The original story:
“Has capitalist ideology failed us?”
BBC Radio 4 Today Programme (listen again)
23 November 2009, 08.55hrs

Summary of the story:
The Today programme set up their “listen-again” with this blurb:

In his new book How Markets Fail, John Cassidy claims that the economic calamity of 2008 did not shatter principles of capitalism as there is not a static set of capitalist principles to destroy. John Cassidy and Executive vice chair of the Work Foundation, Will Hutton, debate who got it most wrong in the Credit Crunch.

John Cassidy argues that we are at a turning point after 30-odd years of Thatcherite Reaganism which discredits “ultra versions” of the free market especially as applied to financial markets. Will Hutton said that it had been a “giant intellectual mistake” to think that while markets work some of the time, they could work all the time.  Alan Greenspan, both contributors thought, was at the centre of all this, based on an ideological view of how markets work. The result is a “vast problem for Britain”. JC said we would “row back” from the extremes of the market view. WH said that there’s a lot of new economic thinking springing up without a clear left right view and a new interest in behavioural economics. JC finished with the remark that Adam Smith’s view that “we can all leave it to the market has been discredited.”

livingissues comment:
It is certainly true that a good deal of commentary suggests that we are re-evaluating free markets. We are revisiting the idea that markets are in equilibrium, that economic players are both rational and selfish, that deregulation is good. It is also often said that John Maynard Keynes has been returned to favour and Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek are out of it and that fiscal intervention not monetarism are the order of the day.

However, it is only fair to say that “old” economics has been discussing all these themes for a very long time and there is no particular hope that some new style of the discipline will spring up and solve ancient problems. For instance, whilst “behavioural” economics does indeed discuss economic players who have consciences and moods, old economics itself spent a good deal of time discussing, for instance, the mood swings which afflict markets. I’m thinking of Keynes’s “animal spirits” and the reviled Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance”, just to cite two sources thought to be at opposite ends of the spectrum.

It is true that market theory discusses the idea of a crowd of perfectly-informed players producing a market-clearing price in a way which can’t be bettered. But even market enthusiasts accept that all players are not likely to be equally well-informed, and that markets are not all-wise (for a start there are “market failures” to do with “externalities” such as environmental issues (which the market doesn’t price properly).

Even though its own fans acknowledge that the free market is richer, weirder and less perfect than theory suggests, in the current crisis they stress that financial breakdowns  like the present really might have been avoided if the markets had been freer. In short, financial institutions took risks in part because they were encouraged by governments to do so. There was, for instance, a surplus of cheap money, a surfeit of government encouragement (and even a tacit guarantee) of “bad” loans to customers (who were also voters) who were not good risks.  Besides, the banks fooled themselves that new-fangled and complex financial instruments were safe. This was a mistake which flowed from their not being rational enough market players who ruthlessly sought full information because failure would have been fatal to their own livelihoods. A truly free market would have kept them more fearful and lot less trusting.

In short, it is not as clear as some commentators suggest that there was once an all-powerful freemarket ideology which created a colossal danger and which now be over-ridden in favour of a more statist, enriched, socialised capitalism which would be vigorous, attractive, safe and responsible.

The original story:
“American journalism needs public support”
Leonard Downie
Financial Times
21 October 2009

Summary of the story:
Leonard Downie, a veteran senior journalist, not least with the Washington Post, argues that there is an interesting response to the crisis afflicting the US newspaper market. Funded from all sorts of sources (and even their own pockets), journalists are putting their own journalism, and that of colleagues of many sorts, online. Furthermore, some bloggers - with diverse sources of funding (and none) are putting good journalism on their sites.  

Downie argues that the many varied sorts of funding for this work should include some sort of state subvention too.

livingissues comment:

There is much to celebrate here. The implication is that journalists can:

(1) sometimes become profit-centres in their own right;
(2) usually get their stuff out there very cheaply;
(3) be funded directly to create their journalism.

As Downie says, everyone from universities to philanthropists and special interest groups can fund this new model.

More generally:
We might want to remember that the future of opinion journalism is much less problematic than the future of news-gathering and investigation. Very good opinion can be produced free or is very easy to pay for (by appreciative users of blogs, for instance).

News is not necessarily expensive: many bodies from law courts to firms to armies can produce high quality and invaluable material for virtually no cost and in their own or the public interest. Much of this can be reaily assessed for its accuracy, and outlets will soon gain or lose reputations for accuracy.

But much news is very expensive to produce and the many new outlets may benefit from sort of professional quality monitoring.

Mr Downie’s own piece suggests that there are lots of ways putting that funding in place.(I have argued elsewhere for a National Media Trust).

One could argue that Mr Downie is quite wrong to reach for state support for this burgeoning process. The state’s influence would be stodgy and tend to the monolithic. It could be argued, surely, that this is a case where society could gain strength by informing itself by the involvement of as many voluntary or market sources as possible?

The original story:
“In defence of the dismal science”
Robert Lucas
The Economist
6 August 2009

Summary of the story: 
Robert Lucas, a distinguished economist, defends his trade. He argues that economists are getting better at forecasting the effects of various possible and likely future events, and better at dealing with events as they come along. He adds that the future to a large extent is a mystery and will remain one.

(Other valuable contributions to the debate came from Robert Skidelsky and Samuel Brittan, in the Financial Times, 6 August 2009.)

livingissues comment:
This is nothing like the last word on a very difficult problem. In effect, Robert Lucas seems to be saying that economists are good at dealing with economic facts provided they are known. This implies (for instance) that when a bank owns assets whose value and riskiness is unknown (as was the case with quite important chunks of bank assets in 2007 and 2008), it’s pretty hard for economics to get a grip on the banks’ situation. So predicting a banking collapse isn’t all that easy. But he goes on to say that the same sort of economics (especially the use of complex modelling) which is accused of knowing less than it thinks, actually was able to respond much better to the 2008/9 crisis than would have been the case previously. What’s more, it built on insights from Keynes and Friedman.

Some of this is in line with the kind of problem Donald Rumsfeld usefully described as he accounted for the difficulty of running a war.

 “….  as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

It is possible to argue that economists don’t properly acknowledge how little they understand, let alone how little they know.

But they don’t need to. The general public already accepts that economists can’t all be right. We often mutter that, “Whenever there are six economists, there are six different opinions.” We are bound to be taking a risk when we pick just one of the six economist to be in charge of our fortunes, and are probably taking as big a risk when we rely on a committee of six economists.

The original story:
“Making Allowances”
Leader Comment
The Times
9 May 2009

Summary of the story:
The Times‘s leader writer ran the gamut of argument on the problem of finding the right people to go into politics, especially how to reward them properly.

livingissues comment:
The nation has been indulging in an orgy of dislike of Members of Parliament and their allowances. Interestingly, The Telegraph is not universally admired for its expose. It was seen in some quarters as a witch hunt which risked taking our eye of the real issues. As The Times remarks, the upshot is probably that the MPs’ “take” is quite small and not very corrupting.

MPs will have to rethink how they pay themselves.

Actually, though, the public has more rethinking to do than the politicians. We have been so busy wanting everybody in authority to be responsive to the point of submissiveness that we haven’t noticed that we want to be informed and led by an elite.

We won’t be led by serious and worthwhile people until we signal that we admire public service. (Nick Stacey told A N Wilson (FT, 9/10 May 2009) how badly we were lacking this sense.) Of course, public servants have to be well-rewarded. But they’ll need respect too.

The failing is partly in the leadership cadres. For all the humbug and arrogance that has always littered the elite – the professional classes – there was also a more widespread understanding of the idea of vocation. Helena Kennedy made something like that point on BBC2′s Newsnight (11 May 2009).

We need to build a new sense of professionalism and the vocational pleasures it can bring.

So it’s a reciprocal matter. The led need to understand their obligation to their leaders and the leaders need to have quite a strong sense of their duty.

This sort of ethos was once quite openly discussed and taught. It wasn’t the preserve of the public school, though public schools certainly took it very seriousy and still do (as the headmistress of Roedean reminded the FT (9 May 2009). Actually, it ran right through society as a value and was taught at every point. It was, for instance, accepted that adults had a leadership role, and it didn’t really matter how poor or uneducated they were.

The original story:

Why did so few stand up to the spin machine?
Guido Fawkes
The Times
17 April 2009

Summary of the story:

Guido Fawkes gives his side of his exposure of Damian McBride (a senior aide to the Prime Minister Gordon Brown) and the “dirty tricks” media campaign he seems to have proposed for the Reg Rag website which was allegedly to be launched by Derek Draper, an erstwhile New Labour media man.

In particular Fawkes takes the mainstream media to task for knowing that there was a poisonous media operation at the heart of government but keeping it under their hats.

Here is a key quote from the piece:

The explosive proof of a smear and spin operation in the heart of Downing Street was met with a universal lack of surprise inside the Westminster village. Everyone who was interested knew it existed. Labour Party rivals to Gordon Brown had long been on the receiving end of poisonous briefings retold by pliant lobby correspondents.

livingissues comment:

It is hard to dispute that the political media is part of a noxious world at the heart of British life. Perhaps inevitably, there is an important cadre of journalists whose entire career depends on their being “in” with ministers and the spin doctors who control the flow of information out of Number 10, Westminster and the ministries. They are in an invidious position.

Tellingly, when a corner of the carpet is lifted (as by Guido Fawkes) journalists then pop up to say they knew this sort of all along. In this case, one such was James Blitz in the Financial Times who told us that he had known for years that Mr McBride was out of order much of the time.

There are two ways to go on this.

One could argue, as Mr Blitz implies, that this new smear campaign by Mr McBride was of a different order to his earlier poor behaviour. That carries the implication that it might have been wrong to expose Mr McBride’s earlier behaviour and that it is right to expose him now. Besides, spin masters and journalists have to be able to communicate in an off-the-record way, so it is very likely that these channels may sometimes be very colourful without – say – a bit of bad language in a conversation being much of a scandal,

But, alternatively, one is very tempted to see the journalists’ behaviour in a more severe light. This is Guido Fawkes’s line and in his case it is not without self-interest and self-promotion.

It is very possible to argue that the New Labour administration has been bad for government because it has been so good at manipulating the media. In the end, of course, the machinery has been exposed. It happened first with Mr Blair, whose work with Alistair Campbell, his press officer, was detected and analysed. Mr Brown’s media operation was in a way both more brutal and more subtle. His spokesmen seem to have been if anything rather rougher than Mr Campbell. But they also more successfully “spun” Mr Brown as intellectual, moral, and solid. In short, they span Mr Brown as not needing spin. It has taken a while for it to become clear that the “real” Mr Brown may be a very complicated mixture of rootedness and storminess, and profoundly interested in the frothy world of perception.

The issue is whether the media has been any good at conveying how poisonous things had become. One way into this is to insist that the personal and the party political be kept separate from the formal and the institutional. Sue Cameron, in the FT, draws this distinction and makes it stick by saying that the tax-payer should only pay for employees – for officials – whose function is highly respectable and in (to use an old-fashioned formulation) the service of the Crown.

The merit of this approach is to recognise that politicians may be vicious, scurrilous, neurotic, gossipy, profane and malicious, but when they put people to work on their behalf in this vein, they or their political party should pay for it. The State, the Nation and the Crown should be kept well away from this sort of thing.

Actually, “special advisers” like Mr McBride always were supposed to steer away from party-political spinning. The Civil Service has just re-iterated the distinction. From now on, the test of whether journalists are doing their own job will be whether they police those old decencies the way they were supposed to all along.

The original story:

Suzy Jagger
The Times
5 November 2008

Summary of the story:
All day we have had reports that black people in the US have been chanting, “Free at last!”. It is worth pointing out that slavery was abolished in the US in the 1860s and that blacks have had the vote since 1870, though it took nearly a hundred years for it to become an easy right to exercise everywhere in the country. (See the timeline in the Times story.) We cite in particular this Times story in which a 93 year-old black woman declares that until Obama came along she saw no reason to vote. This seems to have been the case with many blacks, whose voting record is even worse than that of whites in recent times.     

livingissues comment: 
The notion that blacks have a unique reason to vote for Obama ought to be depressing. After all, Martin Luther King precisely argued that it was necessary for us to judge people by their minds not the colour of their skin.

The situation is doubly depressing if we consider that generations of black non-voters seem to have concluded that there was no politician who was worth supporting. And yet Barack Obama is not self-evidently going to be a better President than any other, and certainly he holds out no greater promise than (say) Al Gore or Bill Clinton or any of the other Democrats who had been on offer before Obama. 

To vote is to engage in democracy. Not to vote is either to say that one is indifferent to the outcome of the election (there perhaps being equal chances of good or bad from any of the possible outcomes), or that the election simply isn’t about anything which concerns one. It is surely incredible that these propositions were true for all the elections that 93 year-old had witnessed and stood aside from.

The original stories:
Easily caught in a web of sinister untruths
 David Aaronovitch
The Times
16 September 2008

Warning sounded on web’s future
BBC Online
Pallab Ghosh

Summary of the stories:
The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from truthful material and real science, says Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web. He is increasingly worried about the way the Web has been used to spread disinformation. In response he has helped form a World Wide Web Foundation to address the problem and to help improve the Web’s accessibility.

livingissues comment:
These stories are important. The web does favour mob opinion over fact, evidence and objectivity. A classic example is the recent panic about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Big Bang experiment producing an earth-swallowing black hole.

But we should remember there’s nothing new about panics and scares. And bigotry is not unique to our century. Web 2.0 merely transmits them faster. It simplifies the process and lowers the cost. Besides, Web 2.0 innovations such as wikis, Twitter, blogs, video posts and the like, equally facilitate – on a gigantic scale – the distribution of evidence, reason and co-operation. 

The question is how do we help users – now accounting for 20% of the world’s population – spot what’s trustworthy content and what’s not?

The original story:
Not guilty: the Greenpeace activists who used climate change as a legal defence
John Vidal, environment editor
The Guardian, 
11 September 2008

The story in brief
Six Greenpeace activists have been cleared of causing criminal damage during protest over coal-fired power. The activists were charged with causing £30,000 of damage after they scaled Kingsnorth power station in Hoo, Kent.

One of the cleared activists described the verdict as “a tipping point for the climate change movement”.

He said: “When 12 normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet then where does that leave government energy policy?”

This, as the Guardian usefully points out, follows a spate of other such cases in which activists  - with diverse causes – were cleared of what would normally be classified as illegal acts.

livingissues comment:
Nobody wants to take away the right of defendants to claim that an illegal act had a lawful excuse. However the question is, is that right and the interpretation of what constitutes a lawful cause being abused? There is a strong argument to be made that is precisely what is happening. Take the latest case of the six Greenpeace protesters.

They caused damage worth £30 000.  Their aim, they said, was to prevent damaging emissions that cause global warming. The plant’s owner claimed lives were put at risk, and there was no dispute between the parties that costly damage was caused to a chimney stack.  In normal circumstances a guilty verdict was inevitable.  The sentence might well have – and should have – reflected that the protesters were not mindless vandals and had no real criminal intent in the normal sense of the term.

In contrast, the logical consequence of this verdict is that other protesters can take the law into their own hands with relative impunity to occupy, disrupt and damage any facility that legally emits global warming gases. That represents a challenge to democracy. It is an outcome that must be interrogated closely.

If, as the protesters claimed, they were saving the planet and that this one coal-fired power station alone threatened the existence of 400 species, then they should be able to persuade the public to force lawmakers to change the law. But their protest suggests that they are not so confident of their arguments.  Otherwise why take the law into their own hands? In the words of the coal-fired spokesperson: “That’s a debate that shouldn’t be taking place at the top of a chimney stack.” Moreover, it is not for juries to help protesters circumvent the democratic process.  

Given the frequency of such cases there is a case to had for strengthening and clarifying the legal definition of what constitutes a lawful cause to break the law.

The original story:
The evolution of creationism
 By Christopher Caldwell
The Financial Times
5 September 2008

Summary of the story:
This knowledgeable FT columnist says there is scant evidence that Sarah Palin is really any sort of creationist, let alone a very fundamentalist one. 

livingissues comment:
Sarah Palin may or not be a brilliant choice by Senator McCain to be his vice-presidential running mate in the race to the White House. But to condemn her candidacy on the basis that she is a creationist seems odd. The evidence that she might be an evolutionary sceptic seems to have come from a remark during the race for her present office, the governership of Alaska.

According to one scientific blogger’s account she seems rather informally to have suggested that children ought to be taught both Darwinian and creationist accounts of evolution. There seems little wrong in that. After all, such teaching might amount to a science lesson in Darwinism and a religious studies, or a sociology, lesson in creationism.

Besides, there are – as Caldwell suggests – many shades to creationism (and Mr Caldwell, I guess, is not a huge fan of any of them). Some very serious thinkers have opined that all the Darwinism in the world still leaves plenty of room for God, and maybe even in the unfolding of the development of species. 

One gets the impression that Sarah Palin does not have strong feelings on the matter. She may even speak in the cannily knowledge that an awful lot of people do. Either way, she seems to have figured that the trick is let children know that the debate is out there. The rest, they can wrestle with for themselves.

Why do the media love this story? As Caldwell says, red-necks may be creationist because it does no harm to hold the belief and it’s an act of defiance against the educated, liberal elite which is so confident that it knows what’s what. So it may be that the liberal elite rightly sees creationism as a very direct affront to its dignity – and a deliberate one.

The original stories:
Georgia’s PR agency lashes out at Russian ‘propaganda’
Matt Cartmell
PR Week
14 August 2008

Russia-Georgia War: The PR Battle
Mark Stone,
Sky News Reporter
13 August 2008

Georgia has won the PR war
Peter Wilby
The Guardian
18 August 2008

Summary of the stories:
The success of the Georgia PR campaign following Russia’s military intervention has been widely noted. The front page of PR Week and The Guardian highlighted how Georgia’s PR company Aspect launched its own broadside against PR rivals advocating Russia’s case. “I’m on the side of the angels,” Aspect’s founding partner, James Hunt, told the magazine. “There are agencies (GPlus) that work for Russia. But I don’t know how they can be comfortable about that.”