jack

The situation now seems very similar to how it originally looked, except that "the government won't jump without having arranged a parachute" became "how long will the government wait after jumping before trying to arrange a parachute" :(

I do admit, if my disagreements with EU policy were larger, I don't know what I would want the country to do, if the choice is basically "join or not".

There's been no progress on a magic solution to keeping customs posts off the Irish border without retaining single market/freedom of movement. Nor to retaining single market without freedom of movement or vice versa. So the original assumption that the government were basically going to have to choose one of the obvious options ("soft brexit", "sea border", or "we're fucked") still seems most likely.

Questions I have. What are different levels of border controls here? I really should understand this and I don't. We already have SOME border controls because you need to show a passport when you enter the country. Except not at Ireland? Do UK and Ireland have identical entry requirements or what?

Single market/freedom of movement mean no more border controls than we have now. Is that right?

Customs union but not single market -- that means SOME border controls? But maybe only on major routes or for large shipments? Is that right? If labour and conservative shift that far but no further how screwed are we?

Next week is the PCC election. I'm not convinced that's a good idea, but if we have one at all, better to have a good one. This time there seems to be less of a broad choice, there are four candidates who are endorsed by parties, even if that was not what was supposed to happen.

https://www.choosemypcc.org.uk/area/cambridgeshire/?postcode=CB

My non-impartial summary follows

Conservative

* "Tough on crime, tough on the causes on crime".
* Moar war on drugs
* Moar police, less back-office expenses

UKIP

* The same, but more so
* Rah police! Down with political correctness!
* Anti-speeding (as was Con), also pro-resources-for-non-emergency-101

Labour

* Some platitudes, more police
* Ex-fireman, ex-Anglia-public-service-lecturer
* Sounds committed to actually going things, in getting involved with communities and bridging them to police

Lib-Dem

* Positive manifesto steps for preventing crime, preventing re-offending, not just being "tough"
* But via friends-of-friends have heard bad things about him personally

To me, Labour guy sounds best, unless anyone has any other rec?

On the scale between "raw libertarianism" and "wealth and jobs completely allocated by central fiat", I think we need less capitalism than we've got now, but a lot more than zero.

I'm not sure exactly what my ideal society would look like, economically it's based on more on practical questions of "what works" than what I want ethically. But from here, much more monopoly controls, higher wages, less large-scale tax-evasion, and also more redistributive.

So, um, basically "less capitalism". But OTOH, I want to stop a long way short of no capitalism. I think we should be employed for wages, or given money to support them if we don't have wages, and should be able to spend that how we like, and that generally leads to a more useful distribution of resources than fiat-ing what we get. I think people should be able to start organisations and see if people are willing to buy from them. I want the government to shape and curate the market and nationalise and ban things when there's a clear benefit, not all the time.

I'm not sure that's all right, I don't know enough about it, but that's my general direction by default. I think that makes me "socialist", but does that make me "a capitalist?" I feel like "yes", but I also think "capitalist" has strong connotations of more free market than we've got now, which I want in some areas, but not most. Is this just another word which is useless to use now?

The government controls the country. Votes control the government. Advertising controls votes. Money controls advertising. Companies control advertising.

Would the most effective form of political leverage be persuading middle class people with pensions to invest them in the right sort of company?

A while back, I asked, "If you accepted the government did have to cut spending a lot, what would you cut." Several people made the obvious suggestion of cutting military. http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/784255.html

I'd meant to follow up on this, but never did. Ilanin made a helpful summary http://ilanin.livejournal.com/109586.html of what our military spending consisted of.

Obviously that's not an official evaluation of any kind, but it looked fairly plausible. I apologise for summarising a detailed post in a few lines, perhaps ilanin can correct me if my summary seems off-base. It seems the military spending can be described in basically three categories:

1. Normal army, navy and RAF, where we pay slightly more per population than a comparable European country (Germany), but not dramatically so.
2. Two aircraft carriers, where we're locked into the contract to pay for them whether we build them or not.
3. Trident.

One weird idea I wondered about, is would Germany, France, India and/or Brazil like to go part-shares in some aircraft carriers or nuclear deterrent? I imagine that's completely unworkable, but in some ways it might be better if the responsibility were spread out a bit more so there was still some deterrent, but less scope for rogue wars..?

Lots of people I know think the budget doesn't have to be cut anywhere near as much as the government think, or not at all. That may or may not be true.

And regardless of who's right, I think it's criminal to cut a lot of different benefits not even across the board, but by bullying, tricking, and lying to people to get as many people as possible to fail to claim the benefit they're legally entitled to, based not on how much they need it or how much they're entitled to it, but according to how much effort they can spend to overcome the hurdles.

But I have to admit, if it is the case the budget definitely needs to be cut, it would be very easy to deny that because I didn't want to believe it and reject any individual suggestions for cuts/tax raises because they were individually unpleasant.

Which means the difficult question is, if something DID need to be cut, what would you cut? Yesterday andrew ducker linked to an essay about citizens income, which didn't necessarily get its figures right, but helpfully summarised the biggest items in the budget. If something had to go, and assuming that you couldn't rely on finding inefficiencies to cut, what would you choose?

There may never be a headline better than "Man takes first steps on moon". It's hard for any event to be as simultaneously (a) positive (b) sudden and surprising, and (c) incontrovertible.

In honour of the event, I wondered, is there anything where the current state of space exploration is going surprisingly well by the standards of early space SF speculation?

1. US, Japan, Russia and Europe collaborate on major space station, without having to suffer a worldwide disaster first.
2. Robot explorer lowered onto Mars by skyhook from hovering rocket.
3. Private company building efficient space vehicles.
4. 500 satellites in orbit, many used to provide real-time position and communication almost anywhere on the globe.
5. Despite a lot of tricky politics and scary moments, zero nuclear wars since the first two nuclear bombs.
6. Automated ship which goes to Mars and explores, with only human control back on Earth -- seriously, how many futurists predicted that robots would do that on their own, even Asimov stories about robots without humans are very rare.

Government Debt

Krugman takes the reasonable-sounding but very surprising position that government debt is Not All That Scary Really. He says that the US government incurred MASSIVE debt in WWII, and that was never paid back -- but now is a tiny portion of the national debt.

Runaway debt is a problem, as is debt that is simply wasted (eg. spent on useless projects, subsidies to people who don't reinvest it, etc). But if the money is sensibly invested in the economy or infrastructure somehow, even via dubious projects such as a word war, it can be a good thing.

And he thinks in the current situation, the government should not be scared of more debt unless they're actually likely to default (which is hopefully still unlikely). This will need to be paid back by taxing more in the future, but hopefully that will be accomplished without raising taxes, but because the economy is much bigger.

I want to believe this because (a) it sounds reasonable and (b) it aligns with my ideology, but I know it's antithetical to out default assumption that it's fiscally irresponsible to borrow too much. But that that's different when we're looking at an economy as a whole (when net foreign debt is surprisingly small), when "paying it back" doesn't mean "giving it away to strangers" but "returning sensible dividends to pension schemes, investment accounts, etc, etc"

Gold standard

Krugman didn't really mention this, but it helped me think about it.

As I understand it, the advantage of the gold standard is if you think the government is prone to imploding, and may take the currency with it, having money backed by something that easily transfers internationally or privately is useful.

However, the disadvantage is that the effects of the government and central bank adjusting the money supply and interest rate have generally been better than letting them be determined randomly by the number of gold mines discovered, and a gold standard gives up on that.

It is sort of a scary question. Do we know enough about the economy that our attempts to adjust it are better than just fixing it to gold so we can't make matters worse? But despite some false starts, it seems like in general we DO do better, and there are a number of proto-depressions in the last 80 years that probably WOULD have happened if the government and central bank hadn't reacted with changes to the money supply.

I haven't read much economics, but I was interested to read "End this depression now". Published a couple of years ago, but sadly still equally relevant.

Krugman is a columnist, blogger, and author (and nobel prize winner) about economics, and left-wing by American standards.

The book sounded convincing to me, but I don't know enough to vouch for the validity, or the correctness of my summary. I hope someone can offer a more authoritative opinion, especially including people prone to agree and prone to disagree.

The current depression in UK/US and similar countries

As I understand it, the short version is, Krugman says not every depression is based on the same underlying causes as the great depression, but this one is. He wasn't originally convinced, but he saw how this depression happened, and it was just like Keynes described in the great depression.. And that the solution, like in the great depression, is simple even if not necessarily easy: for the government to spend a lot of money.

Government creating money

In the old days, government increased the money supply by literally printing money. Since WWII, the same effect has been achieved by changing the amount of money that the central bank will lend to large banks and the regulations on how much money they're allowed to lend out, and by adjusting the interest rate.

Some people are terrified of high inflation because too much causes hyperinflation, which causes Hitler. This is a serious risk (I think hyperinflation happened in Argentina, but they recovered surprisingly well), but only if the economy is otherwise collapsing and the government chooses to GO ON printing money. In fact, the policies of the last 80 years have been surprisingly successful at keeping inflation at a small but steady rate, and we are in no serious risk of hyperinflation -- in fact we probably need HIGHER inflation, but governments are too scared to push for it.

Usually the government and central bank balance unemployment and inflation by adjusting the money supply and interest rate. This is usually but not always the biggest factor in the economy.

However, we recently had the problem that the central bank lowered the interest rate to near zero, and the government increased the amount of loans available to the large banks, but it still wasn't enough. The money theoretically available to the banks wasn't used, because they were too scared of a repeat of the housing crash, and it didn't get loaned or invested, it just got sat on. This is called a "liquidity trap".

Krugman says that the answer is to go further: if banks won't put money into the economy, the government should do it directly. This will increase government debt, but assuming the economy grows, the effect will still be negligible.

Some people think that the solution is the opposite: that we've run out of money, or that people aren't trained for the jobs we need, and the answer is massive austerity measures. Krugman says this is wrong. Unemployment hit EVERYWHERE, in a manner consistent with "people not creating jobs" not "people having the wrong skills".

Who gets the money

This is the bit that arguably is ideological. In terms of economics, it doesn't matter who gets the money as long as they spend it or invest it, not just sit on it.

So Krugman (and I would agree) says an obvious place to start would be putting back the social safety net the government did cut back on. That would (a) be humane (b) restore a status quo (c) be good the economy for all the usual reasons I think a social safety net is good (d) work, because anyone drawing any sort of benefits (work-related or not) is almost certainly going to need them, and hence spend them, creating economic activity, not sit on them.

Giving the money to large institutions which will sit on them, or use them to reduce the cuts on executive pay or dividends, the proceeds of which are likely to be saved not invested, won't help, because the money will not be used.

However, the UK government has (apparently) been giving subsidies to random companies in the form of guaranteeing loans to them for specific infrastructure projects. I think the "subsidise random companies" model has good aspects on a small scale (because it helps small businesses grow) but is a bad idea as the basis for an economy (because it encourages companies to compete on "how much can we bribe politicians to subsidise us" rather than "how much can we actually do useful stuff). However, even if it's stupidly implemented, it's equally good from an "injecting into the economy" standpoint.

However, we need a lot more of it. From what I can tell, if Krugman is right, we need to reverse the austerity and invest even more money, and many people are still arguing for further cuts.

I recently read another essay looking for a way of explaining that "Straight white males on average acquire more/better opportunities than non-straight non-white non-males in similar situations" without raising the defensiveness many people experience when talking about privilege.

It used the metaphor of "Some people are playing life on 'hard' difficulty and some on 'easy', but we didn't get the choose the difficulty level". Link:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

However, I was reminded of another of Scalzi's essays that I found very moving, on being poor. I found it very effective, and it also seemed to attract much much less defensiveness. It was a list of things that people experience, starting something like:

"Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV"
"Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away"
Etc, etc

But I wondered, would it have been better if it had started by saying:

"Not being poor is not panicing when your kids for ask for all the crap they see on TV"
"Not being poor is being able to go to the dentist when you have toothache"
Etc, etc

I think that would make people MORE defensive.

It seems like most explanations of privilege start out by telling people "you can get on a train without wondering if you'll be groped/harassed by police/unable to get up the steps" and leave it implied that other people can't, but I think it's perhaps the second half that needs to be emphasised. Most men already KNOW they can get on a tube train without worrying about being groped -- the relevant piece of information they're missing is that half of the human population can't. And yes, everyone SHOULD know, so it's fair to vent that some people just don't get it. But if I'm genuinely trying to get someone to "get it", might it be advantageous to put the thing they're missing up front in every paragraph, in big letters, spelled out in words of one syllable?

It seems to me "privilege" can be absolute or relative. You can say "people whose parents are landed gentry are privileged" or "people who live in the UK are privileged compared to many other people". So saying someone is privileged because they're white is implicitly making two assertions:

(a) that they have some opportunities that would be harder or impossible if they weren't
(b) that people who don't have those priveleges are the correct "baseline" to measure privilege against.

Now, people assuming that straight white males are the "baseline" default sort of person and everyone else falls short is indeed a systematic problem in society. But if you're trying to get someone who isn't familiar with the ideas to "get it", it seems like presenting them with the fairly objective facts about (a), as in the "Being Poor" essay, and inviting their humanity to empathise, is likely to be more effective than saying "OK, humans have a natural tendency to think of themselves as 'baseline' but that tendency is WRONG WRONG WRONG and you should think of someone without any 'privileges' as the baseline for comparison", even if that makes sense.

I notice that the same problem can occur even between two people who DO know the terms. If person from non-straight-white-male-group-A is talking to person from non-straight-white-male-group-B and avers to something that B has easier than A, people instinctively take that as saying that B has it easier in general (and get very cross if that's obviously not true). Even thought according to the literal definition of the concept of privilege, it's just as correct to say there is a (quite small) amount of "Black Privilege" of things black people can do that white people find a lot harder, even if "White Privilege" is thousands of times bigger.

Conclusions

My questions are, is the distinction between "you are privileged" making me defensive and "you are privileged compared to most people" making my empathetic one that only applicable to me, or am I right that most people react the same way?

Secondly, do you think it would work if more "what it's like to have white/straight/male privilege" essays instead focused on telling people what it would be like if they didn't? Do you think it's harmful if postponse the question of the baseline and just start by establishing the large relative difference?