Can we take welcome at face value?

Matt Brittin, the President of Google EMEA, has some warm words for the EU Commission's efforts to regulate political advertising.

We share the Commission's goal of increasing the harmonization of Europe’s transparency rules for political advertising and we support today’s introduction of legislation. ... The Commission’s proposal is an important and welcome step.

Karolina Iwańska of the Panoptykon Foundation interprets this as a bad sign for the proposal.

First sign that the Commission's proposal for regulating political ads is too weak: Google "welcomes" it. https://t.co/6j7UCQLK0s

— Karolina Iwańska (@ka_iwanska) November 26, 2021

However there are other possible interpretations of Google's position.

The first is a cynical one. It is not uncommon for organizations lobbying against regulation to loudly affirm their support for the general principle, while working behind the scenes to water down any concrete measures. Mr Brittin notes that this is a complex field, requiring a balance ..., and although such words could be based on a sincere desire to improve the proposals, they are also consistent with the cynical interpretation.

But there is another interpretation. However much large companies complain about regulation, they are also aware that regulation serves as a source of competitive advantage for them, since large established companies can absorb the costs of compliance more easily than small players. (In the banking sector for example, this effect was expected to increase polarization between larger and smaller players. And in October 2012 I noted the irony that legislation prompted by bad behaviour by large companies can be more burdensome for small companies than for larger companies.) It also establishes barriers to entry, giving them another layer of protection against anything that might fundamentally disrupt their business model.

Large companies often work behind the scenes to influence the shape of emerging regulation in their favour, and Google is clearly signalling its willingness to appear helpful.

Chapter Four of Shoshana Zuboff's book, which is entitled The Moat Around the Castle, details a broad combination of rhetoric and lobbying carried out by Google and its executives to establish Google's freedom from government regulation. However, this doesn't rule out the possibility that Google now takes a more nuanced position, particularly as much of the public and political attention is currently directed at Facebook rather than themselves.

Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends ...

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Matt Brittin, New EU political ads law is a step in the right direction (Google, 25 November 2021)

Update: See also Interview with Matt Brittin on Channel Four News (2 December 2022)

Natasha Lomas, Report reveals Big Tech’s last minute lobbying to weaken EU rules (TechCrunch, 22 April 2022)

Jane Merriman, Big banks winners from new contingent capital move (Reuters, 27 August 2010)

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)

Related posts: Regulation and Complexity (October 2012), Decentred Regulation and Responsible Technology (April 2019), Amplification and Attenuation (October 2021)

Amplification and Attenuation

@STS_News (Lee Vinsel) poses a couple of important questions on Twitter

• Have any of y'all seen any specific proposals for how to regulate Big Tech companies around mis/dis/harmful information?
• Are there any so-far best philosophical/ethical treatments for why platforms *should* shutdown groups like Qanon?

I think it makes sense to start with the WHY question before tackling the HOW. In my post on The Ethics of Diversion - Tobacco Example (September 2019), I listed four ethical principles that might be relevant to that case, and discussed the need to balance these appropriately.

• Minimum interference principle
• Utilitarianism
• Cautionary principle
• Conflict of interest
  

If the primary justification for shutting down certain groups is to reduce the circulation of ideas that society has agreed to classify as undesirable, for whatever reason, then the minimum interference principle urges us to consider alternative (less extreme) measures that might achieve almost as much suppression with less interference. For example, instead of banning these groups from a given platform, it might be almost as effective to allow these groups to post whatever they like, provided that these posts are not picked up and recommended to others by the platform algorithm. Indeed, it might be safer to keep these groups on a well-controlled platform, rather than push them to migrate onto a less well-controlled platform.

In other words, in order to justify total shutdown, you have to demonstrate that this will produce significantly better outcomes than lighter regulation would.

However, in the case of the social media platforms, this is complicated by conflict of interest. The platform algorithms are designed to promote the commercial interests of the platform, and this means maximizing the engagement (or even addiction) of the so-called users. So society may not feel it can trust the platforms to manage the recommendation algorithms in a way that achieves the outcomes that society wants (and avoids the outcomes that society wants to prevent). And the algorithms themselves are generally not amenable to independent inspection, being incredibly complex and wrapped in commercial secrecy.

Meanwhile, not everyone is comfortable with the idea that ethical decisions should depend solely on the consequences of this or that action. If there is something clearly objectionable in the content that a given group wishes to post, or if we can demonstrate some evil intention behind it, surely we should be allowed to object to the content itself, not merely suppress its consequences? It may also be difficult to determine these consequences with any degree of accuracy, either in advance or retrospectively. So in addition to the consequentialist arguments we have already looked at, moral philosophers have identified a different class of argument, which they call deontological.

This includes arguments based on the intrinsic value of truth, and the idea that platforms should suppress material simply because it contains certain kinds of falsehood. However, I think this idea is insufficient as a basis for regulation, as I argue in my post on Ethical Communication in a Digital Age. 

There's obviously a lot more I could say about the WHY, but let me say a few words about the HOW. One way of understanding regulation and control comes from cybernetics. As we see from the work of Stafford Beer, for example, the behaviour of complex systems can be controlled by a combination of amplification and attenuation. In the world of social media, the critical question is which messages are selected for amplification.

In her article on Amplified Propaganda, Renée DiResta suggests that traditional top-down propaganda (which Chomsky called the Manufacture of Consent) has been replaced by the bottom-up creation and selective amplification of narratives that shape reality. She calls this Ampliganda.

In many cases, these narratives appear to emerge spontaneously from the crowd - this is sometimes called going viral. However, there are increasingly sophisticated ways of engineering and orchestrating these narratives, not just with bots but by convincing real people to participate in their propagation.

Meanwhile, if some things are being amplified, other things are being suppressed or ignored. In most cases, this is not the result of anyone actively deciding to suppress them, more a consequence of the fact that there is a finite quantity of attention. If a book or film or other cultural product receives poor reviews, or perhaps nobody even bothers to review it at all, then it is unlikely to become a best-seller. Similarly, the majority of the content on the internet will be read by at most a handful of people. It doesn't make sense to accuse the platform of exercising censorship, or to complain of being cancelled, simply because something fails to achieve a mass audience.

Furthermore, there are some structural reasons why certain types of content fails to attract an audience. In politics, there are limits to the kinds of idea that people are willing to take seriously - this is known as the Overton window. (However, this can change over time, for reasons that I can't go into here.)

But while the majority of people are comfortably inside the Overton window, there may be a significant minority who are attracted to groups positioned well outside the Overton window. So instead of asking how we should regulate the use of Big Tech by these groups (or some might say the cynical exploitation of these groups by Big Tech), maybe there are some larger questions about the regulation and/or liberation of discourse inside and outside the Overton window.

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Renée DiResta, It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda (Atlantic, 9 October 2021)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Consequentialism, Deontological Ethics

Wikipedia: Overton Window

Related posts: Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Culture War - What Is It Good For? (July 2021)

School Inspections

#Ofsted's @mcladingbowl via @rachelala asks everyone to share a school inspection myth-buster. So here goes.

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Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, reporting directly to Parliament. It carries out hundreds of inspections and regulatory visits every week across England; separate bodies handle inspections in the rest of the UK.

According to Ofsted, inspection acts in a number of ways to drive and support school improvement.

• raises expectations by setting the standards of performance and effectiveness expected of schools
• provides a sharp challenge and the impetus to act where improvement is needed clearly identifies strengths and weaknesses
• recommends specific priorities for improvement for the school and, when appropriate, checks on and promotes subsequent progress
• promotes rigour in the way that schools evaluate their own performance, thereby enhancing their capacity to improve
• monitors the progress and performance of schools that are not yet good, and challenges and supports senior leaders, staff and those responsible for governance.

Of course, schools wish to perform well in these inspections, and to avoid the inconvenience and shame of being selected for "special measures". So it is not surprising that certain beliefs have grown up around these inspections.

Although I don't have direct experience of school inspections, I can easily imagine how such beliefs might develop. Perhaps the inspector visiting school A casually asks to see a particular document, or comments on its absence. This becomes part of the collective memory of the school. Before the next inspection, every teacher in the school has been instructed to prepare this document in readiness. In time, this knowledge spreads to other schools, and becomes widely accepted as "best practice" for passing an inspection.  

Ofsted now wishes to dispel certain myths about the inspection process, and denies that it "requires" or "expects to see" loads of stuff. In its latest clarification, Ofsted officially deprecates a number of specific practices.

But there is a critical ambiguity in the notion of requirement. These practices may not be officially required by Ofsted; but if they happen to be strongly correlated with successful inspections, it may well be rational for school teachers to continue to regard these practices as implicitly encouraged and reinforced by the actions of Ofsted inspectors. It would be a brave head teacher who abandoned those practices that had got the school through past inspections, simply because Ofsted insisted that these practices were not officially required.

Ofsted is also charged with a range of political and social objectives, including promoting British values and tackling extremism, and these implicit objectives are believed to colour its assessments of educational outcomes.

And when Ofsted insists that "it is up to schools themselves to determine their practices and for leadership teams to justify these on their own merits rather than by reference to the inspection handbook", this sounds suspiciously like a classic double bind. Of course you can have as much bureaucracy as you like, as long as you really want to do it for its own sake and not because we told you to. Oh, and please make sure none of it is "unnecessary".

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Ofsted, Framework for School Inspection (July 2014)

Ofsted inspections - clarification for schools (October 2014)

Richard Adams, Ofsted tells teachers what not to do in effort to dispel inspection myths (Guardian 17 October 2014)

Graeme Paton, Ofsted being turned into a 'schoolroom security service' (Telegraph 28 November 2014)


Zoe Williams, Swamp or success: your school is being racially profiled (Guardian 23 November 2014)

School Uniform

#wrongtrousers @HeatonManor, a state school in Newcastle, has attracted opprobrium for putting over fifty children into detention for wearing the "wrong trousers".

It seems that the school had issued new school uniform guidelines, specifying "tailored" trousers, which many parents had misunderstood or ignored. It appears that the school interpreted these guidelines as banning tight or drainpipe trousers, and was zealous in enforcing this interpretation. Clearly there is a question here of language and class: how many parents appreciated the teachers' notion of tailoring?

If you look at the dictionary definition of tailoring, you might imagine that it meant "made-to-measure" rather than "off-the-peg". Many decades ago when I was at school, there were a few boys with wealthy parents, who had their school uniform made to measure. The rest of us had much cheaper off-the-peg clothes, and everyone could see the difference. This of course undermined one of the alleged purposes of uniform, which is to conceal differences of wealth and social background.

What is the real purpose of school uniform? Sometimes it seems that the real purpose is to prevent children from ever wearing anything fashionable. In the early 1970s, school rules prevented boys having long hair, but very short hair was fine. Then in the mid 1970s, school rules were reinterpreted or changed to ban skinheads. Obviously fashions change faster than the schools can reissue the rules.

Another alleged purpose of school uniform in state schools is to ape private schools. Many comments on this incident have accused the school authorities of behaving like dictators: imposing controls on something that is irrelevant to education, and then imposing sanctions that interfere with education. This is a very old debate, and is certainly not unique to Heaton Manor.

Meanwhile, as @MagNews comments, no reference as to affordability! Some families try to get by with one set of clothes, and may have difficulties when these need washing, while others can afford more than one set. Families typically buy new or second-hand uniforms before the start of the school year, and it's not easy to rush out and buy more clothes because the teachers don't like the first lot.

Finally, let's look at the Heaton Manor guiding principles (retrieved 6 September 2014). These include

• Courtesy, self-discipline and respect for others – good fellowship
• Trust, honesty and integrity
• Acceptance of personal responsibility
• Understanding, care and tolerance
• Confidence, motivation, self belief and esteem – encouraging independence 

It will be interesting to see how the school explains its interpretation of these principles in this context.

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Sources


Newcastle school puts 50 pupils in detention for wearing wrong trousers (Guardian 5 September 2014)

More than 50 children put into detention for wearing the wrong trousers (Independent 5 September 2014)

and before you think this is only a UK thing ...

Strict dress code nets detentions at NY school (Salon 15 September 2014)

Jessica Valenti, How many young women can a school legally punish for dress code violations? (Guardian 17 September 2014)


Updated 17 September 2014

Smart Guns

Just suppose that smart guns were safer than ordinary guns.

For example, if someone grabbed your gun and tried to point it at you. If it was a smart gun you'd be perfectly safe because there is a fool-proof mechanism that prevents its use by an unauthorized person.

As with any technological advance, some people are sceptical. How much do you trust new technology? Suppose the gun doesn't work when you need it. Maybe an electromagnetic pulse (triggered by terrorists or natural solar activity) might take out all weapons in the area. Or maybe the bad guys (or the FBI) can hack into this mechanism and disable your gun before they attack you.

Meanwhile, like many technological advances, there are political implications. In the USA, the key question is whether such a mechanism might help reduce gun violence. Some gun control activists think such a mechanism would be pretty irrelevant.

But that doesn't stop the gun rights activists freaking out at the prospect of any damn technology on their precious weaponry. A shop owner in the US claims to have received death threats from pro-gun lobbyists for offering to sell the weapons. Meanwhile, as Joseph Steinberg suggests, an obsession with smart guns may inhibit other technological innovations that could make guns and gun-owning safer.

The belief here is that once these smart guns are available, by a process of technological determinism, they will become irresistible to legislators. Before long, they fear, you won't be able to buy regular guns.

Obviously that's a cause worth killing for.

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David Kopel, Brady Center lawsuit to use “smart” gun mandate to trigger handgun ban in New Jersey (Washington Post 22 May 2014)

Karen McVeigh, Gun control groups accuse New Jersey of ignoring 'smart gun' law (Guardian 21 May 2014)

Michael S. Rosenwald, Maryland dealer, under pressure from gun-rights activists, drops plan to sell smart gun (Washington Post, 1 May 2014)

Joseph Steinberg, Why You Should Be Concerned About The New 'Smart Guns' (Whether You Love Or Hate Guns) (Forbes 4 May 2014)

Nicholas Tufnell, Smart guns: How smart are they? (BBC News, 23 May 2014)

Eugene Volokh, Smart guns, electromagnetic pulse, and planning for unknown-probability dangers (Washington Post 23 May 2014)


See also Batman/Catwoman: Trail of the Gun (hat tip @ChBrain).

Related post Technological Determism (December 2020)

Does Basel want bigger banks?

@Peston via @diane1859 "Basel tilts playing field further towards big banks. It wasn't supposed to be this way."

Here's the dilemma. The official purpose of banking regulation is to protect the whole system from risk. But the actual effect of controlling each bank separately (whether in terms of capital ratios or any other measure) is to encourage the concentration of risk, which makes the whole system more risky.

Counter-productive regulation is an extremely common phenomenon. Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle tells us that the de facto purpose of a complex system is often at odds with the official purpose.

True systems thinking on the part of legislators and regulators might lead us to more effective and appropriate ways of regulating the whole system than simply imposing controls on the individual players within the system. But what's the chance of that happening?

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Jane Merriman, Big banks winners from new contingent capital move (Reuters, 27 August 2010)

Related posts Does Britain need smaller banks? (April 2009), Bearing Limit and Financial Regulation (September 2010)

Short-Selling

To start with, the hedge funds were for the serious investor. The seriously rich got seriously richer by short-selling stuff.

Over the past two or three years, ordinary investment funds (such as pension funds) have got into the hedging game. This has made the game much larger and more automated, and therefore reduced the likely gains.

Short-selling has never been popular with governments. On "Black Wednesday" (1992) Sterling was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism by short-selling. One of the most vocal critics of short-selling has been the German politician Franz Müntefering, who has compared hedge-funds with locusts.

So it is perhaps fitting that hedge funds are reported to have lost billions on the German stock market, betting against Volkswagen. The Volkswagen share price rose dramatically yesterday, thanks to the intervention of Porsche. (I guess we know what cars the hedge fund managers won't be buying next year.)

Robert Peston, Hedge funds and VW: what a pile up! (BBC News 29 October 2008)
Gordon Raynor, Porsche and VW share row: how Germany got revenge on the hedge fund 'locusts' (Daily Telegraph, 29 October 2008)

Blame Obama

My friend Phil from Iowa has long been a passionate McCain supporter, and circulated numerous emails during McCain's previous bid for the presidency. Yesterday he sent me a copy of an article apparently blaming Senator Obama for single-handedly causing the current financial catastrophe. Diana West: Social Engineering Derailed Our Economy.

The argument goes like this. As a community organizer, Barack Obama encouraged poor people (yes there's a racial element to this argument) to take advantage of the available finance. As a politician, Barack Obama supported the availability of finance to poor people. Therefore the collapse of the American banking system is a dastardly communist plot orchestrated by Barack Obama.

Who is the principal beneficiary of this collapse? Why, Senator Obama of course, who now commands a healthy lead in the opinion polls. Therefore the primary purpose of this social engineering was to cheat Senator McCain from his rightful job as President Maverick.

If all this were true, of course, it would rather undermine the standard Republican argument that Obama has no management experience. A president capable of orchestrating such a dramatic outcome, and with such consummate timing, would make an outstanding President.

Of course this is nonsense. As if the weak-minded banks were coerced into dodgy finance by left-wing politicians!? If the capitalist system can be subverted by a handful of left-wing activists, then it isn't quite as robust as the End-of-History ideologues like to think.

Of course the current state of regulation over the banking system is a complete mess - both nationally and internationally. In the USA, regulation has been a battleground between Republicans and Democrats, with the latter blaming everything on Reagan-era deregulation, and the former blaming everything either on Clinton or on the refusal of the Democrats to support partial reintroduction of regulation under Bush.

One of the principles of systems thinking is that a regulation system needs to have requisite variety - in other words, it needs to have just enough complexity to respond intelligently to the complexity of the system being regulated. It is difficult to imagine politicians of any stripe being capable of designing an effective regulatory system. Conversely, it is difficult to imagine someone capable of real systems thinking becoming an effective President. Look at Jimmy Carter: the exception proves the rule.

 

See also Relationships built on self-interest (January 2009)

Regulated Asset Base

I'm so worried about what's happenin' today, in the middle east, you know
And I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow
(Monty Python)

Many people think the letters "BAA" stand for "British Airports Authority", but this hasn't been true for a long time. The company owns three London airports (Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted) and four Scottish ones, and therefore controls a large slice of UK civilian aviation, but it was sold off by the Conservative Government in 1986 and is now owned by Spanish firm Grupo Ferrovial.

BAA gains its revenues from landing fees charged to airlines, and from retail operations. Landing fees are regulated to prevent BAA abusing its near-monopoly position: as a result, landing fees at Heathrow are considerably lower than at rival airports in Europe (Paris Charles de Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol, Frankfurt). BAA has to make up the difference through retail.

So is that the purpose of Terminal Five - more shops, more delays, more pointless duty-free purchases? Not entirely.

BAA is regulated according to a formula that depends on its asset base - so-called RAB. As Michael Ryan (boss of RyanAir) complains to anyone who will listen, this means BAA can make higher profits from investing in white elephants new assets than from running the existing assets properly.

Bear that in mind when you hear them talking up Terminal Five in terms of passenger convenience.

Oh, and a third runway at Heathrow? Ha, ha, bloody ha.

Further comment

• Heathrow Terminal Five
• Travel Hopefully

Sources

• Heathrow held back by low landing fees (Daily Telegraph, 7 September 2007)
• Heathrow and Gatwick quinquennial review (Competition Commission, 2007)
• Written evidence by British Airways to the House of Commons Select Committee on Transport (November 2007)

Poetic Justice

May your enemies never discover your Achilles Heel.

The latest (but probably not the last) in a long line of flawed heroes is Eliot Spitzer, former scourge of Wall Street and currently a leading supporter of Hillary Clinton, who has just been caught with his pants down [BBC News, March 12th 2008]. BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan writes: "New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace has all the elements of a Greek tragedy."

Did he engineer his own downfall, or was he lured into a trap by an enemy who knew his weakness? He certainly had plenty of enemies long before this story broke, so there would be no shortage of suspects.

Technology analysts have been pointing out the role of information systems in catching Mr Spitzer. Larry Dignam (Chief Editor of ZDnet) explains How an information system helped nail Eliot Spitzer and a prostitution ring. Jesper Joergensen, who works for a software vendor, sees an opportunity to put in a plug for his own company's event processing products. "If anyone working in a bank's anti-money laundering, compliance or fraud detection unit is reading this", he writes, "go check out [my company's products]. This is the technology you need to automate these compliance requirements." Thank you Jesper, don't call us, we'll call you.

But the other half of the equation is the role of Mr Spitzer in championing these kind of information systems and compliance regimes in the first place. Hoist, as they say, by his own petard.

Dairy Prices

British supermarket Sainsbury's has been fined £26m for dairy price fixing. Chief executive Justin King told the BBC that its price initiatives in 2002 and 2003 "were designed to help British dairy farmers at a time of considerable economic pressure and public debate about whether farmers were getting a fair price for their products". [BBC News December 7th 2007]

But the Office of Fair Trading found no evidence that farmers had benefited. And the National Farmers Union worries that the fines "could take money out of the supply chain". In other words, the supermarkets will wish to pass the costs of this regulation back onto the farmers.

Supermarkets typically claim to represent the interests of consumers or suppliers, but we may have reason to be sceptical of these claims. See earlier post: Wal-de-Mart and the profit eaters.

Political Party Donors

Donations to the UK Labour Party are in the news again [Party funding row 'a sorry tale' - BBC News, December 4th 2007]. There are two related questions here, which Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle may help us answer.

1. Why does anyone give money to a political party?
2. Why does anyone care about the manner of the donation?

Doubtless some political donations are made in the hope of getting something in return. The UK still has a so-called honours system, where selected people can be given various awards, including peerages and knighthoods. People may also hope to be appointed to various statutory bodies and quangos, where they can exercise some influence and status. Sometimes the motive is more straightforward - perhaps a business wishes to lobby for a favourable decision. (Lots of political donations come from property developers, for some reason.) 

From a moral point of view, all of these practices would count as corrupt. Some people find it hard to believe that anyone gives large sums of money to a political campaign without having some agenda of this kind. And public servants (including politicians, judges and policemen) are vulnerable to accusations of corruption if they accept these donations - and get found out. 

As a (political) response to earlier incidents of sleaze in the UK, we now have laws that govern donations to political parties. It seems that some recent donations to the Labour party have broken these laws, while other donations have evaded these restrictions by being framed as "loans" rather than "gifts". 

There is now an extraordinary public dispute going on between Labour Party officials and someone called David Abrahams, who donated large amounts of money anonymously (and therefore illegally) to the Labour Party. Like most people perhaps, I had never heard of Mr Abrahams until his attempts to maintain his anonymity back-fired. And like many other people, I started to wonder what his real motives were. 

In the past, giving anonymously was an accepted way of ensuring that the recipient was not put under obligation. But under the new regulations, anonymity is now always suspect and often illegal. So things change. 

By donating a few hundred thousand pounds to the Labour Party in a dodgy manner, Mr Abrahams may have delivered a greater benefit to the Conservative Party. Indeed, some Labour Party officials may be treating Mr Abrahams as if they believed this was the effect he intended all along. Abrahams himself has written an aggrieved article in the Independent on Sunday ("I accuse", Sunday December 2nd, 2007), putting the blame for this embarrassment on Labour Party fund-raisers. 

Fund-raising is not an easy job, and it is perhaps understandable that some people with this responsibility steer close to the limits of what is ethical or legal, and are willing to be flexible in order to accommodate the whims of donors. After all, you probably wouldn't be doing the job if you didn't believe in the goals of the party, and the party obviously needs money to achieve these goals. And if you believe absolutely in the moral integrity of the Party Leaders, then surely there is no harm in allowing donors to pay large amounts of money for the privilege of meeting them, since the Party Leaders will never allow their principles to be compromised by vulgar financial influence. So it is easy to see how party functionaries might persuade themselves that the end justifies the means, and that there is no moral risk in bending the rules or exploiting any loopholes. 

The rules may be supposed to protect the nation from corruption, but it's not easy to see whether they actually work. As a citizen with limited access to information, I don't really benefit much from knowing the donors' names or nationalities - what I really want to know is whether there is any link between party donation and, say, planning approval. Advocates of the current arrangements speak of the benefits of "transparency" - but transparency isn't worth much unless you can see the whole end-to-end system, from donation to influence. And links can't be proved from single cases, but require detailed data and statistical analysis. 

Transparency alone (at least in its current form) cannot control corruption. Is it relevant here that the current arrangements were designed by politicians who had a strong stake in the continued possibility of political donation? 

Because they have little power, at least in the mundane world, churches and charities have always been free to accept donations from the most vile people, and devote these donations to worthy causes. (Yet even this freedom is nowadays put under question, and charities are sometimes put under pressure to return donations from highly unpopular sources, lest they are themselves tainted by the same unpopularity.) But political parties can never be given this freedom. 

There are several nested layers of analysis here, which Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle can help us with.

• What is the purpose/effect of a single donation, and the manner in which it was given?

• What is the (collective) purpose /effect of the totality of donations, and the manner in which they were given?

• What is the purpose of the regulations governing political donation, and what are the (presumably unintended) side-effects of these regulations?

• How do the systems of political donation and funding fit into the larger political system?

In general, there are major problems with looking for engineering solutions to social and political problems. Stafford Beer ran into some of these problems himself, in Chile and elsewhere. But regulation is itself a form of engineering; thus once we are on a regulatory path it makes sense to turn to the systems engineering tradition to discover why a particular regulation doesn't produce the required outcome, and how to design better regulations. 

Hence POSIWID.

Dangerous Coffee

Airports are divided into two zones - landside and airside - with a security boundary between.

I have generally found that the sandwiches and drinks are cheaper on the landside. (One major UK retailer sells good sandwiches in its landside shops, but not in its airside shops). And in some airports the best coffee is landside.

Makes sense. Once the passengers have gone through security, they are captive. The airport can get an economic "rent" by making them pay more for food and drink while they're waiting for a flight. (Isn't that the real reason they want us to check in so early.)

I hate being ripped off. So I try to buy anything I need on the landside, before going through security. And at some airports, that includes coffee.

Oh, but you can't do that anymore. For security reasons, you now can't take coffee through from landside to airside. Yeah, what do you think I've got concealed in my latte - nail scissors?

Any stupid regulation can be justified by appealing to security. But it doesn't take much to work out who really benefits commercially from these so-called regulations.

See previous post No Fly on Us

Regulation and POSIWID

Regulation often stimulates the very behaviour it is supposed to control. For example, in the Corporate Governance field, precise specification of codes of conduct sometimes seems to positively encourage people to find creative ways of complying with the letter, while being in flagrant breach of the spirit. 

The POSIWID principle suggests that the purpose of regulation systems is to maintain a stable level of something bad, rather than to eliminate it - since this is (at best) what they actually achieve most of the time. 

 

For Aidan's response to this post, see Purpose of Regulation (November 2003)