Marbury

on david laws and marbury's law

Chris Dillow has a superb post on Laws and laws, which must be read in full. But for now, here's one sentence:

The message here is that it is better to be a prissy, priggish follower of rules than a man of any other virtues - which is a perfect recipe for mediocrity.

Agreed.

But many of you will disagree. Reading the excellent discussion below has caused me to reflect on why I see this so differently from several of my readers and many commentators. In what way are my priorities different, when it comes to choosing politicians?

Here's the thing I think I care about relatively more than most (NB the "relatively" is crucial here):

- How able the person is, how competent - how well they can do the job. The main reason I'm pro-Laws is that - and here, nearly nobody disagrees - this was the most remarkable case of man meeting moment. Everything about his education, professional background, talents, disposition and political positioning made him the right man, at the right time, for this job. Osbourne was correct when, displaying a hitherto unsuspected eloquence, he said it was as if Laws had been put on earth for this role. Nobody thinks Alexander is of the same calibre, but neither is there a better alternative. Given how absolutely vital this role will be over the next year, it would take an awful lot to persuade me that the guy most qualified to do it shouldn't be doing it.

Things I care about relatively less than most:

- Moral probity. To put it flatly, I couldn't give a toss whether a politician is a "hypocrite" or not. As far as I'm concerned, we're all hypocrites in one way or another. I don't think politicians, including ones who fiddle their expenses, are any worse - in fact, let's coin Marbury's Law: people always under-estimate their own hypocrisy and over-estimate the hypocrisy of others. I think Laws's offence was piddling (and if it had been a mum claiming benefits I'd have called it piddling too). Politicians have to reach Berlusconi-levels of moral corruption before I worry about that more than whether they're competent. If the bloke with the moat had been a world-class expert on global affairs and a superb statesman, I'd have had him at the Foreign Office, moat and all.

- Empathy. Again, I couldn't give a flying cellphone whether or not a politician "understands me". If they're at the Treasury I'd rather they understood fractional-reserve banking; if at Education, the data on what makes a good teacher.

giving religion its due

David Sloan Wilson is one of the most brilliant evolutionary scholars around. An atheist himself, he has a great respect for the role of religion in human society. He works with religious communities to see what they can learn from evolutionism and vice versa. This seems to be a more fruitful approach to spreading the Darwinist word than that taken by Dawkins et al. Here's an extract from a fascinating interview with DSW:

I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist. One of the things that infuriates me about the newest crop of angry atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, is their denial of the beneficial aspects of religion. Their beef is not just that there is no evidence for God. They also insist that religion "poisons everything", as Christopher Hitchens subtitled his book. They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.

he just wants to be friends with you

German chancellor Angela Merkel is afraid of dogs. As Russian president, Vladimir Putin tried to exploit this by having Koni, his black Labrador, sit in on their meetings.

From Foreign Policy, May 2010, via Prospect.

hard yards

I liked this sentence from Allegra Stratton's profile of David Laws in The Guardian (published yesterday, before the scandal broke):

Detail on Laws's early life is scant, running to one brief sentence in his Wikipedia entry.

I suppose we already knew that journalistic research often amounts to a click on Wikipedia but it's amusing to read someone being so candid about it.

has laws been broken?

God I hope not. If he is forced out or even sideways over this then it will be a sign of how destructive the over-reaction to the "expenses scandal" has become. Is there one serious person who doesn't think that Laws is the right man, in the right job, at the right - the critical - time? Is there one informed observer who thinks that he tried to profit from this arrangement - who thinks anything other than that he got himself tangled up in his attempts to keep his relationship secret?

The answer to both these questions, if people are being honest with themselves, has to be no. But the tide of moral righteousness is high.

aiming high

The story of how Colin Stagg was entrapped by the police using an undercover policewoman as bait is of course mostly awful, angering and sad. But Jon Ronson's retelling reminded me of its black comedy too. "Lizzie's" job was to entice Stagg into confessing to the murder (he didn't commit) by suggesting that she would find it a massive turn-on:

Lizzie's "dark secret" – as she finally informed Stagg in Hyde Park, a large team of undercover officers monitoring their every move – was that when she was a teenager she'd got involved with some "special people" and "a baby had had its throat cut. And then the baby's blood was put into a cup, and everybody had a drink, and it was the most electrifying atmosphere." After she and her satanic cult had drank the baby's blood they killed its mother: "She was laid out naked and these knives were brought out and this man handed me one of the knives and he asked me to cut the woman's throat, and I did, and then there was this big orgy, and I was with this man, well, this man was the best ever."

Lizzie looked Stagg in the eyes and said she could only ever truly love a man who'd done a similar thing. Stagg replied: "I think you're aiming a bit high."

the naked milibands

The Milibands are so close in policy terms that it doesn't seem unreasonable to look hard at their respective personalities. Here's one question. Which brother will be more likely to take bold risks as Labour leader? There are lots of ways to assess this: look at their past behaviour, career choices, choice of fruit. But you might also want to factor in birth order. According to the highly regarded research of evolutionary psychologist Frank Sulloway, whether a sibling is younger or older tells you a lot about the probability of them being a risk-taker versus someone of more conservative, cautious instincts. Originally in for the fight for food, and now for parental attention, siblings develop different strategies according to where they are in the birth order. Over a period of decades, Sulloway has put together a massive data-set that supports this hypothesis. It includes a huge amount of unfeasibly detailed research on thousands of historical figures (for instance, who voted which way during the French Revolution and who swung Protestant during the Reformation), which he uses to argue to that birth order (not class or technology) is the real engine of history. Here's an extract from a New Yorker piece on Sulloway of a few years ago:

In the family, firstborns identify more strongly with power and authority than their siblings do, they employ their superior size and strength to defend their special status and frequently "minimize the costs of having siblings by dominating them."In their relations with siblings, firstborns are more assertive, jealous, and defensive than laterborns. They also tend to be more self-confident, and are overrepresented among Nobel Prize winners and political leaders, including American Presidents and British prime ministers. Churchill, Washington, Ayn Rand, and Rush Limbaugh might be taken as illustrative.

As the underdogs of the family, laterborns are more inclined to identify with the downtrodden and to question the status quo-sometimes to the point of becoming revolutionaries. They are more open to experience, because this openness aids them, as latecomers to the family, in finding an unoccupied niche. Their openness tends to make them more imaginative, creative, independent, altruistic, and liberal. From their ranks have come the bold explorers, the iconoclasts, and the heretics of history. Joan of Arc, Marx, Lenin, Jefferson, Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Bill Gates typify the behavior of laterborn siblings.

This can all make it sound a bit pop but Sulloway's stuff is taken seriously by some serious people because the data is so rigorous.

Now, together with Richard Zweigenhaft, Sulloway has published a statistical analysis of risk-taking amongst baseball-playing brothers. They wanted to find out if younger brothers were more likely to "steal" bases - a particularly cheeky manoeuvre in baseball. The results showed that for more than 90 percent of sibling pairs who had played in the major leagues throughout baseball’s recorded history, the younger brother (regardless of overall talent) tried to steal more often than his older brother.

You might interpret the very fact that Ed Miliband has chosen to run in this contest as a "base-stealing" manoeuvre. You might also conclude that Miliband's banana moment - after backing down from a challenge to Gordon Brown - was evidence of his innate caution. Then the question becomes - do you think the job of opposition leader demands an instinctive risk-taker, or an instinctive conservative (small 'c', obviously)?

(h/t: Alan Schwarz/NYT)

ps I'm wondering whether that headline will generate some extra traffic.

pps I'm back.

hiatus

I'm going away for a few days, so blogging will be sparse to non-existent until the last days of May.

I hope the weather's nice for you too.

interview

President Barack Obama meets with U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, left, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, March 28, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

explain and inform

A friend points me to this headline on an AP report:

At worst, oil spewed already could fill 102 gyms

That's brilliant, isn't it? It really helps me understand the vastness of the disaster. Now all I have to do is think about a gym (though it's been a while since I've seen one, to be honest) and then multiply it, visually, by 102. Simple. I'm surprised they didn't do football stadiums, that would have been really helpful too. In fact here are some alternative suggestions:

At worst, oil spewed already could fill 1542 swimming pools.

At worst, oil spewed already could fill 674 saunas.

At worst, oil spewed already could fill 23 White Houses.

But no. "102 gyms" is just perfect.

ask a professor

David Leonhardt of the NYT strikes a similar note in his column to Ben Smith's brief post: the last four months have made the first sixteen months of Obama's administration look a lot better than they looked likely to in January. As is standard, Leonhardt pulls in a few quotes from academics to make his point, including this one:

“If you’d asked me about this administration after Scott Brown was elected, I’d have told you it was going to fizzle into virtually nothing,” said Theda Skocpol, the Harvard political scientist. “Now it could easily be one of the pivotal periods in domestic policy.”

It's honest of Professor Skocpol to admit she got things wrong. But if I had asked her that in January and got that reply, I'd have said she was wildly over-reacting. Most reasonably objective commentators, including this one, thought it a setback but by no means a fatal one. Perhaps Leonhardt left out her next sentence: "But hey, what do I know?"

abe's progress

I've just started Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik, and it promises to be marvellous. Here is a great sentence from it, about Abraham Lincoln:

What we wonder at is that a simple Springfield lawyer could become president: from his point of view, probably what was really amazing was that a cabin-born bumpkin had become a Springfield lawyer.

the sage of threadneedle street

I suppose, if you want to know the answer to the question "Where does money come from?" there are few better places to start than the Bank of England.

That's what Mr T. Cuff reasoned anyway, and to that end made a Freedom of Information request to the Bank. Its Deputy Secretary, Ben Norman, replied with an erudite and lucid two pager:

 

You can read the whole thing here in PDF.

Surely one for the Letters of Note blog.

obama's getting good at this

(Photo: Pete Souza/White House)

The White House scored a big legislative victory yesterday: its sweeping bill to reform the nation's financial regulatory system passed the Senate, and is now well on the way to becoming law. It had bipartisan creds too: several Republicans joined Democrats in voting for it, including Ted Kennedy's Republican successor, Scott Brown. This isn't quite as big has health care, but it's an accomplishment of comparable scale, and prompts the usually cautious commentator Ben Smith to declare:

In the space of four months, President Obama has gone from being a president whose legacy might have been limited to the financial stabilization of the beginning of his term to one whose strength, and broad policy legacy, seems difficult to question.

I sometimes think that because he's generally well-regarded anyway (at least over here) people lose sight of what an extraordinarily accomplished president Obama has become. In case you need any more persuading, see David Brooks here (on Obama's ability to deal with several crises at once without panicking) or Ambinder on his evolving approach to foreign policy.

His approval ratings are ticking upwards, though whether they recover strongly enough to help prevent a November massacre depends largely on the economic situation.

UPDATE: The brilliant David Leonhardt has made the same point as Ben Smith, at column length.

Meanwhile, Melanie Phillips (the British Anne Coulter) declares the Obama adminstration to be "evil".

image management

This is the photo that sits atop Andy Burnham's declaration of intent in the Mirror. It's a really bad photo, isn't it? The poky setting and odd angles, the clenched fist and veiny hand (maybe the clumsiness is deliberate and he's trying to evoke subconscious memories of the Michael Foot era, to signify unvarnished authenticity). Weirdest of all, there's a spine hanging from a coathook. Is it his? Perhaps he suffers from a rare condition which means his spine doesn't fit in the usual slot and he has to carry it around. So when he walks into a room, he naturally hangs it from the nearest coathook before starting work. Or maybe it's the Backbone of Leadership, I don't know.

In other news, Diane Abbott announced her leadership bid today. This should at the very least introduce some mischief into what otherwise threatens to be a dry old do. And as the Standard's Paul Waugh points out, she brings much-needed diversity to the race, being the only  candidate to have a child at private school.

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