Gaining Faith in Twitter

Back from the Lib Dems spring conference in Harrogate, the greatest revelation for me was the use of twitter to comment on live proceedings. The 'back-channel' is the technical term for this kind of electronic muttering at the back of the room instead of paying attention to teacher. It has long been said about conferences that the main point is getting to meet people and talk to them, rather than the official speeches and whatnot. Twitter, it seems, brings some of the benefits of being able to talk, to a medium in which you are expected to sit, listen, and clap politely.

I signed up to Twitter a couple of years but didn't really see the point and didn't use it. And I still don't really - I probably won't use it again until the next conference. But during the debate on faith schools - and is this really yet another Lib Dem first? - I had to do what I could to sway the vote, and I had access probably to a handful of other delegates following the #ldconf tag.

I was energised by supporters of Amendment 3, including Vince Cable and Tim Farron, calling the original motion an attack on faith schools - which it was not - and calling for support for Amendment 3, as a "compromise". In fact the original text was a compromise - it respects parental choice of a faith school, and even allows new faith schools, but it demands of faith schools the same high standards of non-discrimination, tolerance and inclusivity, that are expected of all other taxpayer-funded schools. Extremists on both sides will argue that you can't trust the other lot to run schools at all. But that is prejudice. This position does not prejudge a school by the faith, or not, of its leadership, and is supported by a broad coalition of liberal believers and liberal atheists. This coalition is exactly the kind of initiative that is vital in today's society that is at risk of having walls go up between believers and unbelievers.

Rabbi Jonathon Romain spoke at the fringe meeting in support of this compromise, saying 

I want my children to go to a school where they can sit next to a Christian, play football in the break with a Muslim, do homework with a Hindu and walk back with an atheist - interacting with them and them getting to know what a Jewish child is like. Schools should build bridges, not erect barriers.

A Rev Chad of St Chad's (no relation) also spoke at the fringe explaining that he felt the christian ethos was about reaching out to the community, not erecting barriers to keep it out.

It is hard to credit then, the arguments for amendment 3. I suppose if somebody comes to you and says "I represent Jews, or Catholics or Hindus..., and I say this policy is an assault on our faith schools", it is difficult to disagree. But it remains the case that opinion among believers is as divided on these questions as opinion always is, and anyone claiming that a faith speaks with one voice is being a little mischeivous.

Amendment 3, then, sought to maintain selection by faith, that is in Romain's words, to erect barriers not bridges, in part 1, and in part 2, to allow discrimination in employment against senior teachers (eg a head of chemistry) who were of the wrong faith, or who suffered a crisis of faith or the failure of a marriage. Part 1 passed, thanks to the the wrong "assualt on faith schools" hyperbole - that I can't blame delegates for buying in to. Part 2 fell, thank, er, Providence.

Overall I am satisfied with the outcome. I raised this whole issue a year ago on Lib Dem Voice, at a time when many in the party blogosphere were holding pointless and destructive arguments over the existence of God and the merits of religion. And even then I thought the selection by faith issue would be too tough to crack and suggested a compromise on it. It is a shame perhaps that my compromise wasn't put to conference. It allowed selection by faith, but insisted that a declaration of faith be considered sufficient. This addressed the problem of people having to go to church under false pretences, of believers missing out because some cleric or other thinks they don't believe well enough or objects to their lifestyle/social class, etc. It reflects the fact that faith is simply not visible to somebody outside one's own head, and does not justify giving unelected clerics, or anyone else, a gatekeeper role to public services that we have already paid for through taxation.

But the win, as far as I am concerned, is this coalition of liberals. I joined the Lib Dems to make common cause with other liberals, not with (or against) other atheists. The religion and faith schools questions seemed to threaten to divide this party. Blair and Bush might be mocked and condemned for their pro-war faith, but really it doesn't matter. Non-believers can be just as hawkish. What matters is your politics. 

I hope you understood all that from my tweets.

Greenpartywatch: GP candidate faces axe for trying to save the planet

A storm is brewing in the Green Party over an article by Chris Goodall, their PPC in Oxford West and Abingdon, arguing that nuclear power will be necessary as part of the solution to climate change.

He goes where Mark Lynas and Stephen Tindale have gone before. Many leading environmentalists now take the view that nuclear is just too useful a source of low-carbon energy to do without; that concerns over nuclear waste, while valid environmental concerns, pale into insignificance compared to climate change.

Opponents frame the debate as "nuclear v renewables", but this is just framing. Let's take as read support for renewables and efficiency. Then what? Where is the rest of our energy coming from?

Realistically, what nuclear is up against is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). A good idea, but not yet, and perhaps not ever, a technology ready to be deployed. If you are convinced that CCS will work, then you can probably afford to be anti-nuclear. But why would you be so convinced?

Here is a question I put to Steve Webb MP, in a Lib Dem Voice webchat way back.

Do you agree that we should be looking to make progress on carbon emissions, primarily with techonlogies that exist, such as wind, nuclear, CSP, CHP, rail, and smart meters rather than gambling on technologies that might never exist, such as CCS, much better PV, and particular road transport solutions? Where technologies look promising, but don't yet work, rather than buy inferior versions of them, supporting that inferiority, why don't we offer prizes to companies that bring them to viability?

And he responded

We should certainly use readily available technologies such as CHP and smart meters as far as possible. But Carbon Capture is essential to the planet. China and India are rolling out new unabated coal-fired power stations at an alarming rate. Unless those emissions get captured we are all in trouble. So investing in CCS research has got to be a priority. In terms of prizes for companies that bring forward new ideas, in a world of carbon rationing and carbon markets, there ought to be strong economic 'prizes' for green technology - the key is to remove the barriers which prevent them getting to the commercial viability stage.

The position on nuclear - too little too late - had been given previously.

To support this policy it seems necessary to believe that CCS will actually work, and to be willing to gamble the planet's future on it working. Carbon capture is essential to the planet? Nuclear is too little too late. One could just as well say the opposite. Nuclear is essential to the planet, and CCS is too little too late. The second position has the advantage that nuclear is known to work, and building CCS-ready plant actually means building dirty coal plant.

So we face the same questions the Greens do, and we will continue to debate them, just as the Greens, er, oh...

Mr Goodall’s remarks had left many party members “seriously concerned”, the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, MEP, said last night. “It is of great concern to me that a candidate should be promoting a policy which is at odds with the party manifesto, and I shall be taking that forward,” she said. ...  Asked if this would include disciplinary action and possibly even de-selection as a candidate, Ms Lucas would only say: “We will be taking appropriate measures.”

What really bothers me about this - because of course parties should be able to remove candidates who reject their values - is that Goodall's position is being seen by the Green party not as a contribution to the debate on how to save the planet, but as a rejection of the idea that we should be saving the planet - as a rejection of the party's values.

And this way madness lies. If you happen to believe that technology A will do a job better than technology B, for empirical practical reasons, this says nothing about your political values. If, when you explain your reasons, people invoke disciplinary procedures, that does suggest a deliberate attempt to keep heads in the sand and protect sacred cows from any kind of criticism.

But as I have said in the past, it is only by debating these questions openly, by taking evidence on the chin when it hurts, that we stand any chance in the long run of getting the right answers.

Chris Goodall, if you're listening, have a look as well at some of the benefits of trade, enterprise, and science.

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?

On libertarianism and public goods

I have noticed an article in Tristan Mills' shared links defending libertarianism from the objection that the free market would undersupply public goods.

If that's all Greek to you, some explanation. 

Shared links - a bloggers tool for sharing articles read elsewhere that might be interesting. My most recent shared links are listed on the right under the imperative read this too. A bit like libdig for one.

Libertarianism - an ideology that holds that a) property is more important than liberty, and b) that everything the state does is evil. At least those seem to be the priorities. If you are interested in libertarianism, I strongly recommend reading this, detailing one liberterian's escape after seeing the flaws in the ideology. In fact it is a more worthwhile read than the rest of this blog post. You can skip the stuff about the minimum wage. You may ask why I show so much interest in such a fringe ideology: it is partly based on that article that I believe libertarians are usually redeemable. (And while the arguments are specifically about the Ayn Rand flavour of libertarianism, most are applicable to saner flavours.)

Public goods  - (wikipedia) goods that we benefit from, like air, science and free software, that we don't use up by enjoying, nor can we be effectively prevented from using.

OK, so what does this article say? There's a certain amount of reference to prior arguments, so pay attention.  I should add that the author, ka1igu1a, appears to be one of the better kinds of libertarian, so I may be making some unfair assumptions.

[quoting] Underproduction of public goods is inevitable in the presence of 1) the ability to free-ride (i.e. non-excludable goods) and 2) rational self-interest.[end quote]

Knapp attacked this position by claiming "underproduction" to be subjective measure, a measure typically proclaimed by fiat by the central planner. Holtz's rejoinder to Knapp was that Knapp didn't understand "higher mathematics" and that economists have in their toolbox mathematical measures of optimality, including such measures of Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency.

However, ... In Public Choice theory, the "Redistribution Problem" is recast as "Government Failure." Government Failure more or less holds that public goods will be systematically over-produced. It should be noted that "over-production" violates any algorithmic standard of optimality just as under-production does; and,in fact, the violations can be much worse.

I have used the ellipsis to cut out what is presumably a carefully constructed argument, which I will take for granted. Ka1igu1a's retort boils down to this. Free markets may underproduce public goods (although I'm not necessarily accepting this), but governments overproduce them. This is of course no contradiction. I think it is probably true that markets underproduce public goods and governments overproduce them. This is hardly a compelling argument for the abolition of governments, but it is one for not letting them get too big.

The classic example of a public good supposedly is "national defense." Of course, it's difficult to justify why the US needs to spend roughly a trillion dollars a year on national defense. National Defense is Exhibit A of "government failure." The government failure is not in providing the public good of "defense," but that the overproduction of this public good is orders of magnitude more inefficient than any "market failure" could ever possibly be.

A good example. I agree that the US defence budget is too large. On the other hand I'm not sure that all defence budgets around the world are always too large. There are times, aren't there, when rearmament is a necessary evil? The 30s come to mind.

If you seriously believe that the US military industrial complex, with all it's stockpiles of WMD, is somehow a legitimate consequence of meeting a "public good,"

A US focus is fair enough on a US blog - but how does this argument apply elsewhere in the world? 

Holtz seems unaware that human instrumental rationality, point (2), has been debunked by experimental economics, sociology, and game Theory for some time now.

No no no. If the problem is that it is irrational to produce public goods, it misses the point to assert that people aren't particularly rational anyway. Any rationality will lead to underproduction of public goods and any irrationality will lead to, well it could lead to anything, but there is no way you can predict it would lead to a systematic balancing overproduction of public goods. This is a very sloppy argument.

I should point out that Freedom Democrats utilizes Drupal Open Source Software. According to Holtz, I really shouldn't be even posting on this site, because Open Source Software should have long ago been killed by the non-excludable, free-rider problem. Yes, Open Source Software satisfies the definition of a "public good," however no one seriously would even dare to make a Pareto-optimality argument against it's under-production.  Holtz's "inevitably argument" is empirically debunked.

If only Holtz had said that no public goods would be freely produced, ka1igu1a would have a point, but he didn't and he doesn't. My guess is that production of more, better open source software would be closer to Pareto optimal. Not that I think the state can do much to help.

OK, so where does this leave us. Public goods will be underproduced by free markets. There is a real dearth, I suspect, of very useful information. Trivial information you can put in a magazine or something and sell, but anything really important people will hear about, and you can't copyright the truth. In some respects governments do OK here - they pay for scientific research for example. But I guess if they did the same with software, it would be a disaster.

But drawing to a conlcusion, there seems to be a desperation among libertarians to come to the right conclusions however sloppy the arguments used to get there. To me this suggests that we are not dealing with the real reasons somebody has for supporting libertarianism. It suggests an approach which claims to know the answer before the question has been asked. This is not principled or rational, but arbitrary and dogmatic.

Tax: Labour to copy the Lib Dems; Tories to lose the plot

We hear that Gordon Brown (not Alasdair Darling - what is his job, again?) is thinking about tax cuts as part of a fiscal stimulus package. This is something that the Lib Dems have been advocating for some time, particularly that taxes on people on lower and middle incomes are particularly good candidates for lowering to stimulate the economy. Such people are most likely to spend the extra money, and, if they are homeowners, to keep their homes as a result. This sort of stimulus also has the advantage over extra public spending in that it benefits the private sector directly, not just indirectly. More from Nick Clegg and myself on this here.

Some will doubtless feel offended at Labour stealing our policies, but I rather like it. They are admitting to the world that we were right all along, again, and that if you want the right policies on the economy without months or years of dithering first, then vote Lib Dem.

The Tories on the other hand, well, what can I say. 

The Tories unveil their own plans, aimed at dealing specifically with unemployment, on Tuesday.

They say they would fund tax cuts through existing spending and not - as they suspect the government would do - through borrowing. 

The Today programme was suggesting this means tax cuts targetted at people "likely to lose their jobs." Huh? What? How can you measure who is likely to lose their jobs, in a systematic enough way to include this concept in tax law? Or perhaps they just mean tax cuts for bankers. That could be it. But incorporating this kind of nebulous concept in tax law is even worse, and will lead to far more pointless complication of the tax system, than even Gordon Brown's insufferable tinkering. Whatever happened to a simpler tax system?

Bizarre as this is however, it is not the worst of it. They would fund these cuts "through existing spending" [cuts], not through borrowing. So this is not going to be a fiscal stimulus at all. The Tory response to the economic climate is to do nothing. Whoopee.