Urban Theory and the Urban Experience

I wrote something else before, some inane and half-formed thoughts, on some similar subjects, here. I just read it again but I won't give myself too hard a time. It was okay.

I'm currently doing my Masters in Social Policy, it's a masters of research so I'll be doing a pretty empirically heavy dissertation, and people keep on asking me what I'm planning on doing. I am part-time so I have a while to decide yet, but I get a bit embarrassed that thus far I have been mostly unable to give a proper answer. Instead I tend to give evasive answers saying I am planning on doing something to do with urban theory, or perhaps intergenerational inequality, and hope that they don't ask any more questions about it.

It is actually true that I am interested in both of these things. However, particularly with the former, I was until recently operating purely on my own non-academic gleanings and preconceptions on teh subject, and had not yet delved into any scholarship on the matter. Now, with urban theory, this has changed. Over the last couple of days I read Urban Theory and the Urban Experience, a book by one of my lecturers from my first degree in PPE, also at York.

I don't want to say anything good about it because I've met the writer and I don't feel nearly academically confident enough to attempt to formally evaluate it. So instead I am going to hide my true thoughts beneath a thin veil of apparent insincerity in the hopes that I won't get found out. It was pretty cool.

When I am looking into a new subject, what I tend to try to do is to read a couple of books, without trying too hard to take amazing notes or anything, to just expose myself to the subject and get my head around the particular langauge that that stuff is discussed with. A lot of it is to do with surnames. To take an obvious example, any reference to Marx in a social science work is clearly about a lot more than just a dude. It's about schools of thought and stuff, lasting influence, the historically contingent shape of the discipline today, a whole penumbra of shared and not so shared meanings. I'm saying there's a whole load of context to get your head around. But as it is with Marx, so too with the Chicago School (who I guess I did know some things about), and Jane Jacobs, and Lefebvre, and any other name you should happen to choose. So the language is not just about unfamiliar German words and -isms, but also for me about the figures and their associated thoughts. That's what I was up to with reading this book, but as is often then case with books I got a lot more out of it than I was expecting.

I found myself thinking a lot about the city and social control. Like about how the sum of little actions, like individuals sitting on planning committees or somesuch thing, can lead to horrible segregation. There's a writer called Phillip Ball who wrote a book called Critical Mass, which was about how the social and physical sciences learn from each other and provide analogies for each other. Being far more at home with the natural sciences I found it helpful in ordering my thoughts. I found myself thinking a lot in the book about how the sums of individual actions aggregate into patterns of inequality, oppression and control. The decayed city centre is a direct result of the flight of some to suburbia, and a second example would look rhetorically good here but I didn't think of one so I wrote this instead.

This essence on reflexivity, of the interdependence inherent in the city, has always been one of the things most fascinating to me, and I find myself looking for the levers in these systems. I look for ways to align the incentives so that individuals act in socially desirable ways of their own free will, without compulsion. In doing so I prove myself a true disciple of my discipline, social policy, while immediately lamenting the ease with which I slip into such a technocratic role.

Even though I obsess on planning and policy, and crave the opportunity to make grand plans and reshape the urban environment around me, I at the same time recoil from such a desire. It is just another instance of social control, of transplanting agency from individuals and communities into some form of central power base. The manganimous response to the problems perceived around result in an unreflective desire to intervene with little consideration of personal autonomy. In considering this I located something that I had spent a long time searching for: the origin of my discomort with my adopted subject.

One of the strengths of the book, and probably the reason my thoughts followed these threads, was the way in which the narrative managed to discuss urban ills without a presumption that the solutions to these were technocratic. A radical vibe resonated through the text, rarely overt but always present, and I wanted, really wanted, to engage with the issues in question as a proud part of the public sphere, not in a privleged policy partnership.

To weave together the two apparently distinct thoughts I have had on this issue, I consider the aggregated effects of an assemblage of urban experts actively engaging in the issues to the exclusion of the urbanites. Has an honest desire to understand and improve come at the cost of the public sphere? Would a second question located here be pleasing to the eye? I can but ponder.

The above were just some things I was thinking about while reading the book. The idea that has grabbed me the hardest is that of the "right to the city". The city as a public good, one which can be more or less public, and more or less good. As to what I'm going to do my dissertation on, still no idea.

Arbitrage?

Dear friends,

I was taking a look at a piece on political betting when I noticed the wildly divergent prices listed for betting on Michael Gove as next Conservative leader. I read the blog because it is interesting to see people's opinions on what is going to happen next. Often the rationalisations reveal much more than the predictions.

I am a bit iffy on how to figure with odds, but it seems to me that when you can place the same bet in two different places for much the same rate of return, it violates the no arbitrage condition from finance. It should be possible to immediately place a bet on both outcomes of different sizes, so that whatever the outcome one is able to make money.

For example, in the post one bookie offers a bet on Michael Gove promising £16 for every £1 bet that he is the next leader. If I have this right that is in addition to getting the £1 you paid back. So for instance if the bet had been 1/1 it would mean if you bet £1 and were successful, you would get your £1 back and another £1 for it to make friends with. For the bet to be worth the same as £1 then, the first bookie needs the chances of Michael Gove becoming the next leader to be one in seventeen. Of course they will try to cushion that so they can have a profit margin. Another bookie estimated the odds of this occurring at one in eight, which translated in funny betting language as 7/1, in contrast to the previous bookie's 16/1.

So, let's imagine for a moment that the conservative leadership election is tomorrow. I put £14 on Gove not becoming leader with the bookie with the 7/1 odds and I put £1 on Gove becoming leader with the bookie with the 16/1 odds. That means until the results are announced I am £15 out of pocket. I am not worried though. If Gove does not become leader, I get £2 from the 7/1 bet, as well as the £14 I put on that back. That adds up to £16, meaning I turn an impressive profit of £1. If Gove does become the leader of the Conservatives, then I win £16 from my bet there, as well as getting back the £1 I put on it, thus making a total profit of £2. Not amazing figures, admittedly, but barring the risk of bookies going bankrupt or the political system collapsing it seems like a sure thing.

Of course, there isn't actually a leadership election tomorrow, it is probably quite a way off. That means that any profits you are able to make this way are vulnerable to inflation, as the money you get out is worth less than the money you put in before, even though it exceeds it nominally. Much better to ask the bookies if they are willing to bet in gold, or rare pokémon cards.

I wonder if bookies have something to prevent people making this kind of bet. I imagine not, it does not sound like that would be legal. It is standard practice for political betters to have bets on both sides, but this is normally done in response to fluctuations in the betting markets, which in politics is very volatile.

This has been a different one for me. Hope it has been of some interest.

All the best,
Caleb

Young People and the Differential Minimum Wage

Dear friends,

Let me first direct your attention to this petition on direct.gov.uk. It is a petition, admittedly somewhat ambiguously worded, asking that minimum wage be raised to keep up with inflation, last estimated to be at 3.6% according to the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, and for the minimum wage for under 21s to be raised, instead of frozen.

I've actually had a tough time finding correct data on this. At HMRC it only has the figures for last October, in which minimum wage was raised below the rate of inflation (which was about 5% at the time if memory serves), and at direct.gov.uk it also quotes the raise from last October. That is:

• £6.08 - the main rate for workers aged 21 and over 
• £4.98 - the 18-20 rate
• £3.68 - the 16-17 rate for workers above school leaving age but under 18

 The petition is unclear, but this write-up on Liberal Conspiracy present the facts rather more clearly, though without stating sources.

The petition, and the article in Liberal Conspiracy are both commendable, and I urge anyone reading this to sign the petition and share it. Even though the language is hit-or-miss, sometimes that is just what direct democracy in action looks like. Get over it.

In case, however, you are not convinced that young people and the low waged more generally ought not to experience a real decline in living standards over the next year, I have below a couple of arguments which I hope will persuade you.

The first is that 18 year olds plus are legal adults. They have almost all the legal right that 21 year olds have, and most of the few exceptions are unimportant. However, when it comes the the government sticking up for them and making empolyers pay them a fair wage, under 21s are sadly left out. My parents were starting a family when they were 20, some people's parents start even younger. There is nothing wrong with this: people can start families if they want to. And yet wage discrimination means that under 21s have to work 20% longer to make the same amount of money. This is about economic independence, which all adults deserve, even young adults.

Many young people have disabled parents they are caring for, or are saving up to invest in their futures by getting an education, finding their own home, finding transport independence or even starting their own business. Unless they are paid a fair wage they will not be able to do any of these things. Paying young adults less just means they end up more likely to end up on government benefits when things are tough. That's not necessary. Young adults want to work, but work needs to pay.

There are more dimensions to this as well. We don't know what people's home lives are, the point in things like the minimum wage is that it allows people to make their own way even if things are difficult. By no means does everybody have a comfortable relationship with their parents. While parents are often some of the most loving people out there, it is also those closest to us that have the greatest power to make our lives misery. Young adults need financial independence to provide a cushion between them and the vagaries of family fate. Incidentally this also connects to why losing EMA was such a problem, and whay making financial support for university students contingent on parental circumstances is a mistake. Once people get to 18, as far as the state ought to be concerned the umbilicle cord is cut. The state has no place telling 18 year olds that they are still infants then it comes to policy.

16 and 17 year olds live in an odd, half-adult state. It is one of the irregularities of ours and others' societies that these transitionary periods exist, and they are hard to navigate for policymakers and young people alike. Some inconsistencies are clearly ridiculous. It is legal to have sex and join the army, but not to drink, watch adult rated films, or to vote. There clearly needs to be a debate about the status of 16 and 17 year olds, and it is one they should be included in. However, the important factor here is the fact that at the age of 16 one is no longer in compulsory education. If you are not going to continue being educated, pretty much the only thing to do is to work. A 16 year old can do a full days work and deserves full pay for it.

Now there is an obvious counterargument to all this, but it is one which is so bad I can scarcely it is ever stated. The argument goes that it helps young people get employment, making them a preferable hire over more experienced potential employees. The argument goes that nobody would hire a young adult for the same wage as another adult, because they don't have enough experience.

The facts don't support this position at all. Actually, young people are finding it harder than ever to find work, with youth unemployment now at a million. Raising NMW for young people won't decrease young people's employment: it will actually increase it. There are sound economic reasons for this. When we are choosing between work and leisure, we consider on the one hand how enjoyable the work is (not at all) and how much it pays (very little), and on the other hand what else we could be doing with our time. Which is playing Xbox, and I don't know if you've noticed but there have been some kick-ass titles released over the last year or so. Note that this is not a result of gross entitlement, any generation would have acted the same in this situation: the fact is that in relative terms, the only terms that matter, wages for young people have plummetted over the last decades. Given a choice between a shitty hour at work and £3.68 and playing Xbox, the rational young person chooses Xbox, any day. Low wages are keeping young people in the family home, or on street corners surprising people by being politer than expected, instead of doing work they would be doing if it paid a fair wage.

A more forward thinking young person will think: if I do this now, I will get experience and can get a better job later. Actually we have a scheme which exists already for people to get experience of working. Its called Work Experience. It lasts two weeks and can help you get a job later you might actually want. It is disengenuous to suggest that minimum wage jobs for 16 year olds prepare you for anything apart from more minimum wage jobs later. The work has to pay fairly, it is not as if it is an unpaid internship or something (and I am going to talk about what's wrong with them, later).

In case I needed any more economic arguments, young people actually make up the demographic who spend the largest proportion of their income on consumption. Think about it, they are not usually buying a house, raising a family or saving for a pension. The silly response to this is to say they don't need the money then. Well, some of them do, as I mention above. But on average they are more likely to consume, which actually boosts economic growth and creates more jobs for everyone! The very firms paying young people such low wages would probably make more money if all of them got together and decided to pay their young workers more. When young people do save, it is often for things like supporting themselves during university, which is about the most responsible investment one can make.

I have a final point, and this one is about exploitation. I'm not a Marxist, I don't really know what one is, but it is a simple fact of life that when the economy does its thing and money is generated, it comes in two types: wages and profits. Most of it is wages, which goes eot employees, and some is profits, which goes to people who own things. I am not disputing the justifiability of the system of private property underpinning our economic system, at least not now,  I just want to draw attention to one thing. Among different sections of the workforce, the ratios of profits to wages are different. When young people are involved, the wages side of the ratio is lowest relative to the profit side of any demographic you care to look at. The gap between the value of what you produce and what you get paid for it is lower for young people than it is for anybody else. So if you buy into the argument that young people should be paid less, if you're an old person you're an oppressor and if you're a young person you're a willing victim.

That's why you should sign the petition, and tell anyone who cares to listen that age-based wage disrimination has got to end. It's unfair, stupid, and harmful for us all.
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/33865


PS I mentioned I will return to unpaid internships later. I will also look at the living wage campaign later: it's the crazy notion that people should be paid at least enough to live on.

In a cave! With a box of scraps!

Dear friends,

Whenever a cave, or something very much like a cave, are portrayed in a work of fiction, we ought to ask ourselves two important questions.

Question 1: Is it Plato's cave?
Question 2: It is a womb?

I watched Iron Man again last night, and afterwards I mused for a while as to what the meaning of the cave was, particularly whether the answers to either of the two above questions was Yes.

I'll deal with the first, bigger question in a bit, but for now I want to focus on the second. I want to know whether Tony Stark and Yinsen spent a large part of the first third of the film in a cosmic womb.

Yes, yes they did. Well, it is a womb for Stark anyway. For Yinsen it is a tomb (perhaps another common symbolic meaning of the cave). The main piece of supporting evidence for this is that it is within the cave than Iron Man is made, crafted out of base materials to emerge as a new, fully formed identity/person-like-thing. It is both the birth of a new entity in the form of Iron Man, not yet mature as the technical specifications of the suit later progressively improve, ad the rebirth of Tony Stark, an idea that I will return to later as I discuss whether the cave is Plato's. Iron Man is born into violence, built from violence, both facts that jar with Tony's later protestations that the suit is merely an advaced prosthetic. The birth metaphor is in keeping with the film's purpose as an origin story, in the tradition of the first in a series of super-hero films. These films attempt to answer questions about where super-heros come from, how they are made. Heroic births are traditionally extreme in nature. I, for example, was born of a lightning bolt and a fairy queen, at midnight on the winter solstice, on the top of Mount Everest in a blizzard. The extreme nature of events surrounding the birth of Iron Man are a continuation of this tradition. The second Iron Man film can be viewed, among other things, as a coming of age film. These are the simple building blocks of our literary tradition. Though somewhat lacking in subtlety they exercise much power over the human imagination.

But, is the cave representative of Plato's cave? I think the answer to this, too, is yes. I am slightly more ambivalent on this count. The analogy is not perfect, but good enough that I think that the comparison is instructive and can add to our understanding of the film.

I feel I should briefly introduce Plato's allegory of the cave before I begin its discussion. It can be found in Book VII of The Republic, available in translation on wikisource here. It is one of the more influential passages in ancient philosophy, and among the most evocative imagery employed in the history of philosophy, indeed in the history of all writing. It is also an allegory which is frequently alluded to in works of fiction, indeed it can be a pleasant diversion to reflect on the many instances in which this occurs.

In the allegory, Plato describes a group of prisoners in a cave under the ground. All they can see is a shadow-theatre playing out in front of them on a screen. Having never experienced anything else, they presume that this is the real world. Plato describes what would happen if one were to release one of these prisoners, and drag them up out of the cave into the light. There they would come to understand that what they saw before was not real, and come to an understanding of what is real illuminated by the sun, which for Plato is the almost God-like Truth, or the Form of the Good.

Now that I have made a hash of the work of one of the greatest pieces of philosophy of all time, I will try to apply it to the film Iron Man. We might first be led to think that the allegory does not apply, because Stark does not start out in the cave, he has experience of a world outside it. This mislead should not stop us from exploring further though. As a matter of fact he was blinded by ignorance in his previous life as he was unaware of the true nature of things, in this case the corruption within his company. This, and the revelation that he has much more to live for than his habitual shallow playboy ways. A second objection could be that it is actually before the cave when he is attacked, and inside when Yinsen acts as a father figure and contributes to his moral development, that truth is revealed to Tony Stark. The parallel is by no means perfect, but the themes of truth and goodness coupled with the striking imagery of the cave itself suggest to me that this is indeed an instance of the employment of the allegory of the cave.

The TV Tropes article "Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory" would advise caution before ascribing tenuously justified meaning to what may just be convenient plot points: for example maybe he is just in a cave to explain why his allies have been unable to find him in spite of persistent searching. I agree, and post-Freudian and philosophical interpretations are not always applicable, but equally most writers will know about these traditions and may throw bones to them as something of a shout-out, or as a brain-teaser for the widely read audience member. There are also many other, possibly more interesting, ways to interpret Iron Man, ways of thinking about it with reference to individualism, anti-corporatism, American self-perception, post-9/11, teh military-industrial complex, super-hero deconstructivism, liberal interventionism, technological fetishism, and, my personal favourite, interpreting the interesting fact that Stark is, for a super-hero, really rather old (his dad worked on the Manhatten project). You can even read a pro intellectual property and monopoly rights message, compounded in the sequel. I may return to some of these ideas another time. It's about time to finish now. I've got to go off and read far too much into some more unsuspecting works of fiction.

The Coleslaw Cascade

Dear friends,

Who the f#ck likes coleslaw? Actually, I don't want to know. Whoever you are, you shouldn't. It's dire. Shredded cabbage and carrot drenched in mayonnaise. It makes me want to type onomatopoeic approximations of the sound I imagines being sick a little in my mouth would make. Both because the coleslaw makes me feel sick, and because it so closely resembles it.

But coleslaw might be our friend, albeit our ugly and foul-smelling friend, as I try to get my head around the socio-economic demographic transitional model for fashionable but ultimately harmful behaviours. I am sure the reader will forgive me for calling it instead the Coleslaw Cascade.

The idea goes like this. At some point a misguided behaviour, lets say eating coleslaw, becomes part of the culture among a group of people susceptible to picking up, uh, exotic or new behaviours. This is normally better off young people (but could include eccentrics of any age or socio-economic background, or bored middle-life crisisers). As they grow up, because People Are Boring, they carry on eating coleslaw, but because they become better off middle aged people it becomes a behaviour associated with success. Now everyone wants to eat coleslaw.

The thing is coleslaw is horrid tasting, makes you smell and costs you friends (eg me). It also has dire implications for your mortal wellbeing as complete strangers are gripped with a not always controllable but always violent hatred towards you. So the only people who copy the coleslaw habit are people who have not been significantly exposed to the horrors of coleslaw or are incapable of applying the power of their imagination to the contents of their lunch box.

The more general point I am making with the Coleslaw Cascade is that behaviours which command an appearance of sophistication, whether because they are expensive or are associated with high status, but which have significant negative effects, tend to be sticky within a generation as habits are hard to drop, but over generations will gradually descend in terms of the social status that they are associated with until they are mostly dropped altogether.

A couple of examples will help to illustrate this point. Take being fat. There is nothing wrong with being fat per se. A lot people, though some secretly and more recently there has been a trend against this, think that being fat can be quite beautiful. It is sometimes the product of a healthy enjoyment of life. In past times being fat was a clear sign of great wealth as it signified both being able to afford an abundance of food and not having to do physical work. However as the health costs associated with being fat became clearer it fell out of favour.

Since then being overweight has increasingly in Western societies been seen as a signifier of lower social status. This is actually one of the reasons why so much horrible hatred is directed towards fat people, which people for some stupid reason is an okay thing to do, because they subconciously associate fatness with low social status and thus behave like fat people are fair game for picking on. Obviously this is a brutal and horrid way to behave and anyone who is mean about people being fat should stop and feel ashamed of themselves and punch themselves in the nose at least twice. Still, my point stands in that generally being fat has become more common among the less well off and, quite a different thing, those of lower social status.

Similar things have happened to lots of other behaviours. Opium used to be a lot more classy, now heroin is more associated with poverty. Interestingly, car use is one that seems to be going a similar way. Among younger people it tends to be people from working class backgrounds who are quicker to get cars, with many of middle class backgrounds failing to get them at all. Meat eating could quite possibly be another example, as could watching large amounts of television.

These are all behaviours which due to cost or association have at some point or another been deeply aspirational, and which can have negative side effects. A couple of notable exceptions are some other sorts of drugs, which are presumably less bad for you or something, alcohol, which everyone drinks too much or irrespective, and smoking. Smoking was actually behaving very similarly for a long time with the predicatable wealthy-consumption, peak consumption when it was most aspired to,  followed by a tailing off as the health effects became better known. Now the profile of smoking is one where it is disproportionately the practice of younger people, who are reasonably likely to give up as they get a bit older. This is easy to explain: smoking is cool. Young people are cool, and so they smoke, which is cool, and besides we don't fear death anyway because we're young and cool. I'm not actually a smoker - I'm not cool enough. I wouldn't get behind the wheel of a car either: those things are dangerous.

So there it is, the Coleslaw Cascade. Over time coleslaw eating descends the socioeconomic scale, going from a rich persons folly to mainstream to another object of ridicule for the least well off, who people weren't making fun of enough already. It's a bit shit, but that's how it goes. Of course there's an easy solution. Everyone just stop eating coleslaw and we''ll have fixed it, we can all live in peace and harmony.





I could have used sausage rolls. The Slippery Sausage Roll Slope. Or liking Oasis. The Liking Oasis Process. It must have been trendy to like Oasis at some point, I don't see how else they won that Battle of Britpop thing ages ago that means nothing to me.



God! And then they put f#cking cheese in the foul stuff. Cheese coleslaw! Ever heard of voluntary human extinction?

Response to: Response to: Curving for Justice

Dear friends,

The unparalleled (and unhinged) Wooden Womb wrote a response to my post about intergenerational justice in which he made four main points about where my framework for a way of determining a fair distribution of resources accross generations may be lacking. I want to thank zhim for his excellent piece which certainly merits a reply, congratulate zhim for zher excellent taste in clothes and commend zhim for zher fantastic use of Science. I will go through it point by point, but first I want to make a few clarifying statements.

WooWo suggested that the following characterised my position:
"Let’s graph expressed preference for income distribution across the course of their lives vs. what people actually get over the course of their lives."

Actually, though this is merely an elaboration not a contradiction, the model is designed not only to give us a picture of distributing resources over a person's lifetime, it is also supposed to give us an idea of how resources should be shared among different generations.

Obviously assuming either zero growth or that growth has limited effects on people's standard of living (a wildly innacurate assumption) these two things will be the same as each other. My reasons for excluding growth are firstly to make this simple enough to start from, and secondly that I think its importance is overemphasised a lot of the time. The number of houses per person hasn't changed that much, and x-BOXes aren't all that.

That was the clarifying staments. Now, let me address his main points:

1: People Don't Know What Is Best For Them

I must counter this argument by stating that here WooWo is absolutely right. People's lives are far too important to let them be the ones making decisions about them. However, most of the time terrible as they are they are still the best people for the job.
My argument was not supposed to be about giving people complete power over their lifetime income distributions, however. I wanted to make the point that if you did ask them what they wanted, they would give you an answer differing from what we have, but I don't think that's where we should end. I wanted to challenge people and policymakers to go to a different level of abstraction, to ask not what they do want, but what they would want, under some yet to be refined conditions. These conditions would mean that people try to consider what their distributions would be like from a neutral perspective so their current situation doesn't bias it.
When I first tried to think of conditions that would fulfil this role, I thought of making it so the person has to imagine they will transported into a random year in their life. This would not work though, as people would load all the resources into their final years because they might miss a lot of income if they put any into the first phase of their adult lives. So this first potential condition fails because it leads to perverse incentives.
A better condition which I have not found a problem with yet is to ask people to imagine that they will live through all of the phases of the life they designed but in a random order. This would hopefully remove biases people have towards resources now as opposed to resources later.
What the exact conditions would be are academic however. What is important is that we imagine such conditions could exist, and imagine what people would choose. That we we can arrive at distributions less influenced by people's current place in time.
Of course it doesn't completely work in practice. It is impossible to get people to accurately describe what they would do in hypothetical situations that don't, or possibly even can't, exist. That's why they're called thought experiments: if they were eminently practical they would just be experiments. Thought experiments are useful for framing a problem more clearly, and bringing out our intuitions, and pointing out inconsistencies, and other conceptual hi-jinks.
Maybe one day a mad scientist will come with a way of actually putting people in test conditions ans in a situation where they have to make these sorty of choices. It would almost certain be immoral, and fascinating.

I feel I have strayed a little off WooWo's main point here though. While all I have said above does help bring out the difficulties and also advantages of encouraging people to think critically about what they think the best distribution of resources over lifetimes would be for them individually, or for society more generally. As for the core objection about people not knowing what is best for them, this is something which in practice in society we work around. Most people have control over a lot of what they do with their lives. Social institutions nudge us towards things which are deemed good and vice versa, and there are blanket laws for and against some things, but a lot of important decisions are left to people themselves. That's why I don't think we can get a lot of mileage out of the people don't know sh*t objection. Besides, people vote and so collectively they exercise a great deal of power over their lives.
Voting is an interesting one to lookout. Voting gives us information about aggregated preferences, similar to my suggestion of how to use information from these curves to inform public policy. Collecting and aggregating these curves will give us helpful information about people's preferences which policymakers can use with discretion, informing but not dictating their decision. As an example of this works in practice, see Damian McBride's excellent piece about how budgets get written. Impact assessment is an important part of the process, so governments can see how their policies will distribute wealth, income, or other resources between different groups, including between generations: "what’s the distributional impact?".

So much for point 1. I have responded to WooWo by accepting the limitations of this approach while touting its usefulness as a policy starting point and pointing out that aggregated preference information (like voting) is already a large and more or less accepted part of the policymaking process, which this method is no departure from.

2: Temporal inconsistency.

I believe my response to point 1 also covers this. Abstraction provides a limited work-around for this problem, as does framing the question in such a say to try and provoke unbiased anwers. Impossible to perfect but still useful.

3: Satisfaction.

Actually how much people enjoy their jobs was not considered in my model, infact jobs are presented as a resource to be distributed as opposed to a burden. Other than the very worst jobs, by most physical and mental health measures working is pretty much always better than not working. As for the distribution of job satisfaction across ages, I imagine it is one of the main things that we imagine should by slowly going up, in order to have maximally worthwhile lives for people. A little struggle makes the reward all the sweeter. Indeed, Spinoza writes (and I think he's got something there) that happiness is not a state in itself, but a sensation we feel when we are transitioning from a worse to a better state.
When I say resources, we should usually think of resources considered individually. This includes both money and free time. Therefore we should imagine people as they get older getting a little more income and a little more free time. Some peope do love work, but with the volunteering sector there is always a chance for people to turn their free time into rewarding work at no cost.
I will write a blog post at a later point about trade-offs between work and leisure and how it is more complicated than you might think. The headline finding, as expressed brilliantly in Willets' The Pinch, is that earning more per hour often leads people to work more hours, not less.

4. Motivation.

In response to this last point I will draw what I think is a rather apt analogy between advancing in age and advancing in heirarchy, which often amount to the same thing.
In the '50s, bosses tended to earn something like like ten times what the average worker earned. Probably. The exact number is not really important. In the '10s it is more like one hundred times, among medium to large sized companies anyway. If that sounds unrealistic, lets remember that that just means bosses earning about £2 million, to the median person's £20,000. I think that is fairly representative, though the point will stand anyway. Surely people had sufficient motivation to try to advance their careers already in the '50s? Certainly capitalism did not fall apart due to lack of aspiration.
A similar story can be told with average wages for people of various ages. People are still going to work hard to increase their incomes to 150% of what it is now over the next few decades, they won't only budge for some figure like 400%, which is more what the differential between young and old workers is like at the moment. That's based on an estimate of £10,000 for 16-25 year olds (probably too high considering the 20% youth unemployment level, relative poverty endured by students, proliferation of unpaid internships, lower minimum wage for 16-21 year olds, prevalence of temporary and part time work, and non-participation in the labour force) and £40,000 for a 45-55 year old, which will probably be when most people's earnings peak. A range from £20,000 to £30,000 (to use these figures) or from £16,000 to £24,000 (to straddle my median income estimate) will still give people plenty of motivation to challenge themselves, while reducing the amount of lifetime suffering due to financial hardship for everyone.


That's it. I realise I have gone on much too long, but due to the high quality of WooWo's response I wanted to give an answer in some detail. Hopefully this has resolved more ambiguities than it has introduced and corrected more mistakes than it has made. I still think this is a helpful way to start thinking about distribution of resources between generations. I also commend WooWo's excellent conclusion about the robots and stuff. It's pretty cool (though it doesn't necessarily answer the question given the assumption that scarcity will always exist in some form) and I don't have anything nearly so clever to end on.

I tried to make a pun once about a dotty aristocrat who mistakenly thinks porpoise is an abbreviation of poor person, but I couldn't formulate it in a way which wasn't horrifically offensive to aristocrats, non-aristocrats and people with dots on them. It fell flat and I retreated to my room, feeling ashamed and like I had betrayed my moral convictions, wishing there was a God so there could be someone to ask for forgiveness for my slight which had wronged millions of people who I could never apologise to and who could never forgive me. I carry that mark on my soul still. This life is an endless procession of torments, failures and humiliations. The robots comment, that was better.

The Shrinking Room

Dear friends,

Below is a poem called "The Shrinking Room". I do not normally attempt to write poetry, but there is a long story I am working on for which one of the main protagonists is a magic poet. Hopefully within the context this one helps to establish her motivations and so on. That's what I was going for anyway. I realise I have been updating quite a lot lately. If it wasn't obvious, it's because there are exams I am supposed to be revising for.

Sitting in the living room, living,

thinking perhaps about bedtime or breakfast or washing the dishes,

you glance up from your former locus of attention,

shake your head, disbelieve, surely not,

as the walls now appear rather closer acquainted,

Ignore! Return post haste to your crossword puzzle or book.

But you can't long resist the urge to inspect,

just to check that your senses are not incorrect,

then a dooming boom echoes noiselessly on your hollow inside,

the room is shrinking in size,

dust starts to lift as the masonry shifts,

but there you just sit.

Nonplussed you fuss over why you should rust,

while your imploding abode swiftly swallows you up,

but rust you must as though trussed up,

by cords of indifference, impotence,

passivity and pathos.

Curving for Justice

*** Wooden Womb has responded to this blog here. After reading this you might want to check it out. I responded to that response here.***

Dear friends,

Imagine drawing a curve. On the x axis is time, and on the y axis is income. Imagine how you would draw a curve on that graph is what you drew fixed your income for the rest of your life.

Of course, it would have to be abstracted from one's immediate position otherwise one would probably simply make the curve spike up suddenly from that moment in time, followed by whatever the person desired after that. Imagine drawing the curve from something like the original position, maybe after you draw the curve we imagine you are placed at random at a point in your life. In this framework we might imagine that the area under the curve must equal a certain amount, representing society's limited resources. I wonder how you would draw such a curve. I wonder how I would. And I wonder how we can draw such a curve for the whole of society.

The problem with intergenerational justice is that the basic Rawlsian solution doesn't work, not even a little bit. Rawls' intuitive argument makes that case that facts about a person that they are not responsible for are no basis for the deserving of rewards. Heirs don't deserve their parents' fortunes, tall people don't deserve lucrative basketball careers and even clever people don't really deserve Nobel prizes: they don't deserve the traits that they have and so they don't deserve the rewards. Rawls' solution to this is to distribute the rewards in society evenly, with one addendum: that inequalities in this distribution are appropriate just as long as they benefit the least well off.

Rawls changed his position over time, and we might be better served by examining more recent thinkers, but if we are going to start thinking about intergenerational justice Rawls is a good place to start. On first inspection the Rawlsian method seems entirely appropriate for the problem of justice between generations. This is because nobody could reasonably believe that somehow they deserve to be in the generation they are in. Therefore, we might suppose, society's rewards should be evenly distributed between generations. Right?

Unright. What I was trying to bring out at the start with the ideal income over lifetime curve (I damn well hope this thought experiment has not been done before so I can call it the Caleb Curve {almost but not quite entirely tongue in cheek}) was that we might not want income to be evenly distributed across our lifetimes, and therefore we would reject equal distribution of rewards across generations for that reason.

Wisely, Rawls talks not about simple money but about social primary goods. This means things like secure jobs and houses. One feature of the Rawlsian approach which I think is appropriate is that there will never be a time when people drawing their curve will not want secure jobs and houses.

I think if we use a slightly more powerful tool than the curve, for example a chart of all the different resources one would want to have at different times, we would find that rarely if ever will people want to go without secure jobs and houses, and healthcare for that matter, in their ideal resources over lifetime charts. At various points education will be more important, or care for young children or the elderly, but some things will be constant.

The main result I think we would see from these charts or curves is that people, on the whole, will want their disposable incomes to go up over time, thus giving them a feeling that life is getting better, and so they can be optimistic and not worrisome. There may be bumps in this, such as a brief bulge at the start when people want to acquire education, or useful property like their first rung on the housing metaphor and that folly private transportation, and a bump when they are faced with the additional costs of raising a family. People may wish for their curve to decline at the end, so they can just spend their wealth (implicit in this thought experiment is that people will know roughly how long they are going to live, which in an unrealistic simplification that we are just going to have to deal with. The effects of inheritance tax are also not counted in this model yet).

Justice then looks like it will not be an even distribution of resources or incomes across generations, rather it looks like it will consist of an irregular and generally increasing distribution over time. This result appears incongruous given my efforts in campaigning for a greater allocation of society's resources to young people. The framework I have developed appears to justify existing intergenerational iniquities. Think so? Think once more, but be less wrong this time.

We must return to the curve I began with. If one actually drew out these curves and aggregated them with equal  weight, we would find a schematic for a fairer distribution of resources across generations, and it would look wildly different to the settlement we have today. Most people would want to have radically gentler slopes, to have rather less in their late middle to early old age in return for a lot more in their youth. I am confident that this is what the results would show, but I am not satisfied just at that. I want to frame the question in such a way to provoke honest answers, and actually ask people what their ideal lifetime distributions would be. In his later work Rawls spoke more about the importance of overlapping consensus within society as the quality that allows politics to begin. Though we don't agree on everything, we agree enough on enough things that responsible government is possible. Extolling the virtues of overlapping consensus is one thing, however, and actually going out and finding what that consensus is is quite another. We must actually find out what people's reasoned and deeply held views are before they can, as they should, be taken into account. This is one among many examples of areas where political philosophy demands of us that we take our thoughts out into the wider world and engage with people, something which many of that calling are loathe to do. Hesitant or not, if one really believes what one professes to believe, one must act on it.

***Edit: As my wise housemate helpfully pointed out, we actually have a mechanism for transferring wealth between periods of our lives in the form of student loans, which until recently in the UK were charged just at the rate of inflation and not at an interest rate reflecting the risk of default or investors' other options. Thus we know empirically that given the opportunity to change their lifetime resource distribution curves to shift wealth from later to earlier periods many people often will. I don't advocate this as the mechanism by which a better distribution is occurred, but it is an interesting proof of the concept. End edit***

An Excerpt

***Dear friends,

Here is an excerpt of a story I am working on.***

He brushed off his Art History credits, and contemplated a while as he passed through an arch. The history of the arch was one which greatly interested him, and it was a history which was now complete: the arch had already reached its apotheosis.
Yes, the best designed arch in the world had already been built. It was the McDonalds Arch. Properly called a catenary, it was heavily used by the great Gaudi. It is the inverse of shape you get when you hang a chain, and it is one of the strongest and most beautiful shapes there is. The McDonalds logo contains not one, but two of them. You can keep the Roman Empire, the University of Oxford, and the Constitution of the United States of America. The universal truth and beauty of the golden arches would outlast them all, and so would their preservative-stuffed Happy Meals.

Avengers in High-Heeled Shoes

Dear friends,

(note) I have been rather sketchy in my male/female = biological sex, men/women = social gender distinction. This arises out of an uncertainty as to which I am talking about with respect to the subject matter in question: characters don't tend to actually disclose either of those facts about themselves and body type is supposed to represent the whole thing. Sorry for inconsistency and what not, also sorry this ended up so damn long. (/note)

Last night I went to the pictures to watch the almost universally praised film The Avengers, in 3D no less. We drove out to one of those big multi-plex shindigs with popcorn on the floor and young people all over the place. I enjoyed the film very much, but as a feminist beer enthusiast with an awesome haircut who was sat near me frequently pointed out, the female protagonists were inexplicably wearing high-heeled shoes in the unrelenting combat sequences. I think her problem with it was that it was unrealistic and seemed like an attempt by the filmmakers to crowbar their hero into conventional beauty standards.

This is the part where I write about the film, high heels, and high heels in the film.

The film's director, who also wrote the script, is Joss Whedon. The geeks love him. He is the creator of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse and his 2009-made film The Cabin in the Woods was just released, after MGM went bankrupt delaying the original release. Whedon is reckoned to be one of the more feminism inclined writer/director/whatevers in Hollywood. He got his break as a writer on Roseanne, where he was praised for being able to write women quite convincingly, and the show itself was groundbreaking in its portrayal of the powerful, non-standardly beautiful titular woman. He also does work for Equality Now. I am hesitant to condemn the heel situation, mostly becuase if Whedon decided to do it that way, there may have been a good reason.

Here is a roundup of possible explanations for the heels situation:
1) Stature. Scarlet Johannson is quite short, at 5'4", and it may be that she consistently wears heels for compositional reasons, particularly in a film where the tallest of the Avengers, played by Chris Hemsworth clocks in at 6'3".
2) Power. I have no source for this, but I trust the reader also lives on this planet and has heard or read about women feeling more powerful when they wear high heels, because of the height added I suppose but also possibly because of the striking image and associations.
3) Idealisation. Just as male comic book heros tend to exemplify a mainstream idealisation of the man, so do female comic book heros for women. Or at least, idealised women as far as men are concerned: remember that super-hero comics have traditionally predominantly been aimed at, produced by and consumed by men.
4) Canonicity. Black Widow, the main female protagonist in question is ALWAYS depicted in the comics as wearing heels. Whatever else Joss Whedon is, he is also a massive comic books nerd and also the creator of several rich universes, and is probably more than a bit into canon.

Helpfully the first three are also good lead ins for a blog post on high heels. I don't think I would say much in that I didn't in the make-up post. I am aware they are very different topics but my approach would have been similar even if the conclusions would be different. I might still return to this to discuss high heels in real life at some point.

Points 3 and 4 really drives home a theme I want to return to quite a bit. This film is based on a series os super-hero comics, and compared to the portrayal of woman superhero's in the source medium The Avengers was actually an exercise in restraint. There are tonnes of problems with the portrayal women super-heros. The preposterous proportions are one, as well as the ridiculous costumes and the provocative compositions of the frames. Women super-heros are infantilised by the epithet Girl (as opposed to Man) and in the emphasis on their much smaller frames than their male counterparts. Comics are a very stylised medium, particularly in the super-hero genre, and it was actually quite bold of the Avengers to tone down Black Widow so much. If you look at the image results produced you will notice this incarnation is relatively normally dressed, and on the whole is a lot less objectified than in the comics.

Super-hero comics mirror mythology. The character of Thor is a conscious reference to this fact. Myths are about archetypes, and are about the struggles of coming into adulthood and of facing your own mortality. They are typically life-affirming, dealing in themes of confronting great adversity and overcoming personal tragedy, and they centre around the relationship between an individual and a community. Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces remains essential reading for everybody interested in mythology or in super-hero comics.

Mythology paints on a canvas larger than life. It deals in powerful archetypes. By exaggerating our basic human struggles to epic proportions it is supposed to help us come to understand the realities of our own existence. Mythology is tightly connected with rituals concerning birth, growing up, getting married and dying. Subtlety and realism are have no place in this.

Where super-hero comics deviate from this is that they take the fact that mythology is actually about us, ordinary humans, and misuse it. Super-hero comics become a form of wish fulfilment where instead of using unrealistic characters to tell us about our own lives, they start from our lives, and invent characters more reflective of our unfulfilled fantasies, all of the confrontations we wish we had won or been brave enough to enter into, all of the people we wish we could protect, all the glory and adulation we wish we received or were worthy of.

The inclusion of powerful warrior-women in super-hero comics actually represents something of an improvement on previous similar media. Women are shown to be capable of succeeding in the traditionally male dominated spheres of saving the world, etc. Campbell's book includes a discussion of the strong association between heroism and masculinity. However super-hero comics, perhaps by their very nature, are preoccupied with the praising of traditionally male interests. They are almost universally combat-heavy, and the relationship between men and violence is while regrettable well precendented.

The problem is that women are portrayed as the comic creators imagine men fantasise them. I think a similar problem which is underlooked is the representation of men, however. Perhaps partly reflecting their audience's fantasy-self, male characters are portrayed as muscular giants. Super-hero comics reinforce people's ideas of what men and women are supposed to be with their idealised and homogenised bodies. However their bodies appear, there is actually more than one type of female super-hero. I know it is difficult to believe but it's true, there is more than one. There's two.

The first is the wholesome super-hero. This type is best represented by Wonder Woman. This archetype is associated with virginity and purity. They represent the (male) audience member's desires for marriage and stability, a trustworthy partner and potential mother to their offspring, as well as representing an idealisation of their own mother. Their unimpeachable virtue will be expressed in the conflicts by their devotion to justice and unwillingness to use morally questionable means to achieve their ends.

The second type is the vampish super-hero. There are fewer examples of this type. They are more likely to perform heel-face turns. They are not necessarily different in body type to wholesome heros, but they will have more revealing outfits tending towards darker colours. They are often morally ambiguous, willing to manipulate others to achieve their ends, which will sometimes be personal and sometimes magnanimous. They represent the audience members repressed sexual desires, and their impulses towards greater sexual freedom. Their darkness represents the secrecy of their associated desires as well as moral ambiguity and sexual "impurity", which is a particularly nasty Abrahamic concept. Black widow is a vampish super-hero. That is why she does, and must, wear high heels, because of the fetishistic position they occupy in our society. The aggressive shape of the heel is associated with the vampish super-hero's overt sexuality, which is threatening but also appealing to the audience member. Wholesome super-heros will seldom wear high heels. Vampish super-heros will rarely fail to.

Is this a good thing? Probably not, though there might be one or two good side effects. Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods deals with this topic in discussing the archetypes of "whore" and "virgin", and when you put it like that it seems pretty damn harmful, but it probably doesn't have to be. Vampish female characters might help heterosexual or bisexual male audience members come to terms with aspects of their sexuality that they previously found hard to put into a frame of reference. I think the main point here though is that both of these archetypes exist for the benefit of audience members who are men attracted to women. This is fundamental failing of the genre. It undermines the apparent gain made by introducing heroic women if they are only heroic as a pretext for revealing outfits, suggestive frames, and to increase their attractiveness to the audience member. Women super-heros should be written and drawn with women audience members as well as male ones in mind, and should either have more complex sexualities instead of basically fitting into one of two types. They can be role-models, wish fulfilment, or larger-than-life mythic figures, whichever the creators intend, as long as it is for women and not just for men.

Really I would like to see more gender-queer super-heros, who's gender is undisclosed and unimportant. Hell, it would be great to have transvestite or transgender super-heros, or asexual alien super-heros from Asgard or similar. This would actually help super-hero comics and films to fulfil their mythologising role by making them more universalising.

I realise I have gone on too long here, but I wanted to go into some depth about this. The question was why does Black Widow wear high heels. The answer turned out to be quite complicated. In the end I think the problem isn't that she was wearing high heels, but that the super-hero genre is too men-oriented and mistreats the issue of female sexuality, effectively making it all about men and not, as it should be, about women. This will, I think, actually enhance super-hero stories as they benefit from more complex characters and a wider potential audience. In addition they will hopefully stop reinforcing unreasonable and unrealistic impressions of women in people's minds. Is anything actually going to change? Maybe.

A heads up to two excellent bloggers notes from the vulvaground and blokeahontas, who's awesome recent posts on feminist topics made me want to write this piece. You should check them out.

I also read a blog on a similar theme before reading this that focused on realism. I will have to write a piece on realism in films and comics soon in response, but one of the links should hopefully get you it.
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/feminism?before=1316731922
http://livingthegeek.tumblr.com/

All the best.

Makeup

Dear friends,

Here are some simple thoughts about a complicated subject. I think I might start wearing makeup.

Not really. I have just been thinking about makeup and the politics of gender and oppression quite a bit lately, and I have a few comments. I don't stand with the either the males who insist on women wearing makeup or the equally odd ones who insist they don't: to insist on women doing anything seems like a rather ridiculous and harmful thing to do. I remember once my little sister asked for makeup for a birthday in her tweenage years, and I bought her some facepaint. Now I can't decide if that was funny and clever or stupid and cruel. I certainly would have appreciated it if someone bought me facepaint though, facepaint is awesome.

I think I was talking about something else before.

There are a two reasons why if I were a woman I would feel like I should not wear makeup. Neither of them end the conversation though, and obviously not being a woman I don't know what I would actually think.

Firstly, I think the expectation on women to wear makeup is part of a mechanism of oppression on women. Being expected to conform to certain (arbitrary) standards of beauty, including and not limited to wearing some amount of makeup, takes up a lot of time and quite a bit of money, both of which represent a transfer of power away from women (a loss which is not really offset by any gain to anyone, except I suppose makeup manufacturers). As a feminist I think women ought to have more power, and as a Nietzschean of the cuddly variety I think people in general ought to have more power, so in my set of values makeup is not looking good.

However to go from this point to the assertion that one should not wear makeup is to make a grave mistake. It is frankly idiotic to say to somebody who is being oppressed "Why don't you just stop being oppressed?", and that is what such an assertion would constitute. The makeup element is just a part of a system of oppression that works so well precisely because the penalties for not playing along are so severe. These penalties take two main forms that I can think of, loosely the internal and the external. By external, I mean the ways that other people treat the person, and all the material and emotional implications that has, and by internal I mean the way that one treats oneself, feels about oneself. I think the internal element is probably an internalisation of real or perceived social judgements, as opposed to the mere loss of an instrinsic self-regard increase which arises from anthropologically well established preparation rituals. The "battle armour" concept may hold some truth, and it may be true that in fact women feel and perhaps are more powerful in makeup, but we ought to have a society where women can be and feel powerful without taking that measure.

The second reason is that wearing makeup may perpetuate the oppressive beauty norm. Irrespective of what one actually says, wearing makeup may increase the feeling in other people that they ought to wear makeup, particularly of those who look up to one. For me, more scary than being a victim of oppression is the concern that I might be a component of a wider system of oppression.

This too is not a conclusive point. Nobody is morally obliged to make a martyr of themselves in a case like this. I think my position here can only really be that there are morally good things about not wearing makeup as a woman, and probably no morally good things about wearing makeup. However, people are of course very much entitled to be concerned for their own emotional and physical welfare, and this may entail them wearing makeup. As such, if individuals want to wear makeup, they should not feel morally obliged not to. At least that is what I think, and another thing I think is that there is a very good chance I have not thought about this enough or that I am just wrong. I think these are conversations that our society needs to have though.

I have one final thought, and that is about the racial element of the politics of beauty standards. For white women it can be hard enough trying to conform to what we generally understand as the sort of mainstream typical beauty norms (I realise I may have essentially said the same thing three times). But we should think about the effects these norms have on non-white women. When I lived in Kenya one of the most popular "beauty" products was a skin whitening cream. Treatments like this, as well as the time-consuming hair styling that many black women undergo, seem also to be caused by the same systemic mechanisms. If we agree that the existence and appeasement of these norms are disempowering, I think it follows that they are more disempowering for some than for others, and the people for whom it is most disempowering are non-white people, both here in the UK and globally. That might be a good reason to try and weaken, destroy or change beyond recognition those beauty norms, and a part of that might mean opposing wearing makeup. However from my point of relative privelege in these respects, I don't know how helpful it is for me to say things like this.

In Defence of Private Education

Dear friends,

Firstly, let me express what personal interests I have in this topic. I have attended three provate schools in my life, two of them international schools while I lived abroad, and the third in Birmingham, which I attended with both a bursary and scholarship, meaning that when the maths was worked out they ended up owing me money. They never paid up, the rascals. Furthemore, I have recently taken on a student who I am to be privately tutoring in Latin (which I will have to learn a lot more of first), history, French, sketching, philosophy and the ukelele.

I have several lines of argument in favour of the legality of private school education. Firstly, better education is better. Secondly, we ought not sacrifice the futures of bright children in order to raise minima. Thirdly, we are right toe be concerned about inequality of material things and opportunity, but attacking private education is an unhelpful distraction from tackling the root causes. Fourthly, it is unsanctionable to forbid people to take part in activities which lead to the betterment of our civilisation. Finally I will lay out my ideas about how to tackle the problems that people see associated with private education by means other than banning private schools.

Better education is better. If parents have a choice between free education and education they have to pay for, in the context of the full-time education of minors, they have no reason to pay for education unless it is better than the free education. Therefore, if people act sensibly, parents paying for education for their children leads to better education for many young people. It is true that this is a benefit that cannot be enjoyed by all, but there are ways of getting around that, such as by making private schools' charitable status contingent of the provision of sufficient bursaries (which are available only to those with low parental incomes, and are not dependent on ability) and scholarships (which do not take into account parental income but are dependent on ability), therefore incentivising the best schools to help the least well off. The most common objection to this point is that allowing bright children to go to good schools lowers aspirations in less good schools as they do not have the benefit of bright children setting good examples. It is this point that my second line of argument seeks to address.

Firstly, the objection is based on a classification difference between bright children and less bright children, which is a distinction I had hoped to avoid in this discussion, but the objection to my first point cannot be made without said distinction and so I am forced to consider it. I know it is terribly vulgar, but I must resort at this point to personal anecdote as a flawed form of argument. Classification according to ability is acceptable given sufficient flexibility is present within the system for the inevitable times when promising students disappoint and disappointing students show promise. I was a largely indifferent student for much of my life, but in my later years of school I began to acquire some momentum. I applied to two schools in the UK, one a good grammar school and the other a private school. The grammar school was unwilling to admit me on the back of my increased abilities, the private school gave me a scholarship. I mean to suggest that, in fact, private educators are often better at recognising previously undiscovered talent and bringing it in, and the state mechanisms for doing this can often be too unresponsive. Perhaps the state discrimination between students with more or less potential is too inflexible to be any good, but private schools are more able in responding to these differences.

Now that we have dealt with the idea of bright children and less bright children and children who change between the two, let me turn my attention to the sacrificial lamb argument. Banning private schools, assuming they were benefitting some children, and making those children go to state schools, is exactly like using those children as sacrificial lambs for the benefit of other people. It is treating a person, a child in fact, as means to some other ends. I don't think is fair, we should allow people to do what is best for them. Related to this point is the idea that there is some conflict between equality of education and excellence. I think there is a chance that a conflict of this nature exists, and it is up to us as a society to decide where in the scale between excellence in education and equality we want to stand. I would not sacrifice the futures of a million children for on Einstein ("By the age of nine I had mastered differential calculus"), but I think there is an argument to be made that some sacrifice might be worth making in roder to produce an Einstein, and this may require some small sacrifice in the form of state-educated pupils having fewer role models in their classes. In the end I think this a question of means and ends. I wonder if it is any coincidence that the architects of modernity, Leibniz and Spinoza, were both privately educated in excellent schools. I don't subscribe to a "great man" theory of history, but in the world of ideas we do rely on the cultivation of exceptional minds to progress.

There is a way to frame the "sacrificial lamb" argument in Rawlsian terms. It is true that according to the difference principle Rawls can support taking the resources of the most well off in order to help the least well off, and with things like wealth one can see how this is a good idea. But Rawls advocates the priority of liberty before equality, and what freedom could be more important than the freedom to learn? Appraised in some ways, one cannot think of a scarier thing to forbid than learning. It seems almost like the strongest form of oppression, an oppression of the mind itself. I do not think that I am guilty of using hysterical language here, and I would find it very troubling for somebody not to think that these are legitimate concerns.

This bring me to my third line of argument, that people attacking private schools as the source of inequality are missing the root cause. Private education isn't the cause of massive inequality, it is better described as a result of it. It may be the case that it is one of the mechanisms by which that inequality is perpetuated, but it is hardly the worst of said mechanisms. In factit is probably the best, since as well as meaning inequalities are perpetuated accross generations, it also means that some people are better educated than they would have been. The real culprit in the UK when it comes to inequality is a cowardly tax system that does not tax wealth. Inheritance tax is low, and council tax is a regressive abomination. It is true that private schools are a powerful symbol of privelege, but serious thinking about policy should not consist of trying to knock over mere symbols. I must further contend that even if we were to ban private schools, people could still have private tutors for their children, which in fact many of us who have learnt a musical instrument at some point have had. Educational inequality is here to stay. We should not let debates about private schools distract from teh more important conversation about how to make the state education system, which brings up the minima in education, as good as possible while taking into account other uses of public money and limits to our willingness to tax. On this point, I am sure that it is less important to spend more money on education and more important to spend it more wisely, and to deal with the economic hardship that is at the root cause of much educational disadvantage and which banning private schools would do nothing to change.

As to the charitable status of private schools, it has always seemed to be to be a peculiar thing to be bothered about with private schools. I agree with the argument that private schools which are just out to make a profit should probably not have charitable status, but I conclude from it that private schools should have charitable status only if they are in fact charitable. As a recipient of private school charity myself, I must say that they can be very charitable indeed, and in fact charity law in the UK favour education as one of the most uncontroversial forms of charity, and much to my annoyance the things least likely to be awarded charitable status are those which are at all political, a real problem when one is trying to win funding for a community organising group for young people.

I believe my fourth point has in itself been a recurring theme throughout this letter, but I do not think it can be overstated. I believe in a civilisation that raises its eyes to the heavens, not one that cowers in the dust. It is true that there is much misery in our society, an inequality is the cause of much of it. But some of it just comes from us being the kind of people that we are in the kind of system that we are in. We cannot let our quite appropriate seriousness about the problems we face prevent us from thinking about those things that make us so exceptional: the worlds of philosophy, culture and science, of exploration and advancement. Institutions that aid us in these things should be encouraged, and, indeed, mimicked, not destroyed.

We should encourage brilliant schemes like Teach First, and pay teachers more to raise their prestige in teh eyes of this society. We should prevent abuses of the tax system, and tax wealth and inheritance more severely. We should try to foster a culture of equality and not of anti-excellence. We should consider alternatives to our psuedo-meritocratic market capitalist system, and find a way to reward those who strive without punishing people who fail or just make the mistake of being born in the geographic and economic conditions. The greatness we can achieve transcends economic systems and tax law. Many private schools have a longer history than neo-liberalism and should not be seen as part of the same problem. In fact, through their nurturing of inquisitive minds they may just end up producing the solution.

Caleb

Small changes, and big changes.

Dear Friends,

I don't like writing confessional pieces, but this is an especially interesting time in my life and I think that writing down a few thoughts could be both interesting and good.

I finished the taught section of my degree last Thursday. Leading up to that moment and in the days since, I have felt like I am in an unstable equilibrium; that is, like a ball balanced on an upturned  bowl, one push and I will move to an entirely new position. I have become very conscious of the changes taking place. I am still unsure about how I feel about them.

I have rarely had to think about money in these last three years. My tastes are modest, and I have mostly been able to live comfortably and comfortably within my means. But now, in order to carry on living in my home and to feed and clothe myself I must join the million young people already looking for work, in the hopes that somebody will decide my time is worth purchasing. This worries me a little. I want to live and work in York, at least for a little while, because I think that it is wrong that employers think that people should move anywhere in the country for work. Work is seen as something worthier than is, at least than it should be. Our communities and friendships have to mean something, they have to be important considerations when we are deciding what to do with our lives. The strength of my yearning to stay with the people who bring goodness to my life feels like an impediment to fruitful employment.

As an aside, I have been more self-conscious than usual while writing this, because I moments earlier finished reading Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' in preparation for some editing I need to do for the York Student Think Tank, and now I feel the weight of his judgement on every word as I heave it into place.

I have taken to reading and writing more, perhaps because I have been worrying and have more free time. My readings are troubling me emotionally and provoking my thoughts. The inevitable themes of alienation and despair are probably not doing me much good. Perhaps Aristotle's catharsis is doing me good, or perhaps like The Savage literature is slowly driving me insane. Or perhaps I misread Huxley on that point.

The great uncertain lies in front of me. There are many opportunities, but also I have reason to be afraid. I have not yet found the means for my continued preservation, and though society and my more immediate communities are unwilling to tolerate my termination, it is my wish to go my own way. I wonder if the securing of material needs is the answer to the first part of the question 'How am I to live?'.

Abstraction

Do you have to deconstruct everything?

What? I don't know. Maybe. I think so. Perhaps it is the thought that cannot be un-thought, the mode of appraisal that seeks to situate everything with respect to its many causes as part of a continuing process, but also analyses how each thing relates to itself. Metamodernism doesn't immediately make sense as a word, but if we think about it in terms of modernism meaning directness, the attempted sweeping away of barriers between worldly phenomena and human understanding, then metamodernism consists in yet more things: the directness applies also to the work itself and not just its content: for instance the recognition of the presence of the author and the audience. No less, from this vantage point other ways of looking at the world start feeling somehow incomplete or dishonest. In other words, I'm not sure. It might be the case that I have to deconstruct everything. I didn't say this at the time, but it crosses my mind now that deconstruction can be another word for destruction. Well I don't think that's all that I am capable of. I really think that we can build things: humanity, communities, individuals. We can build towers of significance and thought. Though we may have divided their component blocks into a multitude of pieces.

But does this necessarily mean that there is a certain distance always present between the self and the world of experience? Yes I think it might. Paradoxically, intellectual directness appears to lead on some other level to an indirectness. I must confess I worry that I am losing my grip on what it really means to feel.

Briefly, I have just begun to peruse the possibility that the commonness of the theme of not knowing whether the events in a work of fiction are real (within the fictional world, for example as far as all of the characters are concerned) are a comment on the author's very own questions as to the realness of their own work. Sometimes it must seem so real, and sometimes it must seem like the most distant fantasy. When a protagonist wakes up and it is all a dream, is the author telling us how it feels to complete a story? Most writers are writers, and in any work of fiction where the themes of a journey or long and difficult task are present seem to me to be very good examples of instances where the subject matter of the created work lends itself very strongly to becoming a metaphor for how it feels to create the work. The reason I considered this last idea was the nagging question that I did not know whether all that I had written up until that point was the truth, or mere fiction, and we are wont to generalize the personal. I have no answers to any of these questions.

Something I want to make

Dear Friends,

There is something I want to make.

It's a computer game. I have never made a computer game, and I don't really know how to, but there are books for that and it's a relatively new and exciting medium and I have a couple of ideas that have been kicking around for a while.

The one I want to talk about today is an adaptation of the film Groudhog Day.

As a physicalist I find it very interesting to think about Groundhog Day. If he remembers what happened on previous days, then that means the composition of his brain is different every time he wakes up. And if he can be different in some ways, maybe he can be different in other ways too. Bill Murray's character learns tricks like throwing cards, and he learns the piano. This might require his muscles to change a bit, so he can move his fingers across the keyboard faster. If he had been learning guitar instead, would he get hard callouses on the tips of his fingers?

Will he get more physically muscular the next morning (or that same morning repeated again the next time) if he does a lot of exercise? Will he get older? What if someone he knows notices that something has changed about him, one of his crew for instance? Would he just have to explain the magic? I am not sure anymore whether he does explain the magic spell that dastardly groundhog placed on him to anyone, and if it made a difference. I guess there is no reason why not. Anyway I was having fun thinking about what the rules of Groundhog Day would allow to be changed and what thez would not.

The reason I am interested in this is that I was thinking that a Groundhog Day type set-up could be a nice pretext for deconstructing the RPG, in particular MMORPGs.

They are called RPGs for role play games, but in my experience that does not really seem to be the defining feature. You could say that all games are role play games: they are not real life, that is why they are games. (I mean, obviously they are real life, but they are supposed to be representaions of something other than your own real, actual life. You know what I mean). What I find curious about MMORPGs from my limited experience is that the player logs in, or whatever, and when they do they arrive in a world that is essentially unchanged from the last time they did so. Most NPCs that one intereacts with do not change their behaviours to you, or if they do it will usually only be once or twice. No, the only thing that has really changed is you. Like in Groundhog Day.

That is what characterises the RPG for me. A relatively static world where most of the progression that takes place is the development of the character themself. This makes sense, as it seems pretty safe to imagine that RPGs are spiritual descendents of mythology, with their focus on great people (who you get to imagine being) with supernatural ability engaged in almost god-like feats.

And so I thought it would be fun to make a big open sandbox type RPG, where you get to go and explore and do quests and stuff, but every 24 hours in game time you would wake up again in your bed. It could start a bit like Groundhog Day in the setting, or it could just have a few little references to the film and most of it could be more overtly about deconstructing the RPG genre.

This brings me to my next point about this game. Did you ever see the film Adaptation? Oh! Silly me for asking, you can't interrupt me to respond, that's not possible within the medium I am working with! It seems like I am frivolously breaking the flow of my writing to make a silly joke but actually I am trying to make a broader point. Adaptation is a film about its filmmaker, Charlie Kaufman, trying to write a film adaptation of a non-fiction book called The Orchid Thief. It's my favourite film, I'm going to watch it back to back with Being John Malkovic which it references at some point and you are all invited. The film Charlie Kaufman ends up writing is the film that you watch when you see it: so you watch a film of that very film being written. It's interesting. There's lots of self-referentiality but it isn't annoying or overly pretentious, rather it raises some very interesting ideas. Now you should see the theme I was trying to evoke earlier: recognition of the medium one is working with in the content of the created object. In some respect this is inevitable: it is impossible for the paint to make no difference to the painting: the paint is the painting. On the other hand it breaks down the fictions that we surround ourselves in when delving into a good story: it makes us reflective and not fully embedded in whatever world has been created. A world is instead created which is part fictional but part intellectual: where the interplay of ideas provides half of the drama. Obviously it is very easy for this to be done badly, but it seems to me the most authentic way of doing business.

I go into writing because I am interested in saying things. sometimesfor this best to work it is better not to acknowledge openly the fact that one is writing within the writing, but sometimes it is a good idea. I think that making a deconstructed RPG adaptation of Groundhog Day is one of the times that it is a good idea. I could even go Adaptation style and openly speak to the audience within the game about the fact that it is an adaptaion and reflect on what I am trying to do. I could even talk about the influence the film Adaptation had on the game.

We have things like metafiction, metajokes, there's lots of things that can be meta. We can very well ask why looking at a some object through specifications of its own devising should be such a persistent theme, but the answer is not particularly elusive. The objects own specifications can shed unique insights into the object itself. Perhaps completion requires that we see things in terms of themselves as well as in any other light we wish to see them in. If something cannot be meaningful within it's own criteria of what it is to be meaningful, perhaps it cannot be meaningful at all.

I am trying to express an idea now which does not feel like it wants to be expressed, but I will do my best. Just as Charlie Kaufman found it hard to turn a non-fiction book into a film narrative, so I think it would be hard to turn Groundhog Day into this game. I think it can be done better, however, with enhanced disclosure of the project contained within the project. The disconnect between the media can be bridged in part by a certain selfconsciousness and engagement of the audiences higher faculties in making the appropriate connections and creating the complete picture.

I have some tadpole thoughts about the future, or perhaps present, of our ideas which the preceding sentences can be seen as a prelude to. I wish to give the subject greater attention in due course, but I think that there might be an emerging trend occurring towards metamodernism. It has its won wikipedia page, though I am not sure what it says. If we can characterise the first half of the twentieth century as modernist, with the advent of mass mechanisation, the production line and the changes in perspective that brings, we can perhaps see the second half of the twentieth century as postmodern. Themes might include a certain recycling or collage of culture, an anything goes attidute bordering on the nihilistic.

I would tentatively characterise metamodernism as the trend that we might see following postmodernism. To me it seems like a self-conscious but cautiously optimistic way of attempting to derive or construct meaning, carefully acknowledging the influence of what has come before but trying to build on it, not just produce faint echoes and distortions of it. Wrapped up in this are ideas of the difficult situation we find ourselves in, of uncertainty, doubt, isolation, mutual incomprehensibility, meaning as socially constructed but possibly still extant, religion as probably false but possibly good, this jumbled mess of an ephemerally emerging consensus. The metamodernism work is something between art and an academic essay, it seeks to achieve authenticity through disclosure and careful consideration, while knowing full well this might be impossible but trying nonetheless, because there is a fair chance there is nothing else.


Caleb

The trouble with performance pay...

... is that it seems to me it creates perverse incentives. Employees have good reason to attempt to lower expectations on their performance to lower their target thresholds, because it would make achieving those targets more likely, increasing their chance of getting a bonus. Therefore it seems to me that a rewards system based on meeting targets that the employee themself has a say in framing may cause organisations to lower their expectations, and accept less from their employees. This could be seen as a problem particularly in public services where a tepid institutions quickly translate into social misfortune.

I will be interested to see how the narrative develops on high pay in the public and private sectors, but at the moment it looks to me like there is no perfect solution. Every pay policy comes with its own problems.

Dear Archbishop Sentamu

Dear Archbishop Sentamu,

I read a piece on the BBC today about your opposition to the legal recognition of gay marriage as equal to heterosexual marriage. I would like to pick up on two elements of what you said.

First: that the state ought not attempt to redifine marriage, as doing so would be a dictatorial coercion of language, the social structure, history and tradition.

Secondly: that changes like these taking place were causing black people and members of the white working class to leave the Church of England.

On the first point, I commend you for not arguing that homosexuality is against God, or that homosexual parents would not be properly able to raise children. Your line of attack was one of the more nuanced I have seen. It took me a few moments to consider what problem I had with your argument.

I find it troubling that you are suggesting that black people and working class people will disproportionately be against gay marriage (I infer this from possibility of a Church of England which supports gay marriage being proposed as a cause for the aforementioned flight). This may be true, though it would take a pollster to find out and no poll was quoted. What is troubling for me, however, is that you seem to be denying certain people the potential to have an opinion other than what you have depicted them as having.

In fact there are very many non-white people who are in the middle class, some of whom will have what are thought of as typically middle class views. Indeed there are many people who you would call working class who have what you call middle class views. A lot of these people are young people. These views are not the domain of the middle class at all, they are the domain of people who view those superficially different to themselves in more of a climate of understanding, and less of fear or suspicion. This altered viewpoint is not particular to the middle class at all, but to a particular and growing set of ways of viewing the world. These ways of viewing the world constitute exactly the sort of facts of language, social structure and newly emboldened tradition with which you defend your archaic conception of marriage. As their views make their impacts, they are swiftly informing our shared history as well. Exactly the points that you used to attack state sanctioned gay marriage can be better used to defend it. Sometimes, in the good times, the state acts as a limb of society on behalf of a growing consensus within that society. This would be one of those times. Sometimes the Church ought to do the same, and this is one of those times too.

I end on the implicit analogy which I could not help but see in the article. A certain category of people are denied a certain set of actions because to allow them to do so would undermine an important tradition or part of the social structure (or more fatuously because the arbitrary definitons of the words used to describe those people and actions leads to a particular conclusion). This kind of argument could have been, and indeed was, used to deny certain groups the vote, to retain the practice of slavery, and to justify the subjugation of the continents by Empire. It is an an argument that needs to be heard, but it is not an argument to end arguments. In this particular case, as in some memorable times before, it is wrong.