The Green brothers have launched a service called Subbable that lets you let Youtube creators make videos without having to resort to advertising for revenue. Briefly, it invites fans to make monthly subscriptions (usually of, it turns out, around $5, but starting from as low as nothing) to creators, contributing to those projects meeting a pre-set funding goal. There are a few questions I wish I knew the answers to, but my general response is that it is a good thing, as generally I just don't like adverts very much, usually considering them to be at best a dead weight loss on the economy (two very similar products pit adverts against one another competing for market share, their revenues are the same as if they had not competed on that front at all but their costs are much higher) and that it favours big economic players over smaller ones. At worst I think advertising is a pernicious scheme to monetize self-hatred and unhappiness. Obviously these are just (strong) opinions, but I thought I'd nail my flag to the mast anyway so it's up there and you can poke it or whatever.
I've subscribed to CGP Grey's videos, because they are absolutely fantastic and because I love maps and constitutions and election systems and other social science geeky stuff. Doing some quick using-the-search-bar-as-a-calculator estimations it looks like his channel is currently at roughly $5000 of a roughly $12000 monthly goal. That's how it looks anyway, based on an average monthly subscription of $4.33 and 1126 subscribers so far. This comes out at about $144,000 a year, or about four times the UK median income or £21,000 (before tax). I think if he met his target that would put him in the econd highest tax bracket that pays 40% of income as tax, and there are various other property taxes and so on that we pay here in order to fund our generally excellent public services. The UK figure is the relevant one because that's where CGP lives (specifically in London which incidentally has the highest cost of living in the country). I don't have any problem with CGP earning a lot from his videos, and I am willing to stand corrected about any of my calculations. As far as I am concerned anyone who wants to give him money for his work is welcome to and based on that he can earn as much as he likes provided that he pays his taxes and if he starts getting really rich gives a lot to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or a similarly cost-effective charity (apparently helping against tropical diseases typically gives the best return in terms of improved human quality of life on amount donated). But the high figure does make one wonder what will happen if, say, he only gets 80% of the target. If that's the case will he get rid of 80% of ads? Will he have ads for two months and a week out of every year? Or will he figure: hey, stuff it, this is enough I'll be fine with this much after all. For that matter, what will he do if he goes over the target some months? Will the spillover be counted against any shortfall in later months? (It seems quite likely that there will be dips around January, and also after the honeymoon periods when popular shows first transition onto Subbable). I do think there is both a debate to be had on the correct response to these things here and some scope for extra information in the FAQs.
So, perhaps more transparency about these issues is in order, so that the people contributing to these projects financially can have a little bit of the accountability that has made Kickstarter such a successful platform. It certainly looks like a service that shows great promise, especially if it can develop a reputation for curating brilliant content and other little extras like that.
Taking a slightly more philosophical turn, is there an ethical imperative for people to restrict their income to some function of local or national medians, or to try to match up their household income to within some window? Persuasive research of the negative effects of inequality suggests that prosperity is not without its externalities, and so with such a baldly scalable means of income as this it is clear that these are ethical questions that both creators and subscribers ought to be asking, and if they do have insights and opinions, it would certainly make sense to share them in the open-minded, polite way that the internet is so famous for.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
You Will Not Find Your Feminist Unicorn Here
There's been some internet drama, and people have rushed in to arbitrate and so that job's done and we can all settle back down and think about what has just happened.
Here are the facts. A well-known feminist and occasional troll makes, let's face it, a bit of a dick comment.
A well-known troll and probable sexist calls her out on the exercise, citing it as an example of sexism and (apparently worse) double standards.
There are two things I want to pick up on here. The first is the issue around said double standards, and how they might not be as bad as we think. The second has to do with this particular type of nonsense males have to put up with, how it's not cool but why that means they should definitely, definitely be feminists.
Let's give our male argumenteer, let's call him Person D, the benefit of the doubt. Let's imagine, for a second, that his objection is totally right and there totally was some sexism going on. Firstly, as has rightly been pointed out, we live in a world with unequal power relations between the sexes and so all sexisms are not equal. For similar reasons if a black person tells a white person, neither of whom know each other that well, "you're acting so white right now" we can think that's not entirely cool while knowing that it would be enirely different and worse if it had been the other way around. This is because our actions take place in a political and historical context. So, although Person A, the well-known feminist in our example, has done something double-strandardy that doesn't mean it is necessarily bad, or even necessarily inconsistent with her own beliefs. Maybe she, like most people most of the time, thinks that morality has a diverse landscape in which a certain action does not have to be always right or always wrong.
But here's the kicker. Even if there is something wrong with the double-standard, maybe it offends the post-modern cult of apparent authenticity or whatever, something worse has been done, which is the ridiculous standard to which this feminist, and indeed all feminists are being held to. This is not the first example of women (and, lets be honest, women feminists do get a lot more of this crap) being held to ridiculous standards. Women are subjected to completely unreasonable scrutiny by people trying to catch them slipping up, so they can be denounced as physically unattractive or sexually immoral or intellectually lacking. Whole print media empires have been built on this principle. This cultural artefact informs the majority of click-baiting links that try to grab my attention when I am doing totally legitimate research about a TV show or some crap. Well, Person D can stop looking for a perfect feminist unicorn: there is none. It's not just that not everyone in the club is right all the time: as with all clubs, everyone in the club is wrong some of the time. Stop making a big deal out it. It's just blaming people for being people, and it's nonsense.
I return, as I knew I must, to my second point. We do have to stop talking about dicks the way we do. It's not just that people should stop using the suggestion that somebody has a small penis to make fun of them, we need to entirely remove the value judgement from the equation. It's a horrible kind of bullying: it's ability to hurt depends on the presence of powerful underlying insecurities and self doubt. If those vulnerabilities are not there the "joke" is pointless. If they are it is a seriously shitty way to treat someone (even, as far as you're concerned, a bad person). I don't care whether you're a feminist or not, male or female. Don't do it. If you do I'll, well I'll jolly well try to persuade you not to, that's what I'll do.
Here are the facts. A well-known feminist and occasional troll makes, let's face it, a bit of a dick comment.
A well-known troll and probable sexist calls her out on the exercise, citing it as an example of sexism and (apparently worse) double standards.
There are two things I want to pick up on here. The first is the issue around said double standards, and how they might not be as bad as we think. The second has to do with this particular type of nonsense males have to put up with, how it's not cool but why that means they should definitely, definitely be feminists.
Let's give our male argumenteer, let's call him Person D, the benefit of the doubt. Let's imagine, for a second, that his objection is totally right and there totally was some sexism going on. Firstly, as has rightly been pointed out, we live in a world with unequal power relations between the sexes and so all sexisms are not equal. For similar reasons if a black person tells a white person, neither of whom know each other that well, "you're acting so white right now" we can think that's not entirely cool while knowing that it would be enirely different and worse if it had been the other way around. This is because our actions take place in a political and historical context. So, although Person A, the well-known feminist in our example, has done something double-strandardy that doesn't mean it is necessarily bad, or even necessarily inconsistent with her own beliefs. Maybe she, like most people most of the time, thinks that morality has a diverse landscape in which a certain action does not have to be always right or always wrong.
But here's the kicker. Even if there is something wrong with the double-standard, maybe it offends the post-modern cult of apparent authenticity or whatever, something worse has been done, which is the ridiculous standard to which this feminist, and indeed all feminists are being held to. This is not the first example of women (and, lets be honest, women feminists do get a lot more of this crap) being held to ridiculous standards. Women are subjected to completely unreasonable scrutiny by people trying to catch them slipping up, so they can be denounced as physically unattractive or sexually immoral or intellectually lacking. Whole print media empires have been built on this principle. This cultural artefact informs the majority of click-baiting links that try to grab my attention when I am doing totally legitimate research about a TV show or some crap. Well, Person D can stop looking for a perfect feminist unicorn: there is none. It's not just that not everyone in the club is right all the time: as with all clubs, everyone in the club is wrong some of the time. Stop making a big deal out it. It's just blaming people for being people, and it's nonsense.
I return, as I knew I must, to my second point. We do have to stop talking about dicks the way we do. It's not just that people should stop using the suggestion that somebody has a small penis to make fun of them, we need to entirely remove the value judgement from the equation. It's a horrible kind of bullying: it's ability to hurt depends on the presence of powerful underlying insecurities and self doubt. If those vulnerabilities are not there the "joke" is pointless. If they are it is a seriously shitty way to treat someone (even, as far as you're concerned, a bad person). I don't care whether you're a feminist or not, male or female. Don't do it. If you do I'll, well I'll jolly well try to persuade you not to, that's what I'll do.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Rehabilitating the Street
Ah, the street. You have been so maligned.
It's tough out there on the street. You need street smarts. And so on. I mean to illustrate that there is a cognitive and linguistic trend to consider the street to be dangerous, undesirable, or otherwise other. In our perceptions the street has been constructed as a place of drug-dealing, prostitution, malingerling, and other objects of dubious moral outrage.
But the street shouldn't be thought of as a bad thing. In fact, it's the best thing. The street is the basic unit of the public sphere. It both connects us and provides us with a meeting place. I look down my own street, Lawrence Street, and think about how it was established as an old Roman road. Probably bits of it predate even that. From then it has broadly persisted, for all these years, through successive governments and nations. The street remains. Every generation saw fit to keep up its maintainance, because it was so valuable to them. If you tot it up, it's probably the most expensive thing for some distance (although it is likely rivalled by some other streets). It turns into Hull Road, which predictably enough will take you to Hull and the sea. If you follow it into town it has many names, but it's really the same street, and it takes you all the way past the Minster, and then all the way to Thirsk if you want to think of it like that. Romantically perhaps, I like to imagine pilgrims traveling to the Minster along this road, but that probably doesn't make much sense because I don't think it was that major a pilgrimage destination and there is a perfectly servicable river you could travel along.
Within settlements, anything of much value is likely to be on a street. All of our great public spaces: the squares and libraries and all that sort of thing; are arrayed along them like beads of precious stone on a web of golden threads. It is a democratic space, in the sense that it is, even now, a space used for debate and protest, but also in the sense that it is near universally accessible. Street trading is a way of making a living (well, trying to) where the barriers to entry are low. I don't know how it is these days, but for me it is easy to imagine in times past street hawkers graduating into loftier business enterprises. It is an incubator, and an enabler. These qualities that make it attractive to the peddler and the busker also increase its appeal to those whose enterprises find less favour with the law. Some of this may be reality, some is likely to be reputation alone. I suspect that nowadays most drug-dealing and prostitution take place in buildings, for instance.
On two occasions in my travels about the European continent, it was in this public space that I, wearing the apparel and general demeanor of a traveler, was approached by genial strangers with an offer of free lodgings. Both times I accepted and it turned out great, by the way. Charities looking to raise some funds have taken to the streets, as have beggars. The street is therefore also a site of anonymous generosity and community solidarity.
The automobile has changed things somewhat. Although in a place like York there is a large and broadly pedestrianised core, most streets have their choicest parts colonised by private cars. This is a subversion of all that has previously been said of the street. By enclosing oneself in a bubular private sphere within the street, one is also in some senses impoverishing it. Indeed the presumption of a priority for cars in street traffic is somewhat counterintuitive. For within-city travel, there is usually an alternative with fewer negative externalities, and for inter-city travel we tend to use not so much streets as roads. I don't know if there is a formal distinction, but I am sure my meaning is recieved.
But, pardon the pun, this is the path we're on. And there is something to be said for rapid private transportation - there is nothing like it for getting the shopping home. I still do look about, however, for chances to reclaim the street for the public interest. Experiments in shared spaces are a promising lead, wherein priority in the road is not heirarchically arranged but is the result of on the spot negotiation. This has been shown to reduce traffic fatalities, which reinforces my conception of conventional road traffic as suffering from a kind of collective sociopathy. There is no necessity or law of nature bringing about this state of affairs: vehicular privelege is a gift from the public and it can be taken away. It ought not be taken for granted.
I remember when I was in Nairobi, the busiest of roads were a kind of open market, as hawkers would descend anarchically upon our dearly congested. Now I don't want to insensitively romanticise the poverty that led people into busy traffic to try to make ends meet (or understate the inconvenience of somebody trying to sell you something while you are trying to drive), but the illustration does capture one thing: that the street is the cauldron of a creative chaos that is well worth encouraging, and treasuring. Appreciate your street.
It's tough out there on the street. You need street smarts. And so on. I mean to illustrate that there is a cognitive and linguistic trend to consider the street to be dangerous, undesirable, or otherwise other. In our perceptions the street has been constructed as a place of drug-dealing, prostitution, malingerling, and other objects of dubious moral outrage.
But the street shouldn't be thought of as a bad thing. In fact, it's the best thing. The street is the basic unit of the public sphere. It both connects us and provides us with a meeting place. I look down my own street, Lawrence Street, and think about how it was established as an old Roman road. Probably bits of it predate even that. From then it has broadly persisted, for all these years, through successive governments and nations. The street remains. Every generation saw fit to keep up its maintainance, because it was so valuable to them. If you tot it up, it's probably the most expensive thing for some distance (although it is likely rivalled by some other streets). It turns into Hull Road, which predictably enough will take you to Hull and the sea. If you follow it into town it has many names, but it's really the same street, and it takes you all the way past the Minster, and then all the way to Thirsk if you want to think of it like that. Romantically perhaps, I like to imagine pilgrims traveling to the Minster along this road, but that probably doesn't make much sense because I don't think it was that major a pilgrimage destination and there is a perfectly servicable river you could travel along.
Within settlements, anything of much value is likely to be on a street. All of our great public spaces: the squares and libraries and all that sort of thing; are arrayed along them like beads of precious stone on a web of golden threads. It is a democratic space, in the sense that it is, even now, a space used for debate and protest, but also in the sense that it is near universally accessible. Street trading is a way of making a living (well, trying to) where the barriers to entry are low. I don't know how it is these days, but for me it is easy to imagine in times past street hawkers graduating into loftier business enterprises. It is an incubator, and an enabler. These qualities that make it attractive to the peddler and the busker also increase its appeal to those whose enterprises find less favour with the law. Some of this may be reality, some is likely to be reputation alone. I suspect that nowadays most drug-dealing and prostitution take place in buildings, for instance.
On two occasions in my travels about the European continent, it was in this public space that I, wearing the apparel and general demeanor of a traveler, was approached by genial strangers with an offer of free lodgings. Both times I accepted and it turned out great, by the way. Charities looking to raise some funds have taken to the streets, as have beggars. The street is therefore also a site of anonymous generosity and community solidarity.
The automobile has changed things somewhat. Although in a place like York there is a large and broadly pedestrianised core, most streets have their choicest parts colonised by private cars. This is a subversion of all that has previously been said of the street. By enclosing oneself in a bubular private sphere within the street, one is also in some senses impoverishing it. Indeed the presumption of a priority for cars in street traffic is somewhat counterintuitive. For within-city travel, there is usually an alternative with fewer negative externalities, and for inter-city travel we tend to use not so much streets as roads. I don't know if there is a formal distinction, but I am sure my meaning is recieved.
But, pardon the pun, this is the path we're on. And there is something to be said for rapid private transportation - there is nothing like it for getting the shopping home. I still do look about, however, for chances to reclaim the street for the public interest. Experiments in shared spaces are a promising lead, wherein priority in the road is not heirarchically arranged but is the result of on the spot negotiation. This has been shown to reduce traffic fatalities, which reinforces my conception of conventional road traffic as suffering from a kind of collective sociopathy. There is no necessity or law of nature bringing about this state of affairs: vehicular privelege is a gift from the public and it can be taken away. It ought not be taken for granted.
I remember when I was in Nairobi, the busiest of roads were a kind of open market, as hawkers would descend anarchically upon our dearly congested. Now I don't want to insensitively romanticise the poverty that led people into busy traffic to try to make ends meet (or understate the inconvenience of somebody trying to sell you something while you are trying to drive), but the illustration does capture one thing: that the street is the cauldron of a creative chaos that is well worth encouraging, and treasuring. Appreciate your street.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Existence and Essence
There's been something bothering me about the YUSU FemSoc furore which I've been finding it hard to put my finger on. It's mostly blown over now, but my troubled mind still mulls. I think, now, I have a rough idea of what has been niggling so.
A lot of the arguments have centered around questions of what the Women's Committee and Feminist Society are each for. This is based on the principle that if their purposes are too similar, there is no need for the second body to officially exist.
The main defences to these points have been:
1) The purposes are very different and
2) The principle that if they are similar the second shouldn't exist is a) bad and/or b) not even in the rules
Neither of these rebuttals quite capture the anger I felt about YUSUs argumentation. For me, the more telling point is the deeper question, which is about who decides. I was angry because YUSU had presumed to decide both what WomCom's and what FemSoc's purposes were. Apparently without even thinking about it particularly, it had defined them however it pleased: in particular defined them in such a way as to prevent the latter from being ratified. It was a power-grab, and a particularly nasty one. The power that YUSU was saying it had, was attempting to exercise, was a power over the identity of these groups.
Now I personally don't care that much about ratification per se. Financially there are some benefits, but it also involves a lot of hard work and many societies and groups have thrived sans ratification, like Wholly Folk, CU and early days SCOOP, to name but a few. What I do care about is having a union that helps people get on with the things they want to do, instead of getting in their way. And a union which presumes to dictate what the essence of a group or an individual is, that is a union I can't agree with.
A lot of the arguments have centered around questions of what the Women's Committee and Feminist Society are each for. This is based on the principle that if their purposes are too similar, there is no need for the second body to officially exist.
The main defences to these points have been:
1) The purposes are very different and
2) The principle that if they are similar the second shouldn't exist is a) bad and/or b) not even in the rules
Neither of these rebuttals quite capture the anger I felt about YUSUs argumentation. For me, the more telling point is the deeper question, which is about who decides. I was angry because YUSU had presumed to decide both what WomCom's and what FemSoc's purposes were. Apparently without even thinking about it particularly, it had defined them however it pleased: in particular defined them in such a way as to prevent the latter from being ratified. It was a power-grab, and a particularly nasty one. The power that YUSU was saying it had, was attempting to exercise, was a power over the identity of these groups.
Now I personally don't care that much about ratification per se. Financially there are some benefits, but it also involves a lot of hard work and many societies and groups have thrived sans ratification, like Wholly Folk, CU and early days SCOOP, to name but a few. What I do care about is having a union that helps people get on with the things they want to do, instead of getting in their way. And a union which presumes to dictate what the essence of a group or an individual is, that is a union I can't agree with.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Seven Super Psychopaths
What do Seven Psychopaths and Super have in common? Well I watched both of them last weekend, and they are both highly deconstructive. I don't want to give too much away about either of them, since both films thrive on surprise, but I'll be sort of specific at the same time.
With Seven Psychopaths, this generally means not saying a lot. I felt like in some ways it did for the gangster action movie a la QT or Guy Ritchie what The Cabin In The Woods did for that kind of horror I don't know the name of. And it's a genre that certainly deserved to be pulled apart.
Both films are somewhat lacking in positive gender politics, but there is at least some acknowledgement of the fact. Each film has a WASPman lead, (okay, so one's Catholic) but I think that's to make the jab at the genre more effective. Still, it would be nice to get beyond the woman-as-victim archetype in actiony movies. Forever.
Super seems to have been written from the starting point of: what kind of person would actually try to turn themself into a superhero? This is very different to what I think the premise of Kickass is, which is: what would happen if you tried to become a superhero. Super is about the kinds of people who plausibly could, and they are people who for one reason or another have their own ways of engaging with the sort of basic rules of society. In particular, the character Frank (which is punned on as meaning straightforward, perhaps fittingly) has both a very acute sense of which basic social rules are just not meant to be broken, and he himself is completely indifferent to those rules as they apply to him in his swift and graphic interventions.
I know it's supposed to be about deconstructing and making plausible the superhero, but for me Super was far more interesting as a parable about enforcing the social contract, which is far more realistic that the artifice that a superhero has any kind of access to a higher or transcendent moral truth. It's not about cosmic battles between good and evil, it's about the rules for basic decent interaction and the righteous fury we feel when those rules are broken.
So yes, I very much enjoyed both films, and what really got me about both was the sense I had that, at many points, it felt like anything could happen. They had their flaws, in abundance no doubt, but it was great to see them trying something fresh and new with some rather bloated genres.
With Seven Psychopaths, this generally means not saying a lot. I felt like in some ways it did for the gangster action movie a la QT or Guy Ritchie what The Cabin In The Woods did for that kind of horror I don't know the name of. And it's a genre that certainly deserved to be pulled apart.
Both films are somewhat lacking in positive gender politics, but there is at least some acknowledgement of the fact. Each film has a WASPman lead, (okay, so one's Catholic) but I think that's to make the jab at the genre more effective. Still, it would be nice to get beyond the woman-as-victim archetype in actiony movies. Forever.
Super seems to have been written from the starting point of: what kind of person would actually try to turn themself into a superhero? This is very different to what I think the premise of Kickass is, which is: what would happen if you tried to become a superhero. Super is about the kinds of people who plausibly could, and they are people who for one reason or another have their own ways of engaging with the sort of basic rules of society. In particular, the character Frank (which is punned on as meaning straightforward, perhaps fittingly) has both a very acute sense of which basic social rules are just not meant to be broken, and he himself is completely indifferent to those rules as they apply to him in his swift and graphic interventions.
I know it's supposed to be about deconstructing and making plausible the superhero, but for me Super was far more interesting as a parable about enforcing the social contract, which is far more realistic that the artifice that a superhero has any kind of access to a higher or transcendent moral truth. It's not about cosmic battles between good and evil, it's about the rules for basic decent interaction and the righteous fury we feel when those rules are broken.
So yes, I very much enjoyed both films, and what really got me about both was the sense I had that, at many points, it felt like anything could happen. They had their flaws, in abundance no doubt, but it was great to see them trying something fresh and new with some rather bloated genres.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
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.
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.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
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
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
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