I went to the National Folk Festival in Canberra. This always gets me into the kind of utopian mood where you think that the troubles of the world would be over if only we would all be like brothers and sisters to each other[1]. And lately, it always seems to coincide with particularly bloody events in the real world, making me very reluctant to get out of this mood and back to reality.
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Monday Message Board (on Tuesday)
I’m slowly getting back on deck after Easter. For starters, here’s the Monday Message Board, a day late, again. Please post your comments on any topic (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). My suggested discussion starter “What I did in the holidays”.
You know your kid’s a teenager when …
He sleeps in on Easter morning
You know your kid's a teenager when …
He sleeps in on Easter morning
A missing gadget ?
Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son
Most people can solve this familiar puzzle if they think about it for a little while, but only slightly more complex versions have them floundering. Yet the problem described isn’t much more difficult than naming the day after the day after yesterday, which (I think) most people can do instantly. The fact that such a simple problem can be posed as a puzzle is just one piece of evidence that people (at least people in modern/Western societies) have trouble learning about and reasoning about kinship relations.
I’m generally sympathetic to the Cosmides-Tooby idea of the mind as a collection of special-purpose gadgets rather than a general-purpose computer. The work of Kahneman and Tversky on probability judgements (also my own main area of theoretical research) supports this idea. And I’ve occasionally put forward evolutionary arguments to support the view that people are likely to overweight low-probability extreme events.
So, there is a bigger puzzle here for me. Assuming that the set of gadgets with which our minds are now equipped is the product of evolution, shouldn’t we (at least in some phase of our lives) be as good at learning about kinship systems as young children are at learning about languages? After all, it’s hard to imagine that we can be acting to promote the survival of our genes if we don’t know who is carrying them.
It’s often asserted that modern/Western society has a particularly minimal kinship system and that the systems prevailing in other societies are considerably more complex. This certainly seems to be true of the Aboriginal Australian systems I’ve seen described, but I don’t know whether it’s true more generally. Has the kinship instinct atrophied over time, and, if so, what are the implications?
The good news
For Good Friday, I thought I’d focus on some good news.
First, the Indonesian parliamentary election is nearly all good news. It’s good news that the election was held at all, and was pretty much free and fair. It’s even more good news that the military no longer holds a block of seats as it did under Suharto. And, generally speaking the results have been encouraging. Militant Islamists did poorly and the success of the Democrat party provides a plausible alternative presidential candidate, Yudhoyono. The unappealing prospect that Wiranto would make a comeback as president seems to be receding.
The earlier elections in Malaysia were also reasonably encouraging is showing little support for radical Islamism. But here, as in Singapore, the system can’t really be called democratic until it has managed a change of government. Surprisingly, Indonesia seems to have surpassed its neighbours in this respect. Given the dire state of affairs a few years ago, with Christian and Islamist militias fighting it out, the military fomenting trouble and Suharto still in the wings, this is an impressive achievement.
Threaded comments
I’m considering adding a threaded comments feature to the site. You can see how it works, here. I’m in two minds about it. I don’t at all like the usual threaded comments systems where you have to open each comment individually, but this doesn’t seem to suffer from that problem. But it might be overkill for the discussions we have here. Any thoughts?
The Sistani option
I’m going to try hard from now on to avoid debating whether the war with Iraq was a mistake, and to focus on the question of what should be done from here onwards.
I’ve argued for some months that the most plausible option for a stable allocation of power in Iraq is a de facto two-state solution in which the Kurds get effective autonomy and a share of the oil and the rest of Iraq gets a government which will be dominated by the Shiites. With luck, they won’t try and settle too many scores and will recognise the need to keep much of the Sunni professional elite on side. The government would be Islamist, but not a direct theocracy like Iran.
The key to all this, almost certainly, is Ayatollah Sistani. He’s not the person I’d want running my country (or more precisely acting as the eminence grise for its day-to-day rulers), but he seems like the only plausible choice who wouldn’t be an absolute disaster.
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Doing my bit to clean up the blogosphere
I’m reposting this piece by Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber
It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for “Jew” is an anti-semitic site. So this is CT doing our googlebombing best to correct this by linking to the Wikipedia entry for Jew instead. (See Norman Geras for more details).
The back of the envelope model of the FTA
Following up on the snippet below, I’ve done an estimates of the impact of the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US, as it affects merchandise trade. My bottom line is that Australia loses about $1 billion per year, of which $800 million is a net transfer of tariff revenue to the US and $200 million is the deadweight cost of replacing the lost tariff revenue, net of reductions in the domestic deadweight cost of tariffs.
This estimate may be contrasted with the most optimistic one publicised before the FTA was signed, a benefit of $4 billion over 10 years or $400 million per year, IIRC.
I’d like to thank everyone who’s contributed to the debate so far, notably Harry Clark, Uncle Milton, John Humphreys and PM Lawrence. The discussion has helped me to sharpen up my own thoughts. Obviously what I’ve done is very preliminary, and I’d welcome more comments.
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