tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4425456162403117852024-03-13T11:34:10.368+11:00The Lost ColophonRichard Thwaites reviews books that promise something new on politics, history or interesting people.RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-25375157614413994552013-08-01T10:46:00.000+10:002013-08-01T10:46:00.939+10:00Praise to the Cult of Speculation - at whose expense?
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>THE PHYSICS OF </strong><st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on"><strong>WALL STREET</strong></st1:address></st1:street><strong>: </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>A Brief History of
Predicting the Unpredictable, </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>by James Owen Weatherall, Scribe, 286pp. </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><em>Reviewed: 27 July 2013</em></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The genius of the capitalist system is that it provides an orderly, large-scale means for individuals and groups to pool their savings and direct them to new investment on a scale beyond the scope of any individual investor. It also provides the means by which the risks of investment can be spread across a wide range of individuals, balanced against the opportunity for profit.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">But for this beneficial process to continue, there must be a general trust that it works for mutual benefit. If individuals, or investment managers representing them, lose faith that the opportunity for profit is in reasonable balance with the risk of loss, they will not put their hard-earned savings into the pool, but instead seek lower risks in cash or perhaps bricks and mortar real estate. With these choices, they reduce the pool of capital available for investment in risky but genuinely productive activity.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">When the $60million-salaried head of Goldman Sachs investment house travels the world complaining that investors have "lost their appetite for risk", who does he hold responsible?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Nobody who reads <em>The Physics of Wall Street</em> could continue to believe that the risk and reward of equities and financial instrument investments are in balance for the passive investor. Clever speculation techniques, supported by massive technological advantage and availability of massively liquid financial resources, ensure that the superior speculators will always do better in creaming the profit and evading the risk. Where else would the $60million salaries and bonuses be coming from?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The daily value of your superannuation or
other financial investments is now determined by algorithms and strategies that
arise from studies of casino gambling, chaos theory, the survival of migrating
salmon and earthquake prediction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Any factual economic news about interest
rates, employment figures or exchange rates is no more than the latest roll of
the dice in a game where the accumulated savings of people and enterprises are
predated by traders whose sole art is in predicting where prices might move,
and trying to get there before their competitors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Financial markets are an ecology in which
long-term investors are the herbivores, and short-term speculators are the
carnivores.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">This book notes how Nobel Prize-winning
economists have lost millions in the stock markets, while several of the most
successful fund managers have never studied economics but had backgrounds in physics
or higher mathematics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With no interest
in social or economic causes and effects, they have developed sophisticated
methods to analyze price movements as a means of predicting opportunities for
profit. It tells you how they did it and why you can't beat them..</span><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/clever-exploits-of-casino-capitalism-on-wall-street">Read the full review here..</a></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Richard
Thwaites is a helpless dependant on the chaos of financial markets.</span></i></div>
<br />RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-80533769087373288952013-04-30T14:32:00.001+10:002013-04-30T14:32:04.107+10:00Grasping the universe, with mathematics<span lang="EN-US"><strong>THE UNIVERSE WITHIN, </strong></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>by Neil Turok, </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>Allen &
Unwin, 294pp. </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p>To write a book about infinity is tough, and to review it is not easy either.</o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Few things that should interest us more than the basic questions about how we, and everything we know, came into existence. </span><span lang="EN-US">Our oldest creation stories tried to describe
the universe in the language and ideas available to our ancestors, mostly metaphors drawn from human experience. Now we expect things to be explained in a language </span><span lang="EN-US">that can
apply universally to the material world as we perceive it, without entirely negating the spiritual dimensions we infer as a means to fill the gaps in
our understanding.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Uncomfortably for me and many others, that language is mathematics, as applied to the science of physics. Both these domains can be intimidating to many seekers after the truth, who are more accustomed to the floating worlds of emotion and intuition. Most will turn aside, which is a pity.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It was a bold decision for the producers of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's annual Massey Lecture series to commission Neil Turok in 2012. </span><span lang="EN-US">Turok held a chair in mathematical physics at <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Cambridge</st1:place></st1:city> and published, together with
Stephen Hawking, a theory on how universes come into existence. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He now heads the Perimeter Institute in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Canada</st1:place></st1:country-region>, which
supports the study of theoretical physics and campaigns for wider community
understanding of what physicists are on about, and why it matters.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">This book is the texts of those lectures. </span><span lang="EN-US"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Universe Within</i> is about the
ways human minds have grappled to
understand the infinities and imponderables of all matter and energy, from smallest
sub-atomic energy states to the possibly infinite multiplicity of universes that
share time and space with everything we humans are able to observe.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p> Broadcasting is strictly linear - you can't double back to re-hear a paragraph. You get it or your miss it. Turok does his best to catch the average curious mind with anecdotes and colorful metaphors, but I have to wonder how many millions of polite Canadians could genuinely grasp what he was on about from beginning to end. Even with the advantages of the book for, it was a tough read for someone with lifelong amateur curiosity into the general concepts of cosmology and physics.</o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p> If you do follow Turok, you will end up accepting that </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, having
started as a microscopic dot of unbelievably compressed energy some 4-5 billion
years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The expansion is probably powered by unmeasurable "dark matter" and "vacuum energy". <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not the job of physicists to ask why
this happened, but they are increasingly confident that they know how it
happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Turok inclines to the view that our current
expanding universe is just one instance of an infinite number of expansions,
followed after a few billion years by contraction, and then another Big Bang to
start the expansion again.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">A lot of this seems disconnected from human
experience because mathematical reasoning is not the same thing as common
sense. </span><span lang="EN-US">The greatest conceptual leap takes us from
classical physics to the realm of quantum mechanics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this framework the universe is in constant flux on many dimensions and there is no truth, only probability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The job of physicists is to provide theories with reasonable probability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As it happens, the chance of our
own universe even existing is at a very low level of probability. However, because the
number of possibilities is infinite, sooner or later our universe would be
bound to pop up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After the shock, probability
actually makes more sense than certainty to the human brain.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/how-to-conceive-the-forces-that-conceived-us-cosmology-physics-and-maths">Read the full review here</a> </o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Richard
Thwaites has maintained a cautious interest in scientific cosmology since
reading John Milton's </span></i><span lang="EN-US">Paradise Lost<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> as a teenager.</i></span></div>
<br />RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-90447528747251267642013-01-21T10:52:00.000+11:002013-01-21T10:52:05.422+11:00Those sailor-explorers were tough - like Matthew Flinders<strong>FLINDERS: The Man who Mapped Australia, </strong><br />
<strong>by Rob Mundle, Hachette, 386pp. </strong><br /><br /><em>Reviewed: 19 January 2013</em><br /><br />When I was reading this book, I was appalled to find that a couple of GenX liberal arts graduates from Australian universities had never heard of Matthew Flinders.<br />
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OK, it's timely to revise the history earlier generations were taught, in which everything was cast in terms of glorious expansion of the British Empire. But it is sad that intelligent, humane, socially-responsible Australians have no idea how this country came to be what it is today. If you don't know history, you are easily led into delusion. That is why history needs to be written, and written again, and written again, so we know where we came from to inform choices on where we might go next and how to get there. End rant.<br />
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Matthew Flinders was one of a generation who harnessed the curiosity of the Enlightenment to the mercantile competition of European colonial empires. The British seizure of Australia was a pre-emptive strike against their traditional enemy, the French, who were newly invigorated by the Napoleonic regime that followed their revolution. It was an extraordinary period, in which French and British scientists helped each other in the cause of discovery, at the same time as their political and military masters were fighting for global dominance.<br />
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Flinders was inspired by a childhood reading of Robinson Crusoe. He sailed with Captain Cook and also with Captain William Bligh, performing a series of intrepid exploratory voyages in small sailing boats around the uncharted coasts of Australia.<br />
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It is hard these days to understand that several decades after the discovery of Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land), no European knew whether or not it was joined to the mainland (then called New Holland). Sea routes were all hazardous, navigation always risky, so it was not unusual for sea captains to avoid uncharted waters.<br />
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The risks of coastal exploration were extraordinary. Wooden ships were often frail if not rotting, and always at the mercy of the weather. For much of Flinders' voyage around Australia, the planks of his ship Investigator were leaking up to fifty tons of seawater per hour, all of which had to be pumped out by hand.<br /><br />Flinders also experienced what we now call “political risk”. With the assistance of grand figures like Sir Joseph Banks, Flinders had obtained official documents to grant him safe passage through French territories and ports, regardless of the bilateral circumstances. Unfortunately, by the time he was heading home to report his explorations, the French regime had been infested by a cohort of hyper-nationalists vying for the attention of Napoleon.<br /><br />When Flinders' ship limped into Mauritius, he fell into the hands of Governor Decaen, one of these 19th century neo-cons, who had been persuaded that France had a mission to extinguish the British colonisation of Australia. Flinders was kept on Mauritius for six priceless years as a kind of hostage to Decaen's political ambitions. <br /><br />When finally released, Flinders returned home with just enough strength to complete the massive 350,000 word account of his major expedition, dying within days of the publication of A Voyage to Terra Australis in 1814, aged forty. His explorations had been completed before he reached the age of thirty.<br /><br />Lessons for today include how Flinders' ambitions were at times given crucial support by well-placed sponsors, and at other times frustrated by political chicanery, negligence, or sheer bureaucratic inertia. It reminds that history is so often personal, and that in the competition of empires, Australia has never been the main game.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/flinders-mapped-maritime-australia-from-sailboats">Read the full review here</a>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-60075451996059806182013-01-01T08:53:00.001+11:002013-01-01T08:53:41.811+11:00Corporate Spying Undermines Capitalism
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>MURDOCH'S PIRATES, </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>by Neil Chenoweth, Allen
& Unwin, 402pp. </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Reviewed: December 2012</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">If you believe that democracy and private enterprise are, on the whole, better systems than others for the delivery of human welfare, it is always chilling to read how self-destructive uncontrolled capitalism can be.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">A decade ago, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation mobilised high-tech intelligence resources against its competitors in the global PayTV business. Financial journalist Neil Chenoweth has hounded News Corporation for many years, and this latest chronicle of misdeeds reads like a spy novel. But the combatants
work for private corporations, not states.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are no innocent parties, only winners and losers, in a world where
law is seen as a tool and business ethics are for wimps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And because it is true, the story raises
serious questions over the ability of national governments to provide a
business environment in which rule of law can be taken seriously.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The competition was for control of the credit-card sized smart cards that give access to
satellite PayTV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The security of those
cards is the key to billions of dollars in PayTV revenues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since the inception of pay television, independent
hackers and organized pirate rings have repeatedly broken the codes to provide
unauthorized access via a black market in forged smart cards.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">PayTV companies fought
back to defend their revenues, but then used the same capabilities to attack their competitors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>News
Corporation's card
security development company - News Datacomm (later NDS), was based in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> and employed mainly
ex-Israeli military and intelligence operatives. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">NDS infiltrated the internet chatrooms where
hackers would boast about their achievements, developed contacts, and recruited
agents. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They employed former police
detectives and intelligence operatives for many nationalities, including a
former head of Scotland Yard’s criminal intelligence bureau.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These agents used their contacts with state
agencies, bugged phones, burgled homes, set traps, and employed every device
familiar to readers of crime fiction – with apparent disdain for the law. </span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the heat of it, some star European and
American hackers seem to have been double agents, triple agents, or simply
playing all sides for as long as they could.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Eventually two competitors, Canal+ and the US Echostar system,
sued NDS for sabotaging their security codes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The claims were for hundreds of millions in
lost revenue, let alone any share price implications or criminal liability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>News Corporation had twenty lawyers in the <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">California</st1:place></st1:state> court-room,
the plaintiffs had three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite
compelling evidence, NDS was found guilty of only a minor misdemeanour with a $45 penalty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By this time, News Corporation
was a significant propaganda supporter of the Republican Party.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Tales like this explain why democracy is in decline in the developing world. When high principle in Western societies is so undermined by corruption and political pragmatism, why should leaders of less stable societies behave any differently? We can learn more about realpolitik by reading 16th Century European histories than by believing the speeches of venal "democrats".</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/murdochs-private-spies">Read the full review here</a></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Richard
Thwaites was working on broadcasting policy issues while <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Australia</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s pay
television system was being introduced.</span></i></div>
<br />RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-68228307250979426972012-11-26T10:10:00.000+11:002012-11-26T10:10:30.682+11:00A Challenge to the Economics Profession
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>GITTINS' GOSPEL: The economics of just
about everything,</strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>by Ross Gittins, </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>Allen & Unwin, 312pp. </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Reviewed: 24 November</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There is a welter of information and analysis, online and in print, that competes to influence our views and understanding of what might broadly be called "the economy". At least nine tenths of this is nothing to do with the underlying structures and trends that will determine our future material and social welfare. That bulk is usually about the ephemeral trivia of market speculation - will shares and bonds prices rise of fall in the short term. It is no more useful than the form guide for a horse race, and serves the same purpose - to draw in more speculative spending by those of us who are no better than punters betting blindly.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">A few commentators make genuine efforts to cut through the promotional flim-flam and remind us that "the economy" boils down to a social contract underpinning all of our employment, production and trading activities. It cannot be discussed intelligently in isolation from whatever human values we see as important in holding society together and meeting the common challenges of sustaining our world.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So if you are suspicious of the economic
claims and counter-claims of our politicians and lobbyists, then you will enjoy
reading Ross Gittins as I did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are not
suspicious but you care about society, then you need to read someone like Gittins. For thirty years his economic
commentary columns have shone skeptical beams
through the fog and dust kicked up in the name of economics, often by
professional economists blinkered by ideology or by the need to sell their
services to somebody.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Did you know Adam Smith, patron saint of market economics, added an important qualification to his most famous observation about the
primacy of self-interest in human decision-making. Adam Smith followed it up with "How selfish
soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature,
which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness
necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of
seeing it". Rational self-interest is the founding assumption of modern
economic modelling, but Gittins doubts any of us are predictably rational. Neither
can our perception of self-interest be taken for granted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Gittins deplores the trite and self-serving neo-liberal assumption that governments have no role
until free markets can be shown conclusively to have failed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Global Financial Crisis is only the
latest example of how unregulated markets tend to become corrupt, at vast cost
to both suppliers and consumers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Governments alone can set rules for "a
better capitalism" through democractic process informed (he hopes) by more
rigorous media commentary and analysis.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Gittins is not alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a growing rebellion of behavioural economists who take a broader
view, embracing a range of non-monetary considerations for economic
policy – such as social equity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> Is growth a genuine economic benefit, or a short-term illusion? Can any serious economic policy ignore the environmental costs? Can fairness be ignored, when all history shows that inequality imposes heavy costs on social cohesion.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><o:p><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/a-moral-challenge-to-the-economists">Read the full review</a></o:p></span></div>
RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-5514815324555576652012-09-16T08:41:00.000+10:002012-09-16T08:41:52.736+10:00Ocean Issues not just for greenies
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<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on"><span lang="EN-US"><strong>OCEAN</strong></span></st1:placetype><span lang="EN-US"><strong> OF </strong><st1:placename w:st="on"><strong>LIFE</strong></st1:placename></span></st1:place><span lang="EN-US"><strong>: </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>How Our
Seas are Changing, </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><strong>by Callum Roberts, </strong></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on"><strong>Allen
Lane</strong></st1:address></st1:street><strong>, 390pp. </strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><strong> </strong></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><em>Reviewed: 19 September</em></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I was reading this book while the Australian government was deciding whether to give a trawling licence to one of the world's largest floating fish factories. The ships owners have headed for Australian waters after exhausting, and being expelled from, other fishing zones off Africa and in the South Pacific.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Callum Roberts is a professional ocean conservationist. The fishing industry lobbyists and libertarian economists would therefore dismiss his arguments as biased. No doubt the same arguments were made by denialists as earlier human societies in the middle east and in Central America, and Southeast Asia devastated the environments on which their advanced civilisations depended. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The deafening political noise around
atmospheric carbon emissions can distract us from the even more critical state
of our planet’s oceans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US">The plight of the seas is not about the
extinction of photogenic clown-fish or pretty pink corals – it is about threats
to the very engines of life as evolved on this planet. Earth only acquired its
oxygen-rich atmosphere in the latest ten percent of its history, and it was
ocean-dwelling bacteria that generated the oxygen in quantities that enabled
the evolution of land-based plants and animals, ourselves included.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The oceans are still the primary forces that
drive earth’s atmosphere and the climate we experience from it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US">The web of micro-organisms that condition
the water, oxygenate the atmosphere, and feed the next level of life, is
becoming unbalanced with potentially dire consequences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Excess nutrients, flooding from our
agriculture and aquaculture practices, create semi-desert monocultures where
once biodiversity prevailed in the nurseries of oceanic life.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Roberts supports the
harvesting of marine life for human consumption, but he castigates the stubborn
way that humans persist in destroying that upon which our growing population
depends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since the development of
steam-powered trawlers, we defy an elementary rule of capitalism, by consuming
the capital resource rather than the income it generates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More and more mechanical power has been
employed to harvest smaller and fewer fish. </span><span lang="EN-US">Without drastic restorative action, Roberts sees our
strip-mined oceans reduced to supporting vast rafts of plastic rubbish and
populated by little more than hordes of jellyfish and scavenging prawns. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
evidence of recovery is overwhelming when marine reserves are properly implemented. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> <a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/deep-trouble-from-our-damaged-oceans">Read the full review</a></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></i></div>
RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-40732428021210029112012-08-27T10:00:00.000+10:002012-08-27T10:00:00.373+10:00What can we learn from the London Underground?
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>UNDERGROUND OVERGROUND: </strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>A Passenger’s
History of the Tube, </strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>by Andrew Martin, </strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>Profile Books, 304pp.</strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><o:p>Railway books have such a passionate and distinctive following that its hard to read one without feeling like a nerd.</o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">On the other hand, the way a community builds, uses, and thinks about its public transport system is a key insight into the values of the people who make up that community - whatever their diversity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">To use public transport is one
of the few collective experiences of daily life that crosses social divides, or in bad cases may accentuate
them. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The history of <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>’s Underground, or “Tube”, make a
meta-narrative of that city’s development over the past two centuries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">London was first to try the principle of building underground thoroughfares. It tried private and public models of investment and ownership. It tried competitive and centralised models of operation. It reflected fashions in in engineering, architecture, and urban development principles. It embodied the aesthetics of its time in design, advertising and public communication.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">London had the luck to be built mainly on soft clay that made tunnelling relatively cheap, but that didn't stop many lines falling in and out of bankruptcy. Urban transport is one of those fields that defy economic rationalism, because the benefits are too thinly spread to be allocated to individual users.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Most public transport users both love and hate their networks,
but Andrew Martin mostly loves the London Underground, warts and all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> A</span> barrister turned
journalist and author, he has published six detective novels on railway themes, and edited
a weekly column called “Tube Talk” for London's <em>Evening Standard</em> magazine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">There’s a huge culture of complaint,
commentary and anecdote among Tube travelers who include every class and
kind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Martin provides lots of fun and color in this tangled history, while keeping the reader aware of the evolutionary forces that have shaped the Underground, and London with it, since the 1850s.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/the-underground-case-for-public-transport-civic-values">Read the full review..</a></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Richard
Thwaites lives and works in Canberra, a car-based city sadly lacking in effective public transport.</span></i></div>
RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-84346015540835942792012-08-13T13:35:00.000+10:002012-08-13T13:35:09.170+10:00Negotiating China's Rise - like it or not<strong>THE CHINA CHOICE: </strong><br />
<strong>Why America should Share Power, </strong><br />
<strong>by Hugh White, Black Inc,190pp. </strong><br /><br /><em>Reviewed: 11 August 2012</em><br /><br />
It's one thing to understand the strategic challenge, another thing to put forward a sensible win-win solution, but much harder to set out a way to get there from here. Hugh White scores well on the first two, but doesn't really address the third. Diplomats and strategists might call the missing link "the modalities".<br />
<br />
The choices White identifies are to be made in Washington. Australia, we infer, will be swept along whatever course the USA adopts.<br /><br />The key word in White's analysis is “primacy”, which I take to mean unchallengeable military superiority. He warns that America and its allies tend to overestimate America's ability to translate military superiority into political outcomes. White doubts that America, even now, has the real power to prevent a determined Chinese takeover of Taiwan. China's ability to sink American aircraft carriers with land-based missiles could not be neutralized without escalating attacks upon Chinese mainland facilities. Mutual retaliation could reach nuclear level. Few if any American allies would support such a venture. <br /><br />On the other hand, China's ability to assert power beyond its borders is also limited by the major Asian regional powers that have historical reasons to be suspicious of Chinese power - Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and others.<br /><br />In my view White under-states the depth of anxiety among China's neighbours over growing Chinese power. For neighbouring nations, many of which already host significant Chinese racial minorities, have historical reasons to fear economic colonization, and increasing long-term immigration from China. For such nations, a remote, over-fed hegemon (such as America) is preferable to a nearby, hungry hegemon, because they are less likely to move permanently into your house.<br /><br />The rivalry between US and China is focussed in the Western Pacific, where China would like to establish primacy and America wants to keep it. White proposes that America and China must learn, somehow, to share power and leadership, at least within that region.<br /><br />Any proposals for strategic dialogue with China must be read in the context of Sun Tzu's <em>Art of War</em>, whose precepts on tactics, negotiation, strategy and psychology still shape Chinese strategy. They are supremely pragmatic, whereas White argues for adoption of common principles for common benefit.<br /><br />A basic rule of negotiation is that you do not give away your final position at the beginning. White goes so far as to offer, as his final chapter, a proposed text for an Address to the Nation by an American President, setting out the reasons why the United States has decided to share power with China in the Western Pacific. It looks to me like an invitation for China to raise its demands and keep right on pushing. What does China gain by conceding anything in that context? <br /><br /><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/a-new-us-china-balance-up-for-negotiation">Read the full review</a><br /><br /><em>Richard Thwaites is a former ABC correspondent in China and later participated in Asia-Pacific and multilateral negotiations for the Australian government.</em>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-84760809084967120472012-08-06T13:43:00.000+10:002012-08-06T13:43:41.637+10:00Can you be a Futurist without being over-excited?<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>64 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW NOW FOR THEN:</strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>How
to Face the Digital Future Without Fear</strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>by Ben Hammersley, Hodder &
Stoughton,434pp. </strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><em>Reviewed: 4 August 2012</em></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In my time I've reviewed many books about the future, and each has made claims that irritate me as a reader. But I admire books that provoke thought, and maybe there's got to be some drama to keep the pages turning. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Ben Hammersley addresses this book to "non-geeks", who are presumed to be already anxious about a future that they know they don't understand, but will have to endure. You may need to be already a little bit geekish to enjoy the provocations he offers by way of <em>64 Things You Need to Know...</em>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Publishers evidently believe that titles promising hidden knowledge are good for book sales. They may be right. As a contrarian, my instinct is to say "Why 64? Why not 4 or 512?". In fact, Hammersley gives us 65 chapters, beginning binary-style with 00 and ending with 64. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My inner geek mutters again: "64 is a nice round binary number, a power of 2. Why not number your chapters in the base-16 hexadecimal notation used by computer programmers? Give us 65 chapters if you will, but number them 00 to 41 hex ?" Then supply non-geeks with a link to an online hexadecimal converter in case they get lost.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But not much in the world is really binary. Even the genius of computational logic is the way that infinite complexity can be constructed upon machine logic that basically only understands ON and OFF as the prime binary digit. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Let's face it, most average citizens
are worried enough about how to control email inboxes or how long we can avoid committing
our lives to smart-phones and social networking.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Ben Hammersley seeks to bring aid to the
anxious. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> He i</span>s a British explainer and prober of the directions and
affects of the revolution in computerized communications, Editor-at-Large of
the geek journal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wired</i>, and the “UK
Prime Minister’s Ambassador to <st1:placename w:st="on">Tech</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">City</st1:placetype>” (an Internet industry concentration in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Any reader may
find here more, or many less, than 64 things you need to know. </span><span lang="EN-US"> There's no linear narrative and you
can skip randomly about like browsing Wikipedia. There are at least
64 ideas worth thinking about, but readers will differ as to which are
worth worrying about.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Privacy, the future of media business models, unprecedented exploitation of databanks of personal information - short chapters will stir you to thought on any of these.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">At the wacky end we get serious discussion of </span><span lang="EN-US">The Singularity (Thing 53), whereby artificial
intelligence created by humans is expected to evolve beyond the control of its
creators, like Frankenstein’s monster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We humans are to be
subjugated by machines, sometime before 2050.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My personal favourite new Thing is the</span><span lang="EN-US"> “spime” -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a “self-documenting object that can interact with the world by tracking
its own process of production and gathering information about its usage”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The object gains in value as it accrues
information about itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Let's all be spimes.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/things-a-post-singularity-spime-should-know">Read the full review...</a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Richard
Thwaites worked for some years in the Australian Government’s National Office for
the Information Economy.</span></i></div>
<br />RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-48028172047908634372012-07-23T09:33:00.001+10:002012-07-23T09:33:41.772+10:00Farm Subsidies make fraud of US Free Trade demands<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>THE BIG HANDOUT </strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>How </strong><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on"><strong>U.S.</strong></st1:country-region></st1:place><strong> subsidies and corporate
welfare corrupt the world we live in and wreak havoc on our food bills </strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><strong>by Thomas
Kostigen, Scribe, 288pp. </strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><strong> </strong></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><em>Reviewed: 21 July 2012</em></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In the West we have been led to believe that "Free Trade" is an essential expression of the economic principles of free market economics. We have also been told that electoral democracy is the political equivalent of the free market - it aggregates free choice of individuals into the political decisions of national-scale societies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">When I worked on international trade negotiations for some years, I learned that political democracy can often be the enemy of free trade. The ability to compete against the cheapest producers in the world is not the only value that governments must consider when they are deciding how to regulate imports and exports. Free trade forces structural adjustment, and structural adjustment means disruptions to local industry. You may argue about the long-term national interest, but in a democracy you can be sure than economic pain will cost votes and can change governments.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Nobody spruiks the principles of Free Trade
more strenuously than the United States, but Thomas Kostigen's book tells us that the home of free
market economics does not practice what it preaches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kostigen describes an economy characterized
by production subsidies and discriminatory tax breaks that make nonsense of
free market principles, and that make US arguments for global Free Trade seem
hypocritical.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">He asserts that American
exports of subsidized wheat, cotton and rice are destroying the domestic
economies of developing countries, thus contributing to anti-American sentiment
and even terrorism.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">With congressional elections every two years,
the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">USA</st1:place></st1:country-region>
is never out of election mode.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The few
politicians who dare to resist the loud, ruthless and well-funded industry lobbyists are
outvoted by those who dare not resist them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Free markets, national or international, do not offer easy solutions to the "creative destruction" that economists see as a necessary outcome of unregulated competition. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Should the cost pressures of ruthless competition be allowed to force agricultural communities to destroy their own soils and ecologies, as humans have done repeatedly through history? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Can a democratic electorate ever be sufficiently far-sighted to support long-term protection of common resources, and to accept the short-term pain of economic adjustment? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Kostigen can't address these issues, but he shines an uncomfortably bright light on the failures of the American system to deliver the results its people deserve and the world needs.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/us-subsidies-corrupt-free-trade-principles-and-democractic-claims">Read the full review</a> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Richard
Thwaites has participated in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Australia</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s
international trade liberalization negotiations.</span></i></div>
<br />RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-16618440315811900862012-07-09T09:34:00.000+10:002012-09-08T10:36:34.196+10:00Can the Idea of a University survive political funding?<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b>WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the </b><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on"><b>Troubled</b></st1:placename><b> </b><st1:placetype w:st="on"><b>University</b></st1:placetype></st1:place><b>, </b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b>by Richard Hil, NewSouth,
238pp. </b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The liberal ideal of the free-thinking, knowledge-producing University has always been challenged by those who sought to direct the output of intellectual effort, whether for ideological or economic purposes. Currently in the West, it is utilitarian economics that most threatens that liberal ideal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><o:p>There was outrage in Canberra, Australia's capital city, when the Australian National University announced substantial cuts to the teaching budget at its School of Music. The School had started as an independent conservatorium with wide community and local government support, but was absorbed by the ANU about ten years ago. The incident was a stark reminder </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US">that the
relations between a university and its host community can not be taken for
granted.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Where universities are funded by taxation,
the priorities of the university can reflect the politics of the state.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Richard Hil makes a compelling case that the intrusive
administrative demands of today’s universities drive highly-motivated academics
to despair, resignation, or mute repression, in a “Whackademia” dominated by
glib managerialism.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Is it efficient to make salaried academics devote
thirty percent of their time to writing applications (mostly unsuccessful) for
research grants, countless more hours filling in university-generated forms
and sitting in committees for dubious “performance management” schemes that purport
to measure the immeasurable? Or </span>
<span lang="EN-US">trying to meet publication quotas regardless of the state of their research projects? </span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Few of Hil’s interviewees had any faith in
the accuracy of the bureaucratic measures by which their careers and future
opportunities were being determined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Patronage, favouritism, rivalry and revenge were assumed to be at least
as significant for a person’s rating as any documented criteria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">University leaders have become brand managers focussed on competitive ratings
and arcane measures of research performance, because these dubious criteria
determine the flow of funds to their institution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">We are left pondering how the global demand
for vocational credentials, at competitive market rates, can be met by the same
institutions that we might fund to foster thoughtful long-term contributors to
our national cultural and scientific capital, with no immediately measurable
market value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This used to be the ideal
of the University.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/how-bureaucracy-cripples-universities">Read the full review</a></span></i></div>
RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-14875720262360054592012-06-04T14:08:00.001+10:002012-06-05T11:41:46.609+10:00Liu Xiaobo, the angry Nobel Peace laureate<b>NO ENEMIES, NO HATRED </b><br />
<b>Selected Essays and Poems of Liu Xiaobo,</b><br />
<b>ed. Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Liu Xia, with foreword by Vaclav Havel </b><br />
<b>Belknap Harvard Press, 355pp. </b><br />
<br />
Nobel Peace Prize laureates can be angry people. Nobel himself spent a lifetime making explosives and selling armaments, then funded an annual prize for "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."<br />
<br />
Laureates have had warlike histories: Menachim Begin, Yasser Arafat, and Henry Kissinger among a good few others. Most have had nothing to do with armies or peace congresses, but contributed to “fraternity between nations” by demonstrating moral confrontation against political power. Jose Ramos Horta, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama come to mind.<br />
<br />
In 2010 the Peace Prize Committee infuriated the Chinese government by selecting Liu Xiaobo, then as now in a Chinese prison, charged with “incitement to subvert state power”. His “crimes” were purely literary, but enough to enrage the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.<br />
<br />
This book selects essays and commentaries published by Liu, at personal risk, in magazines and online from around the time of the 1989 Tian An Men incident through to Liu's final statement at his Beijing trial in December 2009.<br />
<br />
Liu asserted then that he has “No enemies, no hatred”, but he spares nobody with his trenchant criticism of contemporary China. The Communist Party is his main target, but he also attacks less-radical Chinese intellectuals, dissidents, and those foreign fellow-travellers who make excuses for the Communist Party's refusal to grant fundamental human rights. You can't speak out like this without creating powerful enemies, and you won't persist with it unless you bear substantial reserves of anger. The line between anger and hatred is hard to define.<br />
<br />
The Chinese scholar-hero who dares to speak truth to power is an ancient tradition. But Liu writes off Confucius as a failure at politics who was only endorsed as a sage by later generations of dictators and emperors because he insisted on obedience to authority. Liu blames this for the “slave mentality” of modern Chinese toward their government.<br />
<br />
Mostly, he argues for the establishment of individual rights within China. The Charter 08 document, drafted with other liberal intellectuals, attracted more than 12,000 signatories and embarrassed China's leadership in the year of the Beijing Olympics. This provoked Liu's arrest and imprisonment for sedition.<br />
<br />
Liu remind us what rights are currently denied to citizens of China. The separation of powers between constitution, government and judiciary, and the protection of private property including title to land, are things we have come to take for granted.<br />
<br />
Charter 08 also calls for China to devolve its centralized system into a “federation of democratic communities of China”. This would have sent China's right-wing neo-nationalists hopping mad, as well as the Communist Party centralists.<br />
<br />
Liu despises the self-glorifying rhetoric that infects popular Chinese culture, the mythologizing of Chinese achievement far beyond reality, and the “bellicose and thuggish” attitudes to China's place in the world as it grows in economic strength. He angrily dismisses those Western commentators who over-praise and over-estimate China's past, its progress and its future, accusing them of naivety, patronizing fantasy, or self-serving attempts to ingratiate themselves with masters of the China growth gravy-train.<br />
<br />
There's a lot of anger, for someone who professes to have "no hatred, no enemies". He provokes reflections on Western society as well as on China's.<br />
<br />
<i>Richard Thwaites witnessed China's first modern movement for human rights in the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing in 1979, while Liu Xiaobo was a student.</i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/nobel-winning-critique-of-chinas-human-rights">Read my full review</a><br />
<br />
<br />RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-43309184257732455582012-05-08T13:17:00.000+10:002012-05-14T08:57:18.764+10:00How Short can be Western Thought?<b>A SHORT HISTORY OF WESTERN THOUGHT</b><br />
<b>By Stephen Trombley</b><br />
<b>Atlantic Books, 277pp</b><br />
<br />
I'd like to master the history of Western thought in under 300 pages, but it seems a pretty steep challenge.<br />
<br />
Stephen Trombley's publisher offered him the challenge, and he seems to have risen to it pretty well.<br />
<br />
By "Thought" he means philosophy, and by "Western" he means the shared lineage from Greek and Judeo-Christian cultures. By "history" he seems to mean a chronicle, setting aside as many personal prejudices as possible.<br />
<br />
He does a pretty good job, considering the scope of the task. I got a picture of who said what and when along the 2500-year timeline of "Western Thought". This delivers an overview of what you might be taught in a formal study of Western philosophy, in some Western university. We begin before Socrates when "philosophy" embraced all disciplines, from speculation on the physical world to religion and ethics. We end with Philosophy as a relatively dry academic discipline concerned with the language-based processes of the human mind, and even there challenged for authority by the neurosciences and the persistence of faith-based teleologies.<br />
<br />
Should we be surprised that the history is Eurocentric? I quarrel with his assertion “Judaism was the first monotheistic belief system”. The Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten is known to have promoted monotheism centuries before the Hebrews wrote a history asserting that they were the chosen people of the only valid God. We Westerners have been amplifying that political convenience ever since we embraced Judeo-Christianity, and wondering why others don't like us.<br />
<br />
I would have liked to find reference to the influence of Indian philosophy on the West via Persia, Egypt and the Buddhist missions sent by Asoka (3rd century BC) to Syria, Egypt and Greece. There is good evidence for the influence of Buddhism on Plato and, indeed, on the teachings of Jesus.<br />
<br />
Trombley's philosophical canon is limited to those who sought to discover system in the apparent chaos of human consciousness. The closer we come to the present, the more diverse and complex is the range of philosophical positions to be summarized. Are “how we behave” and “how we think” closely connected? Many philosophers have thought so, and some still do. How do we know what is real? A glance at any news page reminds us that belief is as remote from reason as ever, and no less powerful for the accumulated knowledge and philosophy of the centuries.<br />
<br />
This is not hard to read. If you like the idea of wisdom, you will probably find this quick tour through centuries of hard thinking a pleasure and, at times, a challenge.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/a-short-canter-through-western-thought">Read the full review</a>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-80998284735450087562012-04-02T10:50:00.001+10:002012-04-02T10:54:41.423+10:00Intelligence crippled by ideology<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I</span><b><span lang="EN-US">NTEL WARS: The secret history of the fight against terror. </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">By Matthew M Aid, </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US"><st1:place w:st="on">Bloomsbury</st1:place> Press, 262pp. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>America spends $75billion per year on intelligence functions. It sounds a lot, but that is only about $250 per citizen. The question for outsiders, and for questioning Americans, is why such a vast investment in intelligence seems to produce such patchy results. We hear of the occasional coup such as the discovery of Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan, but then we must ask why did it take ten years, given the resources put to it? </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>It's not as if the value of intelligence is a new idea. People who fight with sticks and stones rely on knowing where the enemy is and what he (or it) is likely to do next. Arguably, modern technology gives governments greater capacity than they have ever had to keep tabs on people at home and abroad.</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">This book describes the disconnect between <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">America</st1:country-region></st1:place>’s vast and pervasive intelligence resources and its failure to translate that investment into effective strategic decision-making.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">It turns out the problems are, as usual, the human factors. Agencies compete with and sabotage each other. The flow of information overwhelms the ability to analyze it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Matthew Aid is a Washington-based writer and commentator on the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> intelligence establishment, with many first-hand sources ready to inform him on the weaknesses of their present or former employers, but especially on the weaknesses of agencies that are rivals to their own. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">He is most critical of the political messes bequeathed by the Bush administration, but is also disappointed that the Obama administration has fallen into similar bad habits of suppressing unwelcome intelligence that does not suit the public management of short-term politics.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">This book should interest not only intelligence and strategy buffs, but anyone hoping to understand a bit more about why global affairs do not turn out as we had been led to expect.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/intelligence-is-what-we-dont-know">Read the full review here..</a></span></i></div>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-1755725341721272262012-03-12T11:02:00.001+11:002012-03-12T11:08:38.047+11:00Is political hatred the product or the tool?<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>THE NEW HATE: </b></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><b>A history of fear and loathing on the populist right. </b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>By Arthur Goldwag, Scribe, 368pp.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>It's disturbing to watch the American democratic process so suffused with rage and hatred, from both left and right. Free speech and open debate is to be cherished, but the cynical peddling of lies and conspiracies to influence frightened voters is the great weakness of democracy.</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Plato warned about it in ancient Athens - at some point the Greek republic had laws that exiled demagogues from the city. In modern western democracies, the challenge is to retain fundamental freedom of speech without turning over democracy to those with the greatest power to lie most loudly.</span><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Thinking people of all persuasions</span> share a <span lang="EN-US">broad discomfort about the political mobilisation of hatred . Some blame whichever party or interest group they don’t support, and many blame our news media for fostering political violence (real or synthetic) for the sake of cheap ratings points or journalistic one-upmanship.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Arthur Goldwag’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Hate</i> looks at a wide range of current Obama-haters, from Tea Party to rabid broadcasters to Islamophobes and bizarre conspiracy-cult websites. He places them in a context of hate-farming that traces right back to the earliest Puritan colonists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems there never was a time when American politics was not infected with conspiracy theories about unseen, powerful groups bent on subverting the Bible, the Constitution, or the apotheosis of the white race in American Exceptionalism.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Religious identity has often been the target, echoing the politico-religious purges that drove Puritans and many other waves of immigrants to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region> from their European homes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freemasons, Roman Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, Communists, homosexuals, witches and innumerable real or imagined secret societies have been the object of hate campaigns embraced by high-level politicians as well as rabble-rousers and entrepreneurs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Goldwag is a declared liberal Democrat, but provides balanced accounts of many hate-merchants and their innocent or questionable targets across the centuries.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">So why are human societies so susceptible to falsehood, prejudice, and paranoid fantasy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Goldwag suggests that the common visceral element is a human yearning for a secure identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any perceived threat to that identity, whether religious, cultural, race, or economic, induces a natural fear that is easily fanned into rage and hate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more that a relatively successful society has fostered a sense of entitlement and “rights” among its citizens, the easier it is to promote outrage and hatred whenever such entitlements may seem challenged. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Charitably, Goldwag accepts that some hate-peddlers at least believe what they are saying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He concludes that the majority of those who claim to believe Obama is a foreign Muslim are less concerned about Obama’s identity than about <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">America</st1:country-region></st1:place>’s identity not being what it used to be, at home or abroad.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/hate-waves-nothing-new-in-america">Read the full review</a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p><br />
</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Richard Thwaites, when a broadcast current affairs producer and editorial executive, has struggled to balance coverage of punch-ups with coverage of policy.</span></i></div>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-23917582458829248042012-02-21T11:31:00.001+11:002012-02-21T11:38:31.232+11:00Deng Xiaoping's life story - a true modern epic<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF </b><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on"><b>CHINA</b></st1:country-region></st1:place><b>. </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>By Ezra Vogel, Belknap Harvard, </b></span><span lang="EN-US"><b>876pp. </b></span></div><b> </b><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">In China, they play politics seriously. We need to know how things work there, and this book will help.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">From one man’s navigation through six decades of Chinese politics, we can learn much about the choices we humans make about how our societies are to be governed. Blow away the fog of ideology, and Deng Xiaoping’s choices, loyalties and betrayals could as well take place in ancient <st1:city w:st="on">Rome</st1:city> or modern <st1:state w:st="on">Washington</st1:state> as in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Beijing</st1:place></st1:city>. Deng’s personal saga of the acquisition, application and retention of power might attract a future Shakespeare, but for contemporary readers it's instructive to understand how this particular man, more than any other, delivered 20<sup>th</sup> Century <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">China</st1:country-region></st1:place> from its Maoist hell into the vital, but still turbulent, economic powerhouse we see today.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">All the evidence suggests that Deng, since his days as a 16-year old Communist student in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region> in the 1920s, Deng never budged on the one principle that all power in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">China</st1:country-region></st1:place> must be centralized through the Communist Party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Communist ideology provided some core principles and objectives for the Communist program, but its main function was to define discipline and solidarity to maintain the Party's grip on power.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">After the death of Chairman Mao, Deng fought bitter battles within the Communist Party leadership to promote economic liberalization, but did not hesitate to crack down hard, whether on life-long Communist colleagues or on Western-influenced student dissidents, whenever he sensed any serious challenge to the absolute power and authority of the Party.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Deng's Leninist conviction on the central role of the Party never wavered even when nepotism and corruption among the Party elite caused deep resentment among the population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few junior crooks could be shot, and senior ones humiliated, but the Party’s hold on power must not be challenged.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Deng’s survival through savage intra-Party struggles and ultimate rise to the top is an epic in itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> This could be compared</span></span><span lang="EN-US"> to surviving at the court of King Henry VIII.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deng’s reputation for effectiveness and Party loyalty meant he always had protectors when he needed them, whereas many equally loyal but less judicious Communists were destroyed utterly by Mao, or in his name.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Any organization that sets itself above the law, as the Chinese Communist Party has always done, may fall to subversion by dominant individuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the late 1960s Mao Zedong had established a virtual monarchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After Mao, </span><span lang="EN-US">Deng Xiaoping emerged as the one figure with the deep personal support base, and the tactical skill, to bring bitterly divided Party factions together into a viable, common program that bypassed the leftist conservatives. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Deng in later years enjoyed recognition as “paramount leader” or “supreme leader”, but he never held or claimed Mao’s absolute authority, and he largely avoided the dangers of a personality cult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deng would cautiously place chosen people in key positions and wait for an alignment of events that favoured his next challenge to opponents within the Party. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">There’s no evidence that Deng Xiaoping had any interest in broadening democracy for <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region>, although there were times when he acted and spoke to mobilize liberal intellectuals, at home and abroad, so as to put heat on more conservative Communist colleagues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deng had promoted the capable and popular liberal Party leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang for their reforming vigour and openness, but when Hu and later Zhao provoked strong reactions from conservatives, whose support Deng needed at the time, he ended both their careers with very public humiliations - sacrifices on the altar of Party unity.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Vogel is a veteran sinologist who has accessed a wide range of Chinese and foreign sources, including some personal interviews with surviving key players or those close to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He assembles insights never available to those of us who were trying to cover these events as they occurred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Because of the Party’s vigilance, sinologists are often reluctant to jeopardize future access to their privileged sources. Vogel abstains from challenging the Communist Party’s central claim that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region> can have only Leninist one-party rule, or chaos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He notes, however, that memoirs of key figures, including former liberal Premier Zhao Ziyang and conservative politician Deng Liqun, could not be published in <st1:country-region w:st="on">China</st1:country-region>, but were published in <st1:place w:st="on">Hong Kong</st1:place>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Richard Thwaites was ABC correspondent in Beijing in the years Deng Xiaoping achieved pre-eminence in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">China</st1:country-region></st1:place>’s leadership, 1978-83.</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/?cat=5">Read the full review here..</a></span></div>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-82051094193867353562011-11-22T10:27:00.001+11:002011-11-22T10:30:14.638+11:00How Humans made Words, and Words made us Human<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>PLANET WORD: </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>The story of language from the earliest grunts to Twitter and beyond. </b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>By J.P. Davidson, Michael Joseph, 445pp.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>As books become easier to write and easier to sell, each book becomes harder to sell. Publishers are finding one of the most reliable strategies is the tie-in between a book and another medium, especially TV. Public broadcasters can't rely so much on the celebrity endorsement power of TV book clubs and the like, but they can anticipate that audience that watches public TV overlaps pretty strongly with habitual book-buyers.</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>It also overlaps pretty well with those people who enjoy language as an art, and may toy with questions about the philosophy and history of language. </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">John Davidson, is an anthropologist and long-time BBC documentary producer of travel and exploration programs hosted by personalities like Michael Palin and Stephen Fry. This book is the “companion” to accompany a new BBC TV documentary series, presented by the over-eloquent Stephen Fry.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Like a TV show, the book sets out to be serious in an entertaining way. It tries not to be boring and doesn't demand too much extended concentration. It is packed with little gee-whizz facts and personal anecdotes that hold attention. </span><span lang="EN-US">As a book, this takes us back to the days before television or radio, when families used to read encyclopaedias and non-fiction miscellanies for entertainment and self-improvement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now we can get lost in a maze of hyperlinks on Wikipedia, launched from any conceivable Internet query.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Davidson and Fry </span><span lang="EN-US">fossick like gentlemen explorers across a vast terrain of human language,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>beginning with the most primitive indications of language in animals, and the extent to which the human body and brain are shaped for language.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">They examine how language is used to build our identities as individuals and as members of communities, and how language is harnessed for purposes of political nationalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">This book is itself a solid object you can hold in your hand and admire on a shelf, nicely designed and built to last, as a classy hardback on good quality paper, generously illustrated and with an attractive slip-cover. </span><span lang="EN-US"> An entertaining and handsome book about words not the last place you would expect to find the name of the printer Gutenberg misspelt as "Gutenburg", among other proofing errors.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/the-story-of-words-at-work-and-play-in-the-style-of-stephen-fry">Read the full review here..</a></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></i></div>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-64339547899223095372011-10-23T21:50:00.001+11:002011-10-23T21:54:37.249+11:00Old China Hands - Rogues or Heroes of the Revolution?<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">S<b>HANGHAI FURY</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>Australian Heroes of Revolutionary </b><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><b>China</b></st1:place></st1:country-region></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><b>By Peter Thompson, Heinemann, 530pp.</b></span></div><b> </b><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Plenty of foreigners write plenty about China every day, from the fawning to the ferocious. Many write with the best of intentions, doing their best to seem impartial and to "explain" China to readers. I've done that myself. Others write for an audience that is inherently hostile to China, playing up the perceived threats and inferiorities of a strengthening, but still alien, modern China.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Not many who write popular histories of China acknowledge that they are taking a specifically "foreign" point of view.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>In </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US"> this book, journalist and author Peter </span><span lang="EN-US">Thompson has sifted through the public records, autobiographies and newspaper files of Australia, Britain and the English-speaking Treaty Ports of China prior to 1949, to remind the current generation of Australians about how many Australians played notable roles in Chinese affairs through the last years the Manchu Dynasty, through the 1911 birth, decline and fall of the Republic of China, and into the 1949 establishment of the Peoples' Republic of China under the iron control of the Chinese Communist Party.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Australians were among the earliest 19th Century opium traders, gunboat “free trade” opportunists, missionaries, scholars and adventurers of <st1:city w:st="on">Canton</st1:city>, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Shanghai</st1:place></st1:city> and the Yangtze valley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Some, like G E Morrison and William Donald, combined influential journalistic careers with powerful inside advisory roles to important players in Chinese republican politics, from the Boxer Rebellion onward.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p>There were also a disreputable cast of opportunists, including some who collaborated with the Japanese regime occupying Shanghai 1939-45.</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Numbers of Australian-Chinese took aspects of their Australian experience back to China.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The biggest Shanghai department stores, Sincere and Wing On, were founded by Australian-Chinese on Australian models, as were numerous progressive newspapers, trading houses and fledgling democratic movements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Australian links are generally ignored by American or European writers of Chinese histories.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Thompson's anecdotal history mainly reflects the views and recollections of non-Communist and anti-Communist particpants in Chinese affairs, as well as being an unapologetic chronicle of foreign interventions, big and small, in China. It may seem anachronistic or politically incorrect to modern sinophiles, but it is a good read for the non-specialist with an interest in modern <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region>, or for the jaded specialist interested in a fresh overview. Having reported from China myself for five years in the past, I recognise that when it comes to Chinese history, the alien perspective may be as valid as the local.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/australian-rogues-and-heroes-in-revolutionary-china">Read my published review here...</a></span></i></div>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-85662538563996599082011-10-02T15:27:00.000+11:002011-10-02T15:27:14.991+11:00Afghanistan - the West's Tar Baby?Most Americans and many Australians (of a certain age) know the folksy tales of Brer Rabbit, read to us as children from the popular books by "Uncle Remus", in the style of African-American story-telling.<br />
<br />
Most memorable to me was the tale of the Tar Baby, wherein one of Brer Rabbit's many enemies made a doll out of sticky tar and sat it in the road where Brer Rabbit was to pass by. The irascible Brer Rabbit, as expected, picked a fight with this mute, inanimate Tar Baby, and began strike it in anger, because the Tar Baby would not reply to his impertinent questions. Brer Rabbit hit the Tar Baby with his right fist, and it stuck in the tar. Then he hit it with his left fist, which also stuck. Then he kicked it with left and right feet, becoming firmly stuck and helpless. I forget how he lived to embarass himself another day.<br />
<br />
The story came strongly to mind in reading Karen Middleton's new chronicle of how Australia, seeing its strategic advantages as bound tightly to the US government, has become further and further enmeshed in the conflict in Afghanistan, from which no exit is visible even when no credible good outcome can be predicted.<br />
<br />
I've read and reviewed several books dealing generally with this conflict, but Middleton's is unique. She is a long-serving bureau chief in the political Press Gallery of the Australian Parliament in Canberra. She was visiting Washington DC with Australia's then Prime Minister, the conservative John Howard, on 9 September 2001, and has followed every twist and turn of Australian policy and political debate on Australia's strategic engagements since then.<br />
<br />
Sadly, Australia seems to be trapped in the same colonial mentality we have suffered since the first British colonies were established in 1788. Governments of quite different political colours have rushed to answer the call for token support from whichever hegemon we were dependent upon, lest we be considered ungrateful for the supposed umbrella of protection we might, in future, wish to call upon.<br />
<br />
Earlier colonial leaders used to get royal favours and knighthoods for their public loyalty to the British crown. Now the most they can expect is the occasional stroll in the White House rose garden, a brief photo-opportunity on a White House portico for the Australian evening TV news, and a patronising affirmation that the USA "has no closer or more trusted ally" than Australia. If invited to a White House karoke night, I recommend any Australian politician to rehearse that great American cultural export, Carole King's splendidly honest song "Will you still love me tomorrow?"<br />
<br />
Karen Middleton's book is:<br />
<br />
<b>An Unwinnable War: Australia in Aghanistan</b><br />
published by Melbourne University Press, September 2011.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/seduced-into-an-unwinnable-afghan-war">Read my published review of Karen's book here...</a>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-56338584021322808612011-09-18T09:08:00.000+10:002011-09-18T09:08:48.167+10:00Extreme Money - how financiers play us for fools on risk and debt<b>EXTREME MONEY: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk. </b><br />
by Satyajit Das, <br />
Penguin, 514pp.<br />
<i>Reviewed: 17 September 2011</i><br />
<br />
The best economists are the not the best mathematicians. They are those with the most realistic appreciation of human nature. Too often, its the mathematicians and algorithm apostles who have garnered the Nobel Prizes for their construction of dizzying theses and techniques for the management of "risk".<br />
<br />
Satyajit Das is an economist who worked decades in risk management for banks and investment houses, but he is also humane and no fundamentalist. He recognises a truth glaringly obvious to all but the economic fundamentalists and their self-serving acolytes. "The Market" is never pure, correct, or inevitable, except in hindsight. The unseen hand that guides the market, so beloved of those who fatten themselves on speculation with funds they have not earned, is no more than the sum of unequal interests.<br />
<br />
The "market" will never be fair when knowledge is unequal. Every practical adult knows that and has experienced it in daily life. "Buyer Beware" may be an adequate baseline for barbarians, but when human societies try to be better than barbaric, we construct agreements and rules about how we will do business with each other.<br />
<br />
Money is the way we measure exchange of goods and services. Finance is the tactics and technologies for directing the circulation of money, for any private or public purpose. Economics is the study of production, exchange and consumption of goods and services.<br />
<br />
Styajit Das's book delivers a horrifying picture of how Extreme Money (under-regulated, manipulative finance) has corrupted both the world of money and the world of academic and government economics.<br />
<br />
Masters of the Universe are the class of financial operators in Wall Street, London and their equivalents, who build, operate and protect a financial system based upon fake valuation of assets and the concealment of risks, so as to turn other people’s real savings into real losses, while the Masters pocket stupendous fees and “performance” bonuses for themselves.<br />
<br />
Rarely do we understand the extent to which our personal risks can be manipulated by the financial Masters of the Universe, essentially to their own private benefit. Risk is abstracted, repackaged and traded by the financiers, using derivatives and hedging techniques, to the point that neither buyer nor seller really knows the risk (and therefore the value) of the instruments being transacted. Ultimately, buyers exchange cash for false expectations of security. The smarter financiers take their bonuses in cash. <br />
<br />
Das exposes the shambles of a system characterized by bogus and failed economic market theory, a shamelessly rapacious finance industry, and a broad failure by governments to protect either their citizens or their productive industries from a finance industry driven by the most perverse incentives.<br />
<br />
The Chicago School of Economics was espoused and funded enthusiastically from Wall Street, and has garnered several Nobel Prizes for economic theories that, when put into practice by financial institutions, have proved shallow and bankrupt. The fundamental flaw has been failure to account for the greed, fear, dishonesty and ignorance that drive opportunistic human behaviour in the real world.<br />
<br />
Alan Greenspan, long-time Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, had a lifelong ideological commitment to Ayn Rand extreme individualism, which blinded him and his like to all evidence of failure in de-regulationist neo-liberal finance policy. A whole generation of politically-favoured economists were essentially fundamentalists, who dismissed any contrary interpretations or inconvenient facts that did not suit their ideology. <br />
<br />
The Masters of the Universe exploited these flawed policies to make personal billions from useless or destructive market manipulations, and the global economy still pays for that. Behind the financiers’ marble façade is a flimsy wooden shack riddled with termites.<br />
<br />
Das's book is packed with facts, case studies and incidents to support its harsh polemic.<br />
<br />
He quotes widely from ancient historians, industry insiders and even post-modern cultural critics to show that underlying issues of trust, governance and human market behaviour are as old as history and as present as the sun. Don’t believe anyone who says, “It’s different this time”.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the challenge is to the credibility of governments. Today, while financiers in Wall Street, London and Sydney resume their well-resourced rent-seeking campaigns, governments in all the capitalist democracies face a crisis of public confidence in their ability to manage their economies.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/dangerous-games-with-extreme-money">Read my published review here ..</a><br />
<a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/dangersous-games-with-extreme-money"></a>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-17199751575237791072011-08-29T08:29:00.000+10:002011-08-29T08:29:20.217+10:00Playing Games with the News - for good reasons <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><strong>NEWSGAMES: Journalism at Play</strong></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Shweizer</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 235pp.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">The role of journalism in shaping public opinion is always contentious. As information media proliferate, the traditional ethics and rationales are challenged by any number of media that draw upon current events as the basis for entertainment and propaganda. If this is not traditional "news" or "journalism", it is none the less a powerful influence shaping the world views, decisions, and behaviours of huge sections of populations.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">In democracies, this matters. Who could deny the power of media "personalities" to make, or more often to break, the public standing of a politician or opinion-leader?</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Newsgames is the product of Ian Bogost - graduate of the MIT new media stream and now professor at Georgia Tech, together with two of his grad students (let's assume the grad students did most of the grunt work in collecting and collating examples and case studies).</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">The point of the book is to examine how "games" interact with the practice of journalism. Here the scope of "games" is extended to cover all forms of interactive simulations and graphics that are now available to the online world. So it embraces quite a lot that might earlier have been described as "educational" material - but who wants education if you can call it games in stead?</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">It's any interesting read for anyone who cares about the role of information in our advanced democracies, and where future generations may go with the information media. Bogost himself is a participant in this, not just an academic observer. His company "Persuasive Games" has been active in producing interactive news-based games that have enjoyed a degree of online success. So you could read a bit of cross-promotion into the selection of numerous examples from Persuasive Games. I don't have a problem with that.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/newsgames-the-news-thats-fit-to-play">Read my published review here..</a></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><br />
RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-91917802186304730672011-08-15T11:10:00.001+10:002011-08-15T22:06:05.903+10:00Insiders and experts tell us why Afghan engagement is futile<a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/australia-in-afghanistan-a-fruitless-war"><b>THE AFGHANISTAN CONFLICT AND AUSTRALIA'S ROLE</b></a><br />
Edited by Amin Saikal.<br />
Melbourne University Press. 210pp.<br />
<i>Reviewed: 30 July 2011</i><br />
<i> </i><i> </i><br />
<b><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/eyewitnesses-to-afghanistans-infernal-politics">CABLES FROM KABUL</a></b><br />
<b>The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign.</b><br />
By Sherard Cowper-Coles.<br />
Harper Press.312pp.<br />
<i>Reviewed: 5 August 2011</i><br />
<i></i><br />
<b><a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/reviews/eyewitnesses-to-afghanistans-infernal-politics">INFERNAL TRIANGLE</a></b><br />
<b>Conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and The Levant – Eyewitness reports from the September 11 decade.</b> By Paul McGeough.<br />
Allen and Unwin. 338pp.<br />
<i>Reviewed: 5 August 2011</i><br />
<br />
It was the burden of the prophetess Cassandra to see future doom, but her curse was that nobody would believe her warnings.<br />
<br />
The bloody embrace of Western nations with Afghanistan is a situations in which everybody who knows what they are talking about realises that almost the entire Western engagement has been futile and even counter-productive.<br />
<br />
The first of these books is a symposium of experts from a conference at the Centre for Islamic and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University. All of them are area experts, several of them are Afghans, others are distinguished military strategists<i> </i>or social development activists.<br />
<br />
Several contributors refer to the great needs for social development in Afghanistan - but none of these could convince me that the Western alliance could deliver such development in any way that would survive the imminent withdrawal of western military forces on the ground.<br />
<br />
Most depressingly, the strategy experts (such as Prof Hugh White) question whether the missions, and particularly Australia's tag-along mission, were ever undertaken for good reasons. We all remain hostage to the hegemonistic fantasies of the neo-con Bush administration.<br />
<br />
Sadly, it seems that our own democratic societies are part of the problem. Our leaders can be overthrown by media-driven perceptions that they are "weak", so they struggle to avoid the appearance of anything that can be described as "defeat". Military establishments and government advisers all try to avoid association with defeat, and so continue to pretend that "victory" is possible. It reminds me of stockbrokers and real estate agents constantly assuring investors that they will be OK "in the long run".<br />
<br />
<i>Cables from Kabul</i> is a personal memoir of a classic kind. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is a classic kind of English establishment product, talented as well as privileged, who served as British Ambassador in Kabul and as the UK's Special Representative on Afghanistan during 2010. <br />
<br />
His perspective is that the western alliance should have learned more from the accumulated history of failed imperial engagements with Afghanistan, particularly the experience of the British Empire a century or two ago. He is probably right. But making these points too often and too cheekily for Washington's taste eventaully caused embarassment in London, and thus put an end to his diplomatic career. We can be grateful for this - his memoir is a classic and fun to read, though the man himself might be difficult to get along with and shows a rather patronising attitude toward Australians (as well as Americans).<br />
<br />
<i>Infernal Triangle</i> is a journalistic collection by distinguished war correpondent, Paul McGeough. The collected despatches cover not only Afghanistan but also Iraq and Palestine (thus the Triangle). He provides many useful perspectives - one being the interconnection between these different war zones. Another is that the chronological sequence of his reports shows his growing disillusion with the Western "project" to democratise Islam. Western indulgence of Israel's expansionism is the common factor linking it all together, because it defines the entire West as an enemy of Islam and, worse, as hypocritical. <br />
<br />
It is sheer madness that our governments turn a willful blind eye to that obvious canker and obstacle to peace and development. Perhaps this is another artifact of our democractic subjection to determined propaganda. Let's never forget that Hitler came to power in Germany by democratic elections. In our era, the real saboteurs of global peace are not Islamists, and not Zionists, but madcap Christian fundamentalists who terrorise American electoral politics (and some ill-informed elements of the Australian electorate as well).<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thwaites.com.au/?cat=5">Read the reviews</a> for a rant-free evaluation of these three worthwhile books.<br />
<br />
<i><br />
</i>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-70818162312153231602011-08-15T10:19:00.001+10:002011-08-15T22:11:28.204+10:00This blog may become less polite..Two things have indicated it is time for a change of direction in <i>The Lost Colophon.</i><br />
<br />
First, I've upgraded my personal book reviews site at <a href="http://thwaites.com.au/?cat=5">Richard Thwaites' Book Reviews</a><i> </i>so that the full text of reviews is easier to find. The new pages present concise summaries and a dated list of links to all past reviews, which is easier to navigate than this public blog's format that hides everything in dated archives. Who ever browses by dates???<br />
<br />
So there's no more need to post extensive texts of my published reviews here.<br />
<br />
Second, there are certain constraints and conventions in writing reviews for an established print medium such as <i>The Canberra Times</i>, the newspaper of Australia's national capital. An <i>a priori </i>respect for the author, and an attempt to be fair to the written work, are reasonable premises from which to write a non-fiction review. A reviewer should avoid grandstanding and self-promotion, while providing readers with the best possible understanding of the qualities and limitations of the work under review.<br />
<br />
But this virtuous commitment to balance leaves little room for the reviewer to share, with his own readers, the essence of the reading experience: how did this book affect me?<br />
<br />
So, as of now, <i>The Lost Colophon</i> will record the personal aspects of the book-review task as I experience it, stepping through current non-fiction works of authors who are trying to say something that is worth taking seriously.<br />
<br />
I'll be talking about all the books I review, and referring interested readers to the reviews themselves at <a href="http://thwaites.com.au/?cat=5">Richard Thwaites' Book Reviews</a>. RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-37697836749823120372011-05-16T10:27:00.001+10:002011-09-05T09:19:31.696+10:00Is Victory worth the Price?<b></b><b>THE ILLUSION OF VICTORY: </b><br />
<b>The True Costs of War. By Ian Bickerton. </b><br />
<b>Melbourne University Press.241pp. </b><br />
<br />
Reviewed 14 May 2011<br />
<br />
Our era of unresolved conflicts, between state and non-state antagonists with ill-defined or unstated goals, seems ripe for a review of the idea of victory.<br />
<br />
Ian Bickerton is a senior historian at the University of New South Wales who has specialized in the study of US foreign policy and of conflict in the Middle East. He takes a dim view of war in general, and in this book, he tackles the problem of war backwards - rather than questioning the causes, he questions the results. The book hangs on his proposition that, in war, victory is an illusion, and in our current era has lost all meaning.<br />
<br />
It's a fine topic for a vigorous debate, but first you have to define “victory”. Bickerton doesn't offer a concise definition, but he refers to “strategic victory” as imparting the ability to impose peace and stability, including within the politics of the defeated nations. That sets the bar quite high. My Oxford Dictionary defines victory more simply, at two levels: “the position or state of having overcome an enemy or adversary in battle, combat or war”; then “supremacy or superiority achieved as the result of armed conflict”. Bickerton's case is that victory of the first kind (overcoming an enemy in combat) does not guarantee any lasting strategic supremacy, superiority, or even peace for the nominal victors.<br />
<br />
His analytical method is systematic but blunt. He takes a series of wars that involved Europe and/or America, from the Napoleonic to the "War on Terror", and lists what the “winners” demanded as their terms of victory. He then checks the situation after twenty-five years. By his reckoning, almost never have the terms of victory turned out as the victors intended. In most cases, the “losers” have done at least as well as the winners. German and Japanese post-war industrial reconstruction are the classic examples.<br />
<br />
On the other side of the ledger, he collates the vast human and material costs of war, which are as likely to have crippled generations of the winning side as of the losing side.<br />
<br />
The horrors and costs of war have been recognized from the beginning of human history, but wars keep happening. So is the idea of Victory really worth attacking in this day and age, or is it something of a straw man? Expectations of victory not be fulfilled, but does that prove that no war should never be fought?<br />
<br />
The historical method ignores the counter-factual - what would have happened if there were no response, and no threat of response, to the temptation for a strong or angry party to use aggressive force? Bickerton quotes Ambrose Bierce that “peace is a period of cheating between two periods of fighting”, but his best alternative to war is “consideration of more creative political approaches to resolving differences between states, and between states and non-state groups”.<br />
<br />
The human propensity for war seems intransigent, but not entirely beyond moderation. Modern weaponry has vastly increased the rate of civilian casualties as "collateral damage" to combat - Bickerton says 90% of casualties in the Iraq conflict have been civilian. But the threat of mutually assured destruction, together with the greater accountability of governments to the governed, provides increasing restraint on the resort to warfare. On average, more democracy should mean less war.<br />
<br />
So how is aggression is to be resisted or even discouraged? Bickerton quotes Sun Tzu on the tactic of “defeating the enemy's strategy” by offering to meet the enemy's objectives by peaceful, mainly economic, inducements. He does not quote another part of Sun Tzu's <i>Art of War</i>, that the greatest general is he who wins the war without having to fight a battle - by isolating, encircling, bribing and intimidating a weakened adversary.<br />
<br />
This is an interesting polemic that deserves to provoke debate.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/?cat=5">Read the full review</a><br />
<br />
<i>Richard Thwaites has reported on wars and politics, and participated in policy wars, but has so far avoided personal engagement in mortal combat.</i>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-442545616240311785.post-2422164280709547932011-04-26T00:16:00.001+10:002011-09-05T09:20:10.539+10:00How the West saw Gandhi<strong>GANDHI IN THE WEST: </strong><br />
<strong>The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest. </strong><br />
<strong>By Sean Scalmer. Cambridge University Press.248pp</strong><strong><br />
</strong><strong> </strong><br />
People all over the world keep putting their lives on the line for political protest. But when public communication in our Western democracies seems dominated by news-cycle political stunts and media demagogcracy, has radical protest lost its moral and political force?<br />
<br />
Sean Scalmer casts a historian's eye over Western protest movements of the 20th Century, from when the techniques of Mahatma Gandhi first attracted Western attention, up to a high point of Western political protest movements, against the Vietnam War.<br />
<br />
Scalmer reviews how Western societies responded to Gandhi's words, actions and image, and how those responses influenced political action in Western democracies.<br />
<br />
His primary sources are the words of the activists, officials, journalists and commentators whose various impressions of Gandhi, or “Gandhism”, fed into the making of Western public and political opinion.<br />
<br />
Until Gandhi's assasination in 1948, Western attitudes generally reflected whether people supported, or resisted, Indian independence from the British Empire. He was also admired and imitated by Western pacifists, numerous 1920-1939 but much fewer once faced with the aggression of the Axis powers.<br />
<br />
Later Western movements that owed technical credits to Gandhi's modes of protest were the nuclear disarmament campaigns, beginning in UK in the late 1940s, the US Civil Rights movements in the 1950s and 60s, and finally the protests against Vietnam War.<br />
<br />
Gandhism (a term Ganhi himself rejected) had both a moral component (setting out how and why the individual should act in particular situations) and also a pragmatic component, setting out how people could act together to achieve political objectives.<br />
<br />
Gandhi's blend of Jain, Hindu, Christian, Sufi and other moral systems earned him a certain mystic authority to mobilize mass protest action in India, and attracted a useful subculture of Western devotees. But the personal side of Gandhi's moral philosophy ultimately was too eccentric for him to be accepted, by Indian elites or by average Westerners, as a political leader for all Indians.<br />
<br />
It was the pragmatic effectiveness of his protest techniques that most influenced Western emulators. Gandhi coined the phrase <em>satyagraha</em> from the Sanskrit terms for truth (<em>satyam</em>) and for firmness (<em>agraha</em>). He and his followers believed that mass non-violent resistance against oppression would morally convert the oppressors.<br />
<br />
Although this occurred, at some level and with some oppressors, more hard-headed analysts attribute Gandhi's political successes to publicity.<br />
<br />
The public sympathy generated by images of demonstrators being treated violently can mobilize support for political change. But its effect depends on the ruling powers being accountable, at least to some degree, to that converted public. And other significant factors may have to be close to a tipping point for the moral sympathy factor to tip that balance.<br />
<br />
Scalmer traces how successive Western protest movements gradually watered down the Gandhian moral element of satyagraha, reducing it to lip-service, then to a pragmatic political method, until eventually American protest movements dropped all reference to Gandhi and claimed that passive resistance methods were their own invention.<br />
<br />
By the end of the 1960s, Rev. Martin Luther King's non-violent protest movement, based on Gandhian as well as Christian values, had been replaced in the public eye by the conflict-model Black Power movement, and by the middle-class anti-establishment stunt politics of the psychedelic era.<br />
<br />
The media, then and now, give publicity more readily in return for the gratification of retailing conflict, not resolution. Scalmer's survey, in the end, is about us in the West, not about Gandhi. Scalmer writes clearly and concisely, and offers insights that are well worth the read.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thwaites.com.au/?cat=5">Read the full review</a><br />
<br />
<em>Richard Thwaites passively resists taking part in organized protest movements.</em>RichardNThwaiteshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00981591313302066482noreply@blogger.com0