The march of folly: Middle east edition

And other things I discovered this week

Funeral for a friend: Tim Colebatch

I looked at Inside Story early this week to see this appreciation of Tim Colebatch. How nice I thought. Then I was shocked to read that he had died. We were friends and would have seen a lot more of each other had we been in the same city. I thought just last week it would be good to catch up but I didn’t follow through because of the tyranny of distance.

Anyway, Peter Martin does a fine job of summarising what a remarkable person Tim was. Journalism imposes very strong imperatives on its practitioners — the deadlines, the work, the bonhomie, the trade-offs, the two-facedness necessary if you’re seeking information from power. If you think I’m looking down my nose — I’m not. I’m in awe of most journalists. But especially the few who keep themselves together and keep trying to thread the eye of the needle. I’d be hopeless — and not because I wouldn’t be two-faced, but because I’d get hopelessly lost in it.

In any event, as Peter’s article makes clear, Tim remained clear-eyed through it. His values were patrician in the best sort of way (though utterly devoid of excess self-assertion), yet he was gentle and painstaking. And he had a kind of naïve faith in good intentions — surely a rare quality among top journalists. Just look at that lovely picture above of Tim at the top of his game. Tentative, inviting, idealistic, questioning. In the circumstances, it brings tears to my eyes.

One of the ways journalists zoom to the top of the profession is to produce a steady stream of books with a few ideas in them — around which they rewrite their last few years of columns of political punditry. At least these days Quarterly Essays keeps them down to 15,000 odd words ;) Tim spared us that. Instead, he wrote a wonderful and much-needed book about Rupert Hamer. And now I come to think of it, the description I gave in the last paragraph is the picture that emerges of Hamer.

Anyway, over to Peter Martin:

I was about to move from one office in the press gallery to another to work with him as his deputy. … Nick Gruen … told me that Tim Colebatch was extraordinary. Gruen said he had read something Tim had written, based on figures no one else knew about, and asked Tim where he had got them from. He said Tim sent him Tim’s figures — pages and pages of photocopied calculations done by hand. Tim had dug into several different documents …, copied out masses of figures by hand and combined them to discover something that wasn’t at all apparent from any of the individual documents. It must have taken hours. …

And then when I got to the Age, Tim did it all the time.

Peter, I know you’re doing the jobs figures today. I’ve just pulled out the six-month trend growth for each state, set it alongside the previous six months and this is what it shows…

Tim’s figuring produced a much greater insight than the Australian Bureau of Statistics press release or summary itself, which almost everyone else was content with.

It was not only journalists and those of us who worked with Tim who noticed this. When he died, an ABS official who had dealt with him wrote on the social media platform X that:

Most journos develop stories by cutting-pasting from media releases. Tim was a whip-sharp user of economic data who actually read statistical publications to develop his own take on the situation.

Another wrote:

As a public servant often required to provide background on the how of policies or programs to journalists, I can vouch for how genuine was Tim Colebatch. No journalist approached an inquiry with more open-mindedness, understood the issues more deeply, nor cared more.

Tim’s method — open-minded methodical inquiry — gave us truths that no one else had discovered. …

I remember getting ready to leave the office one night. … “What are you doing, Tim?” I asked.

“I am looking at British temperature records from the 1800s,” he told me. “I am trying to get a handle on the extent to which there has been global warming.”

“Tim, no one else would do that,” I said. “Everyone else uses secondary sources.”

“Shhh! Don’t tell,” he replied, and I left him to go on checking.

In October last year, Tim and I caught up at our local cafe, as we had done regularly for years. He told me the antivirals seemed to be holding back his cancer, but he didn’t think that would last.

And then he apologised. He had been up into the early hours of the morning attending a virtual press conference held by the International Energy Agency in Paris to outline its update on the path to limiting global warming to 1.5°C. He had interrogated the officials online, and he told me he still thought that if a lot of things fell into place we might just keep global warming to 1.5°C.

And then he walked home to write the piece. He concluded it by saying the Albanese government was

in danger of overpromising on targets while underdelivering on policies to achieve them. Its carbon price is limited to 200-odd companies, it is walking both sides of the street on fossil fuels, and most of the reviews it has launched have yet to produce outcomes. This is what happens when you allow the political staff to take charge of policy.

It was his last message to readers of Inside Story.

RIP Tim. We’ll miss you.

Penleigh Boyd (Arthur’s uncle)

Tim Colebatch’s biography of Dick Hamer

My 2014 review of Tim’s excellent book. And make sure you watch the video. It’s like another world. Hamer would have had a press secretary, but he’s clearly a person with his own life who happens to be doing politics. Professionalisation was proceeding apace. Now politics has pretty much been gobbled up by the trappings and accoutrements of acting yourself as you trott out your talking points.

Hamer was a rat of Tobruk who was always a natural leader with a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He came from Toorak … though Colebatch tells us they were not rich or at least their wealth was earned, not inherited. Rupert’s mum, Nancy had been orphaned at a young age but spent many years as Vice-President of Victoria Women’s Hospital which the Hamer family had spent several decades the previous century helping to build though charity drives. It was the first hospital in the British Empire to be run by and for women.

Hamer’s uncle was George Swinburne who was an engineer who’d made a fortune engineering Melbourne’s gas and water infrastructure and who then endowed the college named after him – now Swinburne University (though he didn’t want it named after him) as an institute for the technical training of the working class. In 1928 Nancy Hamer asked Swinburne’s great friend William McPherson – an industrialist turned politician, now Premier – for money to build a new wing of the Victoria Hospital. McPherson said the Government couldn’t afford it so he paid for it himself on one condition – that it be kept a secret until after the coming election lest people think he did it to buy votes. How times change.

Anyway, the story gets off to this excellent start. I learned a lot about Victorian history and how much we owe to the Hamers, Swinburnes and McPhersons of the world. Hamer is likewise presented as an urbane, hard-working liberal and exceptionally fair-minded person. He gives Henry Bolte great loyalty and expects it from his party in return. In office he does many of the things that Don Dunstan is famous for doing in South Australia – though with less fanfare and from the opposite side of the aisle. He puts a huge investment into the arts, cleaning up the environment and preserving heritage (He’s the guy who saved the Winsor Hotel, and the Shamrock Hotel in Bendigo and Werribee mansion and bought Heide). He outlawed discrimination against women (until the late 60s most women were routinely sacked from professional jobs once they got married).

He legalised homosexual acts and, perhaps dismayed at not saving Ronald Ryan the last man hanged in Victoria and I think Australia, removed Victoria’s death penalty. He also increased investment in public transport building Melbourne’s loop which was regarded as excessively costly at the time, but which it’s hard to believe isn’t justified against reasonable social discount rates. (I’d say the same about the Sydney Airport train to the city. I haven’t really seen the numbers, so perhaps I’ll be forced to change my mind one day, but until then know a service I like when I travel on it!) …

Occasional Tim Colebatch eccentricities grace the page. I doubt many analysts of Australia’s stand at Tobruk reference Muhammad Ali’s ‘rope a dope’ as a model military manoeuvre but it works well enough. Tim also thinks the 1973 tariff cut was a recklessly made decision which turned out to be a disaster. I disagree on both counts, but some might think I’m not objective about it – it was my Dad’s idea! Still Tim fails to mention that a working group of four people including (I think) Jim Cairns advisor left leaning economist Brian Brogan and Alf Rattigan spent about a month writing a paper where they agreed unanimously on the proposal (though Rattigan agonised as it wasn’t done in the way he had in mind for the Tariff Board/IAC). I also wonder if Tim has read my father’s article “The 25% tariff cut: was it a mistake?“. One of the points made there is that all sorts of other macro-economic phenomena did a lot more damage to manufacturing than the tariff cut. To be fair Tim does mention the high dollar and the wages explosion, but equal pay for women was even more important – especially in textiles clothing and footwear.

Anyway, it’s an absorbing biography which was sent me for nix in the hope that I’d tell you that you should go out and buy it.

You should go out and buy it.

I know Tim Colebatch. Tim Colebatch is a friend of mine. And Tim Colebatch is not this small. But he is this small on Scribe’s website.

The UK postal scandal

This article by Robert Barwick draws attention to some parallels between the UK postal scandal and the lower key and as far as we know entirely legal bullying of rural and regional post office franchisers by Australia Post.*

In any event, the article has a link to the four-part ITV series. I found it very affecting. If you’re not in the UK, go get yourself a VPN and watch it. It put me in mind of an idea of Machiavelli’s which the academic John McCormick has popularised. Il popolo (the people) don’t want any trouble. They want to live and let live. I grandi, on the other hand, (the nobles) are insatiable. Literally. The prince can never do enough for them. They always want more.

This underlines one aspect of my support for sortition in politics. It was commonplace political theory in the mid 20th century that democracy was not rule by the people but rule by that faction of the elite which had successfully gained the consent of the governed.

This threw the spotlight on two things. First, the extent to which elites were closed or in fact renewed themselves by promoting the best of the lower classes into their ranks. Second, since they are in charge of the arteries of the democracy mainstream factions of the elite need defend basic democratic norms — otherwise it falls apart.

The US has taken the lead in demonstrating how quickly this process can occur once a major faction of the elite defects. But the giant cultural munching machine that is the media (both media as propaganda led by the Murdoch empire and media as fast food whether of the tabloid or broadsheet variety) makes our democracies’ defence of basic liberal democratic norms wafer thin. Just compare the fate of Daniel Ellsberg with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

So safeguarding the arteries of democracy — the independence of judges and civil servants, of electoral boundaries and norms of impartiality in media — using sortition rather than putting the executive or its nominees in control — seems at least worth a try. They’re giving it a try with the sortition based Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission which has so far proven successful. And yes, after a long struggle, Australia’s electoral boundaries are fairly drawn, but the executive still appoints those who draw them — and all its judges and civil servants. We need only look at the former Administrative Appeals Tribunal to see how easy it is to corrupt a system all of whose members you appoint. (On that here’s a Prospect article on how the Conservative government captured the BBC).

Oh, and go and watch Mr Bates v The Post Office. Yes, it’s egregious. Yes, it might be getting fixed. But, despite its scale, it has gone on for twenty years. All the facts have been known for many years. And the only way it could be given the attention it deserves is by ‘going viral’ via a mini-series. (You might recall something similar when a video of spit hoods being used at Don Dale detention centre went viral — though all the details had been made public in an official report for some time.) And in twenty years, no-one responsible at the Post Office has faced any disciplinary action.

And to take up an old saw of mine, the hero of the story, Mr Bates was offered an OBE. He turned it down while Paula Vennels CEO of the Post Office retained her honour — given her when all the important facts were out. To quote Wikipedia:

The Conservative peer Lord Arbuthnot said that "The hallmark of Paula Vennells' time as CEO was that she was willing to accept appalling advice from people in her management and legal teams. The consequences of this were far-reaching for the Post Office and devastating for the subpostmasters", and he described the behaviour of the Post Office under her leadership as "both cruel and incompetent".

After over a million people signed a petition calling for it, Paula Vennells has given back her CBE. Of course it was a higher honour than the one offered Mr Bates.

* Declaration of interest: Lateral Economics is working with Christine Holgate of TGE to argue for Australia Post to be directed to give access to the ‘last mile’ of its network in regional Australia which would improve franchisees’ revenue and improve rural and regional economies. Thus, for instance, an online retailer could contract with a courier to deliver products to a rural post office, which would be paid a fee to deliver the product. Currently Australia Post refuses to allow this. Instead it insists that it control the whole process, even though it then contracts out logistics to the very firms it is refusing to allow access to its network.

In case you’re thinking this is all part of using city profits to cross-subsidise the bush, that’s how Australia Post’s letter monopoly works. By contrast it has no legislated monopoly over parcel delivery — it has what economists call a ‘natural monopoly’. It’s often uneconomic to duplicate the network in regional Australia. And the only way Australia Post can exploit it’s monopoly is by gouging regional parcel delivery. Where does that money go? To the cities!! Into salaries for Australia Post executives and cross-subsidies to Australia Post’s parcel delivery in the cities. So it can compete against other couriers. Nice work if you can get it.

Mr and Mrs Bates get their just deserts

A holiday with Richard Branson …

The war in Gaza

Killing 25,000 Palestinians. How’s that going then?

I’m not much of a fan of Tom Friedman, and he offers some flip lines in this discussion. But his and Ezra’s basic analysis seems devastating to me. Friedman’s highlighting of the Indian response to the Mumbai massacre is particularly telling. One option for the Israelis was not to go and kill anyone. To try to use the horror of Oct 7th to marginalise Hamas and Iran in so far as that was possible. Horrific as the attacks were, they couldn’t have achieved anything like the ‘success’ they achieved without the IDF being out to lunch elsewhere. If that is right, the attacks were not existential. Just about as horrific as you can imagine. And the IDF could start being a little more vigilant against its murderous foes.

Instead Israel has reacted as the US reacted to 9/11. How did that go then? However many people they kill, who, when they think about it, believes that Israel is going to eradicate Hamas? And what’s the plan after that when around half the population of Gaza has a family member killed or maimed by Israel? All seems about as well-judged as Israeli support for Hamas in the first place. More to the point, since this is the jungle of international relations, have Israel’s actions been in its own interest? Its hard to see.

Robert Wright and Russ Roberts

It was not very well organised but was a spirited and civil discussion between two people with very different views on Gaza. I learned a lot listening.

Extraordinary

JOHN BAIRD, Harbour Swimmers, 1 – 24 February 2024, Opening Celebration Thursday 1 February, 5 – 7pm, Arthouse Gallery, 66 McLachlan Avenue, Rushcutters Bay 2011

Tony Walker on the march of folly

Following on from Ezra and Tom, Robert and Russ, Tony Walker takes us back twenty years. In the House of Commons, May 13, 1901, Winston Churchill offered this: “Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.” And so it has been. WWI illustrated the point, though it wasn’t all democracies of course. But what could illustrate the course of our democracies better than the contrast between George H. W. Bush’s gulf war (Gulf 1) and his son’s effort. The first war was concluded according to the principles of realpolitik, not democratic appeal. It wasn’t popular not to ‘finish the job’. But it was prudent. Anyway, George W Bush won a second term by finishing the job. And Tony Walker argues that the resulting catastrophes just keep on rolling.

History is a vast early warning system, as the American journalist Norman Cousins wrote many years ago. To better understand contemporary events in the Middle East we need go back no further than America’s catastrophic intervention in Iraq in 2003.

Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Louis Vuitton Alzer 65 Monogram Suitcase from the 50s

I know my readers will go NUTS over this. Like me. A brown suitcase with LV written all over it. A true original! The auction house is a little coy, offering this advice. “Starting Bid: $50 Est. $200 - $100,000”. I have to admit I’m at the lower end — but if you do get up above $80,000 just tell them you read it in my substack and they’ll probably throw in the rest.

Churchill tries to get himself killed: again!

Paul Krugman on Europe v the US

I fairly often encounter people who believe that Europe suffers from mass unemployment and has lagged far behind the United States technologically. But this view is decades out of date. At this point adults in their prime working years are actually somewhat more likely to be employed in major European nations than in America. Europeans also know all about information technology, and productivity — gross domestic product per hour worked — is virtually the same in Europe as it is here.

It’s true that real G.D.P. per capita is generally lower in Europe, but that’s mainly because Europeans take much more vacation time than Americans — which is a choice, not a problem. Oh, and it should count for something that there’s a growing gap between European and U.S. life expectancy, since the quality of life is generally higher if you aren’t dead.

Just to be clear, Europe isn’t utopia. There are many real problems, even in nations with social safety nets that American progressives can only dream of. Sweden has a problem with gang violence. Denmark is one of the happiest nations on the planet, but there are nonetheless a significant number of melancholy Danes, and the country has experienced a rise in right-wing populism.

Nonetheless, Europe is in astonishingly good shape, economically and socially, compared with almost any other part of the world.

All that being said, most people have the sense that Europe is in relative decline and that its economy has grown more slowly than America’s over the past few decades. And this sense is correct. But the explanation may surprise you: It’s essentially all about demography.

Here’s a chart comparing growth in the United States and the euro area from 1999, the year the euro came into existence, until 2019, the eve of the pandemic:

In real terms, the U.S. economy grew a lot more over those two decades — 53 percent versus 31 percent. But almost all of that difference is explained by the fact that the U.S. working-age population (conventionally, if somewhat unfortunately, defined as adults 15 to 64) grew a lot, while Europe’s hardly grew at all (and has been declining in recent years). Real G.D.P. per working-age adult rose 31 percent in the United States and 29 percent — basically inside the margin of error — in the euro area.

The United States has, however, had a much stronger economic recovery than Europe — more than can be accounted for by differences in population growth. And this probably does in part reflect Biden policies: America did much more to stimulate recovery with government spending.

Furthermore, while inflation has been plunging in Europe in much the same way it has in the United States, officials at the European Central Bank at least sound much more reluctant than their U.S. counterparts to reverse recent rate hikes, so Europe is running a much bigger risk of recession.

So what’s the matter with Europe? No, the continent hasn’t been overrun by immigrants. No, strong welfare states haven’t stifled the incentives to work and innovate. But Europe does suffer from policymakers who are excessively conservative, not in the left-right political sense, but in the sense of being too worried about inflation and debt, and too hesitant about promoting economic recovery.

Stunning graphs

I continue to be mesmerised by how different males and females are, or are becoming. And it’s clearly a major phenomenon with huge implications that are getting bigger by the day. I’d love to offer some more thoughts here, but unfortunately, things are so polarised and the terrain booby-trapped with trolls that your main achievement will be to be misunderstood. Which is galling and undermines what you’re trying to achieve. So why bother? The problem with Paul Graham’s take below is that I recall the time, a generation or so ago when it was a factoid of political life that women were more conservative than men.

Electric Cars: who wants them?

Which came first, the chicken, the egg, the EV or the dinosaur

A worrying question judging from this Project Syndicate article.

Despite Tesla founder Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial brilliance and billions of dollars in government subsidies to support EVs, it appears that consumers still prefer to drive to a gas station for a five-minute fill-up than to retrofit their garage and suffer the range anxiety that comes from hunting for a charging station in the parking lot of an abandoned shopping mall. J.D. Power reports that 21% of public chargers do not work in any case. As consumers start to shy away from EVs, their choice will affect not just the car industry, but US-China relations, state budgets, and commodity prices.

The evidence is rolling in fast. This month, Hertz, which purchased 100,000 Teslas to great fanfare in 2021, executed a squealing 180-degree turn and began dumping one-third of its EV fleet, taking a $245 million charge against its earnings. Its pledge to buy 175,000 EVs from GM will likely go up in smoke, too. Outside of wealthy, trendy communities, consumers are walking past plug-in EVs and snapping up hybrids and gasoline-powered engines instead.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, EV sales crawled up by just 1.3%. According to Edmunds , EVs tend to sit on dealer lots for about three weeks longer than gasoline-powered cars. With Mercedes Benz EQS units languishing for four months, the company’s chief financial officer recently acknowledged that the market is a “pretty brutal space.” Customers are staying away despite a price war in which Ford, Tesla, and GM slashed EV prices by 20%, on average, leading Ford to lose $36,000 on each unit sold.

At the same time, state governments have been pumping EVs with enormous subsidies, even as their own budgets are bleeding red. California still pours $7,000 into each new EV (on top of the maximum $7,500 federal credit), despite reporting a record $68 billion budget deficit. New Jersey sends a $4,000 check to EV buyers, despite shrinking revenues. How long can these states keep the money spigot open?

EV doubters like Toyota – which instead bet on hybrids – now look prescient. Over the past year, Toyota’s share price outperformed GM’s by 40%. After taking flak from enthusiasts and Wall Street analysts, Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda declared last October that people are “finally seeing reality.” Automobile unions surely are relieved, considering that EVs require 90% fewer parts and 30% fewer manhours to manufacture.

Man boxing, little kid chortling. Lovely

Sugar-coated subversion

When I was much younger I thought Wilde’s paradoxes were strained and silly. But I realised they were like depth charges. This author has the same view. And he’s not so sure about Wilde. I’m biased. I have an instinctive sympathy for Wilde. But as if in a trance, he assiduously courted his own doom. How strange and compelling, like watching a fatal accident in slow motion. I even wrote an essay about it, arguing that that’s what he shared in common with his fellow 1854-born Irishman, Ned Kelly.

Wilde’s aphorisms are more recognisable than his monogrammed shirts. They aren’t confectionery phrases; they’re sugar-coated subversion: “Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas,” “the English are always degrading truths into facts.” Wilde was a serious thinker: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism,” he wrote, is “the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.” Wilde recognised the squalid life of someone forced to work for a baron, a magnate, an oligarch. Frankel rightly illustrates that Wilde’s irony and paradoxes are crucial to his subversive non-fiction writing such as “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist,” which I think are Wilde’s best works.

Well, they’re the best behind The Importance of Being Earnest. In Earnest, Wilde’s combination of wit, paradox, and satire is at full strength. He impugns the English aristocracy, the Anglican church, the attachment to money. Earnest is also about the polarity between private and public lives: Algernon Moncrieff invents a “permanent invalid called Bunbury in order that [he] may go down into the country” to avoid social or familial duties. (The term “Bunbury” generates much comment. Here is my contribution to Wilde scholarship: while in the United States, Wilde met John Boyle O’Reilly, who had been a member of the Fenians. For this crime, O’Reilly was transported to Bunbury, Western Australia, from where he later escaped.) Frankel sees Earnest as an encoded dramatisation of Wilde’s secret life as a lover of males; while writing the drama, Wilde abandoned his family and his draft to pursue a different sort of play with a local boy.

Wilde was fascinated with young literary men. Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”) apparently read The Picture of Dorian Gray nine times and met its author in 1891: “I did with him and allowed him to do just what was done among boys at Winchester and Oxford,” Douglas later recalled. Wilde had paid boys for sex before he met Douglas, but with him he became reckless, taking rooms at London’s Savoy Hotel to host male prostitutes. (Douglas had an adjoining room.) The two even went to Algiers (“the Kabyle boys are quite lovely,” Wilde wrote) for a fortnight of sex tourism.

Less than a month later, while Earnest was all the rage, Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, left a card “for Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic].” Wilde sued him for libel. Assured of success, he and Douglas went for a week-long holiday, and then arrived at the trial in an expensive carriage. Wilde was digging his own grave and asking for a bigger shovel.

His libel suit failed. In the subsequent criminal trials, he was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years with hard labour. He languished in prison, and his writings from there are among his most moving. Upon release, he adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth. (His wife and children, whom he never saw again, also changed their names to avoid any association with him.) In Rouen he met Douglas, who returned to England after his mother threatened to cut his allowance. Wilde died, probably of an inner-ear infection, and was buried outside the city limits of Paris.

Ten years ago, I would have yielded to no one in my admiration of Wilde. Now, I’m not so sure. Any reader of this biography would have trouble labelling Wilde an “icon”: the champion of free artistic expression who censored his own work; the critic of the establishment who lived in the best hotels and ate at the best restaurants. One should pause before calling him a champion of “gay rights”: followers of Michel Foucault would question (as Frankel sometimes does) whether there’s such a thing as a consistent, ahistorical concept of “homosexuality,” and one should hesitate before celebrating a man who left his family to fornicate with prostitutes. The Romantic and Aesthete who believed the artist could find beauty in anything, Wilde couldn’t find beauty in his own Chelsea house or in his marriage. You might not think his decision to abandon them was a moral failure. But by his own standards, it was an artistic one.

The kindness of strangers

Philosopher Tim Crane talks about AI

This is from an essay on AI which was in the TLS in 2020. That’s before the excitement started with ChatGPT, but I think the basic reasoning remains valid. What always strikes me is the deep differences between cognitive artefacts built by biology and by cybernetics. Computer thinking contains many sub-routines just like biological thinking does. But its architecture is machine like and unitary. Right down to worms, biological brains involve some kind of dance, an ecology between left and right hemispheres. What’s that about?

The Promise of Artificial Intelligence gives a brief and intelligible survey of two main stages in the history of AI. The first stage, starting in the 1960s, was what Haugeland christened “Good Old-Fashioned AI” (GOFAI) which solved computing problems by using explicit representations of general principles and applying them to particular situations. (Think of doing a mathematical proof or presenting an argument in logic.) “Second wave” AI, which started to emerge in the 1980s, began from the opposite end, so to speak: deriving general conclusions from huge amount of simple data as input. This kind of approach, variously called machine learning or deep learning, has had considerable success at things that GOFAI was very bad at, like pattern recognition, or updating knowledge on the basis of input.

First wave AI, it was often said, misconceived the nature of thinking: very little thinking resembles calculating or proving theorems. But Smith goes further, and argues that “the deeper problem is that it misconceived the world”. GOFAI assumed that “the world comes chopped up into discrete objects”, and because of this it analysed reasoning into its components by using formal logic (the basic ideas of which underlie modern computing). Smith argues that first wave theorising assumed that the world must be structured in the way that logic structures language: objects correspond to names, properties correspond to predicates or general terms. Things fit together in the world as symbols fit together in a logical language. Smith claims that this is one main reason why the GOFAI project failed: it failed to take account of the “fabulously rich and messy world we inhabit”, which does not come in a “pre-given” form, divided up into objects.

Second wave AI, according to Smith, does not make this mistake. It does not assume a “pre-given” ontology or structure for the world, and for that reason, he argues, it has made progress in the areas where GOFAI failed: in particular, with tasks like face recognition, text processing and (most famously) the game of Go. The distinctive feature of deep learning machines is their ability to detect patterns in large (sometimes huge) amounts of data. The machines “learn” by being given an indication by the programmer which patterns are the important ones, and after a while they can produce results (e.g. moves in a game) which surprise even the programmers. This is in contrast to first wave AI programmes which attempted to anticipate in advance how input from the real world should be responded to in every conceivable situation. Those early AI machines that worked only did so in very constrained made-up environments, sometimes called “microworlds”.

Nonetheless, Smith thinks that we should not be too optimistic about the ability of second wave AI to create AGI. Machine learning may not start with general rules which make ontological assumptions, but it does start with data that is already processed by humans (e.g. things that we classify as faces, or as road traffic at an intersection and so on). Much machine learning, as Smith says, is “dedicated to sorting inputs into categories of manifest human origin and utility”. So even if they are more sensitive to the messy world, second wave AI machines are still tied up with the programmers’ own classifications of reality — indeed, it’s hard to see how they could be otherwise designed. …

Deep learning machines are still being used to achieve a well-defined goal — winning the game — the meaning of which can be articulated in advance of turning on the machine. The same is true of speech and face recognition software. There is a clear goal or target — recognising the words and faces —and successes and failures in meeting this goal are the input which helps train the machine. (As Smith says, “recognition” here means: correctly mapping an image onto a label: nothing more than that.) …

Consider for example, the challenges faced in trying to create a genuine conversation with a computer. Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa do amazingly well in “recognising” speech and synthesising speech in response. But you very quickly get to the bottom of their resources and reach a “canned” response (“here are some webpages relating to your inquiry”). One reason for this, surely, is that conversation is not an activity that has one easily expressible goal, and so the task for the Siri/Alexa programme cannot be specified in advance. …

What, then, is the overall goal of conversation? There isn’t one. We talk to pass the time, to express our emotions, feelings and desires, to find out more about others, to have fun, to be polite, to educate others, to make money… and so on. But if there is no single goal of conversation, then it is even less likely it is that there is one goal of “general intelligence”. So no wonder AI researchers struggle to even define the “task domain” for AGI. As Smith’s book shows, the claims for the possibility of AGI ignore the huge differences between the relatively well-defined areas where AI has succeeded, and the barely-defined domain of “general intelligence”. This is, on its own, enough of a reason for scepticism about extrapolating beyond the successes of actual AI to the real possibility of AGI. Smith’s arguments about the ontological assumptions of AI, whatever their merits, are not necessary to make this point.

Yet I suspect that many still have this lingering sense that AGI must be possible, and that the difference between real human thinking and what computers do is just a matter of complexity. What lies behind this conviction? One widespread idea is that since the human brain is just a complex biological (and therefore material) machine, it must be possible in principle to artificially reproduce what the human brain does (thinking, perceiving, feeling, imagining, being conscious etc) by building something that functions in exactly the same way as the brain. And whatever we thereby build will be an artificial version of our mental processes: an AGI.

This argument is based on two ideas: first, that thinking and other mental processes go on in the brain; second, the brain is a machine or mechanism. So if we can uncover the principles that make this mechanism work, and we have adequate technology — the argument goes — then we should be able to build a machine that implements these principles, without leaving anything out. …

If the way to create a real artificial thinker is to find out first how the brain works, then you would expect AI researchers to try and figure out how the brain or the mind actually works — that is, to become neuroscientists or psychologists. But this is not how AI researchers operate. Just as the invention of the aeroplane did not require building something that flies in exactly the way a bird flies, so the inventors of AI did not feel bound to copy the actual workings of human brains. …

As it actually now is, AI does not rely substantially on any detailed psychological or neuroscientific research. So the fact that the brain is a material mechanism which could, in principle, be replicated artificially gives no support to the idea that AI as it actually is could build an AGI. In fact, given the way AI has actually proceeded, in splendid isolation from neuroscience, it is likely that any attempt to replicate the brain would require ideas very different from those traditionally used by AI. To say this is not to disparage AI and its achievements, it is just to emphasise the obvious fact that it is not, and has never been, a theory of human thinking.

Philosophical and scientific discussions of AI have tended towards one of two extremes: either that genuine artificial thinking machines are just on the horizon, or they are absolutely impossible in principle. Neither approach is quite right. On the one hand, as Smith, Marcus and others have explained, we should be sceptical that recent advances in AI give any support to the real possibility of AGI. But on the other, it is hard to deny the abstract philosophical claim that if you could replicate a human brain in such a way that would produce something that did everything the brain did, then that thing would be a “thinking machine” in one clear sense of that phrase. However, this mere possibility does not mean that today’s AI is anywhere near creating genuine thinking machines. On the contrary: when you examine the possibility more closely, it shows why AI is unlikely ever to do this.