Author: Tom Slee

There is a very seasonal and pretty spooky ghost story at Stageleft, see A Curious Incident.

Real or fake? Well, call me a sucker, but I’d say it’s genuine.

So, following on from my recent gripe about quantum computing, it turns out that there are others who have thought along similar lines, and actually done the work of going beyond generalized grumbles.

Specifically, Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized posts about a paper by M. I. Dyakonov called Is Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation Really Possible? Dyakonov goes on about the theory of error-correction in (hypothetical) quantum computers, which I know nothing of, and in particular criticizes the "threshold theorem", but he also makes some more elementary points that I did, so here are a few excerpts from Mr/Ms Dyakonov’s paper just to show I’m not completely out to lunch.

The enormous literature devoted to [fault-tolerant quantum computation]… is purely mathematical. It is mostly produced by computer scientists with a limited understanding of physics and a somewhat restricted perception of quantum mechanics as nothing more than unitary transformations in Hilbert space plus "entanglement".

[on decoherence] While the relaxation of two-level systems was thoroughly studied during a large part of the 20th century, and is quite well understood, in the quantum computing literature there is a strong tendency to make it look as an obscure quantum phenomenon.

Elsewhere, Dyakonov takes aim at the assumptions of ideal behaviour that permeate discussions of the feasibility of quantum computing, and to my mind does a pretty good job of bringing a little reality into the discussion. Click the  Shtetl-Optimized link above for some more discussion of the paper.

The Flusher King by Peter Scowen, Toronto Star, Sunday October 22, 2006, p. D1.
Maximum Performance Testing of Popular Toilet Models,  7th Edition, Canadian Water and Wastewater Association.

The debate seems endless. The left says the
market doesn’t work; the right says government just makes things worse. It’s an old argument, and it’s time to get it sorted out.

The trouble is, this argument is always made in the abstract. It’s just
generalities. Principal-agent problems here, collective action problems
there, it’s just so much verbal diarrhoea.

If you’re going to have any chance of a realistic answer, you
have to get your hands dirty and take a close look at a real problem.
So that’s what I’m going to do.

And the best place to look? In the toilet. Or more specifically, in the
low-flush toilet which, after many years of messy failures, is now
positively flushed with success. What made it succeed? Was this the
innovation of private industry? Schumpeterian creative destruction at
work?  Or is this a case of state-mandated standards flushing away a
problem that the free market just left floating in the pan?

Thanks to
the Toronto Star
(link works for free until the weekend) we now have the unadulterated
story. Pretty much everything I say here comes from that article.

Let’s start at the beginning. In places where households don’t pay the
full cost of their water, which is a lot of places in North America,
there is a free-rider problem when it comes to water conservation. We’d
all save money if our toilets used less water when they flushed. It
saves in water treatment costs, and it saves because there is less
water to send through the pipes. It’s just a good thing. But if we don’t pay the whole cost of water ourselves, the best choice for each of us is to stick with our current toilet and let others invest in a low-flush model.

But the free market was failing to deliver a low-flush toilet. While
government bureaucrats were of the opinion that 6 litres is enough to
get rid of what needs to be got rid of, the toilet manufacturers were
all selling models that delivered 13 litres (in imperial measurements,
that’s three furlongs and a fortnight) with each pull of the chain (are
there actually any made with chains any more? It would be a great retro
item I think.) Why was the free market failing? Well, probably for lack
of a push from consumers. If you’re not paying the full cost of the
water, you don’t really care whether your toilet uses 6 litres or 13.

So, the obvious solution here is government intervention, and in some
places (the USA) in the early 1990’s the government decided to get tough, and
used its monopoly on force — you know, that monopoly the libertarians
are always complaining about — to compel the toilet manufacturers cartel to adopt an
environmentally friendly line. They outlawed high-volume toilets. One for the state! (although to be honest
I don’t know which level of the state it was).

But as we’ve been told by the libertarians and right wingers, government intervention does not necessarily improve matters, and
one reason is the old problem of information. You can sell a toilet
that delivers 6 litres per flush, but as a customer how do you know if
that toilet is going to do what is needed? Well, before you buy it, you
don’t, so there is an obvious "market for lemons" problem here. The state
can lead the manufacturers to use less water, but it can’t make them
flush thoroughly. Someone needs to do some testing to establish some
clear standards, and who is going to do that?

Market enthusiasts will not be surprised to hear that although the US
government (whichever part it was) had got tough in the letter of the
law, it seems that it didn’t follow through, leaving it to municipalities to find a solution. Seattle and Oakland trusted the Third Way idea that testing could be
contracted out to a private industry group called the National Home
Builders’ Association, which describes itself "a Washington, D.C.-based
trade association whose mission is to
enhance the climate for housing and the building industry." Market
sceptics would just know these tests aren’t going to be really solid,
and so it proved: they used a set of weighted sponges. Sponges!?

Whether this faulty testing was a fault of Blairite PPP illusions or
not, the 1990’s was a decade in which government intervention seemed to
have made all things loo-related worse.

The most vocal opponent of the low-flush
mandate is, of course, ex-Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry. He
describes the low-flush toilets as toilets that can leave you lurking
in the bathroom at a party "for what
seems (to you) like several presidential administrations, flushing,
checking, waiting, flushing, checking." If you have to flush two or
three times, a 6-litre toilet does not save water, and for years Barry
was a vocal defender of "the older 3.5 gallon models – the
toilets that made this nation great; the toilets that our Founding
Fathers fought and died for." (For those who want the primary source
material, much is collected in collections such as Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down).

Mr. Barry has written a lot about toilets, and most of it has been
re-read to me by my two teenage offspring, interrupted by long bouts of
giggling until cornflakes come out of their nose. For those of you who
don’t know him, here is a little of Mr. Barry, writing in 2004:

 

I am often criticized for writing immature ”bathroom” humor, and
not enough about important topics. So today I’m going to write about a
major international event that is going to take place Nov. 17-19 in
Beijing, China: The World Toilet Summit.

 

I am not making up the
World Toilet Summit. It was brought to my attention by alert reader
Marc Howell, who alerted me to the World Toilet Organization, a group
dedicated to improving the world’s public toilets, with a website at
worldtoilet.org. (”Org” is a sound made by many of the world’s public
toilets.)

 

This site states that the World Toilet Summit is a
gathering of ”the KEY DECISION MAKERS, KEY OFFICIALS and the MOVERS
AND SHAKERS” of the international toilet industry. The Beijing host
committee — which includes (I am still not making any of this up) an
official named ”Stone Wang” — states that the summit will feature
workshops on ”hot topics” in the toilet industry. For example, Mr.
Seok-Nam Gang of the Korea Clean Toilet Association will present
“Toilets As Tourism Attraction.”

 

Other hot topics include
”Toilets as Marketing Tools” and ”Generating Revenue Through
Advertisements in Good Toilets.” There will also be a presentation of
the ”Loo of the Year Awards,” a tour of ”toilets and related
facilities in Beijing,” and a “dinner show.”

 

I think the
World Toilet Summit is a great idea, because most of the world’s public
toilets, in a word, stink. I’m not saying the United States is perfect
in this department. We’ve made some serious mistakes, the worst being
the introduction of ”low-flow” toilets, which clog when asked to
handle anything larger than, say, a molecule.

 

Also I am not a
fan of those high-tech public toilets with the automatic sensors that
either (a) become overexcited and flush themselves 37 times before you
even sit down, or (b) lapse into a coma, so that when you’re done you
find yourself waving your arms like a lunatic and loudly remarking
”Well, I’m done!” in an effort to revive your toilet so it will flush
and you can leave, while the people waiting the stall wonder what kind
of sick pervert thing you are doing in there.

(I should add that the second World Toilet Forum is taking place in less than a month   in Bangkok. Its theme, which I also am not making up, is "Happy Toilet, Healthy Life".)

But back to the main story.

As state-opponents might expect, a set of black
markets emerged as private industries tried to improve customer satisfaction.
Plumbers would fix the toilets so that they delivered more than the
6-litre amount. Manufacturers claimed 6-litre compliance when their
toilets actually used more. And more blatant than anything, Dave Barry
reported frequently on prohibition-inspired smuggling of 13-litre
Canadian toilets across the border by the Canadian toilet cartel.
Private industry was finding a way around the government mandate.

But then something changed. The City of Toronto, forswearing the full-fledged coercive tactics used by the brutal US regime, decided
instead to offer rebates to people who would install low-flush toilets.

The
problem of testing raised its ugly head again, and the City of Toronto
got lucky. They contracted Veritec Consulting of Mississauga, where
works modern day hero Bill Gauley (47). When Gauley started testing
toilets he did not use sponges ("I don’t know how many people want to
flush sponges" he said), but used mashed potatoes and mashed-up bananas
instead. The result was devastating. He proved that existing toilets
just were not performing as advertised. He extended his work and joined
up with "politics guy" John Koeller of California. They were funded by
a number of Canadian and American municipalities to produce the
definitive work, and in 2003 they pulled the handle on the MaP Report
(Maximum Performance Testing of Popular Toilet Models).

The industry responded with threats to sue, but once they saw the
evidence they were convinced. And since then, the Star reports, testing
has been paid for by the manufacturers themselves and performance has
improved by leaps and bounds. Not only that, but manufacturers now
proudly stamp "MaP tested and approved" on their products. Now it is
common for toilets to be able to flush not only 250 grams of waste
("the maximum male average" used as a benchmark, which half the toilets
in the 2003 survey failed to flush) but 500 grams, even 1000 grams. And
as Bill Gauley says "if you’ve ever seen 1,000 grams in a toilet…"

Market sceptics will note that, as Joseph Stiglitz emphasizes in his survey of his own work "Whither Socialism",
the provision of information is a costly exercise that is itself open
to free riding. Information is a public good, and now Veritec’s MaP
testing results are available for everyone to read on the Internet. No
individual would find it worth making the effort to do the testing; it
took a large city (and a lot of luck) to get us round that particular
U-bend.

So who is responsible for the happy ending? Is it government in the
form of the City of Toronto? Is it "the industry" who seem to have
bought in to the project?

The story shows that the state/market dichotomy is false, and that the phrasing of the question is at fault. Posing the
issue as "state versus market" loses touch with reality in the face of
this intricate cross-pollination between municipalities, the US Environmental
Protection Agency (who is likely to develop a labelling system based on
the Veritec tests), Veritec itself (which is a private consultancy) and
quasi-state bodies such as the Canadian Water and Wastewater
Association.

The closer we look, the more dependent on the specifics it
becomes. The story even has an international angle, as  today’s MaP
tests have moved beyond mashed potato to use cylinders of miso, the
brownish soy-based paste from Japan, encased in LifeStyles brand
condoms so that they can be reused. And much as I’m sceptical of the
benefits of industry-led globalization, I have to admit that the idea
came from private company Toto, makers of the formidable Toto Drake
toilet. It is indeed a tangled web.

Perhaps the message is that, when we look closely enough, economics
falls apart and gives way to sociology and psychology. Perhaps it is that history is, after all, made by individuals, specifically individuals who are prepared to spend hours developing  "test specimens" and flushing them down toilets over and over and over again. Perhaps it is
that we need to seek a Buddhist-like middle way between the
Scylla of the market and the Charybdis of the state, but a middle way
that has a more human side to it than the metric driven public-private
partnerships. I don’t know.  But one thing I do know is that Bill Gauley deserves the thanks of all of us. Maybe someday I’ll even get a low-flush toilet myself.

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling writes a very generous review of No One Makes You… Good reviews mean more the smarter the reviewer, so  this is very good indeed.

But the trouble with smart reviewers is that they spot those parts of an argument that you skate around, unsure of how thick the ice is. And while Chris is kind enough to call them "quibbles" his points are good ones. I know it’s Not Done to comment on reviews, but maybe I’ll make an exception here.

First, he wonders how widespread the market failures I describe are. I don’t know that there is a way to answer this question. A market failure does not always reveal itself in any obvious way. When eminent economists find it difficult to agree even on such empirical questions as "is inequality increasing in the USA", I don’t know whether we’ll see an empirical answer to the prevalence of market failures. And the costs of overcoming asymmetric information problems are sometimes hard to spot because there are so many different mechanisms. But there are a couple of observations that I can make:

• The broader view you take of a market — that is, as you move away from the purely monetary & private aspects of a transaction to take account of other factors such as status, norms, social impact — the more externalities come into play, and so the more common failures will be. That is, economists themselves will see only a small part of the failure of markets – others, such as sociologists, will see more.
• There are some industries that are almost exclusively devoted to correcting market failures, and so their costs could be seen as a measure of market failure. Advertising (large-scale at least, not classifieds) and law spring to mind. And it is important to note that just because information asymmetries can be overcome at a big cost doesn’t mean the problem is solved.

His second point is about Hayek, whom I’ve never read much of. The bits I have always seemed to be talking about a reality I didn’t recognize. So I can’t really address the point, and will go and read. Mea culpa.

But the third point Chris makes, which is that I don’t say much about government failure, I do have an excuse for. Basically, it seemed to me that no one needs much convincing these days that governments can, left to themselves, screw things up pretty badly. You only have to read EMT Tom Reynolds writing about government targets today to know that (although, come to think of it, the idiocies he describes are rife in private industry too). Cynicism about politicians and governments is so widespread that the point about bureaucracies hardly needs to be made. What is important is to tackle this idea that markets are a fine alternative.

Well, these scribbles hardly do justice to the points, but that’s all I’ve got this evening. Thanks again to Stumbling & Mumbling for the review.

In the Land of the Taliban – New York Times – Elizabeth Rubin

I’ve been working on a couple of short essays to put up here, but they are not quite ready yet. Part of the reason is that I’ve been reading this astounding piece by Elizabeth Rubin, who reports from Afghanistan on the state of that country. I recommend that you click the "print" button on the page, print off all 20 pages of it, and read it closely, because it tells you more about what’s going on than anything else I’ve read in the last two years.

Here are a few tiny pieces, chosen almost at random:

She talkes with one Abdul Baqi about an attack on the family of legislator Amir Dado, until recently intelligence chief of Helmand Province:

Abdul Baqi was also delighted by the attack. He would tell me that
Dado used to burn rocket casings and pour the melted plastic onto the
stomachs of onetime Taliban fighters he and his men had captured. Abdul
Baqi also recalled that during the civil war that ended with the
Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, Dado and his men had a checkpoint where
they “grabbed young boys and robbed people.”
Mullah Omar and his followers formed the Taliban in 1994 to,
among other things, bring some justice to Afghanistan and to expel
predatory commanders like Dado. But in the early days of Karzai’s
government, these regional warlords re-established themselves, with
American financing, to fill the power vacuum that the coalition forces
were unwilling to fill themselves. The warlords freely labeled their
many enemies Al Qaeda or Taliban in order to push the Americans to
eradicate them. Some of these men were indeed Taliban. Most, like Abdul
Baqi, had accepted their loss of power, but they rejoined the Taliban
as a result of harassment. Amir Dado’s own abuses had eventually led to
his removal from the Helmand government at

United Nations

insistence. As one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity out of
personal safety concerns, put it: “Amir Dado kept his own prison,
authorized the use of serious torture, had very little respect for
human life and made security worse.” Yet when I later met Amir Dado in
Kabul, he pulled out a letter that an officer in the U.S. Special
Forces had written requesting that the Afghan Ministry of Defense
install him as Helmand’s police chief and claiming that in his absence
“the quality of security in the Helmand Province has dramatically
declined.”

On a Taliban video:

They invoke a nostalgia for the jihad against the Russians and inspire
their viewers to rise up again. One begins with clattering Chinooks
disgorging American soldiers into the desert. Then we see the new
Afghan government onstage, focusing in on the

Northern Alliance

warlords —

Abdul Rashid Dostum

,
Burhanuddin Rabbani, Karim Khalili, Muhammad Fahim, Ismail Khan, Abdul
Sayyaf. It cuts to American soldiers doing push-ups and pinpointing
targets on maps; next it shows bombs the size of bathtubs dropping from
planes and missiles emblazoned with “Royal Navy” rocketing through the
sky; then it moves to hospital beds and wounded children. Message:
America and

Britain

brought back the warlords and bombed your children. In the next clip,
there are metal cages under floodlights and men in orange jumpsuits,
bowed and crouching. It cuts back to the wild eyes of

John Walker Lindh

and shows trucks hauling containers crammed with young Afghan and
Pakistani prisoners — Taliban, hundreds of whom would suffocate to
death in those containers, supposedly at the command of the warlord and
current army chief of staff, General Dostum. Then back to American
guards wheeling hunger-striking Guantánamo prisoners on gurneys.
Interspliced are older images, a bit fuzzy, of young Afghan men, hands
tied behind their backs, heads bowed, hauled off by Communist guards.
The message: Foreigners have invaded our lands again; Americans,
Russians — no difference.

Interviewing a school headmistress and landowner, also a Ministry of Women’s Affairs deputy:

She weighed the Taliban regime against this new one in terms of
pragmatic choices, not terror or ideology. She said that she had just
wrapped up the case of a girl who had been kidnapped and raped by
Kandahari police officers, something that would not have happened under
the Taliban. “Their security was outstanding,” she said.

Under the Taliban, she said, a poppy ban was enforced. “Now the
governors tell the people, ‘Just cultivate a little bit,”’ she said.
“So people take this opportunity and grow a lot.” The farmers lease
land to grow poppies. The British and the police eradicate it. The
farmer can’t pay back the landowner. “So instead of paying, he gives
the landowner his daughter.”

The picture is depressing, it is complicated, and it has the aura of reality. We desperately need to hear more stories like this. The current debate is "us against the bad guys – fight or leave?" is so hopelessly out of contact that it is not worth having.

I submitted this piece as an op-ed to the Kitchener Waterloo Record. I’ll post if they accept it.

Political debate in Canada is stale, swinging between those who
look to government for solutions and those who look to the free market. This
pendulum has swung back and forth on all the major issues: health care,
education, industrial policy, and on and on.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he
founded is a timely reminder that many of the most promising ideas for a better
world are about neither governments nor business. The source of these ideas is
often the periphery of societies rather than the centre, and they work from the
bottom up rather than the top down. The prize is also a reminder that new ideas
are often difficult to classify: some claim that the ideas behind Grameen are
socialist, others that they are capitalist, and others that this is an
innovative form of aid to the poor. But most importantly, pretty much everyone
agrees that this is an idea that works.

The Grameen Bank was created at a cost of $27 in rural Bangladesh to address a
very mundane problem facing poor villagers: lack of credit. Before you can grow
crops you need money to buy seeds; before you can sell milk you need money to
buy a cow; before you can sell bamboo chairs you need money to buy  bamboo.
The usual route to get this money is to go to a bank for a loan, but big banks
can’t make much money from tiny loans to poor people, and banks also face a set
of problems caused by lack of detailed information. The usual way for a borrower
to guarantee a loan is to use some of their possessions as collateral to
guarantee the loan, but poor people have no collateral — that’s what being poor
is all about — so there would be no way for a bank to be confident that its
loans would be repaid.

For a big bank to individually identify the good risks and the bad risks among
its customers would be a costly enterprise, especially compared to the small
amounts of the loans that poor people need. So even if a bank were to set up in
rural Bangladesh, they would have to charge high interest rates to cover the bad
risks, and these high interest rates make loans unaffordable for the very people
who need them. End result, no banks.

Without banks, many villagers went to local moneylenders for loans. These
moneylenders live locally and had a virtual monopoly on loans, so interest rates
were often extortionate and the borrowers were kept in a state of permanent
indebtedness. Women faced an additional barrier because they typically had
little control over the way household money was spent. So
in addition to not having any money, they couldn’t borrow
it and the rural poor were trapped in poverty.

In the 1970’s Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank entered the picture with a
conviction that they could help people to break out of the credit trap by
providing small loans, typically a few tens of dollars, to help people get on
their feet. These small loans came to be called micro-credit. Despite the word
"bank" in its name, profit is not the primary goal of the Grameen Bank, but it
did seek to be self-sustaining and so it needed some new ideas to make its
convictions work where the big banks would not go.

The biggest single innovation, and one that has caught the attention of many
around the world, was that the Bank does not lend to individuals, but instead to
small groups of borrowers. For each group the members get their loan in turn,
rather than all at once, with the member most in need — as identified by the
group itself — getting the loan first. If the loan is not repaid, none of the
other members in the group get their loan.

This simple but ingenious group-lending model is a way of overcoming the
information problems that stymied the banks. The group members have an incentive
to identify reliable partners, so that they will not lose their own chance for a
loan because of a group member defaulting. The group model also helps to prevent
members from undertaking projects that are too risky, because other group
members would not go along with harebrained schemes that are likely to fail. The
fact that each member’s loan depends on the repayment of the others lends itself
to mutual support so that the early loans get repaid. Mutual support is
supplemented by peer pressure among the members of the group to ensure that each
member is committed to repaying. The group lending model is a framework that
encourages people to achieve things together that, separately, they could not.

The model works. The Grameen Bank has made loans to over 6 million poor
Bangladeshis. The repayment rate on loans is around 98%, which is a remarkable
number for people living so close to the edge. What’s more, almost all
the borrowers are women, and the loans give them a chance
to break free not only of poverty, but also of many of the social constraints
that have prevented them from having control over their own lives. The Bank is
now largely owned by its members, and ten of its 13-member
board of directors are women.

The Grameen model has been widely imitated, with a recent report saying that
over 25,000 microfinance organizations now exist, each serving on average over
25,000 low-income customers. Like any other promising new idea, it has been
built on by the industrious, exploited by the unscrupulous, and improved by the
imaginative. Some endeavours succeed and some fail. The group lending model of
micro-credit is not a panacea, but it is an innovation that has made a real
difference to millions of people.

Group lending does not fit easily into the right-wing/left-wing spectrum. Former
World Bank president James Wolfehnson claims that the award testifies to "the
power of entrepreneurialism", but the Bank is not profit-motivated — in fact it
is aimed at fixing things that the pursuit of profit alone has not been able to
fix. The Grameen Bank is not an example of "entrepreneurship" unless you extend
the idea to mean "anyone with an idea who works at it", which is a bit far
fetched. At the same time, this is a private initiative that is largely
independent of the state and which does foster small businesses, so it does not
fall under the usual umbrella of left-wing initiatives.

Being left-wing myself, I’d like to label the Grameen Bank left-wing in the
sense used by philosopher Peter Singer: it is explicitly on the side of the
weak, not the powerful, but in the end it doesn’t matter. What does matter is
that it works.

The success of the Grameen Bank reminds us that
many of our most influential ideas start with small groups
a long way from the centres of power and influence, finding ways for people to
work together to solve immediate, concrete problems. The
most influential ideas about how to make cities more livable started with Jane
Jacobs looking out of her kitchen window in Greenwich Village, and it was Jacobs
who said that "new ideas need old buildings" — that they come from the
unfashionable parts of town where rents are cheap.

In the middle of all the debate over health services and
social services the feminist movement created sexual
assault centres and other crisis services for women, addressing a whole set of
needs that were not being met within the established framework.
Innovations in open source software production such as
Linux, and in open content production such as Wikipedia have started
independently of governments or markets. The
anti-sweatshop movement has led to the creation of independent
workplace-monitoring organizations that are a necessary step in pushing
companies to implement good working conditions.  The list is long and
diverse, and each of these initiatives has gone through times when it is not
taken seriously, has been torn apart (or nearly so) by internal dissent, and has
faced tough and sometimes unresolved decisions about how to work with existing
institutions.

But each idea has made a difference, and each provides far more inspiration than
the stale "government versus markets" debates we hear so much.