November 11, 2006: Why I am not a Positivist

Once again, David Cole has written an excellent book review for The New York Review. The last time he came to my attention, he was writing about terrorism; this time the issue is the constitutional foundation of our legal system. The book under review is Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, by Richard Posner (pictured above as rendered, with at least two meanings intended, by David Levine). What is at stake is Posner's legal philosophy, which basically reduces judicial ruling to the mechanics of cost-benefit analysis.

While Cole does not mention it explicitly, this kind of positivism-with-a-vengeance actually recalls Bertrand Russell's internationalism, where Russell envisioned a single government for the entire globe that would resolve all disputes by invoking the machinery of an appropriately designed logical calculus. Cole does an excellent job of challenging this vision. For me the most compelling passage of his text is a quotation of a 1961 dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan concerning the nature of due process:

Due process has not been reduced to any formula; its content cannot be determined by reference to any code. The best that can be said is that through the course of this Court's decisions it has represented the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society. If the supplying of content to this Constitutional concept has of necessity been a rational process, it certainly has not been one where judges have felt free to roam where unguided speculation might take them. The balance of which I speak is the balance struck by this country, having regard to what history teaches are the traditions from which it developed as well as the traditions from which it broke. That tradition is a living thing. A decision of this Court which radically departs from it could not long survive, while a decision which builds on what has survived is likely to be sound. No formula could serve as a substitute, in this area, for judgment and restraint.

While the focus of Posner's book and Cole's challenge involves the relationship between the current executive and judicial branches of the Federal Government, reading about the subtleties of due process reminded of when, about five years ago, John Seely Brown enjoined me to drop everything and read Lawrence Lessig's new book, Code (dragging me to a bookstore on Maui in the process). Revisiting the index of that book, I discovered only one entry for "due process," that being in a paragraph on page 7 that reviews the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. That neglect for one of the most important elements of our Constitutional process can perhaps explain the sort of position that Lessig tried to take in his book:

Government should push the architecture of the Net to facilitate its regulation, or else it will suffer what can only be described as a loss of sovereignty.

This, again, is positivism-with-a-vengeance, guided possibly by a calculus more sophisticated than one Russell could have ever imagined, but (in Harlan's language) a "formula" nonetheless. Today we may be more conscious of the judicial issues that have been arising in the way of American military adventurism. However, those issues are also likely to arise in other more mundane aspects of our lives; so we should all be aware of the cautionary arguments that Cole has articulated so excellently.

November 02, 2006 (1): Validate Your Assumtions!

As if there have not been enough entries today, here is an entry for the commonplace book from the interview that Mohammad Khatami gave to the BBC:

Democracy is not something to get exported.

October 30, 2006 (1): The Final Steingart Installment

Today's SPIEGEL ONLINE provided the final installment in the translations of excerpts from Gabor Steingart's Weltkrieg um Wohlstand ("war for wealth") book. Once again the title is as provocative as it is relevant: "Twisting the Knife: Consumers Are Killing the Welfare State." This one actually makes an excellent companion piece to the Book TV broadcast of a lecture that Joseph Stiglitz recently gave to the World Bank to discuss his new book, Making Globalization Work. Stiglitz is the perfect antidote to anyone who has had too much over Tom Friedman's cheerleading, and he even took Friedman on by using the guy's own language. I cannot duplicate the words exactly; but what Stiglitz said went something like "Not only is the world not flat, but it is getting less flatter every day." This then gave him an opportunity to discuss the unpleasant consequences that may ensue from a Digital Divide which is growing larger, rather than smaller.

Unlike Friedman, Steingart is not concerned with the mission of making us feel good. He writes about German consumers; but he could just as well be writing about consumers in any industrialized and Internet-rich country:

The normal shopper at a German department store like Karstadt, wholesale retailer Metro or grocery discounter Lidl is a downright globalization fanatic. He compares prices and services but not nationalities or their social security systems. He wants his rebates and does not want additional charges. He is interested in the good deal, not in the dirty business already going on elsewhere in the world.

Even if he considers himself a romantic, he is actually a materialist by the book. It is only outside of business hours that he occasionally entertains idealistic doubts. And only then does he start to ask himself how it can be that he can obtain such large carpets so cheaply or why the prices on computers and mobile phones these days are so low.

This eventually leads him to a punch line that is not unfamiliar but still bears repeating at every opportunity:

What is important at this juncture is simply the realization that the global labor market, as we have invented it up to now, has created a unified sovereign territory for goods producers. The demand for labor now moves from one land to another, and naturally prefers those states with the lowest possible supplementary social costs.

Many who considered the social market economy to be the final stage of history are now being forced to admit they made a colossal error. Capitalism has, thanks to a global labor and finance market, increased its range, while the social safety net has lost ground. The market has gained power, speed and apparently also inevitability. But the social triumph of yesteryear has faded. Indeed, capitalism is going back to its roots.

I suppose I have enjoyed reading these essays because Steingart follows a path that I have tried to advocate for some time, the path of reasoning about consequences. In all fairness to the average consumer, it is not easy to reason about consequences when your finances demand that you get the best price for every purchase you make. So perhaps Steingart has been a bit extreme in picking on those consumers, but whom should he target? It is all very well and good to say that governments ought to deal with long-term questions of economic viability; but what are any of us to do when a government shirks that responsibility? Passionate talk of revolution is no solution, since the odds are not good that the resulting system will be any more conducive to long-term thinking. Unpleasant as it may sound, we may all have to face up to being responsible for our own assets and apply those assets towards building a safety net that can withstand future abuses from the movers and shakers of the global economy.

October 27, 2006 (1): "Death" of a "President"

Speaking of fiction, The Raw Story ran the German Press Agency item about the limited-release opening of Death of a President in the United States. The byline was Los Angeles, but the film has also opened here in San Francisco. The Chronicle ran their review under an interesting headline: "Bush is murdered in tasteless, creepy 'Death.'" Well, as a long-standing John Waters fan, who was one of the first kids on my block to see a midnight screening of Pink Flamingos, I figure that I have earned myself the right to make my own call on tastelessness! On the other hand the Germans seem to agree with the creepy part, describing the assassination itself as "a chilling approximation." Meanwhile, as of this writing, The Raw Story has harvested 31 comments; and, without wading through all of them, there seems to be a strong faction that want to see this film in order to indulge in their favorite fantasy. I would probably find that even more creepy, were it not for the fact that I was living in Marina del Rey when Platoon came out; and there were movie theaters you wanted to avoid, because the veterans had chosen them to be the places where they would gather to relive their personal horrors while engaging in "dialog" with the images of the actors on the screen. So I guess the only lesson from all this is that, whenever we think we have a working definition of "creepy," something creepier comes along to raise the bar.

So, do I want to see this film? Notwithstanding any definitions of taste, I am always interested in anything that is called provocative, just to see to what extent I am provoked. Will I go to a theater to see the film? Well, this is opera season, not to mention the Symphony, and new new play just opened at Berkeley Rep. Usually I wait for these things to show up on cable. Perhaps I should worry that Comcast will block it, but I would be inclined to believe that they will just wait for a reasonable period of time to lapse after the election.

Meanwhile, just to remind us that irony never died, the front page of the Chronicle Datebook section allocates most of its space to a review of The Bridge. This documentary is real, not "faux," to use the word from the German Press Agency. For those of you unaware of this film, it is a documentary that shows (real) people taking a suicidal plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge and even interviews a survivor of one of these attempts. The Chronicle reviewer was full of praise for this one, but I am going to think a lot harder about whether I really want to see it than I shall over Death of a President. That kind of reality may just be too much with me.

October 26, 2006 (2): The Best Government Money can Buy?

Reuters just announced that Mohammed (Mo) Ibrahim will use his self-made millions to back an annual $5 million prize to be awarded to former African leaders "who had demonstrated excellence in government." Given the problem that Ibrahim is trying to solve, he should definitely be lauded for coming up with a new strategy. However, it revives an old joke that was very popular when I was a kid: Do we have to pay governments to be good, or should governments be good for nothing?

October 26, 2006 (1): White Trash Comes to Europe

SPIEGEL ONLINE is continuing to run English-language excerpts from Gabor Steingart's Weltkrieg um Wohlstand ("war for wealth") book. The title of today's essay is "White Trash, Fast Food: How Globalization Is Creating a New European Underclass." This is a must-read for all zealots who see globalization as the instrument of spreading the American value system around the world. If ever there were a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, this is it!

As others have pointed out, there is not questioning the ways in which things have gotten better. Where the questions arise concerns the consequences of those improvements and whether or not things are getting worse at the same time they are getting better (and we simply choose not to look in the places where they are getting worse). Here is an excerpt from the argument of this particular essay:

We know, for example, that today's proletariat is richer than the worker of generations past. Indeed, with a little skill, he can tap into the coffers of the state's social safety net, which provides him with access to an income comparable to those of police officers, warehouse workers and taxi drivers. Thus, it is not material poverty that separates him from others.

Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call "Underclass TV." The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking -- a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today's proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

He likewise makes little effort to open the door to the future for his own children. Their language skills are as bad as their ability to concentrate. The rising rate of illiteracy is matched by the shrinking opportunities to integrate the underclass. The Americans, not ones to mince words, call them "white trash."

So, once again, the story comes down to education, this time in the setting of that condition of anomie that so occupied Émile Durkheim. Now the debate has to move beyond the question of whether or not we are teaching things of lasting value. Now we have to address whether we are succeeding in teaching anything at all. Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!

October 25, 2006: The Ultimate Fiction of Value

One way to reflect on the implications of postmodernism and its foundations in fictions is to consider some of the articles Gabor Steingart has been writing for SPIEGEL ONLINE (available in English). The one with the greatest impact was filed today with the full title: "Playing With Fire: America and the Dollar Illusion." This is an excellent follow-up to yesterday's article, "A Superpower in Decline: America's Middle Class Has Become Globalization's Loser." Given how hard it is to count on any American news source these days (even the so-called "public" sources) and the accusations of bias now being levelled at the BBC, it is probably quite valuable that Der Spiegel has chosen to support an English-language on-line edition. Even more important is that both these articles are excerpted from a book: Weltkrieg um Wohlstand: Wie Macht un Reichtum neu verteilt werden (which translates as "War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity"). It is rare enough to find excerpts from a "serious" book in a magazine. In this case Der Spiegel has provided us with English-language content before any translated edition has been published. So, to get a feel for the economic implications of postmodern thinking, here are a few paragraphs from the "dollar illusion" article:

For capital market investors, reality isn't reality until the majority of investors are convinced it is reality and have begun reacting accordingly. Right now, everyone is watching everyone else closely. Everyone knows the dream of the stable economic superpower has ended, but everyone is keeping his eyes shut just a little longer.

Government bonds and shares don't have any objective value -- nothing you can see, weigh, taste or even eat. Their value is measured by investors' faith that the purchasing power of $1 million will still be $1 million 10 years from now, rather than having been reduced by half. This faith is measured on the markets almost every second -- and the measure used is nothing but the faith of other investors. As long as the faithful outnumber the skeptics, everything works out fine for the dollar (and the world economy). The trouble starts the day the scale begins to tip.

The process is complicated by the fact that investors aren't driven by blind faith alone. In part, it seems, hard facts also push them to extend their credit of trust a little longer. US economic growth -- an impressive figure on paper -- is an important benchmark. When it is high, investors feel reassured in their faith in the power of the US domestic economy to perform well. True, the trade balance deficit has skyrocketed since it first appeared in the mid-1970s. But the economy is growing steadily anyway, as the dreamers note with growing self-confidence. It may not be growing as rapidly as the Chinese economy, but it is growing twice as fast as the European economy.

And yet this benchmark is not as reliable as it seems. The faith investors have in the figure has actually helped create it. After all, the purchasing price of a government bond feeds almost directly into state consumption, just as the purchasing price of a share makes companies more inclined to consume. It also extends the credit basis of millions of private households -- which in turn boosts consumption. In this way, the expectations of investors -- including the expectation that the United States will continue to grow -- transform into certainties almost all by themselves.

In other words, the capital of trust creates the very growth rates it needs in order to justify itself. US economic growth, in fact, is fueled by ever-increasing consumer spending -- puzzling given that American wages are dropping as is industrial output. Still, everyone knows the answer to this riddle. The rise in consumption isn't based on an expansion of production, a rise in wages or even an increase in exports. To a large extent, it's based on the growing debt. But why do banks keep issuing credit? Because they accept the ever-increasing prices of stocks and real estate as a kind of collateral. A closed circuit of miraculous money minting has been created.

So, in the language of yesterday's post, are these fictions "intended to deceive?" I would answer in the affirmative. This system can only sustain itself if you have a critical mass of agents willing to believe in it, regardless of how sound that belief is. In the postmodern fashion of warping words, trust is being melded into faith until the two can no longer be distinguished. Thus, we are no longer dealing with the ways in which shareholders speculate over their investments; we are now in the domain of those individuals who, in one way or another, agree on questions concerned with the value of currency. Steingart has a useful characterization of those players:

Everyone knows how dangerous the game is, but continuing to play it strikes them as less dangerous than quitting.

Also, as was revealed in Lulu (play and opera), the best players are rarely seriously hurt by their decisions; the pain "trickles down" to those who lack the strength to endure such hits (without whom, however, markets would not be as strong as they are).

Meanwhile, lest we think that this game is only played with the relatively virtual concept of money, the online edition of the London Times ran a story today about the latest generation of "players" in the European Union "subsidy game." Olive oil producers in Spain, Greece, and Italy have been able to net €2 billion in subsidies based on inflated crop figures; and livestock farmers in Slovenia are now playing the same game with their cows, sheep, and goats! In other words the "concrete objects" that are out there in the fields are less important than the reports that are filed about those objects; and those reports have just as much fiction to them as the economic reports used to establish currency values.

Welcome to the postmodern world!

October 23, 2006: Population Politics

According to today's Times Online site, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has instructed the population of Iran to produce more babies with the goal of doubling the country's population to ensure its "dominance." However "voices of reason" may react to this with alarm (and however justified the alarm), we probably should recognize that this is not a new strategy. When I was working in Israel (1971-1973), while this was never articulated as government policy, just about anyone I spoke to voiced this strategy as an important element of patriotism. Even in Singapore, which prided itself on the diversity of its population, I encountered tacit injunctions to the Chinese population to make sure that their numbers would not begin to lag in the demographic statistics. Given the resources crises we face, there is, as I suggested, plenty of cause for alarm; but we also need to recognize that this "political weapon" ball has been rolling for some time.

October 18, 2006: Teachers and Students

Yesterday, CNET News.com ran a story from Washington with the headline: "Google CEO: Techies must educate governments." So much for trying to address questions of reality and fiction! Admittedly, the report does not include any direct quote invoking this language. However, it is clear that Schmidt feels that our government needs such education ("The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff"); so it seems to follow that it is up to the techies to correct this deplorable state of affairs. This is all very well and good to say from the splendid isolation of the Googleplex or the podium; but it does not seem to have occurred to Schmidt that the best education is always a two-way street. Thus, it has probably not occurred to him that it is as important for "those in the know about technology" to become better educated about the nature and working of governments as it is to inform others about the Internet's role in society. Did it even occur to him that the best teachers are the best listeners, rather than the best performers in front of a mass audience? Socrates knew this sort of thing and was very good at it, but my recent experience has shown that techies do not have much time for Socrates. If Schmidt does not watch out, he will find that the adversarial relationship in which he is already engaged will only get more adversarial!

September 28, 2006: Where it all Began

Enough of Generation M and the fictions we are making up to hide behind it! Let us try to remember, for better or worse, that there is a "world of work" out there. This makes it a good time to remember that the same essay that carries Marx' wonderful assessment of religion also signals his discovery of the proletariat. This forms the basis for today's commonplace book entry:

Where, then, the positive possibility of emancipation in Germany? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong as such. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional title but only a human title, which is not partially opposed to the consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, and thereby emancipating all of them; a sphere, in short, which is the total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.

This seems to be where it all began, and one can only wonder if Marx could imagine where it would lead!

September 20, 2006 (1): Ignoring History

It is time to "read into the record" those sentences from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which always seem to be ignored in spite of their value:

Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Never mind that we have yet to track down the source of Hegel's observation. We can forgive Marx the rhetorical flourish in light of the subsequent insight!

I was reminded of this remark while reading Guenther Roth's (necessarily?) massive introduction to Economy and Society, the project to translate all of Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft into English. One particular sentence leapt out at me this morning:

Weber looked more closely at the consequences of the seizure of power than did Marx in spite of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; he saw that revolutionary domination can survive only when an efficient administration suppresses the expropriated former holders of legitimate power.

Can we read this sentence without thinking about Iraq? Can we think about Iraq without thinking about Marx's two-fold analysis of history: the revolutionary overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy followed by the revolutionary overthrow of Ba'athist rule? There is no doubting the general consensus regarding the tragic nature of the first phase. We have only to read the news every day to complete Marx's couplet. I suppose there is little need to comment on how much thought was given to "efficient administration" before going in with the big guns!

September 09, 2006: The Emotional Cost of a Town Meeting

In her paper about "The Collectivist Organization" (American Sociological Review, Volume 44, August, 1979), Joyce Rothschild-Whitt cited the following study of town meetings:

A study of the New England town meeting found citizens reporting headaches, trembling, and even fear for one's heart as a result of the meetings. Altogether, a quarter of the people in a random sample of the two spontaneously suggested that the conflictual character of the meetings disturbed them (Mansbridge, 1979; 1973).

September 02, 2006: Thinking about Subject and Objects in a CRM Society

Two themes seem to be merging together into a common perspective. The more vivid is the impact that When the Levees Broke is having, the more I watch of it. The other is the impact that CRM technology seems to be having on our view of the world, which, in the past, I have considered primarily from the point of view of service. However, what I now have to say applies to all aspects of "customer relationships" purported to be covered by CRM technology. More recently I have also been exploring this theme in my comments on the Confused of Calcutta blog.

Let us begin with one fundamental premise: The name "Customer Relationship Management" is nothing more than (to try to use polite language) a linguistic deception. Anyone who thinks that this technology "manages customer relationships" probably has a thoroughly impoverished view of management, an absolutely distorted conception of the nature of relationships, and nothing less that total ignorance of who the customers are. It is that last point that inspired the title of this entry, because, at the end of the day, all CRM technology is based on the assumption that customers are viewed as objects, rather than subjects who, for one reason or another, have been motivated to engage with the vendor.

Then, while watching When the Levees Broke, it hit me: This is an assumption that has extended beyond the scope of CRM! Listening to a victim's account of the evacuation of the Superdome, the description came to a head when she finally blurted out that the evacuees were being treated like slaves. (Spike Lee may be the only film-maker not afraid to take such racially charged material and put it on the screen rather than bury it in a wastebasket.) To defuse the racial connotations, what she was saying was that the evacuees were being treated as objects. This may have been a matter of expediency or efficiency, but the people managing the evacuation made a calculated decision to deny subjectivity to each evacuee. Where this women invoked the image of the old slave markets, my wife invoked the image of Auschwitz, the other classic example of "mangement by objectification."

Were the victims of Katrina being treated as objects by people hooked on CRM technology? Probably not, but those folks did have the same worldview one finds among CRM promoters and users. Will vendors ever get back to those "good old days" when customer engagement was important? I shall not venture a guess, but I will confess to a strong streak of pessimism!