Category: Politics

The value of a reputation

I strongly appreciate the importance of a reputation for probity.

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.

So many vague accusations and suspicions can float around in everyday life where the best basis for judgement is to appeal to prior probability. But this goes too far:

Mossack Fonseca says it has operated beyond reproach for 40 years and never been accused or charged with criminal wrong-doing.

Mossack Fonseca has just mislaid 11 million documents that show its complicity in a vast web of tax evasion through secret accounts in Panama. Even to say that it has operated legally would be stretching credulity. To say that it has been “beyond reproach”… well, I suppose it’s technically true, since no one knew enough about them to reproach them. Similarly a master burglar, when finally caught with his home full of stolen jewels and cash, could say, “This is an outrage. No one has ever cast such aspersions on my good name.”

A quiet man

I was just reading this interview with former US Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, about Donald Trump. You could see the cutting edge of Trump apologetics, on the way to determining that the Republican establishment has always been allied with Trump. The trick is to reinterpret Trump’s crude thinking as simply crude (or bold, down-to-earth) formulation of very clever, even sophisticated thinking. And then there’s this:

Isaac Chotiner: You were at a meeting on Monday with other Washington figures and Trump. What did you make of him?

Newt Gingrich: Well, Callista and I were both very impressed. In that kind of a setting he talks in a relatively low tone. He is very much somebody who has been good at business. And he listens well. He outlined the campaign as he saw it. I think he did a good job listening. He occasionally asked clarifying questions. He was very open to critical advice. I am not going to get into details, but I will say my overall impression was that in that setting he was totally under control…

Does none of Trump’s rhetoric about Mexicans or Muslims worry you or upset you?

I think he was too strong in talking about illegal immigrants in general, although if you look at the number of people who have been killed by people who aren’t supposed to be here, there is a fair argument on the other side too.

It makes him seem like a reasonable guy who occasionally gets carried away when speaking with the common folk.

Hitler comparisons are almost never useful, whether for insight or political rhetoric. Trump is not Hitler. Even among 1930s fascist dictators, Hitler is not the one Trump most resembles. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but be reminded of something Albert Speer wrote, explaining why as a young academic he found himself drawn to Hitler:

What was decisive for me was a speech Hitler made to students, and which my students finally persuaded me to attend. From what I had read in the opposition press, I expected to find a screaming, gesticulating fanatic in uniform, instead of which we were confronted with a quiet man in a dark suit who addressed us in the measured tones of an academic. I’m determined one day to look up newspapers of that time to see just what it was he said that so impressed me. But I don’t think he attacked the Jews….

Shut it down!

From John Holbo I got this link to weird libertarian rantings by a financial journalist I never heard of. I was particularly struck by this Randian comment

Maybe we should shut Wall Street down for 24 hours, see how everybody who blames Wall Street for everything likes that.

Well, what would happen? I think I know a fair amount about the role of financial markets in the economy, and while I don’t consider them useless, I really can’t see what the problem would be if they were shut down for 24 hours. Not only that, I’m not even sure what their staunchest defenders might claim the problem would be.

In fact, didn’t we try this experiment already? The NYSE, and pretty much all the New York financial industry got shut down for several days or a week after the 9/11 attacks. Did anyone mind? I’ve heard a lot of commentary about the impact of 9/11, and I’ve never once heard anyone even suggest that there had been negative consequences to closing the financial markets for a week.

Being pushed uphill

11 states voted in primary elections yesterday in the US. On the Republican side, Donald Trump won 7 of the 11 contests. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won 7 of the 11. You might think the reporting would take a similar tone in describing both victories. You’d be wrong. Here’s the NY Times headline:

Screenshot 2016-03-02 11.56.06

It’s hard not to see sexism here. The mighty man “overwhelmed” his opponents. The feeble woman was “pushed” to victory. The man was powerful and autonomous, overcoming adversity to fight his way to victory. Not only didn’t the woman fight, she couldn’t even walk on her own. And the people pushing her to victories weren’t ordinary Americans. They were “minorities” — or, as Trump would denote them, losers.

It’s long been recognised that the first woman to be a serious US presidential candidate would have an uphill struggle. Now we know that she’ll have to be pushed uphill.

Change of venue

In the most recent Republican debate this exchange occurred:

TRUMP: If people — my plan is very simple. I will not — we’re going to have private — we are going to have health care, but I will not allow people to die on the sidewalks and the streets of our country if I’m president. You may let it and you may be fine with it…

CRUZ: So does the government pay for everyone’s health care?

TRUMP: … I’m not fine with it. We are going to take those people…

CRUZ: Yes or no. Just answer the question.

TRUMP: Excuse me. We are going to take those people and those people are going to be serviced by doctors and hospitals. We’re going to make great deals on it, but we’re not going to let them die in the streets.

Obviously, Trump recognized the trap of promising the great expense of keeping people from dying on the streets and sidewalks, so he quickly fell back to this compromise position: During the Trump presidency, poor people will be permitted to die on the sidewalks, but not in the streets. This leaves open the question of whether they will receive medical attention or merely cited by medical personnel to the sidewalk. It’s a win-win, since the dying would no longer impede the free flow of traffic.

It’s quite a bit like UK asylum policy: it would be unconscionable to send civilians back into a war zone, and we can’t just let them fend for themselves on the streets of London. So we need to make sure that as many as possible drown at sea, pour décourager les autres.

Of course, this may increase pressure to build barriers between the streets and sidewalks, at least in the vicinity of hospitals. Jobs!

None dare call it “evasion”

Just another example of how the business elites have normalised their criminal activities:

So when politicians, journalists and the public ask rude questions about how Google can pay its chief executive more in one year than it hands over to the British tax authorities, the company should have a simple answer. You make the rules, we obey them – if you don’t like it make some new rules, otherwise go away and leave us alone.

The article suggests that Google is suffering from a sick compulsion to hold itself to a higher standard than is just obeying the rules.

Except, they don’t actually obey the rules. What they do (as I’ve discussed at greater length) is to create structures to exploit the ambiguity in such legal terms as “residence” and “business activity” and “profits”, ambiguity that is in the rules because the lobbyists would otherwise squeal about unreasonable constraints and irrational behaviour being forced upon them by more specific regulations. The law doesn’t actually permit you to pretend your business is actually transpiring at the shell address in the Cayman Islands, but it’s sufficiently hard to prove otherwise, and the elite civil servants are sufficiently unmotivated.

In fact, despite the billions of dollars they spend on tax lawyers in lieu of taxes, they’re not even particularly conscientious about keeping their plausible deniability plausible. Former London Google employee Barney Jones gave evidence to HMRC:

He had watched Matt Brittin, his former boss at Google, give evidence to MPs on the Public Accounts Committee with interest but also mounting disquiet. Mr Brittin emphasised to the PAC one reason Google paid so little tax in the UK was that it did so little business here. The bulk of its work was generated through its Dublin headquarters – where corporation tax was lower than in London.

Mr Jones, a father of four and a devout Christian, knew that wasn’t true. He had worked in the London office from 2002 to 2006 and had his own view of the large turnover of work that was really going on in the UK. He took the facts to PAC chair Margaret Hodge and then on to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC), which took his evidence but wasn’t exactly overjoyed by it.

“They seemed quite defensive and seemed to be more interested in justifying their position.”

For that matter, it’s not even entirely true that they don’t make the laws. Unless you think the US Treasury just decided in a purely independent and disinterested way that the European Commission doesn’t really understand its own tax rules.

Commitment to concrete steps

Apparently David Cameron has decided to take what he can get from the EU and call it victory. I was particularly struck by this “concession”:

a clear long-term commitment to increasing competitiveness and taking concrete steps towards better regulation and reducing administrative burdens

The “concrete steps” presumably to replace the current wooden steps that weren’t leading anywhere. Seriously, though, how does a vague promise to take “concrete steps” in the future differ from a vague promise full stop?

My guess is that the referendum will still go against EU membership.

The American Cavalieri

The British tend to view Donald Trump as an unprecedented only-in-America freak. Self-glorifying libertine billionaire turning his media ingenuity and unbounded reserves of cunning ignorance into a nativist political career. Racism and misogyny lightly disguised as heroic candour. The strongman allure, and the tendency of opponents to dismiss him as a buffoon. He’s the American Berlusconi. Which should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks he can’t possibly win.

Cheating at maths

One thing you get used to as a mathematician: You meet someone in a non-professional context, you tell them what you do (“mathematics” coming after they’ve pushed through vague dodges like “teaching”… “at the university”…), and they look away furtively, as though you’d gratuitously inquired after the origin of their scar or their PTSD, and say something like “I could never do maths”; occasionally a more wistful “I always liked maths at school”. I thought of this when reading this article about a recent Christmas chat by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell:

Corbyn was followed by McDonnell (“he’s about to spend all our money,” said the Labour leader by way of introduction), who thanked the Eastern Daily Press for publishing a letter from a former classmate who revealed that he used to “whisper the maths answers to me to avoid me being caned”. He joked of the Daily Mail headline he expected: “Chancellor cheats at maths again”.

Clearly, he thinks his creative solution to maths anxiety — backed up by the cane — is something that right-thinking people should, if not admire, at least condone, and possibly chuckle at in self-recognition. But as the Labour Party’s aspirant to helm the Treasury, which does presumably require some sort of numeracy, doesn’t he owe the public some sort of explanation of when, if at all, he did actually learn to do sums?

Blurring the lines

Those of us of a statistical turn of mind and inclined toward caution (not the same, even if the categories may be highly correlated) like to compare the lives lost to terror attacks (about which there tends to be unbounded panic, leading to willingness to abandon vast stores of wealth, national pride, and long-cherished principles of justice) and to the sorts of banal lethal events that people don’t get very excited about. For example, there was the study showing that additional automobile travel due to fear of airplane hijacking in the few months following the 9/11 attacks killed more people — through the ordinary difference in automobile and airplane fatality rates — than were killed in the planes on 9/11 (and over time may have killed 2300 people, almost as many as the entire death toll of the attacks).

An obvious point of comparison is between the Paris terror attacks and the remarkably similar style of mass shootings that have become such a regular affair in the US. (More than one a day in 2015!) The latter evokes reactions ranging from a shrug to a right-to-bear-arms rally. The former have American conservatives — who not too long ago would eat nothing but freedom fries — expressing their fraternité with the noble liberty-loving French people, and the need to exclude refugees from ISIS from the US because you can never be too careful. The connection was best expressed by Texas congressman Tony Dale, with an “A” rating from the NRA, who argued that Syrian refugees need to be kept out of Texas because once legally admitted they would be entitled to Texas drivers licenses, and with those they could freely purchase firearms: Continue reading “Blurring the lines”