Over The Counter Culture

Mixed bag of responses today in The Times’ online comments section appended to a story about accusations of war crimes filtering their way through various Western countries’ legal systems, levelled not at the usual motley crew of African nutters but at sophisticated, Westernised ancients of the Israeli government. Whatever your stance, that’s a development that’s bound to provoke interesting and possibly quite uncomfortable reactions from readers and leaders throughout the UK, and it’ll be interesting to see how the media picks this one up.

Unlike other systems, it is said that in the UK, political will can find it hard to block cases coming to court, because anyone in the UK can make the accusation and take it forwards, without the case being picked up (or shelved) by a prosecuting lawyer (e.g. in France, juge d’instruction).

It will be interesting to see how Cabinet can somehow repair ties. The Israelis are very displeased:

President Peres described the incident as “one of the greatest political mistakes” that Britain could have made and calling for the law to be changed.

Calling for our law to be changed, because they don’t want ex-leaders, now retired and stripped of their diplomatic immunity, having to stand trial for war crimes. Surely the office charged with protecting British values and interests around the world appreciates the strength of our system, and the will of our democratically elected Parliament in incorporating the United Nations Convention Against Torture into the Criminal Justice Act 1988, and responded in kind? Er…

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said yesterday that the Government was “looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again”.

Yes. How terribly embarrassing, sorry about that chaps.

To dump this action would be to risk a very serious constitutional crisis within the UK, one that has been building for a while.

Remember that the arrest, in London, of General Augusto Pinochet for war crimes (wanted under Spanish warrant) was considered by many as one of the most significant developments in human rights and international law since the Nuremberg trials. remember, then, that our Home Secretary (none other than Jack Straw, the miserable shit) found a back door to let him go rather than send him to Spain: grounds of ill-health made him unsuitable to go to Spain to stand trial.

So he went back to Chile, stood up from his wheelchair and smiled.

We seem somehow to have escaped the battle even more recently, after the government decided that a case against BAE (bribery and corrupt business deals with Saudi Arabia) should be dropped due to:

1. ‘national security’ – a breakdown of relations with Saudi Arabia threatening bilateral anti-terrorism efforts if we decided to go after the globally corrupt instead
2. fear of job losses: under EU law the UK government cannot continue to contract with BAE if it is found guilty of corruption, which it argues might cripple the arms manufacturer far more critically than any punishment imposed

And the most immediate context is the growing anger at how easily members of our 2003 administration are escaping serious questioning over our entry into the Iraq war and subsequent behaviour therein.

I for one encourage serious outrage if our law gets changed or meddled with at the behest of alleged criminals in foreign lands.

The ever-convincing Chris Dillow over at Stumbling & Mumbling recently posted this. It’s by far one of the most lucid, critical breakdowns of the bonus issue currently baffling all and sundry, especially our MPs. It isn’t an easy problem to fix but one senses that this is certainly the correct rational & informed sentiment to carry when going about doing it; I think the crucial next step is to explore the fallacy of composition (point (1) below) in greater detail.

Posted with his permission – original post here

Why is there still a row about bankers’ bonuses? What I mean is that the issue should by now be settled against them. There’s abundant evidence that large bonus “incentives” are not only not justified (pdf) by efficiency considerations, but can actually backfire, with the result that intelligent observers are demanding an end to them.

If we were serious about designing high-powered incentives, we’d consider abandoning bonuses and instead simply killing under-performing bankers. After all, the threat of death works perfectly well in motivating airline pilots or soldiers. So why not apply it more generally?*

Let’s be clear. Bankers’ bonuses have less to do with rational incentive mechanisms than with the fact that bankers have power. It’s a form of legal extortion.
Which raises the question; why is this not more clear? It’s because any power structure is sustained by ideology – a set of cognitive biases which might have a grain of truth but which serve to defend vested interests. In the case of bonuses, there are four such biases:

1. The fallacy of composition. If any one banker doesn’t get a big bonus, it’s possible he might flounce off in a huff to another firm. But it’s not possible for all bankers to do so; only a tiny handful of British bankers could get good jobs in New York or  Switzerland. In this sense, a blanket nationwide ban on big bonuses wouldn’t do much harm.
What’s true for an individual needn’t be true for a group.
There’s a parallel here with one of the errors that got us into this mess – what Keynes called the “fetish of liquidity”. An asset might be liquid from the point of view of an individual, but there is no such thing as liquidity for al investors.

2. Mental accounting. Last year’s banks’ losses seem to have been put into a separate mental box, and are regarded as an exceptional item now that business is back to normal. But this shouldn’t be the case. Those losses vindicate Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s point that banks, on average, don’t make money because occasional huge losses wipe out years of profits. Which suggests bankers don’t have the skill they pretend to.

3. The fundamental attribution error. The belief that banks’ profits come from skilled individuals is in part due to the common error of attributing to individual agency what is in fact the result of situational or environmental factors. It’s trivially true that today’s banks’ profits are due to cheap money, government guarantees and state bail-outs. But it’s always been the case that profits have risen and fallen according to environmental forces such as monetary policy, waves of takeovers and general investor sentiment.

4. The impossible/difficult conflation. Throughout history necromancers, witch-doctors alchemists and ju-ju men have extracted high incomes. They’ve done so because their patrons have believed their job to be very difficult, demanding supreme skills. But in truth, the jobs of foretelling the future, controlling the weather and turning base metals into gold  haven’t been difficult ones. They’ve been impossible.
So it is, perhaps, with banking. Making high risk-free returns isn’t difficult, but impossible. In failing to see this, we give bankers the fortunes our ancestors gave other charlatans.

* Of course, the same reasoning applies to politicians, as they too can make huge errors which cost society dearly. This probably explains why they are not proposing the idea.

This has to be one the saddest things I’ve read all week.

…cosmetic surgery is now primarily consumed not by the rich, but by the working and lower-middle classes, sometimes even by the poor.  According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), about 1/3 of cosmetic surgery is consumed by people who make less than $30,000 a year.  About 70% of it is consumed by people who make less than $60,000 a year. It is mostly women (90%) and mostly white, middle-aged women (80% and between 35-55 years old).

If past trends are much to go by, this is something we might possibly expect here in the UK and elsewhere in the West (not to mention Japan).

The fashion/beauty industry, for years the source of an irrepressible esteem-destroying, envy creating lifeforce targeted primarily at the very well-to-do with nothing better to do with their money, has now shat all over the minds of people who quite frankly ought to have better things to spend their money on, than plumping up their lips. Let’s not forget the role of lower class diet, doubtless a tidy earner for US liposuctioners.

Once again, business interests walk leash in hand with complacent middle and lower class sheep (a sheep, on a leash?) lacking better sense than to accept and be subject to (and typically pay for exposure to!) that noxious influence and keep their hand in their pockets for objectively valuable endeavours.

Oh, and hurrah for a reduction in the cost of getting cosmetic surgery. What a boon for society that we now have such an ‘affordable’ means to tackle the symptoms (but not the cause!) of endemic low assertiveness and wisdom.

You can’t even argue that it significantly helps intelligent, but not very good looking people (in an age where looks supposedly matter more) to pass on their DNA to the next generation: 80% of people getting cosmetic surgery are women approaching menopausal age anyway.

(via Marginal Revolution)

I wrote last week about the horrible effect of Mandy’s inclusion of a clause giving Alan Johnson and all future Secretaries of State unprecedented and sweeping powers to amend copyright law as they (and not any democratically-elected body of representatives) saw fit.

Now comes the news that protest has spread from idiots on their blogs (bows), via broader groups like the Open Rights Group and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to the major players in the digital economy: Google, Facebook, eBay and Yahoo.

This can only be good news and I doubt anybody involved in pushing Mandy’s clause forwards expected such a quick and concerted slap in the face from established players in the UK’s digital economy. Whether fledgling businesses speak up for or against the Clause still remains to be seen; and I somehow doubt that the House of Lords would stand for the Clause either.

In that case, what on Earth was Mandy thinking he’d achieve by adding Clause 17 remains a mystery. Could it really be so sad and semi-sinister as a move to please a Corfu yachtsman? I don’t mean to imply greedy conspiracy on Geffen’s part; he has openly pledged to pass any money he makes from now on direct to charity. Or perhaps Murdoch is the likelier target of such posturing. Murdoch’s been badgering the great, the good and the puny for years now for stricter (or in his perspective – more generous) scope for extension and enforcement of copyright; here he is at it recently, hinting he’ll sue the BBC…