The copyright wars

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.  Mark Twain 

Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility–reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge–at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar’s own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve. But the bourgeois system of ownership demands that knowledge and culture be rationed by the ability to pay.—Eben Moglen dotCommunist Manifesto

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors’ works have survived even in part. Richard Stallman

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest.  Robert Heinlein

You may believe that copyright rows are a relatively modern phenomenon but you would be mistaken – the world’s first copyright law, known as the Statute of Anne was introduced in England in 1709. The language used by the publishers has a very familiar ring to it. The figure of the struggling author came to the fore and has been a constant ever since. These writers were having their books pirated “…to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families.” It proved to be a most effective lobbying strategy. In a classic example of public choice economics, a few motivated lobbyists were able to get legislation through which benefited them a lot while spreading the costs out over the rest of the population. And remember this “vital” law was passed before the Great Reform Acts, the abolition of slavery and London had a sewerage system.

Now once again the issue of copyright is in the limelight. The modern creative industries are at war with illegal downloaders. The economic argument in favour of copyright is that a monopoly is a necessary evil to give an incentive to people to create something of value. The logic is that if people weren’t paid, they wouldn’t engage in these activities. I think this argument has some truth in it but there was a lot of human creativity before copyright laws came along.

One argument we hear is that file sharing is theft – like stealing a car. That is not strictly accurate. The difference between a song or a film and a biscuit is that if I eat a biscuit, then you can’t have it because I’ve eaten it and it’s gone. A song or a film are what economists call nonrival goods, those which may be consumed by one consumer without preventing simultaneous consumption by others. This is a characteristic of intellectual property – it can be enjoyed by many people at the same time,

Since 1709 there has been a battle about copyright. The spark has usually been some technological development. The content providers always like to talk in apocalyptic terms about piracy being the end of culture as we know it. The latest round in this battle has been with the internet, which has so far been able to defeat the copyright industries. But it’s not been for want of trying; they’ve sued the operators of file sharing networks as well as some individual downloaders in the United States. They have won many of those cases, but filesharing has continued unabated. Now France has its three strikes law. Let’s put this in some kind of perspective – I think movies and DVD sales are pretty healthy and I don’t think we’ll be seeing Robbie Williams sweeping the streets any time soon.

Record companies, for example, have made a lot of mistakes. They have failed to adapt to changing times .The idea of extending copyright from fifty to seventy years is one example. There can surely be no justification for such a measure. There will surely be business opportunities but they need a different model. Singers and groups will be able to make money from concerts and merchandising. I also think €1 for a song is a bit steep. Amazon charging $9.99 for a book to read on its Kindle falls into the same category. I realise that value is a very subjective question but these prices don’t seem the money saved in distribution costs.

I can sympathise with record companies and other content providers. They have seen their whole world turned upside down. The digital transition is proving a golden age for free culture. Information does truly want to be free. I don’t know how long this situation is going to last. I think people like Rupert Murdoch are going to have a hard time trying to get anyone to pay. In the current round of copyright wars, there’s probably greed on both sides – on the part of corporate owners wanting ever more expansive rights, and on the other hand, amongst those who are the most enthusiastic peer-to-peer file sharers believing everything can be free. There’s no doubt that the majority of musicians, film makers and other artists don’t live the life of rock stars. What we need to look at whether copyright law is the best way to promote activity.

More toilet paper than you could dream of

Last week I did a piece on the fall of the Berlin Wall. This week I thought I would reproduce a talk given by Martin Krygier analysing the changes in Poland. I know it’s a bit facile but I like it anyway:

A couple of months ago, that is now, segue to 2009, I returned from Warsaw where I teach a few weeks each year which I’ve been doing for some years. I’ve become used to it. Though it’s special to me, it’s basically just another European capital. A bit shabbier than many, but also with some lovely renovations and innovations. It all seemed pretty normal to me after the time…now. But because I was there during the 20th anniversary of June 4th and those elections, I tried to work out just what had been achieved and how much I had to forget, to remember what had been achieved. Among other things, I reread, as one does, my old articles, I discovered how much I’d forgotten. In particular what I had to make some effort to recall was just how much had had to change to seem so ordinary. No queues, food and goods of all sorts, colours, shapes, sizes. Restaurants in every language and every quality rather than one language an no quality. More than two sorts of car—in fact every sort. Radio taxis…this is a term of art in Polish. Taxis you could ring for. Because the only way to get a taxi in Poland used to be to find the stop, wherever the stop was. You couldn’t hail a cab, you had to seek out the stops where the taxis stood, unmoving, until you found and came to them. they would certainly not come to you.

There was more toilet paper than you could dream of. There were bookstores in which you could actually touch and choose the books rather than point at a distance and plead with surly and rather heavy intermediaries. So many books now, and magazines from all over the world. Huge shopping malls, advertisements… I remember when I was taking the train out of Poland in ‘85, I’d fallen asleep and I woke up and I just saw a hoarding, an ordinary western hoarding advertising—I don’t know what—could be toothpaste, whatever. It was the colour of it just hit me, and then I realised I was in the west.

All this: advertisements, some gaudy, some classy, quite a lot gaudy, quite a lot not classy—all this jostling for your attention, bustling energy, taught, not slack. If you don’t like it, leave. If you miss it, return. Pretty simple, really, but it hadn’t been simple once.

…So ordinary had all this seemed to me, that had it not been this year, where I had to sort of try to remember how things had been, I wouldn’t have remembered, and I wouldn’t have been shocked. And I failed to register the historical novelty of it all until I went to visit Michnik. And I asked him, particularly given the hate-filled nature of Polish politics, which I’ll conclude, and a lot of hate of Michnik in the process, I asked him how he summed up Poland’s past 20 years. He said, ‘It’s a miracle. Independent for 20 years, no president executed, no war looming; free, democratic, unprecedentedly prosperous—in NATO, in Europe; comings, goings, open to everyone, to everywhere. Who could have imagined any of this 20 years before or, in Poland’s case, 200 years before?

But he built some beautiful autobahns

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany there has been a massive overkill on this subject. I wasn’t going to add to all of this but then I saw an article by Seumas Milne in this week’s Guardian, which gave an interpretation of events which had me shaking my head. I do think that Germany is a fascinating case – it’s not often in political economy that you can observe an experiment in laboratory conditions but the division of Germany after WWII is the closest we are going to get to this. Germany in 1945 was a country destroyed by six years of war. Two political and economic models were tried and the results surely leave no room for doubt.

Well for Mr. Milne they do. He chastises his opponents their refusal to acknowledge that the communist system had benefits as well as obvious costs:

The German Democratic Republic was home to the Stasi, shortages and the wall, but it was also a country of full employment, social equality, cheap housing, transport and culture, one of the best childcare systems in the world, and greater freedom in the workplace than most employees enjoy in today’s Germany.

 What an idiotic argument! No government or system does everything bad. Of course, this defence of totalitarianism is asymmetric. I don’t here anyone saying about Hitler: “Well he had the gas chambers but boy did he build some beautiful autobahns.” This hypocrisy is typical. You only have to compare the insignificant number of documentaries and films about communist atrocities compared to those about Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust. In the article which I featured last week Murderous Idealism Paul Hollander points out a possible origin of these double standards:

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as by-products of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

 

Milne also makes reference to ostalgie, the German term referring to nostalgia for life in the former East Germany. The citizens had such a warm feeling about the place that the government built a wall to keep them in. Well I realise that it was really an anti-fascist defence barrier. Anywhere between 40,000 and 200,000 fled the DDR. Perhaps Mr Milne has access to a list of West Germans who risked their lives trying to get into this workers’ paradise. The genius of capitalism has actually found a way of exploiting this nostalgic feeling and there is a thriving trade in ersatz products from the communist years. There is so much hypocrisy about ideological symbols. We have Soviet Chic but we don’t have Pinochet T-shirts. The Hammer and Sickle is acceptable but wearing a swastika is roundly condemned – this is asymmetric outrage.

The Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago but this has not ushered in the end of history. Conflict is all around us – that is the nature of human affairs. There are no definitive answers to how society should be organised. Given human predilection for folly I wouldn’t even rule out a return of communism. Unfortunately I fear the results will be similar. Capitalism has its own problems and we will never be able to abolish crises. What will be the result of the downfall of communism? As Zhou Enlai said of the long-term consequences of the French Revolution – it’s too early to tell. I believe in the chaotic random nature of history. Events now can have unforeseen consequences. Having said that, I think you could rewind and replay the video of world history over and over again and you would still get similar disastrous results with communism. Now it seems that the great hope of communists is Hugo Chavez. Maybe the results will be different in the developing world but I won’t be holding my breath.

Just-so stories?

Surely one of the most pressing social questions of our time is why kids wear their baseball caps the wrong way around. Dr Kipling has the following explanation:

…First, you need to ask yourself what signals a male needs to transmit to a potential mate in order to advertise his suitability as a source of strong genetic material, more likely to survive than that of his competitor males. One answer is brute physical strength. Now, consider the baseball cap. Worn in the traditional style it offers protection against the sun and also the gaze of aggressive competitors. By turning the cap around, the male is signalling that he doesn’t need this protection: he is tough enough to face elements and the gaze of any who might threaten him. Second, inverting the cap is the gesture of non-conformity. Primates live in highly ordered social structures. Playing by the rules is considered essential. Turning the cap around shows that the male is above the rules that constrain his competitors and again signals that he has superior strength. I hope you will have guessed that this was a parody – it comes from Julian Baggini’s book The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten. Dr Kipling is an allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s Just-so stories and Baggini is taking aim at evolutionary psychology, which applies Darwin’s theories to gain an insight into human behaviour. For its critics EP is retrofitting an explanation with the benefit of hindsight. Chomsky put it like this:

“You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.“

I can see the point but I feel that EP is a powerful tool. Maybe I’m just seeking a justification for my political opinions – I have a pragmatic view of human nature. I remember when I was at university I didn’t really buy into a lot of the theories that I heard.  It just seems obvious to me that we have to be heavily influenced by our evolutionary background. This has proved unpopular with many academics who had their vision of human beings challenged; there have been heated debates about the claims of EP. Evolutionary psychology posits that the majority of human psychological mechanisms are adaptations to reproductive problems frequently encountered in Pleistocene environments. (The Pleistocene goes from two million to 11 thousand years ago, the vast majority of our existence.) It is not controversial to assert that animal behaviour is influenced by their genes but when it comes to humans it becomes very divisive. Let’s take mating as an example. In the Pleistocene environment men wanted to spread their genes as widely as possible, whereas for women it was important to be fussier when choosing a partner. This still has an influence on our behaviour. Obviously a lot of other factors interact but I feel it is impossible to ignore our biological heritage.

One especially contentious area is rape. The traditional academic view was that rape had nothing to do with sex – it was a question of violence and that our culture socialised men into it. I find the argument that rape has nothing to with sex rather unconvincing. It is clear that rape takes place in the animal kingdom, including chimpanzees. Evolutionary psychologist Randy Thornhill has argued that in humans it could be the vestige of a reproductive strategy, with the violence employed to get what you want. This is not a defence or a justification of rape. Medical scientists who study who study cancer do not favour cancer. The genes can never be an excuse-; if there is no consent, it is a crime. But it is always helpful to gain insights into what the causes are.

Evolutionary Psychology opens up that whole nature v nature debate. Obviously these questions are complex and it is incredibly difficult to tease out the different factors. Perhaps the best example to illustrate this came from the popular science writer Matt Ridley: In every culture in the world men are more violent than men; But American women are more homicidal than Japanese men. We need to know about to what predispositions nature has given us. What motivates us to act the way we do is always going to invite controversy.  Some of these explanations will turn out to be wrong but we should not eliminate avenues of enquiry because they offend sensibilities.

Rights: a pragmatic perspective

The Oxford Dictionary has a very pithy definition of a right: moral or legal entitlement to have or do something. Unfortunately in the real world actually defining what should be included as a right is more problematic. In the last 800 years we have seen The Magna Carta, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from revolutionary France, The United States Bill of Rights, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and more recently The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union The Universal Declaration of 1948 declares that the “…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…”

But humans are more complex than that and there are wildly differing interpretations of where rights come from and what they should include. There are some interesting ways of approaching the subject. In 1979 Czech jurist Karel Vasak came up with the division of human rights into three generations:

• First-generation: liberty and participation in political life – freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and voting rights.
• Second-generation: social, economic, and cultural in nature – a right to be employed, rights to housing and health care, as well as social security and unemployment benefits.
• Third-generation: the softest set of rights and have proved hard to enact – group and collective rights, self-determination, economic and social development, a healthy environment and even intergenerational equity and sustainability. Critics would argue that this is an attempt to dress up a political agenda as rights

I have forgotten the fourth generation – the right to see football on free-to-air terrestrial television.

The exponential growth of claimed rights over the last few years has led to a complicated situation of conflicting rights. In his book Shouting Fire, lawyer Alan Dershowitz has a list of rights and counter-rights:

Right to free speech – Right not to be offended
Right to life of foetus – Right to choose abortion
Rights of criminal defendants –Rights of victims
Right to keep one’s money – Right to equitable distribution of wealth
Right of gay couple to adopt right of child to be adopted by a heterosexual family
Right to know of sex offenders in neighbourhood – Right of privacy after serving sentence

This is just a sample of a list that goes on for three pages and makes fascinating reading. How can we possibly sort out all these contradictory claims?

Dershowitz takes a pragmatic view; rights come from wrongs. It is a practical viewpoint based on human experience. As we have seen what constitutes perfect justice is very controversial and will probably never be resolved definitively. Intelligent people can and do disagree about economic justice. There is however much more consensus as to what is perfect injustice. The inquisition, slavery, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust and the massacres in Rwanda show us what can happen when there is an absence of basic rights. I tend to favour a negative conception of rights. Negative liberty means that there are certain things that states and others cannot do to you. Just a few negative rules go a long way. Such things as freedom of speech, property rights, due process of law freedom of association are absolutely fundamental. Positive liberty, the right and frequently the obligation to do certain things, has often produced overblown bureaucracies and sometimes even tyranny.

Quotes about rights

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thomas Jefferson

 

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Ayn Rand

 

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight. Bob Marley

 

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law. Lyndon B. Johnson

 

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights. Thomas Sowell

 

If the evens of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it’s that the terrorists can attack us, but they can’t take away what makes us American – our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that. Jon Stewart.

 

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Alexander Solzehnitsyn

 

You don’t have to love them. You just have to respect their rights. Edward Koch

 

Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee. F. Lee Bailey

Monopoly is a terrible thing

Monopoly is a terrible thing, till you have it. Rupert Murdoch

 

I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly. Steven Wright

 

We [Microsoft] don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference. Steve Ballmer

 

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers. Frederic Bastiat

 

 

The Economist’s A to Z glossary of economic terms defines monopoly thus:

When the production of a good or service with no close substitutes is carried out by a single firm with the market power to decide the price of its output. Contrast with perfect competition, in which no single firm can affect the price of what it produces. Typically, a monopoly will produce less, at a higher price, than would be the case for the entire market under perfect competition. It decides its price by calculating the quantity of output at which its marginal revenue would equal its marginal cost, and then sets whatever price would enable it to sell exactly that quantity.

 

When we think of monopoly we are worried about the monopolists’ ability to charge higher prices. From an economic point of view if some Monet is transferred from one group to another. This may be deemed socially unacceptable but it is an equal transfer of wealth from one group to another and doesn’t reduce aggregate welfare. What economists object to is that as the monopolist raises prices above the competitive level in order to make extra profits, customers buy less of the product, therefore less is produced, and society as a whole is worse off.

 

Monopolies go back a long way. Traditionally it has been state power, which has been used to restrict access to particular sectors and industries. In the past kings would grant or sell monopoly rights. More recently it has been governments who have played this role. One way to keep out potential competitors is to have the government make it illegal for others to operate in particular industries. An extreme example was India at the end of the last century which would licence companies and decide what and how much these companies could produce. There are always political justifications for these interventions.

 

As monopoly has come to be seen as harmful to economic growth, over the last century or so we have seen a rise in the number of antitrust cases. They are called like this because cartels used to be known as trusts. There is more to these cases than meets the eye. There are often underlying political motivations and it would be unwise to assume that protection of consumers is the rationale. We often think of the robber barons of late nineteenth century USA, companies such as Standard Oil. They were growing but they were in fact reducing prices. That is hardly typical behaviour for a monopolist Often pressure comes not from consumers but competitors who resent losing their market share. The Microsoft case is a prime example. I don’t think that consumers were clamouring for the prosecution. Microsoft would quickly discover what would happen if they tried to abuse their customers.  There are alternatives to the Windows – Linux, Apple, unauthorised copying and more alternatives would undoubtedly spring up. The latest panic is about Google but who knows how they will be doing in 2030?

 

We also lack an historical perspective. Just because a company is dominant now doesn’t mean that it will hold that position in twenty years time. History is littered with the cases of megaliths that have seen their position eroded by more agile competitors. Bigger is not always better. Natural history teaches us that – Where are the dinosaurs now?

A Petition

Frédéric Bastiat, the French classical liberal theorist, wrote a famous satirical petition from the candlemakers’ guild to the French government, asking the government to block out the Sun to prevent its unfair competition with their products. It is a delicious satire of the kind of self-serving justifications we so often hear. It is more than 160 years old but it is still relevant today:

 

A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

To the Honourable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.

Gentlemen:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

Be good enough, honourable deputies, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate. Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honour of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

But what shall we say of the specialities of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity.

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not picked up from the musty old books of the advocates of free trade. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not instantly rebound against yourselves and the principle behind all your policy.

Will you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, France will not gain at all, because the consumer will bear the expense?

We have our answer ready:

You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too.

Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this objection. When told that the consumer has a stake in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles, “Yes,” you reply, “but the producer has a stake in their exclusion.” Very well, surely if consumers have a stake in the admission of natural light, producers have a stake in its interdiction.

“But,” you may still say, “the producer and the consumer are one and the same person. If the manufacturer profits by protection, he will make the farmer prosperous. Contrariwise, if agriculture is prosperous, it will open markets for manufactured goods.” Very well, If you grant us a monopoly over the production of lighting during the day, first of all we shall buy large amounts of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal, to supply our industry; and, moreover, we and our numerous suppliers, having become rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity into all areas of domestic industry.

Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it?

But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods because and in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. You have only half as good a reason for complying with the demands of other monopolists as you have for granting our petition, which is in complete accord with your established policy; and to reject our demands precisely because they are better founded than anyone else’s would be tantamount to accepting the equation: + x + = -; in other words, it would be to heap absurdity upon absurdity.

Labour and Nature collaborate in varying proportions, depending upon the country and the climate, in the production of a commodity. The part that Nature contributes is always free of charge; it is the part contributed by human labour that constitutes value and is paid for.

If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun, which is, of course, free of charge, does for the former what the latter owes to artificial heating, which necessarily has to be paid for in the market.

Thus, when an orange reaches us from Portugal, one can say that it is given to us half free of charge, or, in other words, at half price as compared with those from Paris.

Now, it is precisely on the basis of its being semigratuitous (pardon the word) that you maintain it should be barred. You ask: “How can French labour withstand the competition of foreign labour when the former has to do all the work, whereas the latter has to do only half, the sun taking care of the rest?” But if the fact that a product is half free of charge leads you to exclude it from competition, how can its being totally free of charge induce you to admit it into competition? Either you are not consistent, or you should, after excluding what is half free of charge as harmful to our domestic industry, exclude what is totally gratuitous with all the more reason and with twice the zeal.

To take another example: When a product — coal, iron, wheat, or textiles — comes to us from abroad, and when we can acquire it for less labour than if we produced it ourselves, the difference is a gratuitous gift that is conferred up on us. The size of this gift is proportionate to the extent of this difference. It is a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product if the foreigner asks of us only three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter as high a price. It is as complete as it can be when the donor, like the sun in providing us with light, asks nothing from us. The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!

Smoke and mirrors

As a magician I promise never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a non-magician, unless that one swears to uphold the Magician’s Oath in turn. I promise never to perform any illusion for any non-magician without first practicing the effect until I can perform it well enough to maintain the illusion of magic.  The Magician’s Oath.

 

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”. From the film The Prestige.

 

I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death. That’s what attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the ‘human fly’ who scales the walls of the same building. Harry Houdini‎

 

We’re starting to realize that magicians have a lot of implicit know-ledge about how we perceive the world around us because they have to deceive us in terms of controlling attention, exploiting the assumptions we make when we do and don’t notice a change in our environment. There is an enormous amount of really detailed instruction on how to perform magic. People are always blown away by how detailed a description you’ll have.  Richard Wiseman

 

 

The world of prestidigitators, conjurors, mentalists, escape artists, and ventriloquists has long intrigued me. I love reading about the golden age of magic – from 1890 to 1930. In particular, as a sceptic, I am fascinated by the relationship between scepticism and magic. Magicians are engaged in deception and come into contact with the dark side of human nature and how easily we can be manipulated. This enables them to shine a light on the paranormal world I will be looking at three magicians to illustrate what I mean.

 

The first is Harry Houdini. Houdini is of course a household name. We have all heard of his famous stunts – escaping from straitjackets, making an elephant disappear, being lowered into water tanks and being buried alive. A lesser known part of his life was as a debunker of mediums and psychics. He began doing this in the 1920s after the death of his mother. It was his background in magic that enabled him to spot things that had escaped many scientists and academics. Later he would have to attend sessions in disguise. He was also able to show how photographers could produce fraudulent “spirit photographs”. I have read on some websites that Houdini was merely exposing the bad apples. But the whole enterprise of talking to spirits is a farce.

 

My second figure, James Randi, is less well-known, although he was described by Arthur C, Clarke as “a national treasure, and perhaps one of the remaining antidotes that may prevent the rotting of the American mind.” Randi is fully fledged magician who has escaped from a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over Niagara Falls However the facet I am interested in is his sceptical persona. Randi certainly takes no prisoners in his exposure of psychics, mediums, faith healers etc. His definition of New Age is spot on: The New Age? It’s just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds. 

 

Randi became of a public figure in the 1970s for exposing Uri Geller as a fraud. When Randi replicated Geller’s cutlery bending exploits he was accused of secretly using psychic powers. This echoed an accusation made by Arthur Conan-Doyle about Houdini many years earlier Randi has instituted a prize of one million dollars for anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls; nobody has claimed the prize yet.

 

My final choice is illusionist Derren Brown. He recently came into the public eye by predicting the winners of the national lottery. He then gave an explanation of how he was able to do it that was pure tosh. but that’s what’s so compelling about Brown – the way he mixes magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. He is perfectly open about his dishonesty. It’s part of the spectacle. You’re never quite sure what is real and what isn’t. When the person doing this is an entertainer that’s fine. It becomes fraudulent when somebody claims special powers.

Politics without romance

Recently the Telegraph had a photo of a sign outside a newsagent’s. It said: “Only two MPs at a time.” This picture perfectly encapsulates public distrust and contempt of politicians. Why do politicians behave in the way they do? One way of understanding politicians’ behaviour is more than fifty years old and is known as Public Choice, which applies the theories and methods of economics to politics. This model, which was heavily influenced by game theory, imports the rational actor model of economic theory to political analysis – politicians are driven by the goal of utility maximization, and as such are no different from people in business. Public choice provides two provocative insights into the political process:

 

1. The individual is what you have to investigate. It rejects such terms such as “the people,” “the community,” or “society.”  
2. The choices made by public and private choice processes differ because of the different incentives and constraints they face when pursuing their self-interest.

 

 You may or may not have heard of public choice but its critique of benevolent civil servants faithfully interpreting the public will infused the series Yes Minister. One of its writers Anthony Jay made this very clear:

“The fallacy that public choice economics took on was the fallacy that government is working entirely for the benefit of the citizen; and this was reflected by showing that in any episode in the programme, in Yes Minister, we showed that almost everything that the government has to decide is a conflict between two lots of private interest – that of the politicians and that of the civil servants trying to advance their own careers and improve their own lives. And that’s why public choice economics, which explains why all this was going on, was at the root of almost every episode of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.”

 

One of the key concepts we need to understand is rent-seeking, taking an extra slice of the cake without actually making it bigger. The name is extremely confusing but offers interesting intuitions into the political process. People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena.

They typically do so by getting:

a subsidy for a good they produce

a tariff on imports.

a special regulation that hampers their competitors.

 

There are many more examples: a cartel of firms agreeing to raise prices, steel producers seeking restrictions on imports of steel; and lawyers lobbying to keep regulations in place that restrict competition from unlicensed practitioners. Of course they will not admit anything as vulgar as grubby self-interest. It will be dressed up as the public good and sometimes these claims will be justified. But the majority of these activities do not create any value, and can impose large costs on an economy. A key factor here is that often the benefits are concentrated in a small minority, while the costs are dispersed. This gives people few incentives to oppose these policies. We spend much more time deciding which computer to buy than in which party to vote for. Political analyst Bryan Caplan is more pessimistic; he believes that the public actually  thinks  that these policies are good.

           

 Where does all this leave us? One key conclusion of public choice is that simply changing the identities of the people who hold public office will not produce major changes in policy outcomes. A good idea is to impose limits on democratic sovereignty and have check and balances in the political system. Electing better people will not, by itself, lead to much better government. I am a little pessimistic in this sense. The one thing that does console me is that the other options are far worse. It may not seem a ringing endorsement but it’s the most you’ll get from me.