The Strange Victory of the Men’s Dress Reform Party

Men's Golfing Clothes in 1901, from the Sartorial Arts Journal, image via Wikipedia

Men’s dress has sunk into a rut of ugliness and unhealthiness from which… it should be rescued. [One of our] aims is the encouragement of a somewhat greater range of individual style than is possible with men’s present very stereotyped costumes.

That excerpt is from the early literature of the Men’s Dress Reform Party (MDRP), founded in 1929. Although the MDRP faded into obscurity by the outbreak of World War II, I think it is no exaggeration to say that it achieved its means – if not its ultimate aims – in our modern society.

Menswear in 1929 was very different from today: many variations existed to account for different seasonalities & settings, and clothes were generally tailored & structured. Today, most men wear similar-looking clothes under most circumstances, with the merest nods to season and occasion.

I would suggest that – contrary to the MDRP’s hopes – this has not resulted in a general increase in individual expression of style nor in an increase in beauty. The simpler, less tailored clothes of recent decades have instead encouraged most men to expend less effort on their appearance. Instead of adopting an individual style, they simply dress in a different (and less aesthetically-pleasing) stereotyped costume.

It is theoretically possible to achieve a handsome look in both tailored and less structured garments. It requires an active, self-editing and insightful approach to wardrobe selection. The uniformity and similarity of much modern mens clothes makes the pursuit of such individual style more esoteric: it requires a deliberate effort by those men wishing to pursue it.

Such men generally fall into two camps: those following fashion and those trying to rediscover elements of older tailoring traditions. Neither path is immutable: fashion follows the aesthetic vision of a house’s designer, and older traditions grew out of similar aesthetic choices made people in the past. The latter has the benefit of being a visual language familiar to a large mass of the general public whereas fashion constantly tries to create (reinvent?) a new visual language which naturally will have fewer speakers at any moment in time. But both systems can give those who want to craft a distinctive & personal visual identity the tools to do so.

As a monthly style publication of the era said of the MDRP’s goals:

Comfort and hygiene are very desirable, but that doesn’t make such things as style and dignity, and custom and suitability, any less important.

It is easy to obtain clean and comfortable clothing today, in a way that the man of 1929 would find astonishing. But the challenge for the man of today who wants to dress well has not changed: it is to select clothing that is attractive and stylish. And to be able to select wisely requires that the man bothers to learn the visual language of clothes in the first place.

For those wanting to know more about the history of the MDRP, a good summary of the its nature, members and political motivations (which included strands of Public Health Policy, Socialism, Class Conflicts and Eugenics) can be found in the relevant chapter by Barbara Burman in The Men’s Fashion Reader, edited by Peter McNeil and Vicki Karaminas.

Predicting the Future II: What the 2012 Boat Race tells us about the future role of Government

In the Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race, crews must pass through the centre arch of Barnes Bridge. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who watched the tumultuous 2012 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race would be forgiven for viewing my last post on Predicting the Future with a degree of skepticism. Who could have predicted the trifecta of unusual events: a lone swimmer disrupting the event, a broken oar within a few strokes of a controversial restart, and the collapse of one of Oxford’s rowers after their battered boat crossed the finishing line in an undeserved second place?

Surely our hypothetical reader would be well-justified in arguing that this sequence of events underlines a chaotic and inherently unpredictable model of reality?

My response is that in fact, it supports the essential thesis of my last entry: that complexity paradoxically reduces unpredictability by reducing the scope for an individual’s directed action to influence larger scale societal events. The Boat Race, like any sporting event, is a very simplified reduction of reality. It imposes strict and arbitrary rules on the flow of events and therefore creates a simplicity that is altogether lacking in real life. It is for this reason that sports are enjoyable to participate in or watch. They offer a glimpse into a simpler time, where one man – or small group of men with common purpose – could change their fate simply through concerted effort. Of course, as in those simpler times, the trajectory of those men’s lives in sport is much more prone to events; a lone swimmer can disrupt a race between two boats on a narrow stretch of the Thames, but cannot so easily simultaneously disrupt all global shipping routes.

Complexity and globalisation create systems so fundamental to society that they have immense redundancy. Competition between providers of these systems ensures this. Where the systems are narrowest – simplest – vulnerability is highest. Returning to the example of global shipping, blowing up the Suez Canal would have significant impact and it is possible to construct a hypothetical scenerio where this could be done by relatively few people. Staying in the Middle East, the global diplomatic attention focused on Iran is in part down to their ability to (transiently) disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

If complexity is an ally of predictability through creating redundant systems, this creates significant implications for good government. The historical guiding principle behind good government is that it should manage events. By anticipating and managing global events to national advantage, it is supposed to create conditions allowing its citizens to thrive. I would suggest that as the world becomes more complex, it should become increasingly easy for governments to predict the long-term future regardless of short-term fluctuations. For instance, globalisation is making China increasingly corporatist (and thus eventually capitalist) by forcing it to invest the large capital flows that its exporting creates. It is only when a country is isolated from the impact of global events that its behaviour becomes more unpredictable: North Korea being a prime example of this.

The implications of this for the (lack of) efficacy of sanctions are interesting, suggesting that the best way to manage countries like Iran would be to drown them in global capital and make it impossible for them to act independently as they’d be slitting their own throats. This theory is not dissimilar to MAD – the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War – except that the embedding of a nation in the interdependent system is done through chains of gold rather than fear.

A counter-argument would be to highlight the financial crisis of the past few years; surely that proved beyond doubt that complexity creates more risk, not less? Certainly, the complexity of the collateralised debt market created an unexpected outcome. However, the underlying trend is little changed. Individual people (and countries) have been ruined, but the overall trajectory towards an increasingly globalised world has not budged. If anything, it has been strengthened by forcing countries like China to acknowledge their increasing responsibilities in that world of globalised capital, forcing them to act in ways that support the system. The beauty is this increasing enmeshment is done voluntarily, out of national self-interest. Would we have seen China allowing the yuan to appreciate to the extent it has in the past year without the financial crisis causing them to import inflation due to US quantitative easing programmes? I think not.

If it is becoming increasingly impossible for national governments to significantly make long-term differences to a nation’s path because of the effects of increasing complexity, what should a government actually do?

We are already seeing the effects: governments are becoming more like advertisers than managers. The role of government is to sell an image of the nation to its citizens, sufficient to make them content to carry on, almost regardless of what actually happens. Of course, this has always been true to some extent. But it’s not surprising that the nature of politics has accelerated in this direction over the past 20-30 years as it is over this period that the rate of globalisation has accelerated due to increasing technological, logistical and financial sophistication.

For those unhappy with the government-as-advertiser model, there is an alternative. Government can act as national life coach instead. It can work to reframe and reconceive reality in a way that is palatable for most of its citizens and encourages them to adopt a positive attitude to maintaining a role within the system. In some ways, this is little more than a minor difference to the advertiser model, but it does at least encourage a focus on broader measures of contentedness. This is the reason we see increased attention being given by governments to concepts like national happiness indices. They are ways to measure and influence the debate around national contendedness without actually having to make significant long-term differences in outcomes. Remember, under this model the government is life coach to the nation NOT to individual citizens within it, and the best interests of the nation do not always coincide with the best interests of all its citizens.

For the individual, the lesson from the impact of complexity remains similar. If you cannot escape the complexity, it will be easier to manage your attitude to events rather to manage the events themselves. But if you can work to reduce complexity in your life, you can diminish the impact of wider events on you personally, and increase your ability to manage your personal future. It’s becoming increasingly hard for countries to do this, but individuals – for now – still have far more scope to act.

Predicting the Future: Concepts and Problems

Dr Isaac Asimov, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly right, 1965 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Toss a coin into the air. What are the chances it lands heads-up?

The conventional answer is 1 in 2.

The convention is wrong.

The conventional answer simply reflects what we can easily calculate: that if the coin is perfectly balanced, and there are no other environmental factors affecting the toss, then if you toss it a very large number times, the average chance of it landing heads-up will be once in every two tosses. An equivalent way to calculate this is to take a very large number of identical, balanced coins and toss each once: half would land heads-up.

However, it is exceptionally difficult to calculate the actual outcome of a single coin toss with any degree of accuracy. Certainly, it is a virtual impossibility before the coin is in the air and only slightly more feasible (at least theoretically) once the coin is in motion. That theoretical feasibility would likely involve cameras/sensors able to track the movement of the coin in the air, and a sufficiently fast computer simulation of the physics involved to be able to project an outcome an instant before the coin lands.

What does this little thought experiment tell us about probability, and about making predictions?

1. Tossing a single coin thousands of times yields equivalent predictive power to tossing thousands of coins simultaneously, assuming the coins in the second experiment are sufficiently similar (homogenous) to not bias the results.
2. Even once a suitably mathematically rigorous model is developed to predict the average behaviour of an entity (or of a sufficiently homogenous population), predicting what actually happens becomes harder and more complicated the narrower the timeframe and the smaller the unit being observed.

While it may seem that I am belabouring very simple mathematical & scientific principles, these two points are highly counter-intuitive to most attempts we make to predict human behaviour. The internal model of people that we tend to adopt is that individual members of society (including ourselves) are unique, and that extensive study of their singular natures is required to predict how they might act. Even then, we assume that our predictions will only hold in the short-term where fewer variables have time to interfere. An expression of what happens in the mind when these incorrect beliefs coalesce is the vanity of the fundamental attribution error, wherein our own motives seem rational & pure and those of others irrational & base.

In fact, people are both simpler and more similar than we like to believe. The reason for this is that we apply conscious thought to our actions in a much more limited fashion than is generally accepted. This should not be controversial: just try remembering the exact details of your last commute to work, and then tell me you are were acting in a fully conscious manner at the time! And yet, most people rail against such an interpretation of their lives.

It does however have advantages. Unconscious actions tend to be more automatic, and therefore more predictable, than conscious ones. Give people time and opportunity to actively choose a course of action, and they can react in surprising ways. But keep them moving on a path that requires relatively less choice, and their potential range of action diminishes. This theory of behaviour becomes extremely useful when thinking about how large groups of people may act. The complexity of societal structure itself is an exceptionally good narcotic agent on the conscious mind: it funnels and moulds our actions in a deep manner, subtly constraining our choices at every step while still providing the illusion of choice.

The beauty of this effect is that it leads to a surprising conclusion: societies – and the people within them – are MORE predictable the larger and more complex they are. Simple small societies bring us closer to the level of a free individual, and so create more opportunity for a single rationally-thinking person to make changes. Large, intertwined societies tend to blur the effect of a single person, reducing the noise affecting the signal indicating the direction of travel of the society.

Irrationality thus becomes an asset to predictability, and rationality a liability. Situations are harder – not easier – to predict when too many people in a group actively attempt to cognitively reason out their next course of action. By constrast, irrationality tends to be the product of the unconscious and automatic mind, and that is much more straightforward to anticipate. The irrational action may or may not actually be helpful in achieving the group’s aim, but it is almost certainly more predictable. Any student of the human mind will confirm this pattern, whether they work as psychiatrist, psychologist, politician, salesperson, negotiator or diplomat.

Of course, I do accept that if absolutely everyone acted rationally all the time, society would be perfectly predictable. This is why the behaviour of an algorithmic computer is theoretically predictable. The difficulty is where both rationality and irrationality co-exist i.e. the human context. Here, it is the presence of rationality that creates a more disruptive effect on predictive power than irrationality. The larger and more complex the society, the less impact a small amount of rationality can have. Trends, conventions and accepted boundaries, however arbitrary, are more effective constraints of behaviour than rational argument ever can be.

Psychohistory is the fictional science created by Isaac Asimov for his Foundation series, which postulates a mathematical predictive model of society. Today, the concept is being explored (albeit in rudimentary fashion compared to Asimov’s fantastical version) through the work of a range of behavioural modellers in many disciplines, though few would apply the term psychohistory to what they do or indeed even realise that their work may in future apply to such a field. The few who consciously strive towards such a distant grand ambition have renamed themselves students of Cliodynamics. Psychohistory as a term survives instead as the study of historical and sociological trends through the lens of psychodynamic principles.

The fictional science of psychohistory, or modern cliodynamics, faces massive practical challenges. Fortunately, two of them are being gradually solved simply by the passage of time: firstly, our ability to computer simulate complex models grows exponentially with increases in processing power; and secondly, our societies become ever more complex and intertwined, limiting the impact of disruptive, rational, behaviour.

While the idea of a fully developed psychohistory of society may induce feelings of anomie or nihilism, it should be emphasised that it does not negate the individual. Individuals will still exist, exercising both rational and irrational thought just as they always have. And they’ll still have all the same illusions around choice and freedom that they always have. It would be exceptionally hard to eradicate such a useful evolutionary trait. Just like today, each of us will still prefer to believe we can control the world, while minimising the degree to which it influences us. And just like today, it will be those with a strong sense of their own identity who will be most able to adopt quiet & discreet lives where such influence is indeed minimised.

Changing Opinions

Sitting on the Fence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How often do you change your mind about something?

I don’t mean having difficulty deciding something and bouncing between a couple of options while doing so. I mean, once you’ve made you mind up, how often do you really change it?

If you’re like most people, the answer is, “not often”. Most people try to make big decisions in a moderately rational way. The bigger the decision, the more they try to apply logic to solve it. Small decisions like whether to order a latte or americano today, tend to be left to the more primitive parts of our brain. For the big issues, though, we like to go through a vaguely scientific process of asking a question, acquiring relevant information, balancing the information against preferred outcomes, and deciding what to do. Trouble is, most big issues are big because they’re difficult to solve logically, which means we end up having to make a final “gut instinct” judgement call in order to finally decide our opinion about the problem facing us. We end up using a heuristic rather than purely algorithmic approach; I’ve discussed such Wicked Problems before.

Heuristic problem-solving is inherently fraught with uncertainty; it’s based on a pattern-recognition approach, the validity of which varies according to the mind of the person applying the heuristic filter. Put simply, the wiser the person, the more likely they are to reach a correct result. But if the problem is truly wicked, then one can never test the result, and so we can never definitively prove who is wisest.

There are many proxy markers for wisdom, including reported or perceived happiness, wealth, position and/or influence in the eyes of others, and how well words stand the test of time. None of these is entirely satisfactory, for self-evident reasons, which means that definining wisdom itself ultimately becomes a matter of consensus and opinion. This is clearly troubling if one is concerned about creating an objective yardstick by which to measure human progress.

However, it is empowering if you are more concerned about making changes that chime in with your own personal opinion. Firstly, it allows you to define the frame of reference for success and failure. Secondly, it promotes uncertainty in other people’s decision-making, creating a space for you to influence their judgement. And lastly – if you are interested in making large-scale rather than personal changes – it provides you with a long-term tool by which to modify the broader cultural perception of what is ethically correct. As a culture, we have even given a name to this last process: Politics.

Politics is the art of persuading a sufficiently large number of people that your opinions are culturally correct. This actually applies as much to a tyranny as it does to the kinds of limited/representative democracies most readers will live in. It’s just that the violence and speed of the mechanisms of changing government that varies: revolution in the former; elections in the latter. But more than this, far-sighted politicians also understand that the optimal way of persuading people of their rightness is to modify the cultural mindset within which the choice is made. Alter the frame of reference, and you can ensure a specific answer will always emerge. This is also something tyrannies and democracies share, with only superficial differences between the two: tyrannies tend to use coercive force and single-party elections; democracies use advertising and other softer propaganda like manipulating the flow of information.

All the above is no more than I would expect an average teenager to grasp, and I actually think many do (at least on an unconscious level), even if the usual response is anomic cynicism rather than recognising the empowering potential. The more thoughtful will recognise another implication, however: even quite severe unpopularity in the short-term is irrelevant, provided you can sufficiently alter the mindset of a large enough group of people to influence their long-term cultural mindset in your favour to protect your long-term survival. This applies to individual lives as much as it does to organisations and to political parties.

Coming full circle to the start of this post, changing someone’s mind is very difficult in the short-term. Instead, you have to alter the way they make decisions. The more time you have to do this, the easier it becomes. This is partly what accounts for incumbency effect in politics: it’s harder to dislodge a known politician from a post than if two unknowns are fighting for the same position. It’s not usually that incumbents have really proven anything about whether they’re right or not; it’s just that they’ve become part of the mental furniture of voters. Even if they’re unpopular in some respects, the incumbent still usually retains a higher chance of retaining power than if they didn’t have that mindshare of reality. In a US Election year, it’s worth noting that this is a big part of the reason that most US Presidents tend to get re-elected for a second term, even if at mid-term it seems like they’re unpopular. UK politics frequently operates similarly: being in government allows you to craft the narrative in a much deeper way than being in opposition, and you can see it in many of the Budget 2012 changes being announced today (esp. personal tax statements, reducing reliefs & benefits and increasing personal allowances), despite the potential for some other changes to be unpopular in the short term. And even when the longer-term cycle of change occurs, political parties never reverse even a majority of changes imposed by their predecessors, no matter how vehemently they may have opposed them at time of their introduction.

Reality is like chewing gum: sticky but malleable.

The ultimate expression of this thesis of persuasion is that tactics should always be secondary to strategy, and that strategy should be guided by clear long-term insightful aims. Only that will allow you to gradually work on altering the perception of enough people for them to reach what you would consider correct decisions. Logic and argument is a poor convincer of anyone except a computer. Persuasion through modifying the frame of reference of the argument works much better on human beings. Next time you disagree with someone, or need to negotiate with them, remember these principles rather than attempting to argue with them. You won’t convince them today, but you might just change their mind tomorrow.

A Panglossian Perspective on the EU summit

Image via Wikipedia

In our turbulent times, it it reassuring to know that certain things remain unwaveringly true. One of those things is that regardless of any grand statements, national interests override supranational ones. Nowhere was this more in evidence than at the European Summit overnight. Interestingly enough, despite that, most of the major countries got their way and will not walk away unhappy.

Purists Germany stopped the ECB from actually solving the Eurozone debt crisis by letting it act as a proper central bank and prevented the ESM/EFSF from getting banking licenses of their own. The UK protected itself from a heavy extra burden of financial regulation in the City, a key driver of our economy, while not preventing the Eurozone from beginning the process of integrating into a more meaningful fiscal union with the real and necessary restrictions of national sovereignty required for a currency union to work. And the French got to maintain the pretence that they are the key diplomatic player in the EU, the power behind Germany’s economic throne, by loading the proposed treaty with so much of that financial regulation as to force the UK to veto an EU-wide treaty. And on an EU level, at least the Eurozone debt crisis has a bigger temporary sticking plaster to kick the can down the road a bit longer.

Let us be clear: Germany holds the Eurozone’s pursestrings and if any nation can be said to have got its way more fully than the rest, it is Germany. They have imposed their economic model on the rest of the Eurozone. It may not quite be an iron hand yet, but the velvet glove is certainly off. In the meantime, the EFSF will run concurrently with the ESM for about a year, which together with other resources pledged, brings the total amount of money in the EU bailout pot for profligate PIIGS to a bit over a trillion euros. That’s still not enough, really. Two would be nicer. But it’s not a bad sticking plaster – certainly better than the ones we’ve had so far – and might just be enough to calm the situation. Time will tell; it’s a little too early to judge that today.

The UK was forced to wield its veto. The usual suspects have begun hand-wringing about “isolation”, but as Terry Smith of brokers Tullet Prebon amusingly suggested this morning: “the UK as isolated as somebody who refused to join the Titanic just before it sailed”. To have signed the treaty would have subjected the City to a huge potential increase in regulation. Like it or not, the City contributes about 10% to our national wealth, a far greater percentage than any other EU country’s financial intermediation services. Add in financial services more generally, and the figure rises to about 1/3 of GDP. Even just considering the taxes it pays (yes, it does actually pay a lot of tax, despite what some would have you believe), that’s an important cash-cow for the UK government to preserve. Subjecting it to a new swathe of regulation is hardly conducive to profit, especially in such fragile times.

The French are very aware of this of course, which is why they insisted on including so much financial regulation in the proposed treaty. Unable to persuade the Germans to give the ECB proper banking powers, they were at risk of appearing impotent in the EU. And if there’s one thing that a French President with a looming re-election campaign can’t afford to appear, it’s impotent. As no other EU nation has as large a financial sector as Britain, it was easy for them to ensure that the other countries would not object; the impact of the regulations would be negligible to them. This ensured that either Britain would capitulate (handicapping one of its traditional strengths, benefiting France) or it would have to veto the treaty (allowing Sarkozy to frame the outcome as British isolation, boosting his domestic prospects).

The UK’s relationship with the EU will certainly now be very different to before. A veto, once wielded, is no longer a frightening spectre to either British PMs or our EU colleagues, but merely a tool. It will likely be used more frequently. I suspect the likely outcome will be a multi-speed EU, with the eurozone (and its likely future members) moving towards a more integrated political and economic union, and the UK and any other permanent non-eurozone members remaining in a looser alliance with the eurozone. The key thing the UK has to negotiate is the maintenance of a single market when it comes to no cross-border tariffs, minimising internal national subsidies, and the other key free trade tenets currently enshrined at an EU-level. Everything else can gradually be allowed to drift apart, which in the medium term will make it easier to begin cutting back on some of the more intrusive bits of current EU social and regulatory legislation.

It is undoubtedly in the UK’s long-term economic interests to remain part of the free-market aspects of the EU (although Channel 4′s relatively impartial FactCheck suggests its benefits may often be overstated). The challenge will be maintaining the UK’s free market relationship with the EU while the Eurozone members integrate further politically. Given the free market aspects are already in place, this should not be an impossible challenge. A delicated balancing act, certainly. But not impossible.

In the longer term, the UK can develop into a low-tax offshore gateway to the rest of the EU, with less regulation than the mainland, attracting global investment precisely because of that lower regulatory burden. A jumbo-sized Hong Kong, if you like. This would not be possible if the UK were part of a more integrated political, fiscal and monetary union with it. In the very long term, the balance may shift again. We cannot predict what the EU or the World will look like in 50 or 100 years. But for today, and for the short and medium terms, David Cameron did the right thing for Britain.

And funnily enough, leaving aside the relative sideshow of financial services regulation, the Eurozone may just have done enough to stave off imminent disaster too. Well, as the title suggests, I am an optimist.

Rebuilding Greece

As global markets rise on the hope that the Eurozone may finally be mustering the courage to grasp the political nettle of the problems generated by a single monetary policy but multiple fiscal polices, it seems appropriate to post this photograph of the Parthenon being rebuilt. Taken during a recent break I enjoyed in Athens & the Ionian island of Kefalonia, the imagery of the Parthenon gradually being reconstructed, reversing the damage caused by years of neglect, resonates neatly with the wider challenge faced by the Greeks.

This was my first visit to Greece in many decades, and much has changed. Despite its current woes, it is undoubtedly a richer and more sophisticated country than I remembered. It has benefited from the influx of funds brought about by EU membership and the cheap borrowing costs it initially experienced as a Eurozone member. The debt has caught up with it and my personal opinion is that all the current austerity measures & bailouts are simply buying time to manage a more definitive restructing of the debt in due course. Call it a default if you prefer, for that is what it will be in effect, but it will be done in a contained way once the rest of the Eurozone has finally erected sufficient economic defences to calm any subsequent financial concern.

Greece itself faces a long period of reconstruction. It is a proud country, with a glorious past (some aspects of which I intend to blog about soon) but it must realise that many of its current problems are of its own making. Poor tax collection, profligate spending and overgenerous public sector conditions are an unsustainable and toxic mix.

I witnessed first-hand the anger and sorrow that the population are feeling. From large protest marches watched over by riot police, to individual stories of woe such as the young museum worker who hadn’t been paid in four months, Greece is struggling to transition. The risk is of an increasingly angry population causing severe unrest requiring military intervention, and a subsequent coup. This may seem outlandish speculation but it is only a few decades since Greece was under military rule. With the current political class widely reviled, it may not take much more pressure for the public to permit a coup.

The following images of the Parthenon show more of the restoration work taking place. I hope the Greeks can manage to rebuild their country with equal care.

Euro Farce

The Eurozone remains en route to implosion. But it’s a slow-motion train wreck.

I first blogged about this almost exactly one year ago, and again last November; I doubt today’s post will be my last. I won’t rehash the detail from those posts, but reading them in light of ongoing events proves their points.

Eurozone central bankers and politicians have consistently failed to definitively address the fundamental structural economic flaw generated by a unified monetary policy and nationally disparate fiscal policies.

That’s because there is no way to address this mismatch, short of unifying fiscal policy to a much greater degree than stronger countries’ economies (and voters) are prepared to accept. Or breaking up the monetary union, which Euro politicians and central bankers refuse to accept.

Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s economics editor, is just one of many journalists now publicly discussing scenarios previously considered verboten. His idea of Euro bonds would be one way of addressing the structural problem, but fails the litmus test, as I doubt it would be palatable to German voters. His final point, quoted below, paraphrases one I made in my earlier articles:

Whether we hit the barriers of political unacceptability or a market attempt to take down the ECB first is a question everybody hopes we never have to answer, but markets have staged attacks on central banks before.

Where I differ from his perspective, is that I hope the question is answered, and soon.

What is needed is clarity and finality, not ongoing slow-motion crisis and farce. Euro currency fragmentation will be intensely painful, but as with a sticking plaster, it’s best to act decisively to limit the overall agony. It’s been over a year since this crisis started, and the hope then was that temporising measures would buy enough time for economies to recover, and that growth would be enough to disguise the underlying problem. If it had happened, it would have worked.

It hasn’t happened, because what Greece, Ireland, Portugal (and Spain and Italy) desperately need in order to grow is rapid and major currency devaluation relative to other world currencies, to make their economies competitive again. They cannot get sufficient devaluation within the Euro, as the relative economic strength of the northern Eurozone countries keeps the currency as a whole moderately attractive internationally. It is falling in value somewhat, despite that, but not nearly enough to save the periphery. The ECB’s recent interest rate hike simply underlines how monumentally destructive the Euro is proving to the peripheral economies, not to mention their citizens.

Solving the problem demands decisive political action to either break up the Euro, or drive the Eurozone significantly towards  fiscal union. Forgive my scepticism but I doubt we’ll get either. Just more muddling through with temporary bailouts and other weak measures. In short, keeping fingers crossed, hoping it buys enough time for natural growth to kick in, and praying the market is too stupid to see what’s going on in the meantime.

Hmm, good luck with that…!

The Hunch

Perhaps it’s the residual imagery of that infamous Hillary Clinton advert from the 2008 Primaries, or simply my memory of too many nights on call for work, but when the phone goes off in the middle of the night, I rarely think it’s good news.

Contrast that with the widely-reported response of David Cameron, British Prime Minister, to his middle-of-the-night phone call from Barack Obama: he “had a hunch” that the call was to tell him that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.

Obviously there are a number of potential explanations for this. For instance, he could have had some advance notice of the operation either from the USA, or from British Security Services who had noted the build-up to the American action. I think the former is unlikely given just how few people knew about the operation. The latter is perhaps more plausible, given the large number of British assets that are operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan these days. Or maybe he detected something in the tone of the voice of the staff connecting him to the US President that unconsciously let him realise that the tenor of the news in advance. Alternatively, Cameron might simply be unwittingly retrofitting his memory to fit the subsequent events, something that we are all prone to do without consciously realising the distortion.

But if the hunch was genuinely his initial reaction, it speaks volumes about the man and tells us something more profound than he may have realised when he said it. There must be a remarkably strong underlying sense of optimism running through your psyche for a man – especially one in his position – to be woken up in the middle of the night, and to suspect that good news is the cause.

Optimism at a psychological trait is poorly understood but appears to be multifactorial in its aetiolog: it arises from a combination of heritable factors and learned behaviours. It is associated with better physical and psychogical health; optimists tend to suffer less mental distress from negative events. Taken to an extreme, it can become unrealistically Panglossian, but on a more proportionate level it certainly seems helpful to life.

Regardless of your voting preferences, knowing whether a politician is optimistic or not is crucial to how they will act when in office as politics is discipline involving a series of wicked problems. An optimist will approach those decisions differently to a pessimist. It is easy to be cynical about, say, Cameron’s Big Society concept, but if he really is as optimistic as the quote suggests, then it is likely to be a genuine belief of his rather than a mere political convenience. It also impacts on the austerity programme the government is undertaking to cut the deficit; an optimist would tend to want to trust research supporting the ability of the private sector to at least partially offset public spending cuts, and give less weight to the contrary position, whereas a pessimist would be unlikely to be as willing to believe. A similar argument can be made to a willingness to reform large organisations such as the NHS.

Optimism doesn’t just colour the decision itself, it can also affect the eventual outcome. I’ve already noted that optimists tend to suffer less mental distress when faced with negative situations. This can lead them to be more willing to make changes that translate the negative into the positive (adversity into success). There is also research to suggest that those suffering from clinical depression actually view the world in a hyper-realistic fashion: their pessimism lets them judge odds more accurately than optimists or even average non-depressed people would, but also demotivates them from making changes to then actively skew the odds back into their favour.

Right decisions are rarely obvious before they are taken, in politics or more generally in life. Understand how you tend to approach decision-making, and so learn to better trust your decisions.

The Destroyer of Worlds

Whether war, no-fly zone, or de facto rebel air wing,  allied military action continues in the skies over Libya.

In a fortuitous scheduling quirk, the BBC screened The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. This Powell & Pressburger 1943 classic is a movie I was certain I’d seen but in fact had not. The movie opens with a wartime chase culminating in the main character (named Candy, not Blimp) being thrown into a Turkish bath, before flashbacking to his younger self in 1902.

The immediate plot development is superficially that of a romantic comedy. There are one or two darker notes, but it is easy to shrug them off as reading more than intended into an innocuous scene. This is especially so for a modern viewer seeing the movie for the first time. Having the benefit an extra 68 years worth of movies, we assume ourselves to be more sophisticated than a wartime propaganda flick could possibly be.

The genius of the movie is that every nuance in the first third is entirely deliberate, as are other lines and scenes that appear to be amusing fluff. In hindsight, they become tragic foreshadowings of what happens to the world as the movie segues into the First World War. The darkness accumulates, and even an ostensibly happy post-war family scene where Candy talks about meeting his new wife has a looming bittersweet quality. Unlike his new family, who never cotton on to his mixed emotions, we are acutely aware of his deep sense of loss at never marrying his first love. This deftness of portrayal is a testament to Roger Livesey’s acting, on display throughout the movie.

Unusually for a propaganda film, two of the best speeches are given to a German character, played with conviction by Anton Walbrook. The thumbnail sketch of his family’s collapse in the interwar period is truly tragic, and all the more powerful for being delivered in an shockingly honest manner. And his later explanation to Candy of the war’s meaning lays out the realpolitik of why the principles Britain was fighting for were sacrificed to ensure victory.

The movie also lightly – but intelligently – touches on difficult areas such as the subjectivity of perception. Are the three women in different time periods played by Deborah Kerr really meant to be identical in appearance? I think not; Walbrook’s character almost says as much in a later scene. He married Candy’s true love, and does not really see her image in the portrait of the woman Candy married; Candy is absolutely convinced of their similarity, and they are both Kerr.

This clash between perception and reality is taken to its logical conclusion in the movie’s final scenes as it comes full-circle to the time-period of the opening scene. Candy reflects on his life; that “he has never changed”. But the viewer is acutely aware of a change in how we perceive him. From the reactionary, bumptious and foolish Colonel Blimp comic-strip archetype we assume him to be initially, we now understand the human qualities of the man, and the ideas and principles he embodies. As the movie’s title suggests, Blimp is now dead to us. Candy lives on.

The propaganda message of the film is thus remarkably nuanced for a wartime film, and perhaps partly explains why Churchill tried to prevent its release. In essence, it argues that Britain has to fight dirty to win WWII, and while that compromises its ideals and the very reason it fights, this is a less-worse fate than not fighting at all. It admits that the country is changing. But it also holds out a faint hope that while the essential humanity of people like Candy remains, the inhumane actions it as a nation takes during the War have a chance to be redeemed after. It argues that nations and armies behave differently – and less civilly – than people, but that while nations exist, war is necessary.

Despite preceding the Trinity nuclear tests by two years, it is both acceptance of – and remedy to – Robert Oppenheimer’s famous misquote of the Bhagavad Gita as he realised what Man had achieved: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”.

Libya is a far smaller conflict, but the movie’s resonance remains a sobering counterbalance to the fervid front pages.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is currently on Amazon.co.uk for just £3.93

Libya Ceasefire? Gaddafi plays Joker in the Pack

International Diplomacy is evolving from a stately Great Game into Speed Chess.

With the destabilising ramifications of Japan’s earthquake taking a temporary step back from the limelight, Libya has again taken centre stage.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have achieved something I thought extraordinarily unlikely a week ago, passing a UN resolution authorising a no-fly zone over Libya.

Not just that, but the detailed wording enables a remarkably broad range of potential triggers to intervention.

This wrong-footed me. I had assumed that their efforts were words not action, designed to bolster an impression of determined humanitarian activity that would play well with their home audiences, but in reality done with an expectation of failure at the UN. And to which they would then be able to say “well, at least we tried our best”. Russia, China and Germany (and to some extent even the USA) instead all chose to call the UK and France’s bluff.

That put the ball back into their court, leading to rumours that British and French jets would be over Libya within hours. Instead, they paused to co-ordinate plans. I wonder if there was an element of realpolitik here; perhaps an expectation that the pause would allow Gaddafi to quickly take Benghazi, and so negate the practical need for any serious military intervention.

Instead, and to my even greater surprise, it is Gaddafi who has blinked first, by declaring a ceasefire.

At this stage, I admit that what happens next is beyond my ken. The situation – and Gaddafi himself – remains too unpredictable. Part of me thinks he is saying whatever it takes to prevent international airstrikes, with actual attacks continuing to take place on the ground. If this happens, will the US/UK/France deploy their forces to the fullest extent authorised by UN Resolution 1973 or will they back-pedal and implement only the barest skeleton of a no-fly zone?

It really is a compelling real-time example of international brinkmanship. It displays how nations can get swept up into a ratcheting spiral of engagement. In this kind of rapidly-evolving game, unpredictability can overwhelm careful planning and Gaddafi is a past-master at putting a spanner into the works.

Drawing parallels with individuals in crisis situations, and my professional experience in that field, the best way to contain unpredictable and dangerous behaviour is for everyone else involved to act in a co-ordinated and highly-boundaried manner. This contains the unpredictability and allows a safe management plan to be implemented to solve the problem. But this requires everyone else involved in the situation to want the same outcome, so they have the motivation to speak with one voice. In the case of Libya, each party has its own vested interests, many of which are in conflict. The danger is that this permits unpredictable behaviour to easily get an upper hand.