Loss of Political Capital

Vote dashes Bush immigration plan (on BBC)

It is unfortunate that in the one issue where Bush is acting in a non-partisan manner, where his views are balanced and his actions tempered, he is torpedoed by his own party. In the one issue where there is a tinge of the "compassionate conservative" in him, the, um, uncompassionate conservatives win the day. Too bad, he lost so much political capital over Iraq that he can't even get his good policies out.

Anti-Americanism explained

The BBC is having a series on anti-Americanism to be aired over Radio 4 in the UK. Based to the article, it seems to challenge the concept of anti-Americanism as a reaction to American foreign policy, putting it in the same hate box as anti-Semitism or racism. The correspondent, Jim Webb, "argues anti-Americanism is often a cover for hatreds with little justification in fact". He travels to Paris, Caracas, Cairo, and Washington to study this phenomenon. Too bad I don't get Radio 4 in this part of the world-- it would've been good to listen in.

It is apparent in the article that the series has a benign veiw of America, attributing anti-Americanism in Paris as a reaction to America's "kind of democracy that celebrates and encourages ordinariness" (i.e., the elitist and cultured French aristocrat versus the egalitarian but uncouth American cowboy). But whatever the etiology of French anti-American sentiment is, what I'm more concerned about is the sentiment as a reaction to American foreign policy-- is it well placed? Webb discusses it early on in the article. After seeing an anti-American protest in London, he observes:

"A pattern was emerging and has never seriously been altered. A pattern of willingness to condemn America for the tiniest indiscretion - or to magnify those indiscretions - while leaving the murderers, dictators, and thieves who run other nations oddly untouched. "

What Webb fails to comprehend is that this strong reaction to America's "tiniest indiscretion" is actually an acknowledgement that it is expected to have moral ascendancy. The world demands more of America and is very disappointed when it acts like other thuggish countries.

More than any other country in the world and more than any other superpower in history, America has trumpeted itself as the beacon of democracy and human rights. The British never claimed to spread democracy in India-- it was honest that it's all about expanding the British Empire. America, on the other hand, never owned up to its imperial past, pointing to Manifest Destiny as the reason for denying the nascent Filipino government its independence.

America prides itself in its democratic ideals and its wide open arms to all peoples. It claims to defend human rights and civil liberties, and promises to defend the world against oppressive regimes. And, to a large extent, the world believed that. That is why the world bristles at America's "tiniest indiscretions"-- it cannot claim to defend democracy and human rights and democracy while destroying them with its actions. America has proclaimed itself to be the good guy, the defender of the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free". Its actions have shown us otherwise. That is why there is so much anti-Americanism in the world-- it's a reaction against hypocrisy. That is why America is so easily condemned for its "tiniest indiscretions".

There is one thing the world hates more than murderers, dictators, and thieves. It is self-righteous murderers, dictators, and thieves.

Re: Filipino Theory of Value

My good friend Out in Four had an interesting thesis in his blog. I wrote this as a comment, but it got too long so I'll just it post here.
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It is always interesting when anthro and econ meet. A few comments:

1. Material conditions and language do not work in a single direction (i.e., material conditions affecting language); it's more of a two-way interaction. Material conditions do affect the language (e.g., our many words for rice-- palay, bigas, sinaing, bahaw), but the language also affects the way we perceive the world (e.g., our word for sickness is sakit, which is also pain, so mental health is often neglected or trivialised). And this is most true for abstract concepts. Therefore, even if you find significant correlations, it will be difficult to establish causality. Did the language develop because they traded, or did trading develop because the people were open to it?

2. Note that most of pre-Hispanic trade was barter rather than in money, so "expensive" might be a very different concept for the early Filipinos (it would be more akin to marginal rates of substitution rather than actually being "expensive").

3. In any study of culture you will always find exceptions, so explaining them within the theory would be very difficult. And unlike other statistical anomalies, it wouldn't be possible to explain them away as outliers-- how does one consider a language or culture as an "outlier"? Could we disregard an entire Weltanschauung because it isn't like any in the rest of the world?

4. Filipino (i.e., Tagalog) is part of the Austronesian family of languages, so a lot of our words would be the same with, say, Bahasa; however, trading circumstances would be vastly different across groups. In many cases, there is more diversity between languages within the Philippines than between other countries (e.g., compare Ivatan and Panggalatok vs. Tagalog and Bahasa). So the results will be driven by how the sample is selected. The results will be different if we compare the different Austronesian languages or if we include, say, Indo-Eurpoean languages into the mix. Not to mention that a lot of our words came from Chinese and Indian (including mahal), so the lines get even more blurred. Cross-section analysis can't be done on data where the supposedly random samples are talking to and influencing each other.

5. Also consider the case of the Maranaos and the Maguindanaos-- almost identical languages, religions, social structures, etc., but the former are prolific traders and the latter are not.

Bottomline, your thesis is interesting, but very difficult to test. Obviously, I'm very much into the study of econ and anthro (the two extremes of the social sciences, actually) and have given this some thought-- studying both makes one aware of the limitations of each. The way I see it, Economics has a long way to go before it is crowned Queen of the Social Sciences.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

US crowd beats passenger to death (BBC)
Angry crowd kills passenger in car that struck child (CNN)
Texas Crowd Kills Man After Car Hit Girl (CBS)

I wonder if the same would've happened if the passenger weren't Hispanic.

Lakbayan: World Edition

Countries I've Visited
(That's 16 countries, or 7% of the total, according to the website.)



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Lakbayan

Found this nice test c/o cyberlaundry. Yes, I have a measly grade of D. Ergo, I should be spending more time on vacation. A LOT more time.

My Lakbayan grade is D!

How much of the Philippines have you visited? Find out atLakbayan!

Created by Eugene Villar.

Amen!

Powell urges Guantanamo closure -- on BBC

Let Freedom Ring

"The United States is committed to the advance of freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism."

-- George W. Bush

5 June 2007

Prague, Czech Republic

US President Bush delivered a speech on democracy yesterday in Prague. It was in many respects a "legacy speech", full of ideals and historical references, waving the principles on which America was founded. It would've been a good speech, if only the speaker weren't so morally bankrupt on the matter.

Bush should be the last person to lecture the world on democracy. His government has been attacking the very values that democracy needs to survive: transparency, human rights, rule of law.

Everything is a state secret with the Bush government these days, and he's viewing congressional oversight as an inconvenience to be shunned. Just last March, he ignored subpoenas from Congress, saying his advisers can only speak behind closed doors and off the record. And this is just over the firing of eight US attorneys because they were not "loyal Bushies". Talk about transparency.

"...every human life has dignity and value that no power on Earth can take away."

Gitmo. Unlawful combatants. CIA renditions. Legal limbo. No access to attorneys or consulates. Wholesale wiretaps. Talk about human rights and the rule of law.

"...freedom is timeless. It does not belong to one government or one generation. Freedom is the dream and the right of every person in every nation in every age. "

Everyone loves the concepts of freedom and democracy embodied in the Stars and Stripes. Everyone loves the libertarian ideals and principles on which the founding fathers grounded the United States. Everyone hates the hypocrisy with which it is preached.

Finally!

Senate OKs new charter to give UP more autonomy (from the Inquirer)

I, Consumer

I read an interesting book review in The Guardian website on Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin Barber. Now, I haven't read the book myself since I haven't had the chance to buy it (can anyone point me to a copy?), but the brief review gave me enough points to ponder.

I won't tackle the book's premise of consumerism being the offshoot of capitalism-- the transition from being a demand-driven economy to being a supply-driven one (i.e., so that "new needs have to be invented") wasn't discussed amply enough for me to comment. It wasn't clear whether advertisers just amplify trivial wants that are already present, or they actually goad consumers into wanting things they didn't want before. Maybe (hopefully) the book tackles this better. However, the review moves on to a more interesting point:

"...Barber moves things on by fingering what he calls the 'infantilising ethos' at the heart of consumerism. The perfect consumer, he says, is like a toddler: unable to defer gratification, lacking empathy, clinging to material objects for security, wanting to be told the same stories over and over again.

xxx

"Consumerism, in Barber's view, exploits the unsophisticated and voracious demands of children and makes adults emulate them. It actively promotes the pursuit of bliss through ignorance. It is fundamentally hostile to history and metaphysics, to anything in fact that might intervene in a citizen's consciousness and make him aware of the difference between what he wants now, as an individual, and what he might want in the long-term, or for society. So, for example, he fancies another cheeseburger, but he would also like a healthy cardiovascular system. He wants an SUV, but he also wants a temperate planet. Consumerism makes it imperative that he choose McDonald's and the Range Rover."

This actually goes to the heart of microeconomic theory: the assumption of stable preferences. Suppose there are three possible options: x, y, and z. A rational individual should have opinions on the three options and be able to order them accordingly, say x > y ~ z or x > y > z (> means "is preferred to" and ~ means "is indifferent to"). Also, if an individual orders the options as x > y and y > z, then this should imply that x > z for him to be rational.

What Barber seems to say is that an individual may have x > y > z, but then advertisers come along and change them to z > x > y, and another one comes along to turn them into y > x > z. Although economic theory already allows for changing tastes, most economic theory still needs the assumption of stable preferences-- calculus would just be impossible without the bedrock of stable preference relations (in other words, the number line). Moreover, Baker says that these changes are not necessarily the outcome of rational thought processes; rather, they are more similar to the "unsophisticated and voracious demands of children", easily swayed with just a little teasing.

This has two important implications. First, in a consumerist world, should all economic theory be modelled to allow changing preferences? Static models can still hold; i.e., there would be no problem if we stick our analysis to an individual's decisions at a single point in time. However, all analysis involving time horizons will have to change-- consumption smoothing decisions on day 1 won't make sense if the individual can't be expected to stick to them on day 2. More importantly, can we even find a way to model and test these changes in preferences? Is there a way to measure the impact of advertising on a person's consumption decisions? Which brings us the the second implication

Measuring and modelling preference changes assumes some kind of rationality in the way individuals interpret and digest information (i.e, advertising)-- a system of cause and effect if you will. But what if individuals are really childlike in their preferences and supposedly rational adults don't know what they want? What if at the decision point the relations between x, y, and z are still changing? In this case, axioms on revealed preferences do not even hold-- choosing x over y doesn't necessarily imply that x is preferred to y because the individual was just as likely to choose y over x at the decision node.

So what now? Well, obviously economic theorists should do a lot of introspecting regarding the basic assuptions that are held so dear. Homo economicus might need a serious makeover to render economic theory more than just a thought exercise. What economists now consider as "irrational" behaviour for Homo economicus might actually be the norm for many (or most) decisions made by Homo sapiens.

But more importantly, we as consumers should start thinking about our decisions and preferences. Do we even know what we want? How and how much do advertisements influence our decisions? What do we really derive from the goods that we consume? Are we now increasingly defined by what we consume?

I consume, therefore I am?
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Thanks to dr. sbdink for thinking of the title.

Tit-for-Tat

It seems we're back to the old game. Russian President Vladimir Putin said recently that they may point their missiles at European targets in response to American plans to set up missile defenses in Eastern Europe. Although the Russia-US word war has been going on for months, this is the first time Putin has made such a strong threat.

First some background: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed by the United States and the former Soviet Union in 1972 to put a halt to the Cold War arms race. One of its basic principles was mutually assured destruction (MAD)-- any country that launches a nuke could expect a quick and equal retaliation, making both countries unlikely to press the trigger. Thus, an important stipulation of the treaty was a ban on missile defense systems that would render MAD inapplicable, which would increase the likelihood of a first strike and foment an arms race to overwhelm whatever defense system is in place. However, in 2002 the US unilaterally pulled out of the ABM Treaty, saying it needed to develop missile defense systems to fend off possible attacks from Iran or North Korea.

An important assumption in MAD is the rationality of all parties-- an irrational player could still launch and not care about the consequences. During the Cold War there were only two nuclear-armed parties to consider-- the United States (and its satellite states in NATO) and the Soviet Union. Both parties were rational even if brinkmanship was a common game (think Cuban missile crisis).

For a presumably rational US to pull out of the ABM Treaty it had to believe that other irrational players have come into play, in this case Iran and North Korea. Both Iran and North Korea have long-range missile capabilites (none can hit the US mainland), and North Korea has confirmed nucelar capabilities albeit still weak. Thus, the US is willing to risk the ire of rational Russia to fend off the threat from potentially irrational and nuclear-armed Iran or North Korea.

So is this calculus correct? Well, it is true that there are now more players in the nuclear game, but only two pose a serious threat to the United States-- Russia and, to a lesser extent, China-- and they're both rational players. Iran has no demonstrable nuclear capabilities as of now, and its missiles can only reach as far as Israel (it won't think of hitting Arab countries, Turkey, or Russia). Iran has not shown any tendency towards irrational behaviour, and all its strategies seem to be in line with rational thinking. On the other hand, North Korea can theoretically hit Alaska if it's lucky; its missiles are more likely to hit the ocean assuming they can get them off the ground. While North Korea has shown bouts of irrational behaviour in the past, this can be viewed as part of its brinkmanship strategy which, rationally speaking, it has played so well.

It does not seem that the US is in any serious threat from ICBMs, so why build defenses in Eastern Europe and bring back Russia into the tit-for-tat game? A missile defense against Iran should be placed in Israel, not Eastern Europe. On the other hand, missile defenses against North Korea should be placed in California, Canada, and Alaska. Moreover, the biggest nucelar threat to the US is not from ICBMs or cruise missiles, but from dirty bombs carried by Al Qaeda and its sympathisers. The Eastern Europe defense shield will be useless against backpack nuclear bombs.

While the US may have valid concerns over nuclear proliferation, it seems that its decision to irk Russia by building nuclear capabilities in its doorstep is a miscalculation of the costs and benefits. It gains very little in facing its stated security threats, but loses a lot in terms of a new arms race with Russia (and China). Russia has already tested new missiles designed to thwart the latest American missile defenses, so the first step in a new arms race has begun.

The irony of MAD is that when one party tries to eliminate the ability of the opposing party to retaliate, it increases the likelihood that the other party will strike first because failure to do so will ensure its exclusive destruction. So in trying to eliminate a threat (real or imagined) from small players (Iran and North Korea), the US has significantly increased the threat from a big player (Russia). Moreover, the clear and present threat from the truly irrational player (Al Qaeda) is in no way mitigated by this strategy.

Makes one wonder who is really the most irrational player in this game.