Urgency is not Agency

I have a lot of students. For some reason, they wait until their assignments are almost due, and then they consult me. They seem to feel that unless there is urgency, there is no emergency. They forget that 'emerge' in its original sense implies the rise of that which is submerged, and the deeper it is submerged, the longer it takes to emerge.

It's for that reason that I must remind them that urgency is not agency. Just because the matter is of some urgency to a student doesn't mean that I must be spurred into action. Indeed, the closer it is to a deadline, the busier I seem to be. What used to be a same-day or eight-hour maximum turnaround time is now about 72 hours or three days simply because the queue for consultations is very long.

Advice for future students: get yours early to avoid disappointment — those who consult me now may be paying as much as a 100% premium over my usual rates. I can't help it; I want to help, but I won't die for my students, and the extra earnings go towards my medical insurance and maintaining the resources I use to help solve their problems.

Measuring 'Progress'

There's all kinds of waffling all the time about social and economic progress.

I think it's easier to just consider two likely factors, based on empirical observation. Societies and economies that are said to have progressed relative to others are those with a higher information flux density or energy flux density.

For those less enamoured of technical-sounding terms, 'flux density' is a measure of the rate at which something flows through a cross-sectional area. So a high information flux density implies that a lot of information is flowing through a specific cross-section. The more 'units' (how ever measured) of information or energy flow through an average cross-section of the society being evaluated, the more 'socioeconomically progressive' it can be said to be.

Whether this is a valid formulation or not is still debatable. However, it's an interesting place to start — my personal thesis that socioeconomic progress can be measured by information and/or energy flux density, or some combination thereof.

Why would such measures be valid?

Well, if information is being transferred from node to node (that is, meaning is successfully conveyed — a la communication theory — from one place to another), then teaching and learning, and other social tools, are implied. The higher the density, the more likely it is that it is for some purpose; it is unlikely that a lot of information is being routed from point A to point B for no reason at all (except, perhaps, for back-up and other 'modern' purposes). If large amounts of energy (of any kind) are being transferred from point A to point B, it is also unlikely that it is being used for no reason at all (except, perhaps, for aesthetic purposes such as decorative lighting).

Although there will certainly be exceptions, the chance of social complexity, diversity of thought, and diversity of purposeful action being present should increase with the increase in these flux densities. In order to make this more robust, I'd propose that successful 'flow' should be measured in terms of what was sent at the transmitting end and what was used at the recipient end. So if someone sends me an email and it is routed to my junk folder and deleted, that doesn't count, since no information transfer in a practical sense has occurred.

Let's see how it goes...

Water

Consider the molecules in a glass of water.

Randomly, some will diffuse upward, some downward. But this mobility is not equal; a molecule that reaches the top may escape into a more rarified state, escape the surly bonds of hydrogen bonding and be one with the upper air. Indeed, what holds most molecules of water back is other molecules of water.

Now consider this statement.

"The progress of the lowest 90% of the population is far lower than that of the highest 1% of the population."

There is nothing new under the sun. How can it be otherwise?

Well, yes, there are alternatives. If your glass of water is a glass of steam, then most of the molecules are in random motion and will soon escape the glass. Some will hit a glass wall and condense, having lost sufficient energy or been sufficiently attracted to the glass or other molecules of water. If your glass of water is a glass of ice, nobody goes anywhere.

But a glass of water is normally taken to be just that — a glass, with liquid water in it.

Economics Scaled

Like a fish, it should be — scaled and gutted. This bastard subject is cobbled together from the residues of common sense and inane graph-plotting. It's one of those subjects that presents too many hypotheses of ideal situations, elucidating nothing but plotting pretty relationships that one could easily obtain from empirical observation with no fancy names.

Brandy

Looking though the not-so-ancient archives...

The economic philosophy of Atlantis has always been to develop a global brand based on what the international community has determined to be benchmarks and other criteria of success.

Yes, it is success-by-rubrics. Instead of creating a brand, you find out what other people call success, aggregate it as far as your limited natural resources and native intelligence will allow, and call it a brand.

Dartington and the Gnome

When one trawls the archives, one learns the most amazing things. This is a tale of Lord Dartington before he became a Laboured Peer, and how he met a Gnome to surprising effect.

It seems that one Young, an inquirer into the lives of those in Londinium's sunrise quarter (what we would have called a muckraker, but now call a sociologist), dug deep into the past and decided (a la Marx) that the sad and sorry state of these lives was based on the fact that they were tagged as people of insufficient merit. Essentially, the apparatus that defines merit, and the delivery of labels of merit, had bypassed them to their everlasting disadvantage.

Young went to the Economic School of Londinium (as did the Gnome); his doctoral exercise was about these lives and was duly traded in for the doctor's cloak in 1955. The Gnome, as you may recall, received his a year later, in 1956, for his work on guessing how much income a nation might have.

Three years later, in 1958, Young, still not Baron Dartington, published a powerful satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which he predicted that birds giving themselves more exotic plumage would feather their nest at the expense of birds who did not know how to capitalise on their own plumage. In 1959, the Gnome started a country on the road to meritocracy. He seems to have convinced the Thunderer of the merits of meritocracy.

And so, Atlantis was founded on the misconception of a satire. Or so it seems. Myths are hard to work out, sometimes.

Four Convenient Myths of Education

There are four main myths of modern education:

1. That all students of the same age should be in the same school level or class.
2. That school should be timetabled.
3. That students should have streams, tracks, or fixed subject combinations.
4. That teachers should specialise.

The first three of these are issues of administrative convenience, based on various ideas such as Piaget's now somewhat discredited concept of stages of learning, Bentham's Panoptikon for prisoner surveillance, and other systems designed with the assumption that all humans behave similarly or ought to do so. The fourth also assumes that this is so of teachers, that teaching ability is something that can be trained as a specialisation, and if so, it works only if the training is keyed to a particular subject or group of subjects.

It is this last one which irritates me the most; the first three can be passed off, explained away, or excused partly on the basis of administrative concerns (more about which, later). However, if a person can learn many subjects from different teachers, why can't a person teach many subjects to different learners?

I think that only the absence of hard work, cognitive effectiveness, and communications skill might be obstacles to the ability to teach any subject well. This absence, however, should not be the case in anyone who has graduated from the system of education in which he or she is deployed to teach. After all, hard work, thinking and communicating are three basic traits all systems should imbue the student with in ANY system.

The main reason, going back to the other three myths, is that of administrative departmentalism. Administrators are happy to divide people into neat groups, in what is called a Fordist arrangement. This form of specialisation is economically tidy. It is also efficient but not effective, because it ring-fences knowledge in a world that requires transdisciplinary prowess.

And that brings me back to the idea of putting administrators in charge of systems. About two millennia ago, Paul of Tarsus, in a letter to the church at Corinth, spoke at length about spiritual gifts and the building-up ('edification') of the Church as a whole (you'll find this in chapters 12-14 of the First Letter to the Corinthians). He went so far as to rank the gifts of the Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 12:28).

In that ranking, he placed the gift of apostleship first; that is, the ability to establish and provide strong foundations for an organisation. Prophecy was second; that is, the ability to look forward and provide direction for an organisation. Teaching was third; that is, the ability to provide education and disseminate knowledge relevant to the organisation and its goals. These were the three major, numbered gifts.

He then listed as subsidiary gifts the following: wonder-working, healing, helping, administration, speaking in tongues — in that order. Indeed, he spent all of chapter 14 of that letter pointing out that the gift of speaking in tongues is of the least importance, especially if no interpreter is present or no interpretation is provided.

This is a key to breaking up the myths of education. Good education is provided by establishing firm cognitive foundations, mapping a way forward, and teaching each person to find their way through the map based on the principles earlier established. Mass education, like Fordist mass production and mass food provision, has corrupted good taste. Or as Paul pointed out in chapter 15, "Bad company corrupts good character."

In the case of an impoverished state in which paucity of resources forces standardisation or 'optimal' resource allocation, perhaps the first three myths have to be supported. But whomever aspires to be a teacher, that person should take a good hard look at the idea of specialisation and realise that teachers can, and should be able to, teach anything.

All it takes is sufficient preparation, time, and effort. And of course, if you're that teacher, bear in mind that no matter what language you think you're speaking, it's a good thing if your students understand what you're saying.

Altruism and Endeavour

I used to be a public servant. At that time, I calculated that I earned something like $1 per client per hour. Fortunately, clients came in groups of 30 or so. Even so, I received what I thought was a useful wage but one far from a professional one.

Time passed. I became a private operative. In terms of professional development, I got better (which you can interpret how you will).

I can now bill more than a hundred times the per client per hour rate. I have fewer clients but even so, I still am earning a few hundred percent more than I used to, on an hourly basis. And I can make use of my time more effectively in terms of my other life-goals and work-in-life balance.

But what to do when the public sector wants me to help out? For lawyers, there is often a pro bono element of public service; surprisingly, doctors have this too. But my own murky profession is one which every adult human being seems to think they can do — some think of it as a general human function that needs no specialist training. They are aghast when I present my bill, and they point out that some members of other professions don't charge so much.

I was heartened to see a healthy debate in the local press recently, concerning a surgeon who purportedly or allegedly charged way above the going rate for a wide range of highly specialised services. From my somewhat cloistered experience, I cannot imagine charging anyone so much, or that such charges can be justified. Of course, I could be wrong.

Over the last few years, I have come to realise that I too provide highly specialised services. Actually, I estimate that there must be about not more than 20 people in this state who can provide such services; not all of them are available or as easy to find. In fact, I suspect that the number is considerably smaller in practice.

As the Good Book says, "The workman is worthy of his hire," and, "Do not muzzle the ox when he is treading out the grain." I have therefore come to a position that includes an element of means testing: if my clients can pay without ceasing, I will accept that situation and charge a rate which is of benefit to me as well as to them, but is not artificially depressed; if my clients cannot afford this kind of standard rate, I will be altruistic and try to accommodate their situation by artificially depressing my costs and resulting fees as far as I can.

A truly grand endeavour is based on hard work and intense effort without token of reward apart from the pleasure of a job well done. However, a living must still be made, because it creates a sense of contract and collaboration in the professional community. This is why communities have traditionally always 'settled a living' upon the religious in their midst.

And that is why, absent a similar modern sensibility, I have to carve my pound of flesh (and blood) from the body politic. I don't do public service pro bono because (unlike many lawyers) I can't afford to upgrade my professional knowhow and maintain my current comfortable-but-not-luxurious lifestyle if I were to do that. But I do make a concession for those who labour in similar fields, because that too breeds amity and mutual respect.

Income Inequality

I've noticed a lot of people talking about income inequality these days, mostly revolving around the ideas of debt, fair wages, and how uncivilised such inequality seems. Very few grasp that it's somewhat inevitable in specific contexts.

Actually, it's inevitable in a context that is very specific and also very rarely thought about. All city-states are like that, because a city-state seldom has control over its hinterland except by huge investment in overwhelming military force.

Such investment normally cripples the economy, because you need to reward the soldiers and mercenaries. A rich city-state normally avoids that, one way or another, by disproportionately rewarding wealth generation, networking ability, and the personal power to control and manipulate others. And this is also how the state will define merit implicitly.

That's it in a nutshell. The whole argument is partly historical in nature and very much longer. Major footnote: see here.

The Demise of the Local

For a very long time, I used to get my weekly entertainment from the comics shop just down the road. Advice and opinions were free, and you could easily meet old friends and fellow regulars. The food in the area wasn't bad either.

One day, no explanations, they went down. Insolvent, I guess.

Local expertise, whether pharmaceutical or literary, is always trumped in the long run by mass-production and huge operations which are financially cost-effective. That's the way of the world.

The paradox is that because humans are rational people, we will indeed do what is less than best for ourselves. That's because most humans will go for the good of the short term rather than the best of the long term. A bird in the hand, as they say, is worth two in the bush.

This is why the world is the way it is. Banks and similar institutions created short-term profit instruments based on long-term fantasies. Rational humans went for them. There was just enough to cover short-term rationality, like the lure at the end of a very long fishing-rod.

Our experiences with the long-term, however, are seldom encouraging. After all, you could die before you get to the end of the line. That's why humans are only rational with respect to the kinds of payout you get when you can see the end of the line — that's why people will sacrifice the life they will likely lose anyway when it will save more lives, and that's why you get deathbed conversions.

And that's why the local mum-and-pop shops down the road will just keep failing unless they find themselves a truly integral niche in the local ecology, one that provides benefits for many without particularly high overheads and with sufficient profit to continue, one day at a time, regardless of trend. Something like professional tuition, maybe.

Atlantean Standards (Part II)

In the mighty shadow of legendary Atlantis is a tiny residue named the City of Lions, Sñgapur in the tongue of the Ancients. Today, I sat in Sñgapur along the concrete orchard with Gnomus and we meditated on the perversity of local standards. The once-colonial residents of the residue still have it in their cash-besotted heads that an overseas education at an institute with a Greater Name is always going to be superior.

Sadly, that is a myth in all kinds of cases except perhaps three. The local universities (actually, there are now four of them) are more than adequate for a serviceable education that is of relevance to the region. The only reasons you might profitably 'go overseas' are a) because the life in the metropolis of your destination is significantly more interesting and you will therefore learn more of the kinds of things which interest you and are actually nothing to do with what you are studying; b) because the quality of intellectual stimulation from unusual people and professors is very high, and it actually trickles down (as is not always the case) to the undergraduate population; and c) because you intend to live and work and have your being there, so you are actually halfway through the export process and will only come back (I'm not saying 'come home', note) as an expatriate of your new country.

Even sadder, there is one major reason why people want to 'go overseas', and it has nothing to do with education. In Sñgapur, there is a sizeable proportion of wealthy people who have had the accumulation and/or retention of wealth as one of their main existential pillars. The problem is that if you choose this as an existential pillar, it makes you feel more secure when that pillar is showing. It is hard to live for it (or with it as a given) and not defend its display (or display it as a defence of your existence).

That means, as Gnomus and I have found out to mixed sensations of hilarity and sober melancholy, that people spend money for ostentation's sake. If your education takes place somewhere which requires you to spend 200,000 local thalers, it is far more demonstrative of status than if it takes place here and costs you a tenth of that. Education is one of the few ways that a person can spend ostentatiously and still feel good about it, as well as defend the practice in any of the social circles that 'matter'. (Oddly, giving the same amount — for example, the 180,000 thalers saved — to charity feels wrong to most people here.)

But defences of practice are very strongly and quickly erected. Talk to any of the young people who are victims of this particular ostentation, and they will say, "Overseas education is good for you. You will be less narrow-minded and you will become a more effective human being, able to appreciate more things and understand more about life!"

Bollocks, really. Take a moment to reflect on the logical and empirical reality.

If overseas education (in general principle) is good for you, then the people at your destination should come down to the various states in this region for their education. If they don't, then they are narrow-minded. Hence you will be surrounded by narrow-minded people. Of course, if they all come here, and your friends all go there, then you will be surrounded by the same people that you have been with all along, which is hardly a recipe for learning something new about people.

More to the point, if you believe that people educated in local universities are narrow-minded, then this blog must be written by a singularly narrow-minded person who hangs out with other narrow-minded people (like the Policeman and my own Lady) who have all been educated here. I would love to see a student walk up to Gnomus and accuse him of having too narrow an education. And I would genuinely be glad if a student, after reading every post in this blog, came up to me and said, "Findings-writer, I think your education is narrower than mine." I would learn something new, then.

Why then are people in Sñgapur seen as narrow-minded? Is the writer of this blog an exceptional case?

Let me try to answer these questions in the context of higher education.

In general (and I must stress, IN GENERAL), Sñgapurians are very focussed individuals who don't realise that even when we are being (or trying to be) avant-garde, artistic, creative, iconoclastic (etc, etc), we are still chained by their colonial past and our mercantile ancestry.

When it comes to education, the former makes us tend to rank other cultures tacitly in this order: 1) Western because of the Enlightenment, with Anglo-Americans first because they speak English, the colonial Master-Tongue, and with special dispensations for other Europeans in various areas of snob appeal; 2) Asian because all major civilisations and religions spring from the zone between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Pacific Ocean; 3) others because they are 'other than'. Some will dispute this, but it's quite clear from university choices that we are overwhelmingly Anglophone in higher education because of our common colonial legacy of language. Most often, people here are just bored and want something new. Anything will do.

The latter, our mercantile ancestry and related familial culture makes us tend to evaluate everything in terms of economic factors — the consequent mental ranking does not normally conflict with the other ranking. This is why Sñgapurians are often narrow-minded. A lot of us can't escape our chains. Especially if we are chained by economics (such as government bonds, personal wealth and the need to display it, and the idea of financial value).

Am I an exceptional case? Actually, we are all exceptional cases if we choose to be. It only takes a bit of effort to stop living life as if analysis consists of polling your relatives and friends and favourite websites, and start thinking about who you really are and what you intend to do with your life.

In this post, I have only outlined a general situation. It is not true that all Sñgapurians are like this, or that those who go overseas have no legitimate reason for doing so. Some have very good reasons for doing so; some of them have excellent reasons without even knowing what these might be. Some will gain a lot from an overseas education, even if you exclude the bonuses that a Greater Name education can bring because of the associated memetic payload. It is also true that Sñgapurians can be narrow-minded for many other reasons, sometimes to do with religion or mental capacity.

All that Gnomus and I want is for the students who we taught and who we still teach to be able to choose their course based on firm principles (whether materialist or spiritual or otherwise) and be honest about those principles. If you are bored with being a resident in a residue, say so. If you want the status associated with a Greater Name, say so. That's the least that anyone can ask of you.

Atlantean Standards (Part I)

I am beset with images from my past as a young man in a world of crusades and crusaders. I remember the hymns: in one, exhortation to lift high the Constantinian standard; in another, to follow 'standards of worth, o'er all the earth'. In all of these, the idea of a standard is literally that of a rallying-point, a banner, a flag, a sign that will 'stand hard' against all enemies.

It was in the age of the moderns, from the 18th century or so, that the meaning of 'standard' finally fell into the sense of 'a definite level of attainment or achievement'. No more knights keeping watch on the mountain heights, no more banners unfurled o'er all the world.

Tonight I was with family, and not for the first time, the talk drifted into the realms of a curious statistic that all present had cause to track out of interest. It was something to do with standards, in the latter, weaker sense.

In Atlantis, split the healers into two groups. For every hundred, take fifty into the first group and put fifty in the second group. Call the first group 'private healthcare' and the second 'public healthcare'. This is the Atlantean healing ministry. Now take all those who are ill and unwell, who suspect their bodies are failing and who are sick in the organic sense. Divide them, for every hundred, into twenty and eighty. Put the twenty into the first group, the eighty into the second group. Yes, this is true; in Atlantis, half the healers attend to one fifth of the unwell — this is the private sector. It follows therefore that the healers in the second group work four times as hard, normally for about half the pay (or less). The main consequence of this is that healers in public service often want to move to the private sector, where their quality of life will improve eightfold or more.

It is the same in the teaching ministry, although the pay differential is not that great. Rather, the independent fiefdoms of education may sometimes generate gross inequities. There are idle sods in some of those fields who cultivate and nurture a bare fraction of the crops that others do, but yet earn twice as much for their clever neglect of the more difficult crops.

It is this which makes me pessimistic for the future of Atlantean standards. An infamous study shows that whereas the mighty mercantile arm of Atlantis generates a whopping GDP on par with some more-established mercenary economies, her people's prosperity payload (PPP) is more akin to that of some of the poorer pirate 'nations'. Atlanteans are mostly poor; it takes them decades to pay off the burden of their 'public housing' which once was a beacon of hope in that island of the main. As my mother pointed out (and as I have mentioned before), her salary in days of yore would have bought six thousand bowls of noodles a month, of which she only needed sixty or fewer (since they were BIG bowls) — for me, her poor firstborn, my far larger salary would not have sufficed for a thousand, and those rather scanty unless concocted by the generous couple at the noodle stall in the old place.

Our money, it seems, is not up to the standard it used to be. And neither is the quality of our striving. What is the point, then, of throwing inferior money at superior problems? Most of us have already surrendered to economic temptation and fallen into the ways of the dark side. Just consider how many professionally unqualified scum are out there making easy pickings from people who want their flab surgically removed, while the poor and sick get treatment of a much lower level than they would otherwise have got from these greedy louts called aesthetic physicians.

Free market? 'Faugh!' I say. No market is free when the information symmetry and the level of intelligence (and greed) are so disparate. We should string the self-advertising, pocket-enhancing buggers up to dry, from the highest of our standards, and let real surgeons do real work for those who need it. Perhaps the teachers should do their part too, so that the daft will know that sucking the fat out of the abused body confers no health benefit at all, but increases the chance of an ignominious death.

World, Flesh and Development

A couple of thousand years ago, in Palestine, an infamous rabbi had an equally infamous disciple (at least, from a modern day perspective, for he was the one who gave us the modern sense of a Greek word that used to mean 'unveiling') who said, "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."

Today I was sitting in a place in Somerset, watching the world go by, when the Meme said to me, "Y'know, the whole world depends on people spending a lot of money on what they don't need. If people only spent money on what they needed, everyone would be poor and the world would fall apart."

It makes a terrible kind of logical sense. And trying to reverse this pattern is not possible unless there is some sort of apocalypse first. Perhaps in 2012? Heh.

Adam Smith and the Facebook Gnomes

Actually, I was going to call this post Adam Smith and the Facebook Gnomes: Productivity Theft and the Wealth of Nations but it was too long a title to capture anyone's attention seriously. The reason for this post is that the time has come for self-flagellation and sad introspection on the demerits of modern online life.

Adam Smith wrote, in his 1776 masterpiece The Wealth of Nations, "When [a worker] first begins his new work, he is seldom very keen and hearty... for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose. Rural workmen obliged to change work and tool every half hour develop slothful and lazy habits."

In other words, multitasking (the doing of many things in an intertwined way) is a productivity sink. Many studies have shown that quick distractions result in long-term time wasting as the brain attempts to reorient itself. Work breaks actually break work. It is better, for example, to develop the habit of working 4-6 hour stretches on one objective than to work an hour, take a breather, and return to work.

However, the personal experience of modern man is such that most people find it psychologically impossible to work for long stretches. Rather, we make a virtue of short attention spans and call it multitasking. This, as Adam Smith points out, reduces productivity and the quality of work.

On the other hand, there are some specific areas of work which require true multitasking — the seamless perception of reality and its manipulation towards multiple ends through common activity. True multitasking is about doing many things at the same time, not doing bits of things in quick rotation or succession. Most of these areas of work require multiple people: think of the way a restaurant (or an orchestra) works, for example.

I've been letting myself take Facebook breaks too often, I think. I spent a day monitoring my productivity and was aghast to find that a day without Facebook adds about five hours of work at least! Going out for lunch actually takes two hours unless you are very focussed — and further downtime may be added if you then feel dozy after a heavy meal. In one day, I realise that unless I am actually teaching, making notes while reading, or doing active and specific research (as opposed to flitting through the internet) I might be wasting up to eight (!!) hours of my 12-hour working day just doing nothing specifically useful.

Woe is me... I feel a sudden urge to take a good look at the dour Scottish Protestantism that made a virtue of hard and unstinting labour without distractions between sunrise and sunset.

I hear it got a lot less dour and more fun after sunset though.

Educational Values

On a warm August morning in 1963, 144 years after the Gambler, the Gnome pronounced these fateful words: "I have always regarded the pursuit of knowledge as the noblest and the most rewarding activity of mankind... If I were asked what is the most important single criterion by which to judge the prospects of any underdeveloped country, I would have no hesitation in saying that it is its attitude towards education." He said this in the context of a talk entitled 'Industrial Growth and Political Stability'.

The problem of course is that defining development is the difficult part. The Gnome grappled with it all his life; he said early on that you would need to look at it sociologically, psychologically, culturally, economically, historically — and you would still be like the blind men and the elephant. In fact, he said, you would be reduced to the maxim of, "I'll know it when I see it."

The issue is perhaps more clearly delineated as one of what kind of development you are looking for. The Gnome's world was primarily an economic one, although in his writings you can sense the frustration he had in realising that his beloved economic precepts were inadequate. In fact, he once said (firmly tongue in cheek) on the eve of a trip to the Annual Conference of the World Bank and IMF that he had to abstain from saying certain things because a) it would not be prudent for a small state to cause unnecessary offence to the great, and b) one should not go to the College of Cardinals reeking of heresy.

He always believed that education was the root of success. The problem was that it was inexorably linked in his mind to economic success, as well as cultural depth and political stability. He linked it to many other things, but the one thing that comes across was that he believed his people to be economically rational, perhaps to the exclusion of other things.

To this day, this is still the problem. Even those who lament the dearth of non-economic values in the national discourse are trammelled by the fact that Atlantis was a state born out of entrepreneurial migration and entrepot trade. The measure of man in modern Atlantis is his effectiveness as some sort of economic factor — how effective, how influential, how good a leader, how able to defend what has been raised.

The great thing about the Gnome, on closer reading, is that he was indeed decidedly heretical in his economic insights. He believed that state control was a good thing in parallel with a free market. That sounds odd, but in the 1960s, when he first said it, it sounded perilously like crypto-Marxism to some in the West. But the Gnome was really an avowed pragmatic socialist, if anything else. His was the world of Weber as well as Marx, of Adam Smith but only as far as an appropriate scale for the exercise of the invisible hand. He believed that the invisible world was all well and good, but it went with a visible glove, at the very least.

All that has crept into the metrics by which we measure local education. It is all very numerical, and if not, it is quantitatively qualitative. We have awards for things like 'Character Development', and schools list these awards — the more awards for qualitative development, the better. It is all very disturbing to those who look at the system from outside.

People, however, deserve the education they desire. For all the bitching, people here love the reliability of the system in the sense of its replicable behaviour, schedules, and concepts. They might dispute the validity, but seldom the utility. And that is probably how the Gnome would have wanted it.

Impressions of Two Nobel Economists

I've been reading stuff by two winners of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences: Amartya Sen (1998) and Paul Krugman (2008). They are separated by about 20 years of age and 10 years between prizes.

I have to say that I find Sen much more readable; Krugman's style is dry to me, hard to get into. Sen's subject matter is more universal: what is the role of reason in ethics, what is justice, what kind of balance should we seek between human freedoms and economic development.

I find myself slipping Sen-ward. Not that Krugman is bad; he is very alive in his own way, although not lively. I read his The Accidental Theorist years ago; I am still working through The Conscience of a Liberal. But I would put Krugman aside for Glen Cook, which I wouldn't do with Sen.

Meanwhile, I've had another look at Sam Huntington. Oh dear, he's full of nonsense.

Skill-Based Technical Change

There's this loony hypothesis in economic circles that had me in stitches (especially after reading what I've been reading for the last 18 months on technological history). It's apparently a fairly entrenched idea that economic inequality stems to a large extent from technological change; the reasoning is that those with technical skills can parlay those skills into economic force multipliers or something, so they get richer faster. This is called 'skill-based technical change' (SBTC) theory.

I don't think so. That's not how technology (not itself a well-understood term) works. But apart from that, there are actually two models of technological spread that are very different, and work against the SBTC model.

Firstly, there's the 'ubiquity' model. In this model, technology spreads very quickly until everyone has the tech. This is the empirical case with many technologies — washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, radios, MP3 players, pottery, the plough, road-building, brick-making. Given a general technological level in a society, some techs will become ubiquitous very quickly. Once the coiled-coil tungsten wire technology became available, incandescent bulbs became ubiquitous within years.

Secondly, there's the 'patent control' model in which the tech originator deliberately makes it hard for the tech to become ubiquitous. But because the only way that's possible is if the tech requires a very high level of tech (e.g. stealth materials tech (and in the past, steel), requiring a large industrial base to be economically viable) or it is very arcane (e.g. stealth materials tech (and in the past, steel), which very few people understand in detail). Such tech is too expensive to give people an advantage.

Real-life examples are doctors and lawyers. The two are oft-cited examples of professional middle-to-upper class prosperity. But as my doctor and lawyer friends will tell you, the economic benefits aren't as obvious as you might think. Doctors have it worse; they tend to get sued more often and need far more supporting tech — lawyers only need information and brains.

The real money-makers often don't have a tech advantage at all; if anything, they are really good at networking and deal-making, which are social advantages. They make use of technology, but the advantage of technology is unclear at best. Any tech they do use doesn't enable them to get rich faster then the next 40% of population, simply because tech of that kind is ubiquitous tech — computerised trading systems etc. It's again brain and skill.

So is inequity accelerated by technology? I don't think so. The same people who argue for SBTC models also acknowledge that a large middle class is created by tech ubiquity, which means the bottom moves up faster than the top. Which, in turn, means technology should actually work against wealth inequity. Maybe some economist can correct me on this point.

Input-Driven Education Systems (IDES)

It was just two weeks ago that I was mulling over the following oft-quoted passage from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The Family capo who sat with me was chortling over some curious similarities that he, a venerable and powerful individual, saw between the eponymous leader and a certain local educator. Let me supply the quotation first, before I tell you the rest. This is from Act I, Scene II.

Caesar:
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,
Cry 'Caesar!' Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear.

Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.

Caesar:
What man is that?

Brutus:
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

I pointed out to my associate that it was I who should have feared the ides of March, a year and a half gone. He shook his head. He said, "Well, you weren't assassinated. And besides, I think you should be in another play!" To which I replied, "No Prince Hamlet, I."

The conversation moved on. But I was made to recall how, in a fit of blatant stupidity, some people had actually been confused about the Church/State dichotomy expressed in the quotation, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (See Matthew 22:15-22.) I was told that by quoting this line, I was making reference to that same local educator and calling him Caesar. Haha, it was one of the most Kafkaesque moments of my life!

But the way that this conversation turned towards that same man was rather instructive. Several episodes were quoted about how this person was running an institution without adequate spirit, innovation, intelligence, or attention to educational principles. It was pointed out that the only reason good results were still being produced was that the students were being culled early and often, so that only the best students were being allowed to take key examinations.

Alternatively, internally-moderated assessments were rigged to allow for better results to be posted; an assessment designed to be given once was thus carried out a second time for students who were deemed not to have met the minimum grade desired. This was defended as 'being good for the students', which of course was true in a grade-oriented sense but certainly was not something done in a spirit of fairness. Students were therefore graded not on the strength of their natural performances, but on the strength of the performances that the executives decided they should be producing.

The last episode quoted to me was one in which the CEO told students that if they did not meet the equivalent of a Cambridge admission grade in the middle of the second year of their secondary education, they would be dropped from the programme. This bar was raised even higher for the final examination.

What to make of such stories? I've seen these things happen for years, throughout the system, in isolated hotspots of chicanery. To my everlasting shame, I suppose I have been part of such things, though on the periphery, without making sufficient noise, letting off steam, or blowing whistles. A misplaced sense of loyalty can be a terrible thing.

Yet there are important lessons to be drawn from this kind of episode. The learning points become more obvious by analogy especially when looking back at economic situations like the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 (now more than a decade ago), and the more recent events of the year just past.

In the former situation, economic results were boosted by the extreme ratio of input-driven vs productivity-driven processes. Essentially, throwing effort into making more and more things, rather than making better things, or making things better, screwed up the system and brought about a crash. In the latter situation, borrowing based on imaginary money (well, more imaginary than usual, that is) eventually led to attenuation of belief, a crisis of disbelief, a failure of suspension of disbelief, and a hefty and terrible dose of consequent reality therapy.

I've seen both of these things developing for a while now. He who has ears, let him hear.

Generational Politics

I've always wondered about charging schemes (pardon the pun) for electricity. When we were young, they taught us that the electricity bill was calculated in terms of kilowatt-hours (kWh); that is, the amount of electricity used to do work multiplied by the amount of time. This looked perfectly reasonable; after all, with terms like 'flow' and 'current', it was almost as if electricity was like water, something turned on and off at the tap.

But I was just thinking in recent months... what is the main difference between water and electricity? The main difference is that it is easier to store water; you generate electricity and if it's not used, nothing happens and the electricity is 'wasted'. In fact, it doesn't matter how many people use mains electricity as long as the load limit isn't exceeded; excess capacity is just excess.

There is a case for conservation of water, of course. We should keep as much reserve water as possible and not waste it. But domestic electricity is just a sideshow compared to what's used in industry. We should be allowed to use electricity as much as we can, up to a certain limit, for a flat fee. I'm sure the reason we don't get this privilege is a political one and not a scientific one.

In fact, the main opposition to Edison's electrical lines was Tesla's wireless effect, first patented in 1904. The difference between the two is a simple one. Edison's wires received financing simply because you can put a meter on a wire and charge for usage (like a tollbooth on a highway), while Tesla's approach would have made it impossible to charge for electricity at all.

Yes, it all comes down to this. Econs students, take note. The only way to really make money is through inefficiencies. If the free market had no failures at all, you'd be paying exactly how much something was worth, and in a sense, nobody would be making qualitatively outrageous profits.

In the case of electricity, if practically infinite energy was to be produced, as Tesla hoped when he studied the harvesting of universal energy, then eventually, everything would be free except craftsmanship, style and imagination. Edison won because people could understand how money could be made from his system of electricity distribution. But Nikola Tesla was a far better scientist, a visionary and a genius.

Then again, nobody has ever been able to prove that intelligence is a winner.

When Pigs Fly

I will always remember one of the rhymes of my childhood, picked up in what used to be a green and pleasant land (and still is, in parts):

Little birdie flying high
Dropped a message from the sky
Angry farmer wiping eye
Thanking God that cows don't fly

But cows jump over the moon; they don't fly. Rather, we often talk about 'when pigs fly', and we talk of cabbages and kings while thinking of whether pigs have wings. Unfortunately, as events of the last 48 hours have unfolded in all their diseased authority, it's not about whether pigs fly, but whither swine flu.

The basic facts can be found at the CDC website and the WHO website. Swine flu is an old disease; it has been known for almost a century. But the virus that has manifested in Mexico City, killed nearly a hundred people and migrated for parts unknown, ah, well... that H1N1 virus is a mutant which seems to have combined avian, pig and human flu viruses in one multipotent package that won't do humans, pigs, birds (or pigs with wings) any good.

Think of it this way: it is like the SARS virus of recent memory, with one difference. That difference is a significant one. SARS victims who were infectious could be detected by their high fevers. The new mutant makes you infectious possibly before anything can be detected. It also seems to spread just as quickly.

Even as I type this, I am conscious that confirmed cases have now spread from Mexico into their large and internationally-connected northern neighbour. The United States now has confirmed and suspected cases from California in the West, to Kansas in the Midwest, Texas in the South and New York in the East. Sea to shining sea, indeed.

The genie is out of the bottle while the disease centres of the world (like failing lymph nodes or flailing neurons) attempt to play catch-up. It is obvious that since the virus first emerged in March, nobody knew how bad it would be. And now, suddenly, it is bad, and it is everywhere.

Maybe we're wrong and it will peter out under our careful and widespread measures. But maybe not. Maybe the huge reserves of Tamiflu™ and suchlike will indeed conquer all. But maybe not.

What is probably true is that somewhere, the gnomes of this world are attempting to figure out what the impact of this latest blow will be on the world's economies. Or the world economy. It won't be good.

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Note: Some states have already gone to yellow emergency: screening at airports. The WHO has "agreed that the current situation constitutes a public health emergency of international concern". Heh.