Less a book review, more a question

A really interesting book I finished reading recently (mentioned in a previous post) is What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel.

I'm not going to review the book here, however I will note that I decided to give it 4 stars on my GoodReads page.  One of my criticisms is that one of the moral arguments it covered made very heavy use of a sports analogy (baseball) which required some knowledge of the game in order that the argument may be followed. This led me to question what the role of sports analogies is in books.  Sandel had a worthwhile point to make, which was well illustrated by the commercialisation of baseball.  It would be a shame for him not to be able to make the argument at all.

How should he have done it?  Do you know of any books which use sports analogies successfully?  I'd be keen to know.

Identifying a Generation

Something I've mentioned in previous posts without an explanation, despite the fact it perhaps deserves one, is the name for my generation - the Millennials.  I will talk a bit about the naming of generations now.

The most famous 'named' generation is surely the Baby Boomers.  These were the generation born in the years immediately after WW2, when the birth rate in developed countries 'boomed'.  By various definintions, this generation includes those born up until various dates in the late 50s or early 60s.  The most common consensus seems to be about 1960.  What interests me is the nature of the debate about when one generation ends and the next one begins.  Suppose that we took the babies of 1960 as being the last birth year of the Baby Boomers.  In that case, we should expect to find many ways of easily spotting differences between those born in 1946-1960 versus those born after 1961 (who are known as Generation X).

So what of the Millennials?  By the same reasoning as for the Baby Boomers and Generation X; in order to identify the Millennials (or Generation Y) as a distinct generation, they need not only to have a different range of birth years, but there also ought to be a number of easily identifiable differences in their lives.  Perhaps they vote differently, have different educational or employment prospects, or different financial wellbeing.  They could usher in a new type of music or consumerism, fashion or food.  Preferably, almost all of these would be evident in order for us to identify them as a separate generation.  Moreover, if I were to choose arbitrary years as the start and end points for a 'generation', it ought to be rather harder for me to do the same thing.

The consensus that seems to be building across the media articles and blog posts I read is that the Millennials - those who entered adolescence in the new millennium rather than the old one - satisfy a lot of these properties.  I will leave it to the rest of the media, as well as perhaps some of my own future blog posts, to identify the ways in which our generations differ, however I will finish here with one observation.

Using Google NGram Viewer (a powerful tool which looks at the frequency of words in books) we can investigate how these distinct generations come to be recognised in published works (the data series currently only runs to 2008).  The first illustration I give below shows very clearly that the amount that is written about the baby boomers is certainly growing, however we really can't ignore the trends associated with the other generations.



My favourite is the following one.  Sadly Google Ngram Viewer currently only has data going as far as 2008, but from this, it does begin to look that our generation is rather more discussed, possibly easier to identify, than the one which went before!

Mindless Activities

I like some mindless activities.  Moreover, I think it's probably more common than we may acknowledge for people to indulge in mindless activities not simply due to idleness, but actually due to the opportunity it brings to think about absolutely anything.

Take for example the following three activities:

1. Long train or bus journeys on your own
2. Long walks
3. Shelf-filling jobs in supermarkets

All of these are something I have some experience of, and all of them I find in some sense either quite pleasant, or at least not as bad as their reputations!  I must caveat this: I have sometimes sought to avoid doing 1 and 3 to excess, but only because I value my time in a way which makes them unjustifiable, or because (in the case of number 1 in particular) you can have too much of a good thing.  I like to laugh, but I imagine I'd find it pretty painful to laugh solidly for many hours.  Similarly, the entire days I have spent on the trains between Leuchars and Barnstaple were rather painful.

What do I find pleasant about them (or at least not as bad as their reputation)?  I feel sure that it is the fact that while doing an activity which may require some physical work, but certainly only a small amount of mental work, allows me to think about all kinds of other things, for long periods, undisturbed.  When else, during our waking hours, do we give ourselves these opportunities?  For some - Douglas Adams for example, or (according to legend) Archimedes - the answer may be 'in the bath'.

In any case, aside from a nod to the title of the 'Cameron Counts' blog of one of my former university lecturers (Professor Peter Cameron), this may in some way begin to explain the title of this blog.  Many of the things I will discuss are indeed just as it says - things I have wondered about while wandering about.

dot UK

Last month, several new web domain extensions became available.  One of these was .uk (until now, you could have .co.uk, .org.uk, etc., but not just .uk on its own).  I decided that I would try to get a more professional domain for this blog, chose 'russell.uk', and tried to pay.  After all, I thought, if I ever set up an eponymous business, the £4.55 investment would surely seem worthwhile!

I was soon to be disappointed, however.  Until 2019, you can only buy one of the new domains if you already own the .co.uk, .org.uk, or similar.  The same kind of rules also apply to other new domains, such as  dot london.

I'm not a fan of these restrictions, but it seems that there are two issues at play which should guide our decision about whether they are justifiable.  Given that these new domains were released because so many of the old ones were taken, which of the following is the more important?

1. The right of the owners of the existing domains not to lose traffic to recent upstarts
2. Giving the said upstarts the opportunity to compete for web traffic.

Interestingly, given my own career choices, russell.co.uk is the domain of a business which sells services to actuaries.  There certainly is a non-zero probability that I might one day want to use russell.uk for something not totally unrelated.  What is more important: my opportunity to do that, or their right to spend the next 5 years deciding whether to stop me?

It feels in many ways that the generation who are now middle-aged took all of the good domain names for a steal, used them to fuel the expansion of their businesses, and then pulled up the ladder behind them.  We can have the same opportunities, but only for a lot more money.  It reminds me of the student fees debate!

Political Attitudes

I feel I have only just written a post about how today's voters identify themselves on the political spectrum.  My central thrust of my argument was intended to be that major parties becoming too similar to one another over the two or three decades leading up to the 2008 financial crash has meant that identifying as belonging a particular side of the political spectrum is not as easy as it once was.  I didn't expect to write any more on the topic particularly soon, but then I came across the British Social Attitudes Survey.  The particular edition I read was a couple of years old, but it had some illustrations which actually served to back up my earlier points remarkably well.

The one I want to focus on is my assertion that the difference between the largest Left and Right Wing parties grew too small, disguising, for many younger voters, where on the political spectrum they actually lay.

So here we see that while almost all voters in the 1980s identified a clear difference between Conservative and Labour parties, this was eroded almost entirely by the dawn of the new millennium.  I would be interested to see what the view of the public is by the time of the 2015 election.  If I were to predict, I would say that a rise, perhaps to something approaching 1992 levels, in the proportion of people identifying a difference between them may occur.

This has a number of consequences.  I'm very interested in what it may mean for the many smaller parties which we now have.  Many will surely be drawn to the politics of Messrs Farage or Galloway.  Others will vote Green, but I suspect that a large number will cling to the familiarity of the two old behemoths of British politics.  As some distance is put between them, it will be interesting to see which way the confused Millennials will go.

Spot the Maths/Stats Mistake #3

This one is just a quick observation, but is the kind of mistake I see very often.

I was reading an article in the Washington Post about the carbon footprint of meat-eaters versus vegetarians and vegans, called 'How much your meat addiction is hurting the planet'.  This is something I have been concerned about for some time (although I am still in the morally hard-to-justify position of eating meat regardless), and I certainly don't dispute the article's central point.

However, I was prevented from fully agreeing with the article when I read this:

"The good news is that while Americans might still eat more meat than mother nature would prefer, they are scaling back, and especially so with the most environmentally unfriendly kind—per capita beef consumption has fallen by 36 percent since its peak in 1976, according to data from the USDA. The bad news is that the rest of the world appears to be headed in the opposite direction. Global demand for meat is expected to grow by more than 70 percent by 2050."

There are two main problems with this:

1. It is comparing beef consumption for the USA to meat (not just beef) consumption in general for the rest of the world.  Since I don't have comparable figures for the rest of the world, I'll not dwell further on this issue here.
2. With the journalist's choice of wording, the reader may be led to believe that this is a comparison between the USA and all countries aside from the USA.  In particular, it may appear all that all of the rest of the world is seeing increasing consumption, and that the USA is the only country with falling consumption (of either meat or beef: we are not sure which, as mentioned in the previous point).  In fact, neither of these are accurate.  What they meant to do was compare the USA with the global aggregate.  There may indeed be many other countries with falling meat consumption.  In fact a quick search says there are - this paper notes a decline in consumption for Germany, the Netherlands and Hungary.

So on this basis I feel that the article would have been much better had it said something like

"The good news is that while Americans might still eat more meat than mother nature would prefer, they are scaling back, and especially so with the most environmentally unfriendly kind—per capita beef consumption has fallen by 36 percent since its peak in 1976, according to data from the USDA. The bad news is that total global demand is headed in the opposite direction. Global demand for meat is expected to grow by more than 70 percent by 2050."

The Right Wing

Who are the political Right nowadays?

Contrary to what I imagine appears to be a statement about how everything was better in the 'good old days', I am not intending to bemoan the current state of politics, either here in Britain or around the world (needless to say, I could happily do either of those things).  What I have instead been led to wonder is whether we are currently succeeding in correctly labelling people as belonging to the political Left, or, more noticeably, the Right.

Let me explain.

I am currently reading What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel (more of whom in a later post).  In it, he posits the following:

"At the time, the financial crisis of 2008 was widely seen as a moral verdict of the uncritical embrace of markets that had prevailed, across the political spectrum, for three decades... The era begin in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom.  And it continued in the 1990s, with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good."

This made me think quite a lot.  When asked in a survey to place myself on a political spectrum, with '1' representing the far left, and 10 being the far right, I tentatively gave myself a '4'.  I had always thought that my (now-waning) belief in the market-triumphalist values which have dominated our politics in recent decades and, in Sandel's terms, have transformed us from market economies into market societies, meant that I was in some sense Right-wing.  In fact, I'm now not so sure, hence giving myself a score of '4'.  But how can this be?

To understand this, I think we need to ask what people think of when they hear the term 'Right wing'.  After a bit of searching around the internet (and again, a look at Quora), I found that the same ideas tended to crop up again and again.  In general, the Right are regarded as being:

• In favour of a reduction of social welfare
• In favour of a reduction of the role of state-funded healthcare
• Anti-abortion
• Against birth control
• Religious
• Climate sceptics
• Unwilling to stick up for the poor
• Against trades union rights
• In favour of 'trickle-down' economics
• Desirous that the free market be used for everything
• Pro big-business

and so on.  Sure enough, very little of this applies to me, and I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way.

The generation of my grandparents would have had no trouble in casting themselves as belonging to the political Right or Left, but things have changed.  No longer are we in a position where Left means Socialist, and no longer are we in a position whereby the non-Socialists all sit on the illiberal right.

The Blair-Clinton era injected a thorough dose of conventionally Right Wing market-centric thinking into the forefront of Left Wing policy making.  As a result, I suggest that we could have on our hands a very confused generation of voters - the Millennials - who are entering adulthood in an age where the very ethos of our major political parties is open to question, and when we have something of a duty to reconsider the role of market based thinking.

I cautiously diagnose what has happened: people who would naturally sit on the political left (e.g. myself) grew up in a post-Soviet era in which there was no 'natural left'.  Even the major Left Wing parties, such as the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, or the Democrats in the United States, were for a time unrecognisable as such.  Faced with a choice of the economic Right (in the guise of the rebranded traditional Left Wing) or the economic Right (in the guise of conservatism), we unsurprisingly were happy to accept our market based societies as being the only choice.  Then came 2008.  The Right and the Left are trying to put some distance between themselves again, and many of us who never had a real decision between Right or Left Wing politics suddenly need to decide which way to go.

Is it surprising that many of us don't know how to politically identify ourselves?