Simon Brett. So Much Blood (1976)

    Simon Brett. So Much Blood (1976) Charles Paris gets week-long gig replacing a cancelled show at the Edinburgh Fringe. During a rehearsal for another play by the same group, the Derby University Dramatic Society, or D.U.D.S., an objectionable young man dies when a prop knife turns out to be a real one. Paris believes it’s murder, and sets out to solve the puzzle. A double twist in the plot confirms the reader’s early inference about the perp’s identity. Along the way Paris has an affair with a careerist young actress, finds a friend who shares his literary and whiskey tastes, briefly reconnects with his wife Frances (they are separated), and provides Brett with an opportunity to show off his knowledge of Edinburgh’s streetscape. The writing varies from barely competent to evocative. Brett indulges in some mild satire on theatrical types, especially the earnest non-professionals who believe that The Theatre is hopelessly out of date. The result, like one of the D.U.D.S. reviews, has good bits, but lacks the coherence of character, ambience, and plot that would make for a satisfying novel.

     Brett has also done other series, TV scripts (my vague memory records better than average videos), and has produced and directed miscellaneous plays and TV series. See his Wikipedia entry for more. This effort seems to me to be below his average, probably because it’s only the 2nd book, an apprentice work. But I’ll have to read a couple more Paris mysteries to confirm that. **

Robert Silverberg. Hawksbill Station (1968)

     Robert Silverberg. Hawksbill Station (1968) Premise: a “humane” totalitarian regime has replaced the constitutional republic of the United States, and sends political dissidents 1 billion years into the past. There is no way to return these exiles. Plot: A newcomer has no political knowledge of value, and it’s clear to the reader, if not the exiles, that there will be way to return. Setting: pre-Cambrian Earth, with no life on land. Silverberg’s depiction of this setting is limited both by his knowledge, and the gaps in contemporary understanding of this era).
     The narrator’s task is to make all this work in terms of character. Silverberg fails. The exiles are political stances and/or psychological case histories. Barrett, the central character, has a backstory involving an love triangle as well as political betrayal, and that’s as complicated as it gets.
     Silverberg is good at elucidating ideas, at presenting ideologies and politics. It’s fascinating to see how little has changed in the US political landscape. Silverberg is especially good at what makes America America: its unwillingness to change, which in practice means a major upheaval in every generation, when the inevitable effects of incomplete transmission of the culture forces changes that the old guard resents. But by the middle of the book, about the only impetus is the plot, which is thin. I’d guessed the resolution, skipped to end and saw my guess confirmed, so I stopped reading. **

Carola Dunn. Rattle his Bones (2000)

Carola Dunn.  Rattle his Bones (2000) Daisy Dalrymple’s 8th case. While researching an article on the Natural History Museum, Daisy almost witnesses a murder. She hears it, but doesn’t see it. This both annoys and pleases her fiancé, Det. Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher, because she of course does some sleuthing on her own, but also provides Fletcher with a couple of crucial clues. The murderer bonks her on the head. He did the dastardly deed to cover up a theft of gemstones, which he wanted to convert into cash in order to finance a dinosaur hunt.

     Nicely done entertainment, with better period ambience than most, characters not too cartoonish, a satisfying puzzle, and well-paced clues and red fish. This is the 3rd Dunn I’ve read, they’re fun, but not keepers. **½

Two Miss Marple Videos (2013)

     Two Miss Marple Videos (2013) A Caribbean Mystery and Gresham’s Folly. Starring Julia MacKenzie, who is no Jean Hickson, but she’s very good all the same.
     These new adaptations of Miss Marple stories pick up on hints in Christie’s texts and elaborate them. Mostly this deepens the characters and improves the dialogue. But they also use visuals to generate ambience and mood that Christie may not have had in mind. The Joan Hickson versions had a feeling of deep currents; here they are closer to the surface.
     Occasionally, the adapters allow themselves a joke. In A Caribbean Mystery, Ian Fleming appears as a hotel guest. He tells Miss Marple he’s writing a spy thriller but doesn’t have a name for his hero. The guest lecturer, presenting a slide show on the island’s birds, announce himself as “Bond, James Bond.” Eureka! This is also the story in which Mr Rafael meets Miss Marple. In a later talehe gives her the task of preventing a crime. The murderer is a wife killer, a type that Christie used more than once, perhaps as a revenge on her unfaithful first husband.
     Both these tales rely on secrets from the past to make motives plausible. In both, the murderers are psychopaths, charmers who feign empathy they don’t feel, and in both the motive is mere money. But sometimes secrets are revealed inadvertently, and then self-preservation leads to secondary murders. Christie believed that killers were overconfident, that they could not imagine being outwitted by mere mortals, and so found added killings easy. There’s a good deal of truth to that, but I think it’s more likely that psychopathic killers just can’t imagine how serious their crimes are, and therefore can’t imagine that ordinary mortals want to find them and thereby restore the balance we call justice. A lack of empathy not only limits one's capacity for relationships, it also limits one’s ability to foresee how others will act, and so limits planning for the future.
      Both videos are good entertainment, especially for Christie fans. **½

Cherry-picking data, patterns, hypotheses, and scientism.

     “Lie, damn lies, and statistics.” That’s the dismissive phrase often trotted out when someone disagrees with a claim that doesn’t fit their biases. “Cherry-picking data” follows close on its heels. These aren’t exactly ad hominem attacks, but they come close. Only a scoundrel would select only those numbers that support their claim. Only a scoundrel will ignore the data that might refute it.
     And so it goes.
     Paradoxically, science depends on cherry-picked data. A new insight usually starts when someone thinks of some observation as weird while everyone else thinks is ho-hum run-of-the-mill background to what really matters. Or has dismissed it as already explained by some existing paradigm. Or just some accidental oddity that doesn’t mean anything. Or random error, which can be safely ignored. But all of that is cherry-picking data. It’s to see a signal in the noise that no one else has seen. Consider how the Higgs boson was discovered: by picking out a mere handful of events and calculating the odds that these few events are likely nor mere random glitches in the data. The Higgs boson was discovered by planning to cherry-pick the data that implied its existence.
     That humans see patterns all around them is a cliché. That most of them are constructs of our propensity to see patterns is another one. But every now and then one of these patterns turns out to be significant. It’s really there. And its existence and shape raise questions. Possible answers to those questions amount to a hypothesis. Framing it so that it can be tested against new or different data takes imagination.
     Inference: doing science starts when someone picks out the relatively rare significant differences between what we expect to see, or notices the strangeness of a familiar patch of reality. It’s when these skills are used to support an a priori hypothesis that we get not science but scientism. Then the accusations at the head of this essay are relevant.

Ian Kershaw. The End (2011) The Collapse of Nazi Germany

     Ian Kershaw. The End (2011) Subtitled “The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945", and that’s exactly what the book narrates. It’s a depressing account of how many factors came together to cause what had till then never happened in modern times, the near-destruction of a nation. That Germans of all classes had a role in this destruction raises questions about attitudes, values, desires, ambitions, ideology, and systems that Kershaw does his best to answer. He shows that all these factors played into the process.
      Attitudes: There’s no question that many, I think most, people realised that the war was lost long before it came to its bitter end. But a combination of Nazi zeal, numbness, fear for oneself and one’s loved ones, patriotism, and a strong sense of duty all prompted people to continue to fight or at least not to oppose fighting. It wasn’t until the very end, when Allied troops arrived at the outskirts of towns and villages, that some local officials found the courage to oppose their own conditioning and the remaining Nazi power and surrender to the invaders. This saved a number of places from physical destruction. The psychological toll however was huge.
     Values: A prime value for the military and the bureaucracy was duty. It was impossible for these people to violate this value. Their sense of self was founded on it. It’s not surprising that soldiers and bureaucrats continued to follow orders and protocols even when doing so became mere theatre of the absurd.
     Desires and ambitions: The Nazi elite knew they were done for. Many took the coward’s way out. Others fled, abandoning their duty. A few believed they could salvage some kind of role in post-War Germany and continued the struggle in large part to buy time for some kind of negotiations, despite the Allies’ repeated demand for unconditional surrender.
     Ideology: Hitler never wavered in his ideology, and when the war was lost, he rationalised his failure as the failure of the German people, who had betrayed him and his vision for a Thousand Year Reich. That his ideology prevented him from building the governance structures and human relations with conquered peoples that would guarantee a stable Reich after his death was something he never publicly admitted, though we of course cannot know what he thought in the dark hours of early morning, when unwelcome insights insinuate themselves into the insomniac mind.
     There were many committed ideologues besides Hitler in the Nazi Party and in the Armed Forces. These people believed that the alliance between the West and Soviet Russia could not last, and that by prolonging the war they could prompt a split that would change everything. That split did come, but not until after the war. Their ideology of suppression of the weaker races led them to use brutal punishment to enforce duty and prevent rebellion. In the final weeks and days, these now legitimised protocols for murder were used by many Nazis to avenge themselves on those who had opposed them.
     Systems: Systems of governance broke down, but it took a long time for them to disintegrate, and at the local level they mostly held up. Local authorities and organisations did astonishing work in coping with the floods of refugees, the diminishing food supply, the loss of electricity and water, the increasing piles of rubble, the damaged transport.
     The central government lost more and more control as communications and transport were destroyed, but as long as Hitler was alive, its power persisted, and since it was the only institution that could parley with the Allies, it could not end the war by surrender until Hitler shot himself. The contrast between the continued functioning of government at the local level and the paralysed non-functioning of the central government is instructive. As systems analysts have noted, All systems are designed to produce the results they achieve, whether or not the results are intended. In Hitler’s Germany, the system was designed to identify the Nazi State with its Führer. That identification was what nearly destroyed Germany. Where local government was in the hands of people who identified with the Nazi State, infrastructure was destroyed and people died. Where people broke that identification, infrastructure was preserved and people survived.
     Kershaw’s book is almost compulsively readable. He has the knack of piling on and organising detail so that an overall pattern or impression emerges. That pattern is one of paralysing inability to abandon the Führerprinzip, for many different reasons. But chief of these was people’s inability to act autonomously, to decide for themselves what would be best for their community. Kershaw shows there is no one reason for this paralysis, and he also shows what happens when  it subsists. A depressing but valuable book, with implications far beyond understanding the unravelling of Germany in the last months of World War 2. ****

Economics 101: Wages

Employment and wages.

     G. Reisman in one of his blog posts purports to prove that lower wages will result in lower unemployment, but that the standard of living will not fall. See: http://georgereismansblog.blogspot.ca/2011/04/wages-and-irrelevance-of-worker-need.html

     The key claim is:
     A drop in wage rates to the full employment point does not imply any drop in the average worker’s standard of living. That is, it does not imply any reduction in the goods and services he can actually buy — any reduction in his so called real wages — because the elimination of unemployment that the fall in wage rates brings about means more production and a fall in costs of production, both of which mean lower prices.

     Reisman’s theoretical argument is very nice. Assuming his premises were true, the conclusion follows. His major assumption is that lower wages will increase employment. His minor assumptions are a) that if wages fall, businesses will hire more workers; and b) production costs will fall. But his argument leaves out the human factor. His simplistic theory would work if people weren't people, and if the economic system weren't a human construct.
     What Reisman doesn’t take into account is that the employer will not pass on the lower costs of production any more than he absolutely has to. In other words, he will try to keep as much of the lower cost of production as profit as he possibly can. What’s more, if he can raise his prices because of the higher demand (which brought about his need for more workers in the first place), he will do so. The notion that increased supply lowers prices, and increased demand raises them, ignores the fact that someone has to decide to ask more (or less), and someone else has to decide to pay more (or less). These two decisions are not complementary. More precisely, they are not symmetrical. Marketing experts know this, and do their best to shift the asymmetry in the vendor’s favour.
     In any case, business people don't think in terms of the economic system or economic theories any more than workers do. Reisman assumes that a business will hire more workers just because wages are lower. Why would a business do that?  Businesses think in terms of the work they have available to produce the goods they wish to sell. If a business doesn't need additional workers, it won't hire, even at lower wages (or lower taxes, for that matter). The argument that lower wages result in more employment is I think founded on the same fallacy as "Save more if you buy two!" On the other hand, if the market demand for the goods is there, the business will hire, and may even pay a higher wage in order to get the workers it needs.
     The economic system is the net result of how people see their economic choices, plus the confusing factors of desire, fear, greed, generosity, fashion, obligations, and so on. Abstract economics can capture these factors if it begins with observations of how people actually behave, but it’s fiendishly difficult, because you can’t run experiments in which these factors are controlled. Statistical analysis can give a rough picture of how these factors affect economic choices, and marketing strategies rely on these rough guides. But as spectacular marketing failures and successes have shown, these statistics are more of a guide to placing bets than principles to guide planning.
     Worse, the human factors interfere with each other. Consider price (again). One of our desires is to fulfill our obligations to those people whom we love, or fear, or wish to influence in our favour, or merely to impress. But we also desire to get the most for the least. For each of us, for any given purpose there is a threshold price above which we won’t buy. But there may also be a price below which we won’t buy. That is, the threshold prices depend on why we desire the goods. Casual observation suggests that many people will pay more when they wish to impress someone than when they wish to express their affection. Conversely, people will often ask a lower price from people they wish to impress, or will even give the goods gratis. Why? Because a gift creates an obligation. Capitalist economics, which assumes that the purpose of trade is to amass wealth, doesn’t capture this aspect of pricing. In fact, it can’t capture it, because the Capitalist assumption is that the purpose of economic activity is to increase wealth. (It’s certainly Reisman’s assumption). That wealth beyond subsistence is almost always a tool for achieving other goals is something that Capitalist apologists don’t seem to understand. On top of that, traditional economics assumes that economic decisions are rational.
     Actual observation of business behaviour shows that lowering costs does not result in increased employment unless corresponding lowered prices increase the demand, ie, if the price of goods falls below the threshold price of an additional group of potential buyers. In that case, the producer may well need more workers. However, technology is the spoiler in this neat theoretical argument. Technology may make it possible to lower costs and employment simultaneously. Lower wages cannot compete against more efficient technologies. That lowering wages reduces the buying power of the workers, and so may reduce the market for the employer’s goods, is something that is, as far as I can tell, rarely a consideration. Technology can also obsolete the vendor’s goods, in which case there is no price low enough to prompt a decision to buy. To take the stereotypical example: motor cars made the buggy whip obsolete.
     However, abstract economics built to defend an ideology doesn’t capture these human factors, it is in fact incapable of doing so. If, as Ayn Rand’s Objectivism posits, wealth is the end-purpose of life, then any stance that sees wealth as something to be used for other purposes is meaningless. In a very real sense, using wealth as a means and not an end is unimaginable to adherents of Rand’s ideology. Significantly enough, Reisman states that his musings are in part based on her ideology. This may explain his preferences for diagrams and theorems that leave out merely human factors.
2014-09-04