Peace will come to earth when the people
have more to do with each other
and governments less.

Via www.compassionateeconomics.com, a book of the same name, available free.

If the received understanding of economics within government is radically incomplete, how much more so is it within society as a whole. We have been brought up and are daily conditioned to think of human beings as the “agents” of textbook economics: as purely self-interested, endlessly calculating costs and benefits, and highly sensitised to marginal gains and losses. And part of the achievement of economists since Adam Smith is to explain to us why this is OK — how individual self-interest can become social well-being.

But a problem comes when this economic image feeds back into society: when it becomes our default picture of human motivation. For we secretly know this picture is wrong. We are aware that there are routine aspects of our daily lives like volunteering or philanthropy which it cannot properly explain. We know that there are virtues such as loyalty and long-term thinking which seem to run directly counter to it. We fret about the atomisation of society, the commercialisation of human culture and the narrowing of our expectations of others. We over-invest in half-baked prescriptions for happiness. We yearn endlessly for the things money famously cannot buy: love, friendship, joy. Yet without an alternative picture of what a human being is, we cannot free ourselves from our assumptions. This is the intellectual heart of the matter.

And:

In the real world, of course, the key assumptions of textbook economics are rarely even closely approximated. But the effect of this formalisation is to exclude from the theory roughly all of the things that give human life its point and meaning.

As I was saying to Beth only the other day after reading Roche^*:

Distracted by celebrity, softened up by the education system, we have also succumbed to what you could call intellectual relativism. We have reached a state of affairs whereby people believe that the validity of their views is determined by the strength with which they hold them, not by any reference to empiricism. And so we hear phrases such as “Well that is your truth – it’s not mine”, or, increasingly, the word which is doing untold damage to the concept of objectivity: “whatever”. When confronted with evidence which undermines the current fashion or your own prejudices, simply lift your hand and say “whatever”, and you can avoid all the discomforts of the value of truth, or objectivity, or of being plain wrong.

via We’re in danger of entering a new Dark Age – Telegraph.

This is a great article by Liam Fox and a reason for optimism: we may yet pick ourselves up and change.

* It’s amazing she puts up with it

Via Right to privacy broken by a quarter of UK’s public databases, says report | The Guardian, we learn that “Britain is now the most invasive surveillance state and the worst at protecting privacy of any western democracy”:

A quarter of all the largest public-sector database projects, including the ID cards register, are fundamentally flawed and clearly breach European data protection and rights laws, according to a report published today.

Claiming to be the most comprehensive map so far of Britain’s “database state”, the report says that 11 of the 46 biggest schemes, including the national DNA database and the Contactpoint index of all children in England, should be given a “red light” and immediately scrapped or redesigned.

The full report is available here. It uses somewhat stronger language:

Of the 46 databases assessed in this report only six are given the green light. That is, only six are found to have a proper legal basis for any privacy intrusions and are proportionate and necessary in a democratic society.

After working around government as a software consultant for several years, I particularly endorse this recommendation:

There should never again be a government IT project – merely projects for business change that may be supported by IT. Computer companies must never again drive policy.

Examining the arguments for the ID Card scheme and the National Identity Register provides a case in point.

Liberty Human Rights maintain a short leaflet, “ID Cards, Fiction and Fact” which explains:

• The ID Card and National Identity Register schemes will cost us privacy and cash.
• The government’s claims about the benefits of the program are fiction.
• ID Cards will not protect us from terrorism.
• ID Cards will not cut crime.
• ID Cards will increase discrimination.
• The Government will not keep our data private.
• The scheme is expensive and of no use.

You can join Liberty here.

The Conservatives go further in their criticism of the scheme here, pledging to abolish it. You can join the Conservatives here.

The survey, by the magazine Legal Business, also says that there is evidence of “cocaine clubs” in law firms’ basements and of partner-led games of poker and taking cocaine with clients. But it also finds that law firms are ignorant or indifferent to the problem. One lawyer is quoted: “I spanked £100,000 on cocaine in one year and no one noticed.”

What they are not talking about though, is the endemic misery the drugs trade causes among the least privileged. I heard just last week, how middle-class drugs money distorts behaviour on the most run-down estates.

Time for a change of heart?

read more – Times Online | digg story

read more – Telegraph | digg story

Troubling footage of an official of the Giuliani campaign. Worrying in the context of increasingly authoritarian law and recent comments from Muslim leaders in the UK, saying they feel they are being “demonised”.

See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2007/dec/27/primaries.rudy.guiliani

read more | digg story