Yarraville shops

The contrast with having moved to an area where nothing is in walking distance, and having had experience with the appalling traffic of an outer (“semi-rural”) Northern Melbourne suburb when attempting to pick someone up from the local station and return to the school we were at that day has just reinforced my problems with the bad urban design which has become such a feature of Melbourne and other Australian cities.

For a start, the roads in the new suburbs really are designed so they bottleneck. The lack of backroads between the new suburbs means one is forced out into the congested linking road even for short trips–trips which are, because everything is so spread out, nevertheless too far to walk with any convenience. The absolute reliance on car transport for even the most mundane trips also hugely undermines any chance to develop a sense of local community. Urban design driven by car–government doing its bit to support the local car industry? Oh, wait … .

The everything-requires-approval system means that we get cookie-cutter suburbs–once a design has got through the approval process, there is no reason for developers not to just keep churning the same design(s) out, with minimal variation. Why put yourself at the mercy of the vagaries of approval processes, when you can just repeat the last effort?

My past and present reading of the urban planning literature suggests strongly that there is a lack of any serious thinking about the incentives approval systems create. Instead, the focus seems to on getting the role of local planning tin god “right”, with a patently highly misplaced confidence in their ability to balance the trade-offs and competing pressures such urban planning requires–difficulties which increase disproportionately the more the approval system attempts to do. Critiques of exclusory technocratic processes are part of the literature, but they are about participation in the control mechanisms, not critical examination of the mechanisms themselves. Neither the problems of Seeing Like A State nor of The Death and Life of … Cities seems to be understood or seriously grappled with.

Government “management” of the land process not only drives up the price of land (thanks to said government management, Australia has the most expensive urban land in the Anglosphere, excepting the special case of Hong Kong) turning “approved for housing” land into a positional good, it also encourages dominance by a relatively small number of developers and hugely undermines the incentive to provide appropriate transport infrastructure. Pre-war developers provided linking transport–such as tram lines. But land was cheap and there was a return to providing such infrastructure–the developer reaped the benefits of the higher value of land with transport access. Now, the cost of land is driven up so much by government land-rationing (and knock-on effects on developer incentives), any such effect is swamped. For the government as well. Hence chronic under-provision of transport infrastructure. The scaling back of new transport provision from the 1970s onwards not coincidentally coinciding with the adoption of State Government land “management”.

Nobody walks to here

The system in place does not stop “urban sprawl”.  It just produces crap, under-resourced and expensive urban sprawl. The suburb I now reside in is significantly worse-designed–f0r both community dynamics (it is designed to have none) and local transport access–than the post-war suburbs of Canberra in the area I lived in before moving back to Melbourne. (I am not holding Canberra up as a benchmark, merely pointing out that the quality of urban design has been going backwards.)

If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then it is insanity to expect the combination of government land “management” and everything-needs-approval to do other than continue to turn out the expensive, poorly-designed, under-infrastructured suburbs it has now been doing for years. After all, the planning bureaucrats have nothing personal riding on the consequences of their decisions–blame attaches either to the developers or the State Government.

The alternative is to abandon government land “management” and everything-needs-approval with a rule-based system. Such as requiring shops within x distance, a school within y distance, and so forth. Set up clear and sensible rules and innovation is encouraged–rather than being stifled by the comfort-zones of planning bureaucrats and the “just repeat” incentives approval systems create.

The idea that complexity can only be managed by command processes is not only false, it is the opposite of the truth. Clear rules generating sound incentives can manage complexity far more effectively than any permit raj. Bangalore, in the land that gave us the term permit raj, provides a chilling example of how a dysfunctional, over-reaching state can mismanage a city–in Bangalore’s case, leading to solution-by-gangster. (The other Asian mega-state is also astonishingly corrupt, with property investment being the best-of-bad options saving choice.)

Corruption may make things worse, but approval systems make corruption much more likely.

One of the ironies of planning-by-approval is that it is often based on an ostentatious attachment to nature–yet nature is not planned. Nature is also red in tooth and claw–there is often something dark not far from the surface in the romanticising of nature. Or, in this case, gardens (which are planned). The garden metaphor provides a notion of superiority and control which may be flattering to the planner but is not a way to create well-functioning urban areas.

This fetishing of approval is part of a much wider tendency to not distinguish between law, command and government, which have quite different interactions with markets and commercial activity. Markets are based on implicit or explicit rules; an effective legal system can greatly encourage commercial activity. Command represents replacement or restriction of open transacting; it is a substitute for market activity. Governments can provide and/or enforce laws (so as to encourage commerce and extend markets) while also engaging in command activities (so replacing or restricting markets). But, then, firms also represent command mechanisms–internally–while engaging in market commerce externally, hence economist Ronald Coase’s famous theory of the firm.

Government action can also benefit some transactions and transactors while restricting others. The coercive power of governments is a great generator and protector of privilege. Approval processes–due to their lack of transparency and inherently higher transaction costs–are a particularly effective way of privileging one group over others; indeed, tend to do so no matter what their explicit intention.

Variety within suburbs can be encouraged by a rule-based system. One of the striking things about the Seddon-Yarraville area is that there are free-standing houses, semi-detached houses, apartment blocks, shops and small offices scattered around.  Conversely, the suburb I am now living in, like the others around it, has only free-standing houses with a few semi-detached and that is it. It actually packs more dwellings and useful parking in a given area: the problem is that is all it does. And at an alienating distance from anything else.

Approved alienation

The “local” railway station has the freeway on one side and vast-not-for-walking-across expanse of empty land on the other. I have to drive to shop or to take the railway and, not coincidentally, the local single-carriageway you-have-no-choice linking road clogs up sometime after 6am every weekday.

Instead of living in the inner city and having a traffic jam on the various access roads, as when I lived in Fitzroy, now I am out in the outer suburbs with far less amenities and a traffic jam on the one-or-two access roads.

Not that I hold out much hope of change. The current dysfunction suits the plugged-into-the-system developers; the state government reaps the higher taxes from land it makes much more expensive; political parties raise funds from people buying access to officials (very necessary in any approval system); and those with advantages in organisation, networks and advocacy love the insider benefits that approval systems create, being devout advocates and practitioners of social mercantilism (using the mechanisms of the state and their advantages in the framing of public debate to create and sharpen an insider/outsider divide). Driving up the price of land increases the value of their houses, as does starving new areas of infrastructure. They typically either don’t care about, or actively despise, the residents of the outer suburbs. As the work of sociologist Katherine Betts has documented, they certainly have very different attitudes to them. (Not that we can expect much more such academic analysis; the canning of the journal she co-edited, People and Place–by far the most cited academic journal in Australia outside academe–no doubt sent the desired message. Sceptically investigating the sort of folk who approve ARC grants is clearly not conducive to continued funding.)

Where once we had a Protestant Establishment, now we have a Progressivist Establishment, but one which views itself as “subversive” and is thereby absolved from any awkward responsibility.

So, the government land-management and everything-needs-approval system will continue to operate and it will continue to churn out expensive, crap, sprawling, socially isolating dormitory suburbs with (worsening) traffic congestion. Something no one will take responsibility for. Certainly not the supporters nor denizens of said government land “management” and everything-needs-approval systems.

Perhaps the last word should go to Sir John Betjeman, whose poem The Town Clerk’s Views was written at a time when British working class communities were fruitlessly resenting the depredations of urban planners who were destroying their communities much more successfully than the Blitz–that killed people and destroyed buildings; the planners frayed away the connections between people and their varied activities which are basic to being a community.

In a few years this country will be looking
As uniform and tasty as its cooking.
Hamlets which fail to pass the planners’ test
Will be demolished. We’ll rebuild the rest
To look like Welwyn mixed with Middle West.
All the fields we’ll turn into sports grounds, lit at night
From concrete stands by fluorescent light:
And all over the land, instead of trees,
Clean poles and wire will whisper in the breeze.
We’ll keep one ancient village just to show
What England once was when the times were slow–
Broadway for me. But here I know I must
Ask the opinion of our National Trust.
And ev’ry old cathedral that you enter
By then will be an Area Culture Centre.
Instead of nonsense about Death and Heaven
Lectures on civic duty will be given;
Eurhythmic classes dancing around the spire,
And economics courses in the choir.
So don’t encourage the tourists. Stay your hand
Until we’ve really got the country plann’d.

The headmaster of a £28,000-a-year private school has indicated he is considering inviting a porn star to teach sex education to his pupils.

Mark Slater, head of The Leys in Cambridge, said students at the historic school need to be aware of the unrealistic nature of the online material. It is vital that children are made aware of the differences between online porn and genuine, fulfilling relationships, he argued.

Referring to the possibility of inviting a porn star to speak to his pupils, Mr Slater, 59, said: “I wouldn’t rule it out simply because of what they have done in their life if I felt that person was going to put across good values and be a good influence.

“I don’t think you can escape porn given that it’s almost impossible to legislate against what goes on the internet.

“There are young people who have got easy access to all sorts of material which wasn’t accessible years ago.

“And I think what we have got to do is empower them with good judgment and make them understand that this kind of thing can be addictive, it can be damaging and a certain amount of willpower is necessary.”

- The Telegraph

In saying this, I do not wish to excuse his behaviour towards Julia Gillard. I think most of us can accept that this is a sacking offence, regardless of the respective positions of the interlocutors. I know what would happen to me if I asked something similar of a client; indeed, as Lt. General David Morrison (Australian Army) has pointed out this week, the number of workplaces that will tolerate this kind of sexist and homophobic crap is rapidly approaching nil.

However, I do wish to make a few observations on the fallout from Sattler’s sacking, and on the treatment of women in public life.

1. Many of the people rightly mortified at Gillard’s treatment by Sattler and others cheerfully posted (on Facebook and elsewhere) various ‘witch’ commentaries and accusations on the death of Margaret Thatcher. Some of them did so while having the singular gracelessness of purporting to be feminists at the same time. This means that they are aware of what such a label meant historically for women throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds. Yes, you know who you are. I think it is to my credit that I only unfriended one of you.

2. Conservative and libertarian women are routinely subjected to rank abuse: Ann Coulter, for example, is a frequent target for transphobic slurs. I am also old enough to remember what was meted out to Bronwyn Bishop and Pauline Hanson. Abuse of the latter was also infused with class-hatred of the vilest sort.

3. When it comes to invasive and biased media behaviour, my experience of left-leaning, middle-class media organisations was far worse than it was when it came to the tabloid right, both print and television. It was the ABC, for example, that obtained my parents’ telephone number by fraudulent means (I believe the kids these days refer to this as ‘phone hacking’). This is why I still want the ABC hacked into bleeding pieces, and hope Abbott proves to be a man of his word when he is elected PM. At least in Britain, I can refuse to own a television and thereby avoid the TV licence—the BBC is, in that sense, user-pays. In Australia, everyone who pays tax pays for a public broadcaster that—if it decides you are the enemy—behaves like the Sun.

4. If women are going to take their place in public life, then standards of civility and good manners need to apply to all women, of all political stripes. Playing the woman is as bad as playing the man, and if you wish to be taken seriously as a commentator, you may wish to think about that.

5. Poet Stevie Smith once asked why the word ‘pretty’ was so underrated. I have a similar question: why is the word ‘nice’ so underrated? Nice, it would seem, is damn difficult, something that takes a lifetime to achieve. And it isn’t even on lots of people’s radars.

I have never been much of a comic/graphic novel reader.* I believe I read most of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Otherwise, my comic reading has mostly been a version of The Bible done as a comic, John Blackburn’s Coley stories (NWS) and Patrick Fillion‘s works.

As a young lad, I did enjoy the Fantastic Four animated cartoon series and the Spider-Man animated cartoon series. But it is the films that get me in.

Part of the fun is having an ambiguous reaction to the villains; having a good villain being particularly central to the Superhero genre. Heath Ledger‘s Joker was splendidly creepy and chilling in The Dark Knight. Sir Ian McKellen‘s Magneto provided an insidious classy gravitas to the X-Men movies. Tom Hiddleston‘s Loki was good charismatic wicked fun in Thor and The Avengers.

The Joker in The Dark Knight was a psychopath pretending to have reasons apart from joy in destruction. But you got where Magneto was coming from in the X-Men movies and, as for Loki in Thor, he had a point about Thor (as Odin dramatically conceded) and then had to cope with one damned thing after another.

Part of why I enjoyed the Fantastic Four TV series is that I thought Doctor Doom was rather cool, in an evil sort of way. He was uber-cool, in an evil sort of way, when played by Julian McMahon in The Fantastic Four and The Fantastic 4: the Rise of the Silver Surfer.

In 2009, celebrating 75 years of comics, IGN published a list of the 100 top comic villains.  It’s top 10 villain list is:

(1) Magneto

(2) Joker

(3) Doctor Doom

(4) Lex Luthor

(5) Galactus

(6) Darkest

(7) Ra’s Al Ghul

(8) Loki

(9) Dark Phoenix

(10) Kingpin.

All of whom have had major role in film block-busters and/or long-running TV series. So, who is your favourite super-villain?

This is also the Saturday chit-chat post.

ADDENDA *It was only in doing this post that I discovered that Ra’s Al Ghul, who plays such a pivotal role in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, was a pre-existing comic villain. The commitment of Bruce Wayne’s mentor Ducard (played by Liam Neeson) to a notion of the good that had no connection to actual people is a form of villainy that has a particular resonance to the evils of our time.

Starting this Friday (give or take time-zone issues thanks to the blog in question being located in the US, me being in the UK, and skepticlawyer being located in Australia), I’ll be writing once a week for Thoughts on Liberty. You’ll be pleased to know I won’t be leaving here, and that all my TOL posts will be brief – go over 750 words there and they’ll split the post in two. Since ‘splitting’ should be left to atoms and Monty Python, you will never see anything from me that exceeds 750 words. Brevity is a virtue

500 word posts also take about 30 minutes to write.

Why Thoughts on Liberty?

In very large part, because it’s like here. Gina Luttrell (the editor) has invested considerable time in creating an environment where the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory almost never happens. This means the comments threads are civil. TOL — as skepticlawyer once was — is also deliberately all female in its writer composition (sorry, Lorenzo!), and has this (in part) as its Mission Statement:

If you look at the membership, readership, or donor base of just about any organization promoting freedom, you’ll find some discouraging ratios: 70-to-30; 60-to-40. These are the proportions of men to women. Walk into any libertarian gathering and you’ll see the disparity first hand. For whatever reason, women don’t seem to be “into” liberty.

This is unacceptable. Why don’t women like freedom? Women have gained more from classical liberalism than from any other ideology in the history of our species: Reproductive rights, suffrage, the choice in who to marry (or not)—all of these are rooted in the idea that women are individuals and have the right to self-determination. These, too, are the fundamental principles of classical liberalism. Women should be the first champions of liberty, not the last.

We here at Thoughts on Liberty are wanting to change that.

While — superficially — the authors at TOL may appear to be all politically similar (this is where skepticlawyer really is different from every other current affairs blog), there is considerable difference between a British classical liberal and an American libertarian, starting with the name (the latter is almost a ‘don’t use’ word in the UK, thanks to its misappropriation by anti-immigration, anti same-sex marriage UKIP). Likewise, if there are libertarian anarchists in the UK, I don’t know any and find the idea of anarcho-capitalism frankly absurd. Anarchists are far commoner in the US, however. I am also an empiricist: if it turns out that the state does a better job than the private sector (private prisons, anyone?), then I am not going to die in a ditch for a principle. Along the same lines, I think rights are contingent, not universal — the common sense position among both English and Scots lawyers, with our tradition of legal positivism — and have their roots in the doctrine of precedent and its relationship with a sovereign parliament. Many Americans disagree — some of them intensely — on both issues.

Of course, I don’t know in any detail the individual political and cultural views of TOL’s other writers, but I can identify instances where all of them have managed difficult topics with dignity and good grace, including one that’s on this blog’s ‘banned’ list. In no particular order, here’s Elizabeth Robinson on abortion, Gina Luttrell on why many women find classical liberalism off-putting, Rachel Burger on same-sex marriage, Cathy Reisenwitz on the fraught relationship between some schools of feminism, freedom of speech, and property rights (especially in the UK), and Chrissy Brown on why Rand Paul is just another politician (so sorry to disappoint you). There are plenty of other pieces worth reading, all of them short and thought-provoking: this is just a small selection. There are also a couple of threads o’ doom (as always). I’ll leave you to find those yourselves…

Anyway, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, swing by and like TOL on Facebook (we all post lots of good stuff separate from the blog) and look out for my Friday posts (the time zone part will work itself out eventually). In the meantime (rather than just include a graphic from the TOL webpage), here’s a video of the editor that goes some small way to explaining the demented madness of the US War on Drugs, and how it manages to intersect–horribly–with both abortion and poverty (produced by ‘Learn Liberty’, who are no doubt responsible for the background music). It explains better than I can why the war on drugs is the signature issue for US libertarians in a way that it isn’t for people in Australia or Britain.

Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.

If trade dropped dramatically, then the rulership could suddenly find itself with significantly less income than its structure of government presumed. The effects of this could be unfortunate …

The Han dynasty collapsed in 220 AD, the Parthian Empire was overthrown by the Sassanids in 224 AD and Rome’s Crisis of the 3rd Century began in 235 AD. Is this sequence a coincidence? It would be a remarkable one if it were, but that is not at all likely.

Rome in pink, Parthians in brown, Han in yellow.
How much control the Han had over the Tarim basin (that big westward bulge) is debatable.

The Han dynasty ruled, with a brief interruption, for 4 centuries (206 BC – 220 AD). The Parthian Arascid dynasty ruled for close to five centuries (247 BC – 224 AD). During the first two centuries of Han rule, the highly commercial Roman Republic–having conquered the highly commercial Carthaginian Empire–proceeded to conquer the highly commercial Hellenistic kingdoms founded by the successful Diadochi (successors to Alexander). Probably snuffing out the first Scientific Revolution while doing so. In accordance with economist David Friedman’s argument that states reliant on taxes on land (rents) will tend to be small (i.e. principalities), those reliant on taxes on trade will tend to be large (empires) and those reliant on taxing labour will tend to be based on linguistic boundaries (nations), the Sino-Parthian anchoring of the Silk Road system led to the Mediterranean world being ripe for unification under a single commercial jurisdiction; particularly one as favourable to commerce as Roman Law.

The Han, Parthian and Roman empires came to span most of Eurasia East to West. This was an excellent basis for the first great flowering of the Silk Road system. Silk flowed westwards from China, buying horses from the various nomad confederations, spices via India, silver and glassware from the Mediterranean. Incense (frankincense and myrrh) flowed from Arabia northwards. Mediterranean copper, lead, tin, red coral and wine flowed via the sea route to India, which had a substantial Roman trade colony up until about 200 AD. (The claim that Thomas the Apostle went to India is not inherently implausible; that religions follow trade routes is a well-established pattern, so–given the extent of Roman-Indian trade–the early spread of Christianity to India is not surprising.)

One of these would swallow all the others …

The Parthians were well-placed to profit even further from these trade flows when the pax Romana in the West and the pax Hanica in the East provided poles of trade–stable empires ruling over tens of millions (a likely peak population of 50-60m each) with vast internal trade and wealthy elites to provide markets for luxury goods. This was the Rome of the Principate, when a lean Imperial bureaucracy (perhaps 300 full-time officials in the central administration) supported rule by a cosmopolitan elite who provided their own aides when appointed to governorships, with cities being largely self-governing.

The first great blow to this mutually supporting trading system linking Western and Eastern Eurasia was the Antonine plague, which killed perhaps a tenth of the population (up to a third in some regions) of the Roman Empire (so about 5-6m people) striking hard at the Roman Army. The Han dynasty had increased taxes to pay for fortifications along the Silk Road system, to better protect and profit from trade that was now significantly reduced. This aggravated an agrarian crisis due to famine. The subsequent Yellow Turban rebellion was defeated, but at the cost of millions of deaths, warlordism and the subsequent collapse of Han rule.

Domino effects

Shapur celebrating in stone

One pole of this trading system had collapsed into war and rival kingdoms, the other had suffered a significant demographic blow. The Parthian Empire–in the middle of this trading system–was suddenly vulnerable due to the loss of trading income. One of their vassal kings, Ardashir I (r.224–241), took this moment to strike, overthrew the Parthian Arascid dynasty and established the Sassanid Empire. The new Empire, with a record of military success behind it, was much more aggressive than its Parthian predecessors, putting the Roman Empire under serious military pressure. The low point for the Romans of this pressure being the capture of Emperor Valerian and his army by Shahanshah (King of Kings) Shapur I (r.240/42 – 270/72) in 260. This was while another serious plague was raging within the Roman Empire, with probably similar mortality levels to the previous outbreak.

Zenobia being wrong but romantic

The Roman client king Odenthasus of Palmyra saved the Roman Empire in the East by vigorous and effective campaigning. But he was assassinated, and his widow Zenobia took over, carving out the brief Palmyrene Empire from Rome’s Eastern provinces before being defeated and captured by Emperor Aurelian (r.270-275), the first emperor to be officially styled dominus et deus (“master and god”) in official documents. (Zenobia was taken back to Rome, where she apparently married a Roman senator.)  The unsuccessful Roman wars against Ardashir and Shapur likely cost the Romans about 150,000 soldiers in a 35-year period, when the Roman Army numbered 350,000 to 450,000 for the entire Empire.

Meanwhile, in the West, two centuries of contact with the Romans meant that the Germanic tribes had also become part of a trading system that was now delivering less; it is likely the decline in trade also adversely affected various nomad peoples, possibly putting some eastward pressure on the Germanic peoples. The Roman Army had been disrupted by disease and was concentrated against the Sassanids. Germanic peoples began to raid and then invade the Empire, which abandoned two border provinces (Dacia and Agri Decumates) entirely.

Dominate

Under internal and external pressure, the Roman Empire survived only by changing profoundly. The dramatic drop in population and (especially) trade meant that the grand estates became much more self-contained, leading to the rise of the manorial economy. That made their interests much more local.

With less trade to tax, the imperial administration moved more to direct acquisition of goods to support the Roman Army. This required a much larger bureaucracy (numbering perhaps 30-35,000 officials). The Roman state had to extract more from less while providing less benefits. Citizenship–which had become universal for free residents of the Empire–came to mean much less. Peasants were tied to the land, turning them into serfs. Slavery largely disappeared–serfdom and slavery not being compatible (pdf) systems. A larger bureaucracy required much more management, leading to the permanent division of the Empire in Western and Eastern halves. (It was not the Empire which became too large for one person to manage–it was actually geographically smaller than it had been, with a lower population overall–it was the expansion of the imperial bureaucracy and the rise of localism which drove the division.) This was the empire of the Dominate; bureaucratised autocratic manorialism.

An Iranian form, spreading West

Where the Roman Army had been an infantry force with cavalry supports, it now became much more based around a cavalry elite in standing field armies with lower-status garrison forces on the borders, whose interests also became more local. It is arguable that the Romans were copying their Sassanid opponents, a process that continued under the later Christian Graeco-Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire. Especially with the development of the theme system.

There was a period of stabilisation in the C4th that saw the Christianisation of the Empire–helped by the death of Julian the Apostate (r.361-3) in battle against the Sassanids–and the building of Constantinople, the New Rome. Late in the C4th, Hun migrations put external pressure first on the Germanic peoples and then on the Empire directly. The continuing Germanic pressure after the Hunnic Empire collapsed was likely partly driven by the end of the Roman warm period in the C5th that also further undermined the demographics and economy of the Empire. Even without the whips of hunger, the more trade retreats, the more land and violence become the dominant sources of income.

The incorporation of Germans into the Roman Army, and the prolonged contact with the Empire, meant that Roman organisational advantage over the Germans waned dramatically. The various Germanic peoples also had much more internal cohesion than the hierarchical and socio-economically localised Empire. The geographically much more exposed and lower-population density Western Empire was unable to withstand the decades of raid and invasion and eventually collapsed as a coherent entity; the fatal blow being the Vandal conquest of North Africa–the last unravaged tax base for the Western Empire.

Romans and Iranians

In the C6th, the surviving Graeco-Roman Empire under Justinian I (r.527-565) attempted to re-unify the Mediterranean under Roman rule. Enjoying considerable success under generals such as Belisarius and the Romanised Armenian Narses–who claimed descent from the Arascid dynasty (a branch of which had ruled Armenia)–Roman armies overthrew the Vandal and Ostrogothic kingdoms and took a coastal province from the Visigothic kingdom. The Empire was clearly the dominant Mediterranean power. Then along came the plague of Justinian, and any chance of further such expansion stopped.

Khosrau II on his favourite charger

In the C6th, the Sassanid Empire had become much more centralised under Khosrau I Anushirvan (“Undiminishing Soul”, r. 531–579), becoming a form of autocratic bureaucratised manorialism; presumably copying their Roman opponents but with the provision of heavy cavalry much more explicitly tied into the manorialism. With the realm’s Central Eurasian borders secured by decisive victories against the Turks, Khosrau I Anushirvan’s grandson, Khosrau II (r. 590-628), attempted to re-establish the Achaemenid Empire, an ambition that dated back to the beginnings of the Sassanid dynasty.

Khosrau II Aparvez (“the Undefeatable”) achieved dramatic successes, which were eventually reversed by Emperor Heraclius, who also made Greek the official language of the Graeco-Roman Empire. Khosrau was assassinated and the Sassanids suffered a prolonged period of internal revolt and dissension. (When considering contemporary Iranian perspectives, it is well to remember this long imperial and cultural history–in recent centuries, conjoined with Shi’a universalism.)

Islam arises

Khosrau II had abolished the Lakhimid Arab kingdom, placing it under direct Sassanid rule, depriving the Sassanid realm of the Arab buffer allies and early warning system that had protected its Arabian border. With both empires exhausted by their decades of struggle–the Romans had likely lost about 200,000 soldiers in 25 years of war and the Iranians probably a similar number–and Roman rule in Egypt and Syria only recently re-established, this was the moment when Arabia became unified for the first time and, inspired by their new unifying religion, with the flexible and meritocratic leadership structure common to successful new movements, overthrew the Sassanid Empire (much of the Sassanid imperial family escaped to Tang China) and took about half the territory and two-thirds of the population from the Graeco-Roman Empire, establishing a vast Arab Empire. Islam, the only major religion founded by a merchant, was generally highly favourable to trade (when raiding the infidel did not get in the way). The Islamic Empire became a pole and a conduit of trade in its own right.

(As an aside, there is a line of jihadi thought which equates the Soviet Empire with the Sassanids and the American hegemony with the Roman Empire; Washington’s neoclassical architecture even provides some aesthetic reinforcement to the analogy. In this reading, the Afghan War is what brought down the Soviet Union.)

In a further display of excellent timing, the Arab Empire was established a few decades after China was reunited under the Sui (581-618) and Tang (618-907) Dynasties. The other pole of the Silk Road trading system was once again united under single rule, with the population and commercial upsurge that went with that. Possibly, the increased trade had made it easier for Khosrau II to fund his ultimately disastrous campaigns of conquest.

Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (c.780-c.850) Iranian mathematician whose name [legacy] gave us algebra, algorism and algorithm.

Islam localises

Then the Tang dynasty declined after the devastating An Lushan rebellion (755-763) and eventually fell (907). (The Abbasid Caliphate sent mounted warriors to help suppress the rebellion; suggesting they understood their interests in Chinese stability and prosperity despite earlier clashes with the Tang.) The East Asian pole of the Silk Road trading system declined and divided. The decline in trade having its normal de-stabilising effects, the authority of the Abbasid Caliphs decayed, being usurped by local rulers. Rather than warriors paid out of centralised taxes, iqta or tax-fiefs were handed out, creating local loyalties. The Fatimids conquered Egypt (969), setting up a rival Shi’a Caliphate based in their new capital of Cairo. The fading power of the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate and the resolution of the iconoclast struggles led to a resurgence of the Graeco-Roman Empire under the Macedonian dynasty (867-1056).

China was reunited under the Song Dynasty (960-1127). During this period the Ghaznavids (963–1186) were able to set up an Iranian-based empire stretching into Northern India, before being supplanted in Iran and Iraq by the Turkish Seljuq Empire (1037–1194).

The conversion of the Turkish peoples to Islam (ironically fostered by the Abbasid policy of accepting all Muslim converts, the basis of their success against the Arab exclusionism of the Umayyads) had removed ghazis from that border, paving the way for Turks supplanting Arabs as the dominant military force in Islam. The Seljuq dynasty was able to sweep a Graeco-Roman Empire suffering divisions between court official and thematic generals out of most of Anatolia after the Roman military disaster at Manzikert 1071, creating the Sultanate of Rum (“Rome”). But the Seljuqs proved unable to set up a stable system of unitary rule, likely not helped by the Song losing control of Northern China to the Jurchin (i.e. nomad) Jin Dynasty (1115–1234) and considerable conflict among nomad peoples, leading to the rise of Genghis Khan.

Not the first folk to look or fight like that to visit the neighbourhood

The collapse of Caliphal political authority led to medieval Islam, the low points for which were the conquest of the Levant by Crusading knights (1096-9) and the Mongol incursions which saw the destruction of the Abbasid Baghdad Caliphate and the imposition of Mongol rule over Iran, the Ilkhanate (1256–1335). The Mongol Empire (1206–1368) incorporated China, the Eurasian steppes, the Iranian plateau and Russia into one vast imperial structure, though its rule over China lasted under a century (1271–1368). The growth in trade also spread the last and greatest of the great plagues, the Black Death.

Chinese unity and Middle Eastern stability

But China was entering the longest period of consecutive unified rule in its history, under the Yuan (1271–1368), Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties. Attempts to create and maintain centralised rule in the Middle East were no longer at the mercy of serious and prolonged disruptions of trade created by extended periods of Chinese disunity. Enter the Ottoman Empire, the longest-running Muslim Empire (1299–1923) which managed to push Muslim rule deep into Central Europe until its disastrous defeat in the Battle of Vienna (1683) ushered in a quarter of a millennia Muslim retreat. (In 1944, the only independent Muslim states were Turkey–under secularising rule–Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia; all the rest were colonies, protectorates or occupied: including Iran, which was under Anglo-Soviet occupation.)

From the late C16th, the Spanish silver peso (the original dollar) became the silver coin of choice in coastal China, as neither the Ming or Qing states minted silver coins while the hyperinflation collapse of the Yuan paper notes discredited Ming attempts to issue their own paper notes. There were periods when Chinese trade declined due to the disruptions which accompanied the transitions from the Yuan to the Ming and from the Ming to the Qing and periodic attempts by the Ming and Qing regimes to block maritime trade.

The success of such attempts is easy to exaggerate–one of the traps of Chinese history is taking the official records too much at face value. Late-medieval European states regularly had more reliable internal information and control mechanisms than imperial China, which was infected from the beginning by a concern for form that easily overwhelmed substance–such as passing off the silk-for-horses trade as a matter of horses-as-tribute and silk-as-gifts–and other pathologies and limitations of bureaucraticised autocracy. The Spanish Empire could enforce reliable coinage over a much more far-flung realm notably better than the Ming or Qing Empires.

Nevertheless, despite such disruptions, the overall level of trade with China was clearly generally much higher, notably during (pdf) the period the Ottoman Empire was expanding most vigorously in the last half of the C15th and first half of the C16th. Chinese silk and porcelain went westwards as European glassware and silver from the expanded Central European silver production went eastwards, a trade highly profitable in both directions. (It is amazing how much historical and anthropological commentary does not seem to grasp the elementary point of gains from trade–no wonder comparative advantage is beyond so many highly educated folk.)

Chinese unity and European expansion

But a unified China also profoundly assisted the post-1500 expansion of the Atlantic economy. Not only did the late C15th economic expansion make it easier to fund voyages of exploration, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the British were all drawn to the trade opportunities the Chinese economy offered, albeit as part of a global smorgasbord of trading opportunities. Hence the phrase ”all the tea in China” signifying great wealth; at one stage the opium trade alone provided a fifth of the revenues of British East India Company rule in India (the power of modern corporations is a pitiful thing compared to that of the Honourable East India Company, whose Army was often bigger than the British Army).

A substantial amount of the flood of silver from the Americas went to purchase (pdf) Asian, particularly Chinese, goods. Indeed, the Spanish Empire was built on that flood of silver, silver whose value was based on apparently endless Chinese demand for silver (pdf), such that:

China’s immense demand-side “silver sink” had supported Spain’s rise as a world power (p.10).

It has been argued that silver declining to ordinary levels of profitability in the 1640s, led to a decline in the Ottoman and Spanish Empires and the collapse of Ming rule (all of whom collected their taxes in set quantities of silver [pdf, Pp10-11]).  More likely, it was the large (and economically disrupting) drop in silver flows to China from the cessation of Japanese silver production and exports as well as falling American silver production, aggravated by interruptions to supply lines and Phillip IV of Spain (r.1621-1640) attempting to crack down on corruption (pdf, p.33) which led to a sharp monetary (and thus commercial and revenue) contraction in the three Empires.

The Spanish and Chinese Empires operated in mutually supporting tandem; flourishing together in the C16th, both weakening in the C17th while the C18th revitalisation of Spain was based on a new cycle of silver exports to a stable and expanding Qing Empire. The two Empires then weakened in sequence in the C19th. The collapse of central authority in the Spanish Empire when Napoleon seized the Spanish king and crown prince and invaded Spain led to a loss of standardisation in Spanish American pesos, which worsened after Spain’s mainland American colonies gained independence, leading to the economic destabilisation (pdf) of the Qing Empire by serious silver coin deflation and copper coin inflation when the shortage of reliable silver coins began to seriously bite in the 1820s and 1830s.

Two millennia of mutual benefit

From the beginnings of the Silk Road system around 220 BC until the beginning of Industrial Age globalisation in the 1820s, a unified and prosperous China has been a boon to Eurasian trade. In more ordinary times, China’s long travail from the start of the Opium Wars (1839) to the start of Deng’s reforms (December 1978)–incorporating the demographic disasters of the Taiping Rebellion (20m+ dead), Japanese invasion (17m+ dead) and the Great Leap Forward (18m+ dead) as well as the more ordinary chaos of the Warlord Era, the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution–would have been a serious blow to global trade. As it was, beginning in the 1820s, the massive expansion of global trade from dramatic falls in transport and communication costs plus the dramatic and continuing rise in productivity more than compensated. But it also provided a deeply distorting perspective on China’s longer run role in the Eurasian, and later global, trading economy.

The economic resurgence of China since 1979 does not represent some threatening new development, despite its dubious internal political economy, it represents the return of a stabilising influence in human affairs. With the major Western Hemisphere Power and China once again linked by trade and monetary flows; except it is China’s dubious saving options, rather than dubious monetary structures, which make US Treasuries–the new “silver pesos”–so attractive (especially now the shine has gone off gold).

ADDENDA REVISED *Since I came across David Friedman’s paper after writing most of this post, the melding was not as smooth as it could have been. To expand on this slightly cryptic distinction, taxes on labour income applies to (monetary) taxes in highly monetised societies. Labour service is, of course, historically a common way to tax farming, but such extraction from coerced labour–particularly for local production–functions in terms of economies of scale as if it was a tax on land. Indeed, a classic reason to coerce labour is to compensate for downward pressures on rents due to labour scarcity/land plenty; so income from coerced labour can be regarded as a substitute for rents. Particularly as such coercion is all about landlord power.

There is also a distinction between early autocracies where water transport (typically a large river) permitted a centralised autocracy to levy labour service (e,g, Pharaonic Egypt, the Khmer Empire) and later periods when mounted warriors could control, protect and extract income from a village. In a situation where trade income was minimal, the ability to effectively aggregate such villages together was limited–i.e, there were diseconomies in revenue collection and no significant economies in taxing land–hence the tendency to small political entities.

“Law-abiding” citizens have “nothing to fear” from the British intelligence services, the foreign secretary says.

William Hague said reports that the UK’s eavesdropping centre GCHQ had circumvented the law to gather data on British citizens were “nonsense”. But he refused to confirm or deny claims GCHQ has had access to a US spy programme called Prism since June 2010.

Mr Hague confirmed he would give a statement to Parliament on the allegations on Monday.

Speaking on BBC One’s Andrew Marr show, the foreign secretary declined to say whether or not he had personally authorised GCHQ to engage with the US internet monitoring programme Prism. But he said GCHQ’s operations were subject to stringent legal checks and scrutiny.

He said: “That legal framework is strong, that ministerial oversight is strong.

“The net effect is that if you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and personal life, you have nothing to fear about the British state or intelligence agencies listening to the content of your phone calls or anything like that.

“Indeed you will never be aware of all the things that these agencies are doing to stop your identity being stolen or to stop a terrorist blowing you up tomorrow.”

The government has come under pressure to respond to allegations that Prism has allowed GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process for obtaining personal material such as emails, photographs and videos, from internet companies based outside the UK.

Mr Hague – the minister responsible for GCHQ – said it would “defeat the object” to reveal how GCHQ or the security services work, because it would help terrorist networks, criminal networks, and foreign intelligence agencies.

- BBC News

Then there are economists engaged in public putdowns. In 2002 Kenneth Rogoff penned an open letter to Joseph Stiglitz. In Scott Sumner’s words:

I used to think that Ken Rogoff’s 2002 letter to Joe Stiglitz was the most devastating demolition of the arguments of an esteemed (but rude) economist that I’d ever read. But now we have a new open letter to Paul Krugman …

Carmen Reinhoff and Kenneth Rogoff are co-authors of the splendid study This Time Is Different:  Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

Perhaps it is a bad idea to seriously annoy a Chess grandmaster, which Rogoff is.

As an aside, I have no particular view about any connection between debt and growth, an issue which has become particularly heated due to controversy over the computations in the 2010 paper by Rogoff and Reinhoff. Though it is a good idea to read Evsey Domar‘s classic 1944 paper on the subject. (But Domar is a particular intellectual hero of mine because of his work on the economics of bondage.)

This is also the Saturday chit-chat post.

ADDENDA  On debt and growth, see this comment on the empirical and analytical difficulties.

ADDENDA ALSO Could not resist the above Dilbert gem (via)

Germany has found that it has 1.5 million fewer people than was generally assumed, following the first census since reunification in 1990.

The new data revealed a population of 80.2 million, the federal statistics office Destatis said. The census in the EU’s most populous country was carried out on 9 May, 2011.

Until now, the census figures dated back to a West German one conducted in 1987, and a 1981 one in the former communist East Germany.

The data reveals that the number of foreign passport-holders resident in Germany had been overestimated. The total number of foreigners is 6.2 million – 1.1 million fewer than had been assumed. They make up 7.7% of the total population.

The number of residents from a non-German background is 15 million – about 19% of the total.

Hamburg has the highest proportion of ethnically non-German residents, at 27.5%. The figure for the capital, Berlin, is 23.9%. And in all the states of former East Germany the figure is less than 5%.

- BBC News

1. Ancient Israel:

And Abraham drew near and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.

And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes: Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it. And he spake unto him yet again, and said, Peradventure there shall be forty found there. And he said, I will not do it for forty’s sake. And he said unto him, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Peradventure there shall thirty be found there. And he said, I will not do it, if I find thirty there. And he said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord: Peradventure there shall be twenty found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for twenty’s sake.

And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake.

– Genesis 18:23-32

2. Classical Athens:

Men of Athens, do not interrupt, but hear me; there was an agreement between us that you should hear me out. And I think that what I am going to say will do you good: for I have something more to say, at which you may be inclined to cry out; but I beg that you will not do this. I would have you know that, if you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me. Meletus and Anytus will not injure me: they cannot; for it is not in the nature of things that a bad man should injure a better than himself. I do not deny that he may, perhaps, kill him, or drive him into exile, or deprive him of civil rights; and he may imagine, and others may imagine, that he is doing him a great injury: but in that I do not agree with him; for the evil of doing as Anytus is doing – of unjustly taking away another man’s life – is greater far. And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours, that you may not sin against the God, or lightly reject his boon by condemning me.

– Socrates, Apologia, 5th Century BC

3. Post-classical Athens, as Aristotle goes grapple, grapple and does not get it quite right:

It is a serious matter to decide that a slave is free, yet it is much more serious to convict a freeman of being a slave [4th Century BC].

Next, the societies that did have it:

1. Republican Rome:

I would rather ten guilty persons should escape, than one innocent should suffer.

– Cicero (attributed in Sallust, but he may not have said it first); 1st Century BC

2. Imperial Rome:

A person ought not to be condemned on suspicion; for it is preferable that the crime of a guilty man should go unpunished than an innocent man be condemned.

– Trajan, 2nd Century AD

3. Medieval Judaism:

The Exalted One has shut this door against the use of presumptive evidence, for it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way.

– Maimonides, 12th Century

4. Anglo-Saxon England:

When the jurors were in doubt about their verdict, for in cases of doubt one should rather save than condemn; it is better to accuse no innocent man, nor conceal any guilty one.

– King Alfred, 9th Century

5. Medieval England:

Indeed I would rather wish twenty evil doers to escape death through pity, than one man to be unjustly condemned.

Chief Justice John Fortescue, 1471

6. Enlightenment England:

Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

Blackstone, 1765

A false impression

The above selection of quotations is apt to give one a false impression, one I hope to correct. The correction is, however, indicative of real human progress. We should be proud of it.

The false impression is conveyed in all the Roman and English quotations: they make it look as though we have always had the presumption of innocence, and we have often set N at about 10. We will let 10 guilty men go free rather than convict a single innocent. I could have found many more English and Roman lawyers stating something similar: Matthew Hale and Ulpian, say. I could also have crossed the Atlantic to the United States, citing a veritable galaxy of American jurists.

However, the English and the Romans are outnumbered by societies — even very great ones — that behave as the ancient Israelites and Athenians did. For most of human history, we human primates have believed that where there is smoke there is fire. When we have accused people of wrongdoing, we have considered our accusations just because the accused ‘have it coming to them’. Ulpian — the first lawyer to think deeply and critically about the presumption of innocence — realised that the presumption of innocence represents a decisive rejection of the ‘just world’ hypothesis, and that this rejection takes real intellectual effort.

The just world

This is because people are uncomfortable believing that suffering is often random, that sometimes bad things happen for no reason at all. Instead, we prefer to believe that people must have done something to deserve what they get. This is obviously a reassuring and comforting belief, which explains its wide appeal. (‘If bad things only happen to those who deserve them, and I’m a good person, then I can be sure that nothing bad will happen to me‘, Ulpian notes at one point)*. For us moderns, belief in the just world can be thought of as a failure to apply the null hypothesis in the moral domain: rejecting the explanation of chance, we prefer to believe that everything that happens is deserved. As should be obvious, the just world hypothesis manifests as the doctrine of karma in a number of religious traditions.

*It is perhaps worth noting that Ulpian, the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, was later fragged by his own men, in part because he restrained their use of torture.

Confining N

It was Robert Nozick – in Anarchy, State and Utopia – who observed that any criminal justice system unwilling to confine N would be one that had no system of punishment at all. This recognises a tradeoff, a balancing act, and the impossibility of perfection. It recognises, too, that every time a guilty person is acquitted the law, in a sense, has failed the community it exists to serve. It also explains why N tends to float up and down throughout English and Roman history. 10 is the most common figure, but the Romans often expressed themselves, like Trajan, in terms of a 1-for-1 trade. Matthew Hale spoke of 5-for-1, and in a 1951 judgment – R v Patel [1951] All E.R. 29 — the Court of Criminal Appeal noted the difficulty of ‘trying to steer between the Scylla of releasing to the world unpunished an obviously guilty man and the Charybdis of upholding the conviction of a possibly innocent one.’

Confining N is therefore difficult. Like Nozick, Jeremy Bentham worried that a justice system that failed to punish the genuinely guilty would fail as surely as a justice system that routinely punished the genuinely innocent:

We must be on guard against those sentimental exaggerations which tend to give crime impunity, under the pretext of insuring the safety of innocence.  Public applause has been, so to speak, set up to auction.  At first it was said to be better to save several guilty men, than to condemn a single innocent man; others, to make the maxim more striking, fix the number ten; a third made this ten a hundred, and a fourth made it a thousand.  All these candidates for the prize of humanity have been outstripped by I know not how many writers, who hold, that, in no case, ought an accused person to be condemned, unless evidence amount to mathematical or absolute certainty.  According to this maxim, nobody ought to be punished, lest an innocent man be punished.

When discussing N, then, it is wise to keep both Bentham and Ulpian in mind, and also to remember that our justice system can be polluted by awful attitudes dragged across from other belief systems. One of the reasons rape is so fraught is not just because, as Ulpian observed, it involves the criminal expression of something that would otherwise be both a perfectly legal and enjoyable act. It is also fraught because the civilisation that came after Ulpian’s decided that there was something inherently wrong with women: they entered the justice system disabled by something that was in them, and that they could not change. This would have flummoxed Ulpian, and reflects badly on we who came after. The doctrine of original sin is, after all, a particularly nasty manifestation of the just world hypothesis.

Taking care

We must take care, then, not to make decisions in advance stipulating that people have something about them that disables them before they enter the justice system. For the longest time, the people entering the portals of justice with a presumption operating against their character were all women. As we became monotheists, we added gays, Jews, and black people to the there’s something funny about you list. We then spent the best part of 200 years removing all those groups from the same list. This removal is far from perfect, of course, although it is well progressed in the developed world.

However, as part of this process, we must also take care not to add new people and new characteristics to that list in lieu of the old ones. That is, I believe, what happened in the rush to judgment in the Duke Lacrosse case: well, they had it coming, didn’t they, white and privileged…

100,000 criminals

What if I told you that the bulk of crime in Britain was committed by 100,000 known and named individuals with a list of previous convictions that makes them ridiculously easy to trace? And what if I added that we could arrest the lot of them, lock them up without charge, and reduce the country’s crime rate almost to zero overnight?

Tempted?

I hope you’re not tempted, but it is true that we know who most of the future criminals are, where they live, what race they are, and lots of other things about them. And it is also true if we decided to revert to the world of Ancient Israel or Classical Athens — just lock ‘em up, where there’s smoke there’s fire, of course they’ll do it again – we would indeed reduce our crime rate to trivial levels (it has in fact been falling for a long time).

However, there comes a point where reducing crime beyond a certain level enlivens the law of diminishing returns: not only does it become prohibitively expensive, but fundamental aspects of our society and justice system have to be bent out of shape in order to achieve it. I seldom recommend the use of popular culture to teach a legal lesson, but maybe it is worth watching this film again:

We do not live in a just world. We ought not to ascribe characteristics to people before applying justice to them (otherwise it will soon cease to be justice). And we should be proud of the fact that we have had the wit to adopt — for the most part — a legal minority position that is striking in its generosity of spirit. Because I don’t buy the just world hypothesis, I don’t think that choice was inevitable. We so easily could have gone the other way.