Category: Politics

Mining rights and intellectual property rights

I was talking recently with an Australian, who expressed outrage that the Australian government allows mining companies to extract valuable resources from state-owned land, almost for free. Now, I have expressed similar sentiments in the past about the comparable US practice. But on reflection, it occurred to me that I couldn’t agree with the claim of another lunch participant that it is a “no-brainer” that the public should be taking a significant portion of the value realised from the resources extracted from public land.

If you think back to the time when US mining laws were first laid out — I think the main US law dates back to 1871 or so — the general view must have been, there are vast territories out there, where valuable minerals are buried, that would be of great use to the general economy, if only we could get them out of the earth. Rather than pay people to go search for them systematically, we offer that anyone who finds some and figures out how to get them to market, can keep the profits from their sale. Continue reading “Mining rights and intellectual property rights”

The tyranny of the 95%

The president of the National Academy of Science is being quoted spouting dangerous nonsense. Well, maybe not so dangerous, but really nonsense.

I found this by way of Jonathan Chait, a generally insightful and well-informed political journalist, who weighed in recently on the political response to the IPCC report on climate change. US Republican Party big shot Paul Ryan, asked whether he believes that human activity has contributed to global warming, replied recently “I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t think science does, either.” Chait rightly takes him to task for this ridiculous dodge (though he ignores the fact that Ryan was asked about his beliefs, so that his skepticism may reflect a commendable awareness of the cognitive theories of Stephen Stich, and his need to reflect upon the impossibility of speaking scientifically, or introspecting coherently, about the contents of beliefs), but the form of his criticism left me troubled:

In fact, science does know the answer. Climate scientists believe with a 95 percent level of certainty (the same level of certainty as their belief in the dangers of cigarette smoking) that human activity is contributing to climate change.

Tracking through his links, I found that he’d copied this comparison between climate change and the hazards of smoking pretty much verbatim from another blog, and that it ultimately derived from this “explanation” from the AP:

Some climate-change deniers have looked at 95 percent and scoffed. After all, most people wouldn’t get on a plane that had only a 95 percent certainty of landing safely, risk experts say.

But in science, 95 percent certainty is often considered the gold standard for certainty.

[…]

The president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, and more than a dozen other scientists contacted by the AP said the 95 percent certainty regarding climate change is most similar to the confidence scientists have in the decades’ worth of evidence that cigarettes are deadly.

Far be it from me to challenge the president of the National Academy of Sciences, particularly if it’s the “prestigious” National Academy of Sciences, or more than a dozen other scientists, but the technical term for this is “bollocks”. Continue reading “The tyranny of the 95%”

Political talk therapy

Two apparently unrelated items from Nick Clegg’s speech at the Liberal Democrats’ party congress: First the BBC quoted his exhortation to the party soldiers, that they should

go to the next election with their “heads held high”.

Then came his announcement of

the first national waiting time targets for people with mental health problems.

People with depression should begin “talking therapy” treatments within 18 weeks, from April.

Let’s see: If the depressed Liberal Democrats can get their talk therapy started in April, maybe they’ll hold their heads a bit higher by the 7 May election.

Define “senseless”

David Cameron has described the defection of Tory MP Mark Reckless to the anti-immigrant anti-Europe party UKIP not as “reckless” (too obvious), but as “senseless”. As in, absolutely nothing could be accomplished by this move to advance the anti-immigrant anti-Europe political agenda by this move.

In completely unrelated news, which BBC journalists unaccountably included in the same article, the prime minister announced that he would not argue in favour of staying in the EU in his planned 2017 referendum if he does not obtain concessions from the EU:

“If I don’t achieve that it will be for the British public to decide whether to stay in or get out,” he said.

But he added: “I have said this all my political life: if I thought that it wasn’t in Britain’s interest to be in the European Union, I wouldn’t argue for us to be in it.”

And Conservative Culture Secretary Sajid Javid told the Daily Mail the UK could still prosper if it chose to exit the EU. “I think it would open up opportunities. I am not afraid of that at all,” he added.

Innumeracy: UK prison service edition

The BBC reports on a study by the Prisoners Education Trust, of the impact of the recent decision of the prison service to limit prisoners’ access to books. The Ministry of Justice has dismissed the study, saying

the PET survey of 343 inmates represented just 0.01% of the total prison population in England and Wales.

This is a twofer, with a pair of errors packed into impressively small space. Even a government minister should be able to calculate that if 343 inmates represent 0.01% of the prison population, then more than 6% of the population (53.5 million) must be imprisoned, which I don’t need to check the figures to know must be wrong. But I did check it, and find that the Ministry of Justice made a wee error of not quite 2 orders of magnitude. According to this publication (coincidentally, also from the Ministry of Justice) there were about 84,000 prisoners in June 2013. Assuming there haven’t been any huge changes since then, those 343 inmates in fact represent 0.4% of the prison population. Where is Michael Gove when you need him?

More generally, the comment conveyed the impression that if the sample were a small fraction of the population then it couldn’t be statistically valid. Of course, that’s not true. If you were doing an election poll of the whole population of England, a random sample of 0.01% of the population would be about 5000 people, which is much larger than most surveys, and enough to get a result that’s accurate to within about ± 1.5%. The real problem with this survey is that it’s not a random sample, and not representative, being self-selected among readers of a certain magazine; but there is no pretence about that, and if the Ministry of Justice were interested in addressing the issue rather than issuing talking points, they could address the question of whether the concerns raised by the more literate of the prisoner population most concerned with literacy are worth taking seriously.

 

The sense of place

I read with amazement the new book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit.  For a book that is so attentive to the physicality of the land, and the particularity of place, it struck me as surprisingly willing to use place names in their platitudinous sense, in a context that made them leap off the page in bizarre ways:

By his very presence, he turns En Harod into the Mecca of the kibbutz movement.

… has turned a huge garage in southern Tel Aviv into the new mecca of dance, drugs, and casual encounters.

After seven and a half years in inferior and mediocre Sephardic institutions, Aryeh Machluf Deri had reached the Eton of the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox world.

If the thought of the Mecca of “dance, drugs, and casual encounters” doesn’t make your head spin (imagine, conversely, describing the Kaaba as “the Reeperbahn of pilgrimage and divine ecstasy”) then surely the thought of an ultra-Orthodox Eton must.

In all seriousness, the book accomplishes something I would have thought impossible: It tells the story of Israel from a Zionist perspective, while refusing to look away from, dismiss, or otherwise morally diminish the suffering inflicted upon the Arab population of Palestine. Ultimately, it’s the most depressing book on the subject I have ever read, not because of the horror that is recounted, but because holding up the justice and injustice of both sides to the cold light leaves the reader (and the author) with the sense that this is a paradox of justice that has no resolution, a doom of eternal conflict. Other books, like Max Blumenthal’s Goliath, that take a much harsher tone toward Israel and its political establishment, arouse a sense of moral fervour, a sense that just a bit of generosity and good will could bring both sides to the promised land of peace. Shavit’s is the disillusion of an old man, who has seen the rise and fall of grand hopes, and sees the avoidance of destruction as the best that his country can hope for.

Fishiness in Scotland

So now Alex Salmond has resigned. Not entirely unexpected, despite the fact that he managed to stampede the British establishment into promising effective autonomy for Scotland, which was exactly what Cameron opposed when the referendum was first mooted.

But surely I am not the only person who thought that a situation where the First Minister was named Salmond and the Deputy First Minister named Sturgeon was too fishy to be allowed to continue. In the interest of expanding the phylogenetic variety at the top of Scottish government, perhaps Liam Fox could be persuaded to abandon the Conservatives?

When to call it quits

Today is the day of the Scottish referendum. As I’ve commented before, I don’t really have a personal opinion about the question, though I think Scottish independence would probably make my life marginally worse. (To the extent that I have a coherent political view of the situation, it is mostly concurrent with that expressed with some eloquence by Charles Stross. I’d much prefer to see a federal UK. I guess that’s what happens when you let aliens with their strange ideas infiltrate the nation.)

The only sense in which I think I have relevant expertise is with regard to the way people are talking about risk. The whole thrust of the No campaign has been to conjure up dangers, known and unforeseeable, of Scottish independence. I think they’re probably right — in particular, I think the economists are right that Scots are being misled by those who claim that they can successfully keep the British pound as their currency. On the other hand, there are also risks of staying part of the UK. In particular, the risk of being taken out of the EU by an English public that is increasingly insular in its outlook (inlook?) Since everyone’s fond of divorce metaphors, we might see Scotland as a woman whose jealous husband is trying to force her to move with him away from her friends and family. There is a long tradition of Scotland using relations with the Continent as a balance against England. It’s not so much a question of whether Scotland wants to be part of a bigger nation or go it alone; it’s a question of whether Scotland wishes to confederate with England or with Europe. And despite a reasonably successful 307 year run with England the choice for the future is not so obvious.

And that raises what I think is the most irksome twist of the No campaign’s logic: The question of timing. If you protest early against a new arrangement, you can be told, “You haven’t given it enough of a chance”. But if you wait too long, you can be told it’s really been settled by custom and tradition. (To be fair, “you haven’t given it enough of a chance” wasn’t really the argument against the 18th century Scottish rebels, who tended to find English muskets doing the persuading.) Surely it’s reasonable to reconsider these sorts of arrangements after 300 years or so. England offered Scotland the opportunity to be a co-coloniser rather than a colony, and it accepted. Now that the imperial dream is not just dead but despised, isn’t it reasonable to ask a new generation whether the union is still meeting their needs?

Recruiting the dead

Former chief of the UK General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt  has spoken up on the Scottish referendum, and what he has to say is deeply disgraceful:

Scottish soldiers have fought over several centuries and in so many campaigns to preserve the territorial integrity of their country from external threat, but in the Northern Ireland campaign more recently, they fought against internal threat, but what about today? Do the families of Scottish soldiers who lost their lives between 1969 and 2007 to preserve the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom now just say, “Well, it no longer matters”?

Now, interestingly, while he does go on to say “I cannot speak for them”, his essay includes not a single quote from a single one of these Scottish soldiers, living or dead. Putting aside the fact that some of them were probably just looking for steady pay or a certain kind of military camaraderie, I think it is extraordinarily condescending — and disrespectful — to enlist the dead to march in ones political campaign. And it is disgraceful to use the term “internal threat” to cover both the Northern Ireland campaign — where British soldiers battled against a terror campaign that sought to change the constitutional order by force — and the referendum campaign

There were many nationalists in Northern Ireland who themselves wished to dissolve the “territorial integrity” of the United Kingdom, but who also opposed the attempts to do so by force. The fact that General Dannatt cannot perceive a gap between seeking to accomplish political goals by referendum and seeking to accomplish it by force says all you need to know about the military mind at its most brutal.

In fact, as a matter of historical record, even their political masters at the time of the greatest turmoil in Northern Ireland, the government of Edward Heath, doesn’t seem to have been fighting to “preserve the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom”, so much as to prevent Northern Ireland from sinking into full-blown civil war. At least, the cabinet seems to have been willing to entertain the notion of British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, but ruled it out when it seemed certain only to exacerbate the chaos and violence.

Scotland’s European future

I commented before on the interesting way an independent, increasingly cosmopolitan Scotland, and an increasingly suspicious and insular rump-UK might pass each other on the way through the EU door. I was interested to find out who is permitted to vote in next week’s independence referendum in Scotland. You might have supposed that an attempt was being made to appeal to the inbred Bannockburn nostalgia voters, perhaps even extending the franchise to self-identified Scots by birth. Instead, the voting eligibility criteria seem sedulously post-nationalist and forward-looking. Birth plays no role, only residence and citizenship. In addition to admitting 16- and 17-year-olds to the franchise, they are permitting — in a move that seems stunningly self-assured to anyone who remembers how the aftermath of the 1995 Quebec referendum descended into ugly recriminations against “money and the ethnic vote” — EU citizens ordinarily resident in Scotland to vote. There’s no clearer statement, I think, of how differently the Scots view their future from how the English view theirs.

And if the nationalists win the referendum on this basis, it will be hard to argue that they haven’t earned their independence honourably.