Various splurges on localism, devolution, state-building, and standardisation

NB: quite possibly conflating issues which are superficially related but really ought to be kept separate. Anecdotal evidence and guys with blogs remain anecdotal evidence and guys with blogs, and should be treated as such.
Also, names have been changed.

Back for Christmas, I've recently been catching up with various people I grew up with. In particular, the half a dozen or so lads who are my age or slightly older at the church in which I grew up. Lucias is my oldest friend, who was my best friend in primary school. He studied Maths at Bristol, did a one-year Masters, and is now doing a Ministry Traineeship at his church there. In a few months he will be getting married to a girl he met there.

Jason and Thomas are a pair of brothers who studied Engineering at Cambridge and Geography at Durham respectively; again, I believe they both have Masters' Degrees. They are now both living in London - Jason putting his degree into direct use in designing things, while Thomas (who was a keen athlete in school, having once placed in the top 30 of the Birmingham half-marathon) is now working in sports marketing - he enthused that next year's World Athletics Championship, which he is involved in promoting, will be Usain Bolt's last race as a professional.

Simon and John are the two older siblings of their family. I can't remember exactly what Simon studies, but am fairly confident that Spanish was part of it; he now works in London. John did Geography and French at Manchester, and is now working for the council there while angling towards going for a Master's.

Finally, there's me. PPE at Manchester, then jetted off to Budapest to study for a Master's in Philosophy. Currently applying for PhD programs, with an eye on Toronto. Long-term, intending to move back to the UK and very vaguely hoping to find a job at Oxbridge.

What, apart from our Christian upbringings, do we have in common? We're all bright, well-educated young men who remember Birmingham fondly and want it to do well. But none of us see our futures here.

This is, I think, the kind of thing Tom Forth likes to go on about on Twitter. We'll come back at holidays, maybe chip in to things - my own contributions are primarily playing piano and organ at church, but people really like hearing that organ played, mind you - but in terms of the lasting contributions that any of us could make to our communities, those contributions will be made elsewhere. Thomas noted that of his friends from Durham, "like 99% of them" have also moved down to London. That's simply where the jobs are.

This doesn't seem good for Birmingham. I don't endorse brain drain as a reason to compel people to stay in the third world, and nor do I endorse it as a reason to compel people to stay in Birmingham. But we've received a lot - of the six people I describe, five of us went to schools run by the King Edwards Foundation - and it's hard to see what, if anything, our home city is getting back.



An interesting essay linked to yesterday by Byrne: "The Strange Death of Municipal England". Key claims:
-government should be doing lots of things
-however, these should be done specifically by local government
-in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was what actually happened
-however, since WWII local authorities have increasingly had powers nationalised
-the tendency is now towards privatisation of such things, to the detriment of quality/equality of service

The essay is good and worth reading, but at the end I was left with a feeling that if you asked the author why (say) libraries should be government-run but food shops should not, you would not get any kind of a convincing answer. Most egregious is the following passage:

In truth, Britain no longer has a government, but rather a system of governance, the term political scientists use to describe ‘the relationships between governmental and non-governmental forces and how they work together’. This is another way of saying that we live in a half-democracy. 

David Schmidtz has the most articulate and developed response to this way of thinking, which is (roughly) that the fact that we aim to realise particular principles with our institutions does not mean that the institutions ought to aim specifically at the realisation of those principles. This is a line of thought going all the way back to Adam Smith, with the immortal line (and also the only line of The Wealth of Nations that I actually remember):

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, baker, or brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

That's my key point of disagreement with the essay: I don't think the changes it herald are necessarily bad. But that's not why I bring it up here. It's because of the tension it argues for between the national and the local, and the argument (which I am entirely open to, perhaps even favourable to) that nationalisation of politics is bad for most local areas.



The other evening, I had an exchange with Tom Forth on Twitter. We agreed that there are many types of policies which, in terms of total impact, are bad, but are good (or at least perceived as good) by the communities which make them. Examples include import tariffs, US cities bribing sports teams to stay in town, favouring domestic companies for fulfilling government contracts, etc. We agreed it is good that the EU prevents member governments from such practices. Our disagreement, I think, is whether the UK government should prevent localities from such practices. (I'm not certain what these would be, but let's assume that they exist and that more powerful councils would practise them). I, motivated by an overriding moral commitment to the wellbeing of individuals, think that it should. He, motivated by a belief in democracy and in particular local democracy, thinks that it should not. (At least, this is how I understand the disagreement).

If such beggar-thy-neighbour policies exist at the city level, it seems at least plausible that the success of London relative to the rest of the UK is to a fair extent due to it being the only city able to pursue them. Let us suppose that this is a good model for how the UK actually works. In that case, there are three obvious choices we could attempt:
(a) No-one, including London, gets to play beggar-thy-neighbour
(b) Everyone gets to play beggar-thy-neighbour
(c) The status quo: London, and no-one else, may play beggar-thy-neighbour

(a) and (b) have the advantages of moral consistency: (c) is desperately unfair on everywhere except London. But (a) may be entirely impossible to practice, and (b) is surrendering to the collective action problem. So (c) may well be the best option available; indeed, given this empirical model of the world, I would take (a) to be impossible and so advocate (c): in practice, clamping down on decentralisation.




A discussion of the increase in federal power, in particular since WWII, in the US. Worth reading for itself, but a real "huh, that seems obvious in retrospect" moment for me was the point that what we think of as common law bears little to no relation to law as experienced by most people for most of Anglo-American history. Rather, there was a whole mess of conflicting local norms, which in the early 20th century were standardised and codified by reformers.

On a related note, the professor in a Gender Studies course I audited this semester noted that we have records of men in 19th century England selling their wives. Clearly this wasn't a common thing, but it happened in certain places. Legal standardisation, of course, put a stop to that.



The point that I'm getting towards, I think, is an attempt at rebutting the arguments made by James Scott and Jacob Levy against centralisation of power. Or rather, I want to accept all of their claims about what High Modernism causes, and say that it was probably worth it. Or maybe it wasn't. The problem is perhaps inherently unsolvable, since it is very difficult to know what the average state of society was prior to the building of the nation-state. The standardisation which destroyed local knowledge and practice was also what made it possible, even in principle, to assess how individual people's lives were going.

Some people - including people I know personally - would argue that communities ought to be protected and preserved, even if they are what we would regard as backward. But again, I state my belief in moral individualism: people are what matters, and communities are only a means towards the flourishing of people. Perhaps they are important, even crucial means, but when society holds its members back, society is to be cast into the fire.

Does legal standardisation relate to modern devolution? I think it does, in a sense. Forcing the young men formerly of St. Stephen's Church to stay in Birmingham would have been good for Birmingham, and quite possibly good for the other people of Birmingham. But it's no way to treat individuals, it's no way to turn London into the growth engine which will eventually realise the post-scarcity society (or as near to that as possible), and... I don't know. The world is complicated, I don't know. I don't know.

Quote of the Day

"A policy of conciliation makes sense only if both sides take it seriously. In relation to communist power, whose political vocabulary lacks the word conciliation, such a policy has meaning only if it is conducted from a position of strength. Otherwise, conciliation turns into capitulation, and the policy of conciliation into a march toward political self-annihilation."

- Adam Michnik in A New Evolutionism from his Letters from Prison and Other Essays (1986), p.141

In the context of discussing why previous reform movements within Poland had not only failed to achieve anything, but had in many cases ended up as shills for the Marxist régime.

What would a future of drone warfare entail?

Noah Smith recently wrote an article predicting that drone warfare is going to make sweeping, and likely disastrous, changes to our lives. It's an interesting article, well argued, and I would encourage you to read through it, but in case this is a brief reconstruction of the argument:

• For the last 700 years or so, warfare has been dominated by people with guns.
• Guns were in a sense a "democratising" force in warfare - needing little training to use, they have made it possible for the average person to take part in a conflict if necessary.
• While guns were not significantly more effective weapons than those preceding them, they were more efficient in terms of benefits (military effectiveness) versus costs (risk of death, need for training, costs of production*). Indeed, while planes and tanks are more dangerous than men with guns, they are less cost-effective and therefore men with guns are still the backbone of any military effort.
• However, drones are - or will soon be - more cost-effective than guns. Therefore, drones will replace people with guns as the key implement of warfare.

Up until this point, I would suggest that the argument does seem to be basically correct - and indeed fairly astute in terms of its analysis.

• This means that the people who control drones will have near-absolute power over those who don't.
• The massive inequality within our society will mean that rich people will have far greater access to drones than poor people.
• Hence, there will be no realistic way for poor people to threaten rich people. Rich people will no longer be constrained by the threat of violence, and with resources produced increasingly by automated processes they will not be dependent upon the poor for their prosperity either.
• Rich people will be able to take over nearly all resources and live lives of luxury, while the rest of humanity will be living on the scrapheap at near-starvation.

...

Okay, this is a pretty scary picture of the future. I'm particularly interested in the idea that ultimately it is inequality which will allow this to happen - as someone who does not see equality as valuable (though I have significant sympathies for Sufficientarianism), this seems like a good solid argument as to why inequality might genuinely be a severe problem. But let's break it down a little.

People who control drones will have near-absolute power over those who don't

I'm not certain it will be possible to fight entirely using drones. There will presumably still be a role for hacking, for bombs, and for infiltration (in the role of an engineer, an entertainer, an escort, etc). That said, let's accept this premise.

Inequality will mean that rich people will have far greater access to drones than poor people

This seems quite obviously true. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that they will have far greater military power. Remember that every single person has a single point of failure: that is, their body. Drones are likely to be available (at least in terms of cost) to pretty much everyone in the developed world, so I would see the principle as less one of overwhelming force than one of Mutually Assured Destruction: sure, some plutocrat can annihilate me and my family, but someone will be able to blow him up in return. I don't see this as necessarily a pleasant situation - it's not exactly clear how one would enforce any kind of justice in this situation, let alone "social" justice - but I doubt that any one person could simply take over the world.

Rich people can and will then take over all of the world's resources through force
Even if they had the ability to do this, this makes several assumptions which are disputable to say the least:

• That they would want to. Most people are neither completely immoral or completely moral.
• That it would be in their interest. If they already have more than enough to not be reliant on poorer people for their services, why should they care about getting even more resources?
• That rich people have a coherent and unified class interest. "Rich people" is not the name of a single, very powerful organisation: it is a set - not even a group - of quite literally millions of people. Even if an individual rich person can clear all the poor people out of some area of value, what is the point of this if some other plutocrat will come along and take it off them? Perhaps there is some way that the first rich person could make his holdings secure, but then why couldn't this be practised by the original holders of the property?

So, while I'm not going to say that drone warfare is a positive development I don't think that it is anywhere near as terrible as Noah Smith believes.

* And, for the morally-inclined among you, risk of collateral damage to third parties.

PS. Another piece about drone warfare which ought to be more widely circulated.

In Defence of Power

This post is intended to discuss Lord Acton's famous aphorism that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." More precisely, I argue that it is overstated, and that this applies at most to certain well-defined types of power.

What is power? The standard definition used in political science discussions is "the ability to achieve desired ends." An objection to consider is that this is too broad a definition, and we refer to the power to get what we want out of other people. However, I reject this: it seems perfectly reasonable to refer to someone with the ability to summon lightning from their fingertips as "powerful", whether they use that power to threaten others into doing their bidding or to power an electric car.

Given this definition, what ways are there to cause one's own ends to be achieved? The ways in which one can cause something to be done can be divided into two broad categories: those which require outside agency, and those which do not. These may be categorised as "doing it yourself" and "getting someone else to do it".

Due to comparative advantage, it seems clear that one will never maximise one's power by doing everything oneself: one can increase the extent to which one's ends are satisfied by focusing one's effort upon whatever one is most efficient at relative to other people, and then trading.

The ways in which one causes others to fulfil one's ends may be divided into three categories, which I take from David D. Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. These categories are Trade, Coercion and Love. Trade is characterised by receipt of goods or services from another agent in return for providing a good or service which that agent values. Coercion involves violence or the threat thereof to compel another agent to perform the desired action. Love involves causing another agents goals to become the same as your own (the name coming from the notion, that, if someone loves me, then they wish me to be happy and take action to achieve that goal, thus achieving my goal of increasing my own utility).

There does not seem to be any inherent reason why trade need cause corruption - indeed, if trade is to be repeated, then due to the discipline of constant dealings, it seems likely to reduce corruption: one cannot cheat a trade partner and expect to keep on trading in the future. However, it is possible that trade in certain circumstances may lead to corruption. I shall consider two views of this idea.

First, the Aristotelian sense of goods having a right and proper function, with their usage outside of this being corrupt. Quoting from Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy, p.72: "Our possessions, [Aristotle] says, have two uses, proper and improper. The proper use of a shoe, for instance, is to wear it: to exchange it for other goods or for money is an improper use. There is nothing wrong with basic barter for necessities, but there is nothing natural about trade in luxuries, as there is in farming." The original passage may be found here.

I am not any kind of expert on Aristotle, so I remain open to the possibility that I have misunderstood him; however, his views on commerce do seem incompatible with the basic thrust of his moral outlook, that we should aim to increase eudaimonia, or human flourishing. The point of trade is that it increases the well-being of both parties, and so if Aristotle has an objection then surely his objection must be to the whole process of "unnatural" enrichment, rather than its achievement specifically through trade. In this case, power in itself is not corrupting: rather, it is the aims which one holds, the aims for the achievement of which one uses one's power.

One could of course argue that enrichment does in fact lead to corruption, or that it is itself a form of corruption. My question then is, at what point does this start? I refuse to countenance any moral system which views the move from subsistence farming to a typical modern standard of living as a worsening of the world. It seems implausible that enrichment of society starts as a good thing, and becomes bad at a certain level of technology.

A second way in which trade may be regarded as corrupting is when it is conducted with those incapable of securing for themselves a fair deal - young children, the mentally handicapped and so on. I would suggest that this situation, when a mentally incompetent person is being taken advantage of, represents power over another person, and will happily agree that this type of power has a tendency towards corruption. However, this represents a very small portion of trade, if it may indeed even be properly classed as trade.

Similarly, coercion, as a form of power over other people, does appear that it would tend to corrupt people.

What, then, of "love" as a means of achieving goals? If one is knowingly manipulating others to carry out one's own desires, it is easy to see not only how this may be corrupting, but how similar it is to "trade" with one incapable of rational dealing. But if one is not choosing to achieve one's goals this way? Well then, one is not capable of controlling the achievement of one's objectives, so this does not seem to truly represent power.

I thus conclude that power is only corrupting when it is exercised over other people. Absolute power, since it seems to include power over others by definition, would therefore seem to be corrupting. However, power is not inherently wrong and in many circumstances may in fact be virtuous.