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Daniel Ellsberg has died, aged 92. I don’t have anything to add to the standard account of his heroic career, except to observe that Edward Snowden (whose cause Ellsberg championed) would probably have done better to take his chances with the US legal system, as Ellsberg did.
In decision theory, the subsection of the economics profession in which I move Ellsberg is known for a contribution made a decade before the release of the Pentagon papers. In his PhD dissertation, Ellsberg offered thought experiments undermining the idea that rational people can assign probabilities to any event relevant to their decisions. This idea has given rise to a large theoretical literature on the idea of ‘ambiguity’. Although my own work has been adjacent to this literature for many decades, it’s only recently that I have actually written on this.
A long explanation is over the fold. But for those not inclined to delve into decision theory, it might be interesting to consider other people who have been prominent in radically different ways. One example is Hedy Lamarr, a film star who also patented a radio guidance system for torpedoes (the significance of which remains in dispute). A less happy example is that of Maurice Allais, a leading figure in decision theory and Economics Nobel winner, who also advocated some fringe theories in physics. I thought a bit about Ronald Reagan, but his entry into politics was really built on his prominence as an actor, rather than being a separate accomplishment.
The simplest of Ellsberg’s experiments is the “two-urn” problem. You are presented with two urns. One contains 50 red balls and 50 black balls. The other contains 100 black or red balls, but you aren’t told how many of each. Now you are offered two even money bet, which pay off if a red ball is drawn from one of the runs. You get to choose which urn to bet on. Intuition suggests choosing the urn with known proportions. Now suppose instead of a bet on red, you are offered the same choice but with a bet on black. Again, it seems that the first urn would be better.
Now, on the information given, the probability of a red ball being drawn from the first urn is 0.5. But what about the second urn. Strictly preferring the first urn for the red ball bet implies that the probability of a red ball being drawn from the second must be less than 0.5. But preferring the first urn for the black ball bet implies that the probability of a red ball being drawn from the second must be more than 0.5. So, there is no probability number that rationalises these decisions.
The title of Ellsberg’s paper was “Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms”. As a result, the term “ambiguity” has been applied, in contradistinction to risk, to the case when there are no well-defined probabilities. But this was not the way Ellsberg himself used the term. Rather he referred to
the nature of ones information concerning the relative likelihood of events. What is at issue might be called the ambiguity of this information, a quality depending on the amount, type, reliability and unanimity of information, andg iving rise to one’s degree of confidence in an estimate of relative
likelihoods.(emphasis added)
I’ve developed this point in a paper whose title Seven Types of Ambiguity is one of numerous homages to William Empson’s classic work of literary criticism. Among these homages, I’d recommend the novel of the same name by Australian writer Elliot Perlman (later a TV series).
The central claim in my paper is that all forms of ambiguity in decision theory may
be traced to bounded and differential awareness. If that sounds interesting, you can read the paper here. If you’re super-interested, I’ll be presenting the paper in a couple of conferences in Europe in July – email me at [email protected] for details.
Since the beginning of this millennium, I’ve been writing critiques of the “generation game”, the idea that people can be divided into well-defined groups (Boomers, Millennials and so on), with specific characteristics based on their year of birth. As I said in my first go at this issue, back in 2000 (reproduced here )
Much of what passes for discussion about the merits or otherwise of particular generations is little more than a repetition of unchanging formulas about different age groups à the moral degeneration of the young, the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old, and so on.
Demographers have a word (or rather two words) for this. They distinguish between age effects and cohort effects. The group of people born in a given period, say a year or a decade, is called a cohort. Members of a cohort have things in common because they have shared common experiences through their lives. But, at any given point in time, when members of the cohort are at some particular age, they share things in common with the experience of earlier and later generations when they were at the same age.
My most prominent contribution to the debate was this piece in the New York Times five years ago, prompted by the Pew Research Centre’s announcement that it would define people born between 1981 and 1996 as members of the millennial generation. After discussing the history of the “generation” idea, I made the central point
Dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Donald Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.
Now, I’m pleased to say, Pew has changed its view, partly in response to a “growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.”
From now on, they will take proper account of age, cohort and period effects, with the result that
our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.
What’s striking is that this is happening at a time when political views, at least in the US, UK and Australia, show a really strong age gradient, with old people far more likely to be on the political right. Understanding this is important, and the use of sloppy labels like “Boomers” (focusing attention on a demographic event 60-80 years ago) is unlikely to be useful.
Jay Rosen coined popularised the phrase “the view from nowhere” (originally due to Thomas Nagel) to describe the default stance of political journalism in the US and elsewhere, often defended as “objectivity”. This is closely linked to the concept of the Overton window, which I wrote about recently in relation to the AUKUS nuclear subs deal
In essence, the “view from nowhere” amounts to treating all positions within the Overton window as equally valid, and providing neutral reportage about them. This may consist of repeating the arguments of their proponents, along the lines “the earth is spherical as can be seen from space” vs “who are you going to believe: a bunch of NASA scientists, or your own common sense, which tells you that it’s flat”. The second mode is “horse-race” commentary on the relative chances of the Flat-earth and Round-earth parties in political contests”. Views from outside the Overton window, such as “oblate spheroid” are simply ignored.
Now we have, in the Washington Post, an objective article about objectivity, by former editor Martin Baron. Baron spends a bit over 3000 words canvassing a wide range of views about objectivity. In the end, he decides it’s a good thing, but never brings himself to actually say what it is supposed to be.
Baron walks up to the edge of the question when he says
“many journalists have concluded that our profession has failed miserably to fulfill its responsibilities at a perilous moment in history. Their evidence is that Donald Trump got elected in the first place, despite his lies, nativism, brutishness and racist and misogynistic language;”
but never confronts the crucial fact that neither the Washington Post nor any other major newspaper ever ran a news story saying “Trump lies” or “Trump is a racist and misogynist” (even now he can’t quite bring himself to actually say the second, just that Trump used “racist and misogynistic language”).
So, was the refusal to state the truth about Trump in plain words a failure of journalistic objectivity or a perfect example of it?
At the end of this long, long article, we are none the wiser. But, at least every viewpoint within the Overton window {1} has been given an airing.
fn1. though not, for example, the view that this is what you would expect from capitalist media companies
I’ve lived through quite a few financial crises, some local to Australia, and others global. Invariably, the first failures are those of obvious shonks (Australianism?) who would probably have failed anyway. Then there are seemingly reputable institutions that turn out to have been shonky. Then there are institutions that played by the rules, but it turns out the rules weren’t good enough. After that, no one is safe and the government steps in to bail the bankers out.Of course, ordinary people pay the bill.
So, I thought I’d get a headstart on listing the hierarchy of excuses, explaining why this isn’t just an inherently corrupt system, doing its inherently corrupt thing. Here we go:
*Silvergate: jumped up crypto bank, not really a bank at all
*Silicon Valley: mismatched assets and liabilities, classic mistake, also woke
* Signature: more crypto, more mismatch, also Trump
* First Republic: all these midsized banks misused the 2017 deregulation
* Credit Suisse: turns out all those capital adequacy requirements could be gamed. And just to prove this, we’ll wipe out the bondholders who helped make the books look good, while bailing out the equity holders
* TBC
I’ve enjoyed Miriam’s posts on things, little and big, that restore our faith in humanity, so I thought I would share a little hope of my own.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about global heating, where it’s often hard to be optimistic about the future. But there are some bright spots. In particular, there’s a good chance that 2023 will be the year that coal use finally begins a sustained decline, and relatedly the year the carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation start to fall.
This is by no means a sure thing. The International Energy Agency predicts a plateau, in which nearly all new electricity demand will be met by solar PV and wind, leaving coal and gas use almost unchanged. But the IEA has a long track record of underestimating carbon-free[1] energy, and there are plenty of reasons to think that this has happened again.
Total electricity demand is currently a bit over 25000 TWh (terawatt hours a year), growing at around 3 per cent per year. So, to meet the growing demand, we need to generate an additional 750 TWh from solar and wind ( Other carbon-free sources, such as hydro and nuclear have been essentially static.)
Assuming solar PV generates at full power for 2000 hours per year, meeting additional demand with solar alone requires addition of between 375 GW of solar PV per year, with any shortfall made up by wind.
The good news is, that’s already happening. Bloomberg BNEF estimates 315 GW of solar will be installed in 2023, up from 268GW in 2022. Additions of wind power have been around 100 GW a year recently, which amounts to between 250 and 300 TWh per year.
Assuming the 2022 installations are already connected to global grids, we should see a reduction in carbon-based electricity generation this year, and steadily larger reductions in the future. That will be true even if electricity begins to substitute for oil and gas in transport, heating, cooking and so on.
Underlying this shift is the steadily decreasing cost of wind and, even more, solar power. This trend was interrupted by the supply shocks of the pandemic and Putin’s war, which led to a big increase in the price of polysilicon, as well as those of coal and gas. But while coal and gas prices remain high, the polysilicon price, while still volatile has dropped back to more normal levels. And new investment is raising production capacity even further, heading for 500GW by the end of this year
Meanwhile technological progress continues apace. Commercially available solar cells now routinely exceed 20 per cent efficiency , while new multi-junction technologies are approaching 50 per cent This didn’t happen by chance: it is directly correlated with a massive growth in research, driven originally by public subsidies, but increasingly now by market demand.
As the urgency of ending reliance on coal, gas and oil has become more evident, supportive policies have reduced costs further. The result is that solar panels are expected to become cheaper in 2023 and beyond. In Europe, the need to respond to the cutoff of Russian gas and oil has led to the removal of some of the NIMBY obstacles to wind farms, transmission lines and so on that have delayed the transition.
The big exception to all of this is China, where coal-fired power has made a resurgence. Up to 100 new coal plants have been granted permits in the last year. This doesn’t make economic or geopolitical sense for China. It does, however, make plenty of sense for regional governments desperate to keep up a flow of large projects, both to maintain employment in coal-related industries, and for the corruption opportunities such projects inevitably generate. It seems likely that most of these plants will, if they are completed at all, lose money and face premature closure. But China has enough excess savings to deal with this.
The prospects for stabilising the global climate still don’t look good. But in electricity at least, there has been far more progress than seemed possible ten or even five years ago.
Electricity is only part of the picture of a response to global heating. I’ll try to write about reasons for hope in other aspects of the problem later. That’s more difficult, but there are still some reasons not to be too gloomy.
fn1. I avoid the terms ‘renewables’ and ‘fossil fuels’ which date back to the energy crises of the 1970s, when we were worried about running out of oil and coal. What matters isn’t that solar and wind are renewable, it’s that they are carbon-free.
Last year, I wrote a couple of posts defending historical presentism, that is, the view that we should examine events and actors in history (at least in modern history) in the light of our current concerns, rather than treating them as exempt from any standards except those that prevailed (in the dominant class) at the time.
Those posts referred to controversies within the history profession. Unsurprisingly, given the current state of the US, they have now been embroiled in the culture wars. Rightwing critics of wokeism have now added presentism to the list of evils against which they are fighting, along with critical race theory, cancel culture and so on.
This creates a dilemma for anti-presentists. Do they welcome political support, even if it comes from rightwing culture warriors? That’s a natural thing to do, but it implies a lot of baggage. Once you identify as “anti-woke”, you’re committed to racism, misogyny, science denial, book-banning and, ultimately, fascism.
The default response, dignified silence, is little better. If academic advocates of anti-presentism don’t define the term for the general public, the far-right will do it for them. Very soon, any negative reference to presentism by an academic historian will be the equivalent of coming to lectures wearing a MAGA hat.
So, is there room for a version of anti-presentism that is importantly different from Trumpism? In the US context, that’s going to be very difficult to find. It’s one thing for Herbert Butterfield to criticise historians taking sides in the disputes between Jacobites and Hanoverians on the basis that the Hanoverians were “historically progressive” as viewed from the 1930s. It’s quite another to say that historians should stay neutral with respect to the battles over slavery and racism that have been central to American history since well before the United States even existed.
Anti-presentism fails miserably on the issue of slavery. There was no time in modern history when slavery was generally accepted. Even an enslaver like John Locke used anti-slavery rhetoric against the advocates of monarchical power as applied to white male Britons. The enslavers who signed the Declaration of Independence stand condemned by their own words, written when they thought they would find a painless way of ending slavery. Most of them (Washington was an exception) failed even the most minimal test of freeing slaves in their wills. And earlier statements in favour of slavery, like those of famous theologian Jonathan Edwards (now the subject of some controversy in evangelical circles) were only made because other people condemned the institution. Finally, although the thoughts of the slaves themselves have been suppressed almost completely, they expressed them in revolts whenever they had a chance.
So, when academic opponents of wokeism/presentism say that current moral standards are being imposed on the past, what they mean is that racist views that are now deprecated were once dominant, and vice versa. So, they can pretend to oppose actually existing racism, while excusing that of their chosen period of study, whether it’s 1619, the Jim Crow South or, for that matter, the Trump Administration.
The real issue isn’t to do with time, it’s whether any moral standards at all apply to history. Rather than saying that (for example) Pol Pot was a man of his times and exempt from contemporary judgements, they should just say that it’s not their job to decide whether genocide is good or bad, just to report the facts. That’s a position that’s hard to refute, but one that, if accepted, will accelerate the demise of history as an academic example.
While we are on the subject of universities, it’s worth noting the likely acquisition of the so-called University of Phoenix by the University of Arkansas System.
After a string of similar acquisitions, closures and conversion to non-profit status, this is pretty much the end of explicitly for-profit university education in the US. It’s a striking development given the strong support the sector got from Betsy de Vos in the Trump Administration, which turns out to have merely staved off the inevitable. The boom in online education during the lockdown phase of the pandemic seems only to have increased the marketability of for-profits to public universities looking to expand their options.
In retrospect, the whole for-profit boom was not an upsurge in enthusiasm for the free-market but a straightforward regulatory scam, exploiting public aid to low-income students. Australia had an almost identical experience with for-profit vocational education. As Richard Mulgan observed, this is a predictable outcome of introducing the profit motive into a system built largely on assumptions of professionalism and trust.
That’s true of contracting out of public services in general. Without tight regulation (which may or not be feasible) contracts will go to those who’ve worked out clever ways to rort the system[1], not those able to provide a better service at lower costs.
fn1. This Australianism roughly translates as “game the system”.
Yesterday, I dug into the deepest nest of folders on my MacBook Pro to find an article I wrote on a 512K Mac in 1987, for a magazine that no longer exists and isn’t (AFAICT) digitally archived. The file must have made transitions from “hard floppies” to removable 44Mb drives (remember them?) to hard drive to SSD and then, when that filled up, to my iCloud backup.
Today, I read about “digital hoarding“. Count me in!
Whatever the psychological causes, it’s hard to imagine negative real-world consequences from storing files. And it’s easier to search for stuff when you need it than to spend a lot of time filing. I used to sort my email, but now I just delete 90 per cent as it comes in, and archive the rest every couple of years.
In the physical world, I’m the opposite. I’m hopelessly untidy, but I follow Marie Kondo in throwing out anything that no longer sparks joy, and in trying to avoid acquiring stuff I don’t need. Being free of paper has been a huge boon in this respect.
Over the past past few years we’ve had to deal with all sorts of new or resurgent evils, including climate catastrophe, Covid and the global assault on democracy. That’s been made harder by the fact that our political leaders (and plenty of their supporters) have either failed to respond effectively, or have actively promoted these evils. Yet there’s nothing positive about giving in to despair, either politically or personally.
In trying to respond, I’ve started thinking about the idea of ‘mitigated disaster’. Despite our collective failures on all of these issues, there’s still a good chance that the worst of the catastrophe will be staved off. And individually, we need to find ways to act responsibly and to resist the call of despair.
I’ll start with climate, because it’s the issue I have been engaged with longest and understand best. Global heating is having disastrous effects, from bushfires to heatwaves to extremes of drought and floods. And our political leaders, making judgements about what we, as citizens want, have failed to do what is clearly necessary.
But, despite all that, we’ve done far better than seemed likely 10 or 15 years ago. Nearly all major countries have committed to net zero emissions by 2050, and many have adopted policies that require the end of coal-fired electricity and petrol-driven vehicles.
Those policies aren’t adequate, but they are a long way from the ‘Business as Usual’ scenarios we were looking at not long ago. On current policies, the best estimate is that we will ultimately see 2-3 degrees of warming. That would be disastrous in all sorts of ways. But it’s not that long ago that we were thinking about 4 degrees of warming https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/scholarlywork/738066-australia%E2%80%99s-climate-in-a-four-degree-world, which would be catastrophic.
No matter how bad the prospects are, we still have the chance to mitigate the disaster. Every coal mine that doesn’t go ahead, every solar farm that’s installed, every waste of energy that is eliminated is a step towards a more livable future. That’s true if we are looking at 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, and even more so if we are looking at 4 degrees.
What can we do, as individuals, to save the planet and ourselves. In a world of national targets, individual action may or not be effective in itself – it may simply allow others to do less. Even so, by modelling the kind of life we need to adopt, we may help the process along. That means things like avoiding unnecessary car and plane travel, putting free time for our family and personal goals ahead of maximising money income and making our homes as energy efficient as possible. The point is both to reduce carbon emissions and to show that we can still have a good life as most people see it – at this point, trying to persuade billions of people to forgo the benefits of modern life is a non-starter.
Things aren’t nearly so encouraging in relation to the Covid pandemic. For quite a while, it seemed as if we could manage the collective action needed to beat the pandemic. We endured lockdowns while we waited for the vaccines that would allow us to return to a normal life. But the initial vaccines were beaten by Omicron, and the effort to develop new ones seems to have flagged. Meanwhile, the combination of anti-vaxerism and general weariness have led to the abandonment of nearly all the interventions that might prevent the spread of the pandemic. With better treatment and the (now waning) benefits of vaccination, the death rate is lower than at its peak, but repeated infections are generating all sorts of adverse consequences that may be lumped under the heading of Long Covid.
The best we can say about our collective response to the pandemic is that most places avoided the worst-case consequences, such as those seen in Republican-dominated parts of the United States, where vaccination was rejected along with other interventions. And, while we’ve lost years of progress in reducing mortality rates from disease, those rates are still lower than they were, ten or twenty years ago.
Looking to the future, it is possible to see some signs of a renewed demand for political action, as the consequences of doing nothing become more and more evident, particularly in the form of collapsing health systems. But it will be a long struggle.
So, it largely comes down to individual mitigation, protecting ourselves as best we reasonably can and making it clear to others we are doing so. In my own case, I’ve got myself vaccinated as much as possible (I’m hoping to get a 5th shot through an experimental program), minimised indoor contact with others (for example, refusing in-person speaking invitations) and stuck to masks, even though I know they mostly protect the non-wearers I engage with. That’s manageable for me, but of course things are much worse for immuno-compromised and other vulnerable people
The other aspect of surviving the pandemic is mental health. The challenges are different for all of us, but I hope some of what I’ve written will be helfpul in resisting general despair about the situation. At an individual level, the most important thing for me is putting in the work to maintain contact with people, now that I can’t rely as much on meeting them in person. Skype and Zoom chats are more difficult than in-person, but we need to keep going.
Then there’s social media. What matters here is to avoid the kind of negative-obsessive behavior advertisers want, and commercial networks promote in order to keep our attention. I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid any kind of negative engagement with others. A recent step has been dumping Twitter for the friendlier climes Mastodon (though I still cross-post and occasionally succumb to the temptation of a sharp response on Twitter).
I’ve gone on for too long, so I won’t say anything more about the attack on democracy than needed to point out that we are winning more rounds than we are losing. Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson are all gone, at least for now, and most of the dictators who seemed irresistible a few years ago (Xi, Putin and Erdogan for example) look much weaker today.
I’ll end with a couplet I cited a few years ago https://insidestory.org.au/westward-look-the-land-is-bright/ one of my favourite poets, Arthur Hugh Clough, in his poem “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth,” which ends with these lines:
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,?But westward, look, the land is bright.
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