Econothink |
If you ask two economists for an opinion, expect at least 3 conflicting answers.
Economics is not the «dismal science» of Thomas Carlyle, a term he coined in an 1849 tract, it's not any kind of science.
As an interested layman I have been wrestling with the ins and outs of the financial crisis and trying to make sense of the views bandied about by pundits, politicians and punters. Where are we in the economic cycle and what might happen in our economic future? Will there be serious inlation or even hyperinflation (like in Zimbabwe or 1930s Germany) so that the savings of the prudent and thrifty quickly become valueless?
Massive inflation in house prices in the decade after 1997 was obscured by
- (1) historically low interest rates,
- (2) dropping the rises from the index of inflation - or rather using an index which doesn't include them,
- (3) gearing - an increase of say £100000 in the price of a house is geared down - the buyer pays off the increase over typically 25 years softening the impact.
So in the end, we have already had a cycle of inflation - as anyone who bought a house just before 2007-2008 will tell you. And we're experiencing a period of deflation as anyone trying to sell a house now will tell you.
Adam Smith, the original economist, pointed out that wealth could only be produced by fixed assets (like tractors or factories) but such assets cannot themselves be counted as wealth. So, for example, buy-to-let landlords contribute to the economy, but only if their properties are actually let.
Following the tailspin in house prices, western governments have been busy injecting liquidity (i.e. money) into their economies. The current euphemism is quantitative easing (QE), a.k.a. seigniorage or sovereign credit, or to you and me, printing money.
And they are printing money as the M1 increase shows. This 'reflation' is because government economists have come to believe that value, and especially property value, is as real (and durable) as concrete. And although events have shown them to have been spectacularly deluded they cling to this mantra.
It's claimed that in the short term the amounts of QE are small compared to the loss in value of property assets and, as a result, inflation won't increase much because of it. The fact that the RPI is currently negative is mainly due to the reduction in property prices and clearly they can't go down forever. At some point the RPI will bottom out. If you aren't paying a mortgage, then inflation is still over 2% and was up as high as 5% last year.
So will printing money produce hyperinflation in the long term?
Unfortunately economics isn't up to the job of answering that question - there are just too many unknowns: how much longer will the government printing presses roll; will Asian creditors demand their money back; when will property prices bottom out; will people continue to accept wage cuts to save jobs; and many more.
Perhaps the best we can hope for are indicators of coming disaster - like economic earthquake detectors. Let's look at the background first.
In the UK we have already begun to import inflation as the pound has weakened with respect to other currencies (even after its recent revival, it's still only 80% of the dollar value it was a year ago). As many imports are paid for in dollars, this inflation is working its way through to retail prices at the moment. Judging by the recession in the early 90s, these effects take about 18 months to work through so inflation (the real kind) should start to show during the first quarter of next year. The government's desperate attempts to push house prices back up may also be having some effect.
The temptation for governments now is to inflate their way out of their debt - if a government borrows a trillion dollars at 5% interest over 10 years then it has to pay back over $600 billion more than it borrowed, and that extra money comes from the taxpayer. But if inflation runs at 5% then that 60% increase is effectively wiped out - an interest-free loan!
As governments have the power to control inflation, and are not known for their ethical principles, we can all expect a dose of engineered inflation over the next decade.
We can also expect that governments will make every effort to suppress the true inflation rate.
In fact this has already happened in the UK (and possibly in the US). In the UK the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) doesn't include mortgage interest and certain other housing costs has until recently been lower than the Retail Prices Index (RPI) which does. So we could easily see double digit inflation in the next few years.
But what about hyperinflation?
In one sense we have already experienced it - it's known as the credit bubble and when it burst, we saw hyperdeflation as the new money - credit default swaps and similar - was seen to be almost valueless. All of a sudden, banks discovered their billions of dollars of capital was worthless. Most of us weren't directly affected by these massive gains and losses but our governments soon made sure that we were.
In 1920s Germany, a complex mix of government good intentions, unpaid war reparations and currency speculation (short selling the mark) led to hyperinflation. In 1920 a loaf of bread cost 2 marks but by June 1923 a loaf of bread cost 430 billion marks. Shops shut down as they couldn't afford to restock using money; people had to just barter goods and services. It was evidently tough on the man in the street.
Money that pays for real goods and services produced by the people for the people (all those using the same currency) is not inflationary. This is however not what has happened as capital injection by governments has been used to settle the losses of banks without any repayment in goods or services - simply caving in to the too-big-to-fail blackmail. So there is now a risk of serious inflation.
From the point of view of the saver in the street, the main harbingers of inflation are rapidly rising interest rates and money changing hands more quickly. So keep an eye on lending rates and the velocity of money. If either of these start to climb suddenly, be prepared for serious inflation.
There are of course winners in inflation - property owners, mortgage holders and other debtors.
Sound like any MPs you know?
Let Adam Smith have the last word: «The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.» |
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| by The Impressionist on Fri, 05 Jun 2009, 08:54 |
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Airport Security |
I noticed that my PC had taken to thrashing its hard disk every few seconds and was worried that it had picked up a virus. The disk light would flash every second and then there would be a rumble as it transferred who knows what private information to who knows where.
There didn't seem to be any network activity so I looked in the task manager and discovered a little process called jqs.exe which I didn't remember seeing before.
This turns out to be the so-called Java Quick Starter process which comes along with the latest version of the Java runtime and is silently installed on machines running windoze 2K or XP.
It's supposed to improve Java startup times (which have been lamentably slow) so if you happen to encounter a website that runs a Java applet, you'll be able to see it a bit sooner - at the cost of an irritating noise and reduced lifetime of your hard disk.
I opted for the quiet life and disabled the process. So on the odd occasion I visit a Java website, I will have to wait a few extra seconds for its applets to fire up. An easy decision.
To disable the service in windows 2000
- start the control panel (Start->Settings->Control Panel)
- start Administrative Tools
- choose services
- right click on Java Quick Starter and choose Properties
- Click Stop to stop the service, change Startup Type to disabled and click OK
(The procedure will be similar in XP)
So far, you will have noticed, this article has said nothing about airport security.
Well, it's about punishing the vast majority for the sins of the tiny minority.
My gripe really isn't with Java, which is an excellent concept and language, or indeed Sun (or Oracle who have now bought it over). It's just that if we can't develop sensible and simple solutions even to technical problems like the speed of loading a piece of software on a PC, then we are doomed to wait in ever lengthening queues at airports, on telephone help lines, at accident units.
Because it's easier to fix a flaky operation by bolting on some cobbled together fix than cure the root causes. Sooner or later, this accumulation of short-term botches brings the whole operation crashing down. Our forebears knew this when they built the London sewage system (still working after 150 years), or the Pantheon in Rome (still working after 1900 years). |
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| by The Impressionist on Thu, 14 May 2009, 09:06 |
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The Moral Manor |
Look up the word Manor in Google and you get a whole collection of definitions, all of which (apart from the trade names) mean the same thing: the home of a rich person.
There is however a more specialised usage of the word - the territory of a criminal gang. The Kray twins, 1960s villains in the east end of London, were quite at home talking about their «manor» and the idea of a new batch of crooks «taking over the manor» after the demise of the old lot is well known.
There are many who would have us all conform to their pet morality.
Like ethical gangsters they lay claim to the moral manor.
For centuries in the west and still today in the middle east, the church was allowed to exercise its self-appointed role as the arbiter of right and wrong. Everyone knew his place in the grand scheme of things and ethical standards were dictated (though often conveniently ignored) by those at the top. This power was gradually eroded and usurped by the merchant classes who came to dominate cultural and ethical standards.
The result has been the popular fetish with personal wealth and the adoration of those who possess it. The «greed is good» ethic came out the closet in the 1980s and culminated in the banking excesses of the 'noughties', though bankers have long been the Cavaliers of Capitalism as coined by Karl Marx.
However, those who enthusiastically or cynically espouse the prevailing morality must beware: paradigm shifts occur at lightning speed and with revolutionary zeal.
Thus when hapless UK chancellor Darling diffidently delivered his recent budget - based on the premise that Britain can borrow and spend its way out of its debt problem - the chorus of outrage that greeted it showed that the paradigm shift was already well under way. With its public finances in such a poor state and no sign of remedial action, it's just possible that UK PLC will be unable to service its debt and, like Iceland, have to go cap in hand to the IMF.
However, a new mood of austerity is descending. No longer are the masses prepared to accept the live now pay later ethic spun by Brown (and Bush) as «economic stability». A shift away from the intellectual complacency and torpor so encouraged by the analgesic Blair/Brown things can only get better era.
The need for thrift is a message that the British people are belatedly getting. A new realism is starting to take hold; the green shoots of independent thought as individuals realise that despite its claims to the contrary, their government will not protect them when the going gets really sticky. Only the ostriches in government who think they can spin their way out of trouble still have to catch on.
It often takes a catastrophic event to shake people back to reality: an earthquake revealing criminally negligent build quality and corruption; fish stocks fished out after scientific advice is ignored; forest fire fatalities after a careless barbecue. Usually prior warnings from concerned groups will have been roundly attacked by those with powerful vested interests. But sooner or later reality catches up and the previously indisputable perversion of the facts in the interests of the few is exposed.
As our current set of mores is being discredited so the moral manor is being taken over by a new set of interests whose aims we can only guess at. You can be sure that government and corporate think tanks are aleady pondering ways to exploit the new morality for their own gain. Then the cycle will repeat itself.
The one positive angle on all this is that the financial catastrophe may have arrived just in time to save us from the kind of State that Philip Pullman has so poignantly characterised: «We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless».
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| by The Impressionist on Mon, 27 Apr 2009, 09:04 |
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Unnatural Selection |
Charles Darwin's great principle doesn't just affect lions and zebras on the plains of the Serengeti ...
In 1937 the Russian composer Shostakovitch was intimidated by Stalin into inscribing the score of his Fifth Symphony A Soviet artist's practical, creative response to just criticism.
In a public humiliation worthy of Stalinist Russia, four leading (ex-)bankers appeared recently before a Treasury Select Committee in a demeaning charade of contrition over their failure to foresee and prevent the credit crunch.
This unseemly, populist spectacle serves only to deflect attention from the abject moral, regulatory and legislative failures of the establishment - the government, the opposition, the administration and their cronies in commerce.
The purpose of government used to be to protect its citizens from foreign thrall - to create an environment in which they could go about their lawful business; the purpose of banks used to be the protection of depositors' money and the supply of credit to the creditworthy.
In the UK the dictum became 'the purpose of government is to be re-elected', rather as the bankers' purpose became to increase their bonuses. Both of these objectives are understandable but have consequences that are ... undesirable.
And it is difficult to see how this culture might be changed. By analogy, most dangerous drivers can't be persuaded to change their ways until they have an «accident». The more serious the crash, the more amenable they are to re-education. Those that survive, that is.
When the present government bailed out the major banks, it showed that its instincts lie in the fix as opposed to the cure. The government opted to apply pain-killers to a broken arm to mollify the patient whilst hoping that the fracture would repair itself. This is unsurprising given that the deputy supremo regulator of financial institutions was a man who, as a banking executive, was closely involved in the unfair dismissal in 2005 of a manager who dared to point out the excessive risks his bank was taking. In banking it seems that it's not just the debts that are toxic.
The environment that selected for those individuals who neglected diligent behaviour in the pursuit of personal gain has led inexorably to this crash. This toxic environment is mainly due to government complacency, an interpretation it seems unwilling to acknowledge, preferring instead to pass the buck to the bankers.
If the government's spin succeeds in persuading us to repeat the feckless spend-spend-spend behaviour that led to the crash, it can expect only an even larger pop as the next bubble bursts.
The establishment may yet rue the day it decided to rescue such powerful and monolithic organisations and in doing so re-endow them with the capability to bring us all down.
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| by The Impressionist on Thu, 12 Feb 2009, 13:38 |
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Saving Time |
Saturday 29th November 2008 is buy nothing day, an annual event with enhanced poignancy in these straitened times. An excuse to save your hard earned lucre rather than blow it on stuff you don't need at a price you can't afford?
As Mr Micawber said, 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and sixpence, result misery.' The currency may have changed but the principle hasn't.
Just as some individuals are better at saving, so too are entire countries. The OECD Trade Balance chart records how much wealth countries have saved in relation to each other. The Trade Balance is the difference in value between what a country exports and what it imports - what it sells and what it buys. If you export more than you import then you accumulate savings and that makes it a lot easier to get through when times get hard. The converse is also true.
It's a chart that you really don't want to be bottom of.
Bottom of the pops is the good old US of A with an eye-watering $882bn deficit in 2006 ($3K per citizen) - followed by the United Kingdom with $162bn ($2.7K per citizen). These are just the deficits with other OECD countries - that is, not including China and much of the far east or the Gulf States.
Countries in the best positions include Germany, at #1 with a surplus of $206bn, and mighty Norway (pop. 4.6 million) at #3 with $58bn. Each Norwegian man, woman and child has a safety net of $12600 to help them through this recession. Perhaps it's having to face a long winter every year that has made them so frugal.
The relegation contenders in this particular league have borrowed money from abroad over the past decade to fund an orgy of consumer spending and fooled themselves into thinking that this was the same thing as a strong economy. In Britain the banks have borrowed £700bn more than the Brits have in savings. This extra money has been borrowed from overseas investors and has been spent on imported cars, gadgets, clothes and trinkets. In fact, all the things that are worth a lot less as soon as you get them home. No factories, then ...
And the UK (and US) governments still want to encourage this lunacy - a process euphemistically known as kickstarting the economy.
The idea that thrift is a bad thing can be traced back to John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s who suggested that if money was saved rather than spent, then demand was reduced slowing the economy and making a recession worse. He called this the Paradox of Thrift - a recession is made worse by savers who don't create demand by buying stuff.
In fact, the argument is a little more subtle: Keynes had it that saving is actually a good thing as long as borrowers in the economy want to borrow. So it's OK if the banks have £100bn in deposits as long as businesses, homebuyers and investors want to borrow at least £100bn. Clearly this is the case in the UK as the banks have lent £700bn more than UK depositors have given them. And so the Paradox of Thrift does not apply: the right thing to do is to save money.
Unfortunately, the US and UK governments have lunged at the simplistic version of the Paradox of Thrift and claim that demand needs a quick boost even though we are grossly overindebted already. Having realised that the US and UK can really pay back only a fraction of their current debt, their governments are cynically trying to resurrect the borrow and spend ethic to create the illusion of recovery.
Even if they manage to hoodwink the public and browbeat the banks into this, the evil moment when investors demand repayment will merely be postponed. If your supertanker is heading towards the rocks, the worst thing you can do is call for full speed ahead.
What happens when depositors and investors demand their money back? Banks (and countries) go bust.
It's already happened to Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, Iceland and loads more. The UK may be on the menu for 2010.
So even if you do buy something in the shops this Saturday, make sure you don't buy 'no more boom and bust' Brown's spin on borrowing more.
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| by The Impressionist on Fri, 28 Nov 2008, 09:43 |
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Cutting Grass and Base Rates |
In most simple descriptions of the internal combustion engine a critical component is left out: the governor.
The governor is a device that measures the speed of the engine and slows it down more the faster it tries to go. In my lawnmower the crankshaft has blades on it to make a fan - the faster the engine turns the more air the fan produces and the more this pushes a vane that closes down the throttle. Even if I open the throttle full, the wind from the fan closes the throttle back.
Why is such a device necessary? Because without it the engine would get faster and suck in even more air and fuel making it go faster still, and so on. Eventually - or in the case of a lawnmower - very soon, the engine would tear itself to pieces as the internal mechanical strains became too great.
Sounds a bit like what has just happened to the financial system, doesn't it.
Governors (not including Governors of the Bank of England) and similar control systems are well known in engineering and come under the heading negative feedback. Negative feedback is used as a protection mechanism in systems where there is amplification - I open the throttle using a tiny push of my finger and my lawnmower expends thousands of times more energy to go faster and cut more grass. The governor feeds a tiny bit of the increased output back to decrease the input.
How could we engineer negative feedback into the financial system to stop it tearing itself to pieces from time to time?
At the moment, bank rates, the rates which savers and borrowers get are supposed to be controlled by setting a central base rate. Unfortunately the base rate is only loosely related to the cost of money. The lawnmower equivalent of a centrally set base rate would be another control that you had to adjust every few minutes to prevent the engine blowing up or grinding to a halt. You can see why even lawnmowers don't use anything so crude.
Markets without effective feedback loops are like an engine without a governor. Unstable. To get stability, all sorts of complicated ad hoc regulations have to be cooked up, like a base rate mechanism, usually as a knee-jerk reaction to some crisis or previous regulatory failure. This leaves opportunities for human error, dishonesty and manipulation and has to be constantly tweaked. The 'light touch' regulation of the UK authority the FSA (Financial Services Authority) has been woefully ineffective.
Suppose instead we were to tie lending and saving rates to price inflation, what would happen?
For the sake of argument let's say savers get 1 percent more than the rate of inflation and borrowers pay 2 percent more.
Now suppose that house prices start to rise, as they did in the UK up until recently. As prices rise, what buyers have to pay in interest does also as we have tied interest rates to prices. Most existing buyers are not too worried by this as their houses are worth more even though they have to pay more to service the debt. But it does discourage market activity (the opposite of what actually happened) even though house prices are increasing and so prices stop rising and fall back a bit. When prices start falling so also do interest rates, stimulating the market again.
For savers, if prices go up, higher rates of return encourage a shift to saving away from spending. The result is the shops sell less, prices come down and as a result so do interest rates.
These changes are almost imperceptible to the man in the street - just microscopic boom and busts. Just as your lawnmower runs at a constant speed even though the grass is sometimes harder to cut, so the economy runs at a nearly constant rate. An end to boom and bust.
The overall effect is stability, something that is in short supply at the moment.
Of course, it will never happen. Governments amd Governors (the human type) just couldn't bring themselves to relinquish the control they claim to have. There are just too many people with an interest in pretending that it was they who rescued us rather than a simple engineering principle.
*Chrometophobe - someone who is afraid of money |
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| by The Impressionist on Tue, 11 Nov 2008, 14:04 |
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The Unbookiness of Blogging |
Why is science so successful at explaining the world and allowing us to manipulate it to our advantage?
The first problem is pinning down exactly what distinguishes science from non-science. For one thing the term is misappropriated by the likes of Christian Science, Creation Science, Scientology and a host of others. And for another, it turns out to be almost impossible to characterise the differences between science and the rest anyway.
Even the popular champion of the scientific approach and scourge of religious fundamentalism, Richard Dawkins, struggles to define the distinction. Dawkins' position must appear to a lay observer to be just as dogmatic as those he seeks to debunk and hence not 'scientific'. And this is counterproductive as there clearly is something that sets science apart in its ability to discern the truth.
So it was a happy find when The Impressionist came across a book called What is this thing called Science? by A.F.Chalmers in which he attempts to identify what distinguishes Science. Various characterisations of science and the scientific method have been touted around and it takes Dr. Chalmers about 250 pages to examine these in detail and develop his criticisms.
This is a worthy task: if only to allow the scientific establishment to waste less time defending itself against charlatans.
In 100000 words give or take, we get slightly closer to seeing what it is that scientists all understand but can't articulate - what it is that they are doing.
The great mathematical physicist Paul Dirac once said to someone who asked him a question about one of his theories «if you aren't a mathematician, I can't explain it to you. And if you are, I shouldn't need to». Dirac was famously terse - to the point of being blunt - but it's easy to see his point that understanding (of anything) is something you can only 'get' - not be told.
If the book is the mainstay of reason, then the blog has emerged as the textual equivalent of the 3 minute song, tailored to the attention span of the average radio listener. A typical blog item is short and covers a single - and usually trivial - point. As with the radio and the capacity of Edison's gramophone, there are some technological and ergonomic reasons for this. And today's internet is an inherently noisy place - a library with market traders in every aisle.
The blogger feels under pressure to keep it short and sweet as he assumes that the bulk of his or her readers will not bother to follow the finer points of a difficult and protracted discussion. And being popular is, of course, everything. Which all goes to make it difficult to tackle anything even approaching the complexity of a single chapter, let alone a 250 page book.
So difficult areas of discourse are not addressed online, and for the same sort of reasons that they are seldom tackled in newspapers or periodicals. This removes them from the attention of the man in the street and that is bad for everyone.
When it comes to reasoned argument in a complex issue, the good old book is still the only real choice.
And there's the advantage that it will survive the next version of Windows. |
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| by The Impressionist on Thu, 06 Nov 2008, 20:14 |
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Marry in haste, repent at leisure |
Electronic messaging is part of the furniture of life now: texts are sent to inform employees that they .. er ... aren't any more; government memos advising that today is a good day to bury bad news (about 9/11) are hastily despatched and paid for later; office FAX machines are effective broadcasters of compromising pictures (take note GB of London).
In the days of snail mail, those who could wield a pen had to think carefully about what they wrote. Partly because what went down on the paper was difficult to erase (I just changed what I had written there), and partly because, like old Entish, anything that was worth saying took a long time to say.
Making a complete fool of yourself in an unretractable message has never been easier. And so our friendly boffins at Google Labs have come up with a clever scheme to protect the unwary (for unwary read drunk) Gmail user from sending a message they might regret later.
The idea is called Mail Goggles and it stops you from sending an email if you're not in a fit state. And that's determined by your ability to solve some arithmetical questions. It only starts up late at night at weekends when, as they diplomatically put it, «you're most likely to need it».
The Impressionist has mixed feelings about this. First, it's optional so most people will turn it off. Second, is it such a bad thing that people blurt out the truth when they don't intend to. There is after all nothing new in that. The fact that John wants to sleep with Mary is not of great interest to the other employees of XYZ, or perhaps even to Mary.
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| by The Impressionist on Fri, 10 Oct 2008, 08:50 |
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The Old TV and The Big Bang |
The Impressionist reckons he is one of the few people left whose television uses a cathode ray tube.
Having had it for nigh on 30 years now without a single failure (it's a Toshiba), it still faithfully and reliably displays the dross that passes for TV in the noughties. Notting Hill is burned into its phosphors now that it has seen it so many times on digital reruns.
A cathode ray tube works by accelerating electrons (tiny particles that we think of as electricity when they're in wires) using electric fields and guiding them using magnets to crash at high speed into a phosphorescent coating on the screen. Each time an electron hits a particle of the coating it causes it to emit light and what we see is the result of trillions of these little events each second. Happily, some of them make up images of Julia Roberts.
At CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a new experiment has been built and will start working at full power in around a week. The new device is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and has been designed to crash protons or ionised atoms of lead into each other at very high speeds and watch what happens. As in my TV, (charged) particles are accelerated by electric fields and guided by magnets. Instead of colliding with a phosphorescent screen, two streams of particles are arranged to go in opposite directions and collide with each other.
When tiny particles like protons collide at high speed they destroy each other and for a very brief instant the energy of the collision goes into producing different particles that are very short lived and not normally seen. This kind of experiment has been done by labs all over the world for many decades.
The LHC differs only in that it can get the particles moving faster and so they have more energy. The energies that the LHC can impart are closer to (but still less than) those found in the Big Bang and so the products of the collisions should give us some more information on the very early phase of our universe and more importantly which of our current theories are right and which are wrong.
What makes us human is our desire to make sense of our world and Science is the only endeavour that allows us to do that. It works by constructing precise theories and then testing them by experiment. If the theory says one thing and the experiment says another then both are investigated until a resolution is found - the experiment or the theory was flawed. It's an iterative process and both theory and experiment are refined with experience. In contrast to other types of human behaviour - politics, religion, ... negative results are taken very seriously and not just brushed under the carpet.
This is one big reason to support science. It works.
The theory under test by the LHC is the so-called Standard Model which already accounts for the world we see and much of the world we don't. The big unknown in the Standard Model is mass, which is the property of matter that gives rise to gravity and inertia. In the Standard Model all matter acquires mass by interacting with a particle called the Higgs boson (after its proposer Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh). No one has seen a Higgs boson as it is expected to come into existence only at the levels of collision energy the LHC can attain. So the LHC will provide evidence of either the existence of or the non-existence of this very exotic particle. Either way, we will understand more about our world.
Why bother? Because if we understand it, then we can do something about it. Until electricity was understood, no one could make an electric lamp, a heart pacemaker, or your TV.
To those who question the need for fundamental research and its cost, The Impressionist asks: how much do you use your fridge, your cell phone, your sewer or the myriad of modern devices that exist only because of earlier scientific effort? What would life be like if doctors still bled patients or witches burned at the stake?
To people who say the money would be better spent on feeding starving Africans, I say (for example) that a tiny fraction of their governments' military budgets would have the same effect. The £2.6bn ($5bn) cost of the LHC would buy about one new aircraft carrier.
Compare that with the possibility of finding out how to generate enough energy to power our civilisation for the next 10000 years or how to get to the stars - which would you prefer?
Science has given us the key to the gates of heaven - whether we use it to open them or not is up to us. |
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| by The Impressionist on Tue, 02 Sep 2008, 13:43 |
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The Price of Gold |
A Beijing Olympics gold medal contains about .19 ounces of gold - which is used to coat the mainly silver medal body. At around $800(US) per ounce, its bullion value would be around $200. (more details). Fortunately, the value of an Olympic gold is more than just its bullion content.
The games of the 29th Olympiad in Beijing (or Peking) have come to a spectacular close and the Chinese can be proud of their achievements in their organisation and presentation.
As Britain showed with its 19 golds, medals can be won even by Brits - given the support of coaches, physios, doctors, nutritionists, sports psychologists and lots of training facilities. Oh, and performance directors: it is theatre after all. The debate now is about how much money needs to be spent to maintain the British gold rush for London in 4 years time.
But if all it takes is money, what does winning a gold really mean?
We might as well start by dismissing the Olympic Creed. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, came up with the Olympic Creed after hearing a speech by Bishop Ethelbert Talbot at a service for Olympic champions during the 1908 Olympic Games in London. The Olympic Creed states «The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.» That went out the window as soon as professional athletes were allowed to compete (officially in the 1988 games in Seoul).
Having been Olympic also-rans for many decades Britain now spends about £100m ($200m) a year on its elite sports, funded mainly by the national lottery. Australian sport, irritated by (as they see it) their poor performance relative to the poms, is pushing for more funding to help them win more titles next time.
As in the English premier league, olympic talent is bought and sold like the commodity it has become.
Top notch coaches like German national Jürgen Gröbler OBE (who coached the East German rowing teams to a stack of gold medals from 1972 until 1988) were lured to Britain with the promise of money and resources and have repeated their success with British athletes. Cycling coach David Brailsford MBE has been offered positions with other countries following the successes of the GB cycling team in Beijing.
Even if the athletes may be overwhelmingly native to the country they represent, training camps are usually in locations with better conditions. The British climate which is either cold and wet or very cold and wet is one reason British marathon runner Paula Radcliffe is based in the French Pyrenees.
If talent and location are up for sale and if winning is all that matters, then a «country» is little more than a convenient way to attain Olympic glory and political kudos.
In an era of globalisation, relocation of human talent and resources chip away at the increasingly blurred concept of country and nation. Can a team be said to be British if it is run on foreign soil by foreign nationals?
And so we come at last to the real meaning of the Olympics - a sports spectacular that started with noble and honourable aims but has become perverted by commercial greed and political ambition. A showcase for competing political and economic ideologies for the benefit of the egos of their respective leaders.
But the nature of Monkey is ... irrepressible, and the youth of the world will assemble in London in 2012 and we'll all briefly put aside our misgivings and thrill again to their athleticism and youthful optimism.
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| by The Impressionist on Tue, 26 Aug 2008, 19:02 |
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Earlier Blog: Impressions and Expressions - Arts, Sciences, Philosophy, Life ... well, sometimes ... |
| Cuil - Context is King ... A new search engine to compete with Google, Yahoo and others was announced a few days ago.
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| Dan Dare is Dead ... The Impressionist stumbled into yet another art installation .
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| Why Cars are Weightless ... Even though they may not have a word for entrepreneur , the French have two words for the verb to know so I suppose that makes up for it.
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| Are Blogs a Waste of Time? ... Like most things in life, blogging is something people do because they think it will benefit them in some way. |
| Turn Again Boris ... Boris Johnson, bumbling TV host and purveyor of bombast, is the new mayor of London. |
| Zeno has left the Building ... A new(?) resolution of Zeno's famous paradox.
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| Losing the iPlot ... Perhaps reflecting the increasing infatuation with all things hi-tech amongst its supposed constituency, the UK government has become a gadget freak. |
| And now ... Ode to Joy on the Spoons ... A fine example of l'entente cordiale occurred on Saturday when the London Symphony Orchestra was scheduled for a performance of Mahler's Seventh Symphony in the Burgundy town of Dijon.
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| Don't Mention the C-Word ... It's a word that inspires the young, terrifies the middle-aged, and bores the old; the stock-in-trade of the new broom; the lingua franca of the middle manager and the politician from banal British ex-chancellors to aspiring US Presidents. |
| The Error of our Ways ... In the news today: UK supermarket giant Tesco's year-on-year pre-Christmas sales have increased by just 3.1% and this had 'fallen short of analysts' expectations' of 4%.
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| Colour Mr Balls Red ... Latest in the time-honoured tradition of politicians exposing their woeful ignorance of just about everything is UK schools secretary, the appropriately named Ed Balls. |
| The Unacceptable Face of Decapitation ... Spare a festive thought for the London Times columnist Matthew Parris whose recent diatribe against the pedal cyclist started 'A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists'. |
| The Mastery of Mystery ... «The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious» - Albert Einstein.
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| Childhood's End ... Want to come out and play? |
| The Age of Energy ... The road outside the Impressionist's house is dug up. |
| Times of the Signs ... Old Europe has suddenly begun to come up with some revolutionary new ideas: old ideas whose time has come. |
| Just Popped Out ... In Britain, the term popped out is used innocently to mean 'gone away for a short time'. |
| Plum or Sugar? ... A battle has been raging in Britain. |
| But will I have enough for booze, ciggies, foreign holidays, drugs, ...? ... As pension funds - run for the incontinent by the incompetent - find themselves in terminal decline, pre-pensioners are apt to wonder how they will be supported in their golden years. |
| Myspace finds Identical Twins Separated at Birth ... The Impressionist recently signed up with myspace.com with a view to spreading his own brand of light hearted banter and genial comment on the insanity of humanity.
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| Googlenopes ... What is a Googlenope? |
| Nothing New Under The Sun ... Nothing essentially new has been invented since the first half of the 20th century. |
| Little Hills ... A Reader's Digest poll of 4000 Europeans voted the British as the nation in Europe with the best sense of humour (the Germans came last). |
| E-lying and Lie-braries ... E-mail, boon or bane, you can't function on the internet without it.
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| What's in a Name? ... A recent case in the United Kingdom resulted in a rare victory for the small(ish) man against the large corporation. |
| Markets ... The word market has been appropriated by so many groups now that it has virtually ceased to have its original meaning. |
| I stink therefore I spam ... The principle that speech should be free doesn't mean that it should also be free.
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| New Anti-Smoking Drug Voted Completely Effective ... The Impressionist was delighted to hear about the recent health care gaffe in his home town of Glasgow. |
| Mroe Is Bteetr ... The Impressionist often tears out what remains of his hair at the misuse of the eenglish as she is rited. |
| Ban the Bag ... The Impressionist was reading his Times on line earlier (well, it's free) when he noticed the leader article about banning plastic bags in Zanzibar.
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| By the Tongue of Albert Einstein ... So on Friday, 3rd November 2006 Tony Blair revealed that he is a born-again apologist for Science. |
| What We Need Is A Good Slump ... A new report on Global Warming was issued today. |
| When is a Question not a Question? ... Lost in London, The Impressionist once asked a man the way to the nearest tube station. |
| Eco-Debt Day ... Apparently today, the 9th of October, is the day when we have used up more of the earth's resources than it can replenish in a year. |
| Vanity, Thy Name is Simon ... In many other species, the male tends to be the one with the impressive looks. |
| Growing Pains ... Why is it that we impose our current mores and attitudes on other times and places? |
| Comments ... Following a suggestion from my fellow blogger, Adam , I've added a comments function to this 'ere blog. |
| The True Meaning of the Gas Bill ... To most people nowadays, questions like what is truth have little relevance. |
| T.B. or not T.B. - What did Hamlet die of? ... The oldest brands are still the most popular with UK buyers, according to recent reports. |
| Dialects ... It's reported that British cows have acquired regional accents . |
| Edinburgh 2006 ... No damascene revelations or deep truths today, folks. |
| Is the cure worse than the disease? ... This week British air travellers have been subjected to lengthy delays at the check-ins following draconian security restrictions occasioned by an alleged plot to blow up several airliners. |
| The Power of Standing By ... In an article a couple of weeks ago in the London Times, Matthew Parris was uncertain as to whether devices left on 'standby', like your telly or DVD player, really consume as much power as is sometimes claimed by vested interest groups. |
| The Machine Age ... The Impressionist has developed a hearing problem (as opposed to the listening problem he has always suffered from) and has begun to take more notice of the sounds of the environment. |
| Beirut and the School Run ... The Impressionist was surprised and pleased to discover that one of our site visitors yesterday was from Beirut. |
| listen-to-me.com ... The Impressionist read - well, skimmed - a statistical account of the practice of blogging entitled 'A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers' (PDF) by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox. |
| Moi? Je Regrete Rien ... As details of yet more UK Government IT screw-ups emerge (Computer Weekly, 18th July 2006), it is apparent that the UK Government will say anything, including misleading Parliament, to deflect attention from its own incompetence and that of its administrators. |
| Hockney Balls ... Channel hopping in the TV desert between World Cup matches last night The Impressionist happened on a science documentary. |
| iPods Considered Harmful to your Health ... Now it's unsafe to use your iPod, The Impressionist was surprised to read. |
| Notional Anthems ... France has La Marseillaise which goes on a lot (7 verses) about conspiratorial kings and, perhaps straying from the point, tigers pitilessly ripping out their mothers' wombs.
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| Science Funding ... The Impressionist read with horror an article in today's London Times by one Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University. |
| Failure Points ... In the bad old days - when blame was distributed according to social class - those at the sharp end of enterprise absorbed most of the flak. |
| Animal, Vegetable or Mineral Water ... The news today has it that we're apparently all getting healthier by buying wholemeal bread instead of white bread, semi-skimmed milk rather than whole milk, and less oil and fat. |
| Eurovision's Revenge ... On 23rd March The Impressionist noted the spat between Serbia and Montenegro over what act was to represent them. |
| Foreign Secretaries ... The Impressionist was unsurprised to see that Margaret Beckett replaced Jack Straw as British foreign secretary in last week's panic government reshuffle. |
| The Italian Job ... A 1 day U.S. |
| My iPod has a Cold ... Clever MIT researchers have produced a prototype electrical battery that uses a heady combination of nanotechnology and biotechnology. |
| Travel Insurance ... The Impressionist spotted a Times article by Matthew Parris which pointed out the folly and pointlessness of most types of insurance policy. |
| Clouded Judgement ... The Impressionist came across the website of the Cloud Appreciation Society (we love clouds, we're not ashamed to say it and we've had enough of people moaning about them). |
| Evil Twins ... After 150 days in transit, ESA's Venus Express orbiter successfully inserted itself into orbit around Earth's 'evil twin' yesterday. |
| The Blind Leading ... The Impressionist recently received a web audit for the website. |
| Showstoppers ... This year is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt. |
| Growing Old Disgracefully ... Of late, The Impressionist has begun to think about old age. |
| Teenage Rebellion ... Today is the 30th birthday of punk in the UK - according to the BBC anyway. |
| Mother's Day ... Tomorrow is Mothering Sunday in the UK. |
| Furovision ... This blog isn't really about music but then I suppose neither is the Eurovision Song Contest.
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| The New Queen ... The Impressionist was honoured today to receive through his letter box a circular whose subject at first appeared to be 'The New Queen Elizabeth II'.
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| Bean Counters ... In 2000 UK Higher Education institutions reel in around 7bn($12bn) each year in foreign earnings. |
| Lord Snooty ... The Impressionist notes today's snooty leading article from the London Times. |
| Chains of Freedom ... The Impressionist has been reading a rather turgid book published in 1902. |
| Friend and Foe ... Robert Herrick wrote
'Great cities seldom rest; if there be none
T' invade from far, they'll find worse foes at home.'
What was true in the days of the city state is equally true in the days of the superstate.
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| What exactly is it that artists do? ... I sometimes read the ramblings of others on the subject of art and its related activities. |
| Yes, but is it Art? ... Ice dancing. |
| Art Blogs 2 ... The Impressionist wrote in this column a few days ago about the problems of websites whose content is image based rather than text based. |
| Nominative Determinism ... This is a $20 word, as Groucho would say, for an idea that's been around for a while. |
| Art Blogs ... The internet geeks are delighted with themselves that they've found yet another way to litter the world with useless information. |
| Freedom of Expression ... While in the West we enjoy (?) the right to visit Art exhibits like soiled beds or pickled sharks, people in other parts of the world have to tread more carefully as the Danes recently discovered.
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| Obfuscation in Art ... Here's a topic I bet you thought had gone away.
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