What we need to see? And read?

I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. The book closes with a new Afterword that I don't think appeared in the original version and tries to frame a 'social agenda' for the book.

As a basis, he looks at the introduction of screens into classical music auditions and shows how this resulted in there being more woman in classical orchestras without the need for affirmative action targets. Then, he applies this to conviction rates for different race groups in the US and suggests that we need to be able to remove the consideration of race from the consideration of guilt.

This argument, for me, brings into opposition two of the arguments in the book. The first is that regardless of our perception of ourselves and how open-minded we may be, evidence shows that all of us make rascist and sexist snap judgments. As part of the argument, Malcolm Gladwell outlined how people can be 'primed' and how this affects us. And his argument makes sense. I've heard from many friends who've studied psychology that it is dangerously naive to believe we can assume we are free of prejudice.

The second argument that comes into contradiction is his chapter on the importance of 'mind-reading' and how good - and uniform - humans are in terms of signalling emotion with facial expressions. This suggests that to test someone's inherent honesty, visual cues are important. So, the question is which is more important - do sub-consciouscous biases overwhelm our ability to read people? The statistics cited suggested they do.

So, then, should we remove any indicators or bias from the justice system?

I'm not sure what the answer is. One thing which occurs to me is that abstracting from visual cues in the case of classical musicians makes sense because the most important information is aural. This plays to Gladwell's argument on the need to select the significant information. It seems easy to carry over in certain cases - for instance, in choosing a researcher reading research samples without names seems a clear way to go. But what information provides cues for guilt versus innocence?

This reminded me of a story I recently read by Ken Liu called Real Faces (reviewed below). In this case, it wasn't about abstracting in the case of guilt, but in the case of hiring an individual. Though a different context, it occured to me that the story could be a direct response to Gladwell's closing Afterword and while it doesn't offer a conclusion to the argument, it certainly raised a lot of interesting questions about the role context plays and how perceptions can be manipulated.

It also reminded me how important story-telling is. I read once that CS Lewis always felt furthest from God right after participating in a debate to defend his existence and closest when writing his Narnia stories. Sometimes, a cogent argument is far less powerful and sheds far less light than the same point as part of a narrative.

Another author that reminds me of this is NK Jemisin. I must be honest, whenever I have read her prose, I find it so deeply veined with anger that I struggle to focus on her argument. However, I loved her series, The Inheritance Trilogy and have dived into the first book of her new series. Her books make me think and because they are couched in stories, I find myself far more open into delving into her ideas through narrative than argument.

2011: Books I Couldn't Put Down

NK Jemisin's The Broken Kingdoms and the Kingdom of Gods: Very original, very enjoyable fantasy. All the reviews praising these books almost put me off because they made them sound so very esoteric. But while clever, orginal and thought-provoking, these books are eminently readable and have characters that make you care.

Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea: The true life story of a mountaineer whose abortive attempt to climb K2 turned into a mission to educate the children of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Beautiful, uplifting story of how one person can make a difference.

Ben Bova's Jupiter: I'm not normally a reader of hard science fiction, but I loved this book. One of the things I normally dislike about hard science fiction is that it's all about the ideas and the technology and I find the characters flat and unsympathetic. The characters in this, though a small cast, were eminently believeable and I loved living through their story. Also one of the best portrayals of a character with a deep faith.

George RR Martin's (ed) Busted Flush and Suicide Kings: I've often been fascinated by the question of how super-heroes would deal with the complexities of a world beyond American suburbs fighting crime. Both of these books came from different angles in approaching the issue but had such rich answers. I loved Busted Flush for the complexity of the primary character and Suicide Kings for its wrestling with some of Africa's great challenges.

Veronica Roth's Divergent: I loved how this book dug into very thought-provoking questions about what's really wrong with the world, what self-sacrifice is and how we choose our morality within a highly approachable young adult, fast-moving, plot-driven package.

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy: I devoured these three books in two days. Definitely my favourite teen craze so far (and I enjoyed both Harry Potter and Twilight), primarily because it highlights so many real issues. For me the Capital and the Districts were a dramatised representation of Dependency theory's Core and Periphery. These books ask hard questions about poverty, social justice and how we judge and treat one another.

Promising Series

I have read all of Robin Hobb's previous books, preferring the Liveship Traders to the Fool and Assassin books. I approached the first of the Soldier Son trilogy with some trepidation because it was a first-person narrative like the Fool and Assassin books. Also I'd heard they were quite a different to Hobb's previous work.

I should not have been nervous. Shaman's Crossing was quite different, with a much slower pace, but still excellent. In many ways, it is the tale of unintended consequences. A father, concerned that his soldier son will be a good officer, hands him over to a conquered enemy for a lesson he believe the boy cannot learn from an ally. When the boy is returned gravely wounded, his father realises his mistake, though he has no idea how far it extends.

I thought the book provided an intriguing look at both cultural and gender differences, as well as the kind of shenanigans that go on in all-boys environment. It reminded me a bit of the Song of the Lioness books that I read when I was younger and I enjoyed it a great deal. I definitely intend to read the rest of the books, though I have to say Hobb did not seem leave any clues as to the direction future books will take.

Another first book I have recently devoured is His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik. I had heard good things about Novik's books and a friend, knowing I like fantasy, had bought me one of the books from the series as a birthday gift. So when suvudu.com offered the first book in the series for free, I downloaded it. Despite the headaches reading on a computer screen gives me, I devoured the book in short order. If the intention of making the first book freely available was to whet the appetite for the rest of the series (which I have no doubt it was), then it has amply succeeded.

Set in an alternative history where dragons are real and important component of any fighting force, it is the story of a British naval officer thrust into the life of an aviator when he captures a French ship carrying an about-to-hatch dragon egg. Aviators live apart from the rest of society, let alone other fighting forces, and he has to adjust to a strange new life aided and abetted by his new companion Temeraire.

I loved the story and the concept. I thought the characters were well-constructed and the plot well-balanced. It is probably one of the best books I have read in quite some time and I look forward with great eagerness to reading the continuing adventures of Laurence and Temeraire.

Putting Down the Masters

Severian is an apprentice torturer with a perfect memory who runs into trouble when he falls in love with one of his guild's 'clients', as they are euphemistically known.

I picked up Gene Wolfe's collected works which make up the "Book of the New Sun" with great excitement after very much enjoying his award-winning novella "Memorare". But I must admit to being gravely disappointed.

The book is touted as a classic work of science fantasy in particular and speculative fiction in general. And it is well-written and has many subtle quirks. The worldbuilding is grand in scale and the ideas are intriguing. But, for me, examining a society where torturers have a guild and executioners seen as some kind of artists, is bait, not meat.

I found the jargon invented for the world alienating, rather than immersive. The plot twists and turns like an out of control snake and while all of these diversions may serve some higher purpose, perhaps thematic, it didn't hold my interest.

And the primary thing that I loved in "Memorare" is absent in "The Shadow of the Torturer". Gene Wolfe's characters and their interactions were so true-to-life and real in "Memorare" but in the book, it always felt like I was separated from them by a wall of water. I don't 'get' Severian or anyone else he interacts with. Possibly with the exception of Severian's initial infatuation with Thecla, I found the romantic interludes dull. Everything in the story felt unfamiliar.

And maybe that's the point and what other people love about the book. Recently, I came across a study group which is month-by-month reading these books of Gene Wolfe. And I would take nothing away from him as a writer - his prose is incredible and he clearly is some people's cup-of-tea.

But he's not mine. All the same, it's been hard to put the book done - not because I was engaged, but because I felt guilty. Putting down literary classics that bored me (like Dickens) has never really bothered me but there's something about putting down a speculative fiction classic that bothers me. This is supposed to be my genre.

Then I remember how many books there are that I'll never get around to reading. How many classics there are and how many I do enjoy. It's alright if there are some authors (or in this case, books) that I don't enjoy and whose work I can't get through. Even if they are good.

Modernisation and Development

Back in the bad old days, development and modernisation were seen as pretty much synonymous. Becoming developed meant, well, becoming more like the West. These days the two ideas have detached themselves and come to mean different things. To some people, anyway.

One of the interesting things about reading a book like "The Sociology of Modernisation and Development" (by David Harrison) is realising just how wide the gap between economics and other social sciences really is. Sure, economists like Rostow were involved in modernisation theory and economists associated with the Economic Commission to Latin America (ECLA) with dependency theory, the two early schools of thought in development theory. But do economists even realise this?

Economics seems by far the most ahistorical of the social sciences. Sociologists seem to always be looking over their shoulders, seeing where they've come from to work out where they might be going. Trying to read a sociology book or article without some exposure to the background is, in a phrase, not so fun.

Economics is quite different. When taught, economic theory is presented as immutable: it all started with Adam Smith and now is sitting on your table. Homo economicus (rational as he is) has always existed and always will. He determines the course of history and will chart the waters of the future. (If this paragraph seems gender-biased, you must be from one of the softer social sciences.)

While economic reasoning and rationality certainly are important, a neglect of the historical aspect can be dangerous. Sociologists seem far less likely to observe something twice. They know what previous theorists have said, what debates and ground have been covered and don't need to revisit the territory. Economists sometimes seem to run in circles, repeating the same mistakes, particularly in development, ad nauseum.

Take for example, the view of development as "being more like the West". Isn't that just what the Washington Consensus (and post-Washington Consensus) was all about? "This is how the West got rich and this is how everyone else will do it". Well, the West isn't looking so hot right now so perhaps that particular brand of advice will be meted out in smaller doses. But if the US and EU get back on their gargantuan feet anytime soon, it may not be long till its more of the same. Developing countries may want to take advantage of the window while it's still open.

The Networks We Don't See

Moises Naim's book "Illicit" is an eye-opener. A spine-chilling eye-opener. The book surveys the depth to which criminal networks have become embedded in our society. Just as globalisation has opened up the world to all sorts of legal cross-border flows, so too has it opened it up to illegal flows of drugs, arms, sex slaves, you name it.

And these are flows do not originate from the hierarchical mafioso a la "The Godfather". Rather as technology has involved, so too has the organisation of the criminal underworld. Yes, there are still very powerful groups and individuals but they are now organised in a networked way, making them that much harder to detect and crack down on.

Another evolution in the world of crime has been the specialisation in function, rather than a specific type of illicit trade. Drugs, arms, people trafficking are no longer distinct strands; instead they have run together where the same set of traffickers could be smuggling all manner of goods across borders. One of the main reasons why some degree of cognisance has been taken of how out of control contraband trade is the link between terrorists and criminals.

One of the areas most replete with grey areas is that of high-finance. As cross-border flows of contraband have grown, so too has the amount of money that needs laundering. While front businesses may still be part of the process, elaborate layers of financial products are also used making it that much easier to get money clean.

An expected boon may come in the form of the current financial crisis as one of the major groups of beneficiaries of financial deregulation have been the criminals. Certainly, as the book points out government aided and abetted as they sometimes are by civil society groups and big business are woefully losing the battle. Naim points to two reasons for this. First, the structure of law enforcement has not evolved in the dynamic way criminal networks have. Second, too much effort has been placed on the supply-side rather than the demand-side of efforts to curb illicit trade.

And this brings us to the crux of the matter. As Naim points out, it is not the glee of doing something morally questionable that motivates criminals, but profit. And as long as there is demand for the product and gains to be made from getting goods from where they're cheap to where they command a high price, efforts to squash the trafficking of illegal goods will prove ineffectual.

Naim's book combines the easy-to-read style and anecdotal evidence of a journalist to a well-thought through academic argument. He explores the structure of criminal networks and the agencies that work against them, analyses the motivators for illegal trade and how these point to improved strategies for combating it, and also looks at how various political theories may blind policy-makers to the extent of the problem. His book certainly is a wake-up call worth paying attention to.

Governments - What For?

Over the last decade, governments have appeared to play less and less of a role in the decision-making of the world economy. Multinational corporations, and in particular the world's major financial houses, seemed to rule the roost. In the wake of the credit crunch, this perception has been shaken up. Only one of the sinking ships, Merill Lynch, got bailed out by a peer; the remaining survivors have been rescued by the American government.

A decade ago, Linda Weiss made the argument in her book "The Myth of the Powerless State" that governments had a crucial role to play in what she refers to as an "internationalising" (as opposed to a "globalising") world economy. She argued that the reason why people believed that the power of governments was disappearing is that they expected the trappings of a powerful goverment to remain immutable. But, she pointed out, a government alive to the evolution of its economy would instead change its tools of trade over time to ensure that it provided what was most needed to nursemaid the economy through its various stages.

The primary examples of powerful government that she singles out are those of Japan and Germany. With an acute eye for detail, she sifts through the twentieth century history of these global powerhouses to show how their instruments for influencing the economy have been altered as their economies grew. Signs that others have mistaken for a weakening state in these two countries, she reinterprets as the evolution of a state alive to the changing needs of the industries it shepherds. And certainly she makes a convincing argument, both for these economies and the other East Asian tigers that have followed in Japan's footsteps.

Weiss contrasts governments which have been, and remain, involved with their economies to those with a hands-off approach, principally Britain and America. After the failure of Keynesianism in the 1970s, these governments have largely favoured the neoclassical approach which allows the economy to tread its own way through international waters. An approach that the last year of turmoil has shown up as being as flawed as in its previous incarnation, prior to the Great Depression.

Weiss also distances the governments of Germany, Japan and the East Asian Tigers from those of the Scandinavian countries. Generally, the Scandanavian countries are also grouped as having strong governments but Weiss draws an important distinction: like the Anglo-American model, the Scandinavian model views the economy as having consumption as its primary aim and fashioning its policies in this light. Germany, Japan and the newly industrialised Asian tigers instead focus on the production side of the economy and in this way have been able to preserve strong government even as the economy strengthens. Thereby undermining what Weiss sees as a false dichotomy between strong government and strong industry.

Weiss' distinction between consumption-based and production-based economies is an interesting one. And certainly one which she backs up and explains in intriguing detail. What is also interesting is her argument that production-based economies tend to have better consumption-outcomes than consumption-based economies.

Throughout, Weiss' arguments are cogently presented and her knowledge of the cases she discusses is exhaustive. She makes a powerful case for the importance of government in the modern global economy and her emphasis on the role that a government can and should take in its economy is certainly one which policy-makers scraping up the latest financial mess would do well to heed.

Equality - Still In Short Supply

Once upon a time the concept of equality was hardly an important one. Today it is a touchphrase as frequently invoked and as little understood as "sustainable development". Equality is, apparently, something everyone wants and, moreover, it is something that everyone should want and should have. But what exactly is it?

When the hierarchical conception of the world first started to break down, it was largely thanks to liberal philosophers like Locke and Hobbes who posited that people were morally equal. Locke justified moral equality in more religious terms, focusing on the fact that all offspring of Adam were equal and could not be compelled by another to do something. Hobbes justified it in more visceral terms appealing to the fact that as any man could be killed by either the confederacy or guile of others, they must all be equal. He also observed that there was no greater proof that men were equal than that each thought himself better than his peers.

Both of these early liberal philosophers used their conception of moral equality to underpin theories of state power deriving from a social contract. For Locke, men exchanged their autonomy for the protection afforded by the state but they could regain their autonomy if the state failed in keeping up its end of the bargain. For Hobbes, the only way to escape the "nasty, brutish and short" life of the state of nature was to hand over all autonomy to the state, or as he called it "the leviathan" and there was no regaining of that autonomy as any challenge to the leviathan would inevitably return society to the state of nature.

As there is no evidence for either the state of nature or a social contract, hypothetical or otherwise, contractarianism has largely fallen out of favour. Moral equality hasn't and these days the implications of it are considered to be spread far more widely.

But for all equality's allure to the modern mind, its evidence in the world at large is fairly limited. Yes, if one chooses only to focus on western societies, it seems that people's rights at least are equal. Though, if one digs into it, the supposed equality of the genders has not filtered through to "equal pay for equal work", except in a handful of countries, and one has only to peruse the most basic of stats regarding race in American to realise that racial equality is still an elusive goal.

If one looks at the world as a whole, the situation is only bleaker. Though slightly outdated, Bob Sutcliffe's book "100 Ways of Seeing an Unequal World" provides a horrifying look at global data on inequality, no matter which axis one chooses to look at it from. For a South African, perhaps the most compelling are the graphs comparing the Black/White division in South African during Apartheid and the North/South division of the world in the 1990s. Sutcliffe takes the ratios of the human development index, education spending, health spending, infant mortality, life expectancy, industrial wages and income and shows that the division between the north and south is as great, and in some cases greater, that the division between blacks and whites at the height of apartheid.

In a world where moral equality has been enshrined into human rights, how can things have gone so badly wrong? Capitalism and democracy are supposed to be the economic and political systems that best enshrine this idea of moral equality. And yet they fail so badly. Perhaps a Marxist would appeal that the most basic forms of equality is equality of income and the problem with capitalism is that it rewards people unequally. The problem with Marxism is while great in theory, in practice it tends to turn into Maoism or Leninism, which involves the sacrifice of many other forms of equality in order to achieve income equality. And do we really believe that our rights to choices about what we believe, what we do, who we gather with are worth that? Especially considering that capitalism tends to generate higher average incomes anyway.

The problem with capitalism is that while in theory everyone is given the same measure of influence over the economy and so whatever tangible outcome they end up with is a result of their own decisions, in practice people start with such different allocations that the final allocation can't be considered to have been derived solely from their choices. This is the problem with capitalism identified by John Rawls. Rawls agreed that equality of income was itself a weak goal especially if everyone was better off if those with the most to contribute, received the most in return. But he stressed the importance of protecting the most vulnerable in society. He argued that those who ended up as the most vulnerable did so largely because of things they had no control over - the talents they were born with, the social situation of their parents. So why should they be punished and others rewarded for possessing things entirely beyond their own control?

And this really is the problem with the world today - people are primarily punished and rewarded for issues far beyond their control. The child born in Niger has a start on life so dramatically different from that of a child, any child, born in the US or the UK, that any hope of them achieving the same outcomes is almost certainly doomed. And if the child should happen to be female, her chances are even worse.

Income equality is certainly not an end in itself and even equality of opportunity isn't - considering that some people are just born lazy. But a little bit more of both would make a big difference to a lot of people - after all, equality is about each person having the best shot at whatever their perception of "the good" is.

Who Runs the World?

Keynes is widely credited as being the brains behind the economic multinational organisations set up after World War Two. In response to the Great Depression, Keynes had argued for the necessity of government intervention to stabilise the boom and bust cycle of the free market. This held both at a national and an international level. However, when it came time to set up these new institutions, Keynes had less to do with the construction of these entities than he might have wanted.

Richard Peet argues in his book "Unholy Trinity" that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were all established on and continue to be driven by a neoclassical influence. The argument that the "Washington Consensus" associated with these organisations is part of a neoclassical agenda is not unique to Peet; what is interesting in his contribution to the literature on this subject is that he traces this neoclassical influence right back to the establishment of these organisations.

In fact, the only thing he identifies as being Keynesian about the organisations is that they are founded on the belief that some kind of government intervention is required in the free market. As others have argued, his book identifies the American government as being the primary agent behind the influence of neoclassicism in these organisations. He goes further and attributes the major financial institutions as being the prime mover behind the American government's espousal of neoclassicism.

The historical argument of the book offers an interesting perspective of how the US government imprinted its influence on the Bretton Woods organisations from their establishment. The world had just come out of a period where the USA had withdrawn from the wider world. Much of the spillover of the Great Depression into the rest of the world was due to this decision. More importantly, the Allies had been staring down the jaws of defeat until the USA had entered the war. The negatives of a US withdrawal from international affairs were only too apparent, so the world was willing to concede the deciding vote in the new organisations in exchange for US involvement.

Peet traces the role of the US government, academic institutions, mutinational financial institutions, particularly investment banks, and press in establishing the hegemonic influence of neoclassicism. Although academic institutions are nominally independent, much of their funding is corporate. Furthermore, economic academics who leave the Ivory Tower, either temporarily or permanently, tend to find a home in government organisations and major financial houses. These same financial houses often own controlling influences over media companies. Peet lays out the academic credentials of the various heads of the two Bretton Woods organisations and it is clear enough that many of them were not only educated at the same institutions but most had worked for investment banks before taking up their positions in these international bodies.

Much emphasis is often laid on the amount of debt owed by poor and middle-income countries to the wealthy ones. But it should not be forgotten that much of these countries' debt are also owed to and traded by major international financial houses. And neoclassical tenets do provide the best guarantee that those debts will be paid as they promote fiscal discipline and the importance of exports. By minimising government spending and maximising export revenues, governments are more likely to be able to pay their debts. However, the other economic effects of such policies are more arguable.

This book does provide interesting insights into how prevailing economic powers use their influence to chart academic discourse. However, what it does neglect is the fact that sometimes this flow goes in both directions. Throughout history, it has often been the thinkers who have envisioned a new way of organising society, both politically and economically, and the rest of society has followed. Even classical theory itself was one of the progenitors of capitalism. There may be feedback effects that serve to entrench theory so as to protect a system once it is established but often it is theory which is the first mover.

As the book mentions, a counter-hegemonic movement has begun in academia and outside of it that opposes the claims of neoclassicism. As the new discourse establishes itself, it too will build a picture of how the world should be organised and should that picture make its way into the real world, it too will spawn interests to feed the theories that brought it into being. One can only hope that the world it builds will be a prettier one for those at the bottom of the pile.