The policy is crazy

Pakistan literally has a policy of crazy, repelling everyone around it.

After being bamboozled for decades, the US is beginning to face up to the fundamental challenge of Pakistan. From its founding, Pakistan has employed its "tribals" to harrass, first India, and now Afghanistan. The policy is habitual and deeply intwined with its religious and political roots. Mohammad Ali Jinnah first created Pakistan as an extortion demand, saying in essence "Give us a rich slice of India, or you will have a civil war". Well, India still got an ugly civil war at partition as well as several wars with Pakistan since.

Why? Why all this crazy? The Mughal empire at 1700 ruled almost all of what is now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. Empires in decline tend to have feelings of entitlement that can lead to lashing out. Muslims see themselves as a martial culture, (rightly so), and thus destined to rule over the vegetarian acolytes of the cow. At independence, Muslims couldn't psychologically deal with the prospect of no longer being in charge .. not even being used by the British as their cat's paws and administrators, but rather being swamped to insignificance in a democratic and majority Hindu country. The irony, of course, is that Pakistan has been perpetually politically dysfunctional; not capable of ruling itself, let alone anyone else, while India has become more stable with more durable democratic institutions.

Thus the rump Mughal mini-empire of Pakistan was born, founded as an Islamic state, a tenet of which is to wage Jihad, and not just the internal, meditative kind. Immediately, an irritant presented itself in the form of Jammu and Kashmir, provinces of the newly minted India that were majority Muslim (67%), but whose Sikh Maharaja, already under attack from Pakistan, decided to join India. The blatant insult of a possible province not seeking to join the already militaristic and dysfunctional new state of Pakistan was too much to bear, and Pakistan has continually thereafter trained, funded and made it a matter of official policy to destabilize and terrorize Jammu and Kashmir as best it can.

Why do its own people put up with this craziness? And more to the point, why do individual insurgents put their lives on the line for such a hopeless and frankly evil policy? Here we get to the true evils of religion, which can plant such certainty, such social solidarity, and such aggressive doctrine into the hearts of its adherents that they are usable for suicide bombing.

Fast-forward to the 1980's, and the interests of Pakistan and the US aligned fatally with the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan. Pakistan had the network of crazies, the US had the money and arms. A match made in heaven, at least as far as waging Jihad against the Russians. The US essentially endorsed what had become standard Pakistani policy for giving itself a feeling of security on each of its borders- behave like a nest of killer bees, ready to be stirred up at the least provocation and able to project force via the conveniently "ungovernable" terrain all about.

Friends? Who needs friends when you have terror on your side? Yet there was one thing Pakistan did need, which was money and military toys to keep its political elite in clover. The US was thus diddled along with promises of "cracking down" on terrorists, non-proliferation,  and being a strategic partner against the Soviets. Which was something of a live issue back when India had pro-Soviet sympathies and Afghanistan had been overrun, but no longer in 90's and after.

Once used to the taste of governing another country, (or at least de-governing one), via its Taliban friends and other networks of Jihadis, Pakistan was never going to give up willingly after the Taliban's fall and let the flowers of democracy bloom. All and sundry, including Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar were taken in and nurtured in Pakistan, with a wink and nod. Selected individuals of US interest from Al Qaida were captured, but the infrastructure of the Taliban was never touched, and was even allowed to take over whole provinces in the northwest. What one might charitably call provincial autonomy in the tribal areas was studiously used as cover for a continuing policy of stabilizing the Taliban and destabilizing Afghanistan.

The sad part is that these countries had all the makings of great friends. Closely tied by culture, religion, geography, even blood and tribe, they could have been like the US and Canada, one the slightly more rural and nice version of the other. But no! Closeness can engender blood feuds and condescension as well. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the militarism of Pakistan means that its political elite sees its political stability built on outside threats and domestic fear, not on friendship and commercial progress. (Is this reminiscent of a recent US administration?)

Now the US and Pakistan have settled into a dysfunctional relationship, with the US never able to tell whether Pakistan's latest promises of virginity are any truer than its last. Would its behavior improve more if we cut the cord, sending Pakistan into a nuclear-armed renewed bitterness, or if we held Pakistan closer with "assistance" by which it is enabled into a quasi-stable and quasi-cooperative relationship?

The answer is obviously that the latter has not worked and will not work. On the street, Pakistanis are virulently anti-US. Pakistan continues to have a policy of destabilizing Afghanistan- indeed much more actively than Iran has dared to do in Iraq or Afghanistan. Pakistan continues its internal dysfunction, with a highly militarized political culture replete with corruption and callous disregard of its own population (especially its various ethnic minorities and "tribals"). Pakistanis routinely claim that they have borne the brunt of Islamist violence, and that is true. But it is only true because they have been playing with fire since their founding. Whether it is the fault of Islam itself, or its embittered historical legacy, Pakistan has brought that problem entirely on itself. Our role should be to contain it as much as possible and support its progressive institutions, but to not financially- let alone militarily- abet their militarism and their tragically short-sighted policies.

An interesting fact in the mix is that there is no formal border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan's military rulers have found it convenient to keep the area porous and putatively uncontrolled, while Afghans have in principle opposed dividing the Pashtun people. It may be time to turn this state of affairs to advantage by breaching the Drurand line, taking some of this territory for Afghanistan and uniting the Pashtuns, while at the same time bringing these tribal areas under better (Afghan) government. As things stand, these border areas of Pakistan (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA) have been put explicity under Taliban rule via active Pakistani policy. Obviously, this is untenable for both Afghan, US, and global interests, not to mention the locals who have been either cowed or executed. Taking the fight to the FATA in person, rather than solely via drones, would be a logical step in light of the perpetual duplicity, not to say hostility, of Pakistan (and might be quite a morale builder for Afghanistan besides). Then Pakistan could decide whether it really wants a war against a country with which it could have very friendly relations, or will accede to better administration.

My prescription would thus be to double down on Afghanistan, strengthen ties with India and Russia, and treat  Pakistan as it has asked to be treated- with some hostility. We should cut our aid and assistance (certainly military) while offering the prospect of better relations when Pakistan's political elite decides to grow up. Would we lose what help Pakistan now gives us? Probably yes- all our shipping-based supplies to Afghanistan go through Karachi/Quetta, and we have various secret military bases in the country, as well as implicit drone attack rights and some intelligence assistance against Al Qaida. So this would not be a minor loss. But what does it help us to get logistical support from Pakistan if we are fighting Pakistan at the same time?

Might Pakistan be driven into the arms of, say, Iran or China, to form a new axis of the disgruntled and misunderstood, not to mention the Jihadi? That would be a likely outcome, seen in formal terms. Our policy towards Iran and Pakistan should really be similar- friendly to their people and their progressive sectors, but awaiting maturity and reciprocity instead of giving gratuitous aid to their retrograde leaders. Pakistan would need a friend somewhere to fend off encirclement by the many powers who just "don't understand". But at some point, one wonders whether they might find it within their power to take a look within and do the hard work of psychotherapy/demilitarization/de-Islamization ... and realize that the enemy was never outside to start with.

Here is a quote from a recent Pakistani newspaper commentary, showing typical narcissistic victimhood, not to mention a unique brand of English:

"Besides the physical threats to security of Pakistan emanating from multiple directions, Pakistan has to contend with never-ending vicious propaganda campaign launched by Indo-US-western-Israeli-Afghan nexus to demean Pakistan and its premier institutions."

• The Pakistani-India border dance, complete with coxcombs.
• A fine book on the topic excoriates all concerned, especially the US, as if we were supposed to save the "region" from its own immaturity and dysfunction.
• In the meantime, Pakistan needs some help!
• Banking with squids.
• Class war could hardly be more obvious, could it?
• The "Discovery" institute seems incapable of learning, ironically.
• Sphagnum  moss ejects its spores at 32,000Xg.
• A fascinating graduation address.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week:

"But the US political scene is even more moribund than ours if that is possible. Even the progressives are claiming there is a fiscal crisis. The facts speak otherwise."...

"So the only “deep hole” I can see in the US is the gaping real GDP gap and the resulting and shocking labour underutilisation data. Which sophisticated nation thinks it is acceptable to have 16.5 per cent of your willing labour force idle in some way or another? Answer: None. Only a nation operating under the destructive spell of neoliberalism would envisage making such a situation worse by cutting back the very thing that is maintaining growth at present."

Petr Kropotkin: biologist, anarchist

Petr Kropotkin takes on Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Victorian anthropology, and the state, in his humanist tour de force- "Mutual Aid".

As the long night of Boshevism set in, one of the last free acts of the Russian people was the mass public funeral of Petr Kropotkin, beloved anarchist and biologist, in 1921. In 1920 he had sent a prophetic letter to Lenin:

"I have read in today's Pravda an official communique from the Council of the People's Commissars, according to which it has been decided to keep as hostages several officers of Wrangel's army. I cannot believe there is no single man about you to tell you that such decisions recall the darkest Middle Ages, the period of the Crusades. Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold. ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture as was done in the Middle Ages."

And this was only one small incident, out of the many (including setting up the Cheka) by which Lenin betrayed the idealism of anarchists and others across the political spectrum to create the system that flowered so fully under Stalin. Kropotkin himself had worked towards liberal democracy in Russia, and had been offered a government position by socialist revolutionary Alexander Kerensky during the ill-fated 1917 interregenum.

When one thinks of anarchism, one usually thinks of obscure bomb-wielding cells and loners bent on nothing but destruction. Something like Ted Kaczynski, perhaps. A bizarre utopianism blind to the need for common refuge in law and state. Advocates of chaos rather than order. One wonders, then, how they could have been so influential at the turn of the last century- why anarchists were one of the prime parties in the Russian revolution and in the Spanish revolution and the fight against Franco, actually governing some regions, such as Barcelona, as narrated by George Orwell.

Part of a collection of posters from the Spanish civil war.  The text announces that the poster was produced by the anarcho-syndicalist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in conjunction with the international anarchist organization Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores (AIT).

The activating impulse of anarchism was of course far more subtle and interesting, and it is laid out in fascinating detail in "Mutual Aid". Petr Kropotkin, raised in a loving home at the highest levels of the Russian nobility, was a biologist and geologist first, and later took up anarchism. His many field trips through Siberia taught him about both the animal and human landscape, convincing him that in the battle for survival, banding together was one of most important resources for any species.

Kropotkin (engaging in what he calls an "embryology of human institutions") insistently points out the degree to which animals including humans are naturally communal and sympathetic, ranging from societies of ants to self-organized guilds of medieval craftsman and even to the nagging consciences of the super-rich who are moved to feats of philanthropy. He is careful to not dispute Darwin directly, respecting the fundamental principles and observations put forth in Darwin's works (which is itself remarkable, since Darwinism was subject to a great deal of scientific and popular derision in his era and the ensuing several decades). But he emphasizes non-antagonistic aspects of biology, and excoriates Darwin's followers, especially Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, who, using mantras like "nature, red in tooth and claw", carried water for the political and racial elites of their day.

The Victorian era, both in Europe and in the US, saw a frenzy of self-justifying theories of white superiority, and a glorification, nay a need, to defeat "inferior" races and nations supposedly in fulfillment of Darwin's theories. Needless to say, Darwin himself would have taken a dim view of all this, since, horrifying as natural selection was on the grand scale, it was never conceived as a normative project for human morals, but as a description of biological reality. Humanity's job, the more enlightened Victorians thought, would be to get as far away from these "natural" morals as we possibly could, with the aid of stern moral training and plenty of psychological repression.

Kropotkin's project is to show that even this view is off the mark. Humans have formed societies spontaneously from time immemorial, and help each other the more heroically the more dire their circumstances. The natural setting of humans is the tribe or clan of 50 to 150 individuals, not the nuclear family of today, and certainly not the war of all against all. His point is that evolution has fitted all advanced social species with powerful pro-social inclinations (and concomitant high intelligence) by which they naturally engage in mutual aid, whether it is birds anxiously alerting each other to danger, chimpanzees tenderly taking care of each other's grooming, or humans taking in orphans after another family's catastrophe. "In the great struggle for life .. natural selection continually seeks our the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible."

The importance of this message becomes clear when one hears anthropologists routinely describe people living in what we regard as primitive tribal societies as the happiest people on earth. I have previously blogged about the Amazonian Pirahã who exemplify this state. Their life seems to take us (well, them, really) back to the garden of eden- a time of deep contentment when the tribe was everyone's focus, sharing was the theme of adult and child life, and the serpent of greed was kept at bay. No state or bureaucracy is required to maintain this society- it is spontaneous and eternal, though capable of being poisoned by modern encroachment, as well as subject its own endogenous, though rare, wars.

Kropotkin makes it clear that this ideal is what he as an anarchist has in mind- the spontaneous organization of tribes, villages, neighborhoods, guilds, clubs .. all the most fulfilling parts of the human condition are his goal, while the state (more or less totalitarian in his European experience) is the enemy, with its overbearing destruction of competing social organizations, its promotion of social atomization. This atomization, where we typically find ourselves living in nuclear families (or even alone) in the modern world, is just as much a target of anarchists as the state. They are two sides of the same coin, expressing the same alienation from our true social and psychological inheritance.

"Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind."

The greatest example of biological mutualism was only fully understood after Kropotkin's time. That is the banding together of individual cells to form animals. From extremely modest beginnings, this form of mutual aid society, extending eventually to the routine suicide of individual cells during organismal development and self-defense and whole bodies slaughed off after reproduction, now rules the world, having opened vistas of ecological possibility unimaginable to our witless single-celled forebears.

And that is the real secret of mutual aid- that helping each other not only helps each individual weather difficult times and thus gain fitness, but also opens new niches and ecological possibilities unavailable to individuals. It clearly supports the concept of group selection, which is a very large topic in itself. Mutual defense is particularly powerful against threats from outside the group, whether from other groups in the same species, from other species, or from the elements at large. Conversely, a war of all against all leads quickly to one of those Shakespearean plays where everyone ends up dead on stage. Not a very successful outcome, if maybe an effective piece of moral instruction, so vital in our greedy age.

"In short, neither the crushing powers of the centralized State, nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution."

In biology, Kropotkin was a visionary, as altruistic aspects of our social nature and that of other organisms are still regarded as pathbreaking areas of research (as I have blogged about previously). Only now is the evolutionary community coming to a better realization that altruism is not foisted on us by god or indoctrination, but is built deeply into our software, and has been forever. While Kropotkin focuses entirely on the positive, in order to reply to the Victorian triumphial tide of "Social Darwinism", it is important to allow that our situation is conflicted, as reflected in the recently coined term "frenemy", which signifies that we have both competitive and mutualistic impulses, perpetually intertwined.

"As to the intellectual faculty, while every Darwinist will agree with Darwin that it is the most powerful arm in the struggle for life, and the most powerful factor of further evolution, he also will admit that intelligence is an eminently social faculty. Language, imitation, and accumulated experience are so many elements of growing intelligence of which the unsocial animal is deprived. Therefore we find, at the top of each class of animals, the ants, the parrots, and the monkeys, all combining the greatest sociability with the highest development of intelligence."

Taking all this up to the current era, Kropotkin devotes several chapters to the wonders of the medieval guild system, the free merchant city, and their relentless destruction by centralized states, royals, and religious empires. From a military perspective, royal and non-royal states were not defensive-minded social clubs like the guild-based civic militas, but were predatory and eager to make war on others, usually destroying the many benefits piled up in peaceful times by the mutual aid societies of day-to-day life.

An Amsterdam civic militia, by Frans Hals.

Kropotkin was incidentally visionary in his view of history as well, remarking that while historians concentrate on the dramatic bloodbaths of past conflicts, they would do well to pay closer attention to the intervening times of peace which are more reflective of core human values as well as creating the wealth that those headlining battles tussle over.

Speaking of the loving craft that medieval guilds devoted to their cities, Kropotkin quotes: "'No works must be begun by the commune but such as are conceived in response to the grand heart of the commune, composed of the hearts of all citizens, united in one common will' - such were the words of the Council of Florence;" 

He then transitions to the labor struggles of his time and the debasement of human values in capitalism. While a great deal of amelioration has since taken place in the developed world, with milder democratic states becoming the rule, his point still holds. It is well-illustrated by BP executives paying each other millions of pounds while patronizing the "small people" on the US Gulf. Modern capitalism relies completely on the natural inclination of its workers to be "team players" while at the same time systematically underpaying them and callously discarding them when convenient in our system of "at will" employment. Managments and boards routinely betray their fiduciary, not to mention ethical, responsibilities by essentially embezzling the riches that they were hired to tend.

This situation is frankly feudal, and it is time to reconsider whether we can make more of human potential by taking a page from the book of human nature. That is, by organizing companies as true "teams" where all members share and share alike, starting with being paid the same, having open books, and having democratic governance.

Lest this be considered starry-eyed liberalism, the anarchic impulse cuts across today's political spectrum. While Democrats labor to make of the state a more supportive, equitable, and sharing institution, Republicans aim to shrink the central government, in hopes of reinvigorating community-level institutions. Thus their mantra of state's rights, local charity, and private initiative. We can argue about which approach is more fair and effective, not to mention beset by ulterior and lesser motives, but it seems as though each party has an implicit vision of improved mutual aid, (i.e. the common good), that drives its ideology. Ironically, the mantra all politicians agree on- that the families are the bedrock of America- is one that is somewhat suspect from Kropotkin's perspective, however, since it really does take a village, not just a family.

Lastly, to bring this discussion full circle, these concepts have some application to Afghanistan, whose clan-based social structure is closer to our evolutionary origins than it is to modernity. Modernity is sure to extinguish the Afghan's age-old freedoms, traditions, and insularity, justifying their deep fears. Freedom to oppress women, freedom to engage in blood feuds and impromptu wars, freedom to run their valleys and villages as theocracies, freedom to terrorize the entire world if they so desire. Well- perhaps there are limits to my & Kropotkin's valorization of the primitive tribal state. Or perhaps Islam promotes an ugly trough of medievalism situated between the high points of true edenic tribalism and modern democracy.

At any rate, traditional social systems have many virtues, and we should not aim simply to blow them up. Better to adapt our aims, while creating a better form of modernity that might be more naturally attractive. To be specific, Afghan provinces and localities need more autonomy, so that they can, for instance, elect their own governors. Strong central government is neither operationally practical, nor theoretically desirable in this setting, beyond the red lines of preventing civil war and Talibanization. Governance, as always, should come from the bottom up.

"New economical and social institutions, in so far as they were a creation of the masses, new ethical systems, and new religions, all have originated from the same source, and the ethical progress of our race, viewed in its broad lines, appears as a gradual extension of the mutual-aid principles from the tribe to always larger and larger agglomerations, so as to finally embrace one day the whole of mankind, without respect to its divers creeds, languages, and races."

• Incidentally, a book on Kropotkin's era has recently appeared.
• Please fight lead poisoning of humans and wildlife.
• Krugman keeps getting it. Does anyone listen?
• America's climate shame just keeps on going.
• "There is now only one bluefin left for every fifty that were swimming in the Atlantic in 1940."
• Are you getting married?
• Bill Mitchell takes on the Japan problem, which looks like where we are headed.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week:

"One of the major agendas of the neo-liberal era has been to disabuse us of this care for others ....

In effect, the austerity push is based on ideology – on the view that private markets will self-correct and if charity is required it will come from private citizens. The anathema to the austerians is public welfare and fiscal support for the disadvantaged ....

There is a long lineage to these ideas. Greenspan’s blind faith in the market was inspired by his mentor Ayn Rand. Would Greenspan care about the unemployment now? I doubt it.

[quoting Ayn Rand:]

'As to altruism — it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it. But it has caught up with them — and that is the killer which they now have to face and to defeat. That is the basic choice they have to make. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject …

Make no mistake about it — and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.

Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the “public good” or the “general welfare” or “service to society” or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism — not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism is man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man — every man — is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone’s need.' "

And, as if to prove the point, Greenspan has just come out with an austerian rationale for canceling the Bush tax cuts. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Watching the evolution knobs spin

Evolution really happens at the dials controlling genes, more than in protein sequences those genes encode.

The shock of humans having only ~23,000 genes has yet to fully sink in. Fewer genes than soybeans? Than the potato? Additionally, the depth to which some of these genes are conserved is also astonishing, with a promoter of eye development working quite well when transplanted into fruit flies. What, then, makes us different? What has evolution been doing all this time?

A recent paper in science adds evidence that far more variation goes on in the promoters of genes than in their coding sequences. The authors tracked the sites of action (i.e. DNA binding) of two liver-specific transcription regulatory proteins in chickens, opossum, mice, dogs, and humans, and found that few  were recognizably conserved. Most sites disappeared, reappeared, altered, and mutated with considerable abandon.

The regulators themselves (CEBPA, and HNF4A) were very well conserved, meaning that as proteins, they had virtually the same sequence in each organism. And more critically, their preferred binding site on DNA stayed the same as well. That tends to be hard to change if their binding to thousands of different sites (~20,000 is the estimate given for each protein) is important for an organism's liver and other organs. Putting it in technical terms, such binding specificities tend to be subject to strong purifying selection.

On the other hand, the individual sites are much less constrained by evolution, since changes affect only that individual target gene. Some genes that have been studied as targets of CEBPA include metabolic enzymes, detoxifying enzymes like cytochromes P450, EPHX1, and SULT2A1, several insulin-regulated genes, growth factors, the gene for albumin, coagulation factor VIII, and other transcriptional regulators in liver development and function.

The current authors use some high-tech wizardry to isolate all the DNA bound to these regulatory proteins from each species of interest, and sequence around each site to see where it maps in the respective species' genome. This gives them the dataset of sites that they then mine to ask whether the sites have stayed consistent over evolutionary time. The answer is no: "For these two liver-specific TFs, binding events appear to be shared 10 to 22% of the time between mammals from any two of the three placental lineages we profiled, separated by approximately 80 million years of evolution (figs. S6 and S7). This result reveals a rapid rate of evolution in transcriptional regulation among closely related vertebrates."

For example, they show the binding of CEBPA to one region around the gene for PCK in liver. Phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase is a metabolic enzyme which helps synthesize glucose.

The coding exons of the PCK1 gene are shown at the lower right. kb = kilo basepairs. Hsap = human, Mmus= mouse, Cfam = dog, Mdom = short tailed opossum, and Ggal = chicken.

The pattern in chicken is quite simple. More sites appear in the mammals, with novel and significant sites appearing in dogs and humans. The scoring of these sites is somewhat unclear, in terms of how minor a site could be and still score, not to mention that they had no functional tests of which sites actually affected local gene transcription.

A key and well-occupied site right at the start of the PKC1 gene is well-conserved, however, and probably has a dominant regulatory role. What role the other sites might have is not clear, and might be minimal. So their  conclusion needs to be taken with a bit of salt, as they indicate that most of the highly conserved DNA binding sites are at this kind of most-influential position near genes that rely heavily on regulation by the bound regulator.

Nevertheless, the reason for flexibility in regulator binding is not hard to find, since binding sites are often composed of only six or eight nucleotides, with sloppy allowances for binding to sites with some mutations as well. New sites can appear easily, and old sites can be destroyed just as easily. So these regulatory proteins bind all over the genome and these sites change frequently, allowing regulatory variation to happen easily by mutation. The authors conclude "Taken together, the steady accumulation of small changes in the genetic sequence appears to rapidly remodel thousands of TF binding sites in mammals." [TF refers to transcription factor, another word for DNA binding regulator].

Given the complexity of biology, the network is the real locus of evolution, with the pieces (proteins encoded by genes) being shuffled around by regulatory experiments over time. Indeed, another recent paper compared the multicellular organism Volvox with its single-celled relative Chlamydomonas, and found that they had almost exactly the same number of genes, and few gene differences overall. They conclude: "This is consistent with previous observations indicating co-option of ancestral genes into new developmental processes without changes in copy number or function." And one of the most important mechanisms of such co-option is placing the given gene under novel regulation. This process is slightly reminiscent of the human economy, which is being driven increasingly as a "knowledge economy", shuffling around financing, software, and organization while the basic commodities of existence remain far more constant.

• Free will, explained. (Only in part, however.. it leaves out our moral responsiveness to others.)
• A judicious analysis of the wikileaks doc dump.
• The Taliban is getting desperate and may be in decline.
• MMT economics in a nutshell.
• Walter Mead pens an uncharacteristically idiotic screed against the greens. As if "prohibition" were being proposed by anyone, anywhere. Note the mash note to fellow anti-green Andrew Revkin.
• Meanwhile, yet another CO2 related apocalypse rears its head.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week, speaking of Minsky's model of financial cycles, requiring broad anti-cyclical policy as well as (right now) government stimulus:

"Through phases of recession, recovery, tranquility, and euphoria, the economy endogenously moves from robust to fragile financial structures. The fragile structure characterised by high levels of speculative and Ponzi finance becomes vulnerable to a multitude of shocks, any of which, in isolation or concert, can alter perceptions of future income flows needed to validate the debt structure and drive the economy into crisis."

Mind of matter

I propose a tentative model of qualia and consciousness.

A rich thread of comments over at another blog motivated me to tackle the problem of consciousness with as much specificity as evidence currently allows, including the voluminous evidence for its material basis. So here I try to lay out a plausible model of fully brain-based consciousness, to address the dualist, who typically says that he or she can not imagine any material basis to consciousness, and even claims that there is some kind of philosophical necessity that the "hard problem" of consciousness is beyond scientific analysis entirely. (I have previously written about the neurobiology of consciousness, which remains unresolved.)

As a philosophical naturalist, I would predict that no new physics will be required to resolve the consciousness problem (such as 5th dimensions, quantum consciousness in microtubules, etc.). It is pretty clear that the brain is a messy product of evolution and works by electrochemical / molecular mechanisms. It is encoded by DNA, bounded by physical space (the head), and is affected at all levels by known lesions, chemicals and other effects. Nothing more esoteric is likely to show up in its study, other than incredibly intricate organization, which we still have great difficulty analyzing as a purely technical matter.

That leaves us with either an identity position that dualists don't seem to understand, (that there exists some brain-based processes that are objective physical events and also constitute subjective consciousness at the same time), or an eliminativist position, which we all dislike (that consciousness doesn't really exist). The problem may go away, but surely not by claiming that we have no consciousness after all. Indeed, the fact that there are unconscious processes that include forms of perception, intuition, and many other computations means that there is some real distinction between things that are unconscious and those that enter consciousness, and thus that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon or semantic issue.

So I should explain the identity position a bit better, despite the admitted lack of a real scientific solution in place.

Everyone has heard about continuity in movies- the need to keep hairstyles constant, props in the same places, etc. even when a shoot of one scene goes over several days, so that the illusion of continuity is preserved. I think this is a big clue to consciousness, which could be thought of as consisting, in part, of a brief memory loop that keeps our experience continuous. The ability to associate a split-second ago with now gives us not only a sense of time, but of consciousness itself, since otherwise we would be bombarded by what seem random stimuli, uncontrolled, uncorrelated, and meaningless.

So that is part of the answer, which can be easily imagined to be embodied by the gamma wave system in the brain that is the humming in-phase communication of ever-changing coalitions of neurons from all over. This would be the perfect system to glue together percepts and mental contents while giving them limited continuity of a fraction of a second, some of which is then stored to short-term memory, which is so notoriously poor, (hippocampus), some of which is stored in turn to longer-term memory (frontal cortex). Recalling something from memory weakly re-creates the engram (gamma pattern) that was originally driven by the perceptual system, and engages the same consciousness system, though with much lower intensity and different feel. We need a prompt like a smell or madelaine to assemble the engram again more fully, though it is never again quite the same as the first time in any case.

But we still have not gotten to the heart of the issue- the redness of red. We know that lesions like strokes can cancel out perceptions very selectively. There was a recent New Yorker article on the inability to read words while having unimpaired vision- an amazingly specific stroke effect. But the funny thing is that the sufferers routinely have to deduce their deficits. If something is missing, even something like half the visual field, we are not notified. The consciousness system soldiers on as though nothing has happened, forming an impression of the world that feels complete out of all the remaining bits and pieces.

Thus consciousness is very grade-able, both among humans with various talents and deficits, and among animals with different senses and brain sizes, as well as within one person in different moods, states of sleep, Dilbertian meetings, etc. It is also the kind of system that presents whatever comes up and doesn't care about what is missing. This again fits the gamma wave system, which wouldn't join up nerves that were not firing, but would just assemble whatever forms a minimal coalition of activity. And lastly, I'll make a stop at synesthesia, where one sensory modality bleeds into another, for instance inducing people to perceive certain numbers as having particular colors wherever they appear. The cause seems to be a literal mixing of neurons in relevant areas of the brain, which has obvious selective implications, both for problems arising from extensive wrong-wiring, and for the possible creativity and special perceptual powers that might result from limited cross-wiring.

What is red? Remember that red is a complete fabrication- our brain's way of mapping qualia to what in physics are numerically different wavelengths of light. The brain can apparently make anything it likes of the stimuli coming in. We should not be surprised if bats see their sonar world in living color as well. The question is why red feels so immediate, and what transaction actually occurs between red and "our perception" of it. In other words, what is the difference between unconscious and conscious information processing?

The difference seems to lie in entry into a privileged process in the brain, such as perhaps the gamma wave system. Other areas of the brain may talk to each other and process information, but that does not enter consciousness. Whatever does enter consciousness comes from relatively high level areas of processing, by virtue of the brain's wiring, which mostly flows from inputs (signals from the eye) to higher levels of processing that are biased towards participating in these gamma wave coalitions (analyses of shape, object identity, face identity, motion, etc.). Some people such as artists may able to "see" a scene without a lot of computational processing and overlaid interpretation, but as it is at a more basic sensory level, implying that they have conscious access to unusual levels of processing.

So consciousness is a part of a unique level of processing, where interpretations are collected and cross-correlated and learned from. Why does that feel real as unconscious processing clearly does not? Incidentally, unconscious processing may be just as complex, as we learn from our social intuitions, which can be incredibly spot-on and discerning about situations we have given little conscious thought to. Dreams also point to enormous depth and richness to unconscious processes, so it may be a mistake to put all this in some kind of higher/lower hierarchy.

A sense of reality may in this theory be the product of pure associational power- the construction of a sufficiently complex and rapidly integrated virtual world becomes what we call consciousness. If everything we see instantly generates a map of spatial, social, artistic, analytical, and other associations, that alone gives the scene "reality", immediacy, and red-ness. Seeing red becomes conscious not through some magical or impossibly recurrent homunculus behind our eyes, but by its particularity in contrast to other sensations and its web of immediate associations with the vast arrays of implicit and explicit knowledge we carry around in the database of our heads.

Suppose you were to see a uniform field of red all the time, day in and day out. You would no longer be conscious of red at all. You would not only be seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, but be seeing only the rose colored glasses and nothing else. Had you no other senses, you would probably lose consciousness altogether, a sensory-deprived victim of extreme torture. But of course we have many other senses- sound, smell, touch, and several newly discovered ones, such as body and spatial sense and the like. We also have dreams- the ability to draw on our voluminous past sensory impressions and their plastic re-arrangements in imagination. So it is literally impossible to do this kind of experiment.

This theory can account for the graded-ness of consciousness, its natural development through evolution, its materiality, and in addition provides a program for the instantiation of such experiences in artificial systems. It informs the common observation that high-level consciousness is dependent on knowledge, such that the study of art history gives us new eyes in museums, and the study of biology gives us new eyes in nature. It also provides a program for the study of consciousness, since its physical correlate should be quite discrete and find-able (by the identity theory mentioned above). It is in the correlation of subjective consciousness to this postulated physical correlate that the test will be found, either confirming detailed correspondence, and driving other theories to extinction, or not.

Lastly is the issue of emotion and pain. The above theory deals with cognitive consciousness, like *appreciating what red is in an immediate way. Emotions are simpler, not necessarily association-based. They are prior to high-level cognition. Past pain is certainly a strong spur to current aversion by association, but how did past pain happen? How was it perceived? There is something elemental and not associative about raw emotions like pain, which form perhaps our first and most traumatic form of consciousness.

Pain can function without consciousness at all. We typically notice that we have pulled our hand from the fire after the deed is done, and wonder at the reflex. But pain can also flood consciousness, issuing its imperative command to fix whatever is wrong. Similarly, other emotions typically operate below consciousness, to the point that our partners are often more familiar with our tics, mannerisms, and broadcast emotions than we ourselves are. As above, the cognitive contents of emotions can be characterized as associative, (what hurts, who did it to us, what is causing pleasure, etc.), but emotions carry extra contents injected alongside as the valence of the pleasure or pain- the command by other systems of the brain that this is something to be done again, or never again.

So it is no surprise that consciousness seems to be a complicated system, requiring rapid and  wide-spread associations to provide the brute contents and textured differentiation of cognition, as well as a brief memory loop that gives continuity to experience. Emotions are injected as extra cognitive contents and feelings, using specially responsive brain areas that date from early evolution and provide more than information: motivation.

I have tried to present a model that is plausible given current evidence, though obviously not very detailed. While there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that something material and eletrochemical in the brain is responsible, it will take a few decades yet to fill in those details.

• Theologians working at public universities find it getting hot under the collar.
• Can you lose your sense of smell? 
• A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there...
• One gets the impression that Hamid Karzai doesn't know much about power.
• Though his isn't the only government beset with unaccountable bloat and corruption.
• An interesting reflection on the worth of work:

".. while collecting salaries of between £500,000 and £10 million, leading City bankers destroy £7 of social value for every pound in value they generate." ... ".. for every £1 they are paid, childcare workers generate between £7 and £9.50 worth of benefits to society."

• The financial industry needs a transaction tax.
• Wear a Pink Sari and Carry a Big Stick.

Go, LeBron!

LeBron James knows what business he's in.

Sorry to stray from my usual dour topics, but the recent LeBron James saga has thrown some interesting light on labor in America. Commentators have been piling on about his narcissism, his breathtaking gall, his callous rending of Cleveland's heart, and the botched PR that will see him rot in hell. Or something like that.

Topping it all was the Cavalier's owner, who threw a titanic snit at losing James to Miami and apparently learning about it on TV along with the rest of us. To which I say, tough luck!

James put the NBA owners through their paces, subjecting them to the most abject groveling, before arranging a prime time extravaganza to burn his bridges to all but one. Where else have we seen a powerful and energetic black man, sometimes referred to as "the one", calling the shots? Firing generals? Showing the man who's boss? Being the man?

So let us not cry for the NBA owners, with their anti-trust exemption. Through their ministrations, the NBA has far more teams than talent. Way too many games are scheduled and as a result, injuries are rampant. The game has become relentlessly physical and combative under NBA refereeing. In Cleveland, James was expected to carry the team mostly by himself, and was unable to make it work. In desperation, they imported Shaquille O'Neal, creating a situation more comical than effective. James did the rational thing and created a better situation for himself elsewhere. All NBA teams try to nurture and milk home-town sentiments ... until they don't, trading players as though they were slaves on the auction block. It was nice to see the tables turned for a change, frankly.

The way I see it, James's primary motivation was to play with his friends and fellow stars, Wade and Bosh. And these are very honorable motives. The US army relies first and foremost on comraderie to build units that fight effectively. This seems lost on the modern NBA, where players are shuffled around on the basis of little more than management hunches, statistics, and needed positions. My local team, the Warriors, has seen season after season end up high in the draft due to terrible chemistry, starting from its top management. One player went so far as to physically choke the coach. Thankfully, both are retired now and resting peacefully. Conversely, the Boston Celtics assembled a star threesome several years ago of Paul Pierce, Ray Allan, and Kevin Garnett, which worked on the levels of both chemistry and talent, to ensuing acclaim. Few thought that Garnett should have slaved on in Minnesota to the end of his career.

In this way star players are taking control of their careers, and in turn, of the league, typically not to make more money, but to play with colleagues they like, and thence to be successful on premier teams- teams that the NBA is structured by its owners to avoid, based on its collusive drafting and salary cap rules. The owner-player tension is evident, and we shouldn't mind the ball going into the player's basket every so often through canny self-promotion and sheer talent.

Lastly, why do it on TV? Wasn't that shockingly self-aggrandizing? Well, the high ratings speak for themselves. If nine million people watch, then it is by definition not self-aggrandizing, it is entertainment, which is, after all, the business the NBA is in. To which, I say, well done, LeBron!

• More on LeBron.
• Crazy capitalists! Runaway monkeys! 
• Let's support congressional action on climate and energy.
• One more point in the deflation vortex. And the Fed isn't helping, either.
• What is supernaturalism and naturalism, anyhow?
• Luttwak disabuses us of faith in the Afghan government. And adds: "Give war a chance."!
• More on the merchants of doubt.
• Lesbian mice? Oh dear!
• A fool in Afghanistan.
• The trouble with torture is ... the media attention.

Kant and the cognitive bootstrapping problem

It turns out that our brains come pre-patterned to deal with space, time, causality, language, and morality, among other a priori concepts. Where did they get them? From evolution, of course.

Respect for dead philosophers is an odd thing. They are often revered for introducing ambitious systems of esoteric metaphysics. Occasionally for having novel ideas. Sometimes they even write well. The questions they raise are perennial and to some, fascinating. But rarely have they solved anything. Ambitious systems are propounded in one era only to be forgotten or overturned in the next, at best remembered by a catchphrase, like "God is dead", or "thesis, antithesis, synthesis". It may be a brutal disservice to the history of ideas to encapsulate the multi-volume cogitations of past philosophers in such token fashion. But unless they have supplied solutions to some of the perplexities of existence, what else can we in all honesty do?

Immanuel Kant grappled with our capacity to reason, among much else. He realized (as prodded by Hume) that experience alone was not enough, combined with reason, to organize our thoughts about the world. We need to have some pre-existing template into which to pour all those experiences, like a basic grid of space, time, and a sense of causality, if we are to have any hope of getting off the ground. Which is to say- our minds can not be an empty slates if we want to learn anything. Or to put it another way, we can not epistemically pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Thus he came up with a priori concepts, which he took to be given structures of the mind, however the mind comes to be.

From the wiki pages: "... Kant is thought to argue that our representation of space and time as a priori intuitions entails that space and time are transcendentally ideal." ... "According to Kant, a priori knowledge is transcendental, or based on the form of all possible experience, while a posteriori knowledge is empirical, based on the content of experience." ... "Something is transcendental if it plays a role in the way in which the mind "constitutes" objects and makes it possible for us to experience them as objects in the first place."

Despite Kant's other ventures in defense of god and of free will, this aspect of his ideas did not neccessitate any opinion on how the structure of our minds arises, and is thus quite consistent with modern cognitive psychology and developmental psychology.

Two recent papers deal with development of spatial consciousness in rats. Incidentally, another recent paper shows that this system (spatial representation and memory across the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus) which is so well studied in rodents, works the same way in humans, studied by way of strokes that create transient dead spots in the hippocampus. The rat papers study very young rats, just as their eyes have opened and they have their first exploratory experience outside the nest, to tell whether their hippocampal and entorhinal place memory/sensing systems are already in place, or only form later after further experience. Their conclusions agree that, while experience helps this system grow both physiologically and in behavioral accuracy, it is in place from the earliest times.

The hippocampus is the location for storing temporary memories, and also for place memory. It is telling that a popular memorization trick among the ancients was to vizualize a palace with endless rooms, where arbitrary memories are stowed by location, available for retrieval later. In the contemporary world, graphical metaphors lead the way in computer user interfaces, giving us "windows" on virtual spaces that organize our affairs far more richly and naturally than text indexes, file trees, or other more easily-implemented methods.

The hippocampus gets its location input from the entorhinal cortex, which is in turn connected to the inner ear, vision, and other sensory systems. The entorhinal cortex contains neurons that respond to head orientation, spatial grid at various scales, borders, and absolute location. This means that scientists have been able to record the activities of neurons that fire only when the rat faces a particular direction relative to its environment, or crosses an imaginary line in an arbitrary polygonal grid that divides up its environment, nears a spatial border, or hits a particular location or landmark.

These cells are assumed to be directly involved in the animal's consciousness of place, since their removal dramatically impairs their ability to learn mazes and know where they are. The question then is... when is all this information set up? We know that learning creates new grids, landmarks, and borders all the time. But is there anything in this system at the start, as neurons get wired up? These papers claim that yes, there is.

They inserted electrodes into the relevant location of 16 day-old rat pups, and found that already at this time, two days after their eyes have opened, and before significant mobility, they have head direction cells and place cells, and one paper finds grid cells as well at this early time.

Example from Langston, et al. showing the location of probes in the entorhinal cortex (A), and local neural firing rates (with peak firing frequency noted) of presumptive head-direction cell recordings, plotted vs actual head direction (B).

Unfortunately, for all the technical pain of doing this kind of work on such young animals (for all concerned!), I don't think they did this early enough. Even with their eyes closed, infant rats are probably acutely aware of place, if only to find the mother's nipple. Vision is not the only input to the entorhinal cortex, so doing this work soon after the eyes open seems insufficient to say that the overall space orientation system is in some part natively present by genetically-driven development alone. Indeed, even in the womb, babies probably have some notion of space, since they are kicking around and active.

As Langston et al. conclude, "Whether the formation of prototypical representations in the parahippocampal and hippocampal cortices requires translational or vestibular experience at younger ages, in the next, remains to be determined."

So the ideal experiment would seem virtually impossible to do- to isolate a developing rat's entorhinal cortex (and thus hippocampus) from external influence to see what the brain wires up all by itself. This could be done by severing the inputs in such a way that they could not regrow. Which would probably derange its development substantially, by cutting off the nerves invading from the sensory areas. Would that tell us that modest inputs from very early times may have strong influences on the nascent wiring? The hard part would be to measure the naive neuronal maps- if they have no input, then how can we measure them? How can a grid cell fire if the rat can't detect a grid? At that point, we might have to resort to dreams as a way of probing the native capabilities of the brain. Could a rat with no spatial experience or sensation still have spatial dreams? Now that would be an interesting question!

In the end, this work seems at best indicative of the conclusions they claim. I would generally agree that the Kantian a priori concepts of space and much else are pre-wired in the brain in some way, based in turn on the evolutionary patrimony of embodied knowledge gained through the school of hard knocks. But the very concept of brain "wiring" is transgressive, both carrying information and constituting information derived from past development and genetic influences. Mammalian fetuses experience things from some early point in time, based to various degrees on genetic wiring. From there on, development is a mad dash of experience and genetic patterning each feeding off the other to generate that mighty device- the fully formed brain.

I realize that this work does not even try to address the a priori concepts of morality, time (also here), social relations, language, etc. I believe they follow the same pattern of modest pre-patterning combined with intertwined experiential development, which the interested reader may wish to study.

• Corruption rampant in the oil industry, with taxpayers on the hook.
• Why macroeconomics is different from regular economics.
• Skidelsky dismantles Osborne.
• On the internet, no one knows you're a stutterer. That is, until you podcast!
• Tom Tomorrow draws a few crocodile tears.
• Enlightenement, shmenlightenment, Texas style.
• The media likes to be "balanced", except when it doesn't.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week: He advocates that the government directly employ excess (unemployed) labor at a sustainable minimum wage, rather than acceding to the business practice of casting them out onto the street.

"Given the overwhelming central bank focus on price stability, and the critical role of today’s buffer stocks of unemployed, we argue that functioning and effectiveness of the buffer stock is critical to its function as a price anchor.

Condition and liquidity are the keys. Just as soggy rotting wool is useless in a wool price stabilisation scheme, labour resources should be nurtured as human capital constitutes the essential investment in future growth and prosperity. There is overwhelming evidence that long-term unemployment generates costs far in excess of the lost output that is sacrificed every day the economy is away from full employment.

It is clear that the more employable are the unemployed the better the price anchor will function. The government has the power to ensure a high quality price anchor is in place and that continuous involvement in paid-work provides returns in the form of improved physical and mental health, more stable labour market behaviour, reduced burdens on the criminal justice system, more coherent family histories and useful output, if well managed."

Apocalypse now

Biodiversity is going downward fast. What are we going to do about it?

Now that the climate change policy is limping forward again after some media outlets retracted their criminally lazy and uninformed coverage far too late to do anyone any good. Now that international scientific work of the IPCC has been validated and cleared all over again in all its essentials ... perhaps we can get down to where we should have been a decade ago- addressing our fossil carbon addiction and its planet-wide perils.

Another international consortium got together (pursuant to a 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity) to publish a paper on the state of worldwide biodiversity, and the news is not good. Human pressure on environments is going up, biodiversity is going down, and human conservation responses, though significant, are not sufficient to alter the trend. Here is the summary figure:

The state (of biodiversity) graph may not seem so terrible, with declines in our lifetimes (since 1970) of about 18% in aggregate over all the dimensions (many studies, over 5,000 populations) the group measures. But zero on this graph is really zero- no biodiversity. One species: humans. That is not a happy thought to contemplate. I can not really comment on their other axes, but their aim is to present trends happening over the last forty years as holistically and globally as possible. 

For one component ....

"The index was calculated using time-series data on 7190 populations of 2301 species of mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish from around the globe."

One would have to note that the effect of humans on the environment hardly started forty years ago, either. Many of the most famous extinctions happened long before, such as the Dodo, the passenger pigeon, Stellar's sea cow, and on back to the extraordinary megafauna of pre-human North America.

Here are some more detailed components that are worrisome:

For me, biodiversity is the core issue with climate change and all the other harms we are doing to the biosphere. If the sea rises and cities are swamped, we can move and rebuild. But when species go extinct, that is pretty much forever. With DNA technology we may eventually be able to bring species back in some form, but what, frankly, would be the point? Without rich ecosystems, they would be just as stranded as before. Whether the atmosphere and rocks heat up is of no concern. But the fate of life on the planet- that is of great concern.

The root cause of this decline is obviously human overpopulation multiplied by economic development, integrated over lack of insight, foresight, and moral responsibility. Our powers as humans have become vast, and unexpectedly we have come up against ecological limits and harms that tax our powers of conception. That is why scientists have been in the lead sounding the alarm bells- they both love nature intensely, and have the capacity and tools to conceive of what is going on. 

But no one individually can divert this train to tragedy. We have to take collective action to avert collective disaster. What we do collectively is a moral question- do we sacrifice today (carbon tax, larger wild land reserves, a ban on ocean fishing, birth control) so that we and future humans (not to mention other creatures) can exist in a more harmonious and beautiful world?

• Roger Ebert's vocation.
• Nation-building works in Palestine, too.
• Can we reclaim our freedom and dignity yet?
• Building the urban bikeway.
• Reform, schmeform, financial-wise. 
• And macro-economic policy direction? Just getting worse and worse.

Indeed, just to give an idea of the scale of the current downturn, this is the overall employment level since 1950, courtesy of BLS:

There have been pauses in employment growth over this time, but never the kind of course reversal we saw over the last few years. Note that this data is more informative than "unemployment", which ignores anyone discouraged enough to not be looking for work, and many other questionable corrections. And here is a ratio of employment to population. Note that the current level has declined to near the 1950's to 1970's levels, when the proportion of women employed was much lower than today. 

We are Afghanistan

The troubles of forging unity from tribalism and chaos are universal.

With support for the nation-building effort in Afghanistan waning, it seems timely to discuss how common its lessons are for societies around the world. Afghanistan has never had a strong central state, unlike, say, Iraq or the US. As we in the US rush headlong into an always-on, utterly connected, everyone talking to everyone else world, we have left the insular tribal worlds of our own forebears far behind. Even the Germanic tribes of pre-Roman Europe seem to have been more organized and cosmopolitan than what we are facing in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, the perennial pull of state's rights here at home, the nihilism of modern Republicanism, and insurgent subcultures like urban gangs, remind us that state legitimacy is not secure even in the most "advanced" cultures- it has to be earned perpetually. And overarching all these organizations is the international political system, which remains dedicated to an anarchic individualism reminiscent of the Germany of Luther's time, or before.

So what will it take to glue Afghanistan back together, and what lessons can be taken to or applied from elsewhere? I'll start in my backyard. One blight of urban life is gang tags, which are applied dog-like to territories to proclaim gang "ownership", a form of sovereignty among gangs, or in extreme situations, over everyone else in the territory as well, as we see in Brazil's favelas and Mexico's cartel-owned cities and provinces.

Erasing such tags is part of a "broken windows" strategy to assert the legitimacy of a community's silent majority over the vandalizing minority who by their "ownership" signs try to assert political hegemony. The lesson is at once extremely simple and complex- that whoever controls the local infrastructure and public spaces gains social power. If we concede our public spaces to corporations in the form of billboards, we give them dominant legitimacy. If we concede our public spaces to gangs, we give them legitimacy, first to tag and counter-tag territories in never-ending internecine battles, and then, if we are sufficiently negligent, legitimacy over other aspects of our lives, like parking lot security, small business security and shakedowns, and eventually coercive power over the entire local political system.

What's the lesson? An obvious one is to know what is going on in order to know how to wield power. We have to know what is going on with gangs in order to realize that their tags are not gifts of public art, but adversarial political statements. We need to know the real power structures on the ground in order to break them and replace them with more broadly legitimate structures. Likewise in Afghanistan, we need to know the social / political setting in order to know the signs they produce. Schools for girls may make *us happy, but they might be threatening to a hide-bound traditional culture. While rebuilding Afghanistan requires some degree of cultural change on its part, we'll have more success the less such change we demand. I'm no expert, only commenting on the need to know what we are doing before trying to rebuild a nation, rather than reading the lessons of failure afterwards.

A second lesson is that the (silent) majority needs an active voice if it is to drown out the vocal, even armed minorities vying for political control, including whatever elite class currently holds power. Such majorities are easily cowed by armed coercion, so it can be tricky to know their true attitude, especially in a canny and beaten-down culture like Afghanistan. The Afghan tradition of elder conclaves remains one of the bulwarks of civil political dialog, and needs to be fostered throughout the system, especially at the grass roots. More generally, such a voice requires media that discuss and bring to light gang/Taliban activities, corruption, cultural ideals, etc. And it requires official channels that control coercive power, are responsive to community needs, effective in addressing them, (such as apprehending gang members), and free of corruption that impairs each of the foregoing elements.

Afghanistan is sadly far away from each of these elements- militias roam the country, the Afghan army has little loyalty or competence, the government is breathtakingly corrupt, the population is largely illiterate, and the stolen presidential election indicates a certain lack of responsiveness to the populace. Where will all this end? The situation is not lost, but without more trust and organization among the anti-Taliban, pro-democracy and pro-state elements, our role is futile.

One critical angle is the nature of central government in Afghanistan. With artificial borders, impassable terrain, and multiple quasi-independent ethnic groups, central governments have never been very strong even when they have been brutally tyrannical. Yet empowering the presumed silent majority of Afghanistan (including women) over the various gangs either allied with or part of the Taliban requires that the state have quite a bit of countervailing power- power that needs be legitimate in that majority's eyes if it is to be effective in the long run. That is the basic trick- how to draw the allegiance of the people (who may or may not have voted for the government) to its use of power over Talibs and other fanatics whether religious, mercenary, or the usual mixture thereof.

The alternative model is one of decentralization, where the parts of Afghanistan go their own way under token sovereignty in Kabul. In the absence of external threats, this would be quite attractive, but it lays the country wide open to divide-and-conquer by the Taliban and its ISI/Al Qaeda allies. That is the threat that necessitates our involvement and in the long run necessitates a strong central state, however novel the idea is for Afghanistan. One way to help this along would be to put the tribal areas of Pakistan on the table- to start discussing the idea that there is a cost to Pakistan for destabilizing Afghanistan, and that cost is US and international support for transferring the "tribal areas" that Pakistan has never shown much constructive interest in to their more natural home in Afghanistan, forming a more unified Pashtun region.

(Incidentally, the firing of General McCrystal puts another interesting light on the universality of these state power issues. It would not serve America well to put its own constitution in danger for the sake of more effective Afghan rebuilding. Seen from the perspective of ancient Rome, we are already in mortal danger by having standing armies, paying them as mercenaries rather than drafting them from the eligible population, paying various proxies to fight for us, sending them off to countless far-away wars and garrisons with little end in sight, and having a sclerotic and corrupted Senate virtually unable to serve the public interest. The last thing we need is military insubordination that brings ultimate civilian control into question.)

This brings me to the international system- another political system with some need of integration and federalization. Right now, nations exist in a largely lawless domain where armed states and non-states compete for shifting alliances either trying to gain legitimacy in the eyes of some audience, or trying to exert direct power over or under the table. The powerful bully the weak, and chaos is held at bay largely through the good (or not so good, depending on your perspective) offices of Pax Americana.

Al Qaeda has shown the power of PR over mere bombs and aircraft carriers. Their message continues to corrode the status/legitimacy of the US in the Muslim world. This is doubly remarkable because their own brutality hardly renders them attractive, as might be, say, the far more justified plight of the Tibetan people under the Dalai Lama.

Having a more organized and democratic international system (i.e. a world government) would be very helpful to address such issues of common concern, like the lawless fishing of the seas, pollution, and climate change. Perhaps the greatest need, however, is to set a floor of minimal standards of local governance, monitoring failed states before they became festering international sores and taking a systematic, organized response that is stronger than the shrugging and flaccid UN ministrations they are met with today. With respect to Al Qaeda, a coherent world government would be much more likely to treat such irritants as policing and governance issues rather than some kind of clash of civilizations / war on terror, etc. The US didn't have an international structure to turn to, forcing it to "go it alone" with all the problems attendant to such foreign adventures.

Afghanistan is a model of state failure, suffering decades of civil war capped by the brutally benighted government of the Taliban. The international system as sponsored by the US is not in quite such a chaotic state, after the last century gave us such cautionary lessons. But the US will not always be the global superpower, nor is it universally appreciated in that position. So it would be wise to build international institutions, as we are building national Afghan institutions, that can further the peaceful interests of humanity in an effective way.

• Friedman is pretty down on Afghanistan. But how can our work there not "resonate" if it has world-wide importance?
• Know thy parents.
• Why are we failing? Because markets are not enough.
• Who governs Britain?
• Stem cells to the rescue.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week, explaining the curious phenomenon where the private markets were clamoring for public debt issues even when the government was running surpluses. And secondly, the fact that public debt has always found a market:

"If you then think about this, independently of the specific proposal that the paper is considering, public debt serves a core function for private profit-seeking. The mainstream macroeconomics textbooks and commentators never emphasise this aspect of public debt.

They are always relating it back to profligate government spending and the sovereign default. The reality is that public debt plays no fundamental role in funding government spending. But it plays a very crucial role in underpinning the risk management in the private sector.

In other words, public debt is really corporate welfare."

Tax carbon, or it will keep taxing us

When will we take our addiction seriously?

Far more serious than America's fiscal deficit / debt is our ecological deficit- the garbage we are spewing into the oceans and air. While in this blog I enjoy taking potshots at religion as our clearest and most outrageous example of cultural self-delusion, and have spent some effort on the delusions of the deficit terrorists and conservative economists generally, and also love to post updates on biology that interests me, none of those issues compare in importance with that of evironmental sustainability.

While the BP blowout sends perhaps one to two million gallons (or ~4,000 tons) of oil into the ocean daily, humanity is sending roughly 30 million tons of CO2 into the oceans daily by way of the atmosphere. Day in, day out, with no end in sight. This pollution may be invisible and less drama-turgic than an oil slick, but it is creating far-reaching and ever-mounting problems for everyone in the biosphere. And that means us, too! Al Gore has told us all about it, But out of sight, out of mind, and why deal today with what can be put off till tomorrow?

Washington's ditherfest on this issue reflects the general apathy of the country, (in addition to large dollops of corruption), which feeds off dramatic events like an oil spill, while finding it hard to attend to deeper and longer-term issues, especially those with economic commons characteristics, prone to pseudoscientific obfuscation, or hard to see directly. In short, it takes moral fiber to face up to the many ills of our carbon addiction:

1. Climate change, with disruptions to Earth's climate not seen for tens of millions of years. Do we have a duty of love and care to our fellow-travelers on planet earth? Should we give future generations of humans a degraded biosphere? Beyond the carbon cycle, we are also upsetting the nitrogen cycle with huge amounts of fertilizers, being responsible now for most fixed nitrogen on the planet. We are laying waste to whole ecosystems in slow motion. Will we take responsibility?

2. Pollution- coal pollution kills 24,000 people in the US, along with countless other health and environmental problems. We are scrubbing some acid from some power plant flues, but there are numerous problems with the remaining pollutants, including continuing acid rain. Mining coal rapes some of America's finest wild country, not to mention its danger to miners. Coal-fired pollution from China is starting to drift clear across the Pacific to us in California. Oil drilling isn't risk-free or clean either- nor is gas drilling. A carbon tax would cleanly target the most polluting fuels with the highest penalties, and would hopefully eliminate the scourge of coal use entirely here in the US.

3. Strategically, we accumulate endless problems incurring trade deficits to send money to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and the other petro-countries for their oil. We get poorer, and they incur the notorious "resource curse" that impedes governance and human development. We import about 1.2 million tons of petroleum per day, costing roughly $700 million per day. The external costs of this in military responsibilities throughout the Middle East and beyond, combined with foregone policy choices in places like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia due to our economic dependence, are incalculable. Our position is reminiscent of Rome's, dependent on Egypt and North Africa for its life-line of grain. That didn't turn out well, either.

So, what will it take to get us off oil? A recent newshour panel talked about new research investments needed to get this ball rolling.

It would be great to have spiffy new technologies and magical solutions. But we have all the materials we need at hand already, in the form of renewable, nuclear, and other technologies. What we need is the will and incentive structure to use them. Wind and solar power are on the edge of economic viability, combined with storage technologies for load balancing on a smarter grid. A serious and sustained carbon tax would give them the playing field they need by pricing-in the many ills attendent to fossil fuel use. Such an incentive structure will naturally bring out sustained technological innovation as well, without a lot of government involvement and direction. It is time to use economics to do the planet and ourselves some good for a change!

How high would such a carbon tax need to be? Energy consumption in Europe is roughly half of ours per capita, with gasoline and natural gas prices roughly double ours, due mostly to taxes. Europe's fossil energy consumption seems to have peaked, with renewables a growing part of their source mix. This would indicate that a carbon tax in the US that would double consumer fuel prices would take us a substantial distance towards higher efficiency and more renewable sources. Technological development that would extend this curve to the complete elimination of fossil fuels is in my view likely, but still a matter of speculation and future evaluation/policy adjustment. Remember that the current policy on acid rain, modest though effective, turned out to be much less costly than anyone estimated.

However partial such solution, it will still be a rather large political and economic pill to swallow, given our spineless political system dedicated to incumbant interests. The climate bills under consideration are only baby steps toward this solution, even after the BP blowout has so dramatically illustrated the stakes. If one thinks of humanity's long term residence on the planet, however, time is very much of the essence, as is effective action.

• Toles on a carbon tax.
• Some notes on a culture of responsibility.
• Who manages our companies?
• And Krugman gets it, on Europe's descent into double-dippery.
• Bill Mitchell quote of the week, here quoting Alan Greenspan, of all people(!):

"'The U.S. government can create dollars at will to meet any obligation, and it will doubtless continue to do so. U.S. Treasurys are thus free of credit risk. But they are not free of interest rate risk. If Treasury net debt issuance were to double overnight, for example, newly issued Treasury securities would continue free of credit risk, but the Treasury would have to pay much higher interest rates to market its newly issued securities.'"