Honour, dignity and victimhood

"I don't know how the baker's boy got down, but I do know that he missed the cart, and got into the very hottest of hot water when he turned up at last at the bakehouse. I am sorry for him, but, after all, it was quite right that he should be taught that English boys mustn't use their feet when they fight, but their fists." (Five Children and It, first published 1902.) 

I was reminded of this passage, which struck me more forcefully when I re-read it in 2015 than when I first read it in 1980-something, by reading this.

Inequality

Various recent interesting things about inequality.

(1) Elite Americans don't care about it, even if they are very left-wing. "Yale Law students’ overwhelming, indeed almost eccentric, commitment to efficiency over equality is all the more astonishing given that the students self-identified as Democrats rather than Republicans—and thus sided with the party that claims to represent economic equality in partisan politics—by a factor of more than 10-to-1".

(2) It turns out that there's not much of it in Britain, not really, not if you bear in mind that "poorest in any given year are not always poor for their entire lives" (e.g. students, unemployed between jobs, pensioners). (It's a bit like how the rise in the minimum wage helps a lot of people who are not in need of it, e.g., dabbling second earners in well-off households and students on their summer jobs.) Interestingly, although "the benefit cuts of the late 1980s reduced benefits and increased cross-sectional inequality, it had a much more muted effect on lifetime inequality. And, similarly, although Gordon Brown's massive expansion of means-tested tax credits in the 2000s reduced cross-sectional inequality, they had very little impact on cutting lifetime inequality."

(3) Finally, it's all going to be reduced massively across the world because, just like after the Black Death, there are going to be many fewer workers.

A miscellany of links

1. You know that chap who got 14 years for Libor fixing? Here is a rather compelling account of his downfall.

2. Economics - the essentials.

3. Elephants. At the risk of sounding like a complete idiot, I wish someone would get on with translating between human speech and elephant speech. "Greg, full of confidence and top of the hierarchy, would take his position at the head of the water trough. The other bulls would approach, placing their trunks in his mouth in greeting. Having paid their respects, the lower-ranking males could relax and drink their fill."

4, It's become one of those glib things people say: we used to imagine that it would be the state enforcing surveillance on us, like a giant Panopticon, but in fact we have chosen to do it with our mobile phones, and so you get to (a version of) 1984 from the bottom up, not the top down. Maybe. But Brave New World always struck me as more plausible - and here it is.

5. Thoughts on multi-tasking. This triggers a series of half-formed thoughts in me. Once I have cleared away some other stuff I'll ... hang on, an email has just come in.

Words used to mean their opposites

"Is there a word in the English language that more reliably means its opposite than ‘amicable’?

Twitter responses included: “moot,” “humbled,” “nice,” “my friend,” “nonplussed,” “cordial,” “priceless,” “tolerance,” “literally,” “spry,” “sincerely,” “honest,” “pal,” “sure,” and “Fine” particularly when given as a one word answer.”

Tyler Cowen's favourite is "spry". "Respectfully" was the one that came to mind for me, and gets a mention in the comments. 

Why We Hate Cheap Things

This piece is by Alain de Botton - but please do not let that put you off. There is an interesting observation buried in the de Bottonishness.

Unpopular things

1. Cockney rhyming slang. Well, maybe it's unpopular.

2. Privatised railways. "The unpopularity of rail privatisation is an odd phenomenon. ... The story of rail usage under British Rail was one of inexorable decline. Between 1960 and 1995, passenger numbers fell by about a third. Since 1995, they have more than doubled. The dramatic trend reversal coincides exactly with privatisation. ... privatisation has achieved many of the things its proponents hoped it would: better trains, new timetables, more responsiveness to passenger needs." So says John Kay.

3. Gunslingers, now extinct. Here is the TLS, in 1928, in an elegiac mood for the Old West.

4. Quantum Russian roulette. This is "a version of Schrödinger’s cat in which the experimenter stands in for the unfortunate animal. In some futures, he will be killed. In some, he will remain alive. But since, from his point of view, he will be aware only of the latter, he will always perceive that he survives." Actually this might be very popular across the multiverse, just not so much so locally.

How Snoopy killed Peanuts

This explains why. (In fact, the title is a little misleading: Charles Schulz (on the thesis of the article) killed Peanuts and Snoopy's development was only a symptom of the disease. But we'll let that pass. Perhaps Woodstock killed Peanuts.)