Month: July 2012

Couple of things to report – little time for reviews – quite a few half-finished reads to come back to, but for now …

I finished Martin Sixsmith’s “Russia” in 3 or 4 concentrated sittings last week whilst on aircraft / in airports / in hotel bars etc. Un-put-down-able – straightforward, knowing and journalistic history of Russia from 862 up to Putin & Medvedev and the 2011 Domodedovo terrorist bombing. The timeline of deaths per page is numbing – hundreds, thousands, millions, thousands, hundreds, tens – yet an easy witty read, packed with information from first hand research and experience. Sixsmith grew up in Russia as well as being BBC correspondent. Question – Putin really is scary, but how would you govern a “state” that spans 9 time zones from the arctic to the Caucasus and the steppes of central Asia.

Example 1: We probably knew that after Borodino/1812 Napoleon got very close to the heart of Moscow before being repulsed. That and the parallel with Hitler are still very close to modern Muscovites I detect, but did we know that the Russians pursued Napoleon’s retreat all the way to the centre of Paris? That had escaped me.

Example 2: The pragmatism of selecting a unifying “culture” – any one will do if it works as a tool of governance. Did we know that Russia chose to import orthodox Christianity from pre-Ottoman Constantinople of the Roman Empire rather than Islam from their central Asian neighbours since that would have interfered with their Vodka drinking ?

Example 3: I didn’t know “Russia” was created by Rurik the Rus in (Ukrainian, Kievan) Novgorod. Given that the Rus were Vikings from the modern-day Norway /Sweden area – we all knew Vikings explored south down the Volga I guess – but I never knew the connection between the modern Scandinavian culture of Rus and the country that carries its name today. Intriguing fact among many in a recommended read. Perhaps no so far from the truth to brand modern Norway the last remaining soviet state. Kruschev and Gorbachev came so close … hang in there Russia.

Also picked-up – in true airport-bookstall anything will do purchasing mode – a copy of Le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor, and also finished it in just a few days. Not his best, and a tough conversational style across first and third-persons, in a mix of real-time dialogue and reported narrative – you gotta keep up with who’s who. But purely coincidentally, tying up the current threads of Banking and Morality with Russian oligarchs, top-management, politicians, terrorists, spies and sport thrown in. Fun current-affairs-founded fiction.

Agius self-assured as you’d expect and still loyal to Diamond, despite the fact both have resigned their posts – ex-chair Agius is now temporarily de-facto acting CEO – a little Putin & Medvedev there 😉

Plenty of admission of specific failures. Very clear message that Diamond was and still is wanted and seen as very strong in terms of business leadership from his board and from shareholders. Basically it was the personal loss of regulator confidence that forced the resignation. His full-year severance pay (ex bonuses etc.) is clearly a retainer for his continued cooperation and availability to the bank.

Clear that bankers were in state of terror at the time, but interesting aside that regulators’ saw Barclays itself as the best in class on compliance amongst the big banks.

Other main issue is the demarcation between investment and retailing arms and the “culture” that may or may not be shared within parts and across the whole, and the fact that Diamond was part of the move to unify – mentioned earlier note (1) here. Pretty clear that independence of investment and retailing is going to become the regulators’ preferred strategy going forward – not that that actually excuses local moral failures, whatever the divisional culture. May be that the counter-intuitive unification is actually the better option ? (Lord Thurso – who seems very respectful of Agius personal integrity – is on the right lines … which layers of culture matter is beyond any one business … IMHO)

Interesting also that many of the other perps in other banks were ex-Barclays people … no doubt quite common, as in many industries. Culture is always in layers within and across organizations. Use of the word “low-balling” also tells a story about the original “crime”. Not really concerned here with whether the original manipulation was immoral or illegal – anti-trust collusion – everyone seems to agree it was wrong, whatever I think (I have a bigger agenda) – but low-balling does suggest it was a normal negotiation game as part of setting rates – achieving a low rate was what everyone believed was needed at the time, understood – whatever their individual motivations or (lack of) instructions. A case of ends not justifying means, but clear ends nevertheless.

[Post Note :

This interesting point from Robert Peston last week. When is low-balling, lying ?

 “[Barclays] understated [their borrowing rates] to try to reassure the market.

Barclays’ defence is that it was dreadfully unfair that its perceived borrowing costs were higher than other banks. And it is convinced that many of these banks were even bigger liars than it was about what they were paying to borrow.

It also points out that in practice its balance sheet, its finances, were in fact stronger than many of these other banks: its creditors were wrong, it would say, to have so little trust in it [due in part to the complexity and opacity of some of its financial instruments].

So was its lie about what it was paying to borrow justified – especially if the survival of the bank was at stake? And if Paul Tucker at the Bank of England encouraged Barclays to lie, as is implied by Diamond’s memo, would he have been justified in doing so?

As it happens, a number of senior figures in the City who are unconnected to Barclays think this lying was the right thing to do in the circumstances. They think Mr Tucker encouraged Barclays to lie and they applaud him for doing so.

You might well say that is evidence of a cancerous moral relativism at the heart of the City. Or you might applaud their common sense realism.”

My point exactly. Those who did the dirty deed took one on behalf of the whole bank. And, of course, Tucker didn’t actually ask them to lie, to low-ball, he just needed to point out that being too high was a problem, for everyone’s confidence in a time of extreme “skittishness”.]

Niall Ferguson’s latest Reith Lecture.

Internet social networks communicate, may even communicate collective action and action collective communications, but don’t themselves take collective physical action.

Drawing extensively on de Toqueville. US experience of low individual reliance on central government and state institutions, and high propensity to form voluntary institutions for so many different ends and moral purposes. Spontaneous participation in the troupe, beyond the family. Historically, statistically such participation is declining and expectation of state responsibility for action is growing. (State should only interfere for common good – over and above the legal framework – for natural monopolies across the troupes, protection from tyrrany of majorities, etc.)

Education for example: Biodiversity of mixed and varied private and public schooling arrangements is preferable to any dead-hand of monopoly. (NB Education is a huge part of Burke’s partnership across the generations.) Good public / state education is also good, measures of quality would probably include community participation.

The challenge is still a class / affluence gap in propensity to voluntary participation ?
“Think before taking sides” – a good message, a la Zizek.

Good to hear Baroness Betty Boothroyd on BBC R4 Today this morning.

Reform needs institutional conservatism. I for one cannot believe the hypocrisy of those baying for blood at government culpability in so many political and economic so-called scandals, yet demanding popular elections for the second chamber. Reckless and ill-considered outrage, as she says.

[Surely the value of British tradition is obvious.]

I’ve certainly expressed neo-pan-Darwinian views on natural evolution that might be called “group selection” – in fact I’ve even defended group-selection per se. I am one of those who sees evolution by natural selection as the best idea anyone ever had, that I’m happy to apply it to practically any situation – even one where cause and effect benefits of any change may be explained in real-time, in a single “generation”.

So I’m guilty as charged here by Pinker. Clearly if we’re going to limit the word evolution to original-Darwinian natural selection – where it’s numbers of copies we’re valuing, and mutations are entirely blind to their effects. Then “group selection” in human affairs – and the affairs of social creatures generally – is something entirely different. Sure it is.

Sure we’re valuing other qualities of life and measures of existence than just head-count and group-count. And sure, in communities of less intelligent creatures, where individual immediate choice can be barely if at all aware of causation effecting future group and individual benefit, then all group behaviour including relative behaviour between group members, is ultimately, reductively, seated in attributes of the individuals. Tell us something we don’t know.

The interesting ground is the middle ground.

At one extreme, parallels in ant analogies and hive rhetoric are surely more poetic than scientific, and undoubtedly more concerned with the natural processes of group-effects on group member selection, and group success, than selection of the groups themselves. Nevertheless real effects.

And at the other, if it were purely a numbers game, then let’s just give up now and admit the bacteria as champions. But, as intelligent humans, with far more sophisticated values than arithmetic, we’re sadly arrogant enough to believe our knowledge gives us control over cause and effect, over multiple time-scales, here and now, later in our lifetimes, and in the legacy bequeathed to future generations.

In reality what we’re concerned with is natural processes of change over one or more cycles, given our imperfect knowledge. These cycles are indeed fractal over many different layers and time-scales and definitely involve – if not blindness – uncertain feedback against the imperfect knowledge and facility used on each cycle of change.

Real allure, wrong definition. The real difference between the sides in the group selection debate are differences in what to value, what matters. Definitions and numbers are very low value indeed.

Latest (3rd of 4) of Niall Ferguson’s Reith Lectures The Rule of Law and its Enemies – The Landscape of the Law, first broadcast last week, continues the agenda that simple law is best for global economic progress.

The point of law is fundamentally property and contracts rights – wide-acceptance, cost-effective execution and reliable-enforcement – thereby minimising overhead cost and risk of doing business beyond your immediate social neighbourhood. Interesting that laws of precedent must (do) rest on common law of what is good, and what is law good for (and that common law is based on social interaction between neighbours, extended by communication to wider society – one source of hypocrisy – imperfect empathy as well as imperfect knowledge). The point of precedent being to ensure that evolutionary changes in law, as society and environment change, are always coherent – consistent within a shared narrative – proceeding step-wise from precedent, anchored but not fixed by precedent. Another of these clear “progressive evolution requires institutional conservatism” messages.

Beyond Law-101 above, the point is primarily one of balance between private and public institutions for setting and enforcing laws of business, without either becoming an over-powerful dead hand – monopolistic on one hand, bureaucratic on the other. The bureaucracy of complex legislation leads to the rule of lawyers (as in the US), rather than law. Ultimately we depend on the true independence of judiciary, rather than judiciary (and executive politics) as extensions of the legal profession.

Let’s hope there is more than Law 101 in the 4th and final extended lecture tomorrow.

Look I still don’t buy it.

A particle suggesting / equivalent to the Higgs ? So all the attempted explanations / metaphors / fancy visualizations to date, tell us that the Higgs Field is about “stuff” that resists the movement of other particles and explains the inertial resistance to movement of those particles we know as “mass”.

So how is it the Higgs Boson has more that 130 times the mass of any other sub-atomic particle ? Where does “it” get its mass from. How can the field explaining mass of other particles comprise particles that already have (lots of) mass ?!? What does a Higgs Boson actually have to do with the Higgs Field ?

All these poxy metaphors are failing to tell us something. Emperors and clothes spring to mind.

[Post Note: Also good to see rejection of the God Particle metaphor – not just because of the two-way offence at bringing God needlessly into the political science debate – but because it grossly inflates the significance of the Higgs Boson – it’s just one potential missing piece in the standard model, with plenty more missing pieces – gravity anyone – and many more opportunities for the standard model itself to be proven entirely wrong.]