Principal Components of Principles

Alix and Jennie have resurrected the peculiar fascinating 2005 political compass, the one that suggets some odd-looking criteria for defining left and right.

I come out pretty close to Alix: left on the main axis of internationalism/rehabilitation, and right on the minor axis of free trade and war. I was against the war, so I must be really keen on free trade.

OK the fascinating thing about this survey is these axes were not chosen by the authors, but arose as a statistical outcome of the actual answers actual voters gave to the questions. Let me try to explain this a little bit.

Lets say you have a 1000 responses to a survey of 20 political questions with simple for/against type answers. What the principal components analysis does is find a formula for a number that would let you predict the answers to one survey, given no other information, with the greatest possible accuracy.

And it turns out that this number reflects opinions on hanging/flogging and nationalism. So this is the principal principle axis. What this means is that if you know somebody is, say -4, on this axis, you can predict their answers to the whole survey with, say, 80% accuracy.

Nobody chose hanging/flogging/internationalism - it is just that this formula and this number gives you the best predictive power. Some other formula might reflect different priorities, but only give 75% accuracy.

It gets a bit more complicated with two axes, but the principle (the principle of the principal principle?) remains the same. With a second formula and a second number, you can raise the predictive power to, say, 90%. A number reflecting views on war/free trade does this better than any other.

What does this mean - well it means that the data is telling us that views that belong together on an axis are highly correlated with each other. Supporters of hanging and flogging tend to be nationalist, and supporters of free markets tend to be pro-war. It also tells us how much the parties overlap, and therefore how difficult it is for any party to position itself clearly without alienating a lot of supporters.

OK that's the good and interesting. What's wrong with this picture? Well for starters, there were only 1 or 2 questions on war and 6 on economics. Having 6 similar questions means that those 6 are 30% of the data and will almost certainly be reflected in a principal component. War may have found itself tacked on as a statistical artefact but I suggest there should be 6 questions on war too before we read too much into this correlation.

Similarly there were 6 questions on inter/nationalism - another 30% of the data - and two on crime. So nationalism is going to come out of the analysis,  picking up one or two more questions in the same way.

So I think a safer interpretation is that there are two components or groupings by which answers are predictable: 1. nationalism and 2. economics, in a survey where a third of the questions are on nationalism, a third are on economics, and the last third are an assortment of other topics.

Oh. That's not exactly surprising is it? If we had a survey with 6 questions about electoral reform, 6 about income tax and 8 assorted others, I wonder what the two axes would be labelled then?

Dear Gordon

Tagged by Millennium Dome.

2 things of which Gordon Brown should be proud

1. Being a bit of a wonk. Why does a little understanding attract so much ridicule from people who understand less? A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but in a PM, less is even more dangerous.
2. Keeping the Tories out since 1997.

2 things for which he should apologise

1. Funding the war on Iraq
2. Failing to topple Tony Blair when it was clear he had taken the country to war on a lie. If that is not grounds for a party rebellion then nothing is.

2 things he should do immediately on becoming Prime Minister

1. Offer a cabinet position to Dave, nice but Knave. Can we see any big disagreements on policy between the two?
2. Cancel all Blair's big ticket vanity spending items: ID cards, premature Trident renewal, unwanted IT systems, war, ...

2 things he should do while Prime Minister

1. Unpick the whole box-ticking back-of-an-envelope-target culture
2. Generate shedloads of renewable and low carbon energy.

Highlight of the Blair Era

I've been tagged by Peter Sanderson for my highlight of the Blair era. Highlight is too positive a word for what I have to say, but here it is.

The moment when:

1. It became clear there were no WMDs in Iraq.
2. David Kelly was dead in suspicious circumstances and the Labour machine was spinning against him.
3. It was clear that Tony Blair was personally responsible for taking the country to war on a lie. (And saying something is certain when it isn't is a lie.)
4. In spite of what was, if we can be excessively charitable, a gross failure of judgement, leading to many thousands of deaths, Blair didn't resign. If this is not a resigning issue, what on earth is?
5. Noting that if Blair had taken responsibility and resigned, this may well have tipped the balance in the US election 2004 into a defeat for George W Bush - because it would have been harder to bareface out the war as not a mistake.
6. The Labour Party, knowing all this, failed to sack him. This is a gross dereliction of duty. It is the job of a parliamentary party to depose Prime Ministers who have lost the plot. The Tories did it with Thatcher when it had to be done, when she was still quite popular in much of the country. But no, the Labour Party clearly did not think he had done anything particularly wrong, and so I consider them as guilty as he is. People who thought that Labour was good at heart, only doing what it had to do to win power, to protect public sevices and tackle social exclusion, were disabused this day.

I'm sorry if this is all too obvious, but it is hard to compete with a betrayal of the British people of this magnitude. Even if you like the New Labour programme, you think that up until the Iraq war the government was doing great, and you thought at the run up to the war, that maybe invasion was the best way to deal with the known threats, according to the intelligence.

Even with that perspective you have to look back, and realise that the intelligence was distorted for political ends, and that the rush to war was driven by a timetable intended to pre-empt the completion of Hans Blick's inspection. A shabby, dishonest, criminal, murderous act.

I tag: Joe Taylor, Anders Hanson, Forceful and Moderate, Tom Papworth and Millennium Dome

Cicero has it succinctly.

The Trap: What happened to our dreams of freedom?

Having missed the first two of these programmes, I was pleased to catch the third. I hope that my profoundest observations on it weren't lost during Desperate Housewives which was on immediately after.

The thesis was, in short, that there was something missing from Isiah Berlin's negative liberty concept, which has led to failures in imposing negative liberty in Russia, Iraq and elsewhere. Cicero provides a good defence of Berlin and negative liberty.

I think you could take Curtis' arguments and arrive at the rather different conclusion that negative liberty just can't be imposed. He makes the point that when it came to the Iraq war, we were so steeped in the culture of self-interest, that we didn't trust Blair and Bush. This is what perhaps led them to fabricate the evidence of a threat from Iraq.

And here's the problem. Freedom suffers if we can't rely on legislators and politicians to be honest brokers, rather than self-interested rational men. And of course we can't rely on anybody not to be self-interested, but we can, if we have elections and a true democratic culture, create the right incentives for politicians and vote out those that fall short.

An attempt to impose negative liberty cannot introduce this kind of check on power. Without democracy, politics becomes corrupt and self-serving whether done in the name of negative liberty, of socialism, of God, or of any other cause you care to mention.

Curtis argues that negative liberty relies on people being self-interested, and that positive liberty seeks to do better than that. But this is wrong. Negative liberty allows people freedom to choose their own values - so long as that doesn't interfere with the freedom of others - and so people are perfectly free to be altruistic without undermining the system. It is positive liberty that makes some reliance on people behaving appropriately and can go wrong when they don't.

The lesson I take from The Trap is not that negative, or positive liberty is prone to fail, but that the imposition of values is prone to fail. The imposition of values is of course against the principles of negative liberty, whether negative liberty is one of the values being imposed or not. Revolutions make things worse. The way to enhance freedom, of either kind, is not to tear down the system, but to reform it incrementally and democratically.

Curtis' description of Pol Pot's murder of the entire Cambodian middle class reminded me of this quote:

As an eco-Marxist I believe that only a socialist society will meet human needs and sustain ecological diversity, politics is based on class struggle, it isn't a matter of changing a few laws we live in a social totality that is utterly destructive and must be replaced.
- Derek Wall, principal speaker of the Green Party

I discuss an alternative approach to environmental problems, offering more freedom, negative and I daresay positive as well, here.