Random Variable

Brad Delong laments why can’t America be run by people like Gordon Brown. The PM announced a plan last Wednesday and started implementing it today, and is now being praised as the world’s saviour. A number of theories:

1. Ideology.
   • John Quiggin wonders if New Labour can at least remember their old-skool social democracy days. William Davies instead points out that New Labour has significant experience with PFI, which are like the proposed nationalisation plans in reverse. Also, the government is keen to point out that these are temporary measures, not a return to British socialism.
2. State institutional design
   • Executive branch is too weak, and the legislature, in the form of Congress is too strong. Even so, Congress gave Paulson the power to emulate Brown’s approach even when he didn’t ask for it.
   • The US state is simply too ineffectual at dealing with disaster in a timely fashion, alá Katrina. Krugman suggests that perhaps the government’s all FEMA’d out.
   • If William Davies is right, then perhaps the federal government is too abstracted away from being knowledgeable about US PFI equivalents.
3. No one had a solution any earlier
   • Unlikely, as Krugman, amongst others, had said that banks were undercapitalised at least as early as the third week of September.

The Register’s Andrew Orlowski tried to make the point that the initial failure of the Paulson Plan in Congress was a sign that democracy works, whilst also taking a snipe at the venerable OpenDemocracy. In retrospect, the article will be remembered for being typical of libertarian wingnuttery. However, there is something to be said about the way democracy worked in the US. In the UK, Brown didn’t need to pass emergency measures before parliament, but the US struggled to find a solution that would pass Congress. There was a wholesale failure of framing, and ideological blinkers clearly prevented the right plan coming about. How can we make democracy function better? In that it allows voters to account the government whilst also being informed about issues. Don’t think there’s an easy answer.

Finally, since the 42 days law was defeated in the House of Lords, there is hope about the health of the UK’s democracy.

Perhaps the best news today is that Princeton economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman took the Nobel Prize for Economics this year.

Apart from being generally right on the financial crisis, he’s done some great work on international trade and economic geography – which one day - I’ll read.

John Quiggin points out the one positive element of New Labour being in power. They were once social democrats, and therefore can even contemplate socialist solutions, unlike their American counterparts (Paulson’s still contemplating non-voting equity):

It’s fascinating to wonder how Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling must feel about all this. Having long abandoned their youthful leftism, they have suddenly been forced by circumstances to implement something that looks superficially like socialism, and might even lead to a genuine restructuring of society (utopian I know, but who would have thought a month ago that we would have been wondering what to do with a nationalised finance sector). At the very least, Brown and Darling must have found it easier to adapt to the sudden collapse of the existing order than those who have never imagined anything else.

As the stakes grow higher in the race of presidency, Obama’s election campaign hits UCL in an attempt to get the vote out.

If you’re American, and you haven’t already, register to vote!

Thanks to IT and Owen for an apocalyptic Kino Fist screening. Barry Hines Threads was truly terrifying. Looking at the credits at the end, it was clear that Hines and Mick Jackson went to some effort making sure the docu-drama-calypse was as accurate as possible, representing a scientific best-estimate of the impact of all out nuclear war, consulting such luminaries as Carl Sagan. Now, there’s a natural scientist with an ethical conscience. Sagan popularised the nuclear winter hypothesis, that large-scale nuclear war would blot out the sun for months, causing harvest failures, with severe impacts on countries whose infrastructure is already decimated by the war itself. At the end of the film, we see a 2nd-generation mutated stillborn baby born in a Britain where most of the English language has already been lost within 15 years, in a society that appears to have economically regressed back to the Neolithic revolution.

But, I was wondering just how accurate the predictions are today. Funnily enough, this requires entering the world of Global Climate Models. Apparently, the models that generated the mass-extinction nuclear winter scenarios were simple 1-dimensional models. These later gave way to more complex models which suggested that the impact of dust would not be so bad at all compared to the initial blast effects [1].

However, the scenarios have been rerun using our latest-and-greatest GCMs (developed for global warming modelling), and to account for the world’s shrunken nuclear arsenal. The results don’t look good [2]:

We use a modern climate model to reexamine the climate response to a range of nuclear wars, producing 50 and 150 Tg of smoke, using moderate and large portions of the current global arsenal, and find that there would be significant climatic responses to all the scenarios. This is the first time that an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model has been used for such a simulation and the first time that 10-year simulations have been conducted. The response to the 150 Tg scenario can still be characterized as ‘‘nuclear winter,’’ but both produce global catastrophic consequences. The changes are more long-lasting than previously thought, however, because the new model, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE, is able to represent the atmosphere up to 80 km, and simulates plume rise to the middle and upper stratosphere, producing a long aerosol lifetime. The indirect effects of nuclear weapons would have devastating consequences for the planet, and continued nuclear arsenal reductions will be needed before the threat of nuclear winter is removed from the Earth.

Even if all out nuclear war doesn’t occur, and you have a nuclear exchange between two small countries, then even that would still be bad as cities burn for weeks into ashes—creating a Nuclear Autumn, to borrow from Thompson & Schneider’s optimism [3]:

The climate changes are large and long-lasting because the fuel loadings in modern cities are quite high and the subtropical solar insolation heats the resulting smoke cloud and lofts it into the high stratosphere, where removal mechanisms are slow. While the climate changes are less dramatic than found in previous “nuclear winter” simulations of a massive nuclear exchange between the superpowers, because less smoke is emitted, the changes are more long-lasting because the older models did not adequately represent the stratospheric plume rise.

All this means, reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals through decommissioning and non-proliferation, as well as clamping down on the market for weapons should still be key priorities for global cooperation. More when I’ve read last month’s NLR.

1. S. L. Thompson and S. H. Schneider, “Nuclear Winter Reappraised,” Foreign Affairs 64 (1985): 981.
2. A. Robock, L. Oman, and G. L. Stenchikov, “Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences,” J. Geophys. Res 112 (2007).
3. A. Robock et al., “Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts,” Atmos. Chem. Phys 7 (2007): 2003-2012.

Afghanistan’s spy agency chief Amrullah Saleh redefines the straight-talk express.

We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down-at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us.

I believe that this a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another.

J. M. Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930) in Pecchi and Lorenzo, Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (The MIT Press, 2008).

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Friend and artist David Henningham suggests in the comments:

I had an idea for a new game; ‘Bank Assassin’. We go queue outside a bank that is in trouble with newspapers/banners two hours before the doors open and try and attract a queue that sparks a run. It’s like Tetris; either we go home when we’re bored, or the bank goes into administration. Job done.

As much as we like a good old-fashioned bank run in the UK, the problem is big capital owners withdrawing their funds from investors, not your high street customer. In fact, the whole crisis is based on the fact that there isn’t any money being held by high street shoppers, and the financial markets are just now catching up with reality.

I have much more to say on the crisis, but I haven’t fully developed my view yet, except to say that Delong and Krugman’s pro-nationalisation approach and Tabbarok and Cowen’s tough love both look reasonable at the moment.

To get into the spirit of blogging again, perhaps I should start writing about my courses this year. So, first off, it’s Democracy and Authoritarianism, taught by David Styan.

We just had the introductory lecture, but next week we’re looking at military coups and will be talking about legitmacy for authoritarian regimes in the seminar.

My initial thoughts, without even bothering to do a cursory literature review:

In addition to the three types of legitimacy given by Weber [1], I’ve been thinking about a further three types of legitimacy for authoritarian regimes; goal-oriented, performance, and electoral.

Now, it would seem that these types of legitimacy are at least conditioned by the times, or in other words, are more timeless than Weber’s three types.

You might want to term this ideology, and leave it at that. However, you might want to consider some of the modern work on institutional norms. In particular, the work of Dimaggio and Powell [2]. Their claim is that under conditions of environmental uncertainty, competing firms start to mimic one another. I think this is the theoretical basis of Spruyt’s work on the sovereign state [3], but how would it apply in the context of authoritarian states. How about this scenario?

1. Country gains independence after colonialism, and inherits weak civil society.
2. Elites tasked with state-building under severe environmental uncertainty: Cold war, economic catching up with colonial nation-states, fear of international military action.
3. Just a few states (maybe even one or two) choosing authoritarianism might kick off isomorphism across a whole group of states.

What are the effects of theorising the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes in this way? It minimises the role of host population culture. However, not to say that elites can’t draw upon cultural repertoires to create organisational norms. It can also lead to regional organisational cultures through mimetic isomorphism (organisations copying each other).

This could part-way explain why goal and performance legitimated authoritarianism exists, but electoral legitimacy is even odder. Why hold elections when you’re going to rule with an iron fist anyway? Clearly an example of ritualistic behaviour, no? Let’s try Meyer and Rowan [4]. They believe that ceremonial behaviour is the effect of rigid organisational formal structure. However, what organisations do to remain effective, is to decouple formal structure from informal behaviour. They then retain legitimacy whilst operating efficiently (on their own terms).

Conclusion:

I am orgBorg.

1. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (Fortress Press, 1965). 

2. Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 2 (April 1983): 147-160.

3. H. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An analysis of systems change (Princeton University Press, 1994). 

4. J. W. Meyer and B. Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977): 340.