The meaning of “is”

One of Bill Clinton’s most famous contributions to the political lexicon is

It depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is.

This was his defense from the accusation of having lied when he explicitly said, of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky,

There is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship, or any other kind of improper relationship.

It was immediately obvious that there was something strange about his somewhat tortured insistence on the present tense, where what he was asked to deny was in the past. Of course, we know that he was trying to be extremely clever in making a statement that was literally true, while seeming to deny an accusation that he knew to be correct.

Now Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has spoken out, not in his own defense, but in defense of the president:

“In all of this, in any of this, there’s been no evidence that there’s any collusion between the Trump campaign and the President and Russia,” he said. “Let’s just make that clear — there is no collusion.”

Is he being ironic?

Statistics, politics, and causal theories

A new headline from the Trump era:

Fewer Immigrants Are Reporting Domestic Abuse. Police Blame Fear of Deportation.

Compare it to this headline from a few months ago:

Arrests along Mexico border drop sharply under Trump, new statistics show

This latter article goes on to comment

The figures show a sharp drop in apprehensions immediately after President Trump’s election win, possibly reflecting the deterrent effect of his rhetoric on would-be border crossers.

It must be noted that these two interpretations of declining enforcement are diametrically opposed: In the first case, declining reports to police are taken as evidence of nothing other than declining reports, whereas the latter analysis eschews such a naive interpretation, suggesting that the decline in apprehensions is actually evidence of a decline in the number of offenses (in this case, illegal border crossings).

I don’t mean to criticise the conventional wisdom, which seems to me eminently sensible. I just think it’s interesting how little the statistical “facts” are able to speak for themselves. The same facts could mean that the election of Trump was associated with a decline in domestic violence in immigrant communities, and also with a reduction in border patrol effectiveness. It’s hard to come up with a causal argument for either of these — Did immigrant men look at Trump with revulsion and decide, abusing women is for the gringos? Did ICE get so caught up with the fun of splitting up families in midwestern towns and harassing Spanish speakers in Montana, that they stopped paying attention to the southern border? — so we default to the opposite conclusion.

Less than zero: A new reckoning

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about capitalism and the nature of wealth I learned from Donald Trump. And now I discover that I was entirely misled, at least as regards Trump’s particular role.

As I discussed in a post a couple of years ago, back in the 1990s I read a newspaper article about Donald Trump’s most recent bankruptcy, and was struck by the fact that, despite having vastly more liabilities than possessions, Trump was still treated as a wealthy man, and not worse than a pauper. And his creditors were willing to come to an arrangement that allowed him to live a rich-man lifestyle, if somewhat less opulent than before. I understood that to mean that modern capitalism makes debt almost as valuable as property, that the person with a billion in debt and the person with a billion in property are considered to be much more similar to each other than either is to the one who has neither debts nor wealth.

Now, having read several books on Trump, including most recently Seth Hettena’s Trump/Russia: A Definitive History, I see that this beautifully esoteric interpretation must yield — at least in the case of Trump — to a simpler and crasser interpretation: At various stages of his career Trump has been propped up by criminals who found the Trump Organisation, and its self-absorbed empty-headed chief, too useful as a cover for moneylending — first for the New York mob, then on a larger scale for Russian oligarchs and criminals from the former Soviet Union — to let it fail. In some sense, this is the value of debt: When there are large numbers in play, it’s easy to hide smaller numbers, just as long as you can come to an agreement to keep the flow going. And it does take a special kind of person to have managed to accumulate that amount of debt in the first place, making Trump’s debt truly a rare and valuable commodity.

I’m perfectly willing to accept a certain claim of innocence, that Trump believed all along that the fact that he kept managing to steer around failure demonstrated nothing but his unique genius. It reminds me of Hitler’s famous comment “Ich gehe mit traumwandlerischer Sicherheit den Weg, den mich die Vorsehung gehen heißt”: I follow, with the certainty of a sleepwalker, the path that Providence has laid out for me.

That narcissistic naïveté probably was, and remains, his most useful quality. First time tragedy, second farce.

Why Israel?

The Guardian has published an “exclusive” on the future of European science funding after  Brexit. The key point:

A draft copy of the so-called Horizon Europe document, seen by the Guardian, suggests that the UK is set to be offered less generous access than countries with associate status in the current programme, known as Horizon 2020, including Israel, Turkey, Albania and Ukraine.

So why does the headline say

Brexit: UK may get poorer access than Israel to EU science scheme

Why Israel? If I had to pick a country on the list whose prominence in scientific research makes it seem insulting that they would have a higher priority in research collaboration than the UK, it might be Albania. It definitely wouldn’t be Israel. So might there be some other reason why The Guardian wants to highlight for its readers the shame of being treated worse than Israel by the EU?

From the archives: Charitable giving to universities

With The Guardian portraying the magnitude of Oxford and Cambridge college endowments on the front page as a major scandal — though taken all together they don’t reach even half of the endowment of Harvard — it seems like a good time to repost this comment I made five years ago, when the government was being attacked by Oxford’s chancellor for considering limiting the tax deduction for charitable donations to educational institutions. The post begins:

Let’s think this through:

  1. The government wants philanthropic funding of universities to replace public funding.
  2. Under current law, contributions to universities (and other charities) are matched by a 40% tax rebate for higher-earning taxpayers, so 2/5 of the costs of nominally “private” contributions are actually paid by the taxpayers. The government proposes to cap this subsidy at 15% of income or  £20,000.

Do you see the contradiction? Neither do I. In a time when the government is cutting funding for all manner of worthy projects, it seems pretty undemocratic to effectively allow wealthy citizens nearly unlimited access to the treasury to support their own favourite causes. The £560 million in charitable gifts last year presumably included more than £200 million in “gift” from the government. Whether or not this is a good thing, it seems troubling, as a point of democratic principle, that control over these £200 million has been passed from the citizenry at large (in the person of their elected representatives) to the infamous “one percent”.

For the rest, see here.

I think everyone would agree that if the wealthy elite want to spend their money on providing luxury education in medieval buildings to particularly talented young people, many but not all of whom come from privileged backgrounds, that’s probably not the most useless or antisocial thing that they’re free to do with their money. (And I can confirm, from personal experience, that Oxford colleges spend insane sums of money on maintenance for their buildings.) But as long as they’re leveraging public funds, which the current government has decided to withhold from educational institutions that serve a broader public far more efficiently, it’s no longer a simple matter of private choice.

The dead end of 70s childrearing

People often raise their children with ideals that they don’t really hold themselves, either because they on some level think they would be better people if they shared these ideals and hope their children will be better (tolerance, patience), or because they think these ideals are particularly appropriate to this stage of life (sharing, studiousness, Santa Claus). But I’ve been realising that some of what I learned as I child — at home, at school, and from the general culture

I genuinely found it weird that Barack Obama was attacked for harboring a secret “anti-colonialist” agenda (inherited from his father’s experience fighting the British for Kenyan independence. If I’d had to say what the core historical experience was that Americans harked back to, that defined our national identity, that we could agree upon, it was the history as colonials fighting for independence. The people opposing Obama dressed up in colonial-era costumes, harked back to the Boston Tea Party, striking a blow against the imperial power. Continue reading “The dead end of 70s childrearing”

Unwritten rules of the road for Oxford

  1. Bicycles and pedestrians are stationary objects. You need to pass them, especially when turning directly ahead of them.
  2. Electric turn signals are a major energy drain! Signals should be activated only after you are well into the turn.
  3. Opening the driver-side door should be done in one fluid motion, as rapidly as possible. Don’t look back!
  4. When trapped by traffic you are exposed to attack from the sides and behind. Protect yourself and your fellow drivers by advancing your vehicle to block the pedestrian crossings, which are points of major vulnerability.
  5. “Cycle lane” is just a newfangled word for “free parking”.* Double yellow lines are there to remind you; where no cycle lane is available parking on the pavement is recommended.
  6. Killing pedestrians is wrong if you’ve been drinking. Otherwise, you’re the victim. (Don’t forget, insurance will pay for the damage. Be bold!)

* There is some uncertainty about the origin of this odd expression. Most experts believe that it has its origin in the Italian sulla collina — “on the hill” — referring to the practice, brought back by 17th century travellers, of establishing resting spots for travellers on hills in the countryside. From there it evolved into the modern usage, meaning “a strip of land set aside for parking vehicles”.

Your shadow genetic profile

So, the “Golden Gate killer” has been caught, after forty years. Good news, to be sure, and it’s exciting to hear of the police using modern data systems creatively:

Investigators used DNA from crime scenes that had been stored all these years and plugged the genetic profile of the suspected assailant into an online genealogy database. One such service, GEDmatch, said in a statement on Friday that law enforcement officials had used its database to crack the case. Officers found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo’s and, despite his years of eluding the authorities, traced their DNA to his front door.

And yet… This is just another example of how all traditional notions of privacy are crumbling in the face of the twin assaults from information technology and networks. We see this in the way Facebook generates shadow profiles with information provided by your friends and acquaintances, even if you’ve never had a Facebook account. It doesn’t matter how cautious you are about protecting your own data: As long as you are connected to other people, quite a lot can be inferred about you from your network connections, or assembled from bits that you share with people to whom you are connected.

Nowhere is this more true than with genetic data. When DNA identification started being used by police, civil-liberties and privacy activists in many countries forced stringent restrictions on whose DNA could be collected, and under what circumstances it could be kept and catalogued. But now, effectively, everyone’s genome is public. It was noticed a few years back that it was possible to identify (or de-anonymize) participants in the Personal Genome Project, by drawing on patterns of information in their phenotypes. Here’s a more recent discussion of the issue. But those people had knowingly allowed their genotypes to be recorded and made publicly available. In the Golden Gate Killer case we see that random samples of genetic material can be attributed to individuals purely based on their biological links to other people who volunteered to be genotyped.

The next step will be, presumably, “shadow genetic profiles”: A company like GEDmatch — or the FBI — could generate imputed genetic profiles for anyone in the population, based solely on knowledge of their relationships to other people in their database, whether voluntarily (for the private company) or compulsorily (FBI).

Willfully misleading

A Home Office spokesman says

It is wilfully misleading to conflate the situation experienced by people from the Windrush generation with measures in place to tackle illegal immigration and protect the UK taxpayer.

Not just misleading, but willfully. There’s no possible way anyone could honestly see a connection between a policy of “hostile environment” (their words) for undocumented immigrants — effectively deputising the health service and every landlord to act as amateur immigration sleuths — and the mistreatment of members of a minority ethnic group whose immigration status has been kept deliberately ambiguous.

One of the celebrated cases reported in The Guardian was that of a man whose radiotherapy for prostate cancer was cancelled because he couldn’t prove his legal residency, despite having lived in the UK for 45 years. It’s hard to imagine that his skin colour and accent played no role in the hospital’s decision to question his status. It reminded me of a question I’ve considered several times: How can a native-born British citizen prove his or her right to be here? Everyone born since birthright citizenship was eliminated has been subject to jus sanguinis, with citizenship conditional on their bloodline. If you’re 30 years old and your landlord is asking you to prove your right to reside in the country, what do you do? Call your parents and ask for their birth certificates? If your parents are John and Mary Smith, how do you prove that they’re your parents? We’re gradually coming to a generation that will need to prove their grandparents were citizens. Registration of citizens and ID cards would resolve the problem, but the Tories got rid of those, suggesting they would infringe on personal liberty. As I commented before, the Conservatives have a stereotype of Nazis demanding people’s “papers”, and decided that the evil was not that disfavoured individuals were punished for not having correct papers, the offense was to provide them with papers in the first place.

Jared Kushner thinks ahead on prison reform

One of the oddest trends of the latter half of the odd 1970s in the US was the transformation of law-and-order conservatives like Charles Colson and even G. Gordon Liddy into prison-reform advocates, after they had spent some time themselves in federal prison for their role in the Watergate scandal. The President’s son in law isn’t waiting. Congress is considering a package of reform measures to improve federal prison training programmes, and increase the possibilities for early release for good behaviour. Reports are that Kushner has taken time out of his busy schedule making peace in the Middle East and solving the opioid crisis to lobby for the bill. JK is, of course, famously well behaved. What good is advocating prison reform if it comes too late for you to take advantage of it?