Are we learning yet?

Tim Harford at the Financial Times writes about Jamie Oliver’s campaign for better school lunches:

What caught the attention of Michele Belot and Jonathan James, though, was the way Oliver’s project had been implemented. Belot and James – economists at Nuffield College, Oxford, and at the University of Essex respectively – noted that the campaign had created a near-perfect experiment. The chef had convinced Greenwich’s council and schools to change menus to fit his scheme; he mobilised resources, provided equipment and trained dinner ladies. Other London boroughs with similar demographics received none of these advantages – and indeed, because the programme wasn’t broadcast until after the project was well under way, probably knew little about it. The result was a credible pilot project. It wasn’t quite up to the gold standard of a randomised trial, but it wasn’t far off.

Their answer – a provisional one, since they are still refining the research – is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent. There is some uncertainty about these numbers: they could be substantially smaller or larger. There is not much that can be said with confidence about scores in other subjects, or other achievement levels – although the academic benefits of the Greenwich lunches appear to be positive, if tentatively so, in almost every case.

The first thing Anne Tolley did when she became Minister of Education was put junk food back in school cafeterias.

Thermidor

Seriously though, a couple of thoughts about the first year of the National government:

1. We didn’t get ’shock doctrined’. Our last two right-wing governments (National in ‘91, Labour in ‘84) used economic crisis as pretexts to introduce radical reforms that they didn’t campaign on and had no mandate for. It wouldn’t have been that difficult for Key and his party to repeat history  and restart the revolution, given the apprehension over the global financial crisis and the general mood of the nation this time last year – but they didn’t. Obviously I don’t agree with everything the Nats have done but they have shown a degree of prudence and responsibility that we haven’t seen from previous right-wing governments.

2. In terms of time in government Key is our least experienced Prime Minister since David Lange. There are other parallels: both of them have spent a lot of their time in office overseas, both of them are personally popular and given to PR stunts that beguile the general populace and most of the press. Key seems to have a lot more control over his cabinet than Lange did, and (crucially) he has more leadership experience. There does seem to be a lack of political management (see the Rugby World Cup fisaco, lack of support in the house for ACC changes and numerous other examples) and a tendency towards conservatism and the status quo that may reflect the fact that the PM is running the country without ever having been in cabinet, or even government.

3. Key does seem to be a fast learner. Watching him on Q & A last weekend and comparing his performance to those of a year ago the difference is stark; he still seems very natural but is a lot more confident and articulate. Prior to the election Key’s interviews and press conferences made him seem downright shifty – he really did act as if he had something to hide, a weakness that Labour tried and failed to capitalise on.

4. Key and his government are (obviously) popular; I think a huge amount of this is tied to relief that the recession appears to be ending and the majority of voters still have their jobs and their houses; this goodwill (rightly or wrongly) flows through to the government. There are other factors: the lack of a credible opposition, stunts like Letterman and Collin’s car-crushing. Something that we saw with Labour is that the popularity of the Prime Minister is not tied to the popularity of the party: Clark kept her position in the polls as preferred Prime Minister for a long time after Labour’s support plummeted.

5. So far the new government’s biggest failure is refusal to engage with the issues of long term super-funding and pricing carbon into the economy. Brian Fallow wrote about both of these issues today. Say what you like about Labour, Clark and Cullen made serious attempts to build solutions to these problems. Key and English dismantled those solutions and then walked away from the problems.

6. To my mind the most revealing political story of the Key government’s first year was the decision not to fortify bread with folic acid (vitamin B9): the PM’s Science Advisor and everyone else with any common sense thought it was a good idea, Sue Kedgeley seemed to think that vitamins were poisonous and opposed it. The Minister in charge (Wilkinson) was too stupid to understand the debate and announced that she opposed the fortification but would do it anyway. Key stepped in and – ignoring his expert advice from one of the world’s most respected authorities on foetal development – sided with Kedgeley, presumably because his polling data told him the policy was unpopular with the scientifically illiterate and easily frightened general public. The opposition remained mute throughout the debate, afraid of being identified with another ‘nanny state’ issue.

All these elements – weak opposition, mediocre Minister, poll driven policy, poor political management – have been fault lines running beneath many of the years political stories. Ironic that this government is obsessed with ‘catching up’ to Australia: from now on the lucky country will have a much lower rate of babies born with neural tube defects than us, and when you factor in lifetime medical costs and forgone tax revenue the downstream effects are non-trivial.

7. On the other hand, the decision by Key and his speaker Lockwood Smith to open up MP spending to public scrutiny was a highly ethical, admirable decision even if it was a spectacular own goal. So huge respect there.

What’s past is prologue: the PM has some good Ministers (Finlayson, Power, Joyce has emerged as National’s Panchen Llama) and a years experience. It’s easy to see how things could go horribly wrong (the words ‘Hide’ and ‘Auckland’ spring to mind), and while we all know that the plan is to ‘catch Australia’ the details on how to do this seem awfully vague. But the last year could have been a lot worse and I am cautiously optimistic about the next one.

End of history, 20 years on.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Karl Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach.1845

I’ve been reading a lot of the blogging and MSM coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Communism and most of the theories/tropes seem flawed, or at best simplistic. So here are a couple of thoughts:

• If you’re overthrowing a despotic regime then people power is important. But if the army and state security services are willing to use force against it’s own citizens it doesn’t count for much (see China in ‘89, Iran this year). ‘People power’ was successful in East Germany because there was a lack of political will to suppress dissent. In some cases when shoot to kill orders were issued the Stasi refused to obey them. So, strange as it is to say, I think many of the main heroes in the reunification of Germany were Stasi agents and officials of the Honecker government – although obviously the ultimate hero was Gorbachev, who publically announced that he would not stand in the way of reform in Eastern Europe and privately advised leaders that the Red Army would not protect their regimes.

• Did the regimes fall because of the economic failure/moral bankruptcy of Communism? I don’t think so: if we look at states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, Burma and North Korea we see that totalitarian regimes that are morally and/or economically bankrupt can still endure. Geopolitical events like the collapse of energy prices in the late 1970s and the failed occupation in Afghanistan seem much more significant and they would have damaged the empire whether it was Communist or Capitalist or Tsarist.

• I do think there’s an economic case to be made for the disintegration of the Soviet Empire though; economic factors forced Gorbachev to charge market prices for USSR goods exported to Comecon countries – this crippled the regimes that had all relied on Soviet largesse. But there’s no reason they couldn’t have struggled on as bankrupt, quasi-independent satellites.

• Did western leaders play a significant role? People like to say that politicians they like – usually Thatcher, Reagan or Mitterrand – ‘won the Cold War’. I think this is nonsense; In the early 80s there was a struggle for power between different factions of the Soviet politburo: if some protege of Brezhnev had prevailed instead of Andropov’s man Gorbachev then the Cold War could have endured for decades. If the popular movements in Europe hadn’t been calling for change or had been resisted then there’s no reason Gorbachev wouldn’t have gone down in history as the Russian equivalent of Deng Xiopang, ushering in market reforms while maintaining the party’s stranglehold on power. I do think Pope John Paul II played a significant role in promoting the Polish democracy movement (and much of the funding came from private Catholic donors in the US and western Europe) and the formation of the common market and the European Union had an undeniable impact on intellectuals in Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia, but the impact Western leaders was negligible; Gorbachev has noted that Reagan’s belligerence strengthened the hard-liners in the Kremlin and made his economic reforms more difficult, so if anything there was a negative impact by western leaders at the time.

• Things have worked out pretty well for West Germany, not so great for a lot of the other former communist states: Russia has exchanged socialism for a faux-democratic form of fascism; life expectancy, literacy and other quality of life standards have declined subsequent to adopting the free-market model. There is free speech in theory but the majority of broadcast media is owned by the state. Print journalists who criticise the regime are routinely murdered; the crimes are rarely investigated. The state of the democratic and civil institutions are increasingly farcical; the country is ruled by a small cadre of men who were senior operatives in the state security services of the former Communist regime. So the ‘good triumphed over evil’ message that’s implicit to a lot of the coverage seems pretty silly to me.

Dissent of the day

Re Harawira’s latest statement and the spontaneity and repercussions of same, a reader writes:

I disagree entirely with your assessment of the likely fallout of Hone Harawira’s apologia. I don’t think any politician does this sort of thing without first polling to confirm the widespread perception that most New Zealanders remain in favour of – or neutral towards – the execution of Phil Goff.

Best apology ever

Censure pardons the raven but is visited on the dove. Sort of.

Also the best thing to happen to Goff since Melissa Lee stuck her hand up for Mt Albert:

On Radio Waatea this morning, Harawira apologised for his language, but not the content of the email, and stopped short of apologising for his jaunt to Paris.

Near the end of his interview with Maori broadcaster Willie Jackson on Radio Waatea this morning, Harawira said Goff should be “lined up against the wall and shot”.

Harawira: “I’m about to hammer Labour again, over Phil Goff saying I should be suspended, you know, from politics – the cheek of the bastard…”

Jackson: “Careful.”

Harawira: “Him and his mates, no seriously, him and his mates are responsible for the passing of a piece of legislation described as the single largest land nationalization statute in the history of Aotearoa. Now if I should be suspended for swearing, him and his mates should be lined up against the wall and shot,” Harawira said.

Harawira was referring to the passage of the Foreshore and Seabed Act, which National and the Maori Party are in the process of repealing.

Goff’s office said the Labour leader would be holding a press conference early this afternoon to respond to Harawira’s latest outburst.

I’ve been mulling over a post about the format of a political apology; we’ve seen a few of them recently, and until today I was under the impression that our political leaders have a generic script that they work off:

1. Deny that you’ve done anything wrong.
2. Explain to the media that your scandal is ‘a beltway issue’/'not a story’. (Journalists and their editors have enormous respect for the news judgement of politicians.)
3. Play the moral equivalence card. (‘The Labour Party’s crimes against fiscal prudence were far more terrible than the mutual and loving acts of which I stand accused.’)
4. Confuse the issue with technical details. (‘Age of consent laws do not apply to other species, only humans. Let me refer you to the Crimes ACT 1961 Section 143 which states quite clearly . . .’)
5. Play the victim: you are being persecuted because you are [a man/a woman/Maori/white/married/unmarried/have a family/are childless/ are gay/a ginger].
6. In the incredibly likely event that none of these have worked meet with your press secretary and examine private poll data on the scandal. If it looks grim then publically apologise for creating the perception that you may have done something wrong. Make a token gesture of repentance (‘Although I did not harm any of my neighbours plants – quite the opposite – I have offered to pay my neighbour the full replacement value of the succulents in question and undertake to stay out of his garden on moonlit nights.’).

I’m not sure how Hawawira’s new stratagem fits in – we’re through the looking glass here people – so it’ll be interesting to see how it works out for him.

Starlings above Denmark

Media doom

Clay Shirky has a post up entitled Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – he looks at the slow-motion destruction of the current media model and the uncertainty around what will replace it.

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

I don’t think blogging can come close to replacing journalism (although when it comes to commentary and analysis I think the blogosphere has largely overtaken the MSM: Garth George, Trotter, Ralston et al didn’t set the bar terribly high.)

If I had to close my eyes and guess I’d pick that print journalism’s replacement will evolve from the Wiki model – although I can’t quite imagine how that will work. The Boston Review writes about the birth and evolution of Wikipedia and raised questions about the homogenity of the wiki authors:

Wikipedia’s potential lies in harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”; however, those crowds are only as wise as they are diverse. The individuals who compose the crowd need to bring different sets of expertise to the project. But in Wales’s own words, Wikipedians are “80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.” This homogeneity, too, may explain the persistence of certain knowledge gaps.

Who are those people? What makes them so addicted to “wikicrack,” to spending countless hours improving the site, often doing mundane, repetitive tasks that they would never do for money?

Today I needed to look up an algorithm that found a spanning tree in a connected graph. And it’s in Wikipedia! And as always I wondered who on Earth took the time to write that article.

I’m always a bit bewildered when I read about Jimmy Wales and his devotion to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Isn’t the idea of millions of anonymous users selflessly toiling away on a grand project the total opposite of what Objectivists believe?

 

 

Then there was the bad weather.

Paris is rather depressing at this time of year:

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife — second class — and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually. Anyway we would go if my wife wanted to, and I finished the oysters and the wine and paid my score in the café and made it the shortest way back up the Montagne Ste. Geneviève through the rain, that was now only local weather and not something that changed your life, to the flat at the top of the hill.

“I think it would be wonderful, Tatie,” my wife said. She had a gently modeled face and her eyes and her smile lighted up at decisions as though they were rich presents. “When should we leave?”

“Whenever you want.”

“Oh, I want to right away. Didn’t you know?”

“Maybe it will be fine and clear when we come back. It can be very fine when it is clear and cold.”

“I’m sure it will be,” she said. “Weren’t you good to think of going, too.”

A Moveable Feast. Ernest Hemingway. Scribers, 1964

Hone Harawira is no Hemingway:

Maori Party MP Hone Harawira has reacted to an email criticising him for bunking off a work trip to visit Paris by lashing out at white people.

In an email exchange released to Radio New Zealand, Mr Harawira accusing “white motherf…ers” of “puritanical bullshit” for expecting him to follow the rules.

“White motherf***ers have been raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries and all of a sudden you want me to play along with their puritanical bullshit.”

Mr Harawira then went on to say how much time and energy he put into fighting for Maori and what a big role his wife Hilda played in that.

“And quite frankly I don’t give a shit what you or anyone else thinks about it. OK?”

Then he added a postscript saying he should feel free to go to the media.

“I answer to my people, not to them or to anybody else.”

Tim Selwyn made a sound point about this [MPs, travel and spouses, not white motherfuckers although Tim does have a lot to say about that too]:

But here again is the spouse factor and how it impacts on – rather than assists – the work of an MP. I very much doubt that Harawira would have gone off to Paris if he was unaccompanied by his wife. The pressure, the demands, their agenda must also be taken account of musn’t it?

Partners shouldn’t go along on business trips – that’s the lesson here. They are not more focussed on their parliamentary or governmental duties because of their partner’s presence – they are more distracted.

 

ACT leader rejects hypocrisy claims

ACT leader and Local Government Minister Rodney Hide, also known as 'Comrade Mowgli'.

ACT Party leader and Local Government Minister Rodney Hide is in hot water again as new allegations are made against the one time perk-buster. Critics and former party supporters accuse the Dancing with the Stars star of failing to live by the standards and ideals of his party, after it was revealed that when in Wellington the ACT Party MPs live in a commune in which they collectivise all property, work and income, make decisions through consensus and non-hierachical power structures and manufacture their own yogurt.

Hide and co-ACT MP Sir Roger Douglas have defended their alternative lifestyle explaining that they are still committed to ACT Party principles of liberty, independence, climate change denial and smaller government but, according to an ACT press release: ‘on a day to day basis [they] reject the sick materialist society that surrounds us and live for things like egalitarianism, love and our Mother the Earth.’

The ACT Party commune is known as ‘Ixtlan’ and can be found near the end of Holloway Road in Wellington’s Aro Valley; there is a small weatherboard house painted in ACT Party yellow surrounded by caravans, tepees and a Mongolian style yurt known as ‘the Mothership’. Although the commune rejects the ‘fascist, reactionary’ notion of private property it is understood that Rodney Hide favors the yurt, preferring it to his Parliamentary offices at Bowen House. The supercity plans for Auckland and the framework for ACT’s Climate Review Panel were all drawn up inside ‘the Mothership’ which is decorated with Tibetan prayer flags and posters of Kahlil Gibran and Ho Chi Minh and scented with sandalwood incense.

It is also where Hide conducts caucus meetings in which the ACT MPs are ’skyclad’, they begin with a brief ritual to Gaia and then discuss plans to reduce corporate and investment taxes and close down the Commerce Commission; they end with sessions of Marxist-Leninist self-criticism and a rousing chorus of The Internationale.

Hide confirmed that the Ixtlan commune does not practise free love, although the subject was discussed. ‘Many of us feel that we should share our bodies as freely as we share our possessions,’ Hide said ‘However one MP objected to the idea and it was rejected on that basis. I will respect the privacy of that ACT MP and not reveal her name or speculate that her very unenlightened, controlling and deeply uncool reaction will impact on her place on the party list.’

The ACT MPs do collectivize their income and former supporters of the party have raised questions about the judgement of the MPs and their committment to the ideals of liberalism.

‘Between us we earn almost a million dollars a year,’ Hide said, defending the practise that defies every principle his party stands for. ‘Of course that’s obscene and we only really need a tiny fraction of that to live comfortably so we donate the rest to charities we consider worthy.’

Sources within ACT have confirmed that the two main recipients of Hide’s generosity are the ultra-left Shining Path insurgents in Peru and the Maoist Naxalite guerillas in West Bengal.

It is the policy of the ACT Party to oppose Communism and promote the free market,’ Hide told the DimPost when confronted with the charity receipts. ‘As ACT leader I support those goals, but as private individuals John, David, Heather, Sir Roger and I will do anything to help our brave comrades  in their struggle to destroy the corrupt bourgeois democracies of Peru and India and put an end to the sick, rotten free market system that enslaves men’s souls the world over. Death to capitalism and the counter-revolutionary running dog John Key!’

Hide later requested that his vow to kill Key not be quoted as he felt it would be taken out of context and did not reflect the close working relationship he enjoyed with the Prime Minister.

On a clear day you can see the class struggle

From Stuff:

A Kiwi multi-millionaire is to invite high-paying guests on to his Never Never Land-style farm to hear how he would rule New Zealand.

Richlister Alan Gibbs will host former National Party leader Don Brash and ACT founder Sir Roger Douglas to discuss what they would do as “New Zealand’s dictator for a year”.

If guests at the champagne lunch aren’t interested in politics they can wander among the farm’s priceless giant sculptures and African wildlife. Gibbs, 70, has lavished some of his $450m fortune on The Farm, a 404-hectare sculpture park at Kaipara Harbour.

Visitors to the event, in February, will pay a “standard” or “premium donation” – the latter includes a ride in Gibb’s invention, Aquada, an amphibious car.

The outdoor gallery boasts 22 sculptures by internationally renowned artists as well as giraffes, zebras, water buffalo and yaks.

I’m no genius, but I’m confident that if Brash or Douglas were dictator for a year they’d lower taxes for the rich: after all, they invest their money so much more efficiently than the government.