Anti-racism as misdirection
A digest, with occasional commentary on what I found on the net this week
Taming government by amnesia
In 2009 I chaired the Government 2.0 Taskforce which made numerous recommendations for a policy architecture in which public data would be ‘open by default’. Eight years later the Productivity Commission report on Data Availability and Use observed:
while Australia ranks relatively highly on implementation of open data policies, it receives a particularly low score on the impact of its datasets — although data is published, the poor update frequency and formatting mean that it is underutilised.
In fact this was the tip of the iceberg. The Commission essentially repeated many of our recommendations. The punchline is that this was not because they hadn’t been accepted. It’s because they had and it was making vanishingly little difference. Welcome to Lord Acton’s quickstep. Lord Acton was the guy who commended rowing as the perfect preparation for public life because it enables you to travel in one direction while you face in the other. I used to use it as a joke, but a few years ago I made it one of my central concepts for understanding bureaucracies.
Like regulation review, like freedom of information, like what happens in numerous government funded social interventions, the mission statements are fine. The policies are OK, but other imperatives (generally keeping stakeholders happy up appearances) displace actually carrying out the high level policies that have been agreed.
Why am I telling you this? Because a second bite at the cherry is coming around. Lateral Economics has begun work on proposing a system of reporting to help policy makers identify how much progress is being made on the ground in opening up government data — how much progress they have made that is, doing all those things that are necessary to make it as easy as possible to use. There are technical, policy, administrative things to be got right not just up in the gods, but down in the weeds in one agency after another.
If you think you can help us, we’re holding roundtables around the eastern seaboard. So please drop me a line if you’d like to attend, or want to suggest someone who should attend.
The moment I saw this I new I had to tell my munchkins
Anti-racism as misdirection
I was reading an article by a colleague and friend Martin Turkis. (You may have seen some of our podcasted discussions) and came across some of what I’ve extracted below from an excellent article from Sept 2020. I didn’t even know of the website NonSite.org. But I do now.
The problem (thought to be so ingrained in American life that it’s sometimes called America’s original sin) is racism; the solution is antiracism. And the confidence in both the diagnosis and the cure is so high that it’s produced action everywhere from BLM protesting in the streets to the Mississippi legislature voting to take down its flag to corporate boardrooms pledging literally billions of dollars—all with the admirable goal of ending white supremacy. …
But they are mistaken. In fact, not only will a focus on the effort to eliminate racial disparities not take us in the direction of a more equal society, it isn’t even the best way of eliminating racial disparities themselves. If the objective is to eliminate black poverty rather than simply to benefit the upper classes, we believe the diagnosis of racism is wrong, and the cure of antiracism won’t work. Racism is real and antiracism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn’t what principally produces our inequality and antiracism won’t eliminate it. And because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it.
What makes racism look like the problem? The very real racial disparities visible in American life. And what makes antiracism look like the solution? Two plausible but false beliefs: that racial disparities can in fact be eliminated by antiracism and that, if they could be, their elimination would make the U.S. a more equal society. The racial wealth gap, because it is so striking and commonly invoked, is a very good … illustration of how, in our view, both the problem and solution are wrongly conceived.
It is well known by now that whites have more net wealth than blacks at every income level, and the overall racial difference in wealth is massive. Why can’t antiracism solve this problem? Because, as Robert Manduca has shown, the fact that blacks were overrepresented among the poor at the beginning of a period in which “low income workers of all races” have been hurt by the changes in American economic life has meant that they have “borne the brunt” of those changes. The lack of progress in overcoming the white/black wealth gap has been a function of the increase in the rich/poor wealth gap.
In fact, if you look at how white and black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10 percent of white people have 75 percent of white wealth; the top 20 percent have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10 percent of black households hold 75 percent of black wealth.
On stumbling into the other side of the frontier: Henry Reynolds
Henry wasn’t all that keen on indigenous history, but couldn’t avoid it in Nth Queensland. A great story of stumbling and serendipity.
Can some Democrat powerbroker please say this?
Cancel watch: a special segment
Coleman Hughes gets shafted by TED comms
Chris [Anderson] seems to view this situation as a dispute between two equally reasonable parties––me on one end and his staff on the other. That is the wrong way to think about this situation.
Here are two key differences between me and his staff:
(1) I believe that there should be all kinds of TED talks: woke ones, anti-woke ones, and apolitical ones. Free speech and viewpoint diversity should reign supreme! But TED’s staff appear to believe that there should be tons of woke talks and zero anti-woke talks. That’s a big difference. I want a bigger tent of allowable ideas, they want a smaller tent.
(2) I believe MLK’s prescription of race-blind, classed-based social policy––as he advocated for in his book Why We Can’t Wait ––is both wise and within the bounds of acceptable opinion. The people on the other side of this appear to believe that anyone who advocates for MLK’s position should be de-platformed. Equally reasonable?
Finally, Chris ought to reframe his view of his staff’s feelings.
For instance, when Chris writes, “Some commenters below just don’t understand how anyone could be upset by a talk arguing for color blindness,” he is straw-manning in spectacular fashion. Sure, somewhere there is probably a person with Asperger’s who truly doesn’t get why someone could get touchy about race. But the vast majority of TED’s critics understand why people get emotional about race––we just don’t think that those emotions should have de facto veto power over what can be argued in a public forum. …
Life is triggering. Part of being an adult is learning to take responsibility for your feelings instead of insisting that it’s the world’s responsibility not to trigger you. We all understand this 99% of the time. Why woke institutions suddenly forget this when confronted with black anger (or Indigenous anger or LGBTQ anger, etc.) is what TED’s critics, myself included, “just don’t get”.
Must watch: Vote yes
Nigel Biggar writes with ‘care and precision’, but gets the chop
Here’s the story of another book cancellation to prevent fits of the vapours, this time by Bloomsbury. You gotta love the corporate speak into which the cancellers waft as they cancel, in this case a book they commissioned with many years research in it. The commissioning editor said this on receipt of the manuscript.
I consider this to be a book of major importance, certainly one of the most important on my list for some time…. Your research is exhaustive. I am speechless. Your argument is conveyed with care and precision. I say again, this is such an important book.
But the book was on colonialism. And shortly afterwards the author received correspondence saying “we are of the view that conditions are not currently favorable to publication”. Deliciously, bad faith usually gives itself away in irrelevant circumlocutions. I love the pacifying, puffing up and pomposifying of the word “think”. They are “of the view".
Cecil Rhodes take II
Intrigued by Biggar’s article I went and checked out the book what got cancelled. I’ve only listened to a tiny bit of it. It, and all the suggestions that came up after I bought it, are enough to tell me that it’s an anti-woke fighting book, which isn’t necessarily a great way to approach culture wars.
I’d rather not join a side on a thing like this (or at least put too much store by that) because it usually doesn’t lead anywhere very interesting. Still, as Mick Jagger once said “you can’t always get what you want”. In the meantime I had assumed, in my quietude (if that is a word — it certainly was a state) that Rhodes was a super unpleasant and racist kind of guy. So I was pleased to have Biggar’s (other) side of the story.
Thus did I stumble, blindly, into the Imperial History Wars. Had I been a professional historian, I would have known what to expect, but being a mere ethicist, I did not. Still, naivety has its advantages, bringing fresh eyes to see sharply what weary ones have learned to live with. One surprising thing I have seen is that many of my critics are really not interested in the complicated, morally ambiguous truth about the past. For example, in the autumn of 2015 some students began to agitate to have an obscure statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from its plinth overlooking Oxford’s High Street.
The case against Rhodes was that he was South Africa’s equivalent of Hitler, and the supporting evidence was encapsulated in this damning quotation: ‘I prefer land to n---ers … the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism … one should kill as many n---ers as possible.’ However, initial research discovered that the Rhodes Must Fall campaigners had lifted this quotation verbatim from a book review by Adekeye Adebajo, a former Rhodes Scholar who is now director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg. Further digging revealed that the ‘quotation’ was, in fact, made up from three different elements drawn from three different sources. The first had been lifted from a novel. The other two had been misleadingly torn out of their proper contexts. And part of the third appears to have been made up.
There is no doubt that the real Rhodes was a moral mixture, but he was no Hitler. Far from being racist, he showed consistent sympathy for individual black Africans throughout his life. And in an 1894 speech he made plain his view: ‘I do not believe that they are different from ourselves.’ Nor did he attempt genocide against the southern African Ndebele people in 1896 – as might be suggested by the fact that the Ndebele tended his grave from 1902 for decades. And he had nothing at all to do with General Kitchener’s ‘concentration camps’ during the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, which themselves had nothing morally in common with Auschwitz. Moreover, Rhodes did support a franchise in Cape Colony that gave black Africans the vote on the same terms as whites; he helped to finance a black African newspaper; and he established his famous scholarship scheme, which was explicitly colour-blind and whose first black (American) beneficiary was selected within five years of his death.
However, none of these historical details seemed to matter to the student activists baying for Rhodes’ downfall, or to the professional academics who supported them. Since I published my view of Rhodes – complete with evidence and argument – in March 2016, no one has offered any critical response at all. Notwithstanding that, when the Rhodes Must Fall campaign revived four years later in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the same old false allegations revived with it, utterly unchastened. Thus, in the Guardian newspaper, an Oxford doctoral student (and former editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal) was still slandering Rhodes as a ‘génocidaire’ in June 2020.
This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.
How demonstrating impact makes things worse …
As I’ve been saying for many years, most accountability for achieving difficult things is pretending. Accountability theatre. Anyway, word is leaking out. A good piece.
Many teams or organisations seek to demonstrate “their” impact — the difference their work makes in the world. They are often asked to do this by those who fund the work. Sometimes they do it because they want to help their staff see the difference that they make.
There’s only one problem with this. Almost all useful social change is achieved as part of a complex system. In other words, your work is a small part of a much larger web of entangled and interdependent activity and social forces.
The systems map of the outcome of obesity illustrates this perfectly — it shows all the factors contributing to people being obese (or not), and all the relationships between those factors.
This is the reality of trying to make impact in the world — your actions are part of a web of relationships — most of which are beyond your control, many of which are beyond your influence, quite a few of which will be completely invisible to you. …
When we think of impact as something we can ‘deliver’, we are pretending to ourselves to make the task of managing social change easier. And the purpose of good management is not to make the task of management easier, it is to confront the uncomfortable messiness of how the world actually works. If we care about making impact in the real world, we need to stop pretending.
Some lovely things in Oxford’s Ashmolean
Brad and the broken bargain
Brad Delong offers high and despairing praise for The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, a new book by Brook Manville and Josiah Ober of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
While the entire book is well-written and insightful, its historical overview is a veritable treasure for all time for anyone who wants to understand the events leading up to our experiment in self-government, the challenges encountered along the way (human nature being what it is), and the patterns that are most likely to be repeated in the future.
But then comes the question of what we should do now. This part of the book left me depressed and empty, with nothing constructive to say, because I agree with the authors’ big conclusion that democracies survive only when they are underpinned by civic friendship between their members.
Looking back to the Roman Republic before 150 BC, Plutarch observed that points of contention “though neither trifling nor raised for trifling objects, were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate.”
If only such a description applied to the United States today!
Instead, one of our two main political parties, the Republican Party, has become so constituted that acknowledging the other party as a civic friend would be tantamount to its own ideological bankruptcy. …
I worry that Manville and Ober are correct about what it takes for democracies to survive. You need a civic bargain, with everyone treating each other the way that most Democrats do: as civic friends. This means that even if you believe members of the other party are misguided or misinformed, you still regard them as fellow passengers on the same boat (or swimming in the same shipwreck, as the case may be).
America’s problem now is that Republicans have made this impossible for themselves. To foster such a sensibility would undermine the grifter ecology that the party has been marinating in for many years. That ecology depends on people keeping their wallets open and their eyeballs glued to the screen, where they receive a steady drip of fear and loathing of their fellow citizens. From state-level races all the way up to the Supreme Court, there is simply too much money at stake to allow for points of contention to be settled through mutual concessions.
When the wrong person was herded into the BBC stuido
The creator of Dilbert is a sicko: A pity but there you go
Important podcasting from Joe Walker (AKA Jolly Swagman)
Fruitloop watch
I found the first few minutes of this kind of diverting. No prizes for guessing whose side I was on. Anyway, when they constitute something like 50 percent of the American electorate, it’s always worthwhile to try to expose yourself what’s in their heads (for as long as you can bear it anyway).
Ancient world watch
If I asked you to imagine a team of archaeologists, what's the first picture that would pop into your head? Probably a bunch of sweaty people sitting in a trench in rumpled sun hats and dusty boots, brows creased with concentration as they brush dirt off ancient bones and broken pottery. (It's a cool job!) But as Geoff Manaugh makes clear in his most recent feature for WIRED, that mental image may need updating. When you imagine archaeologists in the 21st century, they shouldn't just be digging. They should be zooming around Italian piazzas in little four-wheelers, using the latest radar technology to “produce an accurate snapshot of what’s beneath centuries of cobblestone and brick, chewing gum and litter.” They should be scanning entire Swedish islands in enough detail to make out the silhouette of a single Viking coffin (and maybe, one day, the horns on the occupant's helmet). They should be on their computers looking at Indigenous settlements that have long since dissolved into the soil, invisible to the human eye, undiggable by any trowel.
In a story that ventures from modern streets to Roman ruins, including a stop for coffee and cake with a software wizard in Vienna, Manaugh rides along with some of these Big Data archaeologists, and their critics. —Anthony Lydgate | Features Editor.
Johnson and Acemoglu: a story on enclosures
Always nice to hear a story of someone who discovered he was wrong. And changed his mind. Particularly when it led him to swing a bit left and became kinder in his outlook. (The woods — and the Murdoch empire — are full of people who swing in the opposite direction).
Enclosures of various kinds had been going on since the fifteenth century in an ad hoc way. In many parts of the country, landowners could achieve this by convincing the local population to acquiesce to enclosures, in return for monetary or other compensation. Yet in the eyes of the British elite of the late eighteenth century, there was much need for further modernization, especially by expanding their land holdings. About a third of all agricultural land was still held as common land and could potentially be turned into their private property.
Although the rhetoric was couched in terms of productivity increases and what was good for the country, the proposed modernization was far from neutral. It meant taking access to land away from peasants and expanding commercial agriculture. The vision of the age came to see the customary rights of landless peasants as a vestige of the past that needed to be modernized. If peasants did not want to relinquish these customary rights, then they had to be compelled to do so.
In 1773 Parliament passed the Enclosure Act, making it easier for large landowners to push through the reorganization of land they desired. Parliamentarians enacted this new law because they believed, or wanted to believe, that enclosures would be in the national interest.
Arthur Young, a farmer and influential writer, had a distinctive voice in these arguments. In his early work, Young had emphasized the importance of new agricultural techniques, including fertilizers, more scientific rotation of crops, and better plows for harvesting. Consolidated landholdings would make these technologies more effective and easier to implement.
But what about the resistance of the peasantry to enclosures? To understand Arthur Young’s perspective on this, we must first recognize the context in which he was situated and the broader vision guiding technology and agricultural reorganization. Britain was still a hierarchical society. Its democracy was by the elite and for the elite, with less than 10 percent of the adult male population having the vote. Worse, this elite did not think much of their less privileged compatriots.
Malthus’s writings were indicative of the mood of the time and the worldview of well-off people. Malthus thought that it was more humane not to let the living standards of the poor increase too much in the first place, lest they end up back in misery as they had more children. He also argued that “a man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him” (italics in original).
Young, like many of his contemporaries among the upper and middle classes, started out with similar notions. In 1771, almost three decades before Malthus’s argument was published, Young wrote: “If you talk of the interests of trade and manufactures, everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”
Combining this skeptical view of the lower classes and his belief in the imperative to apply better technologies in agriculture, Young became an outspoken voice for further enclosures. He was appointed as a key adviser to the Board of Agriculture, in which position he drafted authoritative reports on the state of British agriculture and opportunities for improvement.
Young thus became a spokesperson for the agricultural establishment, consistently listened to by ministers and cited in parliamentary debates. As an expert, he wrote forcefully in support of enclosures in 1767: “The universal benefit resulting from enclosures, I consider as fully proved; indeed so clearly, as to admit no longer of any doubt, amongst sensible and unprejudiced people: those who argue now against it are merely contemptible cavillers.” Seen through this lens, it was acceptable to strip the poor and uneducated from their customary rights and common lands because the new arrangements would allow the deployment of modern technology, hence improving efficiency and producing more food.
An increasing number of major landowners were keen to have public support and parliamentary approval for what they wanted to do, and Young became a useful ally. Here was a careful assessment of what needed to be done in the national interest, and if this perspective said that casting aside traditional rights and compelling the holdouts was necessary for progress, this was a price British society would have to pay.
By the early 1800s, however, the collateral damage of enclosures was becoming clear, at least to those who wanted to see it. That thousands were being forcefully pushed into deeper poverty was fine with Malthus. Perhaps surprisingly, Young’s reaction to these developments was quite different.
Though infused by the prejudices of his time, Young was an empiricist at heart. As he continued to travel and observe firsthand what was going on as enclosures came into effect, his empirical findings came increasingly into conflict with his views.
Even more remarkably, at this point Young changed his position on enclosures. He continued to believe that consolidation of open fields and common lands would result in efficiency gains. But he recognized that much more was at stake. The way in which common property was being abolished had a major impact on who won and who lost from the change of agricultural technology. By 1800, Young had completely reversed his recommendations: “What is it to the poor man to be told that the Houses of Parliament are extremely tender of property, while the father of the family is forced to sell his cow and his land?”
He argued that there were different paths of reorganizing agriculture; land could be consolidated without trampling the rights of ordinary people and taking the means of subsistence from them. There was no need to completely expropriate the rural population. From here, he went further and articulated the case that providing means of subsistence to the rural poor, such as a cow or goats, was not an impediment to progress. They could better support their families and perhaps have greater commitment to the community and even more sympathy for the status quo.
Young may have even understood a subtler economic truth: once expropriated, poor peasants would become a more reliable source of cheap labor to landowners—perhaps one of the reasons why so many landowners were keen on expropriating them. Conversely, protecting their basic assets might be a way of ensuring higher wages in the rural economy.
When advocating for enclosures, Young was a highly regarded expert, celebrated by the British establishment. Once he had his turnaround, all that changed, and he was no longer welcome to publish whatever he wanted on behalf of the Board of Agriculture. His aristocratic boss at the board made it clear that any anti-enclosure views were not welcome in official circles.
The history of the enclosure movement is a granular illustration of the way that persuasion and economic self-interest shape who benefits from technological change and who does not. The vision of British upper classes on what constituted progress and how to achieve it was critical for the reorganization of agriculture. This vision, as usual, overlapped quite a bit with their self-interest—taking land away from the poor with no or little compensation was clearly beneficial for those doing the taking.
A vision that articulates a common interest is powerful even when—especially when—there are losers as well as winners from new technologies because it enables those doing the reorganization and technology adoption to convince the rest.
There are often many constituencies to be persuaded. It was difficult to convince the poor peasants whose customary rights were being taken away. More feasible and more essential was the persuasion of the urban public and those with political power, such as the parliamentarians. Young’s scientific assessment of the necessity of the rapid rollout of enclosures played a significant role in this process. Predictably, landowners knew what conclusions they wanted to hear, and they embraced Young when he voiced these opinions and silenced him when he changed his mind.
Technological choice was critical as well. Even when couched in the language of progress and national interest, there were many intricate choices about the implementation of new technologies, and these decisions determined how much the elite benefited and how much hardship the peasants suffered. Totally expropriating the customary rights of poor peasants was a choice. We now know that it was not one that was dictated by the inexorable path of progress. Common lands and open fields could have existed for longer while British agriculture was being modernized. In fact, the available evidence suggests that these forms of land tenure were not inconsistent with new technologies and yield increases.
In the seventeenth century, open-field farmers had been at the forefront of those adopting peas and beans, and in the eighteenth century they kept up with the adoption of clover and turnips. There was more drainage installed on enclosed soil, but even in areas where that made a difference, output per hectare was higher only by about 5 percent in 1800. On arable land with lighter soils, which drain well naturally, and on land used for pasture, the yields for open-field farmers were within 10 percent of what enclosed farmers achieved. Output per worker was also only slightly higher for farmers working enclosed land.
The reorganization of agriculture set the tone for the next several decades of British economic development and determined who gained from it. People with property did well, including through parliamentary action where necessary. Those without property did not.
Technological modernization in agriculture became an excuse for expropriating the rural poor. Did this expropriation help with productivity improvements that were so sorely needed in late eighteenth-century Britain? There is no consensus on this question, with estimates ranging from no productivity gains to significant increases in yields. But there is no doubt that inequality increased and that those who had their lands enclosed lost out.
None of this was inevitable. The encroaching of customary rights and intensification of rural poverty were choices made and imposed on people in the name of technological progress and national interest. And Young’s assessment stands: productivity gains could have been achieved without driving landless peasants into further misery.