Morality

I liked this piece on the Euro debt crisis by Aditya Chakrabortty, not least because he argues that the human consequences of austerity "are not merely coincidental to those discussions about how to tackle the debt; they are integral to it."  Whilst it is easy to read all sorts of guff about the 'moral risk' of debt forgiveness, there is far less, other than in the pages of literature where it has been a common theme for centuries, about the immoral consequences of the extraction of repayment from those who no longer have the means to pay.

Chakrabortty has been reading David Graeber's new book and it shows.

Strip away the technicalities and you are left with two ways to think about the debt crisis. One is as a battle between the past and the future ...  the second way to think about any argument over debt [is] as a fight between creditors and borrowers, or the haves and the have-nots. 

He argues that the current austerity programme sacrifices the future of the individual citizens of debtor countries, who bear little responsibility for the crisis, in a vain attempt to repay debts acquired in the past through the actions of previous governments; whilst the creditors use their power to extract as much as possible from the borrowers to avoid facing the consequences of their own poor investment decisions. It is almost as if we have reinvented the old debtors' prisons, on an international scale. The borrowers are punished by endless austerity, whilst the creditors are protected, even rewarded, whatever responsibility they share for the creation of the crisis.

The 1869 Bankruptcy Act abolished imprisonment for debt in Britain and, in effect, allowed for an orderly debt default and debt forgiveness. This is a lesson seemingly lost to the EU as it seeks to bind the recalcitrant nations with perpetual fiscal restraints.

Chakraborrty concludes:

In his recent, brilliant history Debt: the First 5,000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber calls for a modern-day debt jubilee, a cancellation of all debts, just as they had in Mesopotamia. His suggestion is provocative, but it should be taken seriously. Because the longer we keep protecting the haves over the have-nots and honouring the past while destroying the future, the worse this debt crisis will get.

Greece's new place in Europe

Economics

"Mario, you have allowed the Italian budget deficit to rise above 3% of gross domestic product." "Yes, mistress Angela, I deserve to be punished for my lack of fiscal discipline. Please do not spare me."







Larry Elliott on form:

Perhaps a Freud or a Jung could explain what is happening: it certainly defies rational economic analysis.

Another season

And another ground. Swinton's peripatetic existence continues with them now playing at Leigh Sports Village, one of the clutch of modern, multi-use stadia that are springing up to replace the crumbling terraces of grounds that may bring a tear to the eye of nostalgics, but were bloody awful if you needed a pee or to get a decent view of the game. This will be the sixth ground they have played at since the demise of Station Road. Hopefully, there will be just one more move; to the planned new ground of their own in Agecroft.

Today's game was a pre-season friendly against Widnes, newly elevated to Super League. It was the expected defeat to a full-strength higher division team, but really impressive defence was only partly off-set by a rusty attack. The season looks promising. We just need that ground.

Sundry thoughts on return

Delight and the mundane

Here I am back in Manchester, culturally and linguistically at home, but thinking of another place where I am a cultural and linguistic outsider and feel happy.

Worries

Of course, Greece is not a happy country right now. People are obsessing about the crisis, stressed and anxious, reacting with a mixture of anger, resignation and hysteria to their sudden impoverishment as the result of an imposed, ideologically driven, political economy. Passing a piece of graffiti on the way back and reading the words, "resist the new Fourth Reich", I couldn't help feeling that the policies of the EU could hardly be better designed to undermine any sense of European identity in a nation that had embraced it so whole-heartedly.

Perspective

The death of Kim Jong-il gave us a glimpse of something far worse; militarised expressions of ludicrous grief, driven by fear, expressed with a disciplined precision, orchestrated under brooding snow-laden skies that seemed symbolic of this dystopian repression. Greece's undisciplined vibrancy, even in today's economic troubles, is a wonderful reminder of the importance of freedom, especially if it can be found in a benign climate.

Intervention

As I boarded my connection in Frankfurt a lively group of South Korean students, returning to universities in the UK after the break, were laughing and joking, constantly checking their mobiles and listening to their iPods. Watching them, I couldn't help thinking, 'what sort of life would they be leading now if the North had won the Korean War, if there had not been an American-led UN intervention and if the country had been reunited under Kim Il-sung'?

Open education

There is a decent piece from Peter Scott here about higher education policy that gets to the nub of the problem with the reforms to university funding.

The interesting thing about policy is not the measures themselves, but the assumptions underlying them. Applying that test, the government's higher education reforms are anything but. They are rooted in a view of a university education common no doubt in prosperous London-land, but profoundly reactionary – as a bourgeois lifestyle choice rather than career-changing improvement, as validation rather than aspiration.

Scott's critique, though, is not a very radical one either. His argument for state funding through general taxation, rather than the hypothecated graduate tax, which the loan and repayment scheme really is, is based on the utility of higher education as an instrument of national prosperity. In making this case, he is also engaging with a limited, and somewhat conservative, model of higher education.

The one strength in the Government's case for the new fees regime for universities is that there is an inequity in asking those who never benefit as individuals to pay, through general taxation, for a middle class perk that would, in turn, give real individual rewards to those who get qualifications. A similar argument has been used about state funding for the arts. Why should the private pleasures of the elite receive public funding? The counter argument usually made centres on the collateral benefits of elite activities, both in culture and economics. For instance, the defence of a publicly funded higher education is that there is a collective economic gain in having an educated workforce. There is obviously some truth in this, but try asking an unemployed person whether they benefit from the fact that the clerk processing their claim has a 2.2 in sociology. I find more than a hint of sophistry here; what exists is of value simply because it exists.

In both cases, the wrong question is being asked. Instead we should be asking why these are elite pursuits in the first place, rather than being open and accessible to everyone. And this leads me to a tediously familiar subject, adult education. Adult education in universities was one way in which the university could be something other than a middle class diploma factory and instead become a resource for the entire community. It was different and, in lots of ways, pointed to another possibility, universities open to all; comprehensive rather than selective institutions. High level research and top class professional training could easily co-exist with an open campus, short courses, community outreach and part-time delivery. And the same applies to the arts. If there was one thing running through the rather earnest mission of the adult education movement from its earliest days, it was the notion that excellence was available to all, that high art could be popular art. The assumption behind current policy is that neither are capable of change from being a permanent elite ghetto.

This is what a genuinely radical reform could look like, moving lifelong learning from the margins to the centre of the university mission, not bringing in another formula based on a complacent acceptance of the status quo, with bureaucratised plans for wider access floating around at the margins. It would mean profound institutional change and, if the university was an open door instead of a gated community, its pleas about funding would have far greater purchase.

Instead, we are witnessing adult education's lingering death and with it goes hopes for something more inspiring for our universities.

Solidarity

 We are all Greek now.

A New Year

And at last the sun shone after a grey, wet holiday period. The views from the Lafkos road were slightly hazy and snow could be seen on the mountains in the distance. Clear skies means frosty nights, though the sun is warm even if the air is cool. A sunny 2012 in the offing? Wait and see, but all the best to my select band of readers.

Horrifying

I had my suspicions before, now I have the proof. Santa is a Nazi.

UPDATE for Mikeovswintonneedstogotospecsavers. Another angle - open palm, short fingers. Even more suspicious.

Peace and goodwill

Festive greetings ...

... to most of those who pass by this obscure corner of the internet.

Getting away from it all

... snow and gale-force winds knocked out the power lines in over 50 villages in northern Greece, with electricity crews still working on repairing them on Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile, back in the UK:

A Christmas with unseasonably mild temperatures and strong winds is expected in much of Britain.

 Oh well.

Latins and Teutons

So why can't the Greeks be more like the Germans? That should sort all the problems out, surely.

Matthew Iglesias writes in Slate:

Blaming the whole mess on the comparative torpor of Latins places a convenient moral framework around complicated economic questions, and affirms prior beliefs about who does and doesn’t work hard ... It’s true that Germans and Greeks work very different amounts, but not in the way you expect. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average German worker put in 1,429 hours on the job in 2008. The average Greek worker put in 2,120 hours. In Spain, the average worker puts in 1,647 hours. In Italy, 1,802. The Dutch, by contrast, outdo even their Teutonic brethren in laziness, working a staggeringly low 1,389 hours per year.

 He continues with an old truth:

 ... countries aren’t rich because their people work hard. When people are poor, that’s when they work hard.

As Amartya Sen has written

... cultural generalizations ... can ... present astonishingly limited and bleak understandings of the characteristics of the human beings involved. When a hazy perception of culture is combined with fatalism about the dominating power of culture, we are, in effect, asked to be the slaves of an illusory force.

Hat tip John

In Greece

It is good to be back in Greece. After months of disaster stories in the press, it is reassuring to see that it still exists and that the village has splashed out on a new public Christmas decoration. The old metal tree-shaped frame on the jetty has given way to a wooden boat draped with sailcloth and illuminated by fairy lights. Village gossip persists, the people are still here, the winter is mild and pleasant, even if the skies are grey and the sea is splashing over the paraleia as the weather gets cooler. The lane is still firm under foot, the legacy of a warm, dry autumn, the grass has hardly grown and only the clover has flourished. The citrus trees are in fruit, the bright colours of the pitted skins contrasting with their dark green leaves.

Yet the crisis is real enough and it continues unresolved, consuming its human sacrifices that signally fail to propitiate the gods of the markets. The sigh of relief at a half-formed and ill-constructed non-solution will soon give way to the inevitable failure and then ... ? Who knows? All I can say is that this is a country that deserves better and that for some unfathomable reason the stillness of a mild winter's night, broken only by the crackling of olive wood burning in the grate, brings me happiness.

The world has lost two fine democratic voices this week in Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens, both exceptional writers, both intolerant of stupidity and totalitarianism. The contrast between their vigorous and thoughtful urgency with the stumbling, indecisive ideological orthodoxy of the EU is disturbing. Watching European leaders in action reminds me that it is not just evil that is banal, so is banality and it too carries its own dangers. There is nothing barbaric about our European elites, but they are careless. And European democracy is one thing not to be careless with.

One hell of a writer

May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

The year of the dog

Hitler, Stalin (twice), Gandhi, Churchill, Nixon, Mark Zukerberg - all have been Time magazine's Person of the Year. Now they are joined by ... Loukanikos the Greek riot dog.

Well, this year's award is really a collective one to all the protesters who have challenged the established order all over the world, but Loukanikos gets an honourable mention and a picture spread.

Starting with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia that kicked off the Arab Spring and ending with the protests against the fraudulent elections in Russia, this has been an extraordinary year when the quiescence of a population cowed by fear or sated by the excesses of consumerism can no longer be taken for granted. Time's decision not to nominate a single person is down to their view that this year "leadership has come from the bottom of the pyramid, not the top". Perhaps, given the quality of political leadership we have seen lately, the selection of a dog in preference to any of this uninspiring bunch of presidents and prime ministers is all that needs to be said.

Hat tip KTG

Eurodoom

There is a superb, angry summary of the Erozone summit agreement by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Torygraph of all places.

Europe will now have its austerity union, a revamped Stability Pact. Budgets will be vetted "ex ante". Structural deficits will be capped at 0.5pc of GDP. Sinners will be punished automatically once they break the 3pc limit, and submit to suzerainty. Commissars will tell them how to treat trade unions, what to tax, and what to spend.

It is not remotely a fiscal union. There will be no joint debt issuance, no EU treasury, no shared budgets, and no fiscal transfers to regions in trouble.

 And, making the obvious point that this non-union is the flawed solution to the wrong problem:

This is not at root a debt crisis. By endorsing fiscal fetishism, EU leaders are silently colluding in the Neo-Calvinist illusion that budget excess caused the debacle. They know this to be untrue. Ireland ran surpluses for years, reducing its public debt to 12pc of GDP at one stage (Germany is 82pc). Spain ran a surplus of 2pc of GDP. Italy has long had a primary surplus.

It is a trade and capital flow crisis, a regional variant of the US-China imbalance. The damage was hidden during the boom by cheap German, Dutch, and French capital -- and cheap Asian and Mid-East capital rotated through London banks -- flowing into southern Europe. It was cruelly exposed as soon as creditors shut off credit.

In other words, debts and deficits are the symptoms of a systemic crisis, not its cause.

So what is going on? A rehashing of Herbert Hoover, the rediscovery of the economics of Pierre Laval or a "Medieval leech-cure treatment" that "can only drain the lifeblood from large parts of wasted Euroland"? This will not end well.

Thanks to Alan

Winter

So Britain is out in the cold as it stands aside from a deal to impose a permanent winter of austerity on a Europe that craves summer. Cameron has upset everybody by vetoing a treaty imposing the wrong remedy on the basis of a wrong diagnosis even though he agrees with the diagnosis and is busy applying the same wrong remedy to the British economy.

Here is Paul Krugman:

Maybe it was always thus, but the relentless wrong-headedness of the Europeans, their insistence on seeing their crisis as something it isn’t, and responding with actions that deepen the real crisis, has been a wonder to behold.

Literature, history and conflict

I found this fascinating interview with the Israeli novelist, David Grossman, on Normblog. Grossman is a writer whom I admire and I found his latest novel, To the End of the Land, memorable and haunting. Its structure is irregular, it does not offer any type of conclusive ending, instead it is a picture of relationships on a journey, falling through space and time. It is a meditation on ordinary lives shaped by conflict, uneasily escaping from and reconciling with reality by turn.

Norm highlights the concluding paragraph:

There is something in literature so contrary to the general dimension of war. War is all about effacing the other and self-effacement; it’s all about generalizations and sweeping definitions and demonizations. Writing is about specifying individuals, being very attentive to them and caring for them. It insists on nuances.

 This is interesting enough, but, I was drawn to something he said earlier:

We live in a very violent region, which makes people react sometimes in a terrible way ... We are all prisoners and imprisoned. The difficulty of being a human being, being a mentsch even, in such an inhumane and anti-mentsch reality, it’s an environment that is so poisoned with hatred and fears and prejudices and racism that one fights hard in order not to surrender to [these poisons]. It is so tempting to surrender to this way of thinking: demonizing the other, idealizing ourselves, believing the other understands only the language of power and therefore we have to, against our will of course, treat them only with vigor—all of these unbearable ways of seeing reality, which in a way are realizing themselves, it’s a kind of self-fulfilling way of looking at the world.

...It’s not only an abstract thought here; it’s very practical. People are challenged to make sharp, immediate decisions in order to stay alive, especially when they serve in the army. All these extreme dilemmas, which are really dilemmas for Greek tragedies, they are our daily bread, ours and the Palestinians. It is so hard to mitigate all these contrary urges and pressures and yearnings to remain human. Sometimes I compare it to walking in the middle of a huge storm with only one candle in your hand. How do you keep it lit? How do you protect it?

The importance of history as a discipline stands out, developing a narrative that expresses and explains the collective experience of both peoples. On all sides it is assailed by pseudo-history as propaganda, selecting and distorting to support one side or another, to provide a narrative that comforts prejudice, feeds contempt and breeds hatred.

But the drama of conflict, the instinct for survival, the choices that each individual makes with all the consequences that flow from them, what has the historian to say? Yes, it is possible to write about ironies, coincidences, misunderstandings; but fear and grief, or, what Grossman builds his novel on, the absolute terror of the possibility of grief? It is there that we need our artists, maybe walking hand-in-hand with historians, for what they can do is explain the reality of individual experience. Both explore a different dimension of truth and, at its best, history is a profoundly literary subject.

Does it make a difference? Here is the conclusion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1970 Nobel Prize Lecture:

We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

Grossman is more cautious:

Stories today cannot change reality; they unfortunately cannot change the world. Literature doesn’t have representatives in power centers, or financial markets, or parliament, or army headquarters. But maybe it can help us so that this world cannot change us.

If Solzhenitsyn is too bombastic, Grossman is too bashful. Totalitarian regimes have long understood that they need to suppress art in favour of kitsch, one of the great achievements of humanity is that they have always failed.

Capitalism is doomed (perhaps)

The tide has turned, Tunbridge Wells is now in occupation:

 



"We met the Church Warden last night, who happened to be a very convivial chap, the following morning we met the Vicar, who seemed to somewhat sympathy with our cause, however in the last hour, at apprx 12:30 midday today (being Thursday) the Police have shown up, although the Police have been wonderfully friendly, I do believe that they perceive that there may be an issue with regards to us remaining on this site."




  
 Via Wealden Progressive Movement

Sunday sanity

Why the public sector also pays for the private sector - in a neat dialogue from Tim Harford:

This is a modern economy. Everybody pays for everybody else’s salary, except the subsistence farmers and survivalists, who look after themselves

Nice, read it all.

In trouble

Funny how the idea of paying more for longer to get less hasn't been the most successful of sales pitches. But you know it is failing badly when things like this happen:

A head teacher praised by David Cameron in June for not closing her school during industrial action says she will strike for the first time in her life.

Hat tip to John

The season's over

So what better way to review it than by using Lego (er, are you quite sure about that?).