague’s imagination does not run beyond the idea of citizen assemblies as bodies with only advisory power. But I would say that, <a href="https://www.nesta.org.uk/event/democracy-doing-it-for-ourselves/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">wouldn’t I?</a>
More here.
<ol class="footnotes"><li id="footnote_0_36959" class="footnote">Then after summarising some of the ways in which democracy is coming apart, Hague continues.</li></ol>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Michael Polanyi in 1960 on Teilhard de Chardin on evolution</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/12/23/michael-polanyi-in-1960-on-teilhard-de-chardin-on-evolution/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/12/23/michael-polanyi-in-1960-on-teilhard-de-chardin-on-evolution/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 23 Dec 2023 05:49:25 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Ethics]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Science]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call. Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/12/23/michael-polanyi-in-1960-on-teilhard-de-chardin-on-evolution/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call.
Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection was a major mechanism of evolution, but not the only one. He was good with the existence of Lamarckian mechanisms, which was a pretty good call given that they <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2019/12/24/the-poverty-of-intellectual-correctness-part-one-neo-darwinism/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">keep turning up</a>. But neo-Darwinism held that there was just one mechanism behind evolution — genetic variation — and that this was driven exclusively by random mutation. It’s worth pondering the hankering for closure this claim embodies. Why the enthusiasm to shuffle such mechanisms off the scientific stage.
Neatness is one reason. Arrogance another. Laying down the law on the grounds that you’re uniquely qualified to pontificate about them is inherently satisfying to many. There’s also a doubling down on driving purpose out of evolution. And that’s something science had been doing since the scientific revolution — driving our Aristotelian notions of telos from biology. And that was also driving God out of biology. All good if God is seen as some imposition — some being intervening in the universe whenever he wants to vote someone off the island.
The thing is, immanent purpose is an obvious fact of biology. The heart has the purpose of pumping blood. It’s designed to pump blood. That doesn’t mean it has an intelligent designer watching on, occasionally reaching for their remote. But it does mean that it was designed. It was designed immanently. We’ve known for a long time that the immune system works this way — it creates a randomising process of experimentation and then puts its thumb on the scales by amplifying the more promising experiments. (This is the way social media is driving our species to conflict — only where the immune system is part of a healthy emergentism (at least from our point of view, and depending on your values, from the universe’s) the immanent design in social media is, at least in the first instance regressive, leading us down the brainstem towards lower levels of capability and organisation. Perhaps over time we will evolve ways of using its potential positively.
In any event the idea of systems of “directed chance” and the ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">emergentism</a>’ that naturally arises from it fascinated Polanyi and lay as one of the core elements of his philosophy of science and of humanity.
Which meant that I was fascinated and impressed by this brief review.
<blockquote>
<h3>An Epic Theory of Evolution</h3>
THE SUCCESS of “The Phenomenon of Man,” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is a mystery and a portent. … I have seen a dozen reviews highly praising it and have noticed no adverse criticism. I, myself, had readily turned to Teilhard, since I reject the current genetical theory of evolution and had no doubt that Teilhard rejects it too.
But what about all those who so eagerly read and praise the book? Does their acclaim mark the rise of a vast underground movement, sweeping aside the writers and readers who had shortly before accepted the worldwide pronouncements made on the occasion of the Darwin centenary? Where was the public now applauding Teilhard when Sir Gavin de Beer declared that modern genetical research has “established as firmly as Newton’s laws of motion that hereditary resemblances are determined by discreet particles, the genes, situated in the chromosomes of the cells. . . “? Can this be reconciled with Teilhard’s teachings?</blockquote>

<blockquote>Puzzled by these questions, I kept fingering my copy of Teilhard’s English’ translation and finally looked through Julian Huxley’s introduction. In it he praises Teilhard’s work highly and, indeed, claims to have largely anticipated it. Yet it was Sir Julian’ Hpdey who prefaced one of thentost authoritative statements of current selectionist theory (“Evolution as a process”) with the words: “A single basic mechanism underlies the whale organic evolution—Darwinian selection acting upon the genetic. mechanism.”
Teilhard declares: “We do not yet know how characters are formed, acumulated and transmitted in the secret recesses of the germ cell.” In his view, “the blind determinism of the genes” plays but a subordinate part: “We are dealing with only one event,” he says, “the grand orthogenesis of everything living towards a higher degree of immanent spontaneity.” “The progressive leaps of life” must be interpreted “in an active and finalistic way.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>This active striving towards ever higher, more vividly conscious forms of existence, which eventually achieves responsible human personhood and establishes through man a realm of impersonal thought, is the dominant theme of “The Phenomenon of. Man.” . . ‘This image is.very different from that of the repeated failures of precision in the self-copying of Mendelian genes, to which Huxley and the rulihg orthodoxy attribute evolution. It is precisely the kind of theory violently condemned by this orthodoxy for trying to explain evolution by some inherent bias, guiding the direction mutations take. Admittedly, Teilhard’s wording is vague.…
Teilhard’s way r of shrugging aside any question concerning the mechanism of heredity also casts a veil of obscurity tn the foundations of his position. And this is how he avoids an explicit attack on genetical selectionism and also feels entitled to use, without more than the most cursory acknowledgment, the ideas of Samuel Butler, Bergson, and others who have previously interpreted evolution in his way.
And yet in these shortcomings we discover the secret of Teilhard’s achievement and success. He is a naturalist and a poet, endowed with contemplative genius. He refuses to look upon evolution like a detached observer who reduces experience to the exemplification of a theory. Instead he stages a dramatic action of which ‘man is both a product and a responsible participant. His purpose is to rewrite the Book of Genesis in terms of evolution. The thousand million years of evolution are seen here as one single act of cre-ative power, like that revealed by Genesis.
This creative act is inherent in the universe. By producing sentient beings the universe illuminates itself, and through human thought it gradually achieves communion with God. Teilhard uses scientific knowledge merely as a factual imager* in which to expound his vision. His work is an epic poem that keeps closely to the facts. Gaps in the factual imagery of a poem can be safely left- open. So there is no need for the author to argue with selectionism.
As a poet, Teilhard stands powerfully apart and commands assent from many who continue to hold views that are incompatible with his vision; and this is how his work is startlingly novel though it contains few new ideas. . But would Teilhard’s poetry have received such warm response fifty years ago? No, its contemporary success, is a portent. There is a tide of dissatisfaction mounting up against scientific obscurantism. Book after book comes out aiming against the scientific denaturation of some human subject.
Teilhard owes his present success to this movement. But, unfortunately, this has made his success a little too easy. I do not believe that the origin and- destiny of-man can be defined in such vague terms. A text that is so ambiguous that people whose views on its subject matter are diametrically opposed can read it with equal enthusiasm cannot be wholly satisfying. And I suppose that this is why, in spite of its many insuring and luminous passages, it is tedious to read ‘the book from cover to cover. Having avoided so many decisive issues, it can serve only as a new and powerful pointer towards problems that it leaves as unsolved as before.</blockquote>
Read the full review <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HA2GdS9b8O4Z6nQsgLDXHqJ9fgp4wusc/view?usp=drive_link">here</a>.
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<title>Democracy: doing it for ourselves</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/11/25/democracy-doing-it-for-ourselves/</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 25 Nov 2023 04:30:31 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Innovation]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Politics - international]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Politics - national]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sortition and citizens’ juries]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below. 00:00 – Introduction and Overview … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/11/25/democracy-doing-it-for-ourselves/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
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Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=0s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">00:00</a> – Introduction and Overview The talk begins with an introduction to the challenges facing contemporary society and the roles of NESTA in addressing them, including applied research, venture building, and policy shaping.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=129s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">02:09</a> – The Politics of Policy Solutions The speaker reflects on the difficulties of implementing policy solutions due to the complexities of politics and the need for radical ideas to meet the scale of current challenges.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=214s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">03:34</a> – Panel Introduction and Project Background Introduction of the panel members and their contributions to the field, along with a mention of NESTA’s work in collective intelligence design.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=314s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">05:14</a> – Democracy and Governance Types The talk shifts to a discussion of different types of governance, with a focus on Aristotle’s typology and the concept of democratic lotteries.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=643s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">10:43</a> – Media Influence on Politics Analysis of the impact of media, especially the reduction of presidential soundbites over time, highlighting the influence of media on political discourse.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=982s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">16:22</a> – Brexit and Citizen Juries The speaker discusses the impact of citizen juries on public opinion, particularly in the context of Brexit, and how deliberation influenced people’s views.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=1324s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">22:04</a> – Activism and Nonpartisan Politics The focus shifts to the concept of nonpartisan activism and the importance of citizen juries in representing democratic legitimacy and influencing policy.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=1724s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">28:44</a> – Embedding a People’s Branch in Government The idea of a ‘people’s branch’ in government is proposed, suggesting a chamber chosen by sampling to represent a check on elected representatives.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=2225s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">37:05</a> – Panel Responses and Discussion The panel members respond to the talk, discussing their perspectives on deliberative democracy, the role of citizen assemblies, and the complexities of political change.
<a class="yt-core-attributed-string__link yt-core-attributed-string__link--display-type yt-core-attributed-string__link--call-to-action-color" tabindex="0" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPex480hRU&t=3018s" target="" rel="nofollow noopener">50:18</a> – Q&A Session The question and answer session begins, allowing for audience engagement and further exploration of the topics discussed.
You can access the audio <a href="https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/fI0j16kk0Eb">here</a>.
I am not sure why YouTube’s transcript creation hasn’t activated and but I’ve posted a rough transcript beneath the fold.
<hr />
<h2>Introduction and Overview</h2>
Host: Ravi Gurumurthy
Like climate change, obesity, inequality. We have three roles. We do applied research with innovation partners and lots of testing of ideas. We’re also a venture builder, so we both build companies from scratch and invest in early stage companies. And we’re system shaper trying to shape the policies and institutions relevant to those three missions. In addition to that, we have the insights team as part of our family, and the challenge works that work on a broad range of areas right around the world.
Challenge works running prizes, table insights, team doing trials around the world. So that’s a bit of a portrait of NESTA. One of the projects that we’re working on at the moment is called UK 2040 and we’re trying to think through what are the big challenges facing the country over the next 15 years. Where where is there agreement? Disagreement?
What are the options We should be working up? And one of our reflections, I think, when you go through that process, is that while many problems feel intractable and difficult, there are actually policy solutions. But what is difficult are the politics. And even the second or third best policy idea is difficult politics. And I think that’s the context in a way for this conversation, because if we are to try and meet the scale of the challenges facing the country with ambitious policies, we have to find ways of forging agreements on quite radical ideas, not lowest common denominator politics.
And one of the ways in which politicians and governments have responded historically is to try and insulate policy and government from politics. Independent institutions, Bank of England, the Climate Change Committee, even the NHS, was attempted. It was pushed into independence under David Cameron. Short, rather short lived. So actually what we are talking today about is the opposite. Can we define democracy and deepen engagement?
Because that is a most stable, democratic way of doing things and is actually critical if we’re going to make change happen without the blowback that comes from trying to insulate people from politics, which is frankly often a fool’s errand. So we have a fantastic panel to discuss this really fascinating issue. We’ve got Nicholas Gruen, who is over here from Australia, who’s the CEO of Lateral Economics and a visiting professor at the King’s College.
Nicholas has written on many, many issues, including this particular one. We’ve got Martin Wolf who needs no introduction, chief economics commentator at the F.T.. And I think one chapter of his book is actually dedicated to this particular question that we’re discussing today. And we have Claire Melia, who’s the co-founder of the Global Assembly for COP 26, is an expert in participative processes and knowledge and practice lead at the IS my foundation.
So welcome to our panel. This is an area of work that’s Nesta, has quite a lot of history and we’ve done a lot of work in. At the moment, our Center for Collective Intelligence Design, CCD is doing quite a lot of work practically on the ground. So do check them out as well and we’ll potentially bring in some of those ideas during the panel.
The format for today is Nicholas is going to come up and do a talk for about 25 minutes. We’ll hear response from Claire and Martin, and then we’ll have a panel and panel discussion and throw open to both questions here and online. So do get your questions ready. So over to you, Nicholas.
 
Nicholas Gruen
Thank you. But are not forget this. But just in case, I’ll also not forget that. Okay. So I’m told that if I press this button, that happens. And it did. So that’s encouraging. That’s what I’m going to talk to you about. Democracy, doing it for ourselves. And that is a quick outline that you of what I’m going to talk about that you won’t have time to read, but it proves to you that I’ve got some system to all this.
<h2>Democracy and Governance Types</h2>
Nicholas Gruen
Now I want to talk to you. You may be familiar with this typology from Aristotle. These three types of government. And I want to point out a a simple thing to you, which is that two of these systems have a government and the government sorry, a government, a government and the governed. That’s true of monarchy. It’s true of aristocracy and Aristotle had a beautiful description of what democracy was.
It is everyone taking turns in being governed and in governing. And that means that if you asked Aristotle about different institutions and you asked Aristotle what type of institution was were elections, he would have said to you they were aristocratic institutions because they are designed to produce a government to govern the governed. And that’s that’s a simple explanation for why the founding fathers in America chose elections over other mechanisms, which they were well aware of because democracy was a dirty word at the time that they were thinking about designing the Constitution of America.
And the thing that gives people a turn in governing or being governed is a democratic or a democratic lottery. And it remains in our legal system, and it is and it is recognized in Magna Carta and so on. Thomas Jefferson had a hope. And the hope was because he was anxious about democracy like all the others. And his hope was that elections would produce a natural aristocracy.
How is that going then? Which brings me to the corruption of institutions. And in each of these cases of Aristotle’s institution, and then a corrupt form of that institution, what has happened is that the office holder or holders have lost the thread of what their purpose is, which is to be the vehicle for their society’s well-being. And they’ve started to pervert that to.
I think, you know, what the what what they perverted it to their own well-being. And so that’s a better picture of what we find of the situation that we find ourselves in. And, you know, thanks to Dolly, if I press this, I think it’ll point now. Anyway, the vine, if you like, is a delicate thing, and that’s the opinion of the people, what the people want and the spiky, nasty thing is a whole lot of other things like comms directors, people with a lot of money and power and so on and it’s not that the people aren’t involved in democracy, they are, but there’s constant there’s constant negotiation between those two things.
And one of the great one of the great things that gives people of power a lot of lot more leeway than you might think. In theory they had what is vox pop democracy, which is that we run our society on what people think right now, and this is what human beings look like. According to one artist a few tens of thousands of years ago.
And at this point they evolve the they evolved a desire for food that was sweet, fatty and salty. And that’s where we are now. And things that were the stuff of life, the things that were good for us when optimized to that degree become poison. And that’s what we’ve done with our politics. We fast food ified it now.
People blame the Internet for this. But let me show you something that happened before the Internet arrived. This is the length of a soundbite of a presidential soundbite on on American network news. And we’re starting with 1968, and we’re going to 1988 before the before Social media was even a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s time. And that is what has happened.
<h2>Media Influence on Politics</h2>
The length of a soundbite has gone from 42 to 9 seconds. If you can’t communicate something in 9 seconds, it doesn’t get communicated. And that’s if you’re the president. We also have intensifying culture war. If you are out there prosecuting politics, you’re not interested in debating the issues, you’re trying to frame the issues, you’re trying to set up rival camps.
You’re trying to get people to identify with this camp or that camp. And that’s largely the story of Brexit. So this is the vote for and against. Yes, for and against Brexit. And as you know, in the middle of 2016, the vote was 52, four and 48% against and now it is about 6040. And still for various reasons we have this idea that we have, we have the will of the people that we are carrying out when it is no longer the will of the people.
In fact, it is a long, long way from the will of the people. So that’s the scenario that I want to address and I wouldn’t really be very interested in any of this if I didn’t think that the worse things that we can do that are simple and powerful to have a big impact on making this better and being an economist of course it’s I like to talk about Mr. Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, and I want to use just a very simple expression from him.
And he was writing about the Great Depression in 1930, and he used this expression, We have magneto trouble. And what he was saying was that if we take this problem to be a cosmic morality play, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. But if we take it, if we ask ourselves carefully, calmly, what mechanisms might we be able to adjust?
How much can we how much can we fix this? And he had an answer for that in economics. And many economists think that his answer was a very fertile one, and it was a simple one. That’s important, too. And so he is his a way of thinking. What I think is a very important part of the answer, and that is to say that virtually every democracy that you can think of is a three legged stool.
It contains elements of the three. The the three legs are three different democratic institutions. The middle leg there. I’ve called direct democracy in Athens. It was the assembly. In our system it is simply voting. So we all get a say. Then we need more than that. And so we have people who are represented. Let’s see if that works.
No, that just turns everything off. That’s a bit of a pity. And if that. No, anyway, I can’t point. That’s all right. So and then we have two different ways to represent the people because what we need is we need a small group of people who will make themselves knowledgeable enough to make decisions on our behalf, to make decisions for our benefit.
And one way to do that is representation by election. And we’ve and I’ve given you a little hint of all of the things that that deviate from the textbook, our imagining of what that might be like and what it actually turns out to be like, because representation by election is mediated, is mediated democracy. And I think that mechanism is an important mechanism and if I didn’t think that, it wouldn’t matter because who the hell am I?
And then there’s this other way to represent the people. And we use it every day in courts. And that way to represent the people is to grab some people who we have reason to believe are similar to representative of people, of the will, of ordinary people. And of course, as you know, we use that in legal juries in Athens.
They use that to run the whole city. They had a thing called the Council of 500, the July and 1/10 of those 500 people at any one time were running the city. They were maintaining the monuments and the buildings and and and all the other things that had to go on. As well as preparing the agenda for the assembly.
This the supreme decision making body. And they used elections just for a few offices generals and also some financial officers. Now let’s go back to Brexit and let’s see what a citizen jury thinks. In 2017, there was a citizen jury in this city funded by four universities. And they so this is a year after the the the plebiscite.
<h2>Brexit and Citizen Juries</h2>
And they said to the press that they weren’t trying to relitigate Brexit. Remember how terrified people were of that They were looking at what sort of Brexit people wanted. But in fact, if you dug into the data, there was an entry question and an exit question about what you think about Brexit. And if you asked yourself that question, you found that over the four days of deliberation, nobody who voted leave sorry, nobody who voted remain changed their vote, and seven or eight people who voted leave changed their preference.
And so the citizen jury produced pretty much exactly the state of opinion that exists today with the experience that we’ve had so far. Here’s one example, and I mention it to you because I want you to think about the theater of this. So if you’re voting and let’s say you’re voting on the environment, your constantly being campaign to people, there are a bunch of people who you don’t like, who are on the telly all the time telling you a whole pack of lies or whatever you think they are.
And then there’s your side and maybe you think they’re right, or maybe you think they’re a bunch of blocks as well. And in a situation like that, you go to the voting booth and you’re pretty determined not to be the mug. You’re pretty determined not to be taken for granted. Compare that with being in a room of people who exemplify the situation that you are in, which is that you should be thinking about your own interests and you should be thinking about that in the context of all of our interests, because that’s what most other people there will be trying to do.
And in that context, in a citizen jury in Texas, which you may be intrigued to know, was commissioned by Governor George W Bush in 1999. I think the going into the citizen jury people were asked, would you pay a little bit more? And it was very small amount more for renewable energy as opposed for renewable energy rather than fossil fuel produced energy.
And 54% of people going in said they would and coming out 82% of people said they would. So that’s the difference of a of this different way to frame decision is to frame political decisions in people’s minds. Now the problem for me is that the citizen juries have been improving in have been becoming more popular. Lots of people think these are good things, but I think we’re only really at the end of the beginning because I’m almost all citizen juries have been one off temporary subject specific, and they and they advise the real law makers, which of course, which of course rehearses their inferiority, rehearses the fact that the real law makers, they’re the ones who make the decisions.
And again, a great deal a lot of citizen juries are run at the because governments have set them up, because governments have got into a problem and they think this might be a way out. I’m not really against any of that. That’s great. But I think if we’re going to try and make this this approach more, if we try, if we trying to make the next step, you can be here for decades going to governments and saying, what about this?
What about that? I have some experience of people who have spent a lot of time doing that, and it’s quite frustrating. So I want to suggest something. And as I’ve suggested this, it’s occurred to me that it’s actually quite a new and powerful thing. I want to be an activist. I want some activism around this. So there’s some activists.
There’s another activist, there are some activists. And if I ask myself, what are they doing? They’re not going somewhere and asking for permission. They’re not trying to please they’re not placing themselves in a position of supplicants. They will perhaps do that in other contexts. What they’re doing is they are asserting an alternative legitimacy. And that’s what I want to do with citizen juries.
But there’s a big difference because these people are partizan. These people are represent a particular group of people who believe that they are hardly done by and certainly the ones I’ve shown you, I’m good with that claim. There are some others I’m less good with. But what I’m talking about is something it has occurred to me is a different kind of activism.
It’s a nonpartizan activism. It’s an activism of the center, and it’s an activism not for a particular sub community, but for the system, for the health of our democracy. So the goal is, as the 18th and 19th century negotiated by Cameron ISM, two different chambers, initially the lower chamber represented the people, a.k.a the House of Commons. The Upper House represented property.
<h2>Activism and Nonpartisan Politics</h2>
I won’t go into why that wasn’t really the case until 1920, but you get the picture that was true in the United States as well. It was true in my country, Australia, upper houses. Typically you couldn’t vote for an upper house without a fair bit of property and so on. And so each is a check and a balance.
On the other, we need a people’s branch, a branch chosen by sampling to represent a check on elected representatives. So what could be the means of doing this rather than going to the government and asking, well, what I would what I would be doing, what I am trying to do is to privately fund a standing citizen assembly. Well, I want to commence with philanthropy, and that doesn’t mean we can’t take small donations.
Just mentioned that in case you’re interested, but if we can get this done from philanthropic money, I think when people see this and I’ve got a lot of evidence for this, when people see this, they’ll come up with their hundred pounds a year and say, I mean, I want to fund this thing. And the idea would be, say, over five years you phase out philanthropic funding, you get crowd funding, but all the time you are campaigning for government, governments to fund this.
So to fund it with ongoing funding and also a constitutional role for this body. Again, remember, we live in an open society. Some people might disagree with that, but there’s an assertion for you and this chamber, if it has a lot of legitimacy, can challenge the rest of the system if it wants to. And the challenge I would like to suggest that it issue the rest of the system is to say if it disagrees with a vote of the House, of the Lower House or the Upper House, it petitions that House to hold the vote again by secret ballot.
And if it could do that, we would have avoided the hard Brexit that has done so much damage to Britain, We would have avoided the abolition of carbon pricing in Australia in 2013 and we would have yes, we would have impeached Donald Trump, who six Republicans in the Senate voted to impeach Donald Trump the second time around. We didn’t need that many more to get a two thirds majority in a secret ballot.
I will assert you would have done it. So that’s the power that it can claim for itself whether the houses will cooperate or not. Well, I’m not all that optimistic. But then we campaign and we try and get that written into into the the laws of the land. So that’s the basic idea. A standing chamber. It models the way people solve problems because that’s what happens in citizen assemblies and juries as opposed to creating them, which is largely what has become what people do when they’re elected.
Because to be elected and stay elected, you create a problem and you you’re the solution to that problem. It illustrates deviations between the opinion of the people and their considered opinion. There’s no other there’s no institution that’s doing that. Surveys don’t surveys, opinion polls don’t do it. And they challenge elected representatives to do likewise, to represent the considered opinion of the people, and they see secret ballots where they disagree.
There’s another role that such bodies can have. And if and he is the thing that’s happening in democracy at the moment, which is that basic democratic norms are not being upheld by the system. Perhaps one of the most dramatic things to illustrate that is the way in which the United States Supreme Court has become politicized, even though the founding fathers built a mechanism in to try to stop that happening.
And that’s confirmation hearings that, of course, the confirmation hearings have become massively politicized. Well, it turns out that the people themselves will defend basic democratic norms, but they won’t do it if you ask them to vote at the same time as voting for a leader or voting for what they think different parties will do to the electricity prices that that doesn’t turn up high in the air on the dial.
But if you put people together in a group and you say, should we gerrymander this state, as you probably know now, it wasn’t always the case. But now Republicans have far gained far more from deliberate gerrymandering in numerous American states than Democrats. 92% of Democrat voters are against gerrymandering. Guess how many? Guess what the proportion of Republican voters?
These are the ones who vote for many of whom vote for Donald Trump. Guess what proportion of Republican voters think gerrymandering is a good idea? 80 is a bad idea, excuse me, 88%. And therefore a citizens will defend basic democratic norms far more than politicians in the right structures such as the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, which has a role in the Michigan Constitution to redistrict, to draw electoral boundaries and has cleaned up gerrymandering, know in the short time that it’s been around.
<h2>Embedding a People’s Branch in Government</h2>
So how do we embed a people’s branch? You see, what I’ve done is I’ve talked about the idea is this body would be renewed with new people sampled from the community on a rolling basis. So it it’s so there are two problems. One is existing institutions have built like the House of Commons in the House of Lords have built their sense of themselves, their procedures and so on, through various crises for centuries.
And there is a continuity of leadership there. So what I suggest is that that that the citizen with citizen assemblies being new and continually renewed, I would propose a council of elders from the alumni that is produced by each cohort. And I would try to select the best dozen of each cadre and they would become on a council of advisors.
They would have no and this is illustrative. There are different ways of putting this, but they would have no further power. I will. And so I’ll tell you a little as so this is a way of squaring the circle, but this is a way of trying to get to Jefferson’s and Stream, where we are actually promoting the best people.
And let me tell you of something that really excited me when I heard about the Adelaide Citizen, the Adelaide Citizen Jury on nuclear waste, there are 340 people in that citizen jury and they needed to choose spokespeople to speak to the Premier and there they are, the spokespeople and the Premier Jay Weatherill is on the left there and they didn’t want to hold an election.
So what they did was they randomly selected a group of people, about ten people on the last day of the citizen jury, and they said, please join us in a room for 2 hours. The first hour will be spent identifying the criteria according to which we want spokespeople and the second hour identifying who we’ve met in the citizen jury who best meet those criteria.
And then they went and asked people if they’d be happy to be spokespeople. And the and those who agreed were spokespeople. A nice little cherry on the cake. This was extremely popular. It was extremely successful. A nice bit of cherry on the cake for me is that the group of spokespeople was gender balanced, but gender balance was not one of the criteria.
In other words, they were ideally gender balanced, not artificially gender balanced. That to me, I wrote and I was blown away by that. I thought, that’s a very exciting mechanism. And I wrote an article about it. And then the people who improvised this method were a little mystified that I had got so excited. Some time later I discovered that this is how Venice governed itself for 500 years, you will have heard of coups and blood feuds up and down the Italian peninsula, breaking, you know, causing mayhem in most of the cities of the Italian Renaissance and medieval period.
Venice had no coat, no successful coups, was a stable government for 500 years, for 290, from two to from 1297 to 1797, when Napoleon turned up and said cold drinks. And the way they did this was So think of Venice as a little bit like Athens. Athens had about 20% of the population, had a vote and they were radically equal.
This is about 3000 nobles who had who were the sovereign body governing Venice. And what they did was they would randomly select people from that council. They would lock them up. Think of the papal conclave. They’re not allowed out until we get 15 new senators, two new councilors for the Doge and a financial controller. They are given a secret ballot.
So if people want to campaign or threaten or bribe them, you just walk out of the conclave and say, Yep, yep, did your bidding, and you can’t tell whether they do or not. A really, really interesting mechanism which solves Jefferson’s problem of trying to get off, trying to identify merit without flicking the switch towards Machiavellianism, narcissism and whatever else the third Triad is, I’m sure someone can tell me.
I want to I’ll conclude with what Joan Robinson You know, I’m an economist and I’ve quoted Maynard Keynes. This is the second this is the second edition of her Economics of Imperfect Competition, published the first way back in 1933. This was the second edition, 1969. And she said that the the book, the book had become canonical, and yet it frustrated her because she said all the good things or all the things that that she didn’t care about, which are all those graphs, all those things that she thought were a bit of a fudge.
They went into the canon. But what she was really concerned about was this, which is the consumer. As she wrote, Consumers sovereignty can never be established as long as the initiative lies with the producer for the great brand of consumer goods, the buyer is necessarily necessarily an amateur, while a seller is a professional. She’s just talking about consumer goods.
But think about all the other parts of our economy and then think about our political system. And that is the problem writ large. And this is something of a solution. It’s not a solution because we create a new institution which is part of the system. It is because we take we sample from the community, we give people the time.
We give them the capacity to start knowing enough to take turns in governing and being governed. I said, that was the last thing I’ll make it the last thing I might come back to that. And and if somebody does want to ask me why, if somebody does want to ask me why Susan Boyle is on this presentation, we’ll just have to handle that in questions.
Thank you.
<h2>Panel Responses and Discussion</h2>
Ravi Gurumurthy
Thank you. Nicholas. Claire, do you want to respond first?
Claire
Yeah. Okay. Great challenge. Thank you. So I suspect where I’m coming from is that we’re hearing you’re talk in a way about the need for change and it’s coming from you and it’s coming from an activist. It’s coming, but it’s actually from the day citizens and the general public. And that’s backed up by evidence. And there’s pure research that shows that people want radical system change, radical political system change.
So it’s not just us. Probably the usual suspects interested in politics that are asking for change. And it’s not just the social movement. So I want to start from that, acknowledging that there’s actually a demand for radical change right now. And it’s not just a theory and theoretical thoughts. It’s it’s actually happening, you know, citizens assemblies and the deliberative processes.
So you’re using the term justice, but actually there’s a wide range of methods which are at the heart of these processes. It’s about not just about sortation and selection of people at random, but it’s also deliberation. These are the key components in citizens assemblies, sortation and deliberation. So that’s that’s really it’s happening. And we are seeing, you know, the OECD, as you know, coined this, the deliberative wave.
And we think actually there’s a lot more that the U.S. is acknowledging. In the UK, for instance, the doing the brand brown governments that was, you know, more than 200 processes happening, deliberative processes. They might have been called citizens duty because actually there was there was a lot more happening. And my my organization is we as we’ve been supporting processes in Armenia, for instance, which I think speaks to your point about doing democracies democracy ourselves.
There’s there’s been an assumption for, I would say, the past ten or 20 years that to have legitimacy, these processes need a mandate from power holders. And if you get a mandate, you get, you know, a process will be designed that will lead to change. What we’re noticing and I’ve been involved in more than 20 assemblies in the last few years, is that actually that’s a bit simplistic and naive to assume that mandate and a good process need to change.
Politics is messy, and we’ve seen that with the French commercial situation, for instance, where there was a commitment from the from President McCall to not feel to what was coming out of the assembly that would be either translated into a referendum, regulation or legislation. By the end of it, we and that’s the thought. And so on your one on your picture.
We know how politics works. It’s it’s messy. They are vested interest and we need to acknowledge that. I suppose when we’re talking about deliberative democracy, it’s not just good enough to do a process that is robust. You actually need to think about how change happens. What are these recommendations landing and they land in a system that is not suited for actually radical change.
So when you think about the deliberative system, then you need to think about the different components in that system. And the citizens assembly is a mechanism, but you need to think about what are narrative and culture, How does that shape what happens, what well, what’s the role of the media? How is that going to influence what happens once you’ve got the recommendations?
Well, why are the vested interests good? And at which point are they going to influence the process between the recommendation and the legislation? So and this is what we try to do in an article we wrote last month called Let’s Get Real about Citizens Assemblies, it’s actually let’s let’s really talk about politics and how power works. So we need to become power literate.
So just to to, you know, in a way support completely your argument that we need to do democracy ourselves. We need to reclaim it and not put all our hopes into existing power holders open, you know, in a way that’s quite disempowering to say. And I’ve seen that time and time again when I was facilitating these assemblies, people were really activated.
That sense of individual and collective agency being created and then they’re realizing actually the change that we really believe is needed is not happening. So it is actually the risk and that’s the biggest risk I’m seeing at the moment, is that what’s that wave is actually crushing and that it creates disempowerment. This is your illusion then, because the change is not happening.
And so just to summarize, I think we need to see the seeds of the change. And and for me, this this idea of doing it ourselves is actually is really empowering. But that that requires thinking really carefully about then how do you make the change happen? So it’s not just about creating the process. And that’s what’s so interesting.
For instance, with this project in Armenia called the Convention of the Future Armenian, which is a highly complex political contact with war happening in Azerbaijan with as Abidjan, a genocide, literally another one happening on our doorsteps. And they have created a completely independent citizens convention, which has its own affiliation network, which will take some of the recommendations forward, which include, you know, people from civil society businesses.
So they’re not putting their hopes into the existing power holders. So this is where I completely relate to the arguments of let’s reclaim our power, let’s do democracy ourselves, but let’s be really careful about not just putting all hopes into methodology, which could be a method going to treat. Let’s think about system change and how we’re going to change that system collectively.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Thank you very much. I’m and finally, Martin, if you want to come up and give me a response.
Martin Wolf
Okay. That’s so many fascinating ideas.
I decided I’d sort of decide what to say when I heard what people said at the. So I’m a complete non expert on the assemblies and how they work. So my knowledge is such as it is doesn’t overlap with Claire in anything I think and Vicky and I got to this in a rather strange way and basically my starting point is because I got to it via Nicholas that everything he says must be true and right.
But what I won’t do, I is discuss three things, which is why I became interested in this. The this relates to the sort of what I think is the core problem in politics. And the third is what will be involved. David, this is just a reaction to Claire saying it can sort of manage in bringing about an insurrection, which is, I think what you’re talking about and which is, in other words, how do you actually make it politically effective, which is, I think, a pretty big question.
So why did I get to this? So I started writing in 2016, a book called which is published last this year in February called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. And basically it came out of my view, which is not something I would have thought ten years earlier or 13 or 20 years earlier, that our political economic system in as operating isn’t working very well.
And I’m putting this quite gently, and to me it seems clear that some form of capitalism is going to survive. But I’m not at all clear that any sort of democracy is going to. And that’s not something I had expected, and it was triggered by the obvious disaster. Brexit would be not just economic naturally, but politically. It’s created a for it has reinforced a form of politics which cannot possibly deal with any of our problems.
And I don’t think anybody who’s looked at the last seven years can really disagree with that. And of course, in America they’re about to elect a fascist. It’s as simple as that. And it’s a very open question, in my view, not very open whether Americans see America, even its current form of democracy, will survive. So this is a major crisis of our system and the core.
There are many core ways, but maybe one good way of thinking about a good way of thinking about it is get to Nicholas’s point, which could be put in the same way that democracy that is in my book, but not put it this way, democracy as we know it, representative democracy emerging within a constitutional order and out of a constitutional order that itself was highly non-democratic, to put it mildly.
And what made it more or less peaceful in a country like Britain? I won’t go into the whole history of all this. We’ve spent a lot of time on. This is precisely that. And that’s where we get to Claire’s question becomes one very crude way of putting it. Is that at each stage in the process, vested interest of which the most important were the landed aristocracy, and then what marks with the capital is recognize that giving the vote to a lot more people was better than having a civil war.
And there were successive stages. And based on and we ended up with universal suffrage democracy. And the point was not to change too much and it didn’t change too much, except within the system, of course, it developed a new form, not a new form, an evolved form, but the political process itself, which Nicholas has talked about, which is the corruption, the complete corruption of debate.
I think we can describe that this is very so that’s how we got sort of where we are. And in the process of making those adjustments 40 or 50 years ago, we designed a system to cope with this new arrangement, which very broadly could be defined as welfare capitalism. And that’s broken down, in essence, is the argument of the book very, very crudely?
What do you do now? Well, one approach, which is I talked to at length, is try and reform politics, reform the economy in such a way through the political process that it works better for everybody. The other way to think about it is you need to reform politics. You probably need to reform both. And they have to come together.
And it’s in that context that I came to Nicholas’s idea and have only two or three pages actually on why citizens assemblies, and particularly creating a separate house of Parliament selected by vote by lot might be a really interesting idea and might do some useful things to remedy the problems we have. And Nicholas discussed a lot of that, and I don’t have much to add the so that’s why I got to it and what I think are quite nice ideas to start with.
But the big point Clare raised is how do you make this or anything like it happen, which is of course also the good, the big good critique of my book of I wrote a critique of my book. It would basically say, Well, how is any of this going to happen? And the answer is what Claire is suggesting in a very nice and gentle ways or revolution.
And and because it’s trying to undo the 200 years or so, give or take over evolution of what was an aristocratic and monarchical system into a quasi democratic system and say we took the wrong course, we should have been Athenians. I won’t go into all the problems with the Athenian system. That’s another point altogether. I spent a lot of time as a classicist, but the the point is we have to be quite clear about this and this really last point.
If you want to do this, you have to recognize as you’re trying to overturn the logical by the the, the logical basis, I think, of our political system, which is, as he said, an elective aristocracy and the and the to do that you have to persuade the people at large that they are being fooled big time. Very big time.
And you’re going to have to do that against every interest, including all of the media, such as the Financial Times. So maybe what we should focus on if we want something that big is how you make revolutions happen, right?
Ravi Gurumurthy
I didn’t expect you send them all out.
Martin Wolf
I didn’t say I wanted to make this revolution. No, I said, if you wanted this to happen, my amelioration is that let’s get an agreement that we can build on the assemblies that Nicholas thought make them into and make one into an institution, Make it legitimate to such a degree that people have to give it part, which to some extent happened with the House of Commons in over a hundred years and sort of incremental incremental stuff.
But that change will probably be a century or so.
Q&A Session
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. Let’s let’s pick up on that actually, because I want to ask perhaps start with Claire. Nicholas, if you if you take on which I think he mentioned or Belgium or Armenia, how did they get there and what are we learning from those sorts of processes?
Claire
I can start with France. I’m quite close to what was interesting with the French Climate Citizens Assembly, which had more than 90% awareness in the French public by the end of the climate Assembly is that it started with the religion and the social movement. The gesture came together with deliberative democracy expert, activist, and they created this group, this Utoya, which then went to Moscow and negotiated to hold the citizens assembly.
The momentum came from the social movement in France, and that led to a process that was really interesting and change the narrative around what’s possible with deliberative democracy. And then it fitted within the existing power structure and that when that was commissioned by Merkel, what’s interesting for me with the Armenian process or what with we’ve done with the global assemblies, we claim the space was given to cause a claim space rather than a closed or invited space.
So most of the citizens assembly, when they’re commissioned by power holders, are invited spaces. The power holders determines the framing the agenda. The the you know what? How much budget is going to go into it. I think what’s interesting is to look at these claim spaces and how they have legitimacy within themselves. It doesn’t have the legitimacy doesn’t have to come from the power holders if they are done well and that transparent.
And that’s where the governance of these forces is, is absolutely critical. We haven’t really talked about it, but I think the governance of assemblies is where for me, where the nuts and bolts need to be really open and transparent.
Nicholas Gruen
I’m yeah. So one of the interesting things about Belgium and just to explain to people who don’t know the German speaking part of Belgium, it’s only 70,000 odd citizens has a standing citizen council and it’s pretty much, I think, best practice. I think it’s a perfect instrument. It has no formal power that it is funded. 50 people sit for a year and they have the power to commission additional citizen assemblies of a bunch of new people chosen at random.
And they write the terms of reference and just before COVID, they initiated a process in which people were looking at the conditions in nursing homes rather presciently, they then moved and one of the interesting things is that a lot of the things that a lot of the work that this body does doesn’t isn’t very newsworthy because of our politics in the paper is only newsworthy politics.
Quick factoid for you. A a small party in Austria that believes in Sortation did a survey of Austrian citizens before the last election and asked them what they thought was the most important issue for parliamentarians to focus on in their next term. And the answer was education. And the election was about immigration because you can’t. It’s not news.
Education doesn’t get on the nightly news. We don’t have fights about it. We don’t have demonstrations about it and so on. The other interesting thing about East Belgium is that East Belgium, like so many European polities, is run by proportional representation and there are six parties and all six voted for this thing. And in my discussions with Belgian people, they’re a little bit mystified because I’m and they realize that that this is a very different problem that I’m trying to solve, which is that I’m trying to solve a problem.
I’m trying to build a branch of government that can start to pacify civilized discipline. This crazy freak show that we’ve got in our politics. So all parties are not going to suddenly vote for a system of assembly in Britain or Australia or the United States. So it’s a it’s quite a different problem. I’ll also just make a quick comment about Ireland, which is that Ireland is a sort of pin up point for this and I think it’s extremely successful.
I’ve done about six or seven of these governments. They understand that they can be useful to them. And so lots of and so I would say that government, that the government in Ireland is right up at the edge of what I call the end of the beginning, which is that they have not yet got an established concept channel position for citizen assemblies, but Irish people like citizen assemblies.
And I think that’s a very valuable thing. And I just spent earlier this afternoon talking to somebody in, in government in, in the UK about the prospect I said I said to this person the most successful government in Australia, both in terms of policy and in terms of politics, was Bob Hawke and Bob Hawke styled himself not as a political hero but as a steward of a process.
That process in Australia was an accord between employers, employees, farmers, the bureaucracy and big business basically, and small business. And what that meant was that there were large social problems solved. And then they came to the party and they came to the parliament. And if they and of course, what’s the opposition basically take whatever trouble they can and at which point one of the social partners would say to look to the opposition, can you shut up?
We’ve done a lot of work on this. This is going to be good for us. It’s going to be good for everyone because we have to negotiate it through. I’m not suggesting you replicate that, but something like citizen assemblies can enable a politician, a senior politician, to present themselves to the nation as a steward rather than as the latest political hero, which will be a big hero for a while and eventually disappear, worn down by the tabloids.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Martin You want to come in? I just want to also ask you on this, can you see a version where it is actually an assembly that’s invited by a political by power holder as opposed to a bottom up revolution?
Martin Wolf
Yeah, I was I’ve been thinking about that actually related to discussion we just had. What are the circumstances in which politicians might be interested in institutional arrangements of this kind or anything that constrains their discretion in some way? And my sense of this within sort of, broadly speaking, functioning states, we can let’s not get into the difficulty of deciding what they are.
They exist, they operate, and all the rest of it is. And I can think of a few examples when a potato gets so hot that they really, really don’t want to handle it. My understanding and stress stress, my non expertise is one of the reasons the Irish, for example, went in to do this on abortion, is that it was a nightmarish issue, so deeply divisive and so poisonous to politics that it seemed very desirable to find a mechanism which looked plausible and decent and reasonable for people to reach a consensus which didn’t involve them having to make a decision which you’d end up as wildly outraging some very significant part of the population.
But that that was sort of deeply invested in it. And there are a few issues like that. And Nick just mentioned Brexit. Well then obviously many of those characteristics. I could imagine that if Cameron had thought about it, I imagine as I would stress, imagine that if he realized the mess he was going to get himself into, he might have said to George Osborne, You know, isn’t there some way that we can de-politicize this ghastly thing that is tearing our party to pieces and will end up destroying it as a functioning government party, which it has?
And and isn’t this a possible way of doing it? The idea, I’m sure, never crossed their mind, but in other, the supremely hot potato might be one reason that politicians are genuinely interested. And the other possibility, and this is more a question for Claire and this is gets more into the revolution stage. Now, I’m obviously I have no expertise on what’s going on in Armenia except the pretty obviously the country’s in simply staggering crisis as a place.
And if you are in overwhelming crisis or the regime is beginning to break down in one way or another, then revolutionary things happen mostly very, very terrible revolutionary things. But there are situations in which the break from a functioning order is so great that finding some way to work together becomes important. It is conceivable to me, therefore conceivable, I stress conceivable that politicians in the US would start saying if we continue down this where we’re going, we’re going to end up in a civil war.
And that’s really not a place we want to get to. Is there any mechanism we can think of to resolve outside this war? We having the the really bitter, contentious issues that divide us? And again, that might be a situation in which politicians will agree. This is the sort of thing we, we we we could consider as an alternative.
So those a couple of imagined paths which might lead some political forces say actually we need the help of this because the politics we’re now in is absolutely nightmarish.
Ravi Gurumurthy
There’s an assumption that there isn’t, that it’s the process will come up with the right answer and that when people deliberate, they suddenly become rather progressive and sensible and manageable.
Martin Wolf
I don’t equate sensible and progressive. I’m afraid I’m much more reactionary than that.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Well, you said point. There was an assumption that this is a way of when people really about the issues actually they come up with a a better judgment than when they haven’t deliberated. But if you take and I think it’s lots of good examples of that being the case. Yeah, I’ve been involved in enormously things on the energy side where we got people to participate in a 2015 net zero plan and actually people come up with very, very sensible ideas, almost identical to the economists cost optimizing models. So we put through an Energy Department, if it’s very.
Martin Wolf
Easy to get people to agree on what needs to be done in 2050, it.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Is, but even even even nearer term questions.
Martin Wolf
But I’m sure if.
Ravi Gurumurthy
You took questions that are very difficult, like the death penalty or immigration right now, would you take the risk of putting this through a citizen’s assembly or would you be fearful of the potential consequences of doing that?
Nicholas Gruen
So I would be a little fearful. But my view on Brexit, for instance, was that Brexit was a mad thing to do, but that if the British people really wanted to do it and understood what they were doing, I would be in awe. I would think, Good on you. You’re going to take a 4% lower income. We don’t live by bread alone and this is what you want to do.
So this all and so there’s almost no, it’s true. This is one. So citizen juries swing towards retributive ideas. And I think there are for instance, there are some precedents of juries in the South simply not convicting white murderers of black people. So I wouldn’t be that I would take to be a problem. But but but generally, all the evidence I’ve seen is that the considered opinion of the people is very safe, and it’s better than the opinion of the people.
And if it if it differed from me, except on a few incredibly visceral points, I’d go with that considered judgment, not mine. That’s I believe that that that’s that’s those are my values, if you like.
Ravi Gurumurthy
On sort of issues where particular the public are really much more to the right of say, the political elites would you.
Claire
So I was in Copenhagen at the Deliberative Democracy conference recently and we had a session on all some topics too hot to tackle. And there was very different views within the democracy experts. And some were saying, actually we can’t go on on these very polarized topics. And I and I, I don’t think personally that a topic is too hot to handle.
I think it’s about the expectation. So a not deliberative democracy experts put into these processes the expectation of consensus. I don’t think that’s what they are about. I think it’s much more about actually surface things, the deep fears and hopes and governing sentiments and not expecting that we’re all going to come to an agreement. But actually it’s randomizing that we we can live together and agree to disagree in a way that is respectful.
And so it’s quite a profound difference. And someone cool shimmery Windsor, an activist from Israel, has been, you know, basically imprisoned because he was he was supporting, you know, peace, the peace process in Israel. And he’s e believes that a citizen’s assembly posts on on you know, what’s happening in Israel at the moment could really be be done.
So I think I wouldn’t I mean, I’m not the one who needs to answer that. I don’t I don’t know. But I would talk to people who actually have thought about this. And Professor Nicole Camacho, for instance, has written this book called Democracy in Times of Crisis, And she really understands what’s possible in really deeply polarized states in the Philippines, for instance.
So I think it’s it’s it’s possible. We just need to be brave.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. I respond and then we’ll go to the floor for questions.
Martin Wolf
I haven’t thought about this deeply, but I have thought quite a bit about what democracy means. And and it doesn’t mean unbridled majoritarianism. I mean, here I’m with Jefferson, if I may say so. And it’s a constrained system and, the most important constraints. And we can we don’t have the time to discuss how or where they would come but have are obviously individual rights.
So I wouldn’t support any democratic process, including this one, which allow people, for example, to decide by majority vote that a large proportion of the population should be killed. Okay, that’s a constraint, right? You’re not allowed to do that.
Ravi Gurumurthy
I think you’re reactionary. Reactionary.
Martin Wolf
That’s completely rational. Individuals are ultimately majority democracy is only important because individuals are important. That’s the core value. Human beings are important because as individuals in making state decisions which have to be collective, we have to have a process that allows in the best possible way the aspirations, hopes and ideas of everybody involved. And that’s, I think, what we’re discussing.
But if you accept that this is my view that the demand for democracy derives from the value of human beings per say, then there are things you can’t aren’t allowed to do to individual human beings just because of a majority of people would like to do them to them. In other words, there have to be fundamental rights in a system.
I’m not going to discuss how you get there, but that’s why every constitution has them. And by the way, the worst example of the Athenian democracy was in a debate of exactly this kind, which is the vain the million debate, as you know. Now, admittedly, this was written out by Thucydides, but the point is to me, all democratic processes have to be constrained by fundamental human rights.
Now how that fits into immigration is more difficult because the civic rights of non-citizens are an interesting question. But in the case of capital punishment, I’m pretty clear.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. Thank you. Let’s go to the floor. Let’s take three questions in a row. Take the lady, that gentleman there and the gentleman just behind us. Okay. Could you bring the microphone over? Well, so everyone can hear online line. Ready to put your hand up? I.
Claire
Thanks very much. My name’s Sara, and I’m organizing with a group called Just Stop Oil. So I was really interested in Martin’s point of, you know, that basically what we need is political insurrection, because I would agree with him, and I think we do need it to change politics because our politic, our process right now is failing us hugely.
So currently this September was 1.78 degrees above the preindustrial average. And so, Martin, I don’t even think capitalism is going to survive.
Claire
Way that we’re going, nevermind democracy. So and also, we’re on a trajectory where we are going to kill millions of people. That’s what our democratic process is currently doing, if not billions of people. So I think my question is, I mean, I don’t know if just the world can achieve it, possibly not. But those, you know, today there’s an 18 year old who got sent to prison because, you know, they really believe that we need to change this political system that we have.
So what are you going to do to help achieve that, that change to take place? Because there already are people on the streets demanding and occupying that space, you know, saying something different has to happen. So how do we use them to make the the change in our political process happen?
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. Just pass it to the gentleman that I keep. Thanks.
Martin Wolf
James Robertson from Sortation Foundation. You mentioned 2040 at the start. Our vision is that by 2040.
Ravi Gurumurthy
The powers and responsibilities.
Nicholas Gruen
That are currently held by the.
Martin Wolf
House of Lords will be held by House.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Of Citizens.
Speaker 5
Permanent.
Nicholas Gruen
Rolling Citizens.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Assembly. And we realize that’s ambitious.
Martin Wolf
And that’s why we’ve already started the campaign. But we do think we have an opportunity.
Ravi Gurumurthy
So on the question of how that has come up.
Martin Wolf
As I’m sure people will be aware, Starmer’s pledge to abolish the House of Lords basically because everyone agrees.
Ravi Gurumurthy
It’s pretty indefensible in a 20.
Martin Wolf
First century democracy. But it’s under the he is pledged to do that in order to restore trust in politics. Well, our polling shows that people are about four times more likely to trust ordinary people in.
Ravi Gurumurthy
A citizen’s.
Martin Wolf
Assembly.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Than politicians to make a decision in their.
Martin Wolf
Interests. Right. So if it’s trust.
Ravi Gurumurthy
In politics that you want, then a house of citizens is the answer, not an elected second chamber. And then the other thing is.
Martin Wolf
Will people always say, well.
That’ll never happen? But then they’ve been debating.
Martin Wolf
They’ve been trying to get an elected.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Second chamber out of the Commons for the last hundred years, and it doesn’t ever get very far.
Martin Wolf
And so I wonder if there is a possibility that as.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Obviously a house as citizens wouldn’t.
Martin Wolf
Be elected, it would be selected whether they would be seen as less of a threat. So I suppose my question.
Nicholas Gruen
Is.
Martin Wolf
What do you think of that idea?
Ravi Gurumurthy
And so the idea being that even replace the House of Lords.
Martin Wolf
With a House of.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Citizens, basically. Thanks. And you. Good evening. My name is Andrea Sakurai. I’m a systems architect. The seed I would like to plant in your mind is the cost of democracy could be just a pound. The question I’d like to ask is no one’s kind of mentioned money in politics. And the reason I say that is because money is power.
Ravi Gurumurthy
And the political parties, even in quite an informed here, I’d be surprised how many people realize that political parties, whether it’s Conservative or Labor Party or the Lib-Dems, they’re really tiny and I mean tiny by budget. And if you look at the last ten years, the major parties have a budget that somewhere between 10 to 20 million a year, it’s largest in an election year.
Ravi Gurumurthy
None of these parties ever run can balance the books. They are not capable of running their own party like an efficient company, like and or business or an organization. And then what happens is we have donations. And those donations for the left come from unions, but at least they represent millions. Your question? Yeah, the question is why are we talking about the influence of money in politics?
Ravi Gurumurthy
Because politics shapes all the parties. And there are 47 million registered voters in the UK. And if we each paid £1 every year towards a pot, we would have enough money to fund all the parties so they couldn’t take any donations. All right. Thank you. Let’s keep going with some points and questions. Let’s keep them short and then we can have let’s have three football and then let’s go to the panel for some final reflections, if that’s okay.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Let’s go to this side of the room now, Rory. Yes, you can. I say.
Martin Wolf
Sorry, you consider using this mechanism, if you like, for decisions to be taken in advance.
Ravi Gurumurthy
It occurs to me you could also.
Martin Wolf
Have it as a check on and balance on decisions already made. So there’s a huge problem in politics. What is really reputational sunk costs. So projects like high speed to continue after the point of absurdity. If you’d asked me, for example, to advise the Remain campaign, what I would have said is that there was a perfectly rational reason to vote leave, which is you knew you’d never get a chance ever again to leave the European Union.
Martin Wolf
Okay? The odds of being given that choice ever again in your lifetime were practically zero.
Ravi Gurumurthy
You also knew that.
Martin Wolf
The political and governmental and economic class was slightly perversely obsessed with the European project to an extent which they would sign up to almost any future indignity. So if you’d asked me to advise that the Remain campaign, I would have said, Look, if we remain in the European Union, we will have a citizens assembly and permanent standing. And if that reaches a point where 50% of the people or more want to leave.
Martin Wolf
We will have a subsequent referendum. And then I think I don’t think many people wanted to leave in 2016. They wanted to leave for fear of what would happen in 2027 because they’d been told it was an economic project. It turned into a political one. They had been misinformed. Now, if you did that with things like high speed, two large projects where you simply said, we will do this thing, but at the point where it appears to be failure, the Citizens Assembly can override it and provides a low embarrassment way of stopping that could also be useful.
Does that make sense?
Ravi Gurumurthy
Yeah, makes sense. Thank you. Let’s take one from the online and then let’s take one of the back there.
Claire
Thank you. Yeah. So I’ve got a question here from Martin Online, and he said he very much like the idea of kick starting citizens assemblies with flapped philanthropy and what kind of budget would be required to get kick start this great thinking.
Ravi Gurumurthy
And I think the cloud hanging over this really fascinating conversation is urgency because, you know, we’re talking about five years or ten years time, and yet the progression towards potential fascism, as you said, in America, is on a much shorter timeline. And we’ve seen in the actions just in the last couple of weeks about infringement of the independence of the police, you know, the same stirrings of that movement here.
Ravi Gurumurthy
So I really want to pick up I mean, it’s it’s a sign of our times that a chief economic correspondent of the day is the one calling for revolution. And I just want to follow up on your question. If we were going to have a revolution, can we dream all of that? Like, what does that look like? Can we do something before this pivotal election to try and make an impact and start turn the ship around, Lady at the front.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Hold on a second. Hold on. Just let me get the film.
Claire
I just have a question regarding public legitimacy, because I see that is as the core of everything. I mean, if we know.
Ravi Gurumurthy
The British people no longer see their system as legitimate, you know, it will fall apart.
Claire
How do we if we think that democracy has to be deep, polarized and get off the the the parties fighting each other is how the system is set up. It means that we need more citizen engagement. So how do we nurture that with the idea that individual rights come also. With collective responsibility? How do we how do grow that society? Because we have to stop. We have to stop expecting that some leader is going to come and show us the way or give us all answers. We have a collective responsibility to our citizens.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Thank you, Robert. I’m afraid I’m going have to go now to a final round from the panel. I’m going to actually ask Martin to start off. There are a few questions that you might want to pick up. I think the question about checks and balances on decisions already made was interesting. And also the question on funding, is this a big idea or a small idea?
Ravi Gurumurthy
How expensive is this?
Martin Wolf
Okay. I think a fairly straightforward and I but I want to take up money. There are so many interesting questions, obviously. I think a very interesting idea and thought about it that way. One of the ideas in my book, I probably just got it from Nicholas, I saw all the others is that of referendums or proposals for referendums would go through the House of Citizens, and that will be one of their permanent functions to de-politicize the actual motion, and they would have the right to initiate them.
So that might be one way of getting your your thing. My own suggestion, by the way, because I don’t want to go to for various reasons, is that there will be an additional house of the citizens. I would be open to discussion of replacing the House of Lords. I just think it will create more, more difficulties. And there are functions of the House of Lords performance, which I don’t know exactly how they would work in this system.
I haven’t thought about them enough. But anyway, that’s that. That’s how I have a very clear view on money in politics, which is a big theme in my book. And I argue, which I think comes down to what you say that we need a mechanism for public funding of political parties and indeed private funding thereof becomes should become very difficult unless through with clear maximum gift.
So the problem is not just of money. In politics, though. This is changing in America, frighteningly in a way about that very large donations will be discourage. The interesting thing is that some of the parties the Trump machine works in this way have become very, very, very good at getting small donations. And that’s where the Internet has changed something.
So I think money and its role in policy is a very big the lobbying machines are very big issue, but they are quite complicated. Now, the final thing is I just want to get to is it because I was making a logical statement, not a political recommendation, that if you wanted to do this quickly on a big scale, it would have to involve an insurrection?
I’m in general, not in favor of insurrection, because my reading of the history of revolutions is they are generally a very, very long way round after the death of many millions of people to end up where you started. And the Russian Revolution is to me, the definitive example of this. They recreate. It’s a serious system under Putin. It’s more corrupt, more disgusting, and more culturally ruinous than where they started.
That’s pretty horrendous for God knows how many of death the so the political mechanics of this are unbelievably important and they have to be thought about much harder than I have. But I’ll make one point on climate, which is a point on which we’re going to disagree. And this is basically a practical issue. I mean, I tend to think, of it assume that climate is an existential issue.
Right. Assume that absolutely decisive action has to occur very, very soon and know that nothing, literally nothing we do in this country will make any difference. All. We produce a 1% of emissions. Two thirds of the emissions in the world are produced by emerging and developing countries and all the growth. So this is a global problem. Now, that doesn’t mean I have a solution of how you do this.
At the moment it seems very, very difficult. But actually I cannot imagine any conceivable process that will make a lot of difference in this very quickly that doesn’t involve actually going through the machinery of government that we have in the world. Right now and an immense amount of pressure on it from the people at large. And the and I think a an attempted transformation of the political process in a few relatively liberal and open democracies will unfortunately not change the outcome in any relevant way.
So I basically ended up with a conservative political position if you want to achieve any degree change. You can rightly point out that probably won’t work. I think that’s quite likely. So I’m very pessimistic on it, but I don’t see any alternative that will work better in the relatively relevant timetable, and that’s really a very, very depressing situation to be in.
Martin Wolf
But it’s not how I think about it.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Thank you very much.
Martin Wolf
Sorry about the length of that.
Ravi Gurumurthy
That’s alright. Claire, do you pick up any of the questions you want to. One particular one I’m interested in your view on whether the idea of a citizens assembly taking the place of the House of Lords could work, or whether if it were sort of co-opted, would it be co-opted by the establishment and the power holders and the be be effective from the start?
Claire
So that’s one one model replacing the House of Lords that’s very different from actually creating an independent chamber. I don’t think the workings of the House of Lords as a as a House of Citizens replacing House of Lords. I don’t think we we have the the details yet. I’m not sure how actually it’s going to change the system.
For me it’s just a plaster on actually an existing problem acting system. So I’m, I’m, I don’t know they are inside those outside the strategies. It’s you know to, to explore. But for me what’s what we haven’t talked about at the moment is how culture eats politics. And there are people in the audience that are working on actually how to engage how to bring this into popular culture.
I think we we need to hear more about that. How do we do that effectively and quickly? Because to address the point of urgency, I think that’s where we’re going. We could see the biggest shift. So it’s like almost like a social tipping point. If you bring this into popular culture and people realize the potential and the thing we haven’t talked about on the scale.
So at the moment, you know, you’re you’re saying it needs to be addressed at the global level? Well, we’ve done the Global Citizens Assembly. That was an experiment for COP26. We’re now working towards the the UN summit of the future, looking at how a global assembly fit within the multilateral system. But actually how does that connect to the very local processes?
So the multilayered and the the momentum is already happening. I mean, Brian Eno gets requests and offers all the time for hearing people doing deliberative processes on the ground and in communities. So it’s just a question of actually ensuring people know that it’s happening and that these collective agency, collective efficacy is, is built. It’s a movement building piece that we need to do actually.
And I think the there’s the it could happen faster than we think.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Okay. Finally, Nicholas, there’s also a revolution, which I didn’t expect in this this event. But in a way, your ambition for this goes way beyond the sort of single mechanism you actually want to try and create a deliberative culture more generally across how we make decisions. I just wondered whether you wanted to end with almost what’s an extension beyond what you’ve talked about.
Nicholas Gruen
Well, yeah, I think of this, and I think I’m reasonably unique in this among people who are who have discovered or claimed to have discovered that so attention is a kind of giant sanity mechanism that I think of it as more a kind of hemisphere having opened up in one’s mind about governance, that there are these two ways we.
Martin spoke about the monarchical power system every every polity in the modern world, every day, what we call democratic polity in the modern world, stuff that as a monarchy and remains a democratized monarchy, The president is a single figure, an elected monarch. And here it’s exactly the same thing. We have a pyramid. We have enough of sovereignty, and then we then we try to democratize that.
Now it is all sort of woke up at the start, maybe six months, maybe 12 months ago, to realize that Pericles, who most of you know of what’s the hold of any he was a general, one of ten. He wasn’t the holder of Supreme Office. There was no Supreme office that the demos was supreme. And and the the boat, the Council of 500 kept it all together and it functioning.
This is even true of the Roman Republic where that wasn’t they had a period of monarchy and they built the republic not to be a monarchy, to be a system in which the people, the consort was the what, two of them, and they could veto each other and so on. More generally.
Could this is what is in the mechanism in Venice. We can we can mix in these mechanisms and they can detox a lot of us. But that spiky plant keeps growing up. The the, the list in my picture. That’s what I did in Venice. And these mechanisms of view, this idea and up getting the actual people to be the experts to the extent that they can.
Nicholas Gruen
That’s what John Ruskin was to do.
Speaker 5
Is and that’s just because I can see I mean, that’s democracy. It’s pretty happy with McDonald’s.
Nicholas Gruen
With these things. We can.
Ravi Gurumurthy
Change through.
Speaker 5
These courts mechanisms of the sorts of things.
Ravi Gurumurthy
That can enable us to do that. Thank you very much, Nicholas. Thank you. Thank you, Martin. Thank you very much to the audience here and online for a really good discussion.
Nicholas Gruen
Nobody asked me about Susan Boyle.
Ravi Gurumurthy
I’m very disappointed because I Susan Boyle, if you want if you want to know Abbas’s void, we’re going to have some drinks afterwards to do. Please ask Nichols about the Susan Boyle question. Just one final thing from me. You know, I come back to what I said at the beginning, which is when you think about the massive difficult challenges faced in this country and everywhere else, yes, there are some technocratic policy answers, but I don’t think we will get them get to them without political change.
Ravi Gurumurthy
And institutions that drive better decision making, that drive moderation, that drive better reflection and that political space needs to be created. And it’s not being created by today’s institutions. We are both being honest, have done some work in this area, the collective Center for Collective Intelligence Design and Policy have done different experiments, both in the private sector and the public sector as an area.
Ravi Gurumurthy
I think of real interest. I know many of you here are involved in lots of practical experiments, so we’d love to keep the conversation going about what we’re learning together and what the way forward looks like. So thank you very much for joining and to join us for some drinks.
Martin Wolf
As you know, Nicholas, the Fenians lost the Peloponnesian War and the Roman Republic was divided in military dictatorship.
Nicholas Gruen
Exactly. Exactly.
Ravi Gurumurthy
So it’s hard, isn’t it?
Martin Wolf
Yes.
Nicholas Gruen
That’s right.
 
 
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<title>The Voice For John Stuart Mill</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/10/16/the-voice-for-john-stuart-mill/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/10/16/the-voice-for-john-stuart-mill/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Antonios Sarhanis]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:32:26 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[The biggest winner from the referendum on the weekend is John Stuart Mill. There’s a strand of left-wing orthodoxy these days that deprecates free speech and brands opposing viewpoints as dangerous wrongthink. This firebrand mode of thinking is excellent at … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/10/16/the-voice-for-john-stuart-mill/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[The biggest winner from the referendum on the weekend is John Stuart Mill. 
There’s a strand of left-wing orthodoxy these days that deprecates free speech and brands opposing viewpoints as dangerous wrongthink. This firebrand mode of thinking is excellent at producing an engaged cabal of supporters, but its fruits will often face oblivion in the privacy of one’s own voting booth. 
The Yes campaign was undermined by its intellectual siege mentality. In the face of an implacable campaign, only the people already beyond the pale could raise legitimate objections, and so these objections were thought to be invalidated solely by the lack of virtue of those who raised them. 
Although John Stuart Mill is a dead white man, the Yes campaigners could do with reading his arguments for free speech and actually engaging with the viewpoints of the opposing side. When political decisions are made privately, it’s better to reduce the fervent engagement of your own tribe to garner more lukewarm support from the other.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36906</post-id> </item>
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<title>Sotto Voce: The case for an informal vote</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/10/03/sotto-voce-the-case-for-an-informal-vote/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/10/03/sotto-voce-the-case-for-an-informal-vote/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Chris Lloyd]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Oct 2023 06:51:36 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[I find it hard to understand how passionate some folks are about voting Yes or voting No. Not because I do not understand passion, but because the cases for either position are so unconvincing. I am not “barracking” for either … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/10/03/sotto-voce-the-case-for-an-informal-vote/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[I find it hard to understand how passionate some folks are about voting Yes or voting No. Not because I do not understand passion, but because the cases for either position are so unconvincing.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-36901 alignright" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Capture.jpg" alt="" width="213" height="189" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Capture.jpg 666w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Capture-300x266.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 213px) 100vw, 213px" />
I am not “barracking” for either side. If the result is Yes I will find it hard to watch the self-satisfied ABC pundits or Albo taking a bow of glory. If the result is No, I will not want to watch Dutton’s fork-tongued opportunism and I will really hate to see the disappointment of our indigenous peoples.
Guess who won’t be tuning in to the watch the count.

When I look at the various arguments for Yes or No they are mainly weak. The few stronger arguments seem to counterbalance each other. Crucially, I actively dislike both outcomes almost equally.
So let’s look at the various arguments, not exhaustively, but the main ones, which I think lead a reasonable person to consider voting informal.
The functional argument for voting Yes is that direct representation will result in better policy and implementation. This is asserted by supporters quite strongly. I have no idea of this is true and neither does anyone else. I would not be surprised if a Voice ends up being full of sound and fury signifying nothing but disunity and having little tangible effect. But I don’t know either.
The main functional argument for voting No is based on risk. Rather than improving the workings of government a Voice may lead to continual legal challenges as well as conflicting messages and views from a likely disunited Voice. Is this inevitable though and so what anyway? This is just politics as usual. And the government of the day can adjust the parameters of the Voice to improve its function.
I consider the functional arguments weak on both sides. The Voice could be good and it could be bad, but probably not very good or very bad and nobody knows which. So this is my first possible road to an informal vote.
The national unity argument for voting Yes is that it will make us less divided because goodwill towards indigenes will be formalised and agreed by the nation. The national unity argument for voting No is that other ethnic groups like migrants and poor white farmers will feel excluded and betrayed because one group is given special privilege. For sure, we will not be more unified after the referendum. And since the final vote is likely to be close, there will be a lot of disappointed people on October 15, regardless of the outcome.
If we are after national unity, then there is no path to it from this referendum and it would be better not to have a vote at all. Which motivates an informal vote on the basis that “I will not be part of this whole divisive exercise.”
The moral argument for voting Yes is to correct the lack of acknowledgment in the original constitution, and implicitly acknowledge past wrongs by empowering those dispossessed. There would be few Australians who would be unmoved by the symbolic goodness of a Yes vote. The moral argument for voting No is that we should not embed ethnically based rights into the constitution. All sorts of bizarre considerations natural arise and so far are not addressed. Who qualifies to vote as an aborigine?
I consider both of these moral arguments strong though I realise that there are arguments against both of them. But I take the view that the Voice is morally good in one way and morally bad in another. Which is a problem for me because these considerations largely counterbalance each other.
Is there any way that we could have avoided this insoluble moral conundrum?
Yes, there really is.
We could legislate the Voice and add non-functional acknowledgment into the constitutional preamble. Further constitutional change in the future would still be on the table (but unlikely). This is actually the only solution that resolves these two solid moral arguments. And yes, I realise that this is Peter Dutton’s latest policy but I have been saying it for six months, and others well before me.
Which leads me to a different, but what I think is the strongest, avenue to voting informal.
We never asked for this referendum which offers no attractive outcome, to me at least. I deeply resent this forced choice and I resent the Prime Minister for forcing it on me. I want a political price to be paid. This sounds like an argument for voting No, to punish the Prime Minister and to make it clear to future leaders that forcing a contrived and unnecessary referendum on the Australian people will be appropriately punished.
But the problem is that the resulting win for No will not be interpreted this way, as a targeted repudiation of political chicanery. It will be interpreted as a vote against reconciliation. Many indigenes will interpret it this way and will be encouraged to do so. The usual suspects in the media will decry the result rather than analyse the different reasons people may have voted No.
So, for this reason, I do not want to vote No.
The only way then for me to register a vote which properly reflects my views and does not send a message against reconciliation is to leave both boxes blank and write “No Choice” on the ballot.
Can an informal vote achieve anything?
Well, in the past it has.
In 1981, the Tasmanian government had a referendum where voters were offered a choice to build a dam on the Gordon, either above the Olga or below the Franklin. What a choice! Fully 45% wrote “No dams” on the ballot when offered this unacceptable binary. This historically high informal vote result was a good reflection of the popular will and was the only way that this democratic preference could be expressed. The key issue was that the option of “No dams” was not on the ballot. So they created their own third option.
We are in a similar situation now, though not identical since a “No Voice” option is available, unlike in Tasmania. What is identical is that the ballot does not offer what many, perhaps most, Australians would consider the best option i.e. a legislated Voice followed by constitutional acknowledgment. Instead, they are being forced to choose between two options neither of which they want.
It is probably too late to establish a “No choice” campaign and achieve a massive informal vote. So the success of the “No dams” campaign will not be repeated. There is no public discussion of the possibility and the Age and Australian did not even respond to my pitch for a short version of this opinion piece. I guess they are both too invested in one side.
However, I think even the mention of voting informal might turn on a light in people’s minds. They might realise that they do have a third option, albeit not the best one. The available third option is to write “No choice”. I mention it now in the hope that the idea might spread and build. Please share it on FB and X and Instagram. It will help our nation.
If the informal vote is larger than usual this would be an important message to power. How large?
In the last referendum on the republic in 1999, the informal vote was 5.2%. I hope this time it will be higher. And if the result of the referendum is No, a high informal vote will provide another interpretation of the outcome than we are a nation that rejects reconciliation.
Indeed, assuming like me that you have no strong feelings either way, if the polls indicate a clear No result just before the referendum, the only ethical vote is “No Choice”. Because a high informal vote is the only way to soften the message of that outcome.
Moreover, it should lead to an analysis of how ill-conceived this referendum was from the beginning and how both sides of politics are solely focussed on partisan advantage regardless of the damage they do to the nation.
And then we can start talking to each other again, in good faith, without the media and pollies waiting to judge us for their own advantage.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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<title>The academy and partners try wellbeing frameworks</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/09/26/the-academy-and-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/09/26/the-academy-and-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 25 Sep 2023 13:32:01 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36895</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I discover that I don’t seem to have cross-posted this old essay previously published in the Mandarin, and since this is my place of record (where I can make notes to myself in the comments of new sources, thoughts or … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/09/26/the-academy-and-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[I discover that I don’t seem to have cross-posted this old essay previously published in the Mandarin, and since this is my place of record (where I can make notes to myself in the comments of new sources, thoughts or developments) I am doing it now.
This is part three of Nicholas Gruen’s essay series about the difficulty of translating policy into outcomes. Read <a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/84848-nicholas-gruen-what-have-wellbeing-frameworks-ever-done-for-us/">part one</a>, on wellbeing frameworks, and <a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85012-nicholas-gruen-hacking-wellbeing-biggest-returns/">part two</a> on commonsense hacks government could use to bolster Australians’ wellbeing.
<blockquote>“<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/09/26/the-academy-and-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#footnote_0_36895" id="identifier_0_36895" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="T">1</a>he sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented, not methods of invention or directions for new works.” — Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620.</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fig-023.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-84850" src="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fig-023.jpg" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" srcset="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fig-023.jpg 620w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fig-023.jpg?resize=300,227 300w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fig-023.jpg?resize=264,200 264w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fig-023.jpg?resize=397,300 397w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fig-023.jpg?resize=600,454 600w" alt="" width="550" height="416" /></a>
In the first of these essays I tried to show how little change occurred as the result of the Australian Treasury’s Wellbeing Framework (now abandoned). That’s partly because our policymakers took it far less seriously than those in other countries like the UK and New Zealand. Nevertheless, even those countries’ wellbeing frameworks didn’t focus as productively as they might have done on wellbeing. If they had, they’d have generated sufficient information to allow us to start constructing – both generally and within specific portfolios – schedules of increasingly promising ‘no-regrets’ initiatives as we did with greenhouse emissions abatement curves, as illustrated.
Here I want to argue that what we see up close in policymaking has its close analogue in the academy. Firstly in the academic literature, I’ve found incredibly little discussion of the kinds of considerations illustrated in the chart. I presume there are others, but <a href="https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/61221/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_PSSRU_Forder_Using%20a%20%E2%80%98wellbeing%E2%80%99%20cost-effectiveness%20approach_2015.pdf">this</a> is the only article of its kind I can find, and even here it’s notable that the focus is on developing frameworks for generating lists of interventions rather than the process of identifying obviously high-quality projects to which frameworks can be applied in due course when one finds the need and the time to prioritise.
In this part I take a look at a strangely becalmed Australian wellbeing project going on essentially within the academy – though with multiple stakeholders from the wider world. After around nine years, it seems to be just getting going. Yet even now the priority remains establishing a framework rather than searching for the most worthwhile policy interventions. And, even once it does get going, I’m doubtful as to what it will achieve. I’ll illustrate my claim by looking at the corresponding Canadian initiative, which is much further advanced.
Let me summarise my claims in this part and relate them to the general claims introduced in the previous part of the essay. Almost all the discussion occurs at a very high level. As we saw with the Australian Treasury’s wellbeing framework, it’s easy to announce some attractive principles – that policy advice should be framed with regard to a concept of wellbeing that goes beyond the purely economic outcomes captured in GDP. But if I might use the term, if these fine ideas are to ‘trickle down’ to improve our lives, these high-level ideas need to be operationalised. To do so we need to relate the apex principles in a wellbeing framework to concrete policy advice. This would require the framework to change business-as-usual advice and so change policy priorities in some noticeable way, for instance by changing policy advisors’ understanding of the relative value of different programs or changing their priorities in how existing and new programs are developed.
It also calls for investigation of causal questions. We might give more attention to defining and measuring wellbeing, but it’s of little use if we’re not interested in understanding causes, in understanding how policy can improve wellbeing. When we examine the Canadian initiative, it’s hard to see what useable policy insights it has generated. And when we look closely at the way it’s put together, we see something deeply unsettling. The process by which high-level statements about wellbeing are anchored to the nitty gritty of the index of wellbeing is essentially incoherent on numerous levels. The very choices of value that the index promises to clarify – so we can “move beyond” GDP and build an index around what we truly value – are consistently made by default rather than by design. Form dominates substance at virtually every turn.
The Australian and Canadian initiatives are left-of-centre political projects promoting the causes of the environment, community and greater equality over the preoccupation with GDP. Not, as Jerry Seinfeld might say, that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m certainly comfortable with such sentiments. The real problem is that we never get beyond general endorsements of very high-level principles – of the kind you’d hear in a TV studio. The various projects we’ll investigate in this essay never develop the intellectual tools necessary to do so.
<h3>The Australian National Development Index (ANDI)</h3>
ANDI was an initiative that emerged from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_2020_Summit">2020 Summit</a> and commenced in earnest in 2010. <a href="https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/media-releases/articles/2013/deakin-hosts-new-paradigm-for-democracy">This 2013 press release</a> on the Deakin University Website – itself a rebadging of <a href="https://www.deakin.edu.au/research/research-news/articles/andi-guide-to-australias-future">an earlier media release</a> tells us that ANDI is a “new paradigm for democracy”. It goes on:
<blockquote>Deakin Vice-Chancellor, <a href="https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/leadership-and-governance/vice-chancellor">Professor Jane den Hollander </a>said Deakin was delighted to be the invited to “host” ANDI <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/09/26/the-academy-and-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#footnote_1_36895" id="identifier_1_36895" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="sic.">2</a>.
“Deakin has been selected because of its reputation for innovation,” she said.</blockquote>
Something tells me that second sentence is PR – which is to say not to be taken seriously. (More <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2014/11/19/complexity-reducability-integrity-and-bullshit-the-general-untheory/">technically</a> it’s bullshit – something said strictly for effect without concern for its truth or otherwise). Anyway, four years from these announcements, a <a href="https://www.deakin.edu.au/search?q=andi&dknpagetype=All">search of Deakin’s website</a> reveals nothing more. Meanwhile, <a href="https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/beyond-growth-adding-wellbeing-to-the-balance-sheet">an article on the University of Melbourne’s website</a> from this year claims that “ANDI is hosted at the University’s Melbourne Graduate School of Education”. So much for Deakin University’s “reputation for innovation”. In any event, a University of Melbourne website search turns up no further research and the relevant link on the page takes you back to the <a href="https://www.andi.org.au/">ANDI website</a> which has no link to research.
Mike Salvaris, the director of the program <a href="https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/beyond-growth-adding-wellbeing-to-the-balance-sheet">is quoted</a> as saying:
<blockquote><a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/09/26/the-academy-and-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#footnote_2_36895" id="identifier_2_36895" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="W">3</a>hat we are grasping after is a better way of involving ordinary people in a conversation on where we want Australia to be heading. It is about articulating what we want as a whole community, and we can’t do that in a legitimate and inclusive way if we just ask the elites and the politicians.</blockquote>
So here we are, seven years in from <a href="https://wikiprogress.org/articles/initiatives/australian-national-development-index-andi/">ANDI’s launch</a> and we’re still talking about an intent to engage with the community. I have two problems with that. Firstly, though ANDI’s engagement ambitions are grand – involving more than <a href="https://www.andi.org.au/how-andi-works.html">half a million people</a><a id="ref1" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn1">1</a> – and I’m all for involving people other than “the elites”, I’ve no idea how you “articulate what we want as a whole community” by doing so. Different people want different things.
Secondly, if they just asked one person – me – how I want the world to be – how I’d describe my ideal of societal wellbeing, I couldn’t say much. I’d say what everyone says. I want a prosperous and fair economy (though the devil’s certainly in the detail of that second word), a healthy and clean environment, and a well functioning society and governance (though I’m not too sure how to secure them).<a id="ref2" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn2">2</a> But what would I say beyond that? Is ‘the environment’ — whatever that means – more or less important to me than ‘the economy’ – whatever that means? Hard to say unless I know more about this choice I’m being asked to make. (Remember R. G. Collingwood’s comments cited in the previous essay, “knowledge comes only by answering questions, and that these questions must be the right questions and asked in the right order”.) Knowledge of important social facts – like what you, I or we value and how much we value it compared with something else – arises in a context.
I can’t see how anyone, much less ‘the community’ can come to much of a view as to what it values and how much – how it can answer the <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/03/01/tell-me-what-you-want-what-you-really-really-want/">Spice Girls’ Question</a>, and tell us what it really, really wants – unless it considers, and preferably is forced to choose between concrete alternatives. As <a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/77238-nicholas-gruen-against-strategy/">I argued</a> regarding ends and means in strategic planning, in some contexts the relationship is one in which ends take precedence over means and in others, it’s the reverse. As is evident in virtually any complex engineering process to build something concrete – like designing and building a new model of a car or a major bridge, the relationship between the Big Picture and the details is dialectical, not hierarchical.
Yet ANDI and, as we’ll see, so many other similar projects, are rooted in hierarchical thinking in which the Big Questions dominate the design. Only then can we ‘drill down to the detail’ as the saying goes – perhaps with research assistants – filling things out as already determined at the top or at the previous workshop. In fact, one will often gain insight as to how the Big Picture might be framed from the details we encounter doing the small stuff. I know of no other way of answering Big Picture questions like, “How important is the environment compared with the economy?”
Moreover, since building the index is ultimately intended to help policymaking, you’d think such considerations would be integral to developing the index as understanding how a part will be manufactured is integral to designing a production car. Alas, seven years on, we’re still waiting on any serious elaboration of the policy implications of ANDI. Indeed, as we’ll see in the case of ANDI’s sister project the <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/">Canadian Index of Wellbeing</a> (CIW), which has been reporting for around six years, policy implications beyond broad generalities remain thin on the ground.
<h3>The problem of incommensurability</h3>
Asking about the relative importance of ‘the environment’ and ‘the economy’ or any similar question raises the issue of incommensurability. There are two reasonable responses. The least contentious one is taken by the ABS which reports incommensurable domains separately on it’s <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/1370.0">Measures of Australian Progress website</a>.
<figure id="attachment_85186" class="wp-caption aligncenter" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-85186"><a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/measures-of-progress.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-85186" src="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/measures-of-progress.png" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" srcset="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/measures-of-progress.png 1500w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/measures-of-progress.png?resize=300,151 300w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/measures-of-progress.png?resize=768,388 768w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/measures-of-progress.png?resize=1024,517 1024w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/measures-of-progress.png?resize=450,227 450w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/measures-of-progress.png?resize=600,303 600w" alt="" width="550" height="278" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-85186" class="wp-caption-text">Measures of Australia’s Progress at the <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/1370.0">ABS website</a></figcaption></figure>
But this leaves a dilemma. Since people are unhappy about the way GDP has come to dominate the discussion of wellbeing; if we want to rescue other aspects of our lives from this invisibility we need some plausible way of bringing them to account in the same frame as GDP. Amatya Sen, whose work on capabilities has been influential in this area, has always been wary of summarising the wealth of data bearing on human wellbeing into a single index. Yet he was persuaded that it was necessary to shift policymakers’ attention from material output to human wellbeing as a real measure of progress.<a id="ref3" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn3">3</a>
If a single number generated by an index of wellbeing is to help measure the relative importance of different social phenomena – crime and underemployment for instance – the relative importance of each of these compared with other factors in wellbeing, it needs some way of bringing these things into relation with each other. Here’s how Lateral Economics tried to solve this problem as we built the Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) Index of wellbeing.
We began with the national accounts from which GDP is derived and then sought to correct them wherever we thought the dollars aggregated in the accounts missed some clearly important aspect of wellbeing. Subject to the basic idea that we wanted to be measuring the same thing – wellbeing – and we wanted to do it in the same basic unit – which you can call wellbeing-adjusted dollars, or utils or well-beans if you like – each issue was then tackled, as best we could, on its merits.
Our anchor in tackling incommensurability was self-reported wellbeing. By asking, as one might in a court of law, how much money you would need to restore someone to their state of wellbeing without some disadvantage, whether it was low relative income, mental illness or long-term unemployment, we built a highly imperfect but informative bridge between things that would otherwise simply stop us in our tracks with their incommensurability.
As you’d expect the result is messy. Because it was done ‘on the merits’ of each case, the methodology and magnitude of our adjustment to GDP for its inadequacies differed greatly in measuring the wellbeing implications of different phenomena such as inequality, unemployment, long-term unemployment, overwork, mental illness, obesity, hospital safety, life expectancy and human capital. But if you’re going to build a unitary index, there’s no alternative but to make the heroic assumptions necessary and then to open up the methodology and the measurements to scrutiny. It’s intended as the beginning of a conversation in which everyone has somewhere coherent to proceed, either to work with our methodology and/or numbers or to improve it from their perspective and perhaps for others.
Yet as we worked away, I became increasingly bemused by the lack of these kinds of basic considerations in the indexes I was seeing built at the time, from the <a href="https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/">OECD Better Life Index</a> to the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, to which our attention now turns.
<h3>The Canadian Index of Wellbeing and other ‘composite’ indices</h3>
The Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) seems very similar to ANDI but it’s been up and running for years, producing a unitary index since 2011 to assess, as the CIW project puts it, how Canadians are “really doing”. The process of building and maintaining the index has been very involved with a large number of contributors. There were inevitable practical trade-offs involved in choosing indicators. Just a few of the criteria by which indicators were chosen include the ease with which data can be obtained, the ease with which it can be publicly understood, its susceptibility to any number of biases or sampling errors, the extent to which it measures an outcome or output rather than an input, and so on.<a id="ref4" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn4">4</a>
However, alongside this conscientiousness something happens which is so remarkable we should pause to reflect on it. The critical matter of deciding what things are more and less important for our wellbeing – or to put it differently, the values of the project itself – are handled by default rather than by design. The choice is made, as choices are, but all in the guise of refusing to choose. As the <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/sites/ca.canadian-index-wellbeing/files/uploads/files/ciw2016-howarecanadiansreallydoing-1994-2014-22nov2016.pdf">latest CIW report</a> puts it:
<blockquote>“There are many reasons for regarding one or another indicator as more important in some way or other, but what is missing is a good reason for assigning any particular indicator a weighting greater or less than that of some or all other indicators. The absence of such a reason justifies the equal treatment of all indicators at this time.”</blockquote>
I invite the reader to closely re-read the quoted passage, to ponder its intellectual confusion and dissimulation, its feinting one way – “there are many reasons” – and then another – “what is missing is a good reason”. Rather than inhabiting a world of careful thought, we’re in the weightless world of simulated thought, of PR, right down to the telltale temporising of the last three words.
Unmoored from the strictures of reconciling the Big Picture with the details, or the weighting of different aspects of our wellbeing, the process floats free. The difficulty of making intellectual progress is displaced by the pleasing appearance of the same. The aesthetic appeal of easy symmetry fills the vacuum – accompanied, as one might expect, with a strategic diagram. The CIW comprises eight domains.<a id="ref5" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn5">5</a> Why eight? (The Bhutanese equivalent has nine, the OECD project has eleven). Who knows? And each of the domains is weighted equally. How many indicators will be used to determine how wellbeing is proceeding in each of the domains? Why, eight! They’re weighted equally too. Certainly it makes for a fetching diagram.
<figure id="attachment_81948" class="wp-caption aligncenter" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-81948"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-81948" src="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-07-30-at-3.10.10-pm.png" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" srcset="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-07-30-at-3.10.10-pm.png 1010w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-07-30-at-3.10.10-pm.png?resize=258,300 258w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-07-30-at-3.10.10-pm.png?resize=768,893 768w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-07-30-at-3.10.10-pm.png?resize=881,1024 881w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-07-30-at-3.10.10-pm.png?resize=172,200 172w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-07-30-at-3.10.10-pm.png?resize=912,1060 912w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-07-30-at-3.10.10-pm.png?resize=600,697 600w" alt="" width="550" height="639" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-81948" class="wp-caption-text">From CIW’s latest <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/sites/ca.canadian-index-wellbeing/files/uploads/files/ciw2016-howarecanadiansreallydoing-1994-2014-22nov2016.pdf">annual report</a>.</figcaption></figure>
Meanwhile, ANDI is currently intended to have 12 domains. There are no prizes for guessing how many indicators comprise each of the 12 domains: 12.
<figure id="attachment_85188" class="wp-caption aligncenter" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-85188"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-85188" src="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/andi_domains.png" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" srcset="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/andi_domains.png 711w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/andi_domains.png?resize=150,150 150w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/andi_domains.png?resize=300,300 300w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/andi_domains.png?resize=600,600 600w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/andi_domains.png?resize=200,200 200w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/andi_domains.png?resize=100,100 100w" alt="" width="550" height="550" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-85188" class="wp-caption-text">From <a href="https://www.andi.org.au/the-index-in-a-nutshell.html">ANDI’s website</a>.</figcaption></figure>
Virtually all the ‘composite’ indices are plagued by these kinds of issues. They all collapse intellectually, as it were, under the burden of doing precisely what they say was so urgently needed – re–weighting our understanding of what matters alongside or instead of economic measures like GDP. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD_Better_Life_Index">OECD’s Better-Life Index</a> appears better in this respect because it enables the user to weight different domains differently.<a id="ref6" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn6">6</a>
Certainly this delegation to the user is a nimbler way out of the conundrum which ends so ignominiously in choice by non-choice, in the other indexes. But if I’m correct in arguing that progress on comparing different domains of wellbeing depends on some plausible criterion for asserting some commensurability between them, then allowing people to twiddle some dials without the project spelling out the issues and offering some assistance with them, such strictures don’t seem like such an advance. Arguably it sets us back by lulling the user into complacency about the coherence of what they’re involved in. Wasn’t the whole idea of broader wellbeing indexes supposed to help us understand the choices we’re making?
Moreover, some domains are obviously correlated. Housing, income and jobs are clearly correlated in various ways. Shouldn’t the user be informed of this and taken through some examples and strategies for using the discretion they’ve been given to make more sense of the indicators than simply playing their own hunches and preferences. And dig further into the Better Life Index and we find the same old problem. As <a href="https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/about/better-life-initiative/#question15">its website informs us</a>, “Each topic of well-being is measured by one to four indicators. Within each topic, indicators are averaged with equal weights”.
<h3>Curiouser and curiouser</h3>
In fact the CIW and the way it reports its results are even more problematic than suggested so far. Though the decision – or non-decision – made at the top of the CIW project is to weight all indicators equally, the way the CIW is calculated produces wild disparities in the impact of different indicators based on quite arbitrary decisions about how the indicators are calculated. Within each of its eight domains, each indicator is indexed to 100 points in 1994 and then rises or falls against that benchmark. Here are the trends in the Democratic Engagement domain.<a id="ref7" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn7">7</a>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-85190" src="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/trends-in-democratic-engagement.png" sizes="(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px" srcset="https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/trends-in-democratic-engagement.png 723w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/trends-in-democratic-engagement.png?resize=300,178 300w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/trends-in-democratic-engagement.png?resize=450,268 450w, https://www.themandarin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/trends-in-democratic-engagement.png?resize=600,357 600w" alt="" width="550" height="327" />
Note the sudden dip in the index in 2011. This is driven by indicator E – “Percentage of Members of Parliament’s office budget devoted to sending communications to constituents” which <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/reports/2016-canadian-index-wellbeing-national-report/democratic-engagement-domain-raw-data">went</a> from 6.79% to 3.35%.<a id="ref8" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn8">8</a> My attempt to replicate the CIW’s calculation,<a id="ref9" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn9">9</a> moves the indicator from an index score of 142.6 in 2010 (compared with 100 in 1994) to 70.4 in 2011 – a loss of 72.3 points in 2011. As one might expect, most other indicators move by around 1% or less and around four others change by less than five points. So while one might doubt that MPs’ communications spend is a good indicator of democratic engagement, because it’s unusually volatile it has far more impact than most indicators throughout the series and in 2011 it completely dominates the domain.
Within the democratic engagement domain, indicator F measures engagement in political activism. This is expressed as the “Percentage of population that volunteers for a law, advocacy, or political group”. This number starts at just 1.5% in 1994. Accordingly, as it grows to 2.3% its growth has a 53-point impact on the domain. Together these two of the eight domains explain over half the movement in the index.<a id="ref10" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn10">10</a> In fact, this result itself is the arbitrary artefact of the way the original ratio is expressed initially. If one’s metric of political engagement were expressed in the index as the ratio of unengaged to engaged rather than engaged to unengaged its impact would have gone from 53 points to 0.8% points.<a id="ref11" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn11">11</a>
So much for equal weighting.
<h3>Diminishing returns by assumption</h3>
In virtually all the reporting I’ve seen, the CIW is taken to demonstrate that total wellbeing is growing less strongly than the economy. <a id="ref12" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn12">12</a> As the most recent report on the index concludes:
<blockquote>“The divergence in the CIW and GDP tells us emphatically that we have not been making the right investments in our people and in our communities — and we have not been doing it for a long time.”</blockquote>
For the record, I’m not seeking to underplay the emerging difficulties of our age. My own personal list of grave concerns include these:
<ul>
<li>the potential for catastrophic global warming;</li>
<li>growing income and wealth inequality, though it has been far milder in Australia than in the United States;</li>
<li>the plunging functionality of and trust in our elites, particularly, but not exclusively, in politics; and</li>
<li>multi-generational social dysfunction.</li>
</ul>
But, however we measure it, where wellbeing deviates from GDP, the first point anyone seeking to inform the public on the question should be this: in just the way that diminishing marginal returns set in for any commodity, this is also true of income itself. It’s both commonsense and basic economics that the utility or wellbeing we each get from each additional dollar of income can be expected to decline with each dollar as it goes from meeting urgent needs to less urgent wants.<a id="ref13" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn13">13</a>
The CIW’s reporting on its own account fails to highlight this. But the problem runs much deeper. Just as the CIW inadvertently gives outlandishly large weighting to citizen involvement in political organisations as a result of ultimately arbitrary methodological decisions, so the deviation between GDP and wider national welfare is a methodological artefact quite independent of any phenomena in the world it aspires to reflect.
To report one’s own wellbeing one does it on a bounded scale – typically from one to ten. Wherever it starts (the median in the Australian Unity Survey is above 7), this number can’t keep growing at a constant rate. GDP, by contrast, is unbounded.<a id="ref14" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn14">14</a> By my count 52 of the 64 indicators of wellbeing in the CIW are already contained within some bound – usually 1-100%.<a id="ref15" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn15">15</a>
The problem is often perpetuated into the academy proper. Thus for instance, in <a href="https://www.sprc.unsw.edu.au/media/SPRCFile/Pilot_Project_ReportFinal.pdf">a consultancy to ANDI in 2013</a>, well-respected scholars of social research at the Social Policy Research Centre create the impression of buying into the logic of CIW and ANDI while using words which, if read carefully, need mean no such thing.
<blockquote>“The CIW has attracted considerable attention in Canada and internationally not only because of the innovative ideas, methods and data used in its construction, but also because of the ways in which the findings it has generated have been disseminated. Figure 1 compares movements in CIW and GDP over the period 1994-2010 and highlights the very different picture of progress that is revealed by the two indexes. In overall terms, the 28.9% increase in GDP over the period was around five times greater than the 5.7% growth in CIW. And as the report notes, while GDP declined as a result of the recession induced by the global financial crisis in 2008 by 8.3% but had started to recover by 2010, the decline in CIW was almost three times greater (at 24 per cent), with no sign of recovery evident by 2010. These differences illustrate vividly what difference the measure adopted makes to any conclusions about how a particular society is travelling – over the medium-term but also in response to short-run external shocks.”</blockquote>
<h3>Policy implications</h3>
<blockquote>“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.” — Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620</blockquote>
An index is a tool for evaluating what is, and so for comparing it to some alternative. However, it isn’t built to identify causal links between the phenomena it measures. So while it can highlight emerging issues, it’s of no greater use on its own than anything else in determining how to address it. The reason I argue that something analogous to greenhouse emissions abatement curves should be considered is that they embody causal stories – spend this amount and get this much in return. I think the most promising way to do this is with multiple criteria in mind. So the search would identify a number of actions from most to least promising that we could expect to generate measurable wellbeing benefits whilst promoting existing objectives such as GDP growth. This is partly a political strategy for maximising agreement between people with different priorities. And it’s also a strategy for dealing with our own ignorance on the grounds that one can have greater confidence in policies that satisfy multiple evaluative criteria.
But if we’re serious about promoting wellbeing whether we set our priorities via a ‘wellbeing cost curve’ or some other means, we’ll want to build our knowledge of how to promote wellbeing. That requires us to investigate the causes of improving wellbeing. This suggests an agenda of measuring the wellbeing effects of different policy alternatives. Yet there’s a large gap between what’s been done in this regard compared with the grand pronouncements from on high about new frameworks. I’m unaware of the Australian Treasury taking any interest in such work in the period during which its wellbeing framework was in place. I don’t know of anything being done in New Zealand of this kind, though, as we’ve seen in Part One, the UK What Works Centre for Wellbeing has published <a href="https://whatworkswellbeing.org/2017/07/18/what-wellbeing-data-do-local-authorities-need-to-make-better-decisions/">guides for managing for wellbeing</a> at the local level.
Investigation of the wellbeing impacts of different policies might be useful in choosing between them, in optimising existing policies’ impact on wellbeing or in designing new policies. In any of these cases, if one were championing a wellbeing index, one would ideally want to measure that impact at the local level in ways that are consistent with the methodology governing the national wellbeing index. Using the HALE as an example, one might capture self-reported wellbeing before and after an intervention using the same standard of self-reported wellbeing around which the HALE is built (the Australian Unity Index survey). If one did so, the HALE methodology could then be used to generate a dollar value of the wellbeing such programs generated.<a id="ref16" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn16">16</a> This then helps the process of targeting improved wellbeing and informs that process, enabling judgements between relative priorities to be made in that search. It helps both in the choice between programs but also within programs as those delivering them seek to optimise their impact.
Though <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/">touted</a> as a policy tool, as something that can fuel “evidence-based and community-focused decision-making” and as something that “places wellbeing at the heart of policy”, the CIW does not make good on these claims at any level of detail. There’s no investigation of the kinds of programs that deliver collateral wellbeing benefits in addition to other outcomes. Instead, we get something with which people will be familiar in our age of TV talking heads and strategy retreats. Big Picture Thinking. Under the heading “Creating a vision for positive change” we find that:
<blockquote>“the CIW invited 18 people with expertise in one or more of the eight domains to a workshop to reflect on potential policy directions that would enhance the wellbeing of all Canadians. They were asked to consider the findings in this report — … in all domains — to identify connections among domains, and to propose strategies and policy directions that could address multiple challenges simultaneously.
“A central theme that emerged … was inequality, not just in income, but in health, in access to community resources, and in opportunities for leisure and culture. In response, the group recommended policy directions that considered the impact on multiple domains of wellbeing — an innovative and integrated approach to policy that would create multiple benefits for Canadians and reaffirm their core values.”</blockquote>
These are fine sentiments with which I broadly agree, but the work is not in announcing such a vision or “innovative and integrated approach” but in doing the work to show what it is. Alas this isn’t on the cards. The document continues to endorse:
<ol>
<li>a universal basic income and extension of benefits to low-income Canadians;</li>
<li>build on the strength of the education domain and develop a Pan-Canadian education strategy;</li>
<li>focus on an “upstream” approach to health;</li>
<li>leverage the collaborative power of communities for social change;</li>
<li>provide universal access to leisure and culture; and</li>
<li>improve the collection of social and environmental data.</li>
</ol>
Some of these approaches – for instance, 3 and 4 – are widely supported in the literature, though the latter is often poorly delivered by existing governmental institutions and so it is difficult to bring about by edict, or report. By contrast, a universal basic income is highly contentious both in the community and amongst experts. At least in the short run, it looks like an extremely expensive way to improve wellbeing. Alas, there’s no evidence of further exploration of these issues, or of ranking of priorities in the policy roundtable that the CIW reports on.<a id="ref17" href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#fn17">17</a>
Meanwhile, “extending benefits to low-income Canadians” is easily agreed to in principle. More generally, the CIW’s policy package looks extremely expensive, but says nothing about how governments would raise the revenue to pay for it, nor about what one imagines are the economic and/or wellbeing costs of doing so, or how to minimise them.
Perhaps most importantly of all, the link between the index and the policy recommendations accompanying it seems both tenuous and highly generalised – lacking in detail. Because of its arbitrary construction, the index offers no considered insights on the relative importance of inequality or even how much it has increased. And even if it did, it sheds little light on how important it is to wellbeing and none on the most effective way of addressing it. The report offers no thoughts on the extent to which wellbeing, as measured by the index, might be expected to respond to different policies.
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
As ANDI’s <a href="https://www.acola.org.au/PDF/AP21C/AP21C%20FINAL%20REPORT%20Low%20Res.pdf">recent report</a> claims, one of ‘key lessons’ from the global progress movement thus far is this:
<blockquote>“Societies need to give urgent consideration to the implications of these new progress measures and how they can be best put into practical application, use and understanding. This may involve some significant changes to current practices, but over time, it is likely to bring many benefits in government planning, policy making and transparency, and provide a better guide to long term development than current measures and decision-making cycles.”</blockquote>
How urgent can you get?
<hr />
1. As <a href="https://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/urban-rural-and-regional-development/how-s-life-in-your-region_9789264217416-en#page26">the OECD reports</a>, the ABS Measuring Australia’s Progress project (see Section III below) was world leading and “an extensive consultation and review was undertaken to decide on the main dimensions (society, economy, governance and environment) and themes that underpin this framework.<a title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref1"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
2. In fact, as I’ve <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/09/27/architecture-and-beauty-some-thoughts/">written</a> <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/02/16/liveability/">once</a> or <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/02/26/liveability-ii/">twice</a>, I’d like us to take the beauty of our built environs more seriously, but judging from the complete absence of this consideration in these kinds of exercises, let’s write it off as a niche eccentricity.<a title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref2"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
3. Fukuda-Parr, S., 2003. “The Human Development Paradigm: Operationalizing Sen’s Ideas on Capabilities”, Feminist Economics, 9(2):301–317.<a title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref3"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
4. See this <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/sites/ca.canadian-index-wellbeing/files/uploads/files/Canadian_Index_of_Wellbeing-TechnicalPaper-FINAL.pdf">technical paper.</a><a title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref4"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
5. Community vitality, democratic engagement, education, environment, healthy populations, leisure and culture, living standards and time use.<a title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref5"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
6. The Better-Life project itself appears to go to some lengths to avoid publishing a league ladder based on equal weighting between the domains against what one can imagine would be comms directors’ advice (league ladders are invariably lapped up by the media). Sadly, despite it’s best efforts, the media <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/upshot/want-an-easy-life-try-canberra-australia.html">immediately calculate the league ladder</a> in any event, making it the feature of their reporting.<a title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref6"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
7. In <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/sites/ca.canadian-index-wellbeing/files/uploads/files/ciw-indicatortrends-datatables-1994-2014_1.pdf">the latest iteration of the CIW</a>, the current eight indicators of democratic engagement are these: 
A = Percentage of voter turnout at federal elections 
B = Ratio of registered to eligible voters 
C = Gap in percentage turnout between older and younger voters 
D = Percentage of women in federal Parliament 
E = Percentage of Members of Parliament’s office budget devoted to sending communications to constituents 
F = Percentage of population that volunteers for a law, advocacy, or political group 
G = Percentage of population that is very or fairly satisfied with way democracy works in Canada 
H = Percentage of population with a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in federal Parliament.<a title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref7"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
8. There was an election in May 2011, so perhaps the number was generated in the financial year immediately following it.<a title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref8"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
9. This indicator wasn’t used in some earlier versions of the index and the information only exists from 2001 (when it is measured at 4.76%). I’ve assumed the methodology would use this figure as the starting 1994 figure.<a title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref9"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
10. By my calculations if one sums the maximum value they rose to minus the minimum value they fell to since each started out indexed to 100 points in 1994, you get 155.7 points compared with 287.0 points for all eight indicators.<a title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref10"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
11. It’s a little unclear from <a href="https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/about/better-life-initiative/#question16">the notes</a>, but it looks like the OECD’s Better Life Index may avoid this problem by ‘normalising’ the numbers it uses, though the means by which it normalises the numbers raises further methodological issues by moving scores away from directly observed phenomena towards where those phenomena rank against other countries.<a title="Jump back to footnote 11 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref11"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
12. The CIW’s 2016 report comments that “<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/09/26/the-academy-and-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#footnote_3_36895" id="identifier_3_36895" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="f">4</a>rom 1994 to 2014, GDP grew by 38.0%; yet, our wellbeing rose by only 9.9%.” An earlier CIW report was <a href="https://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22Despite+years+of+prosperity%2C+our+economic+growth%22&oq=%22Despite+years+of+prosperity%2C+our+economic+growth%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.1067j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">widely reported</a> in its comment that “<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/09/26/the-academy-and-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#footnote_4_36895" id="identifier_4_36895" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="d">5</a>espite years of prosperity, our economic growth has not translated into similarly significant gains in our overall quality of life”.<a title="Jump back to footnote 12 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref12"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
13. This was a commonplace of orthodox economics at least within the English speaking tradition at the turn of the century <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2006/12/01/christmas-charitable-giving/">championed by leading lights like Marshall and Pigou</a>, though the quest for ‘scientific’ foundations for economics has seen it fall into eclipse.<a title="Jump back to footnote 13 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref13"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
14. Global GDP cannot grow indefinitely without gradually dematerialising so as to be environmentally sustainable, but this subject is not under discussion here.<a title="Jump back to footnote 14 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref14"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
15. Such important caveats may exist within the bowels of the CIW or ANDI documentation, but I’ve not encountered them.<a title="Jump back to footnote 15 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref15"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
16. Thus, if a particular program raises the wellbeing of carers by half a point out of 10 one could use the HALE methodology to generate a claim that “at the cost of $x, a program generated wellbeing worth $y”.<a title="Jump back to footnote 16 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref16"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
17. For instance <a href="https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National%20Office/2016/10/Policymakers_Guide_to_Basic_Income.pdf">the paper referred to in the CIW report</a> that endorses universal basic income concludes its executive summary as follows:Lifting all Canadians to at least the poverty line of $21,810 per person (LIM-AT 2016) via a negative income tax is possible but would cost between $49 billion and $177 billion in new spending depending on the clawback rate. Broadly speaking, cancelling existing income transfer programs in favour of a single basic income results either in dramatically higher levels of poverty, or ethically and politically unsupportable compromises where seniors are pushed into poverty to lift up adults and children. The more acceptable and feasible approach would be to set up a new basic income on top of the 33 transfers that already exist, thus creating only winners, though the main beneficiaries would be middle-aged Canadians. To address poverty among other groups requires other strategies. For instance, policies that help increase wages and lower unemployment for youth, as well as better financial support for seniors, will likely be more effective at conquering poverty for those groups than a basic income approach.In the <a href="https://medium.com/@maytree_canada/policy-brief-would-a-universal-basic-income-reduce-poverty-cd85fd64dbac">next cited work</a> we read this:If we really want to solve these problems, we should not fixate on a basic income policy. When we compare against the strengths and weaknesses of our current system, we can see that most proposals for a basic income are both prohibitively expensive and leave many people with very low incomes worse off. That’s not a good basis for a massive transformation of social policy.<a title="Jump back to footnote 17 in the text." href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/85093-nicholas-gruen-academy-partners-try-wellbeing-frameworks/#ref17"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png" alt="↩" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></a>
<ol class="footnotes"><li id="footnote_0_36895" class="footnote">T</li><li id="footnote_1_36895" class="footnote">sic.</li><li id="footnote_2_36895" class="footnote">W</li><li id="footnote_3_36895" class="footnote">f</li><li id="footnote_4_36895" class="footnote">d</li></ol>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The unbearable lightness of grey academia: note to self</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/08/15/the-unbearable-lightness-of-grey-academia-note-to-self/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/08/15/the-unbearable-lightness-of-grey-academia-note-to-self/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Aug 2023 11:57:41 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Cultural Critique]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36871</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Wikipedia defines ‘grey literature’ thus: Materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports (annual, research, technical, project, etc.), working papers, government documents, white papers and evaluations. Organizations that produce grey literature include … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/08/15/the-unbearable-lightness-of-grey-academia-note-to-self/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class=" wp-image-36872 alignright" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/What-Works-LSE-Impact.webp" alt="" width="451" height="300" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/What-Works-LSE-Impact.webp 624w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/What-Works-LSE-Impact-300x200.webp 300w" sizes="(max-width: 451px) 100vw, 451px" />Wikipedia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_literature">defines</a> ‘grey literature’ thus:
Materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional <a title="Publishing" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing">commercial</a> or <a title="Academic publishing" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_publishing">academic publishing</a> and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports (<a title="Annual report" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_report">annual</a>, research, <a title="Technical report" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_report">technical</a>, project, etc.), <a title="Working paper" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_paper">working papers</a>, government documents, <a title="White paper" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper">white papers</a> and <a title="Evaluation" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation">evaluations</a>. Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or <a title="Non-governmental organization" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-governmental_organization">non-governmental organizations</a>, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.
Some of it is excruciating or just hard to take in. But there you go, no-one mistakes an annual report or many documents for anything less than bland contentless pabulum with some information that might be useful to someone if they know what to look for. And, on the upside, grey literature is often informative and unpretentious. Reports from ABS, BOM and other technical bodies are grey literature.
But there’s an active academic literature that seeks a similar audience. And here’s one formula for the worst of it. You wade into some topical area. You make some distinctions. You deal in ideas that might be the subject of learned investigations in specialist disciplines, but you take things pretty much as given. You might then do some research to get some ‘data’. You might count up the number of a certain type of organisations who have chosen to do Y and how many have chosen to do not Y. You then give talks and consult to said organisations or to those thinking and talking about them.
It’s all kept at a very general level, there are few if any examples and if they are, they’re cursory — illustrative, rather than to interrogate anything. Then you might call for more research. <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/08/15/knowledge-brokering-organisations-what-are-they-and-what-do-they-do/">Here is a blog post</a> whipped up from such an approach.
The rise of Knowledge Brokering Organisations (KBOs) has changed how decision-makers access evidence. Whereas in the past, decision-makers might have relied on internal research services, or favoured academics providing them with the latest research, governments across the world have invested in new organisations that can synthesise existing evidence of ‘what works’.
I’ve thought about What Works Centres. Do they work themselves? I have my doubts and set out what they were <a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/135741-what-works-getting-to-the-land-of-how-part-three/">here</a>. I’d go a little further here and say that they’re a good idea on a napkin. A good beginning to a discussion that might have led to some worthwhile institutional development. But the kinds of issues I’ve raised should have been a live part of their development. For instance, it’s telling that we speak about What Works rather than who made it work or where it worked and where it didn’t. Because it’s likely that, if something difficult is being done, it will be difficult to narrow it down to a stable, replicable ‘what’ and you might like to think more about promoting the agency of those who’ve done things that work. But then that would be more disruptive than putting out lists of decontextualised tips and tricks.
Of course people continue to say things like I said, but very much at the ‘ideas’ level. The What Works Centres themselves don’t seem to be wrestling with them, trying to transform themselves into things that might work better. (Or perhaps they are and I haven’t heard — that would be unsurprising.)
Here’s some more:
KBOs have emerged in countries with different political and policy systems. In all those countries, governments claim a commitment to ‘evidence-based policy-making’ and have invested funding to develop their capacity to use evidence, be that within government itself (for politicians and civil servants) and/or for practitioners such as teachers, doctors.
Explaining their emergence, our interviewees described various drivers, such as a charismatic individual inside or outside government pushing for the need for a new KBO, and the decreasing internal capacity of government and other decision-makers to fill this evidence function. Others spoke of KBOs being created to show that policy-makers cared about an issue and were aware of the lack of good quality evidence in that area.
And on it goes. Half-ideas lie strewn around. Another is social impact bonds. A good idea of sorts, but really only the beginning of something workable and obviously useful.
And on it goes. Reportage as analysis.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36871</post-id> </item>
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<title>From repressive tolerance to repressive diversity</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/30/from-repressive-tolerance-to-repressive-diversity/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/30/from-repressive-tolerance-to-repressive-diversity/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 29 Jul 2023 13:47:06 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Political theory]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36854</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Herbert Marcuse coined the expression ‘repressive tolerance’. It took off — as well it might. It’s an important idea, providing one keeps in mind that there are very few situations in which repressive tolerance isn’t better than repressive intolerance! Indeed, showing … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/30/from-repressive-tolerance-to-repressive-diversity/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
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<div style="width: 516px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="sizing-normal" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F449567c9-248c-4e4c-8951-abe5895fe25e_2492x1660.jpeg" sizes="100vw" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F449567c9-248c-4e4c-8951-abe5895fe25e_2492x1660.jpeg 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F449567c9-248c-4e4c-8951-abe5895fe25e_2492x1660.jpeg 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F449567c9-248c-4e4c-8951-abe5895fe25e_2492x1660.jpeg 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F449567c9-248c-4e4c-8951-abe5895fe25e_2492x1660.jpeg 1456w" alt="" width="506" height="337" data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/449567c9-248c-4e4c-8951-abe5895fe25e_2492x1660.jpeg","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":970,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":1567881,"alt":"","title":null,"type":"image/jpeg","href":null,"belowTheFold":false,"topImage":true,"internalRedirect":null}" />A brilliant illustration of the broad terrain of both concepts. It’s telling (and sad for a left leaning centrist like me) that this comes from the very right wing <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/repressive-intolerance/">Claremont Institute</a>. (Though their artist may have got it from somewhere else). John C. Eastman is on the board. He’s the guy who came up with the plan for getting pro-Trump electors to the electoral college, rather than the electors representing people’s votes. And note the <a href="https://www.claremont.org/page/claremonts-mission/">great quote</a> from the late, great Abraham Lincoln. “”No policy that does not rest on some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.”</div>
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Herbert Marcuse coined the expression ‘repressive tolerance’. It took off — as well it might. It’s an important idea, providing one keeps in mind that there are very few situations in which repressive tolerance isn’t better than repressive intolerance! Indeed, showing the motivated impatience so typical of Western intellectuals, Marcuse showed how you can take the idea and retrofit it to — well whatever you like.
<blockquote>Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.</blockquote>
Voila! Job done. Bob’s your uncle.
Anyway, this leads me to coin the expression repressive diversity. And I’m not sure it is better than its opposite. As the <a href="https://mailchi.mp/sydneyreviewofbooks/march3-527713?e=e5b90ca5a8" rel="">Sydney Review of Books</a> informs us:
<blockquote><a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/writer/eda-gunaydin/" rel="">Eda Gunaydin</a> is a Turkish-Australian essayist and researcher whose writing explores class, capital, intergenerational trauma and diaspora.</blockquote>
There’s certainly nothing wrong with any of these subjects. But how come they so dominate the discussion of difference? Could that be a kind of cultural dominance itself? Note how the blurb could be about any difference or deviance from what was honoured in the dominant culture whether it was based on sex, gender, race, disfigurement, disablement, neurodiversity and on and on. So really, each of these exercises is primarily about the dominant culture and its endlessly rehearsed inadequacies — though those inadequacies are invariably against some theoretical (and so utopian) standard rather than by comparison with other existing cultures.
Should the dominant culture be more broadminded and inviting? Sure should. But then we should all be kinder. I should have been kinder yesterday. So should you. But what about all the things in a person’s history that might be different that might enrich our lives rather than simply provide a benchmark by which to grade our own culture’s intolerance? They’d be particular things, and having articulated them, one might find connections between them, and between them and the dominant culture. But they wouldn’t be, in the first instance, generic ones.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36854</post-id> </item>
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<title>The Pamela Paul Effect: Books betray us, yet still we cling to them</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/22/the-pamela-paul-effect-books-betray-us-yet-still-we-cling-to-them/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/22/the-pamela-paul-effect-books-betray-us-yet-still-we-cling-to-them/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Walker]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 22 Jul 2023 12:12:05 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Information]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Literature]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Methodology]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36835</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Many of us still venerate books. The evidence says they are not very good at what is supposed to be their primary job: putting new ideas in our heads. We are slowing developing new ways to achieve this old aim. … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/22/the-pamela-paul-effect-books-betray-us-yet-still-we-cling-to-them/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_36837" style="width: 650px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-36837" class="wp-image-36837 size-large" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bookshelf-1024x768.jpg" alt="Echoes of an earlier age" width="640" height="480" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bookshelf-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bookshelf-300x225.jpg 300w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bookshelf-768x576.jpg 768w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bookshelf-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bookshelf-2048x1536.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />Many of us own thousands of these. They cost too much, too many have too much filler, and our bookshelves allow only the crudest form of search function.</div>
<h3>Many of us still venerate books. The evidence says they are not very good at what is supposed to be their primary job: putting new ideas in our heads. We are slowing developing new ways to achieve this old aim.</h3>
<hr />
I’d better just come out and say it: compared to the emerging alternatives, I don’t think most books work very well. In 2023, we have a great many potential alternatives, and we need to keep exploring them. Eventually, I expect that search to pay off, perhaps in a big way.
If you have a view about whether books actually help people take in new ideas and perspectives, <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/22/the-pamela-paul-effect-books-betray-us-yet-still-we-cling-to-them/#respond">tell us in the comments</a>.
But first, here are takes on books’ shortfalls, from four critics.
<h2>Deirdre McCloskey: “Look, everyone has this problem”.</h2>
The latest person to remind me of books’ weaknesses is Professor Deirdre McCloskey, the polymathic former professor of just about everything (economics, English, communication, philosophy, history and classics) at universities from Harvard to Rotterdam.
McCloskey is not really an enemy of books. She couldn’t be: so far she’s written 18, co-authored another, edited or co-edited nine more, and has another soon to go to press. Her book <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Economical-Writing-Deirdre-McCloskey/dp/1577660633">Economical Writing</a> is widely considered (including by me) to be the best book yet written on the art of writing for the social sciences.
But the last time I talked with McCloskey, she revealed that she often struggles with reading books. She spoke to me for <a href="https://shorewalker.net/podcasts/">a podcast series I’ve started, called Shorewalker on Reports</a>; indeed, I gave her <a href="https://shorewalker.net/podcasts/episode-1-why-reports-matter.html">a whole episode of her own</a>. She’s great fun. Here’s a transcript of part of that episode (and if you like it, please subscribe in <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shorewalker-on-reports/id1674403570">Apple</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/subscribe-by-rss-feed?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9zaG9yZXdhbGtlci5uZXQvbm0vdGhlLXJlcG9ydHMtcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M=">Google</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/2MVAIE8pooMIMdE8ZPJoqC">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://pca.st/crd1q1zf">Pocket Casts</a> or by dropping <a href="https://shorewalker.net/nm/the-reports-podcast.rss">the RSS feed</a> into your podcast software):
(David Walker: One of the most useful ideas in ‘Economical Writing’ … is that readers are sort of lost and unsatisfied a lot of the time.)
Deirdre McCloskey: All the time.
(David Walker: Almost nobody ever says this.)
Deirdre McCloskey: You’re always confused. I am, aren’t you? (DW: Yep.) I read something; half the time I don’t know what I’m reading. I forget … wait, wait, what’s … what’s this mean … what?
(David Walker: And I discovered slowly … that a lot of people, like me, don’t finish many of the books that they start.)
Deirdre McCloskey: I don’t ever finish a book.
(David Walker: You suggest that writers need to work very hard to keep readers awake.)
Deirdre McCloskey: Just purely awake. I had a wonderful colleague in the history department at the University of Iowa, Bill Aydelotte. Like me he was a British economic, British historian. And Bill said: ‘The big thing in scholarship is to keep awake’. He said: ‘If you’re going to be a scholar, you’re gonna have to read a lot of boring things. So you’ve gotta learn how to stay awake.’ And so vice versa? You gotta – you can’t bore people … ? You know, that seems an awfully harsh standard for some kid who doesn’t know writing very well. But you got to keep them awake.
(David Walker: Also, in that book, you talk about how people get lost very easily in the words. You mentioned talking to a graduate student who assumed he had some sort of mental deficiency, because he kept getting lost in the middle of a paragraph.)
Deirdre McCloskey: That’s right. He was amazed when I told him: ‘Look, everyone has this problem’. He thought he was just stupid.’
<h2>Pamela Paul: “What I don’t remember … is everything else”</h2>
McCloskey was the first person to suggest outright to me that a lot of scholarly writing put a lot of people to sleep. But she wasn’t the first person I encountered pointing out the disconnect between our books and our brains. That would be Pamela Paul, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, a role which makes her, like McCloskey, a Big Book Person. And back in 2018, Paul made a big, brave and revealing confession about how our relationship with books fails us.
“I remember the book itself,” she <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/what-was-this-article-about-again/551603/">told The Atlantic</a>, speaking about her general experience of reading. “I remember the physical object. I remember the edition … I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me.”
And then she said it: “What I don’t remember – and it’s terrible – is everything else.”
Yes, Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review editor, was saying she forgets most of what she actually reads. She even gave an example. She read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, and two days after finishing it, she doubted she could even offer a general timeline of the American Revolution.
That struck a chord. I mostly read non-fiction, and I have often been shocked by the way I forget much of a book’s content within a few days of reading it. I started to think of it as the Pamela Paul Effect. For instance, I’ve read most of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies Volume II at least three times (and parts of it more), and listened to it twice on Audible, and I still can’t accurately recall even the rough formulation of <a href="https://twitter.com/shorewalker1/status/1665542801554313218">its most famous six sentences</a>. Brenda, my wife, reads a lot of fiction, and has a pretty similar experience. Indeed, I’m now pretty sure that most people share this experience. For getting ideas into our heads, books just don’t work well.
<h2>Tyler Cowen: “Smart people often overrate books”</h2>
Another person to make this point is the US economist Tyler Cowen, who blogs at the wonderful Marginal Revolution blog. Cowen is a voracious reader; he famously uses Marginal Revolution to note and quote from many books. Given the readership, anyone publishing a volume on economics or a related topic would be mad not to send him a copy, so he can pretty much read what he wants. So I was surprised to read him saying that he finishes about one book in 10 – not much more than McCloskey.
Long before my latest conversation with McCloskey, Cowen was the first person I heard confess to leaving most books unfinished, and it left a mark. Until then, I’d treated unfinished books as mild embarrassments. Yet on brief consideration, it seems the obviously sensible course. Most writers know that people abandon books, so they put most of their best ideas up the front. Cowen gets most of his books for free, and he lives in a world where you can’t hope to read everything. So read a bit of a book, extract most of its best ideas, see how it goes, and only keep going for a while if you really like it.
In 2019 I had the opportunity to talk with Cowen. He argued not only that books are a bad way of teaching, but that they often have less to teach than their impressive 300 pages would suggest. “Smart people often overrate books,” he told me drily. “Too many of them are puffed-up magazine articles … You can have a wonderful 600 page history book. Nothing wrong with the book. But if you read it, you just may not remember that much of it. And I’m not sure it’s the optimal thing for everyone to do. So I would say they’re somewhat overrated by people who read them.”
<h2>Andy Matuschak: “Books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge”</h2>
For all that they question books’ effectiveness, for all that they need workarounds to help them retain what they most want to remember – for all that, McCloskey and Paul and Cowen all still take books very seriously. If you want a really seditious attitude, you need to look outside the bookish circles in which they move.
And there you will find researcher Andy Matuschak, former head of R&D at the online educator Kahn Academy. a few years Matuschak came out as a fully-fledged Book Sceptic, writing <a href="https://andymatuschak.org/books/">a website essay titled Why books donʼt work</a>. People enjoy reading books, he said; they just mostly don’t absorb very much knowledge out of them:
<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/22/the-pamela-paul-effect-books-betray-us-yet-still-we-cling-to-them/#footnote_0_36835" id="identifier_0_36835" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Explanatory non-fiction books">1</a> … aim to convey detailed knowledge. Some people may have read ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ for entertainment value, but in exchange for their tens of millions of collective hours, I suspect many readers—or maybe even most readers—expected to walk away with more. Why else would we feel so startled when we notice how little we’ve absorbed from something we’ve read?
All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it
Experience has taught Matuschak that people learn in a number of ways with varying degrees of effectiveness. But mostly not through books: they work only occasionally, usually in the hands of “active readers” who react to the text as they go, turning over and comparing and analysing and recombining ideas as they read, often making summary notes as they go.
<h2>Beyond words on the screen</h2>
Before most people got used to on-screen reading, the book not surprisingly seemed the supreme source of knowledge. It was harder to see then that not every great idea needed or deserved the same 300 pages. It was harder still to see that giving people the ability to publish their ideas electronically via the Internet – in words with hyperlinks, or as podcasts or YouTube videos or databases or tweets or TikTok clips – might enrich everyone’s lives (at the same time as exposing everyone to the sorts of squabbles of ideas that once thrived only in academia).
Books have held sway as the supreme sources of knowledge at least since the printing press appeared. But we’re emerging from the world of the book into a richer universe, one in which books are one of many ways to absorb knowledge.
People like Matuschak are working on better ways to absorb information and ideas – in Matuschak’s words, to “design mediums in which ‘readers’ naturally form rich associations between the ideas being presented”. The surprise is that we seem at the moment to be making quite slow progress. But don’t bet on progress being slow forever.
<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/22/the-pamela-paul-effect-books-betray-us-yet-still-we-cling-to-them/#footnote_1_36835" id="identifier_1_36835" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Note: At some point I hope to post a sequel to this article, exploring the most promising techniques, from Matuschak and others, for improving people’s ability to absorb ideas.">2</a>
<ol class="footnotes"><li id="footnote_0_36835" class="footnote">Explanatory non-fiction books</li><li id="footnote_1_36835" class="footnote">Note: At some point I hope to post a sequel to this article, exploring the most promising techniques, from Matuschak and others, for improving people’s ability to absorb ideas.</li></ol>]]></content:encoded>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36835</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Elite Capture: how Christianity wrote the playbook</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/13/elite-capture-how-christianity-wrote-the-playbook/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/13/elite-capture-how-christianity-wrote-the-playbook/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 13 Jul 2023 08:01:23 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Religion]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sortition and citizens’ juries]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36828</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire, via Emperor Constantine’s … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/13/elite-capture-how-christianity-wrote-the-playbook/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aupVJkTnIqY?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation"></iframe>
This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire, via Emperor Constantine’s conversion. Heather’s book shows how much Christianity was spread not by those ‘meek’ whom Jesus would have inherit the earth but by the powerful for whom converting now offered improved relations with the emperor’s court.
Over time, and through the period of Charlemagne it infiltrated European life via various drives for Christian piety. By the 12th century, the Church had deeply infiltrated people’s lives through the seven sacraments — which marked the rhythms of people’s weekly lives and the major milestones of their lives — they included baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, and marriage. And by the 12th century, the church was in many ways more powerful than any king or emperor, controlling the universities, and religion across Europe. The church is also the template for a specific organisational form — governed across nations by a single kinglike officer supported by a skilled bureaucracy administering an elaborate and time-honoured legal code.
Here are the chapters and timestamps of the discussion.
<ul>
<li>00:02:48 Emperor Henry IV meets Pope Gregory VII</li>
<li>00:06:23 Rise of the papacy</li>
<li>00:10:20 The modern world and monarchy</li>
<li>00:13:30 Ancient constitutions and power-sharing</li>
<li>00:18:47 Positive decisions about Christian beliefs</li>
<li>00:21:39 Christianity’s preoccupation with doctrine</li>
<li>00:25:21 Practical piety and purgatory</li>
<li>00:30:04 Late development of afterlife vision</li>
<li>00:33:25 Syncretism in early Christianity</li>
<li>00:38:38 Church revenues and charitable purposes</li>
<li>00:41:15 Lack of trained priests</li>
<li>00:45:13 Spread of religious rules</li>
<li>00:48:22 Conversion and power dynamics</li>
<li>00:52:03 The church as a separate institution</li>
<li>00:56:24 The irony of secularism</li>
<li>00:58:58 The Christian church and connection</li>
</ul>
A full, machine read transcript is below the fold. 
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">00:00</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Welcome to another edition of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality. I’m here with my friend Peyton Bowman, friend and colleague who is joining us from Japan, and with Peter Heather. Peter Heather is the Chair of Medieval History at King’s College London, has been since 2008, and has previously worked at UCL, Yale, and Oxford. He’s published far more books than he really should have, if he was going to be fair to the rest of us. But he’s just published a large and excellent book called Christendom, a romp through the millennium from Constantine to the mid-medieval period of the 1300s. And you’ll find out soon enough why I’ve got a particular interest in this. I’ve become more and more fascinated with the transition from ancient thinking to modern thinking, and from an inherently pluralistic way of thinking when you’ve got lots of different gods in lots of different cities, between lots of different groups of people, and the Christian idea of a unitary structure to all that. And it seems to explain a lot about our ethics, about our religion, obviously, about our politics, and so on. So that’s my focus, and I now want to introduce Peter. He should tell us anything more about us that I haven’t been good enough to tell you, and then I’m going to ask him to think about what happens at the beginning of Chapter 11 of his new book, in which Emperor Henry IV encounters Pope Gregory VII, not for the first time. Because in many ways it is an extraordinary story, and it’s the culmination of this thousand years of development that the book Christendom is all about. Welcome Peter.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">01:56</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Over to you. Thank you so much for having me. I don’t think there’s anything else much I should say about myself, except that I’m a great gardener and cricket lover. Ah, well, well I’m… Which seems appropriate, given who I’m talking to.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">02:18</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">For Peyton’s benefit, there’s been a little bit of a skirmish between England and Australia in an international test series focused on a question of fairness, and some people in my country are saying, yes, more lectures from the British on fairness. No, thank you very much to people who brought us on the line. Anyway, unless you want to come back on that, which you’re most welcome to, we can get on</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">02:39</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">with the show. No, I do honestly think the British lecturing anyone on fairness does seriously lack staying power. Fairness means the British win. You must understand this. That’s the definition of fairness, obviously. And if you don’t get that, then there’s no point in going any further. No. So, more serious matters. Well, we can make a situation where fairness means the Pope wins, I think. Well, it is that old adage, isn’t it, about history is written by the victor. It’s obviously the correct outcome from a victor’s point of view that they won. So, that’s the way it’s going to be shaped, and there’s no escape on that. The start of chapter 11 is such an interesting moment, I think. One of the points I’ve been trying to make in the book is for just how long Christians were happy to accept that kings and emperors, because they were divinely appointed to hold unique levels of power, had, but by God, had therefore unique religious authority. And you get occasional contrary voices, but emperors have been in charge both by right and by practicality of the church for 800 years, ever since Constantine. But at this moment, we’re in the 1070s, we see a number of different forces coming together, which were set up the change. In Western Europe, this is going to lead to the rise of the papacy as a kind of CEO for Latin Christendom for the first time. So in charge of things like calling councils, ultimate responsibility for doctrine and for disciplinary standards, and with at least a say in high church appointments. They don’t care who’s in charge of a small parish somewhere in Kent in England, but they do care. Well, they do get to inspect them. They do get to inspect them. And they do care who’s the Archbishop of Canterbury and who’s in charge of major monasteries and this kind of thing. So all of those kinds of powers, if you look at them in the first millennium AD, after Constantine, they’re in the hands of kings and they’re in the hands of emperors. But here in the 1070s, we see a pope able to confront an emperor for the first time. They’ve excommunicated each other in front of these cheerfully constructive exchanges, that the seriously self-important people tend to have. But it’s important to see that it’s Gregory, Pope Gregory, who’s changing the goalposts, moving the goalposts here. I think that is still sometimes missed. But he’s put a statement down in the early 1070s called the Dictatus Papi, where he basically sets out an agenda for shifting the kinds of powers that emperors have and kings, in fact, have customarily exercised into the hands of the Roman papacy. And that’s what he and Henry IV are clashing about and also about control of the papacy,</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">06:03</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">because since the time of Charlemagne, emperors have had at least a… But just to tell our viewers that Charlemagne, I’m no great shakes on Charlemagne, but I do know, correct me if I’m wrong, that he got himself crowned emperor by the pope on</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">06:17</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Christmas Day 800 AD, correct? Absolutely. So best date in history, Christmas Day 800. Since the time of Charlemagne, well actually since the time of his son in the 820s, then emperors have watched over papal elections and have again had a say in papal elections. And Gregory wants to assert complete independence and transfer powers that kings and emperors had previously exercised into the hands of the papacy. They’ve excommunicated one another. Henry’s in trouble at home with a revolt of princes. He wants the…</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">06:54</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">And what part of Europe is he emperor of? It’s not modern Germany, but it’s kind of the Holy Roman… What we…</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">07:01</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Can you tell us? It’s the Holy Roman Emperor. It’s really Germany, Austria and Northern Italy. It’s a chunk of territory through the middle of Europe. Hitler would have been very impressed. Yeah, no, he’d have liked it. Yeah. Though it didn’t go far enough east actually for Hitler’s point of view. Well, that’s right, he could solve that. Yeah, no, seriously. So Henry’s facing a revolt of princes. He wants the sentence of excommunication lifted. He’s got to come and eat humble pie. We’re at a lovely Italian mountaintop castle called Canossa. It’s in winter. There’s snow on the ground. The story is that Henry and his wife and his son cross the Alps in winter, supposedly very dangerous, and Henry has to wait in the snow for three days outside before Gregory will admit him. He duly eats humble pie. The sentence of excommunication is lifted. As then, of course, Henry deals with the rebels and immediately they excommunicate each other again and the battle continues. But it’s a symbolic moment of the massive increase in ambition that’s coming out of Rome and of the creasing inability of emperors to do anything about it. This is a process, not an event. Canossa doesn’t make this happen suddenly.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">08:32</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">You can see the pendulum is swinging. So this to me, well, let me tell you when I really started thinking, gee, which I think these events you’re describing are called the investiture crisis. I think this is right. And so I learned about this and also about the Abbey of Cluny founded in 900 and something, I think. And this is all part of what scholarship I’ve read on this. And the significance that it had for me is that this provides a model really for the modern world. One way to think about the modern world is that it consists of lots of little monarchies. So think of the CEO of your organization, that organizations go up to a single point. And yes, that point might, there might be lots of democratic safeguards or lots of ways in which this king-like officer is held accountable to people underneath them. The idea that this is really the way to run something is, it sort of shocked me when I realized that ancient Athens isn’t a democracy in the way that, so modern democracies are elective monarchies in the sense that every modern democracy I can think of has a head of state. Sometimes that head of state is the same as the head of government. Sometimes it’s different, but it’s a pyramid. And then we’ve democratized the monarchy and the Americans don’t call their monarch a monarch. They call him a president or her a president, but it’s a single point. In some ways it’s more singular than the Westminster system, which bundles up this pyramid into arguably two positions, but it’s really only one because only one has the serious power. Now I guess we’ve all heard of Pericles, and Pericles didn’t have the power that he had in Athens over 25 odd years because he occupied a position like this. He was an elected strategos, I think might be the right way. You can correct me if I should. I know that plural is stratego. I think I’ve got that right. Correct me if you want to. But there were 10 of those each year. And he’s one of these characters, a general in the army effectively. And it’s by virtue of his charisma, his ability to carry the assembly that he enjoys all this political power. And likewise, what really shocked me I guess was that the Roman Republic likewise was quite self-consciously against this pyramid. It was quite self-consciously against this pyramid because you had consuls. Firstly they were preoccupied with distributing power, and secondly if there’s a highest officer it’s a consul, and there are two of them and they have some kind of veto power over each other. So then we get this thousand year period which starts with an emperor, Emperor Constantine, and by tangling, this is my way of putting it, by tangling Constantine up in a set of codes, law, the practice of religion, the practice of education and so on. And because as your book makes clear, Constantine and Christianity have something in common, certainly after Constantine, which is this appeal to God as the chooser of the emperor in some sense. That this, you run this thing for a thousand years and all of a sudden you end up back with this pyramid which has been institutionalized in a far more profound way than just an emperor with a whole lot of power. So sorry that took so long but I’d love you to reflect on that and tell me whether the, that is, you know, what your story, you know, what your story has to say about</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">12:40</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">the set of concerns that I came to your book with. Well, yes, I mean the kind of constitutions you see in Athens and in Republican Rome are even more specifically designed to prevent the kind of pyramid structure that you’re talking about. That’s the whole point of them. That is why they’re there. They’ve had experience of the pyramid in the deep and distant past and they do not want it. So we create a sort of much more balanced oligarchic system. I mean, Athens is not a democracy because two thirds of the people who live there are slaves and have no rights at all. It’s all kinds of, they’re just not a democracy like us. They’re not a democracy at all. This is a misnomer in our terms. They define a small group, smaller group who run things. They set up a system whereby it’s extremely difficult for single persons and bosses and likewise the Roman Republican constitution. But I suppose I think as a historian, if I think through time, it’s very difficult to run entities with this kind of power sharing, especially large entities. The processes of communication and registering of opinion that are required in those kind of constitutions can only work on a pretty small scale in the pre-modern world because of communications technologies, et cetera. So you’re going to end up much more often with things like our versions where you end</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">14:19</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peyton Bowman</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">up with pyramidal structures with checks and balances within them, I suppose. Yeah. One thing that’s really interesting about the story you present in Christendom is whether it’s deserved or not, the image of the early Christian church is that this is a group of disenfranchised people who are undergoing martyrdom and completely excluded from society to the extent in which they’re being thrown into the gladiator pits or whatever it might be. It has this very loose structure that eventually grows strong enough to weed out some of the books that are non-canonical from the Bible, but it’s not very organized. But then at the moment that Constantine adopts, or in your book, he reveals his perhaps secretive Christianity that has been there all along. It’s a balancing act. He changes the whole way in which that operates at the council of Nicaea. Maybe you could talk a little bit about maybe how that transition happened and how this pyramid was suddenly imposed on something that was in a way inverted from that model to begin with.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">15:28</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a fascinating element in the story. I think it’s not sudden either. You have dispersed Christian communities, maybe 600 out of the 1,800 self-running towns of the empire have an organized Christian community of some kind in about 300, as headed by a bishop. They’re used to running their own affairs. They do talk to one another. As you said, fascinatingly, they’ve managed to decide broadly, but not completely, by 300 on a set of books that they all consider canonical, the Old Testament plus most of what we recognize as the New Testament now. How they’re going to read those books, precise doctrines, exactly how the relationship between God the Father and God the Son works, where the Holy Spirit fits in, then there are clearly variant views. It’s a tolerated variation. I think they’ve progressed by defining what won’t work rather than by defining what will work. It’s a negative definition of the fringes as to what they don’t think is a reasonable point of view. They’re in the middle of one of these fights when Constantine declares his Christianity. But I think much more important than that is that Constantine inaugurates this new mechanism, the ecumenical council, the gathering of enough bishops that you can plausibly and reasonably say whatever they decide on does reflect common Christian opinion. That’s the first time that that’s been possible. There have been regional councils, but they’re small. So North Africa or Asia Minor and a bit of Syria, we haven’t had everyone or nearly everyone together. Even a couple of Brits make it as far as Nicea. This is so far in ancient terms. It is. My mind is boggled by thinking about it.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">17:19</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">I’m always boggled by how well-traveled the bishops of Europe all the way along are. I think Augustine turns up in Britain and North Africa and Asia Minor. They’re all over the place. They’re real jets. Absolutely. And how have you been, Godwin? Just minus the private jets?</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">17:38</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yes. And suddenly, oh my God, we’re all together. We can start to make positive decisions about what we believe. I actually think it takes two jets. Yeah, two, come in.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">17:52</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yeah, come in. I want to ask quickly, is this because, can we say something as simple as Constantine has the resources to bring this about? Could Christians have done this before but they just didn’t? Or is it the fact that he’s the emperor and he can make this sort of stuff happen?</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">18:10</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yes, I think it’s more the latter. I think it probably hadn’t occurred to people that it might be possible. Christianity is only persecuted periodically, really. It’s persecuted nastily. People die and people die in unpleasant ways, but in pockets of time. It’s not constant by any means. But I think that’s probably enough to create a climate where you wouldn’t want to gather all your leadership in one place, for instance, and people wouldn’t feel comfortable about leaving their congregations with no certainty they’d ever get back to them. So there is that element to it. But certainly, Constantine funds these councils. So it struck me it’s like a huge research project in the fourth and fifth century to sort out Christian doctrine. Where periodically we’ll get everyone together to think about the next problem. But it takes a while for the new habits to set in. I mean, as Peyton said, they’re not used to thinking this way. And I see it doesn’t solve the relationship problem between God the Father and God the Son or how we’re to understand it. It puts out a point of view, which then has the imprimatur of having been the point of view put out at Nicaea. But it takes people 60 years, three, two, three generations to accept it. They’re not happy about it to start with, or quite a big chunk of opinion isn’t happy about it to start with. And it takes a while to rumble around. I think by the end of that 60, 70 years, then we’ve made that mental shift from pre-Constantine Christianity, where we’re used to tolerating diversity and running our own affairs to post-Constantine Christianity, whereby we think we should make a positive statement. That everyone who’s really a Christian should sign up to it because we’ve all gathered together. We’ve said this is what Christianity is. Therefore you should sign up to it. I do think that takes 60, 70 years. It’s after Theodosius’ council in Constantinople in the early 380s that we, and his willingness to enforce it much more brutally by taking churches off people who won’t sign up to it and by finding lay supporters, important lay supporters of alternative points of view, really colossal sums of money or threatening to.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">20:27</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">It’s that that sort of cements in place the new habits. So I, well, let me make an assertion. Tell me if you agree with it, that Christianity is more preoccupied with doctrine than any other major religion. So that’s my proposition. And so I wonder whether this process that you’re describing of the early councils is</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">20:52</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">the time at which this comes into being as a particular preoccupation? Now that’s a really tricky question, which I don’t feel qualified to answer. But I can offer a couple of observations. One is Christianity sets itself a much trickier problem with its doctrine of Godhead than any other religion I know, because Christ has to be both God and man and equal to God. Now how do you make that work? What exactly does that mean? How can that be? Then that’s a really complicated problem about your Godhead that only Christianity has. By asserting the full divinity of Christ, but saying he’s simultaneously a living, breathing human being who’s also fully human, you’ve created a problem which is not easy to resolve. So that would be firmly in favor of your point of view there, Nicholas. On the other hand, I do know that Islam and Buddhism, we’ve globalized our first year historical outline courses, so I’m now a bit more clued up on things that I would otherwise be, also go through very important formative processes where even if you don’t have the full details, you can see that what emerges from a process of sustained debate has transformed itself quite substantially from where it began. In Islam, it’s really from the death of Muhammad in the 630s through to the Abbasid period from about 800, so a 170 year period of considerable internal formation. Buddhist is obviously much older, but again, there are a series of rather important councils</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">22:33</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">in the early history of Buddhism whereby there are, very interestingly. Do they have analogies with heresy and things like that? Do they conspire about heresy?</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">22:45</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">They do set up rival camps. They don’t use the word heresy, that’s very Greico-Roman, but they do do that. And they also manage that transition from what Christianity is doing simultaneously from very small rigorous sect that is demanding very high standards of behavior and is clearly only meant to be for a small group of believers who are going to make it to heaven to a mass religion. That was the bit that struck me from my brief acquaintance with the early transformative history of Buddhism is that those councils, the meetings of their leaders, that’s the</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">23:18</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peyton Bowman</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">deal, that’s the job that they’re doing that jumps out at me. If I seem to remember, there is a kind of Charlamagne figure, this King Ashoka in India, so he nationalizes it in India to some degree.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">23:30</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yes, that’s absolutely right. So in many ways, the other thing, the thinking about these councils is that they sort of conjure up Europe. They conjure up this unity, which is a remarkable thing.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">23:52</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yes, they do in the longer term. You’ve got, as far as I can see, there are two very creative moments in the thousand years of Christian history that I’m looking at, fourth and fifth century where you’re tackling these kind of very big doctrines about the Godhead. As I said, Christianity makes your life very difficult. You’re going to resolve that. But then a second period in the 11th and particularly the 12th centuries where, in a kind of way, it’s about doctrine, but it’s doctrine that’s tied into patterns of practical piety much more directly. So the moment where ideas of purgatory are formalized, which in a sense is a doctrine, but actually I think much more importantly becomes a practical mechanism for defining what a good Christian is because, as it were, nearly everybody’s going to end up in purgatory. So the whole of piety is directed around minimizing the amount of time that you or your loved ones are going to spend in purgatory. So you’re trying to look after your own soul, but you’re also trying to look after the souls of those you love. Purgatory is kind of like hell, but at least you know you’re going to get out of it at some point. That becomes the focus. So it leads to all kinds of logical extensions. We think about different types of sin, what their consequences are, venal sins, mortal sins that might put you into hell unless you purge them, how long venal sins will put you in purgatory, but then also remedial action. What can you do actually to counteract the effects of sin by yourself or by those you love in order to achieve better outcomes? So this is all happening, particularly those intellectuals, Christian intellectuals at the University of Paris, which is emerging in the first half of the 12th century. But it’s a whole set of doctrines, but they are much more tied into actual practical lay piety than say the fourth, fifth century where you’re trying to decide the right way to think about the relationship of father and son, his identity of essence. That’s an important thing to decide, but it doesn’t feed into everyday life in the parish, as it were, in the same way as what’s going on in Paris in the early 12th century. And it is the combination of these two moments of creativity, the heritage from the big doctrinal forming in the later period tied into this extraordinary, extremely creative and intense moment of identifying purgatory and generating a model of practical piety in Paris that creates the totalising model that will be spread across Europe and which brings Europe together.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">26:50</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">You need both of those things, I think. Piety, sorry. So purgatory is a doctrine that is very handy for the church, a doctrine that can be parlayed into a lot of power from the church. First the church becomes the guide to piety. It lays claim to the seven sacraments which are, which populate people’s lives. And you’ll have to correct me, but let me try and tell you what they are for the viewer, the viewer and the listener, which is birth, confirmation, then marriage or priesthood. You know, you’ve got a flow chart and extreme unction. So I’m missing a sacrament or two. I don’t think it includes picking up your pension or anything like that.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">27:45</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">So what are the other ones? So what do we go? We go baptism, uh, that’s where it is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s, yeah.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">27:57</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">So my point is, my point is that these, both of these things, um, that, that purgatory becomes an instrument of, of power for the church papal power, but the power for the church in a much more distributed sense, even including direct monetisation via indulgences,</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">28:16</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">which I presume comes a bit later. Not, not a whole lot later. Yeah. I mean, uh, confession and communion are crucial sacraments as well. Uh, they’re the ones you’re, you’re really missing. Um, yeah, it does. Firming up that view of the afterlife, uh, to that there’s a, that there are three possible stops, heaven, hell and purgatory. I mean, it’s astonishing that it’s not until the 12th century that that becomes clear. I think, uh, I think in various things astonished me as I, you know, I’m a late Roman historian. I started from the late Roman bit and then wanted to finish the story. That’s so I know far more about the late Roman stuff than the later stuff. And the latest stuff was a journey. Uh, various things surprised me on that journey. But actually the thing that’s probably surprised me most is how late it is for the, the vision of the afterlife to be firmed up. So clearly, uh, I think that’s kind of astonishing.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">29:11</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">And then that would also mean how sudden it was that the, how quickly these reforms of the 11th and 12th century follow on from that.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">29:21</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">So that’s a, that’s the secret ingredient, perhaps a secret doctrinal. And you can see there’s a lot of resistance of slightly in co-eight. I mean, that’s, uh, you get a lot of charismatic preachers in the 11th and 12th century who have their own little groups and whatever. And they object to one or other of the sacraments or whatever, you know, but you can see, uh, the thread running through it is that there is great novelty, uh, in this model and people are surprised by it. And it takes some time for it to be accepted. There’s a, uh, a wonderful article, um, about the clergy of Lincoln Cathedral in England in about 1200. And Lincoln is a very major cathedral. These are very well-educated, um, leading churchmen within the English, the English branch of the church, North of the Channel. And in 1200, you can see the impact of these new teachings as they struggle to deal with a problem. And some of them are wanting to deal with it in the way they’ve always dealt with it. Uh, but the more advanced are saying, no, no, this is actually a sign of purgatory. And you can see that the article shows beautifully, uh, also goes back to their library. They got some of the new books, but not all of the new books. So, you know, these ideas are there, but they’re not familiar yet. They haven’t been internalized. Uh, and it captures that moment of transition. And that’s in a cathedral in 1200, you know, the leading cathedral community.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">30:48</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">So it will take longer to work its way down to parish level, et cetera, et cetera. If you can send us a URL to that, um, article, I’ll, I’d love to put it in the show notes for anyone who’s interested. Follow up. And, and I just want to stress here that at this point, so at this point we have the popular, we have the church having, uh, people may not like this quote, infiltrated the lives of Europeans, the lives of everyone in Europe who thinks of themselves as a decent person. And they train people to be part of this system in a unitary structure, which they control</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">31:24</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">through the university. Yes. This is the first time it’s happened. I mean, uh, in a sense you’ve got, um, uh, an interesting intersection between organic processes of growth because Christianity has been spreading and spreading slowly. Um, but what it means for people and, um, what difference it’s supposed to make to their lives that keeps getting the definition of that changes. Uh, one of the things that I hope comes out in the book, um, about conversion periods, which are usually, you know, a century, century or half in different places is that very often in those early periods, you’ve got almost no priests, almost no churches. People are being baptized. They’re signing up to Christianity, but they’re bolting it on top of the certain, they’re bolting what they understand as the key Christian elements on top of most of the spiritual spirituality and religiosity that they already have. Um, so, uh, you’ve got this slightly dirty words, syncretism floating around, which is kind of mix and match Christianity. If you ask these people, they would say they were Christian. I have no doubt about that. And I think most of them are being baptized pretty quickly, um, uh, in the history of the spread of Christianity. But if you looked in, in detail at the religious elements of their lives, you’d find a very strange and very different mixtures in each place with certain Christian elements, uh, bolted on, on top of, uh, what they do and certain Christian ideas added to their understandings of the cosmos, uh, as they already existed. So this has been happening for some time. Um, the period from the later ninth to the 12th century sees a massive expansion in the number of actual physical churches. This is another key element, uh, in the system, in the development of the system that landowners are incentivized, uh, not least by saying it’s really good for their souls as well as not bad for their pockets because they can keep some of the tithes to build many more churches and the great period of church building, uh, is between the later nights and say, and 1100, a little bit later in some places, but you know, um, it, most of the parish churches in England are built, um, between about 900 and 1100. Uh, I think the figure is 5,000 churches are built in that period. And that’s just England. That’s just England. That’s just England. Yes. I mean, it’s similar even in Italy. It’s not that Italy has been doing this since the sixth century. The great massive expansion of the number of churches, basically the possibility of sticking a church in every substantial rural community that happens around the year 1000. Um, and this means that you can change the nature of what it means to be a good Christian. Um, before that happens, it can’t be about going to church on a regular basis. It can only be about going to church on big festivals a few times a year. You know, the, the, the calculation done for tour in the sixth century, the basis of, uh, we have a historian, uh, based in tour who writes a lot and tells us he’s the bishop and he tells us about his diocese quite a lot. The best guess from that is that, uh, people are on average six miles from a church in tour, which doesn’t sound much, but that actually means it’s a 12 mile walk to go to church and back. So people are not doing that on their day off very often, but do it sometimes they’re being baptized, but it can’t be about regular church going only after all these churches are built. Can you do that? And then of course you have to staff these new churches with priests. So what you have, what happens, I think is it, this process of organic growth generates a potential religious delivery system. And then the new teaching from the parish, from the parish university as then mobilized by the papacy in the 12th and early 13th century uses this delivery system, which had been created by a different process in order to roll out this extraordinary, much more intense</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">35:24</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">version of daily required daily Christian piety. And when I talked about indulgences being monetized through, sorry, purgatory being monetized through indulgences. In fact, I should have mentioned tithes, which is presumably a much larger source of revenue and one which is more federated. As you say, people are not handing all of it back to the church because they’re using it to build local churches and all of this sort of stuff. So it’s a very substantial. And where would most of those tithes being raised from what we, I mean, it’s very anachronistic to call it the middle class, but where are the tithes, although you, at least in movies, you see tithes being imposed in, they take a few chooks from the local peasants and things like that where a tithe’s a general obligation to be taken in the car.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">36:16</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yeah, they are. Yes. And they’re used to fund the building process to maintain the building and to maintain the priest who’s going to be attached to the building.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">36:30</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">So yes, they are very diverse. How much goes to arms?</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">36:34</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">A, L, A, M, E, S. That depends substantially, I think, on the choices of local priests. I mean, in the sixth century, the defined split of church funds is one, this is, and about bishops, there aren’t very many parish priests, is that the bishop gets one quarter of church revenues for himself. The second quarter of church revenues, it goes to his clergy, his staff. The third quarter of church revenues goes to maintain buildings and to pay for candles and lighting and all the rest of it. And the other quarter is for arms. I confess, I don’t really know if that vision that one quarter of church revenues should be for charitable purposes is maintained in the later medieval period.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">37:31</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peyton Bowman</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">I suspect it might be, but I don’t know. How does this process differ from the eastern part of Europe? So you mentioned that they were building all these churches in Italy, but my understanding was that the early church was this very urban religion. You had these very powerful bishops in places like Constantinople, Alexandria, and the pope was kind of one of these. The bishop of Rome, he was one of these guys who was a super powerful bishop of a big city. And then the west was very rural initially, especially, and you had some monasteries here and there. But how did the balance of power change? So I imagine if you had a church in every local town, then these individual priests start to gain more power than the bishops, or is there a relationship, a way in which that affected the structure of power in that church?</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">38:22</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">They certainly become much more present. In the early church, it’s all about the bishop. In the pre-Consantinian church, once bishops appear, then they control baptism, only bishops baptize, they have a monopoly on preaching, but their communities are small. The fact that only they can do this is telling you that you’re dealing with a body of people who can meet together as one group. You can’t have one person in charge of everything for a city if you’ve got several different Christian groups. That is obviously not going to be functional. You see over time the license spread of some of these functions, baptism, preaching to broader groups of people, as you would expect. The serious problem you’ve got with this massive expansion of churches in the high medieval is the lack of trained manpower because there are no seminaries at this point. We don’t have a lot of information, but the information we have suggests that priests can still be married at this point, that being your local priest is probably a heritable profession. In other words, we know that there’s basically one anecdote which relates to a family from who are grandson, son, grandson, father and grandfather priests over time. That makes so much sense if that were the case elsewhere because there aren’t books you have to be taught. They’re taught quite a lot of liturgy, but they’re taught by rote. It would make a lot of sense if it’s a father to son thing in general terms. I think most of us think that was the general pattern for local priests, but this is before all those churches are built. When all those churches are built, what is the training if there are all the people who are now conducting services? What do they know? What are they teaching? That becomes a serious problem. It’s in this context that you see the particularly innocent, the third and his successors sponsoring these new preaching orders, specialist preaching orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans in particular in the first instance, but there are others who are university trained preachers. They either have to go to university, one of the emerging universities, or be trained by a member of their order who had themselves been to university. They’re up on all the new doctrines. I think they’re the people who are going to spread the vision of purgatory, sacraments and what the new patterns of piety should be rather than parish priests in the first instance because parish priests are not trained. That’s a crucial story. We’ve created this new system without having a structure of training priests. We’ve got to spread the new vision of piety, but also I think as Nicholas mentioned much earlier on, you’ve got this process of visitation going on in the 13th century where you go round from place to place and see what is actually happening in all these parishes.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">41:39</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">That’s also a very important element in the story, I think. One of the elements of your story which will surprise people, I think, I suppose it surprised it all made a lot of sense is that Christianity, despite Christianity’s radical message that slaves are equal in the eyes of God and poor people are equal in the eyes of God to an emperor, that Christianity certainly post Constantine spread via the powerful, via the ways in which the incentives that it gave powerful, I’m thinking of landed wealthy to convert to give themselves better access to court and things like that. And you correct me if that needs correction. But the point I wanted to make and then draw you out on if there’s any drawing out to be done is that now after this thousand years has passed, they’re now creating this new elite class, which is more relevant to our own time, which is the educated and educated class. And in many ways, modern that what is roiling the modern world, if you are to judge by the what’s happening to our politics, is that there are there is an army of people who feel that they’re getting ripped off by these elites, that these elites look after themselves and don’t look after them. Anyway, there’s a whole lot in that question. Please, please grab some of it. Please grab some of it.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">43:16</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Tell me what it reminded you of. Yeah, that does have the kind of statement where you expect to see the word discussed. So I’ll do it.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">43:23</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peyton Bowman</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yeah, exactly.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">43:25</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">That’s right. Discussed. To Peter Heather’s book.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">43:32</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yeah, no. I’d start anyway. Finish. Yeah, no. Let me. The bit I guess where I end up is with the reflection that this kind of extraordinarily similar vision of required religious behavior that spreads from Iceland to the Balkans, Straits of Gibraltar to Scandinavia. That is incredibly unusual. You do not see it in the ancient world. You do not see it now in the modern world. Lots of people believe in all kinds of spiritual systems. I mean, as I said in the introduction myself, I’m no more than a kind of lapsed Anglican agnostic. I have no, would make no claims to know anything in particular about life, the universe and everything in that crucial question. But I can see that that is extraordinary. That outcome that you’ve got by 1300, absolutely the same set of rigidly defined rules as to right religion, right religious behavior spread over that kind of space, that geographical space. And remember, distance is much bigger in the Middle Ages because people move smaller. This is like it’s spreading over the whole of Eurasia. Now, you saw that total ideological system, coherent ideological system being observed over that degree of space. This is weird. This is seriously weird and you need to think about it as weird. Because this is not a way.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">45:06</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">I’m big well insisted it’s unusual and not weird.</td>
</tr>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">45:10</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yes, I’m happy to have weird blasters unusual. I would not agree with that.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">45:15</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Well, they’re basically the same idea with a different violence, good and bad. Yeah, exactly.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">45:21</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">I’m given to colorful vocabulary, I know. So I have to watch myself. So this requires a lot of explaining. That it’s this is not what normally happens to people’s entirely comprehensible contemplation of life, the universe and everything. It doesn’t normally generate this kind of totally coherent, ideologically rigid outcome. So why? And actually, there’s a lot of power involved in this. I do honestly think that the best way to think about this is a kind of one party state in the end, that actually you’ve been required to conform to this structure by a mixture of formal and informal constraints that have been working their way through different groups in society for a thousand years, which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of genuine faith involved in the structure. There’s a lot of genuine faith involved in every one party structure. I don’t discount that for a moment. But if you don’t have the power element in there, the constraint element in there, you would never achieve this uniformity because I don’t know of any parallel structure that doesn’t involve power at just about every level. So when you go looking for that element of more or less constrained conversion and adherence is there. Yeah. And I think there’s a very interesting methodological problem, particularly in the early bits, the bits that I start with, because what we get preserved for us are the accounts of the more enthusiastically convinced converts. And the tradition has been to kind of use that material to construct a vision of Christian conversion, which is entirely voluntary, you know, or deeply spiritual. You’ve got this incredible monograph produced by Augustine of Hippo, his confessions where he’s telling you about the 20 year process and all the twists and turns that he went through. And in terms of sheer scale of talking about conversion, that’s a dominating narrative. It’s much bigger than any other narrative that we have. But even the other narratives we have are about saints and they’re about martyrs and confessors and they’re really convinced. But of course, there’s a transmission mechanism, which means that that material comes down to us, which is medieval monks. Everything is copied by medieval monks. That transmission system is inherently tilted towards preserving the materials from those who converted out of conviction. And they’re real. I mean, I’m not saying everyone’s forced to convert, not remotely. But I do. I would make the point that our source base is very much tilted towards those who convert out of conviction. If you go hunting for it, then the, as it were, the incentivisation that moved lots of other people who are not so deeply convinced one way or another to go along with the system, which then starts to emerge. And so I’ve been trying to kind of bring that out where I can. But I hope not by trying to suggest that it’s all about power. It’s just I don’t see how you possibly get to this uniform outcome by 1800 without power being there at every level. And I think actually the Reformation underlines that point, because as soon as people are offered choices, quite a lot of people choose to go with an alternative, non-Latin Catholic Christian.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">48:57</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">And then those alternatives metastasise into new alternatives at a rate of knots.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">49:02</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Yes, that’s right. So, I mean, I think that underlines how odd the 1300 outcome is and how much force of formal and informal kinds is required to hold it in place. Because I think, yes, there’s the Inquisition. Yes, there’s lots of fining going on. But there’s also, if you grow up in these systems, they have they define the norm for you, you know, whatever we’re all, I think, prone to this, whatever we have experienced in our childhood, that’s normal. And then the world gets weirder as we get older. The things that are around us as children change. And that doesn’t seem right. So if you can manage to put in place a structure that then will maintain itself pretty solidly for several generations, you are establishing a really strong norm. So the informal side of constraint is very important to you, I think.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">49:58</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">So, yeah, but it’s pretty interesting when you say power early on, it’s power qua power, but it’s not mostly exercised directly by the church. It’s exercised in this, when there is power to be exercised. I mean, the church generally does, you know, in the words of Napoleon, I think, doesn’t have any divisions. So always the power. I thought it was Stalin, but you know, we’ll say, well, yeah, well, what did you want? Well, yeah, it’s worth a mass. That’s right. That’s different, isn’t it? You’re right. You did right. So, so, so the, the, the real, there’s some alchemy here about the power, because this is a body that thinks of itself as the law of spiritual and somehow it’s got, it’s managed to entangle itself with, with, with the people, with the</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">50:51</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">divisions, the people with the, so on. This is, this is the key point. Um, the church does not exist in the early period as a separate corporation. That that’s what Connoisseur, if we go back to Henry the fourth and Gregory the seventh does, uh, eventually we define the church as a separate institutional body. Yeah. That’s a 12th century phenomenon. Uh, the, the worldview is that the divinity is so embroiled in everything that everything on earth is reflecting the divine will, potentials. Human beings can get it wrong. You know, the Roman empire always had to get out clause that yes, God’s choose emperors, but humans can misinterpret what God is saying, so you can end up with a jerk as emperor and you’re therefore entitled to get rid of him. Uh, but the proof is in the pudding. If you get rid of him, if he’s defeated, he wasn’t God’s choice. Uh, if he’s there for a long time and it works, he’s God’s choice. So, uh, the divinity is so embroiled and the Roman state’s ideological claim is that it is a direct, uh, reflection of the divine will, uh, it’s institutional structures, it’s ideologies. God has made these things happen. It is the manifestation of God’s will on earth. In that context, the church cannot exist as a separate institution and it doesn’t exist as a separate institution. It’s part of this structure. You have religious specialists within the structure, but actually everyone is part of God’s special structure for the world. And it does take until the 12th century for the church actually to define a separate space for itself and to become a separate actor. So, you know, this is why early medieval Kings can choose bishops. They go, sure, they should choose bishops. Yeah. It’s right for them to choose bishops, you know, and in that context, talking about the church with a capital C and thinking of it as separate from these, um, what we would understand as state structures, the kingdoms, the courts, et cetera, you know, the royal courts. Yeah. That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not the right way to think about it.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">52:51</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peyton Bowman</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">How early does that start? I mean, if you look at, is it with Constantine or is it prior to this? Because I think there is that, uh, you know, w you know, in the New Testament, it says give unto Caesar what Caesar’s and things like that, but there is a sense in which, you know, at least to his followers, Jesus is expected to be a member of some kind of revolutionary group or kind of the new David in some sense, and to kind of take back control from the Roman empire, but.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">53:16</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Well, there’s a phrase. There’s a slogan. You could, you could do things with that slogan. Anyway, go on. Go on. Yeah.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">53:22</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">No, I mean, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. No, you’re quite right, Peyton. It shouldn’t have happened. If you, if you read the text, this is not what should happen. Um, but this is what I have. My phrase is not as good as take back control, but is the Romanization of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. Uh, this is what the, the process of conversion is always about mutual change. At least to start with the religion has changed and the, the, the receiving structure that receives the religion has changed as well. They’re both changed. Uh, but in the fourth and fifth centuries, uh, that is what is changed about Christianity, uh, that it has to basically buy, you know, that Roman imperial ideology, that it’s God’s vehicle for creating a higher order society, um, on earth that predates Christianity that’s coming out of, uh, Hellenistic visions of kingship. It’s old. It’s been there since whenever. What Christianity, what the process of making the empire Christian on one level is actually well, yes, that divinity is actually the Christian God. We’re not changing anything else. We’re just changing the identity of the Christian God. And when we do that, then all of that strand, uh, that’s there in the text, as you rightly say, uh, is going to be suppressed for a while, uh, you know, it will be drawn on when emperors make the wrong doctrinal choice, you get individual church was rumbling on about it and saying, Oh, I’m pretty shouldn’t be doing that. But actually 95% of the time and 97% of churchmen all buy into the new ideology. But yes, okay. Uh, Christian emperors are obviously God’s choice and the, the, uh, distinction between, um, secular and sacred doesn’t exist. I mean, the idea of the secular is a very clever idea that’s thought up on a rainy afternoon in the Vatican in the 12th century, I think. Cause it emasculates Kings and emperors for the, of their religious power and of their religious status.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">55:20</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">Uh, yes, it’s a, it’s a fine irony. It’s a fine irony that it was the church who came up with the idea of secularism as well. Uh, they’re surrounded. You know, yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That’s it. That’s it. There’s a line, there’s a line in a Monte Biden sketch where someone asks for money for the orphans and he asked for a rich man. And he says that idea, that, that idea is so simple. It’s brilliant. He says, you just get up, you want this. So, so here we have it. I, when you started talking about Canossa, back to the original story, I thought this, what, uh, this man is a true storyteller. He’s taken us back to the beginning where we came in. Uh, but maybe this is just as good a place to thank you a very great deal for this. It’s been, I think it’s been a fantastic conversation, a fantastic book. And I might just read, you know, I think we need to try and sell your book because it’s a damn good book. And this is for a random, a random person on Goodreads, absolutely stunning. This ambitious book writes the big history of late Roman and too early to high medieval Christianity. It takes a wide historical view. So the trends and themes of conversion, idealistic reform, intellectual change and coercion are always foregrounded, never lost in the detail. Peter Hither has always been a remarkable writer, but I think this is his masterwork.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">56:43</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">It goes on, but there you are. I promise I did not write it myself.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">56:48</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">But I do know that universities have people beavering away on their, these are called comms people. So we won’t totally rule out the possibility.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">56:56</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">But let me tell you, my first book was on the fall of the Roman empire. And there was some large, there was large scale chuckling coming from upstairs at one point and it was my son’s aged 12 and eight at that point, concocting a review, which they put on Amazon and it’s still there and it’s had at least 61 likes. And I know for a fact that they’ve not even read the book.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">57:23</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">So if you can find which one is them, then. Okay. All right. Well, look, thank you again. It’s been a lot of fun and it’s a fantastic book and at a very, a book of immense contemporary significance, I think, in ways that I, I hinted at or more than hinted at during the conversation. So thank you very much.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">57:43</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Peter Heather</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">And, uh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been great fun. Thank you. Thank you very much. We’ve conquered time and space to have the conversation.</td>
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<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2 font-mono">57:55</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-nowrap px-2">Nicholas Gruen</td>
<td class=" align-top whitespace-wrap px-2 overflow-none">The Christian church started it off and where it’s, it’s still going with this great carnival of connections. So there you are. Thank you. My pleasure. Okay. So I will stop recording.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ol class="footnotes"><li id="footnote_0_36828" class="footnote">32rem</li></ol>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Why ESG is a puppet show and what to do about it</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/11/why-esg-is-a-puppet-show-and-what-to-do-about-it/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/11/why-esg-is-a-puppet-show-and-what-to-do-about-it/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jul 2023 04:08:17 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sortition and citizens’ juries]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36824</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The more I’ve thought about sortition or as I call it “representation by sampling” the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/11/why-esg-is-a-puppet-show-and-what-to-do-about-it/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aBTFQ6wwlq8?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation"></iframe>
The more I’ve thought about sortition or as I call it “representation by sampling” the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to undermine the bona fides of people’s contribution to discussion. They minimise rewards for listening and maximise the rewards for assertive speech.
Performance, especially performance before those with greater power saturates our daily lives. This is illustrated in the opening of one of my favourite passages. It’s <a href="https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/insights/public-sector-porkies-10-years-of-lying-up-the-hierarchy">from an anonymous local government bureaucrat</a>.

I spent 10 years of my life writing. I wrote neighbourhood plans, partnership strategies, the Local Area Agreement, stretch targets, the Sustainable Community Strategy, sub-regional infrastructure plans, funding bids, monitoring documents, the Council Plan and service plans. …
I have a confession to make. Much of it was made up. It was fudged, spun, copied and pasted, cobbled together and attractively formatted. I told lies in themes, lies in groups, lies in pairs, strategic lies, operational lies, cross-cutting lies. I wrote hundreds of pages of nonsense. Some of it was my own, but most of it was collated from my colleagues across the organisation and brought together into a single document. …
Why did I do it? …<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/07/11/why-esg-is-a-puppet-show-and-what-to-do-about-it/#footnote_0_36824" id="identifier_0_36824" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="B">1</a>ecause it was my job.
No matter who I read this to, it always elicits a shock of recognition including those who don’t work for bureaucracies. School kids recognise it in their endless performances of their capabilities.
The Greek political principle of parrhēsia is directed specifically against this kind of tendency — it is the taking of risk to speak truth to power and it is speech that is heedless of reward or punishment.
The Greek political principle of parrhēsia is directed specifically against this kind of tendency — in our language it is the taking of risk to speak truth to power. But it is a distinctly modern form of speech — in which the warrant for its truthfulness (whether scientific or political) is not its persuasiveness to others, but it’s truthfulness to the speaker — it is the speaking of one’s own truth, and that truth is demonstrated by the speaker’s heedlessness of the consequences of his truth-telling.
In any event, in the discussion recorded above I argue the scope for sortition to help us escape from this trap. The audio file is also available <a href="https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nicholas-gruen/episodes/Why-ESG-is-a-puppet-show-e26lraa">here</a>.

<ol class="footnotes"><li id="footnote_0_36824" class="footnote">B</li></ol>]]></content:encoded>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36824</post-id> </item>
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<title>I have seen the off-ramp and it works</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/06/11/i-have-seen-the-off-ramp-and-it-works/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/06/11/i-have-seen-the-off-ramp-and-it-works/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 11 Jun 2023 07:58:30 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Humour]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36808</guid>
<description><![CDATA[From my Substack newsletter. Extraordinary images are being detected within the early pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. As you know, the JWST went in search of exoplanets. Anyway at about the same time I was seeking an AI artist to illustrate … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/06/11/i-have-seen-the-off-ramp-and-it-works/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[From my <a href="https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/the-off-ramp-from-reality-first-glimpses">Substack newsletter</a>.
Extraordinary images are being detected within the early pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. As you know, the JWST went in search of exoplanets. Anyway at about the same time I was <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/22/the-off-ramp-from-reality/" rel="">seeking an AI artist</a> to illustrate the phenomenon of <a href="http://www.themandarin.com.au/77238-nicholas-gruen-against-strategy/" rel="">corporate anti-thinking</a>. You know the kind of thing where grown people, some of them quite intelligent sit around and agree on their ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ — each of which can be agreed in an hour’s discussion and expressed in a single short sentence. They then agree on their five favourite values.
Anyway, on applying advanced upscaling technologies NASA scientists are decrypting within JWST images off-ramps from reality on our galaxy’s exoplanets.
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<div class="image2-inset"><picture><source srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png 1456w" type="image/webp" sizes="100vw" /><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="sizing-normal" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png" sizes="100vw" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png 1456w" alt="" width="1456" height="971" data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/9a2f9b5e-c2f7-44d8-83ad-57ef75d207b0_3072x2048.png","fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":971,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":11271968,"alt":null,"title":null,"type":"image/png","href":null,"belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":null}" /></picture>
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Even more exciting, when the castle is upscaled it turns out it’s really a jumping castle.
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<div class="image2-inset"><picture><source srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png 1456w" type="image/webp" sizes="100vw" /><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="sizing-normal" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png" sizes="100vw" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png 1456w" alt="" width="512" height="512" data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/27b4f0e4-70fb-4930-92d0-4af713292e01_512x512.png","fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":512,"width":512,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":404442,"alt":null,"title":null,"type":"image/png","href":null,"belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":null}" /></picture>
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It’s believed that executives are floating weightless inside the castle, but NASA scientists were reluctant to preempt the results of a probe which is believed to be imminent.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36808</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Four ways to fix the world</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/06/03/four-ways-to-fix-the-world/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/06/03/four-ways-to-fix-the-world/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 02 Jun 2023 13:43:37 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Cultural Critique]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Isegoria]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sortition and citizens’ juries]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36792</guid>
<description><![CDATA[A while back I condensed a bunch of things I have been thinking about into four ideas which I explored with Peyton Bowman in these two discussions. In discussions with philosopher and school teacher Martin Turkis, it occurred to me … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/06/03/four-ways-to-fix-the-world/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DxcE_PC5rgc?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation"></iframe>
A while back I condensed a bunch of things I have been thinking about into four ideas which I explored with Peyton Bowman in <a href="https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/i/50624602/what-are-we-missing-foundational-principles-from-the-deep">these</a> two <a href="https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/i/51057391/four-foundational-principles-for-a-flourishing-organisation-or-society-part-two">discussions</a>. In discussions with philosopher and school teacher Martin Turkis, it occurred to me it would be interesting to see if I could write them out in a summary form that could be understood by high school students and then see what Martin’s students thought of the ideas. I think this is a better test of their worth than whether they can be published in some learned journal. We then talked about the upshot of it all in the discussion recorded above.
If you prefer to imbibe through audio only, <a href="https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nicholas-gruen/episodes/Four-ways-to-fix-the-world-e253ism" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">here</a> is the mp3 file.
<h2>Four ways to fix the world</h2>
Every society evolves unique ways for people to live together happily and productively. But they change over time. Modernity has eclipsed these four ideas.
Recovering them can make us happier and more productive. 
<div id="attachment_36793" style="width: 1294px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-36793" class="wp-image-36793 size-full" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-02-at-9.11.44-pm.png" alt="" width="1284" height="870" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-02-at-9.11.44-pm.png 1284w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-02-at-9.11.44-pm-300x203.png 300w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-02-at-9.11.44-pm-1024x694.png 1024w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-02-at-9.11.44-pm-768x520.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1284px) 100vw, 1284px" />As some Troppo readers may know, I regard most <a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/94786-deep-strategisation-the-schlock-of-the-new/">diagrams</a> as a kind of <a href="http://clubtroppo.com.au/2010/10/13/strategic-planning-strategic-diagrams-and-complete-nonsense/">disinformation. </a>Unless that is, their representations add a little to understanding the relationships being depicted, which is (arguably) true here.</div>
<h2>Isegoría </h2>
Isegoria was a foundation of ancient Greek democracy. It meant not freedom but equality of speech. 
Our institutions mostly fail to honour those of lower status. Yet, those people do most of the work, so they understand it best. Toyota understood this and empowered workers on the production line to measure their performance and endlessly optimise it, quadrupling their competitors’ labour productivity. Quadrupling!
More generally amongst those in charge — for instance in congress/parliament, in management and on mainstream media — university graduates outnumber the less educated 20 to one compared with 50:50 in the population. 
Thus, many feel their voice and perspectives are unwelcome or unpersuasive in public speech. When they do participate, they’re often belittled as racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc.
Banishing their concerns from polite discourse isn’t just undemocratic; it sets off toxic culture wars. Those concerns should be welcomed in the search for democratic ‘win-win’ responses. 
<h2>Parrhēsia</h2>
Our concept of freedom of speech helps build a ‘free market in ideas’. But we’re starting to learn that, if the best ideas are to win out, they need to be received and considered in good faith. 
The ancient Greeks understood our weakness for flattery. And the way those in power demand to be flattered. 
Their antidote was parrhēsia. Our idea of speaking truth to power is similar. But parrhēsia is richer.
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">In parrhēsia, the speaker speaks to the powerful but without trying to please or manipulate them. By contrast, our own public speech is sodden with rhetoric (PR, spin, ‘comms’, ‘messaging’).</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">We gain confidence in parrhēsiastic speech not because it persuades us that it’s more scientific based on objective evidence — as if we are the arbiter of truth — but because the speaker speaks from their heart as demonstrated by the fact that they put themselves at risk.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">It draws the powerful into relation with those they have power over. It imposes a duty on the powerful to overcome their vanity and so open themselves up to others’ perspectives, and so, reality.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Merit</h2>
We are so preoccupied with moral arguments for the justice of democracy that we downplay the other argument for democracy — that democratic decisions are better decisions. 
Take Wikipedia. We love the paradox that allowing anyone to edit it ought to create chaos, and yet we get an encyclopaedia. But we don’t take the next step and ponder why. Wikipedia is a meritocracy. As authors contribute more and better work, they gain recognition, status and authority.
Democracies must be open to all. But, like Wikipedia, to work well they must weed out the self-seeking flatterers, the foolish and the boastful, to recognise and give greater authority to the best contributors. 
How’s that working out then?
<h2>Fidelity</h2>
We love harnessing people’s self-interest to serve public needs. This is Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. A farmer needn’t ask the public which crop they most need, because the information is embedded in the price they’re willing to pay. So the most profitable crop is also the most socially needed. 
Likewise we think competition between politicians gives us good government and managers competing for promotion or executive bonuses gives us good management. 
But we also need integrity. However cleverly designed, no social system is healthy without its participants buying-into its common purposes. No sophisticated order of human society — neither government, management, science, nor law — not even the market — can be healthy without also being a fiduciary order — with a ‘moral fabric’ binding people to serve one another.
The extent to which we can improve all aspects of human accomplishment — our productivity, expertise, cooperation and wellbeing — depends on our prior fidelity to common purposes. As businessman Charlie Munger says, “the highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.” 
<h2>Competition </h2>
Competition is indispensable to a social order, just as it is to a game. Markets and government are games of a sort. They provide a framework of rules within which people compete. 
However taken to extremes, competition breaks out of its bonds and undermines the ethical forces that bind us together, just as it can if competition in a game leads players to cheat. Today, extreme competition is breaking through these ethical boundaries, and that’s undermining the four qualities above. 
So how can we build the society Wikipedia hints at, keeping competition vigorous where we need it, and yet protect isegoria, parrhēsia and the common understanding of our shared interests in cooperating? If we can, those winning the competition will be the best, not the most self-interested and ruthless.
Here are a few hacks from which to build. 
<h3>De-competitive representation </h3>
We’re represented by a jury, not because we voted for its members but because they’re just like us. So we need to bring citizens’ juries into our politics — groups of people chosen to be just like us — to thrash out issues and decide what’s in our interests. 
Where our elected representatives are hugely skewed towards highly educated, middle-class, prime working age, articulate and self-assertive people, a jury’s membership has a mix of abilities and temperaments just like us. That’s isegoría or equality of speech in action. 
Further, there’s no competition to be won. So discussion is more deliberative, less performative and competitive. And it focuses more on the interests of the group than individuals or factions getting their way. 
They speak and listen to improve their ideas and work towards a compromise everyone can live with. So there’s more room for honest, unembellished communication. Less incentive to flatter and ‘spin’ to the audience — either inside or outside the jury. 
Citizens’ juries could lead debate on contentious issues, like abortion, gay marriage and greenhouse action, as they have in Ireland and the UK and France. They could act in myriad ways as a check and balance on our electoral system. They could consider and advise on citizen-initiated referendums — as they do in Oregon. They could supervise redistricting as they do in Michigan. Citizens’ juries could sit as shadow houses of Congress or parliament as they do in East Belgium and Paris.
<h3>Bottom-up merit selection</h3>
If rules are followed, competition selects the best in sport. But most other competitions are set up by the powerful. They choose who gets hired or promoted. Voters decide which aspiring leaders please them most. 
Now we trust juries to determine criminal guilt. So now imagine a situation where a jury — a random group of peers met, deliberated and held a secret ballot for who should be promoted, or made president — of the nation, a corporation or the Student Council.
Those chosen gain no authority to perpetuate their own power, preferences, prejudices or prowess. And the kind of merit selected would include service to those on the front lines and to the group more generally, rather than self-assertion and currying favour with the powerful. For those who seek the honour of representing students on the Student Council, in such a system helping others might work better than self-promotion.
 
This method of randomly selected ‘electors’ choosing the best is how Venitian leaders were chosen — from the Doge down to Senators and cabinet members. While other Italian cities suffered blood feud-driven crises, coups and civil wars, Venice enjoyed over five centuries of stable government until Napoleon invaded in 1797. 
<h3>Building society upon the better angels of our nature</h3>
Both representation by sampling and ‘bottom-up merit selection’ interdict direct competition and moderate hierarchy — building it from the bottom up. Each gets the best from people, not by imposing rules and accountability from above, but because they feel how doing their best can be a gift between one another offered in faithfulness to the group.
They’re hacks — tried-and-true — that can revive isegoria, parrhēsia, true merit, and good faith to all.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36792</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Engines of oligarchy: with Hugh Pope</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/28/engines-of-oligarchy-with-hugh-pope/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/28/engines-of-oligarchy-with-hugh-pope/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 28 May 2023 08:41:08 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sortition and citizens’ juries]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36782</guid>
<description><![CDATA[One of my favourite podcasts with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. Hugh has just brought to publication a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle’s … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/28/engines-of-oligarchy-with-hugh-pope/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
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One of my favourite podcasts with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. Hugh has just brought to publication a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle’s point that elections installed a governing class and were therefore oligarchic. The institution that democracy represented the people was selection by lot as embodied today in legal juries. And it has a delicious fondness for G. K. Chesterton’s idea that “democracy is bringing the shy people out”. You’ll also see me learning profound new things — like the fact that one of the things democracy is about is how you change your mind.
If you’d rather just listen to the audio file, it’s <a href="https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nicholas-gruen/episodes/Engines-of-Oligarchy-with-Hugh-Pope-e24nj58" rel="">here</a>.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36782</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Voice analysis</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/25/voice-analysis/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/25/voice-analysis/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Chris Lloyd]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 May 2023 01:21:11 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Indigenous]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Politics - national]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Race and indigenous]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36761</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This post is rather long. If you want a point form summary, scroll down to the bottom. Secondly, this post does not represent the views of anyone else but me. As part of his pre-election platform, the now PM promised … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/25/voice-analysis/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h6>This post is rather long. If you want a point form summary, scroll down to the bottom. Secondly, this post does not represent the views of anyone else but me.</h6>
As part of his pre-election platform, the now PM promised to get an aboriginal Voice into the constitution during this parliament.
Since Albo basically controls both houses on this issue, we will almost certainly be asked to vote on his recently proposed proposed wording (emphasis added):
<blockquote>There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to Parliament and the Executive government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
The parliament shall, subject to this constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the aboriginal and Torres Straight islander voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.</blockquote>

It is worth noting here that the word “recognition” does not appear anywhere in these 73 words. Nor does it mention “first peoples” or “dispossession”. There is zero symbology here. It is all functional.
A successful referendum will put those words into the Constitution, these being the “standing orders” of the nation. Importantly, the composition, functions, structure, governance not to mention eligibility to stand, eligibility to vote, as well as the voting system (i.e. “procedures”) is not specified and will be the subject of separate legislation. The third stanza makes it clearer that parliament will be in control.
No legislation authorised under the third stanza has been formally drafted. This being the case, unless you are ideologically committed to the Voice as a matter of pure principle, an informed vote requires some details on the likely implementation plan. This is Dutton’s constant refrain on “more details”. However, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/28/how-would-an-indigenous-voice-work-and-what-are-people-saying-about-it?fbclid=IwAR3kGHr507LOi8Zi6sN169eLexE7HxkgoH6uR5YuyR8rp-28U5JZ5wTwrZU" target="_blank" rel="noopener">some significant work has indeed been done on the details</a> by Tom Calma and Marcia Langton. This proposes
<ul>
<li>two members from each state and territory, which means 14 members. I note that this entrenches the over-representation of the smaller states, just like the senate, which a former Prime Minister famously called “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG1khlbqI9k&ab_channel=ABCNews%28Australia%29" target="_blank" rel="noopener">unrepresentative swill</a>”.</li>
<li>a further five members representing remote areas due to their unique needs – one member each from the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales. So more senate-like bias towards remote minorities compared to those who choose to live in Redfern. And I should note that, if this report is correct, there are no remote areas deemed to exist in Victoria.</li>
<li>One additional member representing Torres Strait Islanders living on the mainland. I really have to wonder why those on the Tiwi islands do not get a special guernsey.</li>
</ul>
This model of 20 members is not obviously bad, but it is not obviously good either and it was created by two highly paid careerist darlings of the progressive left, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ourcountryourchoice/posts/marcia-langton-has-accused-indigenous-politician-jacinta-price-of-legitimising-r/1202319709908303/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Marcia Langton</a> and <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/25/asia/australia-day-2018-date-debate-intl/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tom Calma</a>. This is where the political action will be – the actual legislation. It’s all in the details.
Members would serve four-year terms, with half the membership determined every two years. There would be a limit of two consecutive terms per member. If only we could impose the same limits on the national parliament! Lifetime politicians like Albo and Abbott would be as dead as the Albatross. (OK, <a href="http://datazone.birdlife.org/sowb/casestudy/many-albatross-species-are-in-alarming-slow-decline" target="_blank" rel="noopener">they’re not extinct</a> but I wanted the alliteration!).
I can imagine many other models. In particular, the aboriginal “nations” are not represented at all which seems at odds with the general “right side of history” argument for this body. However, this could mean 500 or 1000 members, which is perhaps why it was not considered.
Importantly, the electorate will have no input into the implementation details. It will be legislated before the election as part of Albo’s promise and only after a successful referendum. It will just be passed by parliament with Green and Teal support . The political backdrop will be the unenlightening, unedifying, superficial, emotional, partisan commentary from the usual media institutions and suspects.
Critical elements remain not only unspecified (as Dutton constantly complains) but also not discussed in the main stream media at all. Such as:
<ul>
<li>Who is eligible to vote? Who is eligible to stand?</li>
<li>Will they be paid? How much?</li>
<li>Will the voting system be first past the post, preferential, proportional representation or something else?</li>
<li>What will be the barrier to standing? Could there be 500 candidates in some regions?</li>
<li>Will “establishment” candidates have funding from the Electoral Commission, as is the case for general franchise elections?</li>
</ul>
Surely, it would be better to have more functional details established before the referendum. There is really no reason why the ALP could not have a draft of the bill already circulating. Indeed, my position has always been that we should have legislation first with a possible referendum in Albo’s next parliament.
What are the upsides of the Voice?
The main one that progressives are running with is symbolic recognition. Clearly this is a weak argument since we abandoned t<a href="https://www.indigenousjustice.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/mp/files/resources/files/12-01-16-indigenous-recognition-expert-panel-report.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">he original plan</a> for a preamble stating that aborigines were here first. In 2017, Pat Dodson and Mark Liebler’s plan was suddenly changed to something completely different at Uluru. Symbolism was explicitly rejected by the Uluru committee. Yet the apology was symbolic. Was that a bad idea?
Amazingly, there is no recognition or preamble as part of the Uluru proposal. This could have been bundled in with the Voice and would have made it harder to oppose. You really have to wonder who is running this process. How could the recognition preamble ever have been abandoned?
Another stronger argument in favour is direct representation with a view to better decisions, better programs, better outcomes and better use of government resources. This is actually more a claim than an argument. If it were definitely true, it would be an unassailable argument.
However, government departments are consulting community organisations already. What about the <a href="https://www.niaa.gov.au/who-we-are/the-agency" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Indigenous Australians Agency</a>, whose role seems to be to coordinate with and advise the Commonwealth? The key distinction between this agency and the Voice is that the indigenous agency advisors are employed, not elected. So, if you believe the Voice will be much more effective than this agency then you believe that directly elected representatives are more effective in connecting government and communities than full time (indigenous) public servants. You might turn out to be right. But it would be a hard sell to the electorate if expressed this way.
An attractive outcome would be that we get some diverse aboriginal opinions – not just the regular aboriginal firebrands. Under the Langton/Calma model there will be two representatives per state. Political dynamics being what they are, there will likely be a “left” and “right” candidate; for instance <a href="https://www.acu.edu.au/research-and-enterprise/our-research-institutes/institute-for-positive-psychology-and-education/our-people/dr-anthony-dillon" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anthony Dillon</a> versus <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Foley" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Gary Foley</a>. You can probably guess who I would vote for but, alas, I will not be eligible to vote.
A diverse Voice (remember when diverse actually meant diverse?) that includes the less radical should lead to a deeper discussion rather than the uniformity we endure from the usual suspects dominating public discourse via Q&A, the Drum and the Guardian.
On the other hand, diversity means conflict. If the Voice is evenly distributed between left and right, it will be hard for them to provide unequivocal advice to government. Which is just politics as usual. One possible outcome would be that there is an ALP and a Coalition aboriginal candidate in each state. Political dynamics being what they are, we could easily iterate towards this.
If you vote for the Voice are you voting for this? Or are you voting for a combination of long overdue recognition and a more effective and representative indigenous input into government decision making? You just don’t know.
What are the main downsides of passing the Voice into the constitution? 
Future jurists may read implied rights into the new words that will be inserted into the founding document, especially taking into account the political discussion of the times which they are entitled to do, in intuiting our overall intent. The phrase “may make representations to” could potentially be interpreted to mean that the Government must give high weight to these representations. Presumably they could not formally ignore them. What about state funding to support these representations? Future high courts will decide.
Some constitutional lawyers have also raised concerns about the addition of the words “Executive Government”. This has mainly been added through the influence of the 272 page Co-Design Report of Marcia Langton. I understand that it means the public service. So the Voice could make representations to senior public servants and committees, as well as parliament. The question is whether they would be entitled to make such representations to every arm and level of the executive government and potentially hold up the workings of government. Real time appeals to the courts (including the High court) would delay rather than facilitate decisions.
The term “matters relating” is not defined and could become a point of contention and disagreement. The government of the day may not appreciate being lectured on debt levels, foreign policy, changes to superannuation etc. though aborigines are affected by this as much as anyone else.
It was recently put to Marcia Langton:
<blockquote>If a government decision is made without listening to the Voice it could be challenged in the High Court and potentially stopped from being implemented until the Voice had been heard.</blockquote>
She replied: “that is a possibility and why would we not want that to be the case?”
But overall, the wording is anodyne enough that it is unlikely to lead to major substantial change apart from its face value intention. And the third stanza provides some protection from judicial activism.
Perhaps the Voice will become an evenly balanced partisan body dominated by existing political tribes, and therefore become less effective than a truly community based representative body could be. But that will be a lost opportunity, not a disaster.
It is claimed by Greg Sheridan that the Voice, once it is operating, will lead to constant racial discord. I think this depends on the make-up of the Voice and, in any case, I do not think that media and activists need the Voice to stir up racial discord. They are doing just fine currently.
He also argues that the Voice is only the first step on the road to co-government. This is a slippery slope argument. Slippery slope arguments are not wrong in principle. But they are easy to make and do not allow for common sense.
I encountered the slippery slope argument on gay marriage. “If you vote for it then the next step will be trans-activist nonsense”. Well they were right about trans-nonsense being the step. But we can all resist trans nonsense where it actually appears. I am a living example that you can vote for gay marriage without automatically supporting female impersonators in prisons. Similarly, one can vote for the Voice and resist calls for co-government when they are made. And since aborigines are a tiny minority, they will never be able to impose anything on the rest of us.
The effect of this referendum on politics. 
Quite apart from the substance, the way this change is being presented is often <a href="https://theconversation.com/were-all-in-declares-an-emotional-albanese-as-he-launches-the-wording-for-the-voice-referendum-202435" target="_blank" rel="noopener">emotive and evangelical</a>. If you are against it, then you are racist. Peter Dutton is against it and he did not attend the apology so you have to support it to perform your disapproval of Dutton. If we are going to base constitutional change on how likeable our current politicians are then we are lost.
This should be the most purely intellectual decision that we can muster. But no. Not in 2023.
It is a “moment in history” that we have to be on the “right side of”. This makes constitutional change a social media contagion. And make no mistake that a large proportion of young voters will entirely base their decision on Tiktok and Instagram influence. The effects of this debasement of democracy will be far reaching and long term. Future changes to the constitution will no longer begin with an appropriate onus of proof. It will mainly be “the vibe” and the attractiveness index of the influencer who brings the referendum to your attention.
Finally, the government is not going to fund both the yes and no cases. This has been required with previous referenda where approved (and to some extent fact checked) brochures were sent out to each household. The argument of the government is that such a process is archaic. The consequence is that voters will get their information from their own sources. You can see how well that works out in some cases. #foxnews
Why a referendum at all?
The people who railed against the gay marriage plebiscite as unnecessary are the same folks who say we must have a referendum for the Voice. A referendum for gay marriage was considered a denial of human rights. Anything else but a referendum on the Voice is similarly considered a moral failure.
I was on the fence on the issue of statute versus referendum on gay marriage. The plebiscite was a reasonable compromise. We decided in favour of gay marriage not because we “must” according to human rights zealots, but because we wanted to. And there is nothing in that decision that can be extended or modified by a future High court.
A change to the constitution is binding. There has never been a reversal of a constitutional change. So, the Voice will be permanent. Legislative mistakes on the other hard are easily reversed.
The argument for constitutional change has not been made in any but emotive terms. It is variously about locking the change in so it cannot be reversed by future Tony Abbots, it is about recognition of aboriginals and it is about not rejecting the “generous offer” of aboriginal people expressed in the Uluru statement.
It is a fact that changing the constitution in this way prevents our children and grandchildren from abolishing the Voice at some point if it proves to be <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/pearson-calls-for-reform-of-atsic-20021111-gdft6t.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dysfunctional, as ATSIC proved to be</a>. This is true of any constitutional change – it commits future generations to certain principles – so it is always worth treading carefully.
But this is a weak argument against the Voice it seems to me. Since the Voice is to be implemented by statute, the government of the day could change the Voice in any way they deemed fit, in any way they thought would cure its perceived ills, short of abolishing it entirely.
Now a reasonable person might ask why the Prime Minister does not create the body right now. Indeed Victoria and SA have already legislated a kind of Voice. There is nothing stopping him legally and he controls both houses (at least on this issue). I think the reason is obvious. If he did, then people would rightly ask why we need to change the constitution. His answer could only be … <a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=gls09kO-8DE&ab_channel=BatsOne__;!!ArRwEOZWieQ!XYwhIYzF04yScviOoOgdr5GWhN59PS9hR756VZ_BT9FmyfMyis1cQK1rL85FKeazwz6fRsQ1F8PJ13vh6xdT5iI$" target="_blank" rel="noopener">it’s Mabo, it’s the constitution, it’s the vibe</a>. Simply put, if he legislates the Voice which he says is so important right now, then the referendum is sunk.
So, what is his justification for denying aborigines a voice to parliament over the first 12-18 months of his government? Has he been asked this question by any journalist? He has not. Will he be? I really do hope so.
Let me finish this section by answer the question “Why a referendum”. Why has it been put to us?
It is the basest politics from Albo.
This was the very first thing he promised in his victory speech. It is a classic wedge. He knew he would force Dutton to oppose it, because the Coalition are divided on culture war issues. This means that Albo and the ALP get all the glory if it passes and no blame if it fails. He is willing to play with the constitution but, more importantly, drag the entire nation into an unnecessary racial argument, just for political advantage. A preamble of recognition, followed by a legislated Voice, would have served all constituents better. But there was little advantage in it.
How much more evidence do we need of the psychopathy of politicians? There aren’t too many decent ones I can name. Perhaps Gough, McCain and Obama.
The options
I also reject the legitimacy of a binary choice. We will choose between
<ul>
<li>Option 1: Insert the Voice into the constitution</li>
<li>Option 2: Do not do this, which means do nothing.</li>
</ul>
Whatever happened to …
<ul>
<li>Option 3: Include acknowledgment of aboriginal pre-occupation in the constitution and leave the possibility of an aboriginal advisory body to parliament (which Option 2 does anyway).</li>
</ul>
This <a href="https://www.indigenousjustice.gov.au/resources/recognising-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-peoples-in-the-constitution-report-of-the-expert-panel/">was the original intention of constitutional recognition</a> and was widely discussed for over a decade until the Uluru folks decided to take a completely different approach. I was blind-sided by this at the time, as was Malcolm Turnbull. It bore no relation to what we hadbeen agonising about for the previous 10 years.
I suspect that if Australians were offered three options, they would choose option 3. Yes, I know that this was rejected as part of the 1999 republic referendum bundle but polls suggest that if it has been offered separately it would have easily passed. Sentiment is even more positive now.
How will I vote?
I will probably swallow my shit sandwich and vote yes.
Why? It is the only form of “recognition” that we are being offered. While I resent Albo’s cynical motives in forcing this issue, I do not want to slap indigenes in the face with a rejection and I cannot see that it will likely do much harm. This was pretty much my rationale for voting for gay marriage as well, even though I bristled against the sanctimonious bullying of the yes campaign.
So I will resist my usually contrarian nature and take a pragmatic view: it probably won’t do much harm, even though we never needed a referendum to do it. Some professional aboriginal activists may be able to make a career in Canberra and the High court will have some extra dockets to process. We will all get to know the “leaders” of the Voice – and be in no doubt that there will many self-appointed leaders that will be on the telly every night.
It might do some good even. We might find that grass roots activists will have more access to and influence on the pinnacles of power and we could see some better outcomes.
But I think the whole political process has debased our democracy. And I will not be surprised if the next six months does even more damage to how we look at the rules that support our freedoms and how they are changed.
Summary
Reasons to vote for or against the Voice, in each case listed in the order of how salient I judge these reasons are in the minds of proponents. My personal view of the strongest points would be Yes 2, 3 and No 6, 7.
Reason to vote Yes.
<ol>
<li>To recognise Aborigines in the constitution.</li>
<li>To give marginalised Aborigines more say in decisions that affect them.</li>
<li>To get better outcomes by connecting government decisions to communities</li>
<li>A no vote will be a national vote of contempt for Aborigines</li>
<li>To begin a longer journey towards negotiating treaties.</li>
<li>Dutton is a bastard.</li>
</ol>
Reason to vote No.
<ol>
<li>To not give special rights to any racial or ethnic group</li>
<li>It will lead to constant racial division and conflict</li>
<li>It will be another expensive ineffective political institution</li>
<li>It will involve High Court challenges.</li>
<li>It will slow down government decisions.</li>
<li>It is unnecessary as Aborigines already have input into government policy and decisions.</li>
<li>The process of this referendum is so debased that it deserves to lose.</li>
</ol>
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<title>The off-ramp from reality</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/22/the-off-ramp-from-reality/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/22/the-off-ramp-from-reality/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 May 2023 09:16:37 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Political theory]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36747</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This post began as an ad for an artist with traditional and AI graphic design skills. If you want to apply, please be my guest. But the post also presents a nice simplification of a way of thinking. Right now … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/22/the-off-ramp-from-reality/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-36753 size-full" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/d5f2716ebc6cd0bd9544a5d2f8baa232-beautiful-stairs-beautiful-places.jpg" alt="" width="304" height="232" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/d5f2716ebc6cd0bd9544a5d2f8baa232-beautiful-stairs-beautiful-places.jpg 304w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/d5f2716ebc6cd0bd9544a5d2f8baa232-beautiful-stairs-beautiful-places-300x229.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 304px) 100vw, 304px" />This post began as an ad for an artist with traditional and AI graphic design skills. If you want to apply, please be my guest. But the post also presents a nice simplification of a way of thinking.
Right now I’m wondering how to illustrate what I call “the off-ramp from reality”.
We can be deflected from really looking reality in the eye with wishful thinking. H. A. Simon argues that this happens in corporations.
<blockquote>What managers know they should do — whether by analysis or intuitively — is very often different from what they actually do. A common failure of managers, which all of us have observed, is the postponement of difficult decisions. What is it that makes decisions difficult and hence tends to cause postponement? Often, the problem is that all of the alternatives have undesired consequences. When people have to choose the lesser of two evils, they do not simply behave like Bayesian statisticians, weighing the bad against the worse in the light of their respective possibilities. Instead, they avoid the decision, searching for alternatives that do not have negative outcomes. If such alternatives are not available, they are likely to continue to postpone making a choice. A choice between undesirables is a dilemma, something to be avoided or evaded.</blockquote>
I’d say that, since Simon wrote those words this process has been industrialised by various processes including the specification of ‘corporate values’. Invariably they’ll define them as a list of pleasing expressions. But usually, the real issue is how those values get traded off against each other. An organisation might agree on these three values among others.
<ul>
<li>We’re a close-knit team</li>
<li>We’re always keen to improve</li>
<li>The customer is always right.</li>
</ul>
Lots of people will be happy to sign up to all three, but I’d argue that we only really understand the reality of those values when we face the discomfort of how and in what circumstances one would trade one off against the other. Each value will sometimes be impossible to honour without sacrificing one of the other two. Supporting a colleague — always a nice thing in the abstract — might have to give way to the need to improve or satisfy a customer (in each case by reproving or disagreeing with what a colleague has done).
Note — according to an older tradition, the teaching of medical ethics, or the process of applying codes of conduct would focus people precisely on the uncomfortable dilemmas. If you really wanted to explore corporate values at your strategy retreat, you wouldn’t list your favourite values (This always reminds me of Woody’s mother saying to his father “Have it your own way, the Atlantic Ocean is a better ocean than the Pacific Ocean”.) Instead each of the small tables might explore situations where value 1 would be sacrificed for value 2 and vice versa. And why. But I’m unaware of that ever happening and very open to any counter-examples from readers’ experiences.
Thinking you can have all the values is just wishful thinking — and that keeps us away from reality. <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2022/03/06/will-you-join-me-in-the-alt-centre/">My post inviting you to the ‘alt-centre’</a> endorses James Burnham’s assertion that more than nine-tenths of political debate is likewise, just wishful thinking, or in my terms, an invitation to the ‘off-ramp’. ‘Freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘human dignity’ and ‘fairness’ are transcendental/metaphysical values:
<blockquote>From a purely logical point of view, the arguments offered for the formal aims and goals may be valid or fallacious; but, except by accident, they are necessarily irrelevant to real political problems, since they are designed to prove the ostensible points of the formal structure—points of religion or metaphysics, or the abstract desirability of some utopian ideal. … We imagine we are arguing over the moral and legal status of the principle of the freedom of the seas when the real question is who is to control the seas. From this it follows that the real meaning, the real goal and aims, are left irresponsible. …
This method, whose intellectual consequence is merely to confuse and hide, can teach us nothing of the truth, can in no way help us to solve the problems of our political life. In the hands of the powerful and their spokesmen, however, used by demagogues or hypocrites or simply the self-deluded, this method is well designed, and the best, to deceive us, and to lead us by easy routes to the sacrifice of our own interests and dignity in the service of the mighty.</blockquote>
This off-ramp from reality distracts us with chimeras. It takes us to a weightless world in which you don’t have the discomfort of choosing whether you’ll sacrifice this value or that one. So when we get tangled up in arguing for ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ as transcendent values or just the more mundane organisational values outlined above, we’ve already mostly lost contact with the more uncomfortable reality that these things do not exist in our world as abstract entities, but only ever in concrete situations and they do not appear with any force or clarity except where they are traded off against other things we also value.
There’s another off-ramp that operates not so much through our attraction to comfortable abstractions, but rather through our passions, particularly anger, self-righteousness and contempt. We take this off-ramp when a conversations fail to help us understand others or the world and lead instead to frustration and recrimination. The conversation takes the form of a discussion, but it’s really just an exchange in which two people stay in their own heads and talk past each other. Thus, for instance two people quarrel and each ends up thinking ‘that’s just what they would say’, without really trying to understand where the other is ‘coming from’.
Just as political debate takes the fantasy off-ramp from reality in the form of abstract values, it also takes this darker form. Let’s say you want to argue something about some ideologically contested issue — it might be whether we should be concerned about welfare cheating, or whether corporate tax should be increased or lowered or something more explosive like whether you sign up to a slogan which doesn’t solve some difficult edge case (trans-women are women?). That off-ramp of being accused of bad faith by those you suspect of bad faith won’t be far away. They would say that wouldn’t they?
And so the conversation never gets going. It just sits in preconfigured train tracks. More broadly political debate is mainly preoccupied with framing issues to provoke prejudices — the exact opposite of an engagement with reality and an invitation to thought.
And so to picturing this. …
Here’s the kind of thing I have in mind, though I’ve just put two AI images next to each other in a Powerpoint picture.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-36749" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screen-Shot-2023-05-22-at-6.20.07-pm-300x235.png" alt="" width="440" height="345" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screen-Shot-2023-05-22-at-6.20.07-pm-300x235.png 300w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screen-Shot-2023-05-22-at-6.20.07-pm.png 669w" sizes="(max-width: 440px) 100vw, 440px" />
The idea is that the person is in the world and could travel somewhere real and find out more about it. But he takes the ‘offramp’ from reality to a fairyland of unicorns, rainbows and I think coloured ballons with people enjoying themselves, and then there’d be either one other pathway leading to reality — or as in the diagram with a number of other pathways.
But I’m discovering that, though AI can be amazingly good at generating some initial image, instructing it with additional text is often inadequate to get it to do what you want. Here’s the attempt of one person who’s worked on this. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-36752" style="font-size: 12px;" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screen-Shot-2023-05-22-at-6.44.27-pm-300x173.png" alt="" width="614" height="354" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screen-Shot-2023-05-22-at-6.44.27-pm-300x173.png 300w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screen-Shot-2023-05-22-at-6.44.27-pm-768x442.png 768w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screen-Shot-2023-05-22-at-6.44.27-pm.png 906w" sizes="(max-width: 614px) 100vw, 614px" />
The off-ramp and the separate worlds aren’t very clear. Another person I worked with from Upwork who was shown this ended up saying this:
<blockquote>I spent some time trying to generate some of your ideas this afternoon. Unfortunately, I was unable to create the specific concepts with the AI generator I use. I thought I could create the component parts and compile them, but I was unable to execute the basic idea of a highway with an offramp during my trial. … I have been trying to conceptualize how to do it efficiently. I imagine you could create it with a digital painting, which is done by plugging a drawing pad into Photoshop. A person could create the base drawing that way, and then add the AI images behind them : ie paint the highway, paste in an exit sign and billboard from stock, then erase and add or overlay a section of AI fantasy world.</blockquote>
Anyway, you can see roughly the design I’m trying to work towards. It probably requires ‘mixed methods’ of AI generated images then supplemented with human-generated additions all worked on in a graphics program like photoshop. It could be varied — so that there could be a different off-ramp with a more menacing and angry hue to illustrate conversation that gets nasty on social media or perhaps several off-ramps of different kinds in the same diagram.
And there you have it. I hope the some people find the ideas in the post of some value on their own and whether they do or not, that this explains what kind of image I want to work towards.
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<title>Wellbeing: can we escape the iron law of business-as-usual?</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/08/wellbeing-can-we-escape-the-iron-law-of-business-as-usual/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/08/wellbeing-can-we-escape-the-iron-law-of-business-as-usual/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 08 May 2023 03:18:53 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Economics and public policy]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36739</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I really enjoyed this week’s uncomfortable collision with reality with colleague Gene Tunny. We covered a lot of ground talking about the use and abuse of the wellbeing agenda. Where does it come from? Why is it taking off as … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/05/08/wellbeing-can-we-escape-the-iron-law-of-business-as-usual/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Gb9oSVE1zNs?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation"></iframe>
I really enjoyed this week’s uncomfortable collision with reality with colleague Gene Tunny. We covered a lot of ground talking about the use and abuse of the wellbeing agenda.
Where does it come from? Why is it taking off as an approach to policymaking?
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How do we make the most of this as authorisation to improve our world?
By avoiding the pitfalls!
I argue that the main pitfall is imagining ourselves to be part of some grand new way of thinking. Bureaucrats and think tanks reach for frameworks and schematic diagrams. But if they’re the wrong kinds — if they’re schematic rather than built to aid action — those frameworks simply give us new labels with which to dress up the same old same old and the iron law of business-as-usual takes hold again. Until the next new fad, the next new vocabulary.
But done well, we could really address some big problems at the same time as improving the health and prosperity of our communities. If you prefer it, the audio is <a href="https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nicholas-gruen/episodes/Wellbeing-escaping-the-iron-law-of-business-as-usual-e23i9fg">here</a>.
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<item>
<title>Understanding the present by listening to the past: Walter Lippmann’s “The Public Philosophy”</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/04/27/understanding-the-present-by-listening-to-the-past-walter-lippmanns-the-public-philosophy/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/04/27/understanding-the-present-by-listening-to-the-past-walter-lippmanns-the-public-philosophy/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Apr 2023 07:29:26 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Political theory]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Politics - international]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sortition and citizens’ juries]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[War and military]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36711</guid>
<description><![CDATA[One way to get beneath the surface of what’s going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense. … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/04/27/understanding-the-present-by-listening-to-the-past-walter-lippmanns-the-public-philosophy/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-36712 alignright" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screen-Shot-2023-04-27-at-5.27.09-pm-300x417.png" alt="" width="300" height="417" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screen-Shot-2023-04-27-at-5.27.09-pm-300x417.png 300w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screen-Shot-2023-04-27-at-5.27.09-pm-737x1024.png 737w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screen-Shot-2023-04-27-at-5.27.09-pm-768x1067.png 768w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screen-Shot-2023-04-27-at-5.27.09-pm.png 894w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />One way to get beneath the surface of what’s going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense.
I was browsing in one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops around, (as is my wont) when I came upon Walter Lippmann’s 1955 book, The public philosophy. Walter Lippmann was one of the great journalists and thinkers of the 20th century. And wrote a series of books which were landmarks in their day, despite uniformly bland titles. Public opinion. The good life. And this one — The public philosophy.
Reading part 1. I was shocked to discover a critique of democracy that I had not really crystallised for myself. It comprehends two tendencies both of which are at their most disastrous in the avoidance of war on the one hand and the fighting of wars on the other. 
In the first place there’s what I’ll call temporal mismatch. It can take an electorate years to catch up with emerging developments and so public opinion can be a disastrous guide to the exigencies of a particular situation. A further aspect of public opinion is its capacity for wild swings in sentiment which I’ll call temperamental amplification. 
Lipman explains how democracies wildly overshoot. They’re not good at avoiding war by preparing properly for it. It is easy to understand why that is. Wars are very expensive. So preparing for them is expensive too. That means that politicians get the choice between warning the electorate and preparing for war and winning elections. If they call for more military spending their democratic opponent will say that it can be handled without serious financial pain — either because the threat is overblown or because it can be managed via borrowing or some other evasively defined expedient.
Then as war looms larger, far greater sacrifice than would otherwise have been necessary is called for, alongside industrial scale demonisation of the enemy. We’re somewhat familiar with this narrative from WWII, but Lippmann extends it back to the insoucience of war before WWI, the imposition of the Carthaginian Peace of 1919 which, in humiliating Germany made Round Two of the Great War all the more likely. (Lippmann became fast friends with Keynes when they were both in Versailles. Coming to terms with the cataclysm of that war and its peace burned itself deeply into both men’s thought.)
Of course, this is directly relevant to today’s circumstances where the economic hangover from both COVID and Europe’s first major war in eighty years is intensifying the scarcity of energy and food. In so doing undermining living standards. A further demand is to get Ukraine the arms it needs to fight off the Russians — but that’s expensive too. 
But how much are our political leaders levelling with their populations? They’re not of course. Because to do so they’d have to say something like “Here’s the plan. We need to reduce living standards compared to what they would otherwise be by 2-3%. Then their opponents will denouce this as the council of despair and incompetence come out and say they can do all they need to do without such hardship.
An extract from Lippmann is over the fold.
<hr />
<h2>The Malady of Democratic States</h2>
<h3 style="padding-left: 40px;">1. Public Opinion in War and Peace</h3>
WRITING in 1913, just before the outbreak of the war, and having in mind Queen Victoria and King Edward the VII, Sir Harry Johnston thus described how foreign affairs were conducted in the Nineteenth Century:
In those days, a country’s relations with its neighbors or with distant lands were dealt with almost exclusively by the head of the State — Emperor, King, or President — acting with the more-or-less dependent Minister-of-State, who was no representative of the masses, but the employe of the Monarch. Events were prepared and sprung on a submissive, a confident, or a stupid people. The public Press criticized, more often applauded, but had at most to deal with a fait accompli and make the best of it. Occasionally, in our own land, a statesman, out of office and discontented, went round the great provincial towns agitating against the trend of British foreign policy—perhaps wisely, perhaps unfairly, we do not yet know — and scored a slight success. But once in office, his Cabinet fell in by degrees with the views of the Sovereign and the permanent officials (after the fifties of the last century these public servants were a factor of ever-growing importance); and, as before, the foreign policy of the Empire was shaped by a small camarilla consisting of the Sovereign, two Cabinet Ministers, the permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and perhaps one representative of la plus haute finance.1
Without taking it too literally, this is a fair description of how foreign affairs were conducted before the First World War. There were exceptions. The Aberdeen government, for example, was overthrown in 1855 because of its inefficient conduct of the Crimean War. But generally speaking, the elected parliaments were little consulted in the deliberations which led up to war, or on the high strategy of the war, on the terms of the armistice, on the conditions of peace. Even their right to be informed was severely limited, and the principle of the system was, one might say, that war and peace were the business of the executive department. The power of decision was not in, was not even shared with, the House of Commons, the Chamber of Deputies, the Reichstag.
The United States was, of course, a special case. The Congress has always had constitutional rights to advise and to be consulted in the declaration of war and in the ratification of treaties. But at the time I am talking about, that is to say before the First World War broke out, it was American policy to abstain from the role of a great power, and to limit its sphere of vital interests to the Western Hemisphere and the North Pacific Ocean. Only in 1917 did the American constitutional system for dealing with foreign affairs become involved with the conduct of world affairs.
For the reasons which I outlined in the first chapter this system of executive responsibility broke down during the war, and from 1917 on the conduct of the war and then the conditions of the armistice and the peace were subjected to the dominating impact of mass opinions.
Saying this does not mean that the great mass of the people have had strong opinions about the whole range of complex issues which were before the military staffs and the foreign offices. The action of mass opinion has not been, and in the nature of things could not be, continuous through the successive phases in which affairs develop. Action has been discontinuous. Usually it has been a massive negative imposed at critical junctures when a new general course of policy needed to be set. There have, of course, been periods of apathy and of indifference. But democratic politicians have preferred to shun foresight about troublesome changes to come, knowing that the massive veto was latent, and that it would be expensive to them and to their party if they provoked it.
In the winter of 1918–1919, for example, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson and Orlando were at a critical juncture of modern history. The Germans were defeated, their government was overthrown, their troops disarmed and disbanded. The Allies were called upon to decide whether they would dictate a punitive peace or would negotiate a peace of reconciliation.
In the Thirties the British and the French governments had to decide whether to rearm and to take concerted measures to contain Hitler and Mussolini or whether to remain unarmed and to appease them. The United States had to decide whether to arm in order to contain the Japanese or to negotiate with them at the expense of China.
During the Second World War the British and the American governments had again to make the choice between total victory with unconditional surrender and negotiated settlements whose end was reconciliation.
These were momentous issues, like choosing at the fork of the road a way from which there is no turning back: whether to arm or not to arm — whether, as a conflict blows up, to intervene or to withdraw — whether in war to fight for the unconditional surrender of the adversary or for his reconciliation. The issues are so momentous that public feeling quickly becomes incandescent to them. But they can be answered with the only words that a great mass qua mass can speak — with a Yes or a No.
Experience since 1917 indicates that in matters of war and peace the popular answer in the democracies is likely to be No. For everything connected with war has become dangerous, painful, disagreeable and exhausting to very nearly everyone. The rule to which there are few exceptions — the acceptance of the Marshall Plan is one of them — is that at the critical junctures, when the stakes are high, the prevailing mass opinion will impose what amounts to a veto upon changing the course on which the government is at the time proceeding. Prepare for war in time of peace? No. It is bad to raise taxes, to unbalance the budget, to take men away from their schools or their jobs, to provoke the enemy. Intervene in a developing conflict? No. Avoid the risk of war. Withdraw from the area of the conflict? No. The adversary must not be appeased. Reduce your claims on the area? No. Righteousness cannot be compromised. Negotiate a compromise peace as soon as the opportunity presents itself? No. The aggressor must be punished. Remain armed to enforce the dictated settlement? No. The war is over.
The unhappy truth is that the prevailing public opinion has been destructively wrong at the critical junctures. The people have imposed a veto upon the judgments of informed and responsible officials. They have compelled the governments, which usually knew what would have been wiser, or was necessary, or was more expedient, to be too late with too little, or too long with too much, too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in war, too neutralist or appeasing in negotiation or too intransigent. Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this century. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decisions when the stakes are life and death.
<h3 style="padding-left: 40px;">2. The Compulsion to Make Mistakes</h3>
THE ERRORS of public opinion in these matters have a common characteristic. The movement of opinion is slower than the movement of events. Because of that, the cycle of subjective sentiments on war and peace is usually out of gear with the cycle of objective developments. Just because they are mass opinions there is an inertia in them. It takes much longer to change many minds than to change a few. It takes time to inform and to persuade and to arouse large scattered varied multitudes of persons. So before the multitude have caught up with the old events there are likely to be new ones coming up over the horizon with which the government should be preparing to deal. But the majority will be more aware of what they have just caught up with near at hand than with what is still distant and in the future. For these reasons the propensity to say No to a change of course sets up a compulsion to make mistakes. The opinion deals with a situation which no longer exists.
When the world wars came, the people of the liberal democracies could not be aroused to the exertions and the sacrifices of the struggle until they had been frightened by the opening disasters, had been incited to passionate hatred, and had become intoxicated with unlimited hope. To overcome this inertia the enemy had to be portrayed as evil incarnate, as absolute and congenital wickedness. The people wanted to be told that when this particular enemy had been forced to unconditional surrender, they would re-enter the golden age. This unique war would end all wars. This last war would make the world safe for democracy. This crusade would make the whole world a democracy.
As a result of this impassioned nonsense public opinion became so envenomed that the people would not countenance a workable peace; they were against any public man who showed “any tenderness for the Hun,” or was inclined to listen to the “Hun food snivel.”2
<h3 style="padding-left: 40px;">3. The Pattern of the Mistakes</h3>
IN ORDER to see in its true perspective what happened, we must remember that at the end of the First World War the only victorious powers were the liberal democracies of the West. Lenin, who had been a refugee in Switzerland until 1917, was still at the very beginning of his struggle to become the master of the empire of the Romanoffs. Mussolini was an obscure journalist, and nobody had dreamed of Hitler. The men who took part in the Peace Conference were men of the same standards and tradition. They were the heads of duly elected governments in countries where respect for civil liberty was the rule. Europe from the Atlantic to the Pripet Marshes lay within the military orbit of their forces. All the undemocratic empires, enemy and ally, had been destroyed by defeat and revolution. In 1918 — unlike 1945 — there had been no Yalta, there was no alien foreign minister at the peace conference who held a veto on the settlement.
Yet as soon as the terms of the settlement were known, it was evident that peace had not been made with Germany. It was not for want of power but for want of statesmanship that the liberal democracies failed. They failed to restore order in that great part of the world which — outside of revolutionary Russia — was still within the orbit of their influence, still amenable to their leadership, still subject to their decisions, still working within the same economy, still living in the same international community, still thinking in the same universe of discourse. In this failure to make peace there was generated the cycle of wars in which the West has suffered so sudden and so spectacular a decline.
Public opinion, having vetoed reconciliation, had made the settlement unworkable. And so when a new generation of Germans grew up, they rebelled. But by that time the Western democracies, so recently too warlike to make peace with the unarmed German Republic, had become too pacifist to take the risks which could have prevented the war Hitler was announcing he would wage against Europe. Having refused the risk of trying to prevent war, they would not now prepare for the war. The European democracies chose to rely on the double negative of unarmed appeasement, and the American democracy chose to rely on unarmed isolation.
When the unprevented war came, the fatal cycle was repeated. Western Europe was defeated and occupied before the British people began seriously to wage the war. And after the catastrophe in Western Europe eighteen agonizing months of indecision elapsed before the surprise and shock of Pearl Harbor did for the American people what no amount of argument and evidence and reason had been able to do.
Once again it seemed impossible to wage the war energetically except by inciting the people to paroxysms of hatred and to utopian dreams. So they were told that the Four Freedoms would be established everywhere, once the incurably bad Germans and the incurably bad Japanese had been forced to surrender unconditionally. The war could be popular only if the enemy was altogether evil and the Allies very nearly perfect. This mixture of envenomed hatred and furious righteousness made a public opinion which would not tolerate the calculated compromises that durable settlements demand. Once again the people were drugged by the propaganda which had aroused them to fight the war and to endure its miseries. Once again they would not think, once again they would not allow their leaders to think, about an eventual peace with their enemies, or about the differences that must arise among the Allies in this coalition, as in all earlier ones. How well this popular diplomacy worked is attested by the fact that less than five years after the democracies had disarmed their enemies, they were imploring their former enemies, Germany and Japan, to rearm.
The record shows that the people of the democracies, having become sovereign in this century, have made it increasingly difficult for their governments to prepare properly for war or to make peace. Their responsible officials have been like the ministers of an opinionated and willful despot. Between the critical junctures, when public opinion has been inattentive or not vehemently aroused, responsible officials have often been able to circumvent extremist popular opinions and to wheedle their way towards moderation and good sense. In the crises, however, democratic officials — over and above their own human propensity to err — have been compelled to make the big mistakes that public opinion has insisted upon. Even the greatest men have not been able to turn back the massive tides of opinion and of sentiment.
There is no mystery about why there is such a tendency for popular opinion to be wrong in judging war and peace. Strategic and diplomatic decisions call for a kind of knowledge — not to speak of an experience and a seasoned judgment — which cannot be had by glancing at newspapers, listening to snatches of radio comment, watching politicians perform on television, hearing occasional lectures, and reading a few books. It would not be enough to make a man competent to decide whether to amputate a leg, and it is not enough to qualify him to choose war or peace, to arm or not to arm, to intervene or to withdraw, to fight on or to negotiate.
Usually, moreover, when the decision is critical and urgent, the public will not be told the whole truth. What can be told to the great public it will not hear in the complicated and qualified concreteness that is needed for a practical decision. When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute. Even when there is no deliberate distortion by censorship and propaganda, which is unlikely in time of war, the public opinion of masses cannot be counted upon to apprehend regularly and promptly the reality of things. There is an inherent tendency in opinion to feed upon rumors excited by our own wishes and fears.
<h3 style="padding-left: 40px;">4. Democratic Politicians</h3>
AT THE critical moments in this sad history, there have been men, worth listening to, who warned the people against their mistakes. Always, too, there have been men inside the governments who judged correctly, because they were permitted to know in time, the uncensored and unvarnished truth. But the climate of modern democracy does not usually inspire them to speak out. For what Churchill did in the Thirties before Munich was exceptional: the general rule is that a democratic politician had better not be right too soon. Very often the penalty is political death. It is much safer to keep in step with the parade of opinion than to try to keep up with the swifter movement of events.
In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people.3 And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.
With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular — not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.
This devitalization of the governing power is the malady of democratic states. As the malady grows the executives become highly susceptible to encroachment and usurpation by elected assemblies; they are pressed and harassed by the higgling of parties, by the agents of organized interests, and by the spokesmen of sectarians and ideologues. The malady can be fatal. It can be deadly to the very survival of the state as a free society if, when the great and hard issues of war and peace, of security and solvency, of revolution and order are up for decision, the executive and judicial departments, with their civil servants and technicians, have lost their power to decide.
Footnotes
<hr style="padding-left: 40px;" />
1 Sir Harry Johnston, “Common Sense in Foreign Policy,” pp. 1–2, cited in Howard Lee McBain & Lindsay Rogers, The New Constitutions of Europe (1922), p. 139.
<div style="padding-left: 40px;">
2 Cf. Harold Nicholson, Peacemaking, Chap. III.
</div>
<div style="padding-left: 40px;">
3 “As we look over the list of the early leaders of the republic, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and others, we discern that they were all men who insisted upon being themselves and who refused to truckle to the people. With each succeeding generation, the growing demand of the people that its elective officials shall not lead but merely register the popular will has steadily undermined the independence of those who derive their power from popular election. The persistent refusal of the Adamses to sacrifice the integrity of their own intellectual and moral standards and values for the sake of winning public office or popular favor is another of the measuring rods by which we may measure the divergence of American life from its starting point.” James Truslow Adams, The Adams Family (1930), p. 95.
</div>
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">36711</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>The bigotry we are blind to</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/31/the-bigotry-we-are-blind-to/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/31/the-bigotry-we-are-blind-to/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Chris Lloyd]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 31 Mar 2023 07:27:59 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36689</guid>
<description><![CDATA[(Cross posted from On Line Opinion) Australians are very mindful of prejudice and discrimination in our community, and rightly so. Yet, many prejudices are so fashionable and pervasive that they go unnoticed. We are blind to some bigotries. I am … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/31/the-bigotry-we-are-blind-to/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[(Cross posted from On Line Opinion)
Australians are very mindful of prejudice and discrimination in our community, and rightly so. Yet, many prejudices are so fashionable and pervasive that they go unnoticed. We are blind to some bigotries.

I am a member of an ethnic and cultural group called Whyjens. You could probably guess this from my name alone.
It is with some shame that I acknowledge our massive over-representation in the prison population. This fact is routinely and publicly interpreted as an indication of our intrinsically violent nature. It is variously blamed on genes and/or culture both in the Australian and the Guardian.
When I draw people’s attention to the number of us who are incarcerated, it is greeted with the suggestion that it is “our own bloody fault” or even with mirth. I have been called a rapist on the basis of pure prejudice. I worry that my children hear such views and internalize them.
Yet, Whyjens are also massively over-represented among victims of crime. We are given harsher sentences for committing the same crime as non-Whyjens. Those of us who are incarcerated are commonly subject to rape without public outcry. It is just considered part of the punishment.
We are also over represented amongst alcoholics, drug dependents, the homeless and most forms of social dysfunction.
We have triple the suicide rate of the general population and significantly shorter life expectancy. But there is no public campaign to close the gap.
At every single age, from 1 year old to 100 years old, our mortality rate is higher. More recently, our Covid fatality rate was double that of non-Whygens.
We are subject to a unique and deadly form of cancer that only Whyjens can contract. Roughly 17,000 are diagnosed each year. Yet there is no special funding provided by government specifically towards Whyjen health outcomes. Indeed, government funded health research is openly targeted at non-Whyjens whose average life expectancy is longer than Whyjens. Total government grants awarded to non-Whygen medical research is four times that of Whygens.
Educational resources are explicitly diverted to non-Whyjens whose educational outcomes are already way better than Whyjens in almost all dimensions. Whygens are expelled from school at 10 times the rate of non-Whyjens. When I went to school we were the main victims of corporal punishment.
We are routinely the object of pejorative generalisations and jokes about our supposed incompetence, predisposition to violence and closeness to apes.
There is a popular book called “Whyjens are dogs” and “Why Whyjens are clueless”, openly available. Some years ago, I even saw a book called “Whyjens are vermin and should be killed.”
Whyjens are barred entry to many night clubs, being easily recognizable by our facial characteristics. More than 2 Whyjens have virtually no chance of entry. It is argued that too many Whyjens in the one place are likely to instigate violence. This is all legally sanctioned and approved of by the non-Whyjen majority.
Whyjens are still legally barred from attending certain public baths. I am banned from certain drinking establishments. I am charged more for insurance.
Whyjens are targeted and killed by police. In the US, police kill blacks compared to whites at rates 1.5 times higher than their population size would justify. Police kill Whyjens compared to non-Whyjens at rates 20 times higher.
Many tens of thousands of Whyjens have been forcibly separated from their children by court order and enjoy only very limited access. This stolen generation of children is denied access to their Whyjen heritage. Recent federal legislation, if passed, will consolidate this odious principle.
Qantas have an official policy of not letting unaccompanied children sit next to Whyjens, because of the fear that we might molest them.
In at least one democratic country, it is written into law that the penalty for murder will be less if the victim is Whyjen.
Indeed, it is the common view that the life of a Whyjen is worth less than the life of others and this had been embodied in policy at several levels. It permates Hollywood not to mention the reporting of crime. If a Whyjen murders a Whyjen it is barely newsworthy. In the reporting of both natural and man-made disasters, the deaths of non-Whyjens are listed first and separately and are considered more tragic by general consensus.
What is my ethnic-cultural group. Who are Y-gens? Is it some micro-ethnicity from Cymru-Wales?
Well, Y stands for a chromosome and gen stands for gender. We are males.
Did you guess the punchline? Check the facts yourself. It think it is a nice device to just list the facts and have the reader construct a deserving ethnicity in their own mind. The fact that Whyjen sounds a little like Uigers helps!
 
 
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<item>
<title>Extraordinary measures in extraordinary times</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/28/extraordinary-measures-in-extraordinary-times/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/28/extraordinary-measures-in-extraordinary-times/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 28 Mar 2023 05:16:04 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[One measure of the success of a social movement is the extent to which it creates a ‘commonsense’ that even its ideological opponents get roped into. That was the great triumph of neoliberalism — bringing the moderate progressive left into … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/28/extraordinary-measures-in-extraordinary-times/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_36685" style="width: 427px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-36685" class="wp-image-36685" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Me6njPz231Fk3tQRGy9UfhpH8g0046jpg-300x220.jpg" alt="" width="417" height="306" srcset="https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Me6njPz231Fk3tQRGy9UfhpH8g0046jpg-300x220.jpg 300w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Me6njPz231Fk3tQRGy9UfhpH8g0046jpg-1024x752.jpg 1024w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Me6njPz231Fk3tQRGy9UfhpH8g0046jpg-768x564.jpg 768w, https://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Me6njPz231Fk3tQRGy9UfhpH8g0046jpg.jpg 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 417px) 100vw, 417px" />This picture makes the obvious point that if we got an extremely large person to put on extremely large rubber gloves and gave them an extremely large scalpel, there is no end to the good they could do, starting with fixing up our crumbling political system</div>
One measure of the success of a social movement is the extent to which it creates a ‘commonsense’ that even its ideological opponents get roped into. That was the great triumph of neoliberalism — bringing the moderate progressive left into its fold. In fact it was the left — fancying itself the less stupid party and full of people who think about policy — who were the original entrepreneurs of deregulation in Australia, New Zealand and even the US — Jimmy Carter set off a lot of deregulation in transport and some other stuff in infrastructure. (One can even include Jim Callighan’s Government in the UK if you include his now canonical proposition that you can’t spend your way out of a recession — which is wrong by the way, but in context it probably wasn’t.)
And before neoliberalism, it was Nixon who embraced the New Deal consensus — and helped extend it to the environment and who said “we’re all Keynesians now”. Anyway, remember how they hated profiteers and got into all kinds of government intervention including rationing in WWII. Well that made good economic sense. And some government intervention in the presence of commodity price spikes makes sense today. Such interventions include domestic price caps and windfall taxes.
In the piece below Isabella Webber explores the case. It’s a pity that these discussions don’t simultaneously discuss institutional developments that might make government intervention safer and more likely to be unwound through time. Even if one has established that they’re good policy, there remain good reasons for neoliberal hesitancy on price controls based on the prospect of those policies being deployed on behalf of powerful interests — or political expediency — rather than the public interest.
The kinds of institutions one needs, require some insulation of the policy from day-to-day politics. We’ve traditionally dealt with that with independent agencies — like the RBA and the ACCC, though I’m increasingly persuaded that citizens’ juries can more effectively internalise the issues and arrive at the right answers.
<blockquote>The history of price stabilization goes back centuries, from the mists of classical China (my own <a href="https://www.routledge.com/How-China-Escaped-Shock-Therapy-The-Market-Reform-Debate/Weber/p/book/9781032008493" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">research focus</a>) to the major crises of the past century: World War II, the Korean War, and the stagflation of the 1970s in the United States. In each case, price-stabilization policies served as emergency measures aimed not just at “fighting inflation,” but at doing so in a fair and socially stabilizing manner. Their primary purpose was to attack profiteering (from wars, famines, and disasters) head-on. They have tended to work in highly concentrated markets, and when implemented before inflation spirals out of control, while performing poorly otherwise. And when carried out in democratic societies, through a mobilization of the population behind a common project of price restraint, they have been massively popular – especially when weighed against the alternative of austerity.
But by late 2021, that history had dropped out of the common sense of economics.
In February 2022, my colleague, Sebastian Dullien, and I set out to establish that there are indeed feasible alternatives to macroeconomic tightening. We <a href="https://twitter.com/IsabellaMWeber/status/1492562056242999298" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">proposed</a> a fiscally financed price cap on basic household consumption that would preserve market prices at the margins. This led to another round of criticism from economists. But our proposal also received strong endorsements from a wide range of interest groups.
Fast forward to September 2022, when I found myself appointed to a German government <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/transcript-isabella-weber-on-" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">commission</a> charged with designing a price-stabilization policy to address the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There, we developed the so-called “<a href="https://www.intereconomics.eu/pdf-download/year/2023/number/1/article/the-tale-of-the-german-gas-price-brake-why-we-need-economic-disaster-preparedness-in-times-of-overlapping-emergencies.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">gas-price brake</a>,” and the key principles that I had been advocating were subsequently enshrined in German law.
Germany is not alone in implementing a price policy. Across Europe (and in the United Kingdom), governments have implemented various forms of price controls to contain the war’s fallout in global energy markets. The European Union has <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64032130" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">enacted</a> a gas-price cap, the G7 has <a href="https://sanctionsnews.bakermckenzie.com/g7-sets-price-cap-for-russian-oil-at-usd-60-per-barrel/#:~:text=On%20December%203%2C%202022%2C%20G7,or%20are%20exported%20from%20Russia." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">imposed</a> a price ceiling on imported Russian oil, and the US government has leaned on the price of oil by <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/11/02/oil-gas-prices-strategic-reserve-biden" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">releasing supply</a> from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Moreover, leading economists have rushed to endorse selective, targeted price controls. By January of this year, <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/columnist/paul-krugman" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Paul Krugman</a> of the New York Times, for example, was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/inflation-economy.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">suggesting</a> that it might not be so foolish after all to respond to price explosions with price policies, even though he had <a href="https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1477247341212184577?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">criticized</a> this approach earlier.</blockquote>
I wrote this piece before I discovered that my normal subscription didn’t cover it — they wanted a ‘Premium’ contribution. I found a way to access it and reproduced the extract above, but just a warning. If you press the “More Here” button below, you may be able to read the rest of the piece, but save it because, if my experience is anything to go by, you’ll get locked out.
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<title>How did the Chilean left crash their referendum?</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/12/how-did-the-chilean-left-crash-their-referendum/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/12/how-did-the-chilean-left-crash-their-referendum/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 12 Mar 2023 11:56:30 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Economics and public policy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Political theory]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Politics - international]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36652</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I’ve been looking for an explainer of what’s been going on in Chile and, thanks to Brad Delong for pointing it out. Of particular interest was the way a government won 55 percent of the vote and then held a … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/12/how-did-the-chilean-left-crash-their-referendum/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-36653 alignright" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Plane-300x277.gif" alt="" width="300" height="277" />
I’ve been looking for an explainer of what’s been going on in Chile and, thanks to Brad Delong for<a href="https://braddelong.substack.com/p/interviewed-by-smart-thinking-books?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=47874&post_id=106138404&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email#:~:text=cheaply%20is%20key...-,Marc%20Cooper,-%3A%20Chile%27s%20Utopia"> pointing it out</a>. Of particular interest was the way a government won 55 percent of the vote and then held a referendum on a new constitution that crashed— as in really CRASHED!
It crashed not just because it left itself open to “a right-wing disinformation campaign”, but because (allowing for the usual kinds of misrepresentation that are standard operating procedure) it was the victim of a right-wing information campaign.
<blockquote>In July 2022, just four months after the inauguration, the constituent assembly released a draft of the new constitution that would be put up to a referendum in the fall. Laden with 338 articles, it attempted to do everything for everybody who had a hand in formulating it. The proposals ran from meat-and-potato social justice and economic rights issues to proposals that might seem exotic or downright utopian. They included assigning human rights to nature; abolishing the Senate and replacing the House with ill-defined regional committees; and changing Chile into a plurinational state that recognized indigenous territory as almost a standalone nation. The draft also included gender rights, sexual rights and propositions that were foreign to most Chileans, or at best, relatively new in Chilean politics.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-36656 alignright" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Toy-car.gif" alt="" width="250" height="194" />“It was way too much,” says Rene Rojas…. “There were two big categories of articles. On one side the basic social needs and rights like healthcare, education, housing, retirement to be guaranteed by the state. On the other hand, a group of more narrow identitarian social justice issues of all types: gender rights, ethnic rights, rights of nature that were all presented in a moralizing way
as special protections for people suffering narrow forms of oppression – not universalist ideas. And in the campaign to approve the draft, that second set of rights that drowned out the more basic, universal ones. It inverted the national mood.”</blockquote>
If you create rights in all things Good, then for them to actually be rights (as opposed to the usual bullshit) those rights have to be exercisable against someone. If they are to have any effect they will advantage some to the disadvantage of others.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-36655 alignright" src="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Car-crash-300x132.gif" alt="" width="300" height="132" />
My objection is NOT that I’m not in sympathy with many of the economic rights. James Tobin argued for them in the 1960s and 70s and plenty of mainstream progressive economists would have agreed. But he didn’t think you get those rights by putting nice sounding words in a legal document (they had those kinds of rights in the Soviet Union). He thought you get them by fighting for and building the institutions that will deliver them. But political schmooze won’t get you far in doing that. You need to start moving towards your preferred destination, and use that to explain what you’re up to to build support to go further.
Campaigning fairy floss won’t get you there any more than a nice ‘values statement’ appearing in your foyer will deliver the values. Here’s a telling quote:
<blockquote>“I think we all were really naive,” says Barrientos, the historian. “We thought that all this discontent that exploded in 2019 was the beginning of a political process. And we thought that it was a process that was leading to a major change, and we put too much faith in all the millions that marched. But I think it was more a catharsis – a major expression of different identities that exploded at the same time. But that’s different than a coherent political movement. If you ask me today what is the legacy of the 2019 social upheaval, I don’t have an answer.”</blockquote>
How often have we seen that kind of thing? Occupy Wall St for one. George Floyd another. Serious social change is hard slog. The (activist) left have been hard pressed to come up with anything much in the last couple of decades beyond the sloganeering of ‘defunding’ police and various woke campaigns. The actual politicians are still doing worthwhile things, such as the Biden Administration’s climate change initatives and the attempt to get more money to American children. The activist left — at least from what I’ve seen, not so much.
I’d add that the one reform that I think could pave the way for greater radicalism, though it would only create the preconditions for its possibility and it would take time to develop any momentum would be by building far more sortition into the way the constitution works. This gives politics much greater insulation against the alarums and excursions arranged by the right who are at a natural advantage because substantial parts of the media now operate as right-wing propagandists. The left have their own favoured media outlets but they mostly play by the rules — those working for them still think of themselves as doing news and current affairs, so are prepared to give progressives a hard time if they behave badly enough.
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<title>On understanding the other side of things</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/11/on-understanding-the-other-side-of-things/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/11/on-understanding-the-other-side-of-things/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 11 Mar 2023 07:41:01 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36645</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The only education I ever got was in history. And what history taught me is wrapped up in the story the premier English speaking philosopher of history of the 20th-century told about detecting the Albert Memorial. I wrote it up … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/11/on-understanding-the-other-side-of-things/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
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<picture><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="sizing-normal alignright" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8f44b9ea-8f8c-4cb8-90ac-12a34d1bbfb0_3000x2001.jpeg" sizes="100vw" srcset="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_424,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8f44b9ea-8f8c-4cb8-90ac-12a34d1bbfb0_3000x2001.jpeg 424w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8f44b9ea-8f8c-4cb8-90ac-12a34d1bbfb0_3000x2001.jpeg 848w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8f44b9ea-8f8c-4cb8-90ac-12a34d1bbfb0_3000x2001.jpeg 1272w, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8f44b9ea-8f8c-4cb8-90ac-12a34d1bbfb0_3000x2001.jpeg 1456w" alt="" width="474" height="316" data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8f44b9ea-8f8c-4cb8-90ac-12a34d1bbfb0_3000x2001.jpeg","fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":971,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":null,"alt":null,"title":null,"type":null,"href":null,"belowTheFold":true,"internalRedirect":null}" /></picture>
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The only education I ever got was in history. And what history taught me is wrapped up in the story the premier English speaking philosopher of history of the 20th-century told about detecting the Albert Memorial. I wrote it up <a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/83318-nicholas-gruen-evaluation-knowledge-comes-not-numbers-questions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">here</a>, but the upshot is a point that’s both obvious and routinely ignored: if you disagree with someone, chances are you might not appreciate the way they’re looking at something. And that’s dangerous (don’t you think?) when countries are at war or considering it. All countries have terrible problems with this, but the United States even more than most. Perhaps this is always true of the global hegemon.
In any event, that’s why John Miersheimer’s advocacy of his perspective is so valuable, even if ultimately he’s wrong. He’s trying to get supporters of Ukraine to understand something they don’t agree with. Since none of us are gods, since we’re all extremely fallible, good faith disagreement is incredibly important. Yet its amazing how fast it goes out the window.
Which is why I liked <a href="https://nonzero.substack.com/p/earthling-trading-places-with-xi?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=17302&post_id=107678392&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email">this piece</a> by Robert Wright, even down to its objection to the jingoist blinkers of American econoblogging wonderkindt Noah Smith.
<blockquote>This week Chinese leader Xi Jinping got a lot of attention by saying “Western countries—led by the US—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.”
The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-xi-jinping-takes-rare-direct-aim-at-u-s-in-speech-5d8fde1a?mod=article_inline" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">called</a> this “an unusually blunt rebuke of US policy” and the Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/08/xi-jinping-china-us/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">called</a> it “an unusually explicit public riposte of the United States by the Chinese leader.” And various commentators called it evidence of deep and irrational hostility. Fox News’s Laura Ingraham <a href="https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/1633438044169568258" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">said</a> that Xi “hates this country.” And social media pundit Noah Smith <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1633545158838083585" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">tweeted</a>, “What’s scary to me is that we heard similar rhetoric from Germany before WW1 and Japan before WW2.”
Funny he should mention World War I! Some social scientists consider that a paradigmatic example of nations leading the world to catastrophe through a misreading of each other’s intentions. President Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter he wrote a decade before war broke out, saw the dynamic at work:
<blockquote><a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/11/on-understanding-the-other-side-of-things/#footnote_0_36645" id="identifier_0_36645" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany">1</a> sincerely believes that the English are planning to attack him and smash his fleet, and perhaps join with France in a war to the death against him. As a matter of fact, the English harbor no such intentions, but are themselves in a condition of panic <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/11/on-understanding-the-other-side-of-things/#footnote_1_36645" id="identifier_1_36645" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="and">2</a> terror lest the Kaiser secretly intend to form an alliance against them with France or Russia, or both, to destroy their fleet and blot out the British Empire from the map! It is as funny a case as I have ever seen of mutual distrust and fear bringing two peoples to the verge of war.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<a href="https://nonzero.substack.com/p/earthling-trading-places-with-xi?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=17302&post_id=107678392&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email">More here</a>.
<ol class="footnotes"><li id="footnote_0_36645" class="footnote">Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany</li><li id="footnote_1_36645" class="footnote">and</li></ol>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>AI: is it coming for us? (No) Is it a big deal (Yes)</title>
<link>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/08/ai-is-it-coming-for-us-no-is-it-a-big-deal-yes/</link>
<comments>https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/08/ai-is-it-coming-for-us-no-is-it-a-big-deal-yes/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicholas Gruen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2023 08:41:29 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Best From Elsewhere]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Economics and public policy]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://clubtroppo.com.au/?p=36639</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I’ve started posting things here that I’m drafting for my weekend newsletter — which you can subscribe to here — so here’s another tidbit. This is an excellent podcast featuring an ‘industry expert’ and then someone who’s introduced as an … <a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/08/ai-is-it-coming-for-us-no-is-it-a-big-deal-yes/">Continue reading →</a>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://clubtroppo.com.au/2023/03/08/ai-is-it-coming-for-us-no-is-it-a-big-deal-yes/#footnote_0_36639" id="identifier_0_36639" class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" title="">1</a>">I’ve started posting things here that I’m drafting for my weekend newsletter — which you can subscribe to <a href="https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/">here</a> — so here’s another tidbit.
<div class="apple-podcast-container"><iframe class="apple-podcast " src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence-vs-humanity/id1661152233?i=1000603116828" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" data-attrs="{"url":"https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence-vs-humanity/id1661152233?i=1000603116828","isEpisode":true,"imageUrl":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/podcast-episode_1000603116828.jpg","title":"Artificial Intelligence vs. Humanity","podcastTitle":"Crash Course","podcastByline":"","duration":3140000,"numEpisodes":"","targetUrl":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence-vs-humanity/id1661152233?i=1000603116828&uo=4","releaseDate":"2023-03-07T09:00:00Z"}" data-mce-fragment="1"></iframe></div>
This is an excellent podcast featuring an ‘industry expert’ and then someone who’s introduced as an ‘economic genius’ — Tyler Cowan. The industry expert is good on salient facts to help you understand how we got to where we are now. American journalism seems to value this more than our own journalism which has a good deal more spin about it — and many more appearances on Insiders.
Meanwhile Tyler gives us his take on AI which is well worth listening to. He is indeed an amazing fellow. He runs his own podcast where he interviews people from a vast range of different backgrounds, casually demonstrating his own reading in the area. He seems to publish a book every year or other year. He runs a group blog, holds down an economics professorship and a Bloomberg column. And one of the books he published is on his own autism. You can notice it in his style. Anyway, it’s not surprising he’s so up on ChatGPT since he’s the nearest thing to ChatGPT team human has ever thrown together itself.
Naturally enough Tyler’s take is that AI could be a threat like any — he repeats “ANY” — important new technology but that it’s too early to regulate it — since we wouldn’t know how. And that in the meantime we should be excited about its ability to complement our own abilities. Indeed, while teachers and lecturers around the world see AI as a threat to their ability to examine their students, Tyler’s jumped out of the blocks in no time. Now of the three essays his students are assessed on, one examines them on their ability to use AI for research assistance and collaboration.
Which is cool.
Anyway, I recommend the podcast.
<ol class="footnotes"><li id="footnote_0_36639" class="footnote"></li></ol>]]></content:encoded>
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