Nublu, the nightclub on Avenue C between 4th and 5th Streets (I won’t link
‘cos the website resizes one’s browser) has long marked itself with a blue light
above the door. Now, a block down, between 3rd and 4th, there’s another blue
light. This one is a gorgeous high-def vertical screen (LED? I dunno), animated
with bubbles slowly rising to the top. I’d love to know what the story behind
it is.
Statistics are hard, as Charles helpfully pointed
out to me a couple of weeks ago. But one has the idea that techier people
grasp the relevant concepts more than your standard arty journalist might. And
then one reads Paul Boutin
in Slate:
While the Web guys admit they could be off by half, Nielsen claims its television
ratings have a margin of error of 4
percent.
If you follow that link, you’ll find that it doesn’t quite say what Boutin
says it says. In fact, the words "margin of error" don’t even appear.
Rather, one finds this:
According to sampling theory and a very tasty laboratory test, 19 out of
20 times we take a well-stirred sample of soup containing 5,000 vegetable
pieces, we get between 48% and 52% carrots. There is no guarantee that the
percentage of carrots in a sample of this size will be between 48% and 52%
(one time in 20 it will be outside this range, but usually not far outside
this range). The same sampling errors apply to a representative sample of
television viewers.
Ignore the carrot language for the time being. What Nielsen is saying here
is that the company is 95% certain that its TV ratings are within 4 percentage
points of well, something. But that something isn’t the "true figure"
– the actual number of households watching a certain program. Nielsen
first assumes that its sample is perfectly representative (that’s what
they mean by "a well-stirred sample"); only then does it
calculate the margin of error. (This is true of all opinion polls, by the way,
including – and especially – political ones.)
In other words, there are two ways that Nielsen can be more than 4% out in
its TV ratings. On the one hand, it could simply be unlucky. Indeed, 5% of its
ratings are more than 4% out; it’s just that no one knows which 5%
they are. Alternatively, its methodology could be imperfect. Any problem with
the representativeness of the sample, or reporting bias, or technological glitches,
is not included in what Boutin calls the "margin of error". Which
means that if there was any way of actually measuring exactly how many households
were watching a given TV program on a given night, we’d find that more than
5% of Nielsen’s ratings would be more than 4% off base.
But there isn’t. So Nielsen ratings are accepted as the least bad option for
broadcasters and advertisers. On the web, of course, there are alternative ways
of measuring traffic to websites – looking at one’s own server logs being
the most obvious – and so it’s much easier to tell when Nielsen is wide
of the mark. "The more I dig into how Web ratings work, the more I realize
people in other media are in denial," says Boutin. Which might be true,
if people in other media really believed the Nielsen rankings. But in fact,
those people are simply making the only decision they can make: to take Nielsen’s
figures at face value, because there is no alternative.
Anybody counting anything is going to make a mistake. Take SAT scores, for
instance. There will, on occasion, be errors in the way that a certain person’s
test has been graded. The machine goes wonky, the wrong score is spat out, with
major or minor consequences. One hopes those errors are very infrequent. But
more to the point, there will often be occasions when someone with high scholastic
aptitude gets a low SAT score, or someone with low scholastic aptitude gets
a high SAT score. Everything from a hangover to a complicated love life to a
successful test-cramming service can affect SAT scores, which means they are
a far from perfect proxy for whatever it is they’re trying to measure. But it’s
useful for there to be something standard and quantifiable in the academic world,
and the SAT is one of the least-bad options.
The fact is that it’s not people in other media who are in denial, it’s Boutin’s
"web moguls". They think that because they have hard-and-fast numbers
for their own website, that there is or can be some kind of knowable truth about
how many pageviews and unique visitors they have. In reality, however, just
like anything else quantifiable, there are going to be measuring mistakes both
big and small. Everybody else has been resigned to this for decades. It’s only
on the web where people still dare to hope.
One year ago, Jason Kottke gave up his $10,000-a-month web design gig to become
a full-time blogger. A good website, he
assured us, was about to get much better:
The goal is to use the increased level of focus and time to create a (much)
better site. More time means there will be more content of a greater variety.
Some days, that may mean more posts and more links. I’ll be able to go to
more (hopefully interesting) events in NYC (& elsewhere) and write about
them. I’ll have time do the occasional bit of real journalism, collaborate
on neat projects like Dropcash, and do larger projects that require longer
time scales to finish…dare I hint at a return to more 0sil8-like projects?
(I dare.) And there are opportunities that I’m sure will present themselves
as I settle into the luxuriant folds of full-timeness.
Inspired by Jason’s promises, 1,450 micropatrons clubbed together and raised
$39,900 for the newly-impecunious blogger. They then sat back, and… well,
nothing happened. Today, Jason falls
short of apologising to his micropatrons for not giving them what he promised.
Instead, he says he won’t be raising any more money (well, duh) and that his
reason for not doing much more on kottke.org than he had done all along was
that "life intervened".
The annoying thing here, more than anything else, is the lack of transparency.
Kottke apparently felt no responsibility to his employers either to do what
he said he would do, or even to explain to them why he wasn’t doing it. "I’ve
been trying to think about what to say on this occasion for, oh, about six months
now," he writes – which is at least as long as we, his readers, have
been wondering what on earth was (or, more to the point, wasn’t) going on. But
he said nothing at the time, and has said little more today.
Bloggers are entitled to a private life, but at the same time if they’re going
to commit to doing something – especially something they’re being paid
to do – then they should live up to that commitment. It’s worth noting
that the kind of blogs which make the cover
of New York magazine are the blogs which are updated dozens of times per day,
whether the editors particularly feel up to it or not. In other words, they’re
not a stereotypical blog, the product of some guy in his pyjamas uploading whatever
he feels like on a semi-irregular basis. They’re professional operations, where
blogging is a paid job with well-defined responsibilities. Pete Rojas might
now be a millionaire. But he got there by working 80-hour weeks more or less
non-stop since the launch of Gizmodo in August 2002.
When I moderated a blogging
panel at the Apple Store in May 2004, I think the tide was turning. At the
time, Nick Denton was still in his blogs-will-never-make-money mode, but both
Jen Chung and Choire Sicha conceded that what they were doing was a far cry
from what 99% of other bloggers did. They updated their sites regularly because
they had to, which was great in terms of building a readership, but much less
great in terms of the kind of satisfaction that most people get from publishing
their thoughts on the internet and getting feedback on them. Blogging had, for
them, stopped being something they loved to do, and had turned into being a
job.
There are many jobs which start as loves. Orchestral musicians, for instance,
always start off with a love of music, but it’s hard to keep that love alive
when you’re toiling away in the pit of a Broadway musical eight times a week.
And the cynical bastards who populate the art world all had a love of art somewhere
in their childhoods, before it was beaten out of them by backstabbing gallerists.
The fact is that when you turn something you love to do into a full-time job,
there’s a very good chance you’re not going to continue to love doing it indefinitely.
The best way to stop loving Mars Bars is to be forced to eat 12 of them per
day for a year.
Jason Kottke, it appears, failed to understand this, or at least to understand
it fully. Who knows: maybe the "life" which "intervened"
was indeed wholly unexpected and could never have been anticipated. But life
happens to most of us. In Jason Kottke’s case, he let his life take precedence
over his job. Which is possibly an admirable thing. But he should have addressed
that possibility at the outset, when he was raising money. And he certainly
should have publicly addressed the fact that he wasn’t doing his job once it
became clear to him that he wasn’t going to meet his own earlier expectations.
Jason asked his readers to contribute $30 each to support the site. That number
is (was) very close to the cost of a magazine subscription. And, like a magazine,
Kottke asked his readers to pay up front for future content. Maybe it would
have been better if he’d asked for payment in arrears: that way there wouldn’t
have been the possibility of dashed expectations. Magazines do go bust, of course,
leaving their subscribers on the hook. But that’s the exception. Kottke was
the first blogger to experiment with the micropatron model, and now there’s
a good chance that his flameout will result in his being the last, as well.
I like blogging; I am not a professional blogger. Very soon, felixsalmon.com
is going to unveil a major redesign, which I anticipate will come with a significant
uptick in posting frequency. There will still be long-form pieces, but there
will also be shorter posts, and delicious links, and I have no idea what else.
I might start devoting multiple posts per day to a single subject. If all this
results in an increased readership, then I might even make some money from advertising.
But I’m not going to promise anything. Because I don’t want to break any promises.
I hosted a wine contest last night. Thirteen people came, and each brought
two bottles of wine. We all tasted one of the bottles, while the other bottle
was put into a prize pool. (Hat tip to Gothamist
for the idea.) Every person scored every wine on a scale from 1 to 20, and then
the scores were aggregated. For this contest, we decided to taste red wines
retailing for between $15 and $40. Here are the results:
| Wine | Total score | Price |
| Clos
del Rey , Languedoc, France, 2002 |
183 | $34 |
| Marion,
Cabernet Sauvignon, Veneto, Italy, 1999 |
180.5 | $40 |
| Priorat, Embruix,
Vall Llach, Spain, 2003 |
162 | $27 |
| Domaine de Bonserine, Côte Brune, Côte Rotie, France, 2000 | 159 | $28 |
| Caro, Cabernet/Malbec, Argentina,
2001 |
157 | $37 |
| Bonny Doon Old Telegram Mourvedre,
Contra Costa County, California, 2001 |
152* | $25 |
| Castello di Modanella, Campo
d’Aia , Sangiovese, Tuscany, Italy, 1998 |
136* | $23 |
| Chiaramonte
Nero D’Avola, Sicily, Italy, 2002 |
135 | $19 |
| Domaine Maria Fita, Fitou, Languedoc, France, 2002 | 134.5 | $24 |
| Prunotto, Fiulot,
Barbera D’Asti, Piedmont, Italy, 2003 |
133.5 | $17 |
| Capçanes Mas
Donís , Montsant, Spain, 2003 |
129 | $14 |
| Robert Sinskey, Los
Carneros , Pinot Noir, Napa, California, 2003 |
125 | $34 |
| Maria Fita, Le Schmitou, Vallée du Paradis, France, 2002 | 84 | $21 |
*The scores with an asterisk are the two wines from people who took the game
a little too seriously, who recognised their own wines and gave them their highest
score just so that they would have a better chance of winning. Of course, neither
won. The full results, in Excel format, can be downloaded here.
If you plug the scores and prices into a correlation
calculator, you get a result of +0.61, which I have to admit is higher than
I thought it would be. Here’s a scatter chart so that you can see the results
visually:
There was one wine which everybody hated – the Le Schmitou. Interestingly,
it’s a Fitou from Maria Fita’s Eric Schmitt, just like the Maria Fita Fitou
which came in at a much more respectable 9th place. The difference is where
in France the wine comes from – the location seems to make an enormous
difference, since the Languedoc was quite dark and bitter, while the wine from
the Vallée du Paradis, near the Spanish border, was far too sweet for
anybody’s taste.
Beyond that, it seems that there was a large number of more-or-less average
wines, getting between 125 and 136 points, and ranging from $14 to $34 a bottle.
To no one’s great surprise, the really overpriced wine – worse and more
expensive than most of the rest – came from California: the Robert Sinskey
Pinot Noir.
The top two wines were both reasonably expensive. The winner was by far my
favourite wine of the lot (I gave it 17 points, while my second-favourite got
12), and I was happy to see Luke walk away with his choice of the prize pool.
That included my wine, the Caro, which I was very disappointed I didn’t rate
more highly.
The party itself was a huge success, lots of fun, and we’ll definitely do it
again. But I did learn a couple of lessons. Firstly, when you’re tasting a lot
of wines in succession, on their own and not in the context of a meal, it’s
hard to really appreciate them all. Secondly, the wines which we were rating
average, and giving 10 points or so to, were all much more expensive than the
wines we normally drink, and we would probably love them in most everyday contexts.
So these results should probably not be taken too seriously. But I think I might
try and track down a couple of bottles of that Clos del Rey all the same.
Simon Dumenco is not a lazy columnist. But even the most avid columnist has
an off week, when he simply can’t think of anything to write about. The worst
solution to this problem is the "I can’t think of anything to write about"
column. The second-worst solution to this problem is the knee-jerk "X will
be killed by the internet" column, where X can be anything from TV news
to your neighborhood grocer. In Dumenco’s weak
effort this week, X is glossy fashion magazines.
Obviously, new media is not the most obvious candidate for giant-killer in
this particular case: Vogue and its ilk have only been getting fatter and fatter
of late, more or less in line with the extent of internet penetration among
the mag-reading demographic. But Dumenco sees disaster in his crystal ball:
But inevitably, fashion advertisers that prop up the glossies will, like
everyone else, increasingly migrate to Web and mobile interactive advertising.
And here’s why: Google’s emphasis on text-only ads notwithstanding,
we’re all increasingly seeing incredibly cool, sophisticated, Flash-animated
and even streaming ads that actually don’t crash our Web browsers. (What
used to not usually work … now usually works.) Suddenly it’s entirely
conceivable that say, Diesel could find the right combination of interactive
advertising — animated Web spots, sponsored mobisodes, etc. — that would
not only give it the same aura of cool it used to get from its perversely
witty glossy ads, but would be more cost-effective and truly measurable in
a way that print will never be. (Diesel has already created one static ad
that appears only online, at ZooZoom.com.)
Can you just feel Dumenco desperately trying to hit his wordcount
here? There’s more extraneous verbiage in this paragraph than in an average
Lewis Lapham essay. The gallimaufry serves two purposes: to fill column inches,
but also to distract from the fact that the substantive point he’s making is,
well, bullshit.
Dumenco is quite right when he says that fashion brands rely on advertising
in fashion magazines: "The brands are the print ads, and vice
versa." But he misses the bigger picture. If someone is going to drop $10,000
on a Prada frock, it certainly helps if the Prada brand has been suitably pumped
up for her by print ads and by Prada presence in the editorial pages. But it
also helps if she’s been convinced that the entire high-fashion edifice is something
fabulous and valuable. And for that one needs the glossy magazines.
Individual fashion houses can drive demand for individual brands. But to drive
demand for fashion in the first place requires a large number of glossy magazines
being published month in and month out, each reinforcing the others’ message
that Fashion Is Good. Websites might respond to demand for fashion content,
but they’re never about to create it. And no one knows that better than the
fashion houses whose entire industry is largely a creation of the very magazines
in which they advertise.
Fashion advertising is unlike most advertising in that it only obliquely attempts
to get a consumer to buy a product. Perfume ads sell perfume, of course, but
ultimately Chanel fashion ads are more for selling perfume than they are for
selling fashion. The key is to get the brand buzzing among the people who matter
– editors high up on magazines’ mastheads, and maybe a handful of department-store
buyers. After them, it helps if various fashion-industry insiders get it too.
So you use trendy and expensive models, buy enormous swathes of Italian Vogue,
and generally ignore the end consumer. Why do you think that there are so many
tiny fashion magazines? It’s two reasons: firstly, an ad in a tiny magazine,
if it’s read by the right people, can have much the same practical effect as
an ad in a major Condé Nast glossy. And secondly, these magazines more
or less give their ad pages away to major advertisers, because the mere presence
of a big name on the back cover can give the magazine buzz and legitimacy. Eventually,
the magazine can grow up into an Another Magazine or Zing: small by Condé
standards, but still successful enough to sustain itself.
But websites don’t work like that. For one thing, fashionistas are notoriously
computer-illiterate. If you want to reach them, you have to stick to print.
But in any case there’s nowhere you can advertise online which has the punch
and power of a print ad. Dumenco’s ZooZoom example actually works against him
if you try to find the ad he’s talking about: the website is horribly designed,
almost impossible to navigate, resizes your browser window, and has no permalinks.
Even if a fashionista did see an ad or an editorial shoot they liked, they would
find it impossible to send that story to a colleague. And there’s certainly
no easy way of ripping an image out and putting it in a clipping book somewhere.
Just look at the Diesel ad that Dumenco’s talking about: the reason it appears
only online is that it’s crap. In fact, the only interesting thing about is
that it’s online. So long as fashion advertisers’ idea of an online ad is basically
taking a print ad, scanning it, and putting it on the web, online fasion advertising
will continue to be irrelevant. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not "increasingly
seeing incredibly cool, sophisticated, Flash-animated" ads, either, be
they for fashion products or anything else. In fact, I can comfortably say that
I’ve never seen a Flash-animated ad which was "incredibly cool".
Dumenco finishes by bringing up the evil spectre of Lucky, the shopping mag.
Apparently it has, ahem, "set the entire industry up for a fall by converting
the formerly immersive magazine-reading experience into a distracted browse
that’s just begging for transactionality." In other words, Lucky
readers are looking for shopping ideas, and it’s easier to shop from a website
than it is to shop from a magazine.
Well, maybe, if and when a website ever manages to come up with a browsing
experience as navigable and pleasurable as flicking through a magazine. Remember
that websites give you things you didn’t know you wanted – it’s hard to
design a website which can do the same thing. But in any case, Vogue is not
Lucky without the transactionality. Vogue sells millions of copies. Its readers
are not women who want to know what $10,000 frock to buy, but rather women who
like the aspirational frisson of reading a magazine which purports to assume
that its readers all buy $10,000 frocks. Lucky isn’t a glossy fashion mag; Vogue
is. And high-end fashion advertisers will continue to support it because it
supports them. And because a double-page spread in Vogue is a very seductive
thing. Much more seductive than any mobisode.
It is impossible, today, to experience a work of art the same way as it would
have been experienced 100 or 200 or 400 years ago. Orchestras can play baroque
music on original instruments; churches can display the same altarpieces they’ve
had since they were built; but still audiences will pack in with a worldview
and set of assumptions utterly alien to the original artists.
Let’s say I go to an art gallery – or even a church, for that matter
– too look at a Caravaggio. As Edward Winkleman says, "there’s often
as much value in the pilgramage as there is in the actual viewing". The
pilgramage, in this case, is likely to involve being herded onto a jet plane
after going through X-rays and security precautions; it will also include all
manner of other carefully timed and scheduled transportation. And assuming that
the Caravaggio is in Italy, the pilgramage is attendant upon the fact that I
chose to visit Italy over Peru, or Russia, or Thailand.
Once I finally get to the home of the painting, I’ll probably pay some kind
of admission fee, and eventually jostle my way through a pack of tourists in
comfortable clothes to a point where I can admire an expensively-secured and
artificially-lighted painting. Maybe I’ll be listening to an audio guide as
well, giving me a bit of background on what I’m looking at. I’ve turned my phone
off, so calls go straight to voicemail. But I’ll suspect that if I make it into
an internet cafe, I’ll discover at least three urgent emails which need responding
to – assuming that my inbox hasn’t overflowed with undeleted spam.
In other words, synchronic viewing – the art or science of putting oneself
in the place of the audience for whom the work of art was intended – is
at best an academic exercise, and at worst impossible. For a garden-variety
art lover, to experience a work of art is to experience it diachronically. The
work was made then, but we are now. Either the work still has artistic power,
or it doesn’t.
Caravaggios, then, today compete for our attention with everything from email
to tiger sharks. When we look at them, we’re very likely to think of them as
representational art – a concept, of course, which came into existence
centuries after Caravaggio’s death. What we admire in them may or may not be
the same thing that viewers admired four hundred years ago: great art often
has the characteristic of being perceived as great by a broad range of viewers,
despite meaning very different things to different people. And in any case,
paintings, like anything else, change – physically – over time.
The colours we see today are simply not the same as the colours that Caravaggio
painted: we are, after all, reacting to a centuries-old artifact.
So I’m puzzled by the
ire with which the aforementioned Winkleman greets an exhibition now on
show at the Loyola University Museum of Art. One of the primary purposes of
any museum, especially one in a university, is education, and the Loyola museum
has found itself a novel and really rather effective way of teaching people
about Caravaggio: by using reproductions, it has put on what it calls "an
impossible exhibition" – a show which could never be brought together
using the original paintings.
Paintings have been reproduced for decades, of course. The basic pedagogic
tool of any art history teacher is the slide show, while most homes include
at least a few art books or magazines. There are hundreds of millions of people
who can recognise the Mona Lisa despite never having seen it in real life; millions
more have spent many an enjoyable hour in front of the television, learning
about art from the likes of Kenneth Clark, Robert Hughes or even Wendy Beckett.
Would Winkleman sneer in the same way at, say, the Hughes television series
on Goya? Suppose that PBS said in a press release that
The aim is to let millions of people all over the world see these masterpieces
of Spanish art. It’s an example of the ‘democratization’ of art.
Would Winkleman respond like this?
That is a flat-out bald-faced lie! The aim is absolutely nothing of the sort.
This project accomplishes nothing…NOTHING…toward letting millions of people
all over the world see any masterpiece. The attendees are not "seeing"
a single "masterpiece." They’re looking at television.
It seems improbable: one thinks the blogger doth protest rather too much. And
in fact Winkleman’s vehemence with regard to Loyola University is not a function
of the inadequacy of their chosen medium to convey the effect of the painted
originals – quite the opposite, in fact. Few people are likely to consider
watching a television program to be in any way equivalent to looking at a painting.
But at Loyola, the reproductions are so good that Winkleman fears, he says in
a comment, that "’real’ artwork exhibitions will begin to seem quaint and
pointless."
Loyola, in conjunction with Italian television station RAI, has taken advantage
of today’s technology to mount an exhibition which has not been possible in
the past. With the aid of high-resolution digital photography and modern backlighting
techniques, Caravaggio’s paintings have been reproduced at actual size and in
great detail. The reproductions are utterly flat, of course: while you can see
cracks in the canvas, you can’t admire the texture of the brushstrokes.
That’s a deal-breaker for Winkleman:
ARGHHHH!!!! That’s like saying you can see the members of the orchestra moving
their arms, hands, and lips, but not hear the actual sounds coming from their
instruments. What’s the freakin’ point???? It’s called PAINT, you halfwits.
If the texture wasn’t integral to "seeing" the image, Caravaggio
would have drawn the damn things.
I have to disagree. Caravaggio’s paintings are pretty flat: he was more interested
in light, colour and composition than in the texture of the paint. Paint was
the best medium for what he wanted to do, and in fact anybody who wants to see
the original paintings from which these reproductions are taken can travel the
world and do so – although it’s likely to take a long time and many thousands
of dollars. But for somebody who is interested in Caravaggio but who doesn’t
have either the time or the inclination to go on such a grand tour, this exhibition
provides at the very least an excellent idea of what his paintings look like
– a much better idea than looking at slides or book plates would.
In fact, Winkelman’s quibble about paint texture has very little to do with
his real objection to the show: if somehow the reproductions were made three-dimensional
so that the paint texture, too, was reproduced, his distaste would probably
only increase. Winkleman’s real issue is ontological, not phenomenological.
There is One True Painting, any attempt to artificially reproduce it in a museum
sestting is heretical, and in fact the closer that the reproduction gets to
the original, the worse the heresy.
Winkleman does, in fact, concede the educational value of the exhibition. He
just says he doesn’t want to see it an art gallery, presumably because he thinks
that art galleries should show only art. It’s a superficially reasonable point,
but there are two flaws with it. Firstly, if this show isn’t put on at a museum,
it probably won’t be put on at all: what other institutions exist with the ability
and mission to put on an exhibition such as this? Secondly, the display of art
at a museum is ultimately a means rather than an end in itself: if a museum
put on a show but nobody went to see it, that show would be a complete waste
of time and money. The important thing is the experience of the exhibition-goers,
not the static presence of the art itself.
People who go to see this show know full well that they’re seeing reproductions
and not originals. They suffer no injury in doing so, and in fact might well
learn from and enjoy looking at the reproductions on show. When something causes
good and no harm, I’m generally in favour of it – especially when the
arguments against are all of the slippery-slope type. (Winkleman loves to extrapolate
into a hypothetical future where all local museums put on shows like this on
a regular basis, thereby sating their local populations’ hunger for art, and
destroying demand to see the original works of art in major metropolitan centers.
It doesn’t seem to occur to him that it’s much more likely that the opposite
is true, and that exposure to art in reproduction only serves to increase the
desire to go out and see it in real life.)
It’s worth noting, however, that the Loyola museum is quite up-front about
the derivative nature of the reproductions on show. No one is claiming that
looking at the reproductions is the optimal way of experiencing Caravaggio;
the entire exhibition is predicated on the idea that it’s second-best, even
if an actual exhibition of all those paintings in one place would be a logistical
impossibility.
In concert halls around America, however, a more invidious use of technology
is being increasingly introduced – amplification. When singers or instruments
are amplified, there is usually no notice given to the audience. And as Tony
Tommasini recently noted
in the New York Times, the spread of amplification could have an enormously
deleterious effect on opera around the world. He tells the story, for instance,
of the principals in Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti in a recent production
at Caramoor. The artistic director thought they were being overpowered, and,
as a solution to that problem, miked them up.
Tommasini claims, quite plausibly, that if singers don’t have to work on beefing
up their voices, they won’t. And opera is likely to go the way of Broadway,
with the beauty and subtlety of the unamplified human voice replaced by a more
bombastic entertainment and the audience moving from active to passive engagement
with the performers.
I generally believe that if a performance is being amplified, there’s a good
chance it doesn’t need to be performed live at all. What, exactly, is the point
of having a live band at a Broadway show? It’s vestigial, really, and doomed,
in time, to obsolescence. At the opera, however, appreciation for the beauty
of the unamplified music is at the heart of the artform. If that is taken away,
the performance can become something of a fiasco.
So the introduction of technology into the exhibition of a centuries-old artform
is not always a good thing. If museums started showing reproductions instead
of originals, then I would most certainly object – just as I object
to opera houses showing amplified opera instead of unamplified opera. But if
you’re honest about what you’re doing, technology can be a great help. Since
all Broadway shows are amplified anyway, why not use a recording rather than
a live band? It would save on costs, and maybe help bring ticket prices down
from their current insane levels. It would also allow the director to have much
more control over the subtleties of the music, and the ability to create exactly
the sound he wanted.
But if fine art is being presented as fine art, then interfere technologically
with the original as little as you possibly can.
Much to my surprise, I love America. We spend a lot of time in Britain bitching
about America, Americans, Americanisms and of course the American administration.
It’s very easy. But whenever I come here, I find some things very comfortable
– familiar, even. Part of it is the universal acceptance of things we
try to fight in the UK. Bad TV constantly in the background in bars and airport
waiting lounges. Overly enthusiastic customer care in shops and hotels. Massive
corporate chains, cars and food portions. All these things are just part of
America. No one seems to prickle when they walk into a Starbucks. It’s
almost refreshing.
I also like the belief that it’s my god-given right to be whomever I
want, do whatever I want, change the world, fuck the world, create my own world.
Whenever I come here I return to Britain inspired, fired up, ready to follow
my dreams, do the impossible, be that person and create that job. Back in Britain,
it’s good to be comfortable, secure, following an accepted path. It’s
good to be content with who you are, where you are. There is merit in that too.
Britain has its advantages. A good cup of tea is common, delicious and properly
made, scallops are served with the orange bit as well as the white, marmite
is a sensible spread for toast, museums and art galleries are usually free,
it is relatively easy to see a doctor and not be charged for it and the majority
of the population is suspicious of, and a little uncomfortable around, overt
nationalism. In addition, Christianity is not referred to either as the Truth
or a worrying extreme right wing movement and there’s no problem with
Darwin being buried in Westminster Abbey.
On the flip side, our shops close around the end of the working day and sometimes
never open at all on a Sunday. Late night licensing has only just been introduced
but many pubs still ring the bell at 11pm. And brunch, frankly, is a disaster.
Why have Brits not woken up to the profitable luxury that is brunch? Last Sunday
I had a divine crab and avocado benedict at my friend’s restaurant
but it needn’t be so fancy: good coffee, juice, various egg dishes, pancakes
or waffles, and plenty of time for refills and hangover recovery are, I think,
the main ingredients.
I did laugh during brunch though when my friend’s six year old daughter
pointed to her plate and asked, “Mama, are these potatoes organic? I hope
so cos otherwise we’d be eating Darth Tater”. Visit StoreWars
for clarity on this, it’s worth it. The day before, in the same town,
we went to see a Truckers Parade. Only in the US can I imagine having so much
fun watching multiple lorries driving past decorated to the nines with fairy
lights, Rudolphs, flashing candy canes and extra large Santas ho ho ho-ing.
I like the diversity of this country: the organic-food movement coexisting with
the truckers.
On a more challenging note, I have found myself caught between two visions
of America, and the world, that are impossible to reconcile. The primary reason
for my visit to the States is the annual meeting of the American
Geophysical Union in San Francisco. This is a huge and well respected affair:
twelve thousand people, disciplines ranging across all the geosciences, five
days of simultaneous poster and oral sessions from 8am to 5pm. The thing that
strikes me is that while the debate on the street still seems to be “is
climate change happening,” not once do I hear that asked inside. To these
scientists, the critical questions now are how climate change will come about,
what the implications are and what processes might be implemented that could
make the change slightly gentler. What changes are we already observing, what
are the models predicting, how accurate are they and what areas need particular
attention?
Some of these discussions happen in fields close to my own but most range
into places that interest me greatly but travel beyond my full comprehension.
The conference includes geophysicists, atmospheric scientists, climatologists,
chemists, biologists, physicists, geologists and mathematicians to name a few.
Hot topics include simulations which use super-computers to model everything
from molecular processes to the entire global climate. There are also results
from field experiments taking place everywhere from the tropics to the poles,
and covering land, forest, ice, ocean, desert and cities. Big picture, tiny
picture, theoretical, experimental, diverse interdisciplinary studies: each
one dedicated to understanding one particular aspect of the world a little better.
If I manage to follow the introductory slide and conclusions of a talk outside
my field then I walk away having learnt something. I trust that other experts
in the room will challenge the presenter if any of his or her arguments are
fundamentally flawed. It interests me to discover what the salient points are,
where the areas of debate still lie, and what the different disciplines are
concerned by. I realise that I trust the scientific method and I trust the people
presenting this material even if I don’t entirely understand their work.
Perhaps it’s because I received a scientific training. I prefer to think
that it’s because that training showed me how the scientific method works
and I have been convinced by many of its merits. I believe that this method
is, on the whole, applied ethically and responsibly across all of the disciplines
I have been listening to. And so, ultimately, I have been convinced that climate
change is a reality we will face during the next few generations. In some hot
spots around the world such as the antarctic peninsula and the arctic, we appear
to be observing its effects already.
The scientific community is convinced of the reality of human-induced climate
change. We do not know how it will manifest itself, as the world is an extremely
complex place with many interactions and feedback processes that we don’t
understand. This is what the current science is focusing on, this is where debate
lies and these are the aspects where experts disagree. It is the nature of scientific
interrogation to debate and question, and hence all the more convincing that
the overwhelming majority of the scientific population agrees that climate change
is a reality. (This isn’t that uncommon though: gravity and evolution
are generally accepted theories these days too.) The question, “how am
I supposed to know what to think when the scientists themselves seem to disagree?”
drives me up the wall. Of course they disagree, but it’s the detail, not
the general trend, that is being argued about. That’s how we find stuff
out.
So, what is my challenge? Well, I am wondering: What more scientific results
could be discovered that would make any substantial change to public opinion
or policy? Although I see the validity in more science being done, including
more extensive simulations of climate change that in turn require more field
data, it seems to me that the real work now has to be in public education and
outreach.
Do we need to explain the scientific method better? Do we need to explain climate
change better? It would be a start if we could get the main points across, and
increase the public trust in science in general. Without public concern, policies
won’t be changed, as the timescale for effect is much longer than a goverment
term. Without policy change, the climate system will be pushed extremely hard
and extremely quickly and none of us can say for sure what the result will be.
What we can say is that no one has yet come up with a model that predicts that
all will be just fine.
Part of what I love about America is its boldness. Part of what I hate is its
belligerence. How can scientific argument turn things around so we make bold
steps in a different direction?
The job of under secretary for international affairs at the US Treasury is
a hugely important job which few people have ever heard of. It’s a political
position, which means the decision as to who gets it is made not by career Treasury
officials or by technocrats, but rather by the White House. The present holder
of the job is Tim
Adams, who most recently held a senior position in the Bush-Cheney 2004
campaign. But Adams is no Bush crony – or, at least, he’s not only
a Bush crony á la Michael Brown or Harriet Miers. Adams is a
very smart, very competent guy, on top of his brief, who will do the Bush administration
proud in an extremely difficult job.
I can’t find a listing online of Adams’s predecessors. But since I moved to
the US and started getting interested in such things, I can remember Larry Summers,
Tim Geithner, Randy Quarles, John Taylor and now Tim Adams holding the job.
(Do let me know if I missed someone.) All of them are super-smart guys with
a genuine ability and passion for the intricacies involved in building the international
financial architecture and navigating its more recondite nooks and corners.
Put it this way: the least able of the lot, in my opinion, is John Taylor, a
highly respected Stanford economics professor after whom the well-known Taylor
Rule is named. And he’s a very able guy: I’ve heard it said that he was
more or less single-handedly responsible for saving the Uruguayan economy from
collapse in 2002, and he managed the enormous problems of setting up the new
Iraqi central bank and national currency much more smoothly than anything else
has gone in that country.
Adams, Taylor and Quarles are the kind of Republicans that most Democrats can
easily embrace. Not because they’re moderate (Adams, for one, certainly isn’t),
but rather because they’re simply very good at their job. They quietly and efficiently
attempt to ensure America’s long-term economic health by looking after the economic
health of the world upon which America relies. The irony, of course, is that
they’re doing this despite the fact that the Department of the Treasury has
less power and influence today than it has had at any point since 1945. The
under secretaries for international affairs might have been great, but O’Neill
is mainly famous for gaffes and gallivanting around Africa with Bono, while
Snow has stuck to his talking points so closely he seems to be little more than
a White House spokesman.
What’s more, I suspect that Summers, Geithner, Quarles, Taylor and Adams all
agree on much more than they disagree on. Every last one of them is Davos Man
incarnate, a sophisticated believer in the virtues of globalization who nevertheless
is well aware of its limitations. If they’re not dealing with an international
financial crisis, they’re working very hard on crisis prevention and on setting
up a robust system for crisis management. And even the extremely wealthy Quarles
got his job through sheer ability and not because of political connections and
donations. Adams, here, is the big surprise: despite having unrivalled political
connections, it turns out that he’s actually qualified to do the job as well.
Not that this necessarily means a lot, but he co-founded the G7
Group in 1993, and ran it for a while before moving to the Treasury after
Bush’s election. And the G7 Group is full of extremely smart people: Alan Blinder
is vice chairman, while Arminio Fraga sits on the advisory board.
There are a couple of good reasons why it makes a certain amount of sense that
Adams’s job has not been hijacked by hotheaded political appointees who might
easily do far more harm than good. One is that although the job is extremely
important, it carries little prestige: those who would be big Washington fish
generally have no desire for the job in the first place. Secondly, the job generally
manages to avoid overlapping with US electoral politics. Even conservatives
who want to abolish the IMF stop short of wanting to abolish the international
affairs department at Treasury, or even wanting to change it. On the rare occasion
that Treasury is in charge of a politically-fraught issue, such as Cuba, it
generally does what it’s told, and the rest of the world is sophisticated enough
to understand that blaming Treasury for US Cuba policy would be silly.
All the same, the caliber of the holders of this position is truly striking.
I can’t think of any other full-time position with such consistently high-level
appointees, in business, politics or anywhere else. Maybe music director of
the Berlin Philharmonic – but that’s at the zenith of its universe, while
the career trajectories of the likes of Summers and Geithner show that the Treasury
job can be a mere stepping stone on the way to much greater things. The fact
that all the recent appointees have been so good is probably
more luck than judgment. I’d love to see a list going back a bit longer, to
see the degree to which the recent trend holds. But for the time being I’ll
try and reassure myself that at least there’s one small corner of government
which seems to be capable of simply getting on with doing a good job, regardless
of who’s in the White House.
The ongoing debate over Google Print Google
Book Search is yet another manifestation of a more fundamental debate over
intellectual property rights. But one thing has been nagging at me for a while,
and it’s based on the whole idea of an author owning a work of IP, which ownership
can be transferred to a publishing company. This ownership – known as
copyright – is an interesting thing. For one thing, although it is transferrable,
there doesn’t seem to be any market in it. One would imagine that JK Rowling,
say, or her publishers, might be interested in selling the copyright to her
books – I’m sure there are a few hedge funds out there who would pay a
lot of money for such an asset. But to my knowledge, the only way to buy copyrights
is to buy an entire publishing company.
(Why might a publishing company be interested in selling an author’s copyright?
Because publishing companies are often strapped for cash. Because they might
be better at finding new talent than at monetizing existing talent. Because
it would help consolidate all that author’s copyrights in one place. Because
they’re planning on stopping printing that author’s books. There’s all manner
of possible reasons.)
More interestingly, the publishers, who have the copyright in the work, are
hiding behind an organisation called the Authors Guild in their fight with Google.
It’s a question of spin: the chattering classes will support struggling writers
over Google any day, but a fight between Google and HarperCollins (prop: R.
Murdoch) would probably go the other way in terms of public opinion.
It seems to me that the law is based on what you might call the auteur theory
of creation: a work of IP has an author, and it’s up to the author what to do
with the copyright. Publishers might have legal right to their copyrights, but
the moral right still resides with the original author. Take a couple of examples
from a recent article by Lawrence Weschler in Harper’s, on the subject of war
movies. Apparently, when Francis Ford Coppola and his editing team were putting
together Apocalypse Now, they cut the most famous scene in the film to a particular
Solti/Vienna Philharmonic recording
of the Ride of the Valkyries. Then, when they realised they hadn’t
secured the rights, Decca balked at the purpose for which the music was intended,
and denied the filmmakers’ request. It was only after Coppola personally asked
Solti for permission that the rights were acquired.
Weschler also talks about a similar situation 26 years later, when Sam Mendes
and Walter Murch were editing the new film Jarhead. Murch was part
of the team which edited Apocalypse Now, and Jarhead includes
a scene where Apocalypse is screened in front of a room of fresh marines.
Once again, the studio was not keen on granting the new film rights to the old
film, and once again it took a personal intervention – this time from
Coppola – to secure it.
These examples clearly show the distinction between legal and moral copyright
– or, to put it another way, between ownership and authorship. Although
the record label or the film studio was the entity which owned the rights, it
was ultimately the author of the work who made the decision as to whether or
not it could be used.
What I’m unclear about is the degree to which the ability to make those decisions
is a function of the success of the author. If Solti and Coppola hadn’t both
been giants in their field, would their publishers have cared so much about
their will? If it came down to a situation where the CEO of the publishing company
wanted to say no and the author wanted to say yes, who would win? As a journalist,
I often sign contracts signing away any and all rights to my own work –
I can’t even put it up on my own website without permission. So I’m not sure
that moral copyright is particularly strong or useful these days, even though
it certainly does exist.
The thing which fascinates me even more is the lack of any ambiguity, in the
vast majority of cases, as to where the authorship lies. Walter Murch, who edited
Apocalypse Now, was in no position to provide rights to it; that privilege
belonged not to the editor but to the director. The Vienna Philharmonic, which
played the Ride of the Valkyries, was not consulted on whether or not its music
could be used in Apocalypse Now; that decision was made by the conductor,
Georg Solti. And I’m sure that if I wanted to reprint Weschler’s essay in an
anthology of film-themed literature, it would ultimately be Weschler himself,
and not the publishers of Harper’s, who would make that decision.
As we all know, moving pictures and orchestral recordings are highly collaborative
affairs. Both involve hundreds of creative individuals working very hard to
make something that no one individual could ever come up with alone. It’s hard
to see what gives the director of the film, or the conductor of the orchestra,
the moral right to make decisions about the use of the work of art which he
created in conjunction with so many others. Writers have long sought authorship
of films, and the orchestral example is even more fraught: it would seem that
the conductor is the author if the composer is dead, but the composer is the
author otherwise.
But even magazine articles are much more collaborative than they might seem.
I’m sure that many of us have had the experience of reading a book which has
previously been excerpted in the New Yorker – Kitchen
Confidential, say, by Anthony Bourdain, or Everything
Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer, or Uncle
Tungsten, by Oliver Sacks. In each case, I think it’s pretty obvious to
anybody who’s read them both that no matter how good the book is, the magazine
excerpt was better. The New Yorker takes its editing process seriously, and
the output is of a much higher quality as a result. Even relatively mediocre
prose stylists like Simon Schama are a joy to read in the New Yorker.
More to the point, the New Yorker’s editing process ensures that good writers
never have an off day. I think that Weschler is one of the great non-fiction
writers alive, and will read pretty much anything he writes; his books, just
like his New Yorker pieces, are wonderful. But that article in Harper’s was,
well, not up to his usual standards. It was sloppy, not very easy to read, overfull
of verbatim impenetrable theory from the likes of Adorno. I’m sure it would
never have got past the New Yorker’s editors in such a state.
So does even a solitary author like Weschler deserve all the credit for his
works? I think not. A great magazine article is, I’m convinced, a genuinely
collaborative effort – which is why you’ll almost never find a great magazine
article in an otherwise mediocre magazine. (I think this also might explain
why many small literary magazines often feel a bit underpowered: they kowtow
to their writers, and don’t edit nearly enough.)
I had dinner with Oliver Sacks on Sunday night (um, excuse me, I think I might
have dropped something around here?) and took the opportunity to ask him this
very question. He said he’s working on a book about music at the moment, and
that he’s probably not going to submit any of it to the New Yorker. A book is
looser than a magazine article, he pointed out, and he seemed worried that if
he got caught up in the New Yorker’s long and laborious editing process, he
could lose momentum on the book. In fact, he seemed if anything a little annoyed
about that process, and I learned that when the Uncle Tungsten excerpt was being
edited, there was a lot of tension between the New Yorker, on the one hand,
which wanted something closer to pure memoir, and Sacks, on the other hand,
who wanted to keep as much chemistry in there as possible.
If there was tension, however, I think it was highly productive tension, since
the final product was great. And so I think that authors should be more willing
to give real credit – not just a bit of lip-service in an acknowledgements
section at the front of the book – to their editors. Credit in the form
of some kind of joint ownership of moral copyright. Now there’s a challenge
for creative commons.
I haven’t posted here since mid-September; it’s now November. I have a couple
of excuses (I got married, had a honeymoon, am moving house, have been posting
at MemeFirst), but it’s still a very poor show. Maybe all the goings-on in my
real-world life have rid me of the need to get minor issues off my chest at
great length. We shall see. As the number of blogs explodes along with the number
of people who use RSS readers, we’re increasingly living in a world where infrequent
posts of decent quality are to be preferred to mediocre new entries coming along
on a daily or even hourly basis. So I’m not feeling particularly guilty.
All the same, it’s worth posting something, if only to prove to myself that
I’m still alive and capable of writing one of these things. And one of the things
which has been on my mind over the past few days is The Forty-Part Motet,
a work of art that has recently been installed at MoMA. Todd Gibson has already
about it at length, and he’s mostly right.
I saw the piece last week, on a trip to MoMA with my wife. (Yes, it still feels
very weird saying that.) When we were sitting in the café talking about
what we’d seen, there was a bit of confusion: I kept on saying that I loved
"the Tallis piece", and while Michelle couldn’t remember the name
of the person responsible for the installation she really loved, she knew that
it wasn’t Tallis, and, moreover, that it was a woman. The name she was searching
for, of course, was Janet Cardiff, and she was talking about the exact same
piece.
Questions of authorship rarely arise in a fine-art context, except in cases
of forgery or attribution. It’s generally accepted that someone is
the artist, who should get any credit due. Artists have played with this notion,
of course, and many, from Old Masters to the likes of Warhol and LeWitt and
Koons and Hirst, use assistants extensively. But you don’t get the kind of debates
in the fine art world that you do in other arenas: is True Romance
a Tony Scott film or a Quentin Tarantino film? Whose Hamlet did you
see? That of the actor in the eponymous role? The director? Shakespeare? Why
is it that the authors of operas are generally considered to be the composers,
while the authors of ballets are generally considered to be the choreographers?
You get the picture.
In the case of The Forty-Part Motet, however, authorship is very difficult
to attribute. MoMA doesn’t seem to have any doubt: the artist is Janet Cardiff,
who was assisted by a large number of people, and who recorded a 16th Century
choral work by Thomas Tallis. Todd Gibson, on the other hand, apportions credit
more equally:
The Forty-Part Motet takes all of its emotional punch from the choir’s
performance of Tallis’s piece.. In her piece Cardiff has harnessed the power
of a live performance by using the skills of a master recording technician…
Unlike her other work where she creates original sound environments, here
Cardiff has recreated a sound environment originally developed over 400 years
ago. Filtered through Cardiff’s technology, the music sounds good enough to
make listeners choke up.
I would go even further. Cardiff has created a nice-looking space, with an
oval of 40 speakers, but that is really no big deal. Her recording technicians
did a good job, too, but then again recording technology has been sophisticated
enough to create a piece like this for a very long time. I don’t consider this
a Tallis piece "filtered through Cardiff’s technology", because the
technology is pretty commoditised at this point, and there’s really nothing
to indicate that Cardiff deserves the possessive.
In other words, the work, as experienced, is Tallis’s, not Cardiff’s. It’s
a work of art which actually gets better when you close your eyes. Insofar as
this is "one of the most sublimely beautiful spaces in Midtown Manhattan,"
to quote Gibson, that’s because of the music, foremost, and perhaps the view
out the window.
Tallis is something of an expert when it comes to the sublime, of course. And
it’s a testament to the power of his music that it can transform a modernist
white box into something both transcendent and devotional. But neither Cardiff
nor MoMA is making it particularly easy on him.
I would dearly love to own this piece – to have a room devoted to it,
where I could listen to it whenever I liked. I could sit still, or walk around,
as I slowly got to know every part and how they fit together. But the piece
in MoMA isn’t like that. People are constantly walking in and out – chances
are it was halfways over before you even entered the room.
But it gets worse. 99% of the people who walk into the room have little if
any idea what it’s all about. They’re in one of the greatest art galleries in
the world, and they have come to look at art and to understand it. So they walk
into the room, which has music, like a lot of contemporary art, and they slowly
get it. First they get the structure: the way that each speaker corresponds
to one singer. Then they get the overarching beauty of the music. And they realise
how great the piece is, and get excited about it.
The problem, of course, is that people don’t visit MoMA alone. They visit with
their friends. And so whenever they get excited about a piece, they feel the
need to tell their friends. Now I’ve been to a fair few Tallis performances
in my time, but I’ve never been to anything with half as much chattering. At
the end of our trip on Friday, Michelle went to the bookshop while I returned
to the Tallis piece. I sat down, and within a minute a large earth-mother type
was bustling in, telling her friend all about the work and how much she loved
it. I shot her a nasty look, but it didn’t do any good. She sat down next to
me, and started rustling around in her plastic bag for whatever items she needed
to listen to the music. Meanwhile, a bunch of other people were talking quietly
about the work as well. I soon found myself essentially incapable of enjoying
the music.
Tallis is a subtle composer. The voices work with and against each other in
complex ways, and a few words stand out because of their plosive or sibilant
endings. Listening to Spem in alium, especially a recording as richly
detailed as this one, you become attuned to very subtle textures in the music
– you become a much more active listener than you ever would be normally
in an art gallery. And so all of the chatter and noise in the gallery really
gets in the way and ruins the piece. There might be a debate going on about
but no one would debate the proposition that one simply shouldn’t start
up a conversation in the middle of a devotional choral piece by Thomas
Tallis. And yet that’s exactly what happens all day at MoMA.
There are things which MoMA could have done to minimise the problem, and didn’t.
There are things they couldn’t have done, too: I think that ideally, if this
work is to be presented to the public, it might be better placed in a performing
arts center, like Lincoln Center, where there is more of a culture of appreciating
aural as opposed to visual art. But still:
MoMA could have hidden the piece away somewhere, signposted, as a special installation
deserving of special attention. At the moment, it’s just another piece in the
contemporary rehang: you pass it on your way from the Nauman to the Turrell,
and so it’s easier for the public to give it the kind of (noisy) attention that
they give to everything else.
More subtly, and more easily, MoMA could have just dimmed the lights a bit.
I’m not saying that the audience should sit in darkness: the visual structure
is striking, and the window can and should remain uncovered. But simply making
the gallery dimmer than the rest of the museum would help to signal to viewers
that this is not a primarily visual piece, and that they should slow down and
quiet down a bit.
MoMA could even have simply put a sign up, saying "silence please"
or words to that effect. They’re happy with "do not touch" signs –
does speaking in The Forty-Part Motet not ruin it just as much as touching,
say, a Serra?
Cardiff should be overjoyed that this work is on display at MoMA: there’s a
good chance that more people will experience it over the next year than have
seen or heard all her other works put together. She should go down to 53rd Street
and talk to a couple of people, and try to make the experience as close to what
she intended as possible. And that means changing the work a little in the face
of new realities: MoMA is simply a very different gallery to PS1. What worked
in the latter might not work in the former, and there’s no harm – and
quite a lot of benefit – in taking that into account when the piece moves
across the East River to Manhattan.
I’m in New York and loving it. Quite a contrast from last time I visited,
a fortnight after having returned from Antarctia the first time, constantly
getting rushed at by honking cars while staring at the rooftops and fire escapes
of tall tenement buildings. I went to the New York Public Library to escape
the mayhem but even there became overwhelmed by the books. No, today I’m
loving it and have had a most amusing morning.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m here for my brother’s
wedding. Folk are flying in from around the world: UK, Germany, Egypt, California,
Sweden, Argentina… descending on the city for what promises to be a great
party. And as warrants for such an occasion, the hype is picking up. Now, any
follower of this website should have realized that though I adore my brother
and everything, well almost everything, about him, we are very different creatures.
I don’t like shopping, I don’t know the correct names and locations
of any countries in South America, or any continent for that matter, can’t
argue politics, culture, current affairs or money with any conviction and certainly
wouldn’t know the difference between cool and kitsch. However if he and
Michelle are going to have a party, no amount of sea ice could keep me away.
So, first I got my hair cut, that was a novelty but I survived and no-one,
not a soul, noticed. (Why do folk pay good money to look exactly the same?)
And then I bought a dress, and some shoes. Pink shoes no less. And today I went
to get my legs waxed. My ‘beautician’ was a polish gem and rather
than gawk at my furry legs we spent most of the session talking about how ridiculous
the hair-free culture in the US is. I still can’t believe that her 15
year-old daughter, or anyone for that matter, shaves her arms.
Next stop? The spa directed me to Bloomingdales to buy some make-up. Now I’m
not sure how you’re supposed to decide between the various desks piled
high with powders and lacquers but after circling the floor once I somehow ended
up in a chair in the Mac booth, being done. There were three worryingly beautiful
people working at this stall: one doll-like girl, one heavily made-up queen
and my gentleman artist with finely curled lashes for whom I was the palette.
We begun with foundation, he did half my face first and then the whole thing
to show me the difference. I looked like me but blander. Then he put concealer
on and I looked like me but blander and paler. And then he put cream blusher
on and I looked more like me again. Finally he put glycerine all over my freshly
blushed cheeks and I looked exactly like me at a party. Once it was all done
he covered me in invisible powder (the point?) and told me to beware of the
subway as the air there is so filthy. I didn’t think it appropriate to
mention that Felix and I were intending on taking the F-train to his wedding.
Next came the eyes. Inside light, outside dark. Make the dark bits lighter
with this one. Make the sticky out bits lighter. Edges dark again, “like
an apple”. Right, that helps. Then a middle colour at the top and a dark
one at the edges and underneath and then a pencil right in my eyes so they watered
and looked bloodshot but I later realized that was the desired effect. “Smokey”.
And then the lips. This was my favourite bit.
“You usually use yongblast?”
“???”
“Yonglast.”
“?”
“Do you usually use long-lasting lipstick?”
“Um, I think I’ve worn lipstick 5 times in my life”
“Oh.”
And he gave me some lipgloss stuff that apparrantly lasts 7 hours as long
as I don’t eat chicken wings. I’m going to test it all day today.
The crème de la crème came at the end with lash curling and mascara.
This took ages, I have no idea why and when he showed me the mirror I burst
out laughing as I looked the spit of Aunt Sally. The whole thing took him twenty
minutes but he confidently said I should, with practice, be able to get my morning
make-up routine down to seven though evenings would obviously still require
half an hour. I was having such fun by this time that I bought 80% of the products
and he gave me his phone number. I still don’t understand.
As I was leaving I asked if it would be very cheeky to come back on Saturday
for him to repeat the activity for real. He replied in all sincerity, “what’s
cheeky?” adding, “ I heard a Brit once call his friend a cheeky
bastard but didn’t know what it meant.”
I walked home with my pre-pubescent legs and drag-queen lashes laughing to
myself. I did feel beautiful but, contrary to the aim of the exercise, it had
nothing to do with the external applications and all to do with its ridiculousness.
Everybody knows that American blacks pay more for their groceries than American
whites do. The same, it seems, is true of mortgages. (Update: I just, you know, actually read this first sentence. And no, it doesn’t mean that American mortgages pay more for their groceries than American whites do. OK, you can continue reading now.)
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve released a major lending
survey (PDF), looking, among other things, at the question of whether blacks
pay more for their mortgages than whites do.
The answer, unambiguously, is yes. Subprime mortgages – housing loans
which cost about 2 percentage points more than those for people with good credit
– are a booming business at the moment: some $530 billion of such loans
were written in 2004, up from $35 billion in 1994.
And it turns out that among low-income homebuyers, about 39.2 percent of blacks
but only 12.9 percent of whites took out such loans.
Clearly, discrimination is going on, right? Not so fast. As the New York Times
"a large part of the contrast between mortgages to blacks and whites could
be attributed to differences in lending institutions". Here’s what the
report says:
Most of the reduction in the difference in the incidence of higher-priced
lending across groups comes from adding the control for lender to the control
for borrower-related factors. For conventional first-lien home-purchase loans,
the mean unadjusted incidence of higher-priced lending was 32.4 percent for
blacks and 8.7 percent for non-Hispanic whites, a difference of 23.7 percentage
points. Borrower-related factors account for about one-fourth of the difference.
Adding to this adjustment the control for lender reduces the remaining gap
markedly, to 7 percentage points.
In other words, we start off with an enormous gap, of 23.7 percentage points,
which needs to be explained. About a quarter of that gap – 6 percentage
points – can be accounted for factors relating to the borrowers themselves,
such as their income, the type of property securing the loan, whether there’s
a co-applicant, even property location down to census tract.
A much large chunk of the gap, however – about 11 percentage points
– is accounted for by differences in lenders. Blacks, it would seem, disproportionately
get their mortgages from high-priced (subprime) lenders rather than from other
sources – even after controlling for factors such as income and creditworthiness.
That brings the remaining gap down to 7 percentage points, and racism is by
no means the most likely explanation for it. Crucial factors such as borrowers’
credit scores and the amount they have available for down-payments are not included
in the Fed’s data, so they could account for that final bit of the difference.
Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that blacks pay more for their mortgages than
whites do, and that the single biggest reason for this is that they go to expensive
mortgage shops. The mortgage shops don’t discriminate between blacks and whites:
a white person going to the same shop would get the same rate. But it seems
that the shops selling mortgages mainly to blacks charge higher rates than the
shops selling mortgages mainly to whites.
Concludes the Fed report:
Black and Hispanic borrowers taken together are much more likely than non-Hispanic
white borrowers to obtain credit from institutions that report a higher incidence
of higher-priced loans. On the one hand, this pattern may be benign and reflect
a sorting of individuals into different market segments by their credit characteristics.
On the other hand, it may be symptomatic of a more serious issue. Lenders
that report a lower incidence of higher-priced products may be either less
willing or less able to serve minority neighborhoods. More troubling, these
patterns may stem, at least in part, from borrowers being steered to lenders
or to loans that offer higher prices than the credit characteristics of these
borrowers warrant.
So there are two things to worry about here. Firstly, why aren’t the low-cost
lenders lending to blacks as much as they lend to whites? Are the big national
mortgage shops less willing to operate in low-income black neighborhoods than
in low-income white neighborhoods? Secondly, are the shops which do
operate in low-income black neighborhoods taking undue advantage of the fact
that lower-cost shops aren’t operating there? Are they selling their customers
higher-priced products just because they can?
Loan sharks have known for centuries that the poor can be much more profitable
than the rich when it comes to lending money. It would make sense for subprime
lenders to set up shop in areas where major financial institutions with more
competitive lending rates are few and far between. And those areas, it would
seem, are predominantly black.
In other words, even if no one is behaving in an explicitly racist way, a result
starkly diffentiated along racial lines can still emerge. How to address that
problem is a major issue for the Fed, and this report should be welcomed as
the first step in doing so.
According to Nick Kristof of the New York Times, MIT’s Kerry Emanuel is a "hurricane
guru". Conveniently, Mr Emanuel published a major hurricane study in
Nature just before Katrina hit the US. What did that study say? According to
Kristof,
There are indications that global warming will produce more Category 5 hurricanes…
Nature magazine this summer reported a new study by Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane
guru at M.I.T., indicating that by one measure hurricanes have almost doubled
in intensity over the last 30 years.
That’s what Elizabeth Kolbert, in the New Yorker, thinks
Emaneul is saying, too:
In a paper published in Nature just a few weeks before Katrina struck, a
researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that wind-speed
measurements made by planes flying through tropical storms showed that the
“potential destructiveness” of such storms had “increased
markedly” since the nineteen-seventies, right in line with rising sea
surface temperatures.
But wait! Here’s Paul
Recer, in Slate:
There is one hurricane scientist who believes he has found a possible link
between global warming and storm intensity. But it’s an entirely theoretical
one. In the Aug. 4 edition of Nature, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology presented math models that he said "show a substantial
increase in potential intensity with anthropogenic global warming, leading
to the prediction that actual storm intensity should increase with time."
Emanuel concedes, however, that the observed storm intensities do not match
what the models predict and that his study can only "suggest" that
global warming "may" lead to more intense storms. In the New York
Times last week, he agreed with Gray and Klotzbach that the increase in hurricane
activity the last two years "is mostly the natural swing."
What’s this about the New York Times? It turns out that alongside Nick Kristof’s
opinion column, the NYT’s news staff talked
to Mr Emanuel as well. Here’s what the article says:
In an article this month in the journal Nature, Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane
expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote that global warming
might have already had some effect.
The total power dissipated by tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and
North Pacific — including typhoons in the Pacific and Indian Oceans
— increased 70 percent to 80 percent in the past 30 years, he wrote.
But even that seemingly large jump is not what has been pushing the hurricanes
of the past two years, Emanuel said, adding, “What we see in the Atlantic
is mostly the natural swing.”
It certainly seems as though Slate’s Recer is being economical with the truth.
Obviously it’s silly to blame global warming for an individual catastrophe like
Hurricane Katrina, or even for an uptick in hurricane intensity over a short
period of time like two years. That’s likely to be natural swing. But if you
look at the past 30 years, then clear anthropogenic patterns can start to emerge.
But don’t take my word for it: Kristof helpfully links to the actual
paper (PDF). Emanuel seems clear, saying that that storm intensities are
measurably greater now, and that global warming is at least in part responsible.
And once you read the paper, Recer seems even more disingenuous. While it’s
true that "the observed storm intensities do not match what the models
predict," Recer fails to inform us that that’s because the observed storm
intensities are actually much greater than what the models predict.
Far from the correlation with global warming being "entirely theoretical",
the observed data more than backs the theory up.
Observed storm intensities in the north Atlantic and western north Pacific
have more than doubled over the past 30 years. Meanwhile, a model based on sea
surface temperature alone would predict that those intensities might increase
by about 10%. There is another model, however, based on temperature in the troposphere
more broadly, which shows storm intensities increasing by about 40%.
Emanuel’s conclusion is that only part of the increase in storm intensity can
be explained by the increase in sea surface temperature. Other factors, like
sub-surface temperature (which has also been rising) are likely to be needed
to explain the rest of the increase – as well as cyclical factors.
But is Emanuel just a lone crank? That’s the impression that Recer gives:
After 24 years of relative quiet, more than 30 major hurricanes have churned
in the Atlantic since 1995. Most researchers, however, think that increase
has nothing to do with global warming. Those who study tropical cyclones say
that Katrina was part of a natural cycle of angry storms that will batter
North America for decades.
But note that Recer is fudging a little here: while the sharp increase over
the past ten years might be cyclical, would "most researchers" say
the same thing about the increase over the past 30 years? Here’s the graph:
What Emanuel is talking about is the steady increase from the mid-1970s, not
the shocking increase from the mid-1990s. Yes, hurricane intensity is obviously
cyclical, to some extent. But that doesn’t preclude a secular increase as well.
But this is where science journalism starts to break down. We can’t all go
back to primary sources and check for ourselves; and in any case, the vast majority
of us are quite unqualified to read charts like the one above. Ultimately, we
have to take it on trust that journalists are presenting research fairly. It
could be true, pace Recer, that most scientists think that increased
storm intensities have nothing to do with global warming. On the other hand,
Kristof doesn’t simply site "most researchers": he cites names and
papers of many scientists saying quite the opposite.
What would be great would be if a qualified scientist could give us a layman’s
guide to exactly what the broad mass of scientists really believe about such
things. I wonder if my sister might be intersted in providing such a thing.
Grey mizzle across the country, a hanging mist, traffic fluidly moving through
the capital’s centre, commuters buying coffee, picking up the free paper,
listening to their ipods. Schoolchildren on a train, the first day of term after
the summer, a little apprehensive, a little excited, grey and red uniforms.
I feel a great warmth for the working, participating, world this morning. Policemen
in their fluorescent yellow jackets, taxi drivers waiting to take passengers
to offices. People transforming from lovers to parents to passengers to workers.
Cycle gear being replaced by suits. The world is moving, the day is starting
and it’s not even 9am yet.
I’ve been thinking about this ‘growing up’ thing since Felix’s
last post. I’ve been
to a wedding and watched two friends do the thing they really want to do: get
married, make a commitment to each other, live together… and by that I mean
really live, lebensgefährter, travel through life together. Other friends
have had kids lately, something that has made them so happy, has been absolutely
rewarding. Something they really wanted to do. It’s quite something to
feel capable, ready, grown-up enough, to not only want these things but to carry
them out. To opt in.
I fear I may have been wrongly represented. Or rather, people may have assumed
my stand-point by virtue of the last year in a strange place, ‘a wonderfully
simple bubble’ as commented
by Span. A number of people wondered if going to Antarctica was running away
from something, escaping reality, and I used to vehemently defend it as an alternative
way to ‘opt in’ to life rather than opt out. (Similarly, I think
‘gap-year’ is a terrible expression, suggesting an acceptable one
year ‘out’ of the real world.)
What you may not know is that I have been thoroughly enjoying being a part
of the working world since coming back. Making my contribution to the 9-5 world
that I know so little about. I love flexi-time and take great satisfaction in
swiping-in and out every day. I like my dull job. It’s exciting in the bigger
picture, perhaps, but the daily process of number-crunching is a far cry from
laughing with the midday stars. I like coming home at a reasonable time and
having an evening to take whatever class I fancy, cook dinner or meet folk in
the pub. I love the house that I share with one friend. Today, I even like the
rain. And sure, I can see that ten years of this might become monotonous and
dull – but so could ten years on the ice.
I have never lived such a routined life as at Halley. So today, for the record,
I’m all about opting-in. Choosing the life you want. Having babies, buying
houses, going to work and contributing to the flow of whichever city you live
in. In Cambridge, it’s biking along the river and shopping in the market.
In London, it’s watching people on the tube and magicking myself from
one side of town to the other on the buses using my swish new oyster
card. In Edinburgh this weekend I enjoyed being a tourist, admiring the great
old buildings and being swung around the dancefloor, clueless, at a ceilidh.
Yes, cities have grown this way because enough people have actively chosen this
life. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all.
I dedicated my Ph.D. thesis ‘to the hydroxyl radical, omnipresent but
ever elusive, you have a wicked sense of humour’.
In retrospect, this may seem a little theatrical. But at the time I truly felt
that I had been chasing this mysterious species for four years, day and night,
had sacrificed my life and happiness for it in fact, and to no joy. I thankfully
had a thoughtful supervisor and after four years of drowning in a mud pool and
banging my head on a brick wall he and my examining committee found it within
themselves to take pity on me, and allow me to submit a negative thesis. Two
hundred and forty-four pages on how not to measure hydroxyl radicals.
But I loved my project, I truly believed in it, I saw the potential it had
to physically expand our knowledge base and thereby our understanding of atmospheric
chemistry around the world. I did indeed dedicate my life at the time to this
doomed technique, and proving it would never work was sodden with mixed emotions.
I was glad that no-one would ever have to repeat all those terrible experiments
pointlessly, but I was also gutted.
Hydroxyl radicals are great, so informative about the immediate air composition,
and the method we were developing should have made them cheap and simple to
measure everywhere in the world.
Our method involved bubbling air through soluble aspirin and then analysing
the final solution. Hydroxyl radicals in the air react with aspirin to form
a product (2,5-dihydroxy benzoic acid if you must know) that is extremely fluorescent.
Separating reactants and products is relatively simple and the concentration
of the final product should be able to tell you how much hydroxyl is in the
air providing you know how long you bubbled for and what the flow rate was.
It really was that simple.
The two-hundred odd pages I mentioned above were dedicated to all the other
things that also react or interact with aspirin to produce the same result.
Light, ozone, bacteria, you name it. Even when we had got rid of most of them,
there was still an interference left and so, regrettably, we gave up. For what
we wanted to do, the method was rubbish.
Unfortunately for me, the best methods to measure atmospheric hydroxyl radicals
are still big and flash and expensive. They are actually wonderful instruments,
fascinating and amazing, but their cost necessarily means that there aren’t
many in the world.
Hydroxyl radicals, in contrast, are everywhere. Or a tleast they’re everywhere
that there’s any chemistry kicking off. They are present in tiny concentrations:
fractions of a part per trillion (that’s one hydroxyl in 10,000,000,000,000
anything elses) but they are crucial to keeping the chemistry happening. Where
there is pollution, they break it down and in so doing are themselves destroyed
and created. Where there is light, they are the mechanism that perpetuate photolytic
chain reactions. They are sometimes known as the dustbin of the atmosphere but
I prefer to think of them as little pac-men, munching their way through the
ever changing game. In fact, these are the same things that we are told we have
to control inside us by taking lots of antioxidants like tea, red wine and garlic.
Oxidising the air: good in general. Oxidizing your stomach: not so good. They
themselves aren’t good or bad, they’re molecules. They are however,
extremely powerful and effective. And better yet, a great indicator of everything
that’s going on around them.
Because of their low concentration and short lifetime (less than a second between
being produced and reacting with something else), they respond incredibly quickly
to changes in atmospheric composition. During the solar eclipse a few years
ago, for instance, the Leeds FAGE machine got some stunning data showing an
immediate drop-off of hydroxyl radicals when the sun disappeared and an immediate
return to their prior concentrations when the light returned. So they’re
good indicators of what’s going on in real time on a second-by-second
basis. Which is why I was so keen to develop a method that was cheap and cheerful,-
so we could get this data at every monitoring site from Halley to Weybourne.
Well, I may have not yet seen a global hydroxyl measurement network being
implemented for the cost of some pain-killers but I have seen hydroxyl measurements
in Antarctica. And that for me was pretty special. The ultimate combining of
two dreams I guess. To be honest, it was special for everyone concerned, and
not only for scientific reasons. First the ship didn’t get in so the project
was postponed by a year, then the ship did get in, the lab got built but we
didn’t think there would be enough energy for this beast to run in the
second summer when it was due to arrive. Then the beast got in, the power supply
was sufficient but the ice was weak and it looked like the beast may never get
out… from beginning to end, getting FAGE to the Antarctic was an investment
of nerves and faith as well as money.
There was an inherent risk even if the logistics would have run smoothly, too:
weather. As I said before, hydroxyl radicals are around in small concentrations
on the best of days. The best of days are sunny, clear, calm and long. On foggy,
windy, stormy, or icy days it was unlikely there would be enough radicals around
to measure them at all even if the machine stood up to the conditions. And we
didn’t know what kind of conditions it would withstand. I had been told
clearly at the start of last season that if we got two complete days of data,
that would be fine. If we got a week, that would be great.
As it turned out, the FAGE boys collected the longest data set from the instrument
ever, anywhere: 5 weeks of continuous measurements. And that in one of the most
remote and technically challenging places in the world. Everyone related with
the project should be rightfully proud.
It’s a hot, smoggy day in London and I’m sitting on an overcrowded
train. It’s too hot for this many people to be in one space. In fact,
it’s too hot for this many people to be in one place: London. The city
feels unnecessarily full. And all these people so abstracted from what I would
call the real world.
Our culture consumes us. All that energy that goes into simply existing,- what
to wear (will I get sweat patches, would make-up run), how to get about, packed
diaries of events planned weeks in advance still being juggled on the day, mobile
phones ringing and bleeping, news to digest, scheduled exercise.. and that’s
not to mention buying food, washing, sleeping, eating and having fun. The world
I care so much about feels very far away despite being right under my feet.
It would be difficult to convince anyone right now to not travel in an air-conditioned
car for 45 minutes instead of this 2 hour commute although it probably matters
even more on a day like today. Really truly, will that one journey make any
difference? Really truly, in the grand scheme of things? No. Will any of it
make a difference? I don’t know. Is it too late? Maybe. These aren’t
the answers you want to hear from a committed environmentalist and they aren’t
the answers I want to give. In many ways, the whole field of climate research
is incredibly dissatisfying: the more we convince ourselves that climate change
is real, the more we are doomed. I do believe it, most definitely, and not only
because I want to and that the science I have studied is convincing. The thing
that has probably persuaded me most is meeting well respected, senior, eminent
scientists who have been convinced by the data. Unlike me, these people didn’t
enter the field as idealists and environmentalists hoping to find a solution
to the world’s problems. These men (mainly) were pure scientists, kineticists,
physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians whose expertise was called
upon about 30 years ago to try and figure out if the climate was changing and,
if so, how. They had no vested interest in the result: moral, political or economic.
The application of pure and applied sciences to climate research first grew
within the individual disciplines. Then, more recently, a whole new interdisciplinary
field grew, commonly known as Earth System Science. Applied science has always
existed but the focus shifted from trying to understand the intricacies of a
particular field, now, to trying to predict what may happen in the future.
I am an atmospheric chemist: we look at chemical processes happening in the
air. Because it’s only possible to know so much, we generally represent
the air as a box with arrows in and arrows out and the stuff we are really interested
in happening in the middle. Often chemicals leave our theoretical box and are
deposited to leaves (hand over to biologists), water (oceanographers), the ground
(earth scientists) and the ice (glaciologists). To figure out how the chemicals
are entering our box, we need to know about wind (meteorologists), radiation
(physicists) and emissions from the cryosphere, biosphere and oceans.
Every other discipline does the same but only in the last few years have we
reached the stage where we can stack these boxes, in all dimensions necessary
to overlaps sides with everyone, and see what happens when you try and simulate
the whole world. We have also only recently had the computer power required
to run simulations of this world into the future and back to the past. Inevitably,
the models often go wrong at the interfaces of the boxes since these areas have
had less attention in the past: we know less about what happens here.
This is where interface studies come in, like the one that sent me to Halley.
We were studying the interface between the snow and air (cryosphere and atmosphere).
Understanding these processes should help the big picture in lots of ways, from
interpretation of ice cores (a common record for past climates) to better guesses
at processes occurring in high clouds that are made of ice particles. Similarly,
there are people studying the interface between the air and oceans, forests,
cities, deserts and rock. All of this information is incorporated into models
that simulate the world, try to reproduce the past and present and predict the
future. And the more data comes in from a wide range of areas, the more certain
we become that our climate is rapidly changing and is doing so due to man-made
influences. But sitting on this overcrowded train on the hottest day of the
year, I don’t feel the relevance of any of this to me.. or of me on it.
I don’t care. There are more important things to worry about, like what
I’m going to have for dinner tonight or when I can see my friends.
I want to write about science. Well, I don’t really, I’m dragging
my heavy arms to the keyboard, I have surfed every website I can think of, I
have even done the washing up. It’s not that I don’t like science.
I find some aspects of it fascinating in small doses. It’s just so big.
I don’t know where to begin. Or end.
There is no beginning or end, just a story spiralling ever inwards and outwards,
over itself and through the gaps in the middle. People know lots but no-one
is ever sure of anything. That’s the whole beautiful premise of science.
But equally, in our society, it’s somehow seen as fact, as Truth, as having
the Answers. And the answers are held within, they’re out there for the
finding.
I visited a primary school a while ago to talk about Antarctica and was introduced
as an explorer. It made me smile, but this was the way the teacher had managed
to fit me into the national curriculum; explorers were the topic of the week.
Initially we decided that I kind of was an explorer, yes, since I was going
to Antarctica and that was an exciting place that not many folk went to. But
as the classroom chat developed, and the kids asked more questions about my
work, we learnt that I truly was an explorer and that one way of being an explorer
today was to be a scientist. (I would argue that any academic, or independent
thinker is an explorer by the same premise but that discussion wasn’t
entirely relevant to the 6 year-olds in front of me.) Anyway, it suddenly made
it feel exciting, and relevant. The discovery of things we don’t yet know,
the pushing back of knowledge boundaries. Exploring unchartered territory. And
then I felt very underqualified and returned to the safer topic of what we did
with our poo.
Going to the Antarctic as a scientist was another a very humbling experience.
Until then, I had done my thing, taken courses, read books, splashed around
in a lab happily confident that nobody really cared about what I was doing and
that in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t very important. To me it
was life-changing and misery-making, but that’s the nature of a Ph.D.
The rest of the world didn’t bother with details, they were content as
long as I jumped through and over the various hoops and hurdles necessary to
qualify. And then I got this job with BAS.
I’d like to say that the work suddenly became important and relevant
because it was important and relevant. Because it was crucial to our understanding
of climate change. Because it was cutting edge and would ultimately save the
world. These things might well be true and have certainly been argued convincingly
(well, maybe not the world-saving bit) which is why we had the funding in the
first place. For me, however, the scariest bit was the faith my colleagues on
the ice seemed to have in the value of our work. Sometimes it was justifiably
skeptical faith (‘bloody beakers’ was not an uncommon phrase to
have directed at us) but the entire infrastructure nominally existed to make
science programmes possible. On some level, therefore, everyone justified their
existence by the science that happened there. And again justifiably, they wanted
to know what they were going to all this hard work for. Builders, plumbers,
electricians.. everyone but scientists really, would ask me for bite –sized
explanations of the point of our lab. And seeing as we’re government-funded,
that’s not an unreasonable demand.
So why do I shy away from talking about it? Why didn’t it crop up the
whole time on this website while I was down there? Even strangers sent me emails
asking for a description of the science I was doing!
Well, firstly, it was my job and it was hard work and often not much fun and
at the bottom bottom level of field science that we were working at it seemed
to take all my energy just to keep kit running, let alone explain and understand
its greater purpose. I knew I had known it once and been convinced then and
that was enough. At the time, it was my job to get the numbers and someone else’s
to do something with them. I didn’t have the energy or interest to do
any more.
Secondly, it’s incredibly daunting to speak authoritatively about anything
scientific because I’d probably get it wrong, or not entirely right. I’d
far rather rant about something I know nothing about (politics, capitalism,
the relative merits of golf) than about something I am meant to have studied
in depth but actually have just realized how much there is to know and how little
I know. I have known bits at times, generally the night before an exam, but
I have a memory like a sieve and get myself in a terrible muddle when trying
to piece the jigsaw back together. Plus, people ask questions that I quite simply
don’t know the answer to. Is using chip fat a good idea as a new fuel
for cars? Is nuclear fuel bad? Are the objectives set in Kyoto achievable? What’s
the truth about climate change? Are your results good news or bad?! They’re
good questions and I’m getting better at answering them, realizing that
educated banter is an acceptable response, but my information source is often
exactly the same as that used by the questioner. So often I just wish that one
of the wise people I look up to was there to produce the Right Answer. Or at
least make us believe there is one.
Anyway, Science at Halley is extremely important. Not only for itself, as
itself and for what it sets out to do, but also for the psychological peace
of its inhabitants. Most of the guys I wintered with might not agree with me
on this but it did on some level keep the base going, keep us going, give us
the tiniest hint of a sense of purpose. Without the greater umbrella of our
work, I would have struggled hard to justify the imprint we were leaving on
the continent. In fact, I did often struggle with our existence there and came
up with a variety of bluffs to keep me happy. Sometimes I saw myself as a park
warden, other times convinced myself that the science we did had the potential
to be really helpful, more often than not, I settled on the thinking that if
we weren’t there then someone else might be and they could easily be exploiting
the land even more than we were. And anyway, isn’t the whole Antarctic
presence thing just political?
Since getting back I have been approached to consider turning my web diaries
into a book. Initially I didn’t really see the point. They’re on
the web after all and were never meant to be anything other than a way of keeping
in touch with my friends and family as well as recording memories for myself.
As a collection of stories, they might have been fun to read at the time but
I still don’t know exactly what the allure was to people I have never
met. Why did you read and why would you read? Or what would you read? As they
currently stand, they lack something. They lack a lot and are incredibly lopsided.
Most obviously, they don’t tell anyone else’s story and they barely
mention the daily work we did.
I can’t change the bias that they are my experience and mine only. And
I can’t and won’t tell someone else’s story or pretend that
anyone had the same year that I did who was there at the same time. Some people
hated it. Some people were not moved either way. For many, I have no idea what
they thought. We weren’t on summer camp, we didn’t sit around and
discuss out deepest philosophies on a regular basis. We won’t become one
strong cohesive group in the future, one for all and all for one. But we had
a good year. We had a great year. Or rather, I had a great year. And I’m
thankful to every winterer, and summerer, who made it so good.
So I’m a bit stuck. It has been suggested that what I could perhaps add,
and which might provide some glue between the diaries, is some background, some
science. There are a number of grand arguments for this: maybe I could inspire
young people to become scientists or help shake the stereotype of my profession,
maybe people reading the entries might inadvertently learn something about climate
change and remember to turn a light bulb off, once, after reading that one chapter..
maybe maybe maybe… but I don’t think that’s why you read this
far or why you’d buy the book. Or is it? So instead of chasing my tail
I’ve decided to come clean and ask you straight, those of you who have
read this far, why did you and what else would you like to see added? Or, and
be honest now, have they had their time and place and should they be gently
left to the multifaceted archive that is the internet.
I had this very conversation just yesterday, when my friend Ephrat came over
at lunchtime with a tailcoat she’d embroidered for my upcoming wedding. But
today Lindsay has nailed
it with a bile-filled stream-of-consciousness rant which I sympathise with
100%.
I take some solace in the fact that the vast majority of the things that Lindsay
is railing at don’t apply to me. But I don’t kid myself that she wouldn’t include
me in that group anyway. Over the past year I’ve proposed marriage, gone apartment-hunting,
and actually bought a new place on Avenue B and 3rd Street. Before long I’ll
be set up with a master bath and a spare bedroom and a barbecue in the back
yard. This Is Not Punk Rock.
When I moved to New York, I had the time of my life. I partied all night, I
had platinum-blonde hair, I wore ridiculously outrageous clothes which had made
it to Century 21 because no right-minded male would ever buy them. I shared
a basement duplex with a transexual party promoter and too many cats, I subsisted
mainly on $1.50 slices of pizza, and I spent significant amounts of time comparing
prices on Levi’s 501s so that I didn’t spend an extra $4 unneccessarily.
The company I worked for didn’t pay us website people very well, which meant
we couldn’t afford to go to the coffee shop in the lobby every day. We therefore
went out and bought our own coffee machine instead. Which had a habit of overloading
the power system and thereby shutting down all the computers in the office whenever
we turned it on, which was kinda funny.
Over time, things changed. Even as my disposable income rose, my desire to
go out and party all night waned. The process was accelerated when I changed
jobs: the new one entailed getting up very early every morning, which meant
that come Friday I’d normally be passed out on my bed by 7pm.
You can look at what I was writing
in mid-2001 and already it’s clear that I’ve become a privileged yuppie, albeit
one who hates himself for being that. Ephrat told me yesterday that a self-aware
boring yuppie who knows he’s a boring yuppie is better than an oblivious boring
yuppie who, in Lindsay’s terms, "starts believing a person can be interesting
just because they’re famous or rich".
Meanwhile, Ephrat herself – a woman who has dedicated her life to making
the world a better place, and who values her beliefs much more than any job
– even Ephrat is occasionally tormented with worry about her New York
City lifestyle and whether it’s not a little hypocritical. Which means there’s
really no hope for me.
But I’ve been this way for a while, now. My decisions to become a property-owning
married man are maybe not as momentous as they seem, insofar as in many ways
they only ratified my pre-existing condition. I’ve been living in this same
apartment for well over 7 years now, firstly with a succession of roommates,
but then the last one moved out and Michelle moved in. At that point we had
an entire two-bedroom apartment to ourselves: we had attained a comfortable
lifestyle which, once achieved, is very difficult to give up.
I do envy my younger self, and his ability to have a great time without the
need for comfort and luxury. I envy people like Ephrat, or Lindsay, or my sister,
who are still in that place today. I feel a bit like David Byrne, who got
the question right many years ago:
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here?
…
And you may tell yourself
My god!…what have I done?
The easy answer, of course, is also the difficult one. It’s "well, I’ve
grown up". It’s something I never really wanted to do – something,
in fact, I promised myself I wouldn’t do. I never liked grown-ups, I never liked
their smug security and their indulgent attitude towards the likes of me.
And there are some people who are very good at not growing up. Four years ago,
one such person gave a rather self-satisfied speech at the rehearsal dinner
of a friend of mine who was getting married: "Congratulations," he
essentially said, "on growing up even as I never managed to". I jumped
to my friend’s defense, and gave a speech of my own. No, I said, my friend wasn’t
a boring grown-up. He might have a posh job and a beautiful wife, but he was
still the same guy who only a couple of years previously was living in a St
Mark’s tenement with the bath in the kitchen and the toilet down the hall.
Well, I was wrong. My friend had become a grown-up, much as I refused to believe
it, and now I’m becoming one too. Or rather, I’ve been one for a while, and
now I’m admitting it. "Let’s not become what we’ve always hated just yet,"
says Lindsay. "Or is it too much to ask – ever?" Maybe, Lindsay, it
is too much to ask. I wish you luck in your endeavour, but ultimately
it’s not a binary thing: we all fall somewhere on the spectrum, and a Manhattan
lifestyle in a model-infested building with elevators and security guards and
a large-format photograph of a Chinese river in the lobby is not particularly
Punk Rock either.
I’ve long believed that the secret to happiness is not getting what you want,
so much as being happy with what you’ve got. (Don’t worry: that’s about as Deepak
Chopra as I ever get.) That’s why I’m not ambitious. Other people can chase
their dreams; I’m happy as I am. Or that’s the theory, anyway. In practice,
if there isn’t a disconnect in one direction, there’s a disconnect in the other:
what if you don’t want more, but in fact you want less? What if you
have a bizarre love-hate relationship with your disposable income? On the one
hand, I love having the freedom to wander down to the local coffee shop for
a capuccino and a salami sandwich whenever the fancy takes me. But on the other
hand I feel that I don’t really deserve or need that freedom, and I’m perfectly
capable of looking after myself without it.
I certainly have no interest in returning to my lifestyle of eight years ago:
I’ve discovered the wonders of monogamy, for one thing. And in any case I’m
probably getting a bit old for that kind of thing. So maybe I should just be
happy that I was happy then and am happy now.
The way I see it, one always cuts off possibilities over time: it’s part of
what growing older is all about. Youth is about exploring those possibilities,
choosing some and spurning others. When we spurn possibilities in our youth,
we don’t notice it so much, because there are so many left. But eventually you
reach a point where you find yourself with that beautiful house and that beautful
wife and you ask yourself how you got there. And it was never a considered decision,
it was just a concatenation of natural choices. It’s like the present debate
over intelligent design: just because something looks premeditated, doesn’t
mean it is. And just because you didn’t always want to end up here, doesn’t
mean that here isn’t actually a pretty good place to end up.
Bohemianism, for lack of a better term, is a lifestyle and a dream: it’s a
way of living, and a desire to keep on living that way forever. Hugh Macleod’s
cartoon today
is one of his classics: one of the ones he explicates on this
page. Here’s how he describes it:
Spring ’98. I was at a bar, it was late, I was kinda tipsy.
Suddenly I realized that my life hadn’t changed much in the last decade since
leaving college. Work, bars, cartoons, random conversations of a big-city
nature, second-hand bookshops and art films, the occasional bout of random
or regular sex to tide things over etc etc.
It wasn’t as interesting as it used to be. But I hadn’t moved on, really.
And I had no idea where to go next.
Welcome to New York.
For Hugh, the bohemian dream had faded, but the lifestyle remained. For me,
it’s the other way around: the dream remains, but the lifestyle is now long
in my past. I think I’m better off this way round.
The top brass at the New York Times must be ecstatically happy about their
new ombudsman. Far from making use of his privileged position to speak truth
to power, Byron (Barney) Calame seems to think that his job is to defend New
York Times stories to the paper’s readers. Insofar as he does anything at all,
that is: Calame has published precious little in his first three months on the
job.
Last year I noticed that
Daniel Okrent, the first public editor, pretty much gave up on his web journal
after a while. His replacement, Calame, made his first web
journal posting on May 24, and has only put up two substantive entries of
his own since then. Both are milquetoast in tone, and the most
recent one, on August 5, is atrocious.
Calame here puts his $0.02 into the debate
over a controversial "Modern Love" column
from mid-July, in which freelance journalist Helaine Olen fires her nanny after
reading her blog. The nanny responded,
quite convincingly, on that very blog – but Calame refuses to link to
that response. Instead, he simply prints an email from Bart Calendar of Brooklyn,
and thenceforth essentially addresses his entry to Mr Calendar and people like
him, rather than to the really aggrieved party – the nanny/blogger in
question.
The first thing worth noting is that Calame’s entry fails the first rule of
transparency. Calame prints Calendar’s email, and the response from Trip Gabriel
of the New York Times, but nowhere links to the nanny’s own refutation: we get
the impression that we’re eavesdropping on an internal conversation without
really knowing what the substantive allegations are.
Secondly, Calame’s considered conclusion, after weighing all the evidence,
is that… "first-person columns by outside contributors put a special
burden on the editors at The Times". He also adds that "the process
followed by the editors demonstrated as much care about fairness, privacy and
accuracy as was possible." (My emphasis.)
In other words, Calame completely sidesteps the central question – whether
the column was, actually, fair and accurate, and if not, whether the New York
Times should have published it. Instead, he reatreats into process, and decides
that the unnamed Sunday Styles editor in charge of the piece should not be blamed
for any problems with the column.
But what about the author? After all, the New York Times published her. But
it seems that since she’s a freelancer and not a staffer, Calame is not interested
in asking whether she violated any tenets of fairness and accuracy. This is
just plain stupid: readers of the New York Times should not be expected to know
whether a certain column is penned by a staff member or a freelancer, and the
public editor should treat both types of writer equally.
In fact, it’s pretty clear that both Olen and her editor screwed up on this
piece. There’s even a glaring factual error in what is essentially the column’s
nut graf:
Looking at archived entries one afternoon, I read her reactions to an argument
my husband and I had when she was in the house. "I heard a couple fighting
within the confines of couples therapy-speak," she wrote. "I wanted
to say, smack him, bite her."
It went on like that for three ghastly pages.
Three pages? Wow, that’s a really long blog entry attacking her employers.
No wonder the nanny was fired, right?
Wrong. In fact, the entry
is only 362 words long – compared to the 1,700 words of Olen’s column.
If the nanny’s entry was three pages, then Olen’s piece is over 14 "ghastly
pages" long.
And what’s more, the entry isn’t really about Olen at all – it’s basically
a reworking of themes from Sylvia Plath, presented in a manner reminiscent of
Jeanette Winterson or Shelley Jackson. Olen totally distorted the nature of
the blog, and her editor, who also read the blog, was complicit in that.
When it comes to journalistic storms in teacups, everybody has a different
opinion, and I don’t fault Calame for coming down in a different place than
I do when it comes to this particular column. I do, however, fault Calame for
consistently weaselly behaviour. His failure to address the question of whether
Olen’s column was fair and accurate is symptomatic: he has not yet criticised
the Times in any strong terms.
On June 29, he faulted the newspaper for not fully disclosing its ties to Bruce
Ratner, but called it "an unusual lapse," and made sure to point out
that "Mr. Ratner’s project with The Times was mentioned almost every time
he had a substantive role in an article." On May 24, he said that the Times
might have reported on the Downing Street Memo earlier than it did, but that
ultimately what it did was understandable and was "better than the readers
of most other newspapers got".
As for his printed column, which gets many more readers than the web journal,
so far he’s made it into print four times. In the first he simply introduced
himself and blathered on about how he intended to do his job. In the second,
he defended a Times article about the CIA. In the third, he devoted an entire
column to the extremely recondite question of how to caption photos and illustrations.
And in the fourth, he cleared up negative conceptions of the Times which were
raised by an earlier correction.
Thus far, then, both online and offline, Calame has had not a single substantive
criticism to make about the reporting in the New York Times. I simply can’t
believe that any reader of the Times – let alone one who’s paid
to look for errors and mistakes – could possibly be as blasé about
the newspaper’s weak points as Calame appears to be.
There was no Calame column today: despite the fact that he’s meant to appear
every other week, we’ve now gone three weeks without his byline appearing in
the paper. But I can tell you what probably would have appeared if there had
been a column:
"Some readers have complained about Story X. Here’s one such complaint.
I put that complaint to the editor in charge of Story X, and she said something
which I’m going to quote at length. You see? It’s perfectly understandable how
Story X made it into the newspaper. So those of you who ascribe nefarious motives
to the Times are wrong. Love, Barney."
What a wuss.
The New York Times can’t compete with the Wall Street Journal on general business
and finance stories. But it does have aspirations to own one particular beat:
media, that most New York of American businesses. So when Lachlan Murdoch resigned
from News Corporation on Friday morning, it was inevitable that the story
would appear on the front page of Saturday’s Times. What was not inevitable
was that the NYT story would be so bad.
There was a lot of time to write the story. The news was released early on
Friday morning, which means that Richard Siklos had all day to come up with
something good. And he did, if by "good" you mean "long":
his article comes in at some 1,600 words.
But evidently the extra time ended up simply giving Siklos (along with contributors
Geraldine Fabrikant and Katharine Seelye) more room to hang himself.
The angle they ended up taking is simply bizarre: "Murdoch Son Leaves
News Corp., Tossing Succession Into Question" runs the headline. But if
anything the opposite is the case: with Lachlan out of the picture, it’s more
certain than ever that if and when Rupert retires or dies, he’ll be replaced
by Peter Chernin. Maybe, at some distant point in the future, James or even
Lachlan could end up running the company. But right now I’d say there’s less
question over Murdoch’s successor than ever – as you might expect when
one of the contenders takes himself out of the running.
Moving on, it doesn’t take long for the story to descend into incoherent cliché.
"The abruptness of his departure suggested a palace intrigue of the kind
that some of the News Corporation’s media holdings – like The Sun in London
or The New York Post newspapers or the Fox News Channel – would follow with
great relish," we’re told. Huh? Can anybody really imagine the Sun or Fox
News caring in the slightest about this story? No one at either of those places
needs to be gagged by Rupert on this one: it’s simply not a story of mass appeal.
Most Fox News viewers don’t even know who Rupert is, let alone care about Lachlan.
Even more hilariously, New York Times house style seems to dictate that we
pause in the middle of the sentence to be told that the New York Post is a newspaper.
Then we’re told again in the following paragraph, which talks about
"The New York Post newspaper, where he was publisher". The first time
it seems quaint and mildly patronising. The second time, it’s simply farcical.
Indeed, talking of NYT house style, throughout the piece the name of the company
in question is always "the News Corporation", not "News Corporation"
or just plain News Corp, which is what all human beings call it. What the definite
article adds, I have no idea.
Pretty soon, the story lapses into utter narrative incoherence. Here’s a typical
sequence:
In a statement, Lachlan said, "I would like especially to thank my father
for all he has taught me in business and in life."
In the quarter ended March 31, the News Corporation reported earnings of $400
million on sales of $6 billion, compared with earnings of $434 million on
sales of $5.2 billion. Wall Street’s reaction to the news was muted, with
shares of News Corporation down 23 cents, to $17.34 yesterday.
Merrill Lynch media analyst Jessica Reif Cohen said that with Lachlan’s departure
she believes James "becomes the heir-apparent to his father’s empire.
However, this remains a very long-term issue, as we continue to expect Mr.
Chernin will take the helm of the company when Rupert Murdoch retires."
Lachlan Murdoch was raised in the United States but spent six years working
at, and eventually running, the Australian businesses in the 1990’s. His record
in that country, where he was chairman of its newspaper operations, was blemished
by a $475 million (Australian) investment in One.Tel, a telecom company that
collapsed in 2000.
Each paragraph is utterly unrelated to the last: it makes for exhausting reading,
and precious little illumination – News Corp earned $434 million when,
exactly? The previous quarter? The same quarter last year? And when the Times
talks about "Wall Street’s reaction to the news," does it mean the
earnings or the Lachlan news? Indeed, did the earnings even come out yesterday?
The NYT doesn’t even do us the service of telling us what A$475 million is
in US dollars, let alone give us a proper noun for the "its" in "its
newspaper operations" to refer to. It’s all extremely difficult to understand
– and actually impossible to understand, when you get a bit further down
the article to the bit where it tries to explain the family shareholdings.
I could go on like this indefinitely, nit-picking the article apart, but you
get the picture. There is one moment of comedy: we’re told that "while
Lachlan is more pensive, James is more cerebral". Hm. Glad that’s cleared
up.
It’s entirely possible to write a perfectly clear and concise article on this
subject: the Guardian did an admirable
job, and I’m sure most other newspapers did too. But all too often, the
New York Times, with its overlong articles and need to somehow squeeze into
the story every single fact it can lay its hands on, publishes puddings like
this. If the Times really aspires to owning the media beat, it’s going to have
to rise to the occasion when something worthy of the front page comes along.
I’ve already made it very
clear what I think about credit cards: this post is an attempt to flesh
out one theory of how and why they work the way they do – to the benefit
of banks and the detriment of consumers. On the one hand it’s all blindingly
obvious, but on the other it’s not something I’ve really seen spelled out in
quite this way, so I thought I’d take a crack at it.
Most people, if you ask them what their highest-value asset is, might point
to their car, or their heavily-mortgaged house, or something like that. In fact,
their highest-value asset is much more likely to be their job: the present value
of their future income is enormous, and almost certainly worth more than their
home even without a mortgage. But although people don’t really think that way,
they do understand it on a gut level, just as they understand asset-liability
mismatches on a gut level.
What I’m talking about here is the difference between stock and flow, and the
way in which credit card companies take advantage of that difference to make
enormous profits. In financial markets, of course, there’s always someone willing
to convert stock to flow or flow to stock: any given income stream is worth,
today, a certain fixed amount of money. If I have a stock of money, I can convert
it into an income stream by buying bonds, and if I have an income stream there’s
bound to be someone I can sell it to for a fixed amount.
When it comes to personal finance, however, the equivalence breaks down. You
can’t monetize the present value of your future income: I can’t go to some broker
and tell him he can have 10% of all my future earnings in return for an upfront
payment of, say, twice my annual income.
As a result, unable to switch at will between stock and flow, people like to
match their assets to their liabilities. If their main asset is a flow –
their income – then their liabilities should be flow liabilities too.
Why did so many people feel uncomfortable about privatization? Because it took
a stock asset (a national company), sold it, and then applied the proceeds to
flow liabilities – the general fiscal account. It was called "selling
off the family silver" to pay day-to-day expenses: an asset-liability mismatch.
The general idea is that flow liabilities – the monthly bills –
should only be paid with flow assets – monthly income. Selling off assets
to pay the bills is unsustainable.
The genius of credit cards is that they slowly and invidiously turn flow liabilities
into stock liabilities. A credit card is a wonderful way of paying for something
today if you’re not going to get paid until tomorrow. So long as you pay off
your debt at the end of the month, it’s an interest-free loan: free money. It
feels like flow debt rather than stock debt: you use your income over the course
of the month to pay for your purchases over the course of the month.
Credit-card debts increase in small increments: a purchase here, a purchase
there, a finance charge at the bottom of the statement. Any individual purchase
can be justified. Here’s a thought experiment: tell someone that he has a credit
card with a $5,000 credit limit, and let him make purchases until the credit
limit is reached. There’s a good chance he’ll do so, even if the interest rate
on the card is over 20%. Now, take that same person, and offer him a $5,000
loan, unsecured, at an interest rate of 10%, which he can then spend on whatever
he likes. There’s a good chance he’ll refuse, even though going that route would
save him money in the long term compared to going down the credit-card route.
That’s because the second choice is stock debt, and people don’t like stock
debt because they don’t have stock assets. The first choice is flow debt, and
that’s fine, because people do have flow assets – their income.
What’s more, people always underestimate their future expenditures. They’ll
buy something now, justifying it with the idea that they’ll spend less next
month – something they rarely do. Most people who max out their credit
cards don’t intend to max out their credit cards. It just happens, almost while
they’re not watching. That’s another reason why our thought-experiment guy will
refuse the $5,000 loan: even if he understands that it would work out cheaper
than a $5,000 credit-card balance, he doesn’t think he’d ever max out a $5,000
credit card. A loan carries debt service whether it’s spent or not, so in fact
it’s rational to take the credit card rather than the loan if you think you
won’t carry much of a balance on it.
But anyone who’s ever got a credit card bill, whether they’ve paid it off in
full or not, has suffered a certain amount of cognitive disconnect between the
large number at the bottom of the bill and the seemingly small numbers which
constitute it. How could a series of individually small transactions add up
to such a huge amount? When you’re out there spending, it really doesn’t seem
that big. But when the bill arrives, suddenly those flow transactions –
day-to-day monthly expenses – have been transmogrified into a whopping
great big stock of debt.
That’s why, individuals would be much better off if they took out loans to
pay their expenses than if they borrowed on their credit cards. (They’d be better
off still living within their means, of course.) But loans are large, up-front,
stock transactions. They can be justified in exceptional cases, such as buying
a house or a car, or starting up a business. But people won’t take out a loan
to pay a restaurant bill, because they’ll be paying off the loan long after
the asset they’ve bought with it has been literally flushed down the toilet.
What’s more, any fool can see that if you need to take out a loan to pay a
restaurant bill, you shouldn’t be eating at that restaurant. Increasing your
stock of debt for the sake of a flow transaction like eating out is a classic
asset-liability mismatch. And yet people pay for their meals on their credit
cards the whole time, and, as often as not, fail to pay those credit cards off
in full every month. To all intents and purposes, they’ve borrowed the money
for the meal, and they’re paying interest on it at exorbitant rates.
Credit cards, then, are a wonderful way for banks to help consumers delude
themselves that they’re living within their means. Most people who carry a revolving
balance on their credit cards are simply spending more than they’re earning,
month in and month out. It’s unsustainable, but the existence of their credit
cards lets them get away with it for a much longer time than if they had to
justify their expenditures to their bank manager. The key hurdle becomes not
"can I pay my entire bill off in full at the end of each month", but
rather "can I pay the minimum amount at the end of each month". The
answer to the second question is nearly always yes – until you’re in a
hole of enormous magnitude.
Eventually, this entire edifice of credit-card debt could come crashing down
onto the banks, causing them as much harm as it’s presently causing consumers.
For the time being, however, they’re making billions from it. If that annoys
you, you can do your bit. Pay off all your credit cards with a loan –
one secured on your home, if necessary – and always pay them off in full
every month from here on in. Otherwise you’re just pissing your money away.
I’ve just got back from London, after an absence of about a year in which time
I bought a New York City apartment. I don’t know if that’s why, but this time
was my first visit ever where I didn’t feel in some sense that London was home.
It’s a great city, and I still love it – but after almost 9 years’ absence,
I feel more like a visitor than a Londoner when I’m there.
When I left, London didn’t even have a mayor – now he’s been re-elected,
by a reasonably
comfortable margin. I think he’s done a great job: the congestion charge
was sheer genius, backed up with a Giuliani-like determination to push it through
in the face of enormous inertia. And Ken’s not resting on his laurels: he’s
upped the charge to £8 from £5, and is likely both to raise it again
and to extend the congestion area to include a large chunk of Kensington and
Chelsea.
At these sort of levels (£8 is $14 at today’s exchange rate), people
only drive in to central London when they really need to. Ken also seems to
have tweaked the timings on London traffic lights so that they stay on red for
longer than they used to, with more time given over for pedestrians instead.
At the same time, he’s invested heavily in the bus system, which is clean, cheap
and efficient. When I lived in London, I almost never took buses; now, when
I visit, I take them the whole time.
The upshot is that the number of cars in central London is down dramatically,
while the number of people taking buses is increasing
impressively. Bus mileage is at its highest point since 1957, and ridership
grew more than 38 per cent between 2000 and 2005. Last year there were 1.8 billion
passenger trips on buses – by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that
equates to easily tens of millions of car journeys through central London which
Ken has stopped from happening. In the process, he’s made life much nicer for
anybody wanting to get around the capital.
Traffic is even lighter, it feels, at the weekends, when the congestion charge
is not in force: it really seems as though Ken has changed Londoners’ habits,
and helped them to move away from a reliance on their cars.
Of course, the vast majority of people not taking a car are taking public transport
instead, which is why the attacks of July 7 were so particularly nasty. In nearly
every way, however, the bombings didn’t really change anything, which is wonderful.
I was in London for the rally afterwards, and for the very touching 2-minute
silence the following Thursday – Londoners were certainly hit hard by
what happened. But to their eternal credit, they didn’t react by lashing out
at anybody, and they bore the disruption with stoicism and general good humour.
I simply can’t imagine New Yorkers reacting the same way. If 50 people were
killed by suicide bombers in the subway here, all manner of chaos would probably
ensue, and I daresay underground ridership would fall noticeably for many months
before a lot of people felt safe getting on a subway train again.
Londoners even coped well with what to me was an extremely worrying turn of
events: the attempt at a second suite of bombings, two weeks after the first.
Go back to those buses: on average, the amount of time one should expect to
wait for a bus to arrive is equal to the amount of time one has already been
waiting. Terrorist attacks are the same. In the immediate aftermath of September
11, we all feared that another attack was imminent. Today, almost four years
later, we – quite rationally – feel safer. London, similarly, had
gone a long time without any terrorist incident, and I very much hoped that
July 7 would be the last attack for many years. The fact that the peace lasted
only two weeks is very bad news: it implies that similar attacks might well
come sooner rather than later.
Clearly, the Metropolitan Police got even more worried than I did, since the
following day they ended up pumping eight bullets into the head of a perfectly
innocent Brazilian chap whose main mistake was living in the same block of flats
as – well, we don’t know, but in any case it was a block of flats which
the police were interested in.
I do understand that if you’re pointing a gun at (a) a suicide bomber who is
(b) armed and (c) capable of exploding himself and killing any number of people
around him, it makes sense to kill him. I also understand that in the heat of
a chase and in a situation requiring split-second decisions, no one can make
the right decision every time. But. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
that there have been seven incidents like the one on July 21 just since July
7: that’s one every 65 hours on average. No shoot-to-kill policy should come
into play every 65 hours: that’s a guarantee that it won’t be very long until
a tragic mistake like this one is made.
I was horrified at the news that the executed man was innocent: the idea of
shooting someone in cold blood like that seemed very unBritish. My father said
that the police kill innocent people all the time in places like New York, but
I don’t think that’s true. I can’t think of any case here since Bloomberg was
elected and appointed Ray Kelly as police commissioner – I’d be very interested
to hear if there has been one. In fact, I’d love to see numbers on how many
people were killed by NYPD cops altogether during the Bloomberg administration.
In any case, shooting suspects repeatedly in the head without any intelligence
as to their identity is a desperate act of a police force which does not seem
to be in control of the situation, and I suspect, after reading William Finnegan’s
article about the NYPD in last week’s New Yorker, that it wouldn’t happen here.
Not that I want to find out.
But there was a big difference between 9/11 and 7/7, and not simply that of
scale. 9/11 was an attack on America, and on New York, and, I suppose, on the
Free World. "We are all Americans now" and all that. 7/7, by contrast,
felt much more like an attack on Londoners than on London. London itself got
back to relatively normal relatively quickly: the carnage and horror was mostly
hidden away underground. The long-term effects of 7/7 will be felt mostly in
the lives of hundreds of people which have been ruined; the long-term effects
of 9/11 are, by contrast, global.
I feel that now New York is less at risk from a terrorist attack than London
is. Say what you like
about the silliness of randomly inspecting bags on the New York subway: for
terrorists planning an attack on a major city, where any major city will do,
New York must now be pretty far down their list. New Yorkers might hit New York,
but I just don’t think New York has militant Islamist youth in the way that
England does. For a militant Islamist Englishman, London is the obvious target
– and the events of the past few weeks are proof that there is a significant
number of such men, willing to explode both themselves and their compatriots.
Yet at the same time London still felt friendlier and more vibrant, in many
ways, than New York. It’s certainly not as convenient a place to live: I spent
£30 on one cab ride from Waterloo to Dulwich, and London’s low-rise nature
means that you’re always a longer walk from any urban amenity than you’re likely
to be in NYC. But Brixton feels wonderfully alive – more so than ever,
really – and is even yuppifying in a very multiethnic way, with an incredibly
good new modern Caribbean restaurant called Moca
which I would heartily recommend to everyone. Just down the road, in Brockwell
Park, is the fabulous lido – a
hugely enjoyable and varied day could easily be spent soaking up reggae performances
in the park, swimming in the pool, occasionally retreating to the calm of the
walled garden at the top of the hill, and never even leaving the confines of
one park in a relatively forgotten corner of south London.
London’s one of those rarities: a city which is at its best in the summer.
The festivals, the bank holidays, the Proms, the Carnival, the precious days
of wonderful weather – no wonder plane tickets are so expensive. I went
there at a fraught and trying time, and still left loving the city, admiring
its inhabitants, and grinning inwardly every time I saw an ad for the Toyota
Prius saying that Ken Livingstone had decided to waive the congestion charge
for electric cars. Once, on a bus going through Knightsbridge, a fellow passenger
and I exchanged glances as a very large and extremely loud American family "joked"
around on the upper deck of the bus, annoying everyone but themselves. "Those
Americans, what can you do" was the unspoken message we were sending each
other: "we Londoners just have to grin and bear it". But I felt like
a bit of a fraud: I’m not a Londoner any more, and in fact I’m a New Yorker,
which almost (but not quite) qualifies me as being an American myself.
So I come back from wonderful homestyle
food on Rivington Street to wonderful
homestyle food on Rivington Street, and I’m happy with the place I’ve ended
up. I’ll miss London, especially in the summer, but I still think that the corner
of Avenue B and 3rd Street is the best possible place in the world to live.
The continual changing scenery can be slightly overwhelming at times. Mostly,
as I say to everyone, it’s like I’ve been gone for 10 minutes. Not
even ten days to the Med with holiday snaps to prove. Ten minutes or a really
long and pleasant coma.
As expected, daily life and daily people have changed very little and I slipped
back into a routine of work and play like I’d never left it. I have however
met two eight-month old humanoids who hadn’t even been conceived before
I left and found good friends in new homes without a moving box in sight. My
dad is no longer in his job and has retired via a fairly nasty legal case, two
close family friends have been through cancer therapy and recovered, my brother
has got engaged and bought an apartment. These are all events that I would like
to think I would have been more of a support through had I been here.
Instead, I have been living in a wonderfully simple bubble. One life. Time
moving at exactly the speed it’s meant to. Or rather, people moving at
exactly the speed of Time. Back in the ‘Real World’ (as locals like
to call it), we cram in far too much and rarely appreciate the clouds. It’s
obvious, of course, but all this juggling is exhausting.
I don’t even mean high-pressured jet setting or living the high life.
Kensington-Victoria-Dulwich-Brixton-London Bridge-South Bank confused me enough.
We climb into a transport time capsule and emerge in a whole new place, scenery,
and social dynamic. Add to that the mobile phone that instantly transports you
to some entirely other place, and I feel torn apart. At the pub I meet distant
friends who I haven’t seen for eight years coupled with those I have thought
of regularly during the last year. This weekend I have met up with people from
seven very different but fundamental times in my life. Most Londoners do this
happily within a day, every day. So, the multiplicity of our lives, that is
something, though known, that has surprised me. I can do it… but I don’t
particularly enjoy it.
Other things I have noticed, in the 10% of the time that everything isn’t
really normal.
ex-winterers report the same).
people-I-don’t-know-but-should-show-an-interest-in (i.e. friends of
friends) is a disaster.
freedom.
door is liberating.
twenty three amusing (to me) diversions and at the end there is generally
no punch line. Or point.
going to milk this bubble for as long as I can.
Ecco have both led to pain. Tell me, is it my foot breaking the shoe in or
the shoe, the foot?
that matter.
It’s true: there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.
At the end of May, the US Congress passed the Stop Counterfeiting in Manufactured Goods Act. Faced with a huge and growing problem, the Congress acted decisively: simple possession of counterfeit labels can now mean the confiscation of an entire factory, even if the factory is mainly used for entirely legitimate purposes.
But just how huge is this problem? Look at the act itself. Right at the beginning, under “Findings”, we’re told that
(2) the U.S. Customs Service and Border Protection estimates that counterfeiting costs the U.S. $200 billion annually.
When I saw this, I was surprised. That $200 billion number looked suspiciously similar to the basis for New York Comptroller Bill Thompson’s bogus statistics. This time, however, there was a cited source for it, so I called up the Customs Service.
I spoke to a very friendly spokeswoman called Erlinda Byrd, who told me that Customs didn’t compile such numbers at all: she had no idea how their name wound up getting attached to that figure in federal legislation.
So I determined to find out how big the counterfeiting problem really is. Virtually any article you read on the subject will have some language about how counterfeiting “is estimated to cost” or “is believed to be” $200 billion or $500 billion or some other number each year. Most of the time, there’s no indication at all of who is doing the estimating or the believing. I made it my job to find out where these numbers came from, and whether they made any sense.
There’s certainly no shortage of experts in this field. I spoke to Peter Lowe, the assistant director of the Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau, which is part of the International Chamber of Commerce. He reckoned that the numbers probably came from an estimate that counterfeiting accounted for between 5% and 7% of world trade; the source of the 5-7% number itself, however, he said, was “lost in the mists of time”. Like most people I spoke to, Lowe was wholly upfront with me: “I don’t know what the source of that was, to be honest,” he said, “but it’s widely bandied around: it’s passed into anti-counterfeiting folklore.”
I spoke to Steven Gursky, a lawyer who is a board member of the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, and who runs the intellectual property practice at the law firm of Dreier LLP. “People seem to have gotten very comfortable with the number of $200 billion: I’ve heard it over and over again,” he said. Gursky was a source of anecdotal numbers. “If one company can sell $30 million of fake goods to one customer in one year, that’s why the number doesn’t shock me,” he said. After all, the $30 million was just in the clothing industry: there’s also auto parts and shaving blades and batteries, and airplane parts and baby formula and pharmaceuticals and all manner of other things which are commonly faked.
I spoke to Tim Trainer, who used to run the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, and who now runs the Global Intellectual Property Strategy Center. He said that “trying to gauge illegal conduct is impossible,” but that you could at least make a stab at getting some numbers by looking at customs seizures and extrapolating from there.
I spoke to Ruth Orchard, director general of the Anti-Counterfeiting Group, which actually went to far as to commission a couple of reports from the CEBR looking at the economic impact of counterfeiting.
And yet, after talking to all of these experts and reading (or at least skimming) hundreds of pages of reports in a search for any kind of hard data or even backed-up estimates, I found pretty much nothing.
There’s lots of propaganda out there, of course. The IACC helped to sponsor a Harpers Bazaar event on counterfeiting, and gave attendees a handout entitled “Fakes by the Numbers”. It started by saying that estimated annual sales in counterfeit products worldwide are $500 billion, and even borrowed from Bill Thompson’s report, juicing it up even further by saying that $1 billion is “the minimum estimated annual loss in tax revenues in New York City due to counterfeiting”.
The ACG has its own factsheet, which says that “in the US, the FBI estimates losses to counterfeiting at US$200-250 billion a year”, and even gets industry-specific: “The Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association (MEMA) conducted a survey indicating that the global automotive industry loses US$12 billion to counterfeiting, thereby resulting in the loss of 750,000 jobs”. But if you look at the MEMA publication, you’ll see that there was no survey: instead, it cites a 1997 Federal Trade Commission report to back up the $12 billion number. The 750,000 number is nowhere to be found – which is unsurprising, since it’s ludicrous on its face.
This is a pattern: every time you think you’re getting one step closer to a real survey, or real data, the purported source of the information turns out simply to be citing someone else. For instance, the International Chamber of Commerce has a pretty chart on page 144 of its International Anti-Counterfeiting Directory, showing the value of trade in counterfeits exceeding $350 billion as world trade in general increases. But really it’s just a chart of world trade, shown once at the 100% level and once at the 6% level. Reverting back to that annoying passive voice, the caption for the chart simply says that “the overall level of counterfeiting in the world today is generally estimated at 5-7 per cent of world trade”.
Insofar as anybody ever cites a source for the 5-7% figure, it’s an OECD report from 1998 entitled “The Economic Impact of Counterfeiting”. This is a very comprehensive report, but it never made an attempt to quantify the size of the problem. Instead, it reverted to the same old passive voice:
The overall costs of counterfeiting in the world today are normally estimated to be 5-7 per cent of world trade. There is no substantial aggregated data to support the high percentages, but the figures are now accepted and used to illustrate the extent of the counterfeiting problem.
In other words, a report which admits there’s no data behind the percentages, and even goes so far as to call them high, is the most commonly cited source for those very percentages.
The report then gets positively funny:
In 1997, the Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau (CIB) of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) calculated the nominal value of the estimated share of counterfeit goods as a percentage of world trade. They used aggregated data on total world trade provided by the World Trade Organisation and took the general assumption that counterfeiting has increased from 3 per cent in 1990 to more than 5 per cent in 1995.
In other words, multiplying one number by 3% and another number by 5% counts as a “calculation”. Well, I just calculated, in that case, that US chocolate consumption has doubled in the past year, since it was 2% of GDP a year ago and is 4% of GDP now. The point is that unless those percentages have any kind of factual basis, they’re at best meaningless and at worst outright lies.
The most footnote-rich report comes from the IACC, in a white paper(I have a revised version, which I can’t find online) entitled “The negative consequences of international intellectual property theft: Economic harm, threats to the public health and safety, and links to organized crime and terrorist organizations”. This report takes the OECD technique one further:
In 1982, the International Trade Commission estimated losses from counterfeiting and piracy at $5.5 billion. In 1988, losses were estimated at $60 billion. In 1996, damage to the United States economy was estimated at $200 billion.
Bank robberies, by contrast, generally involve less than $70 million per year, but seem to garner more public attention and law enforcement resources.
This astonishing rise from $5.5 billion in 1982 to $200 billion in 1996 says nothing about an increase in counterfeiting, of course: it simply shows an increase in the kind of numbers that pressure groups like the IACC are willing to put out with a straight face in an attempt to get attention.
But let’s unpack what the IACC is saying here: basically, take all the money that US banks lose in bank robberies in one year. Multiply that by a factor of 50, and that’s what US businesses lose to counterfeiting in a week. We’re told that the average bank robbery garners $4,587: you’d need to pull 21,000 of those an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, to get up to $200 billion a year. Is anybody scratching their head here and saying “that can’t be true”? Not that I can see.
The good thing about the IACC report is that it’s footnote-heavy; the bad thing is that it seems to be entirely indiscrimiate in what it footnotes. There’s lots of unsupported Congressional testimony, alongside press releases and magazine articles: it’s very hard to find solid research amongst the fluff. But look hard enough and you will find one glimmer of hope: a CEBR report written for the European Commission entitled “Counting Counterfeits”.
When you read the report, you realise that it’s actually a report about how one might go about quantifying the extent of counterfeiting, were one so inclined, and how much such an exercise would cost. Nevertheless, the report does cite another CEBR report, which found that “the trade in counterfeits in just four industries reduces EU gross domestic product by €8 billion per annum and costs 17,000 jobs.” Note that the €8 billion number, which seems much more solidly-grounded than most other numbers we’ve been looking at, never seems to get cited. Could that be because it’s so much lower than the other numbers we’ve been looking at?
I very much wanted to read this report with the €8 billion figure. Finally, I thought, I could point to some real statistics. Even if €8 billion is a lot lower than $200 billion, it’s still a very large number, and I could at least get a vague idea of how much that $200 billion number might be exaggerated.
The CEBR, however, didn’t want to send me the report: it was privately commissioned by the ACG in London. So I phoned up the ACG, and they were kind enough to send me a copy. (It’s not available online.) And indeed, at first glance, this was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. It’s full of lots of mathematical equations: here, for example is the page where the CEBR shows how it’s calculating revenue loss.
The conclusions of the study are, therefore, quite precise. The clothing and footwear industry, it finds, loses €7.581 billion each year in revenues and €1.266 billion each year in profits; similar calculations are made for the perfumes and cosmetics industry, the toys and sports equipment industry, and the pharmaceutical industry.
And yet. Hidden behind all that four-significant-figures accuracy, what do we find?
Using data obtained on the likely scale of counterfeiting in each industry from the ACG for the UK and Association des Industries de Marque (AIM) for the remainder of the EU, the model was used to estimate…
In other words, the CEBR built a hugely complex model, and then what did they feed in? Data from the very people who were commissioning the reports. Every number in the report is derived from Table A1.1 in the report, which I reproduce in full below:
Table A1.1 ACG and AIM Estimates of the Proportion of Counterfeit Goods
| Sector | ACG/AIM |
| Clothing and Footwear | 11 |
| Perfume and Toiletries | 10 |
| Toys and Sports | 12 |
| Pharmaceuticals | 6 |
That’s it. Four numbers, representing estimates of the proportion of each industry which is represented by counterfeit goods. Four numbers, it’s worth noting, which seem, on their face, to be absurdly high. This report was written five years ago; even today, with people ordering drugs off the internet in enormous quantities, no one estimates pharmaceutical counterfeiting in developed economies to be more than 1% of the market. Yet the CEBR, in estimating the cost of counterfeit pharmaceuticals to the EU economy, unblinkingly swallows an assertion that counterfeits make up fully 6% of the European market.
Nowhere in the report is there any hint of how these numbers were arrived at, and nowhere do the authors ask themselves whether the numbers are plausible. Nowhere are we given any plausible reason to believe – or, indeed, any reason to believe at all – that counterfeits account for fully 12% of the European market in toys and sports equipment.
As they say in computing, GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. The €8 billion figure which looked so promising turns out to be based on estimated numbers which are simply implausible on their face, numbers which no one seems to want to defend.
What else is there? If we look across the pond, we find the UK Patent Office’s Annual Enforcement Report. Scroll down to page 51, and you’ll find a table showing the value of counterfeit goods seized by the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
According to the PSNI, they seized 40,000 videos and DVDs worth £2,000,000, 80,500 music CDs and cassettes worth £1,800,000, and 5,000 pieces of computer software worth £450,000. Do you detect a pattern here? Apparently counterfeit CDs are worth on average £22.36 (over $40); counterfeit DVDs and videos are worth on average £50 (over $90); and counterfeit pieces of software are worth on average £90 (over $160).
Clearly, no one ever pays $40 for a counterfeit CD or $90 for a bootleg DVD – nor, I hazard, are people likely to pay $550 for a counterfeit power tool. So the PSNI valuations are way out of whack – I can’t imagine how they were arrived at. No wonder that, later in the report, we’re told that “we require a settled classification system for products and more robust valuation procedures”.
Indeed, if you keep on going to page 110, you’ll find a table of seizures alongside what is more reasonably put as their “retail value” – which is clearly an estimate not of what the counterfeits are worth on the street, but rather of the retail value of the things being copied. Some things, however, aren’t sold at retail, like rolls of counterfeit labels and tags. Those simply get valued at £10 each – that’s per label, not per roll.
These kind of valuations are great at generating enormous and scary headline numbers, but it’s hard to see how they reflect any kind of reality. So where does that leave us? Back where we started, with Erlinda Byrd at US Customs. She emailed me some numbers which can also be found here, showing that US customs seized $138,767,885 worth of counterfeit goods in 2004.
A lot of people I spoke to thought that the counterfeiting statistics were extrapolated from these customs figures – which I do trust, or at least trust more than any other numbers out there. According to another Customs spokesman, Barry Morrissey, Customs carefully examines the paperwork and manifests for every cargo shipment into the US. If there’s anything suspicious, the shipments can be x-rayed (finding, perhaps, that what is meant to be golf clubs is actually polo shirts), or physically inspected. Nationally, about 8% of cargo shipments coming into the country are physically inspected. If we assume that customs seizures account for 8% of all counterfeits entering the country, then that would put the value of counterfeits successfully imported into the US each year at about $1.6 billion.
Compare that extrapolated $1.6 billion figure to the $287 billion that New York’s Thompson values the counterfeit market at nationally: there’s simply no way that home-grown counterfeits can make up the difference. It’s entirely plausible that Thompson’s estimate is two full orders of magnitude too large – you could take just 1% of his number and it could still be an exaggeration of the truth. Of course, we can’t know for sure, because there simply aren’t any remotely reliable counterfeiting statistics out there.
The underlying problem is that anti-counterfeiting groups know full well that they can put out any numbers they like with utter impunity: there aren’t any pro-counterfeiting groups who are going to take issue with their numbers. Meanwhile, journalists and politicians are sheep who will uncritically parrot any number that is thrown at them.
More to the point, however, it’s now too late to start generating fact-based, reliable numbers. The OECD, it is rumoured, may or may not be embarking on a survey trying to quantify the effects of counterfeiting. But if it does, and the numbers bear any relation to reality, they’re hardly going to be trumpeted by groups such as the IACC and the ACG. All their rhetoric is tied up in the idea that counterfeiting is growing fast – something which I don’t doubt.
But world trade probably reached$7.9 trillion in 2004, and 7% of that is $475 billion. A lot of people have been using the 7% of world trade number as the basis for their calculations, which means that if the OECD comes up with a value for global trade in counterfeits which isn’t in the hundreds of billions of dollars, it will look as though the number has fallen substantially. And that’s a message which nobody wants to send.
The upshot is that a lie has circled the world hundreds of times before the truth has even found its boots, let alone thought about putting them on. The contest between the truth and the lie is so incredibly unequal that the truth will never win: it’s now far to late for that. This isn’t a sexy story, and it’s hard to see how the lie is causing much, if any, harm. But just bear it in mind next time you see seemingly authoritative statistics being bandied around by journalists or politicians. There’s a good chance they’re utter bullshit.
UK charity Action Aid has been getting quite a bit of press
today with its report
that only one-third of G7 overseas development assistance (ODA) is "real"
aid. The rest, they say, is "phantom aid". (If you’re interested,
the full report is here,
in PDF format.)
The thing that struck me about the report was where Action Aid said that debt
relief counts as "phantom aid". I think that debt relief is hugely
important for poverty reduction, and so I was rather angry abou that, especially
since Action Aid defines "phantom aid" as "aid which may have
achieved other goals, but did not help to fight poverty".
There are many, many things to take issue with in the Action Aid report –
for instance, since only 30% of the world’s poor live in middle-income countries,
Action Aid counts any aid to those countries beyond 30% of the total budget
as "phantom aid". This is profoundly silly: poverty-reduction programs
are, if anything, more effective in middle-income countries, because
those countries have better institutions.
But let’s stick with debt relief. Consider a highly-indebted country with a
poverty problem. It needs to spend money on providing clean water to its poor,
but it also needs to spend money on debt service. In this situation, by far
the most efficient way for a foreign government to get clean water to the people
who need it is to simply forgive that country’s debts. All the transaction costs
of the foreign government trying to provide the water itself – from consultants
to bureaucratic procurement procedures – disappear at a stroke. The local
government, which is certainly better placed to provide water than the foreign
government is, gets budget money freed up to be spent where it’s needed.
The local government can also, with its newfound creditworthiness, start to
finance projects which are needed for the long-term health and growth of the
nation, like building roads or ports. What’s more, it can quite easily reallocate
money where it’s needed when it’s needed, something a foreign government would
find almost impossible.
Now, debt relief on its own does not necessarily decrease poverty. If the money
saved in debt service is spent instead on private jets for the president and
kickbacks to his buddies, then the debt forgiveness will have done no good at
all. That’s one reason why the HIPC
program was so slow to get off the ground: it took a long time for governments
to prove that they were worthy of it. But when it’s done right, debt relief
is pretty much the most efficient way of delivering aid imaginable. Just think
of the costs involved with the average World Bank poverty reduction program,
complete with environmental impact assessments and whatnot, compared to the
cost of a local government simply going out and doing what is needed for its
poorest citizens. So I’m pretty upset that Action Aid simply declares that no
debt relief helps to fight poverty.
Then, however, I read the Action Aid report, and it does make some good points.
Here’s what it says:
All debt relief provided since 2002 has been counted as part of ODA,
despite the fact that the Monterrey Consensus agreed that year explicitly
stated that aid increases should be additional to debt relief.
Irrelevant. While the Monterrey Consensus never said that
debt relief should be excluded from ODA budgets, it did set a target for ODA
which explicitly excluded debt relief. To no one’s great surprise, many countries
are a very long way from reaching that target, even when you include
debt relief. But debt relief is a type of aid, and it is therefore perfectly
reasonable to consider it ODA. If Action Aid wants to castigate countries for
not meeting their Monterrey Consensus goals, that’s fine. But it does not mean
that debt relief is "phantom aid".
Cancelled debt stock – the principal and interest on the loan –
are counted as ODA in the year in which the relief is agreed, even though
any benefits are felt over several years.
Arguable. On its face, this is quite a strong argument. Let’s
say that Freedonia is paying $5 million a year on $100 million of debt, and
that Belgium then decides to forgive that debt. Suddenly, Belgium’s ODA expenditure
for that year has gone up by more than $100 million, while the amount of cashflow
freed up for poverty reduction is a mere $5 million. Clearly, Freedonia would
have been better off simply taking the $100 million from Belgium, using $5 million
of it to service the debt, and spending the rest on poverty reduction.
On the other hand, there are two reasons why debt relief is accounted for this
way. The main one is that this is simply the way that budgets in the OECD work.
Loans are assets, and accounted for as such. When a loan is written off, that’s
a line item in the country’s budget, and the full amount of money needs to be
found for it immediately.
Furthermore, Freedonia gets more than just a cashflow benefit from the write-off:
it also gets a significant decrease in its indebtedness. Without a write-off,
Freedonia will simply continue to pay interest on its loans and never pay down
the principal. With the write-off, Freedonia’s debt burden falls substantially,
making the country’s economy more stable and attractive to investors.
These figures exaggerate the actual transfer being made to poor countries
because debt relief is valued at its full nominal value. Much of the debt
relief provided to poor countries simply closes the gap between what countries
were scheduled to repay and what they actually were able to repay, and has
often done little to relieve budgetary pressure on poor countries.
Fair. If Belgium had already agreed that Freedonia need only
pay $1 million a year on its debt, then claiming over $100 million in ODA upon
forgiveness seems even more exaggerated. Freedonia gets ony $1 million a year
in immediate cashflow benefits, while Belgium gets to crow about its enormous
ODA budget. There’s no way that Belgium’s action can be spun as meaning $100
million’s worth of poverty reduction.
What’s more, Action Aid shows that total debt service costs, especially in HIPC
countries, have actually been rising, rather than falling, even as large chunks
of their debt have been forgiven. It’s good that the debt has been forgiven,
of course. But without cashflow benefits, it’s not clear that there’s been much
poverty reduction as a result. And it certainly seems unlikely that even a small
fraction of the $9.4 billion cancelled in 2003 made its way to direct poverty-reduction
programs.
In the UK, debt cancellation has been presented as additional to aid
spending. This is double counting.
Unfair.The UK, as far as I know, has been quite upfront about
its debt relief activities and their place within the ODA budget. No one’s counted
debt relief on its own and then added it to an ODA total which already includes
it. Therefore, no double counting. The Action Aid methodology says that all
debt relief is "phantom aid", not just debt relief which is double-counted.
Funding debt relief from aid budgets is not only misleading. It also
risks penalising countries that are not indebted, as aid resources are diverted
towards heavily indebted countries. It also violates the principle that creditors
should carry some of the cost of debt relief, given the role that reckless
lending has played in the debt crisis, and the fact that much of the initial
lending was not supporting development-related expenditures.
Arguable. While it might be fair to include debt
relief within an ODA budget, it’s not fair to fund debt relief
with an ODA budget – and I daresay more than one country has
been doing that of late. In other words, certain countries might have spent
money directly on poverty reduction which they allocated instead to debt relief.
That’s a bad thing. The big question is the extent to which that behaviour goes
on, and since it’s all based on a hypothetical – "how big would your
ODA budget have been had you not done the debt relief?" – it’s very
difficult to answer.
Poor countries without debt have not necessarily been penalised – that’s
a strong word – but it’s true they haven’t had the same amount of attention
paid to them that the HIPC countries have had.
As for the "principle that creditors should carry some of the cost of debt
relief", aren’t the creditors carrying all of the cost of debt
relief? If they’re not, who is? I think I understand what Action Aid is trying
to say here, but it’s a very weak argument indeed.
Weirdly, after running through its arguments, Action Aid concedes my main point:
Debt relief can be a particularly effective form of resource transfer,
as it is untied, stable, predictable and flexible.
Well, exactly! The only argument seems to be whether it belongs in ODA budgets
– and if it does turn up there, whether it is "phantom aid".
My view is that any effective, stable, predictable and flexible form of resource
transfer is most definitely foreign aid, and not phantom aid.
I think the biggest problem with the Action Aid report is that there’s an unspoken
assumption running throughout it that we generally think that the amount of
poverty reduction is proportional to the amount of money that is spent on poverty
reduction. Action Aid gets halfway to the truth of the matter: that some parts
of the broad global poverty reduction program are much less cost-effective than
others. But the charity also confuses the matter by trying to draw a bright
clear line between "real aid" and "phantom aid".
In fact, all aid is useful to some degree, and there is no such bright clear
line. Countries spend money on ODA for many reasons, and some of that money
is always going to be more cost-effective, in terms of poverty reduction, than
other chunks of that money. The problem is that Action Aid spends a large amount
of space in the report comparing the amount actually spent on aid to the amount
that it thinks should be spent on aid. It’s confusing means (money) with ends
(poverty reduction).
In fact, there’s no formula tying a certain number of billions of dollars to
a certain number of lives brought out of poverty. Action Aid shouldn’t be concentrating
on dollars, it should be concentrating on people. Scaring up a "scandal"
(cf the Guardian headline) over "phantom aid" doesn’t achieve that
in the slightest – if anything it reduces pressure on governments to spend
more and do more. After all, if two-thirds of the money is wasted, what’s the
point of spending the money at all?
