Scarcity and Poverty

 @IDS_UK and @owenbarder offer two related but logically distinct interpretations of a new book on the Limits to Scarcity.

• How faulty economic models keep the poor poor.
• Does rhetoric about scarcity help to keep the poor poor?

From a POSIWID perspective, these two interpretations each imply a hidden purpose: for the economic models and rhetoric respectively. But the POSIWID heuristic is a fairly blunt analytic instrument that probably doesn't help us choose whether to focus on the models or the rhetoric.

Here's an extract from the blurb

The 'scare' of scarcity has led to scarcity emerging as a political strategy for powerful groups. Aggregate numbers and physical quantities are trusted, while local knowledges and experiences of scarcity that identify problems more accurately and specifically are ignored. Science and technology are expected to provide 'solutions', but such expectations embody a multitude of unexamined assumptions about the nature of the 'problem', about the technologies and about the institutional arrangements put forward as a 'fix.' 

The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation (2011). Edited By Lyla Mehta. ISBN 1 844075423

The Purpose of Ritual

@ColinBeveridge asks about the purpose of the introduction ritual at the start of many meetings, and suggests that Going Around The Table Is A Waste Of Time.

"So-called ‘face time’ is increasingly precious to all of us, which makes me wonder why we routinely waste so much time, at the beginning of meetings, by ‘going round the table’ to introduce ourselves to each other."

I was at a meeting this week where the introductions lasted almost until lunchtime, and one of the attendees had to leave before the introductions had finished. But in terms of the purpose of that particular meeting, long introductions seemed both necessary and useful.

In other meetings, especially where most of the people already know each other, the introductions are often skimped or omitted altogether. A bit of perfunctory small-talk and then down to business. From an ultra-rationalist perspective, this style might seem more efficient.

But what if systematically encouraging all the participants to exercise their voice-box and social manners before tackling the main business of the meeting resulted in a more effective discussion, to which the quieter and more thoughtful participants made a more significant contribution? Would Colin still think that the ritual was a waste of time?

Watching the Australian Open on the television this week, it occurred to me that the introductions at the start of many business meetings served a similar purpose to the warm-up before a tennis match - helping the players to shake off the stress of waiting for the match to start, and also get used to the conditions of the court, before starting to compete in earnest.

If going around the table is really a waste of time, as Colin thinks, why do so many meetings do this? There must be some positive social effect that explains why people maintain this ritual. POSIWID - the purpose of a system is what it does.

The Purpose of Baldness

Experts say they have discovered what they believe is the root cause of male pattern baldness - faulty stem cells. [Cause of male baldness found, BBC News 5 January 2011]

The BBC News story puts the word "cause" into inverted commas, presumably to indicate that it sees a problem with the attribution of causality, but it doesn't seem to see a problem with the word "fault". And yet on what grounds does it make sense to identify this feature as a "fault"?

The human body has many features that reveal one's age and health to potential sexual partners. Evolutionary biologists are fond of attributing purpose to these features, which supposedly help to bias reproductive activity towards the "fittest" members of the population; these biologists often speculate that these features have evolved because of the possible advantage they could confer, both to those individuals who send the "right" signals and also to those individuals who respond "correctly" to these signals. This kind of argument supposedly explains why men are attracted to certain kinds of women, and women are attracted to certain kinds of men.

An interesting example is the lack of a penis bone in humans, which Richard Dawkins has explained by the argument that it is biologically useful for young women to differentiate between those men who can produce a decent erection and those who cannot. On the same logic that would regard male pattern baldness as a "fault", an impotent man might regard the lack of a penis bone as a "design fault" that prevents his competing with younger and more vigorous men.

Obviously there is plenty of money involved in faking the signs of youth and good health - everything from hair transplants and botox to plastic surgery. But men and women are often conned into spending substantial sums of money on painful treatments that don't make them any more attractive to the opposite sex and merely make them look ridiculous. Maybe it's easy for me to say, but there are worse things than baldness.

Decoding Disclosure

In her piece #WikiLeaks no favor to historians, Kiron K. Skinner believes there will be some unintended consequences of the recent deluge of WikiLeaks.

"Policy makers, intelligence analysts and statesmen [will] find it necessary to write to each other in code. ... Once frank and private interactions among statesmen will become more diplomatic. ... This will probably lead to greater secrecy and manipulation until technology devises yet more powerful lenses to reveal even the most private state encounters."

But surely historians have always been trained not to take any documents at face value. It stretches belief to imagine that private interactions among statesmen have ever been totally frank, or that official documents have ever been completely objective. Dr Skinner advocates other forms of historical document, such as contemporary interviews with political actors, but of course these cannot be taken at face value either.

Powerful people often oscillate between discretion and indiscretion. Journalists and spies have many ways of tempting people to boast about their knowledge and influence (Vince Cable being a recent victim of such techniques - see BBC News). Given the complex psychological and political factors that trigger specific instances of disclosure, there is no reason to believe that those items disclosed are either consistently more important or consistently less important than those not disclosed. As it happens, many of the WikiLeaks disclosures are pretty banal, and some commentators have gained the impression that the life of the professional diplomat is also pretty banal, but this impression may simply be a consequence of the WikiLeaks process together with selective media reporting. Anyone who believes that WikiLeaks provides some kind of "truth" should read Slavoj Žižek Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks (LRB 20 January 2011).

Scandal sheets such as Private Eye have always had coded ways of disclosing information. For example, famous people are often described as "tired and emotional" (drunk) or "discussing Uganda" (having sexual intercourse).

Historians will continue to have to wade through bureaucratic self-justification, empty boasting and unsubstantiated rumour, filtered through a gauze of topical references and codes, and to try and understand the hidden power of negotiating positions that were never made explicit. (Žižek mentions a crucial meeting in Portugal in 1974.) WikiLeaks isn't going to change this very much.

Twists of Fate 4

In Twists of Fate 3, I mentioned some cases where it seems natural to personalize fate, and attribute him with a cruel sense of humour.

We might also attribute the following example to a personalized fate with a perverse sense of humour.

NYC jumper saved by trash uncollected since storm
26-year-old leaped from ninth floor apartment and landed on pile of refuse. His aunt told the New York Post it was lucky the city had the snow and hadn't cleared the garbage.

MSNBC 3 January 2011 via @milouness

Lucky but undignified.