Category: Uncategorized

Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail writes about California’s new law in California puts lens rangers on notice. Here’s what the new law says

The statute forbids two types of invasion of private space: one literal, one virtual. It makes it an offence to take pictures or sound recordings of anyone "engaging in a personal or familial activity and the physical invasion occurs in a manner that is offensive to a reasonable person," and it also forbids doing so to a person "engaging in a personal or familial activity under circumstances in which the plaintiff had a reasonable expectation of privacy, through the use of a visual or auditory enhancing device, regardless of whether there is a physical trespass."

In other words, not only is standing in the subject’s way or pushing your camera into her car window unacceptable, but so is using a zoom lens 50 metres away from her bedroom.

Smith notes that "U.S. public reaction to the law is overwhelmingly positive" and is sympathetic himself. But he has reservations…

And yet, and yet . . . the people who are thrilled to see their icons protected from the scum are exactly the same people who gobble up the tabloids. They must be; the numbers don’t lie. The only way a magazine can offer $400,000 (U.S.) for the first photo of Madonna’s baby is to have millions of eager readers.

Those readers — that type of reader — seem to form the bulk of the American population right now. It’s the same population that elects Hollywood celebrities to positions in government, the same population that has grown to know or think it knows Lindsay Lohan through her pictures in magazines, and feels sympathy for her when she is assaulted or threatened or humiliated.

It’s a bit like being an animal-lover and eating chicken: We’re not opposed to consuming the final product, we just don’t want to know how it’s produced.

Smith is right, but it reads like he thinks there is a contradiction here and there is none (see previous post for another example). There are two separate choices – one is whether to read the Enquirer (given that it is available) and the other is whether to approve of its methods. Given most people can only actually act on one of the choices — whether to read the Enquirer — it is hardly surprising that the market reflects that preference but not the other.  That’s why the whole idea that the market responds to our preferences is a half-truth at best — it can only respond to a few of those preferences: those that can be expressed by an exchange of money.

Not that I read the tabloids of course. I’ve just heard about them, that’s all.

So the other day LS was watching FootBinding: Search for the Three Inch Golden Lotus.  Part of the show was about whether footbinding was really oppressive, given that the choice to bind was usually made by mother, who had herself been bound.  In particular, "Columbia University Professor Dorothy Ko mounts her show Every Step a Lotus and contends that footbinding was not the tragedy modern thinkers make it out to be"

In Dorothy Ko’s book of the show "she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in
a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity,
motherhood, and handwork."

There is no contradiction between reasonable courses of action and tragedy. It is quite possible for people to make choices and still be oppressed: what matters is the system of incentives. In this case, the origin of the exploitation is in the value given to bound feet (by a patriarchal culture), not in any coercion to bind: once the right incentives are set, coercion is no longer needed. Given that a woman with bound feet would have a better chance at a stable or prosperous future than one without, it made sense for women to choose to bind their daughters’ feet. The cost to the decision was high (and higher, of course, for those of lower status who had no others to do work for them, and for whom the binding process started later, if at all), but not as high as the cost of failing to secure a good marriage.

This idea — that there can be no exploitation as long as people are given choices — is present today in a lot of free-market arguments. Why not give children the opportunity to work in sweatshops? It gives them a chance to be better off than they would otherwise be. Or, as Gary Becker argued recently, why not let people sell their internal organs for transplants?

Footbinding is a compellingn example of how oppression is perfectly compatible with individual choice (albeit made by mothers, but with their daughters’ best interests at heart).

I have spent some time this afternoon at The Commons Blog, subtitled "Markets Protecting the Environment". It is a group blog run by proponents of Free-Market Environmentalism (FME). This is not something that I would expect to agree with, but not a strand of thought I have looked at much, so I read over their "About Free-Market Environmentalism" page and a book review of David Roodman (of the Worldwatch Institute)’s "The Natural Wealth of Nations".

(the trackback is to the latest post on their blog, because I can’t trackback to the home page).

It is not news that, in the search for ways to control environmental damage, one of the routes that is being tried is that of markets. Emissions trading schemes for greenhouse gases and sulphur dioxide are prominent examples. Fine, I say — whatever works in cutting down pollution. I have no particular axe to grind for or against the use of markets in this way. I imagine they will work well in some cases (easily tracked gases that become widely distributed), and not in others (difficult to track pollutants, or pollutants that are local (such as mercury) for which a market may lead to very polluted "hot spots".

But this is not what FME is about. They argue that using markets "simply as tools for the fficient delivery of environmental goals… [while] the goals themselves remain collectively determined" is simple market socialism.  Instead, they want to use markets as a way of "determining what is to be done" as well as how it should be accomplished.

The basic premise is that private ownership provides the incentive needed for conservation: "The record of private owners in conserving resources is superior to that of government agencies". And there are certainly cases of well-preserved or conserved resources that you can find. The beautiful picture on the commons blog front page of the Natural Bridge of Virginia is an example. But a bridge is one thing, and not perhaps typical. To extrapolate these concrete, easily identified objects to "property rights" in such things as dioxins and blue whales is a big step, and not one they convince me can be made.

Let me give a few reasons why they fail to convince me.

One issue is that they have a cavalier attitude to the nature of environmental problems.

• Resources? "There is little reason to fear running out of oil or mineral resources, for prices will rise well before stocks expire". 
• Sulphur dioxide and acid rain? "But was a sulfur oxide emission reduction plan needed at all? The most
  extensive US study of acid rain to date suggests that acid rain was not
  a substantial threat to forests and streams, despite environmentalist
  claims to the contrary."
• Climate change? A whole series of articles on the blog suggests that the position of FME is that this too is not much of a problem.

There is a collective action problem to be overcome when it comes to collecting the information on which environmental action is predicated. Groups that help to overcome this problem seem to me to be either government sponsored or to be enthusiasts (bird watchers, for example, who track bird numbers over time) — neither of which is a market-based approach.  So the fact that they are dubious about a whole raft of environmental assessments makes me think that their "leave it to the market" approach to establishing environmental goals — which ignores this collective action problem — is not one they are particularly concerned with, because when it comes to it they don’t think the problems are that big.

A second reason is an impression that the FME outlook is, in the end, more about
getting rid of government activity than about the environment per se.  Their worldview is one in which the only two players are government bureaucracies and markets. And they rule out government point blank: "It was the fatal conceit of socialism, in Hayek’s famous phrase, that wise government bureaucrats could guide society to a better future. Substituting red aspirations with green ones does not change the undertaking’s essential nature – or its likelihood of success." This leads to odd judgement calls. On the one hand, designing a (Pigouvian) tax code "that fully and accurately internalizes negative environmental externalities (forget the positive) is a fool’s errand. It requires "impossibly detailed knowledge". On the other hand, when it comes to establishing property rights "the technical requirements of property rights definition and enforcement are also substantial" – and yet they are optimistic that the market can deal with them, even though they require the same "impossibly detailed knowledge" that the tax approach does.

A third reason that they don’t convince me is that their tone is too often smug. They are preaching to the converted. The pervasive use of "government bureaucrats" serves only to emphasize their lack of efficiency. The suggestion that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc demonstrates the failure of any role for the state once and for all ("Central planning has clearly failed.")  In the book review (see top of this post) they start off by saying "We are all free-market environmentalists now" before going on to claim that Worldwatch is merely "faux-market". Or categorizing Worldwatch as being "like so many others that mouth adherence to market strategies". Such digs are everywhere, and they don’t help.

A fourth reason, they slide by some of the problems of private ownership, while
overestimating the problems of public ownership. It is easy to say that
"behind every tree should stand an owner who can act as its protector"
but you can’t really say the same about a salmon that swims thousands
of miles. And while they like to quote Garrett Hardin about the failure
of collective ownership they seem to neglect the well-know fact that
many instances of collective ownership have succeeded well (Elinor
Ostrom and others having catalogued lots of these).  And they don’t pay
attention to the argument by CW Clarke that it may make perfect
economic sense for a single fishing body to drive whale populations to
extinction even in the absence of a commons.

Finally, they use the passive voice trick a lot to mask some real difficulties with their program. That is, they slip into the passive voice and so obscure just who is meant to be the active role in an activity. I suspect this is not deliberate, but it is revealing anyway. For example: "In a true market system the involuntary imposition of waste streams by one party onto others would be forbidden". By whom? I suspect they know it must be the state, but can’t get themselves to say so. The  drive (of private industry) to reduce costs results in pollution only "when property rights are insufficiently protected". But who is to do the protection? And when it comes to automobile air pollution "An owner would be assessed a fee proportional to the amout of pollution his auto generated". Who is to assess the fee? and who is to determine the amount of pollution generated?

These slips do suggest that in some ways FME has more overlap with other environmentalists than they would like to admit. Activities such as purchasing of wildlife reserves by the Audubon Society in the USA or compensating farmers to ease the reintroduction of wolves into Montana are apparently part of the free market, but I suspect there are few environmentalists who would argue against them. And to lump the activities of volunteer groups into the "private" realm is itself problematice — such collective groups are typically neither of the state nor of the market, and the FME attempt to claim them is unfounded. If that’s what FME is really arguing for, OK, but it’s not that big an intellectual deal.

A fine initiative reported in today’s 
Globe and Mail

For thousands of years, Indian villagers have used an extract from seeds of the neem tree as an insecticide. So when a U.S. company patented a process for producing the substance in 1994, India reacted with outrage.

After spending millions of dollars in legal fees to successfully overturn the patent, India’s government is now creating a 30-million-page database of traditional knowledge to fend off entrepreneurs trying to patent the country’s ancient lore.

India is not alone in worrying about "bio-prospectors" profiting from the genetic resources of its plant life with no benefit to its people.

It joined with China, Brazil and nine other countries a few years ago to begin pushing for international protections. 

The database project already has caught the interest of others. A South African team recently visited and a Mongolian mission is coming in January, said V.K. Gupta, chairman of India’s National Institute for Science Communication and Information Resources.

The database, called the Traditional Knowledge Data Library (TKDL), will make information available to patent offices around the world to ensure that traditional remedies are not presented as new discoveries.

"If societies have been using it for centuries why should it be patented?" said Shiv Basant, a senior official at the Health Ministry’s Department of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy, India’s traditional health and medical disciplines.

The government has also successfully challenged patents on the use of the spice turmeric to heal wounds and rashes and a patent on a rice strain derived from India’s famed Basmati rice.

But that is a tiny fraction of the problem.

A 2003 study by Mr. Gupta’s institute estimated that about 7,000 patents worldwide are based on indigenous Indian knowledge, far too many for India to challenge in expensive legal fights.

Officials hope the database will head off future battles.

"If we have all the data in TKDL, we will not have to spend all those millions of dollars," said Ajay Dua of the Commerce Ministry’s Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion.

Currently it is difficult for overseas patent office researchers to prove purported innovations are really based on old lore because, while the information is widely published in India, it is often in ancient languages such as Sanskrit or modern regional languages like Tamil.

"We decided we have to break the language and access barrier," Mr. Gupta said.

He convened a group of 150 experts in traditional medicine, scientists, doctors, patent lawyers and computer programmers to put together the database of traditional knowledge.

Instead of laboriously translating the manuscripts, the scholars structured the texts into classifications widely used by patent examiners.

The texts are then entered in the database, where specially developed software translates them into Hindi, English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish.

"We created knowledge conversion software that converts local names of diseases and plants into modern names," Mr. Gupta said.

More than 1,500 yoga poses have been catalogued, too.

That’s because yoga poses also have been patented, often by Indians who are living abroad, Mr. Basant said.

A patent researcher can search the database using key words or phrases.

So if the plant aloe vera is entered, the traditional term Kumari will come up with a list of its known medicinal uses.

More than 10 million pages already have been loaded into the system and 20 million more will be available by the end of 2006, Mr. Gupta said.

Several international patent offices have applied for access to the database and it will be made available to them as soon as the group finishes establishing technological and legal safeguards to prevent the knowledge from being wrongly exploited, he said.

Vandana Shiva has written a lot about Biopiracy, and this story is a next chapter to some things in her book of the same name. I have not followed the Indian and Pakistani governments’ activities in challenging patents on long-known non-innovations, such as Neem fungicides, Basmati rice and Nap Hal wheat. The use of the patent system as a way of enclosing the intellectual commons (as Shiva describes it) illustrates just how distinct the notions of competitive markets and capitalist markets (which are commonly conflated) really are.

Ive startit reading Riddley Walker again. Evry time I read it theres summit new. New chance evry time.

Here’s Riddley on technological progress (p. 96):

Some of them ther shels ben broak open you cud see girt shynin weals like jynt mil stoans only smoov Id all ways usit the word shyning same as any 1 else myt. The sun is shyning or the moon is shyning. Youwl see a shyning on the water or a womans hair. When you talk of the Little Shyning Man its jus the middl word of what hes callt there aint no real meaning to it. Suddn when I see the shyning of the broakin machines I begun to get some idear of the shyning of the Littl Man. Tears begun streaming down my face and my froat akit…. How cud any 1 not want to get that shyning Power back from time back way back? How cud any 1 not want to be like them what had boats in the air and picters on the wind? How cud any 1 not want to see them shyning weals terning?

Riddley on individual choices:

Only my self! Looking at them words going down on this paper right this minim I know there aint no such thing there aint no only my self you all ways have every 1 and every thing on our back. Them as stood and them as run time back way back long long time they had me on ther back if they knowit or if they dint.

Riddley on Wal-Mart (p 147):

What ever happens itwl be that you dint want to happen. What ever dont happen that’wl be the thing you wantit. Take your choosing how you like youwl get what you dont want.

Aksherly thats not Riddley that Granser talking but its still the same he knows what he means rite enuf.

Trubba not.

Here is a depressing observation from Juan Cole at Informed Comment:

The LA Times probably reflects the thinking of a lot of Americans
in hoping that these elections are a milestone on the way to
withdrawing US troops from Iraq. I cannot imagine why anyone thinks
that. The Iraqi "government" is a failed state. Virtually no order it
gives has any likelihood of being implemented. It has no army to speak
of and cannot control the country. Its parliamentarians are attacked
and sometimes killed with impunity. Its oil pipelines are routinely
bombed, depriving it of desperately needed income. It faces a powerful
guerrilla movement that is wholly uninterested in the results of
elections and just wants to overthrow the new order. Elections are
unlikely to change any of this.

The only way in which these
elections may lead to a US withdrawal is that they will ensconce
parliamentarians who want the US out on a short timetable. Virtually
all the Sunnis who come in will push for that result (which is why the
US Right is silly to be all agog about Fallujans voting), and so with
the members of the Sadr Movement, now a key component of the Shiite
religious United Iraqi Alliance. That is, these elections lead to a US
withdrawal on terms unfavorable to the Bush administration. Nor is
there much hope that a parliament that kicked the US out could turn
around and restore order in the country.

Letter to the Globe and Mail:

Dear Editor,

Regarding your editorial "…and anti-WTO folly".

You tell poor countries to follow Hong Kong and China in "abandoning isolation and central planning and embracing trade and outside investment". But many Latin American countries did just as you ask in the 1990’s and did not see the benefits you promise. For every Hong Kong there is a Honduras — or more than one in fact — a country that has embraced outside investment for decades and is still miserably poor.

And while China’s growth started in the 1970’s, it only joined the WTO in 2001, its economy was and is still highly protected, and its financial markets were largely off-limits to outsiders until the turn of the century. Not exactly a case of prosperity by globalization.

You tell poor countries to "join the international trading system", but most countries that have escaped poverty used practices forbidden under the rules of the WTO. The globalization poster-children of Japan and Korea, and others including the USA, all engaged in capital controls, selective import restrictions, and knock-off industries that would now be called violations of intellectual property rights.

If you want to convince me of globalization’s "wealth-creating power" you’ll have to do better than that.