Inequality in British State Schools: A Completely Avoidable Situation?

Figure 1: Absenteeism by level of deprivation, England, 2004

The Guardian today reports that Britain’s top 50 state-funded comprehensive schools and academies have become more unequal over recent years, and are not reflective of the social composition of their surrounding areas, or of the remainder of the schools in England. Those of us from more equal societies might think this is not a big deal but the research is quite stark in showing very large differences between the schools and their surrounding communities. Of course, inequality in educational outcomes in the UK is stark and scary compared to other OECD nations, and to help digest this I’ve provided two figures. Figure 1 above shows rates of authorized (i.e. with parental request) and total absenteeism (i.e. including truancy) for small areas in the UK, by the level of poverty of the area; the further left you go, the poorer the community becomes. Figure 2 below shows GCSE achievement on the same scale. In this case, “deprivation” is measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which I think is the scale for measuring poverty that is favoured by the UK Office of National Statistics.

Figure 2: GCSE Scores by level of deprivation, England, 2004

School outcomes in the UK are obviously heavily determined by wealth. The Guardian report suggests that amongst state-funded schools this effect is most obvious in the elite schools, the comprehensives and academies. This, it suggests, is due to increasing income inequality in the UK, and because of the power of house prices. Basically, middle class families in the UK are able to buy houses in the catchment areas of the best schools, ensuring their children can access those schools. This in turn has the effect of pushing up property prices in those areas, forcing out poorer people and preserving the schools for the wealthier incomers. It appears that some of these schools have a policy of guaranteeing access not just on the basis of catchment area but on distance from the school, which guarantees that people with better purchasing power can push out poorer people.

The statistics about differences between school socioeconomics and that of the surrounding communities are pretty stark. They report that

uptake of free school meals – which is most often linked to parents receiving low-income benefits – was lower than half the national average: 7.6% in the 500 leading schools compared with 16.5% in almost 3,000 state secondary schools in England.

Just putting aside the fact that this suggests 16.5% of British families are too poor to provide their children with lunch, we can see that the communities served by these schools are, on average, wealthier than the rest of the country. They are also wealthier than the communities they are embedded in. Measured in terms of whether the schools enrol equal or higher numbers of students on free school meals as are present in the local community, the report found

only 25 also exceeded their local average, and they were well outnumbered by the 106 schools that had fewer than 3% of their pupils eligible.

Most of these elite state-funded schools were somehow managing to recruit on income, even though they are ostensibly open for all. This isn’t inevitable, and some schools have shown that it is possible both to recruit above-average numbers of poorer children and to have good academic results. For example, Chesterton community sports college in Staffordshire:

Chesterton college in Newcastle-under-Lyme has 22% of its pupils on free school meals, compared with its local authority average of just 9.8%. In 2012, 72% of its pupils achieved five good grades at GCSE, well above the national and Staffordshire local authority average of 59%.

This shows that in a good school, poverty is neither a barrier to access nor to success. So what’s going on? This Guardian article is citing a report by the Sutton Trust, which recommends some interesting solutions to the problem, including the use of lotteries or banding (basically, stratified random sampling) to ensure equal access (or, at least, better access). These are interesting ideas for short term solutions, but they don’t address the basic problem: massive inequality in British society somehow ensures that even with free-to-access services (like health and education), those with the assets manage to seize the advantage. The report makes this clear through one simple stark claim: some proportion of this elitism in state-funded schools is only possible because some parents are willing and able to move houses to be in the catchment area (and to push others out of that catchment area). People are required and willing to move homes just to get these superior education services. Should a good high school education be worth that much? Why are people moving homes to secure education outcomes? And should they have to?

I think this problem is driven by two factors: 1) investment in the majority of British state-funded education is so poor that people are willing to move homes to ensure their kids don’t have to go to some schools; and 2) the middle class in Britain now see their situation as so precarious that they are willing to make major asset purchase decisions (home purchase) simply to guarantee their children continued membership of the class they grew up in.  It seems to me that neither of these things should be necessary, and that there are alternative ways to manage society that would prevent these two situations – in my opinion, in a way that benefits everyone.

Increase investment in the worst schools

Looking at the two charts above, and considering the success reported by some of these elite academies, it’s pretty obvious that there must be some terrible schools in the UK, and some schools in serious need of extra investment. This won’t work by itself, since a lot of these areas need major cultural and economic change of their own, but better schools, and better teachers in those schools, supported in their work and properly able to deal with challenging students, will make a difference to the outcomes at those schools. It won’t completely change the phenomenon of rich and middle class parents fleeing to the state-funded comprehensives, but it will reduce the incentive as parents realize that attending a completely ordinary local school won’t kill their child’s future. I’m willing to bet as well that part of the reason poor schools in poor areas do so badly is a lack of educational diversity – no high achieving children, no historic record of achievement to inspire subsequent generations of students, and no reward for teachers to encourage them. If all these teachers have to look forward to is another year full of future criminals and children whose parents make no effort, then they will soon give up. And parents with any desire for their children to achieve will see that and move on. I’m also suspicious that the worst schools in Britain aren’t just educationally tatty: their facilities are, I’m willing to bet, also terrible, and the entire community lack pride in them. That can be fixed.

Increase attention on negative outcomes

Figure 1 shows rates of absenteeism in the poorest schools, but unauthorized absenteeism is something that police and social services can intervene in. Why don’t they? Because they’re dealing with other pressing problems. I think a lot of people in politics in the UK don’t realize just how pressing those problems are, or how much they degrade poor communities and depress the people living in them. Better attention on those problems, and greater efforts to ensure that the community in which children live is supportive of the learning needs of children, will in time lead to reductions in inequalities in behavior related to childhood delinquency – less absenteeism, less casual violence, less malicious fires, less vandalism. But there is no easy way to achieve this except through more funding: more funding for social services, police, teachers, council beautification programs, and activities for children. I don’t think any political party in the UK sees these things as essential state services anymore, and instead of funding these services they’re squeezing them, at the same time as they squeeze the general education budget and the welfare budget. While that happens, sensible people will take their children out of poor areas, making those areas more intense areas of community dislocation, reducing the likelihood that the existing social services will be successful in fighting the problems, and creating a vicious circle of social exclusion. I don’t see this vicious circle being stopped without concerted community effort.

Reduce the social mobility hard scrabble

Why is an education in Britain so crucial that parents will buy a new house in a new area just to ensure it? I think it’s because the middle class in the UK and US has become precarious, and a lot of people in that class are aware that their children risk falling out of it. Securing a position in that class is becoming a desperate struggle, with increasing numbers of losers who are falling out the bottom end of the class and into the increasing pool of poor and socially excluded. This is Ed Milliband’s “squeezed middle,” the middle class who in America and the UK have increasingly turned to debt and the housing “ladder” ponzi scheme to stay ahead of the Joneses. This race has to end, and there is a very simple way to end it: shift from a society focused on social mobility to one focused on social sustainability. I’ve written about this on my blog before: social mobility is a false promise of wealth and advancement, and a better alternative is to find ways to ensure that all jobs are socially sustainable. That is, find ways to ensure that even people at the “bottom” of the ladder can raise a family and live a halfway decent life, rather than having to scrabble up. In such a society education is still important, but because there is less urgency to achieve a ticket to success – because all careers are sufficient to support a happy life – education is not commoditized. Such societies exist, in Northern Europe and Japan, and to a certain extent Australia and Canada; and in these societies, people do not have to fight their neighbours to push them out of a precious school place. And if they do, the people pushed out will still grow up to a functioning life. The UK needs to move away from its competitive, inequalitarian social model towards these models.

Engage corporate power

A society built on social sustainability can only be built in two ways[3]: through a powerful system of taxes and transfers, or through a system in which corporations agree to some kind of social contract. Of course, in reality most such societies see a little of both, but I think a lot of thinkers in the anglosphere see social sustainability as only possible through the former, and I think they see it this way because they think corporations will not give up their wealth for a greater good, but need to be coerced into it. This is, I think, fundamentally defeatist. An alternative to a punitive system of taxes and transfers is a Japanese style system of shared corporate responsibility, in which companies pay their lowest staff a living wage, and don’t pay their highest staff stellar wages. Just because corporations won’t do these things of their own volition doesn’t mean they have to be forced to at gunpoint, but I think the natural assumption in the UK is that no one will give up anything without being forced to. That needs to change. In this respect I think Britain could learn a huge amount from Japan, which has a very strong social contract based around individual and corporate responsibility – something which I think a lot of British people don’t believe is possible.

I think Britain’s inequality is heading into a very bad place, and it’s not going to be an option to ignore it for much longer. It’s cruel, counter-productive and embarrassing. The huge inequalities developing in education can’t be solved just by throwing money at the poorest schools, though this is an essential minimum: changes need to be made in the way that the government tackles social disunity in poor areas, and also in the way that British society views “upward mobility,” competition and social sustainability. But with proper attention on improving schools in the short term, and a shift in social and economic priorities in the long term, Britain can reverse its inexorable slide into a failed state. Can they do it? I’m not hopeful, but I think it can be done.

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fn3: that I can see. I think a third option is colonialism and theft of other nations resources, but let’s put that side for now.

 

The Moral Hazard of Near-system Space Colonization

Imagine our planet sends out a colony ship, to colonize some distant planet. It’s flying at near light speed, but the journey is still expected to take about 300 years; time dilation effects on the ship mean shipboard it’s only, say, 150 years – 5 or 6 generations. While the ship is speeding to its destination, development continues on earth, and about 100 years after launch they discover faster-than-light travel. By the time the colony ship reaches its destination the planet has already been colonized, populated, developed and matured. The colonists arrive to a huge party, to discover their mission was pointless.

If you were one of the middle-aged residents of that colony ship, would you be happy with the society that sent your great-grandparents out into the dark? You spent your entire youth and young adulthood in a tin can, for nothing except the promise that soon – in your lifetime – you would arrive at a new world and have the chance to make a unique contribution to human history. Instead, some bunch of cosseted earth-siders got their first, because they had the good fortune to be born 200 years later. Your contribution becomes a footnote, for which you waited 40 years in the freezing dark, drinking your own piss.

Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion about the viability of colonizing interstellar space, started from one of John Quiggin’s economists’ assumptions. In amongst all the technical jiggery-pokery about giga-joules and the Great Filter, a few people have pointed out the moral bankruptcy of colony ships, based on the simple and obvious fact that the children are being born into a tin can, and have no way out. Thinking about this at the gym (which, presumably for weight purposes, a colony-ship wouldn’t have), it occurred to me that the moral issues associated with colonization are getting a lot more real than those discussed in the Crooked Timber post, and that we need to be aware of a serious risk of moral hazard, and of serious ethical challenges, in our lifetime. I speak, of course, of the Mars One private mission to Mars.

Mars One and moral hazard

Mars One aims to settle up to 40 humans on Mars by 2025, on a one way mission. The mission will be financed by some kind of Big Brother style TV show documenting the (no doubt fascinating) process of colonizing Mars. The settlement is intended to slowly develop, even to ultimately be able to expand using local materials – hopefully to even build a dome of some kind large enough to grow trees. But it is likely that for the foreseeable future it will be dependent on supplies from Earth, and that these supplies will be coming through the parent company – which is financing itself through the sale of research opportunities and the TV options. For a few years this seems like a pretty viable source of income, but people will get bored of the Mars TV, and anyway we don’t know what will happen to that parent company. This all raises the very real possibility that the company will fail, at which point those people on Mars are ostensibly going to be cut off from their supplies. There is also the possibility that they will breed out there in the Red, and that their children won’t be happy about their birth situation. Which raises two scenarios demanding attention from the people of earth:

1. The company goes bust, and suddenly the task of supplying those 40+ people (80 if the adults have been breeding efficiently) falls on … who? A government will have to step in and bail out those people, because no one on Earth is going to tolerate the possibility that 40 or more people in the world’s first ever interstellar colony will starve to death because of a corporate bankruptcy. This project is too hope-y to fail. Once the company gets those shmucks onto Mars, the rest of the world is going to be basically strong-armed by morality and sentiment into backing the project no matter what. And given that currently there are only three groups – NASA, ESA and Russia – capable of getting stuff to Mars, this means it will be Europe, the USA and Russia that foot the bill if anything goes wrong. This is classic moral hazard, banker bailouts on an interstellar scale (if not financial magnitude): the private company raises a couple of billion bucks to sink into a stupid high-risk project and then, when it collapses, for reasons not predicted by the regulatory authorities, it can’t be allowed to go down.
2. The company continues, and the settlement is a success, but the Children of Mars decide they would like to swim in the sea. They point out to their earthbound cousins that they didn’t ask to be born in a Mars colony and they would like to go home. If the original company is gone under this problem will be even more pronounced: not only is the ESA and NASA supplying the adults, but now the kids point out (quite reasonably) that they want out of their squalid little collection of domes. But nobody has the means to get them out. That wasn’t planned for. To get them out, space agencies will have to send the component parts for a rocket, then the fuel, and the folks on Mars will have to assemble that rocket, and with no option for test flights, the kids will hop on and come back to Earth. That’s a hideously expensive project, but someone on Earth is going to have to foot the bill and it’s going to be very hard to deny that responsibility. Of course, once the kids start going back, the adults will demand the same right. Which means that Earth has to either tell them – we’ll keep supplying you till you die, in a society with no children (who’s going to care for you?), or “sure, you made this decision 20 years ago when you were young and stupid, but we’ll bail you out now.” That’s classic moral hazard.

You can see the way this will play out on earth, but in case 2) it is possible that the original inventors of the project will be dead. No one will even be around to be angry at. And, in a really visceral way, no one is going to be able to say no. Of course one can imagine other scenarios: imagine that the first settlement was made by the USA under Kennedy, and they were willing to spend 2% of their GDP on it; 40 years and a couple of financial crises later, with an increasingly oligarchical and corrupt government, suddenly Americans have a huge public debt and a weird resistance to growing more, their economy is declining, economic power is shifting east – but they still have to commit to sending supplies to That Stupid Colony. The kids of the new era might think they had been shackled with an unreasonable burden (“we could spend that money on Obamacare”) but of course, their choices about it are restricted to either abandoning the colony to starve, or paying some fantabulous amount of money to bring them back. This is hardly a fair choice to saddle your grandkids with. And of course, the original colonists are the people who made the stupid choice to go there, but even if you made them pay they wouldn’t be able to – no human being can work off a debt that size.

Note also the costs of supply will escalate if there are unforeseen medical problems associated with low gravity: then money will have to be sunk into solving the problem, and not by the company that sent them up there. And who is going to educate the kids? That is usually a state responsibility, but no one is going to be setting up a school on Mars. A solution will have to be found based on some kind of school of the air.

But there are other, unpleasant moral issues that will arise in the future of such a colony.

The morality of forced interstellar stardom

Mars One aim to pay for their project through some kind of television project, that will start from 2025. No doubt for a short time this will be hugely popular, but after a few years of watching people wandering around in a couple of inflatable domes the viewers are going to get tired. Revenues will decline. The company will have growing costs though, as the colony needs supplies to feed more members. What will the company do? It might be able to make up the shortfall in research services (“you want to investigate that crater? We’ll send a rover”) but there will be a limit to this, and of course as they try to sell more research services the price will go down. So then, naturally, they will begin to try to make the TV show more appealing. And how are they going to do that?

Zero-G porn.

Of course, for starters they’ll use the usual run of Big Brother-style offerings: stupid game shows, conflict, diary-room confessions, titillating shower scenes (well, maybe not, on Mars). But this will pale after a few years, and we all know what will happen next. Pressure will be brought to bear. Things will be done. People’s relationships will be laid bare. The failing relationships will be filmed; the young couples getting together; people’s most private moments. And the colonists will face an unpleasant choice: the person who supplies your water is telling you you need to make your tv show more “appealing” by doing X. Will you refuse? Probably not. And then, of course, there will be children in all this. Will they even be told about the cameras? At some point they will realize that all their earliest years of development were being filmed against their will by some arseholes a billion kms away, and watched by a million more arseholes. When they come of age, into their tiny domed town of 100 people, they’re probably going to have some righteous wrath saved up.

What will they do? What should we do about what they’re going to do, what has been done to them? When these kids, who have never been to a prom (but have seen prom-date movies), who have never been to a nightclub (but have watched music videos), who have a choice of, like, 6 partners (but have watched a thousand rom-coms) demand to return to a land with trees and standing water, what are the people on earth going to say to them? “We enjoyed watching you grow up on a strange planet, but we can’t afford to have you back”?

What does a riot look like, in a domed city made of plastic on a world with no atmosphere?

There is also, of course, the endless possibility for horror in this settlement. Suppose a dome blows, and the usual emergency systems don’t work properly: the colony loses its farm section, and no matter how hard we try we can’t get the food to them in time because it’s physically impossible. There’ll be no eating grass roots and insects and watching children with swollen bellies but knowing a precious few will survive, like Ethiopia in the 1980s. Everyone will have the certain knowledge that they will die. Will we be forced to watch as they turn to cannibalism? Who will turn off the tv feed? What if they have a broadcast installation? Then the videos will be going up on youtube no matter what the company does, and anyone with a dish will be able to see the sordid terrible end of our first stellar mission. We can all imagine hundreds of similar scenarios, and all of them on film by design.

Preparing for the moral hazard of Mars One

It’s not looking likely that anyone is going to ban Mars One, but it seems to me that as a society we need to come up with a plan for what will happen as a result of it. This isn’t Jonestown or even Greenland in the 15th century: whether we as individuals agree with the project, once it is in place on Mars we will all be watching it and cheering it on. Which means that we need to recognize that there is a risk that things will go wrong, and future generations – or us, in 30 years time – will have to bail out at enormous cost a project which was marginal from the beginning. I think governments need to find a way to prepare for that, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the first step in that preparation is to make Mars One think about the future. At the very least, some of the capital they raise needs to be put aside against eventualities. Some possible uses for a Mars wealth fund include:

1. Simple investment, to ensure that by the time things go wrong there is a stock of money available to finance special projects
2. Trust funds for the kids. They’re going to want stuff, and we’re going to need to provide it, so we should prepare
3. Funding directly to government-run space research projects, especially projects for deep space propulsion and Mars exploration. If the funds are used to develop alternative ways of getting to and living on Mars, it improves the options for those people in the future
4. Contingency funds for if the Mars population grows too fast
5. Profits could be invested in sending extra supplies to Mars, to build redundancy and stockpiles

With mechanisms like this in place, bailouts will be less costly, and there will be insurance against risk.

Laws also need to be passed. Governments need to look very carefully at the contracts these colonists are signing, and add clauses about the rights of colonists to refuse new entertainment demands, and the way that those contracts might extend (or be inferred to extend) to children. Anything involving porn or cam-girl type stuff needs to be carefully discussed. Some kind of dispute resolution system is going to be necessary, possibly even independent oversight. Imagine, for example, that a Mars colonist is being pressured to do some semi-nude stuff, but doesn’t want to: what options does he have to resolve that? What if the company refuses him access to a workplace rights lawyer? The company at the very least should be forced to establish an independent communications system, guaranteed by government, so that people on Mars can have a reliable and independent way to contact friends, relatives and conciliation bodies. Otherwise they will essentially be slaves.

I don’t think any of this has been considered.

Are Mars One taking the piss?

I’m noting that there is an application fee of between $5 and $75 for potential Martians, and they are hoping to recruit a million applicants. If the Mars One people are planning to fold before the project is initiated they will make a lot of money. It seems like a lot of aspects of this project are going to run on a very tight deadline, and haven’t been thought through. Is it possible that the whole thing is a get-rich-quick scheme that is never going to see reality? It seems very possible to me. But if not, we as a society need to be thinking very carefully about what we want to tolerate up there, and how we’re going to manage the ethical challenges and moral hazards of a private initiative to colonize Mars.

 

The Strange Economy of Misogyny in “Grimdark” Fantasy: Richard Morgan’s Steel Remains

Every girl wants some …

While I was in Greece working for two weeks I had no internet access, something of a catastrophe for my millions of fans but a strange chance to chill out for me[1]. Fortunately I had downloaded a couple of books to my kindle before I left[2] so I had plenty to occupy me, and first on my list was the Richard Morgan series The Steel Remains and The Cold Commands. In this post I will give a brief review of the two books, but what I’m really interested in with these books is the subtext, and the underlying implications of the world structure of the sub-genre they are derived from.

I have previously read and reviewed Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk/space opera cross-over novels, Altered Carbon and Woken Furies, both of which I really enjoyed for dubious reasons. Richard Morgan’s two new novels are fantasies rather than science fiction, and are also a departure from his previous style in that they are clearly intended to be “grimdark,” that new style of fantasy realism that embraces violence, rape and brutality but, most especially, rape. In his sci fi, Morgan kept the sexual violence repressed and simmering on the edge of the story: sure, there were snuff movie makers and some nasty criminal undergrounds, but they were just that – some kind of tiny minority who traded cruelty to a tiny minority. In The Steel Remains series, Morgan has moved the sexual violence to the centre of the story, along with a heavy dose of brutality, and embraced all the lowest aspects of grimdark. I have previously commented critically on his justification for doing this, and also on the general trend towards misogyny and violence in stories like A Game of Thrones, so I entered these two novels with very mixed views on what to expect.

First of all, I enjoyed these books for all the same reasons I enjoyed his previous works. In their broad outline they haven’t really deviated much from the basic themes of Altered Carbon. The story features on some elite soldiers who are veterans of a great war to save civilization. The war was brutal and they are scarred from it; but even more by the the cruelties they were forced to commit when they were deployed to put down civil revolts near the end of the war. They have emerged as scarred survivors with a very short fuse and a strong drive to hurt bullies and criminals, largely to try and rectify their own past complicity in horrible crimes. This means we get to see a healthy dose of bully-smashing, which I always find thoroughly enjoyable: child rapists, murderers, slavers, torturers and bastards get all manner of cruel and just desserts in this story, and it’s really hard to feel any pity for them. The world they’re in shows no shortage of such people, and in fact if our heroes were to set out on a mission to do in every bully and cruel bastard on the planet, they would end up very lonely. The world is divided into two main countries, a northern and southern empire that are basically equivalent to Europe and Asia Minor: the southern continent is clearly meant to be Muslim. One of our heroes is a gay son of a very privileged family, in a world where homosexuality is a deep sin; another is an outlander from horse tribes generally seen as barbarians. The main character (the gay man) is a picture in repressed rage, basically a shirt-lifting version of Kovacs from Altered Carbon. There’s a lot to like in watching these two men dispense with anyone who offends their sense of rightness which is, in general, the same as the reader’s. I think this means they are relatively (for fantasy) deep and complex characters, and generally in the right in a degraded and mediaeval kind of way. Unfortunately the story is not as tight as in his previous works: there are parts that don’t make sense and at times it feels like I missed a book, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Some sections, particularly those set in the faerie world, just don’t make any sense to me. There’s also a strong deus ex machina running through the whole latter part of the story, with one of the characters basically getting out of any situation through his role as vessel for some ancient darkness, the role of which is not explained. That aspect of the novels is pretty shit, actually, and I was disappointed with those elements of the story. So, although the novels retain some aspects of Richard Morgan’s best works, they represent both a structural and moral degeneration from his previous highs.

Which brings us to the issue of the grimdark. If the moral universe in which our heroes operate were to be characterized in two easy themes, it would be: every man rapes, and the strong can kill with impunity. This is grimdark, you see. At the time the story is set, the northern kingdom has instituted a new system of debt slavery, in which basically anyone who cannot pay a debt can be sold, along with their family, into permanent and brutal slavery. That is, if your neighbour goes underwater on their mortgage, you can buy them, and then rape them with impunity – and even pay for them to be sent to a special training school which will somehow (probably, the implication is, through rape and violence) turn them into willing sex slaves.

Furthermore, as far as I could tell in this world, free women seem to be divided into only two types of person: noblewomen and sex workers (who of course are routinely referred to as “whores,” a noun which in this story basically replaces “woman” in the narrative flow). The men could fill more roles, but no matter what they did, unless they were very very high in society, our heroes could murder them in the street without paying any penalty. It appears that in this world of grimdark, slaughtering people who spill your beer is pretty standard practice. I guess beer is expensive.

The implications of these setting elements are obvious and abhorrent. What kind of world can pass a law to enslave ordinary people’s neighbours? How is that going to work? Sure, one of our heroes is employed to rescue a girl from his extended family who is sold into this situation, but we’re somehow meant to believe that they are the first and only family to decide to take independent action against slavery, and that the rest of the world is just going along with it. This seems hardly credible. There is not, in general, any particular group targeted for exclusion and enslavement, and no sense that “it won’t happen to me.” Just ordinary families getting swept up in slavery because they went into debt. This scenario is just impossible to credit, even in a mediaeval dictatorship. Who would tolerate this? How long would it last before people started rebelling? Especially in a world where heroes can kill ordinary men with impunity, it seems pretty likely that a village would scrape up the money to pay a few mercenaries to go and liberate their enslaved members. It seems far less likely that they would buy those enslaved members and then subject them to the full cruelties of lifelong slavery. “Hi Bob, yes, I always enjoyed chatting with you at the pub, but from now on I own your family because you didn’t pay the beer tab, so I’m going to rape your wife and daughter every day.” Doesn’t figure, does it? But the society of these novels seems to just go along with it, as if they had a missing moral bone … which they certainly seem to lack when it comes to prostitution and murder.

There are prostitutes – sorry, “whores” – everywhere in this story. In one notable scene, our hero is stalking through some random street and hears a prostitute – sorry, a “whore” – busily sucking off a sailor in an alley, then notices a whole queue of sailors waiting for her services. This is … phenomenally weird. Everywhere we turn there are “whores,” but these men have to queue up; or is it the case that demand outstrips supply? In which case how can these sailors afford a blow job, and why are there “whores” everywhere we look? In this story “whores” serve as a kind of scenery or background the way trees, birds and carriages might be in a more standard story. Whereas in the Belgariad our heroes would be leaning against a wall and an ale cart or a bird seller might walk by, in this world it’s always a perfumed “whore,” who trails behind her (in a particularly odious moment of poor writing) “the smell of used woman.” Scanning the world Morgan lays out for us, there seem to be no female shop-keepers, apiarists, porters or grocers: just noblewoman and “whores.” And there are an awful lot of them, too. Also, just as in A Game of Thrones, these “whores” appear to be completely expendable, so if you have ever wondered what it’s like to kill a girl, you just hire one of those expendable “whore” things that are on every street corner, and no one will care if you do her in horribly. How does such a world come about, especially when there is a huge stock of slaves available to be used however one sees fit? The only way I can see this working is if there is a massive gender imbalance, but the female majority hasn’t yet figured out it can gang up and take over just from sheer weight of numbers. It’s just economically and politically weird. It seems, for example, that men care about their daughters – so how are they tolerating a world where every second daughter grows up to become an expendable “whore”? The observable nature of the world seems to run repeatedly up against the moral framework, in a way that ultimately cannot be reconciled.

The same applies with the weird phenomenon of people being able to murder each other with impunity, and also the cold-blooded way that men routinely dispose of all injured opponents by killing them. No world that works this way would stay civilized, and typically these kinds of extra-legal killings have only been possible in special places or at special times. The degree of casual murder on display in this story would be out of place in Japanese-occupied Manchuria or modern Afghanistan (as, for that matter, would the degree of misogynist violence). Those places were devastated war-zones under occupation; we’re meant to believe that this world is a functioning and stable society, bar a little bit of war recovery.

There is no place and time in history that has managed to stay civilized and maintain this degree of sexual and non-sexual violence. The setting is impossible, unless we are to imagine that the obviously basically human societies being portrayed are fundamentally amoral and alien, which they’re clearly not meant to be. It’s as if Morgan wanted to portray the moral exigencies of men trapped in total war (which is certainly the implication of his self-exculpatory musings linked to above) but couldn’t be bothered stepping outside the standard fantasy setting – as if it was too much effort to create the physical backdrop for the moral story. And who would want to write this moral story anyway?

I think this is a problem with “grimdark” generally: they want to write a world where men have unparalleled rights over and access to women, but they want to imagine a world where women can still walk the streets freely; they want men to be able to kill bullies without punishment, but they want a world where men still drink together with strangers in pubs. The reality is that these worlds don’t coincide, and the failure of the grimdark authors to realize this makes me think that they’re actually just using a cheap, knock-off fantasy setting to work through their unresolved adolescent issues: they want to get back at all the women who rejected them and all the men who bullied them, but they haven’t the imagination to construct a setting where this is possible; so they just dial our assumptions about the barbarity of mediaeval worlds up to 11, and get to work on the non-consensual sex. To me, this is lazy and weak world creation, and yet another example of how over the past 30 years the fantasy genre has consistently failed to live up to its transformative and speculative potential[3]. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that, as the nerds of the 80s grow into the peak of their spending power, and also start to experience their mid-life crises, their fiction will begin to be dominated by stories that appeal to their unresolved adolescent angst. But if it’s going to do that, I would prefer that it would at least do so in a slightly more mature and creative way than “grimdark” has so far managed to present me with. I guess I was hoping for too much …

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fn1: That’s a lie actually, I was very angry about it.
fn2: Kindles are worth their weight in gold when you are travelling

fn3: Actually the soft-porn bdsm series Gor from the 70s(?) did this. In that story the author constructed a moral framework in which women fundamentally want to be used by men, and are turned on by male power. Although superficially based on capture and forced enslavement, willing were actually consenting to their own slavery, thus didn’t rebel and could be turned into willing sex slaves. Whether or not you think this is horrible (I don’t; I think it’s just porn) it is, at least, an attempt to make the moral underpinnings of the story match the actions of the protagonists. It’s an attempt to explore what the world would be like (from a pornographic perspective) if humans were morally different to how we actually are. Grimdark doesn’t bother with this speculation: it just rapes people[4].

fn4: that sentence sounds clumsy if it ends with the word “women,” but let’s be clear about this: by and large, grimdark doesn’t rape men (or if it does, they are generally deserving of it). It rapes women. Over and over again.

 

In Praise of Excel

Recently a major economics paper was found to contain basic excel errors, among other problems, and an amusing storm of controversy is growing around the paper. The controversy arises because the paper was apparently quite influential in promoting the most recent round of austerity politics in the western world, and the authors themselves used it actively in this way. The authors even managed to find a magic number – 90% – at which government debt (as a proportion of GDP) throttles growth, a threshold that many small government activists and “sustainable deficit” types have been seeking for years. It’s like manna from heaven!

There’s been a lot of hilarity arising from this, about how woeful the economics field is and about how vulnerable policy-makers on crucial issues like government spending can be to even quite terrible research that supports their agenda. But there has also been some criticism on statistics and academic blogs about the use of excel for advanced analysis, and what a bad idea it is. Andrew Gelman has a thread debating how terrible excel is as a computational tool, and Crooked Timber has a post (with excellent graphic!) expressing incredulity that anyone would do advanced stats in excel. While I agree in general, I feel an urgent need to jump to the defense of MS Excel.

MS Excel is great. It’s much, much more convenient than a calculator, and it can be used to do quite complex calculations (as in sums and multiplications) in multiple directions that would take ages on a calculator. On most computers now the calculator is buried or, if you’re a windows user, crap, and if you need anything more than addition it’s much more convenient to drag out excel. Sure it takes a moment to load compared to your calculator function, but it is so much easier to compare numbers, to calculate exponents and logs, and to present simple results in excel than in a calculator. As a simple case in point: if you get regression coefficients from Stata you can copy and paste them into excel and exponentiate to get relative risks, etc.; then you copy the formulas below, run a new regression model (with, e.g. random effects that weren’t in the previous one) and paste the results to enable you to compare between models quickly and easily. Similarly, if you’re checking a paper to see if they calculated odds ratios or relative risks, you can chuck those numbers into excel and do the comparisons with the contingency table right there in front of you. It offers a simple, graphically convenient way to visualize numbers. This is especially useful when the task you’re approaching is conceptually very simple (like a contingency table) but takes a bit of time to do on a hand calculator, and takes a bit of time to convert to the file formats required in Stata or R. In the time it takes me to think about how to structure the problem, input four lines of data to R, and then write the code to calculate the odds ratios, I can do the whole thing in excel, have the contingency table in front of me to check I’ve made no transcription errors from the paper, and fiddle quickly with changing numbers.

If you’re doing cost-effectiveness analysis in TreeAge (shudder) or R, excel is a really useful tool both for outputting results to something that is vaguely attractive to use, and for doing ballpark calculations to check that your models are behaving reasonably. This is especially useful if you’re doing stochastic Markov models, that can take hours or days to run in TreeAge, because you can’t trust software like that to give you the correct answer if you try to treat your stochastic model as a simple decision tree (because of the way that TreeAge faffs around with probability distributions, which is non-intuitive). Make a few simple assumptions, and you can do approximate calculations yourself in excel, and fiddle with key numbers – cohort size or a few different parameters – and see what effect they have.

Recently I was helping someone with survival analysis and she was concerned that her definition of time to drop out was affecting her results. She conducted a sensitivity analysis in Stata to see what effect it was having, and although with correct programming she could have produced all the material she needed in Stata, the time it takes to do this and debug your code can be time-consuming if you aren’t a natural. It’s much easier with modern machines to just run the regression 10 times with different values of drop-out time and plot the output hazard ratios in excel.

So, I think excel is a very useful tool for advanced modeling, precisely because of its ease of use and its natural, intuitive feel – the properties that recent excel bashers claim make it such a terrible device. While I definitely think it should not be used for advanced models themselves, I find it a hugely valuable addition to the model-building process. Reproducible code and standardized tools are essential for publishable work, but unless you are one of those people who never does any fiddling in the background to work out what’s going on in your model, excel will turn out to be your go-to tool for a wide range of support tasks.

In any case, the bigger problem with Rogoff and Reinhart’s work was not the excel error. Even if they had got the excel code right, their results would still have been wrong because their modeling method was absolutely appalling, and should never have seen the light of day, even at a conference. The main flaws in their work were twofold:

• They binned years together, essentially giving different years different weights in the final model
• They stripped the years out of their time series context, so crucial information contained in the time ordering of deficits and growth was lost

I think the second flaw is the most specifically terrible. By using this method they essentially guaranteed that they would be unable to show that Keynesian policies work, and they stripped the cause-effect relationship from all data collected in the Keynesian era (which lasted from the start of their data series to about 1970). In the Keynesian era, we would expect to see a sequence in which deficit increases follow negative growth, so unless the negative growth periods are very short and random, Reinhart and Rogoff’s method guarantees that this looks like an association between negative growth and higher deficits. If Keynesian policies actually work, then we would subsequently see an increase in growth and a reduction in deficits – something that by design in Reinhart and Rogoff’s model would be used to drive the conclusion that higher debt causes lower growth.

In short, no matter what package they used, and no matter how sophisticated and reproducible their methods, Reinhart and Rogoff’s study was designed[1] to show the effect it did. The correct way to analyze this data was through the presentation of time series data, probably analyzing using generalized least squares with a random effect for country, or something similar. Using annual data I think it would probably be impossible to show the relationship between debt and growth clearly, because recessions can happen within a year. But you could probably achieve better, more robust results in excel using proper time series data than you could get in R from Reinhart and Rogoff’s original method.

The problem here was the operator, not the machine – something which should always be remembered in statistics!

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fn1: I use the term “was designed” here without any intention to imply malfeasance on the part of the authors. It’s a passive “was designed”.

 

What Kind of Spellcaster was Margaret Thatcher

A Facebook campaign running in England at the moment is driving the song Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead up the charts, in celebration of Margaret Thatcher’s death. This has the right-wing media up in arms, and has led to an open case of attempted censorship of the BBC. But old school role-players should also be up in arms with outrage at this attack on the legacy of the ’80s: although Margaret Thatcher is clearly a spellcaster of some kind, the Witch was not an authorized character class in the 1980s role-playing canon! Nothing is more frustrating than to see important aspects of the original system mis-used in the popular press, and so in the interests of accuracy, I think we should tackle the question of what kind of spellcaster Margaret Thatcher actually was. Being an ’80s phenomenon, Margaret Thatcher has to be fitted into the character class options of the old school canon: that is, she has to be either a magic-user, druid, cleric, paladin or ranger.

First of all, we know that “the lady’s not for turning,” so she can’t be a cleric or paladin. She doesn’t seem to have been very out-doorsy, and I think it’s safe to say she wasn’t true neutral, so druid is out. And by examining her history of spell-casting, we can rule out ranger.

So what spells did Maggie cast? First and most obvious is Mass Hypnosis, a fairly high level spell. Many northern newspapers claim that she destroyed whole areas of industry in the north, so maybe she could cast Earthquake as well. Along with Ronald Reagan (who was surely a Paladin!) she could use Detect Evil – before they joined to cast that spell, no one (no one!) knew that the Soviet Union was an evil dictatorship. It’s also fairly clear that she regularly used the Domination spell on members of her cabinet, and her resistance to assassination attempts suggests the use of Contingency and possibly also Resist Fire. From this list we can see that she had access to spells that were outside the ranger list. Thus we can conclude that she must have been a magic-user.

Finally, however, there is one additional power she had that suggests the ’80s was being run as a house-ruled boutique campaign. Many editorialists are claiming that Margaret Thatcher created Tony Blair; but Tony Blair is clearly a Vampire, and as far as I know there is no spell that can be used to create Vampires. So either she was so powerful that the GM had to create a whole new set of spells for her, 1980s Britain was being run based on an obscure supplement of Dragon magazine, or the entire industrial and economic wasteland that was the UK from 1978 to 1990 was being run on a unique set of house rules.

So, based on the available evidence, Margaret Thatcher was an extremely high level magic-user character being run in a homebrew post-apocalyptic UK campaign. And definitely not a witch.

 

Sudden Existential Crisis

The two inevitabilities in life: death and centripetal force

Iain M. Banks is dying: having seen off threats from militaristic empires and proto-gods, his galaxy-spanning, anarchist semi-utopian Culture has less than a year to live because of cancer. This marks the sad end of a great science fiction career, and a well-respected fiction writer.

My first encounter with Banks was his first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, which re-invigorated space opera for me. His Culture novels contain a combination of elements which, though present individually in other writer’s work, for me coalesce beautifully in his best science fiction. He takes the standard space opera tropes of technology-as-magic to its logical conclusion of post-scarcity economics, and is not scared to consider the full social and cultural ramifications of such a political culture. Simultaneously, he is willing to take on seriously the prospect of artificial intelligences (“Minds”) being vastly superior in capacity to humans, as close to gods as a physical object can be, and takes seriously the task of crafting stories in which many of the protagonists have close to godlike power. He also overlays his novels with a subtle political commentary, not usually overtly preaching in any direction and not necessarily coming to strong moral or political conclusions. His work is, in this sense, genuinely speculative, and a welcome addition to the canon.

He also invents great Ship names.

Iain Banks’s fiction novels are a stranger and more diverse affair, ranging from thrillers like Complicity to the semi-fantastic dreamscapes of The Bridge. His first fiction novel, The Wasp Factory (also the first of his fiction novels that I read) gained strong reactions, but I think is generally well-regarded. At the time perhaps his career prospects didn’t look good, though, because it was a radically weird work. At the Crooked Timber thread on Iain Banks they report this review from the Irish Times:

It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.

I guess his fiction is not as universally admired as his sci-fi, and certainly some of it I found uninteresting (I think I read the Crow Road and didn’t enjoy it at all).  I think he has also attracted some attention for his politics: in real life he is a staunch leftist in the Scottish tradition (more Burns and Adam Smith than Marx or Mills), liberal or anarchist in leaning and strongly critical of the major political movements in British life. Like another great leftist in science fiction, though, when his works are political they stand as a challenge to his own side of politics as much as his opponents, and his utopianism has more to say about the limits of anarchist political thought than it has criticism of modern conservativism. Compared to China Mieville I think he is more willing to put his politics forward in his work, but he does so sutbly and with a nice alloy of cynicism and realism that prevents it from being preachy. In fact, the most political book of his I’ve read, Dead Air, is more of a cynical cry for help than a screed, and the only other strongly leftist character in his books is an unhinged murderer (from memory).

So, it’s a sad day for science fiction as Iain M. Banks retires from the public eye to put his affairs in order. Let’s hope that he has a strong legacy, and his work remains influential for some time to come. It’s just a shame that he will Sublime before the Culture does …

 

What to do About Maths?

On Monday I was required to monitor at the Tokyo University undergraduate entrance exams. I shepherded 60 terrified 17 year olds through a 2.5 hour Japanese language test and then a 100 minute maths test. These tests were part of a two day examination process for those want to enter the humanities faculty of Tokyo University. About the Japanese test I can say nothing, but the maths test interested me, and can be found online (in Japanese) at the Mainichi Shinbun newspaper. In order, based on my feeble attempts at translating the exam, the four questions were:

• A straightforward but nasty calculation of the properties of a line intersecting with a cubic function, including elucidation of all minima and maxima of the products of the lengths of two line segments
• A geometry question with two proofs
• A constrained linear programming problem
• A simple Markov model with a slight twist

The students had 100 minutes, and to their credit quite a few of the students managed all four, though a lot also stumbled and didn’t get past two. I would say that for a well-trained student with good maths skills, these four questions can all be done inside their allotted 25 minutes, but it’s a pretty risky process – even a small error at the start, or misconception of how to do the problem, and you have basically lost the whole question because you only have time to attack the problem once. And these problems are probably about the same level of difficulty as the questions on a standard year 12 maths exam in Australia – where usually we would have three hours.

But these questions were for the Humanities Faculty of this university. If you want to study Japanese literature at Tokyo University, you first have to get through that 100 minutes of high level mathematics. It says something, I think, about the attitude of Japanese people towards mathematics, and towards education in general, that they would even set a mathematics test for access to a Humanities Faculty; and it says even more about the national aptitude for maths that the students could tackle this exam.

At about the same time as these exams were being held, the Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald released articles slamming the mathematical and science abilities of the average student in the UK and Australia, respectively. The Guardian reported on a new study that found English star students were two years behind their Asian counterparts in mathematics, with 16 year old English students at the same level as 14 year old Chinese. The study also found that

The research also found England’s most able youngsters make less progress generally than those of similar abilities across the 12 other countries studied. The other countries studied were Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Slovenia, Norway, Scotland, the US, Italy, Lithuania and Russia.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on a new study showing that the proportion of students doing mathematics is falling fast, with apparently only 19% of students studying maths, science or technology in their final year of school, and a rapid fall in mathematics enrollments amongst girls especially. The corresponding figure in Japan in 2002 was 64%.

So is this a problem, why is it common to the English speaking world and viewed so differently in Asia, and what can be done about it? Obviously as a statistician I think this is woeful[1], and it certainly is my personal opinion that understanding mathematics is a good thing, but is it bad for a society as a whole to neglect mathematics education? I don’t know if that’s objectively verifiable. So let’s skip that question, assume for now that improving the number of people taking mathematics is good, and just jump onto the question of why it is unpopular in Australia, and why the British are so bad at it.

First, I would like to dispute the possible explanation provided in the Guardian article by “the researchers”:

In east Asian cultures education has historically been highly valued. This can be seen not only in teachers’ high salaries, but also in the heavy investment of families in private tutoring services

While it may be true that “social and cultural factors” affect maths achievement, the idea that Asians are better at maths because they value education more highly is a very weak one. If this were the case, would it not also be the case that Japanese would universally be better at foreign languages than the British or Australians? Japanese get a long exposure to English teaching but are generally woeful at it, despite all the money they sink into private tutoring services. No, there’s something else going on here, something about the Asian approach to maths and the way it is taught that is important.

It is certainly the case that private tutoring services need to be considered in the mix. When comparing a 16 year old English student to a 14 year old Japanese student, for example, you are comparing someone who does a 9 – 5 study day with very long winter and summer holidays against someone who does an 8 – 8 study day with two-week holidays, and who gets 2-on-1 or small group tutoring in key subjects for up to 3 hours a day, and on weekends. This process starts at age 10 and really ramps up at about age 15-16, just when the linked article finds the biggest gap between English and Asian students. It’s also the kind of process that benefits the “brightest” students most, and would explain the gap very nicely.

It may be that if the UK wants to compete with the sleeping giants of Asia on basic educational outcomes, it’s just going to have to face up to a simple fact: British students need to study harder. A lot harder.

There are some more nebulous cultural factors that come into play, however, and I am going to go out on a limb here and name a few factors in Japanese society (the part of Asia I am familiar with) that I believe make Japanese so much better at maths than their western counterparts.

• It isn’t about native talent: A pet hate of mine about western approaches to mathematics is the idea that some people are talented at it, and most people aren’t. I don’t think this is true at all, and I think it’s not something that Japanese believe very strongly. The reality is that getting good at maths is a long, hard slog that involves a huge amount of repetition of basic skills (things like completing the square, substitution, differentiation, interpreting graphs, sign diagrams, etc.) – just like learning a language. Sure, solving maths problems requires creativity and intuition, but these are only of any value if you know the tools you can apply them to, and are familiar enough with those tools to recognize when and how to use them. Mathematics – and especially high school mathematics – is a process of drilling, drilling, drilling, and I think that Japanese recognize this. In Japan the default assumption is that if you pay attention at school and do your homework, you will be good at maths. Sure, they recognize that advanced maths requires extra commitment and talent, but there is a fundamental assumption here that the broad body of maths (up to and including differentiation, integration, limits, and basic probability theory) are things that anyone can learn.
• The teacher is important: the flip side of the idea that education is important is an increased stress on the value of the teacher, and their role as a guide. The role of the guide is also viewed very differently if they are teaching something that they believe anyone can do, compared to if they are teaching a subject that everyone believes is impossible for most mortals to comprehend. Find me a westerner under the age of 30 who is “terrible at maths” and I will show you someone who was humiliated by an arrogant maths teacher at a crucial time in high school, usually around when they were 14. I was in the bottom class in mathematics when I was 14, expecting to drop out as soon as possible, until a good teacher put some time into teaching me, and I found that I really loved it. In Japan, teachers can be bullies and they can be cold and hard, but I would also argue that they have a much greater burden of personal care and responsibility placed on them compared to western teachers, and the failure of their students is treated more like a professional failure (rather than due to the student’s personal talents) than it is in the west. I think this is especially important with mathematics, because when you don’t get it it really hurts – like a kind of itching in the back of your brain – and the failures pile up rapidly. Just a single year between 12 and 14 in which you give up on maths is enough to make all the subsequent years ever more challenging, meaning the damage and the attendant confidence failures compound.
• Being nerdy is cool: In Japan, it’s okay to be a nerd, and being good at mathematics is admired and respected. It’s virtually unheard of to find someone here who looks down on a man who can do maths, or thinks that it is beyond the female brain, or thinks that being interested in mathematics is weird. Furthermore, the nerd world in Japan is much more gender neutral than in the west, so there’s nothing unusual about girls doing maths. Good mathematics skill – up to and including being able to rearrange equations or solve systems of equations, for example – is not seen as a weird foible, but as an admirable sign that you are a rounded human being.
• There is a social expectation of mathematical skill: In addition to nerdiness being much more acceptable, the range of mathematical abilities that qualify you as a nerd in Japan is much more esoteric and advanced than in the west. There is a general expectation that ordinary people can solve maths problems, that they understand the basic language of mathematics so that even if they can’t solve a problem they know roughly what it is and where it sits in the pantheon. Parents assume that their kids will learn mathematics, and don’t dismiss it as the too hard subject that only the special or the weird get ahead in. Whereas in Australia having a kid who is good at maths is unusual, in Japan it is unusual (and embarrassing!) to have a kid who is not good at maths.

I think these properties add up to a society in which mathematical achievement is encouraged and widespread. I think that Australia and the UK need to change some cultural factors so that the intellectual and educational landscape is closer to that in Asia if they want to keep up on mathematics and technology achievement – especially since China’s education system is maturing, and other Asian nations like Vietnam, Singapore and India are getting wealthier, with all the educational gains that implies. So what should Australia do?

• Ditch the nerd-baiting: there’s something really wrong with the way the English-speaking world treats people who do nerdy things. I’m sure it’s mellowed a lot since I was a kid but it’s still there, the kind of ugly-four-eyes assumption about anyone who is interested in anything that isn’t sport or fashion. Until this weird attitude dissipates – and until the nerd world becomes more gender-balanced, to boot – it’s going to be hard to encourage the kind of cultural changes needed to make maths achievement standard across the board
• Less intuition and initiative, more drills: I think it’s very sweet that maths teachers want to encourage their charges to think about the broader world of maths, about creative problem-solving, about applying maths to the real world, etc. But I think those are natural talents all humans possess, that cannot be unlocked without a robust background in the basic skills that make mathematics work. So leave the creativity for people who need it, and stuff kids’ heads full of “useless” rote learning of techniques and drills. It’s boring, but it’s essential to the bigger stuff. If you aren’t able to immediately see when and how to complete a square, then any problem which requires this basic technique is going to be beyond you, no matter how intuitive you are. Maths, possibly more than any other discipline, is built from the ground up, tiny block by tiny block, and all those blocks are essential. So ram them down every kid’s throat, and make every kid think that knowing the quadratic formula is not a test of some kind of obscure talent, but a basic expectation of every 12 year old
• Force mathematics at higher school levels: When I finished school our balance of subjects had to include at least one science/technology subject, but it didn’t have to include maths. This is wrong, and part of the reason that so many students in Japan do mathematics is that you can’t get into a good university if you take this approach: every one of the better universities includes mathematics in its entrance exam. My personal belief is that completion of higher school certificates should require one foreign language, mathematics, and English. That leaves two other subjects to choose from, and guarantees that you have to do some kind of mathematics to the end of school. Not only will this very quickly lead to a society where entire generations of people are generally familiar with mathematics, it will also put a real focus on the quality of teaching at the earlier years, since any student who is doing badly in years 8 – 10 is going to fail their higher school certificate. [Probably this suggestion for a national curriculum is completely unreasonable, but at the very least students could be forced to do mathematics up until year 11, for example].
• Make school more robust: The Japanese school system is about to shift to a “tougher” system that will include Saturday morning classes, because the previous system was considered “relaxed” compared to earlier years. This is, frankly, ridiculous, but so is the attitude towards education of most of the English-speaking world. Summer holidays are way too long and relaxed, there is a real lack of extension classes and tutoring, and expectations are altogether too low. Education isn’t valued enough, and until this changes anyone who wants their child to do better is going to be swimming against a strong current. Educational achievement is partly supported through the shared goals of a whole society, not just through the targets of individual families, and the expectations we hold for education are primarily set through the school system. So toughen it up – not in the sense of making teachers scarier or bringing back outdated “three Rs” educational styles, but by increasing the amount of time students spend at school, setting tougher standards for graduation and university entrance, making schools compete with each other (as Japanese schools partly do) and forcing parents to take greater responsibility for and involvement in their children’s education. This change isn’t specific to mathematics, but it would certainly help.

I don’t think there’s anything special about Asian students, or about Asian culture, that we can’t adopt. Asians’ mathematics achievements aren’t some kind of native or racial talent. It’s just a collection of attitudes towards education, mathematics and nerdiness that we can adopt if we want. Obviously there will be (potentially challenging) institutional changes required as well, and many people may judge it not worth the effort, but I personally think a world where everyone is good at mathematics is a better world, and we should be aiming for it. With these cultural changes maybe one day everyone will know the obvious thrill of being able to complete a challenging mathematics exam … and enjoying it!

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fn1: Though obviously, the less people doing maths, the longer I will remain competitive in the marketplace …

 

AKB 48: Modern Nuns?

Today we heard word of a scandal overtaking the modern Tokyo phenomenon of AKB48. Their 14th most popular member, Minegishi Minami, was caught by a journalist leaving the house of a “boyfriend,” a 19 year old member of some random boy band (compared to AKB48, the boy band in question is largely irrelevant). The pictures were published in some scandal rag, Shukan bunshun (週刊文春), a magazine which basically makes its income from printing shit. As a result of this indiscretion, Miss Minegishi has been demoted to research student (kenkyusei) status, meaning a massive loss of pay and  that in the strange heirarchy of AKB48 she will have to climb back up the ranks to reclaim her position as an enormously popular public figure.

The heart bleeds, doesn’t it? Actually the apology is a beautiful and heartfelt thing, and it’s clear that Miss Minegishi is under a lot of pressure, as one might expect if one were published leaving the house of one’s lover the morning after a trist and published in a magazine read by millions of people, in a country where everyone (well, not me!) is watching you and discretion in sexual encounters is paramount. This is a nation where holding hands in public is still frowned upon by many young people, and kissing generally avoided at all costs. Being photographed the morning after a shag is obviously going to be very embarrassing.

AKB48 sold $200 million of records alone in 2011, and endorse everything from elections to instant coffee. They are the very definition of a household name, and getting into the top 48 of this weird little business enterprise is a license to print money for the young women involved. It’s also not easy: their recent documentary carries the subtitle no flower without rain, which draws on an old saying about how beauty and/or success depend on suffering. The structure of the AKB48 system is redolent of university and the early years of the corporate system: it is intended to reproduce the sense of having to strive to make it, being indebted to one’s seniors, and being vulnerable in the face of life’s challenges. In many ways, AKB48 are perfect representatives of the Japanese notion of gaman, of having to suffer through adverse circumstances to achieve: this is the same spirit of gaman that enables Judo masters to bully their charges[1], but which makes a Sumo wrestler like Takanoyama enormously popular because he tries so hard. Two sides of the same coin … I don’t know if it could be said that Miss Meinegishi is being bullied in this instance, though … what she did do is fall foul of a contractual obligation not to go on dates. That’s right – AKB48 girls are not allowed to go on dates! The Guardian article makes it appear as if this rule is based on “the strict rules to which Japan’s young pop stars must adhere to project an image of unimpeachable morals” but this isn’t the reason at all – that’s just bullshit western misinterpretation of east Asia’s so-called conservatism. The real reason that Miss Minegishi has to live a sexless (or at least secret) life until she “graduates” from AKB48 is that her band is idolized by nerds and pre-sexual teenage girls, and to both groups of fans they have to appear pure and single. These are girls next door who are struggling through a metaphorical high school/university/early corporate life, and girls like that don’t get DP’d in love hotels.

Miss Minegishi’s extreme haircut is also not forced on her by her contract: she did this all by herself, to symbolize her abasement. This means she’s going to be trying extra hard to regain the favour of her fans, and my prediction is that this little cock up is going to be a goldmine for her and for the AKB48 business: she’ll soon be returned to the top ranks, fans will love her more for having fallen and strived, and there’ll be another documentary with tears and struggle – a genre that AKB48′s fans love.

Which brings me to my William Gibson-esque point: these girls are Japan’s modern shrine maidens, the modern equivalent of western nuns of yesteryear. They’re required to swear themselves to celibacy, live lives of constant self-flagellation and torment, and simultaneously have to symbolize everything that is admired in the women of their time: chastity, beauty, sexiness, innocence and endurance. They also have to tread the line of hypocrisy that characterizes modern attitudes towards young women: at the same time as they are making swimsuit videos and soft porn, these girls will get demoted if they are caught having sex. And because it’s Japan they also have to be educated: there’s currently a TV show about some of these girls going to college and trying to get a qualification. William Gibson has a few short stories about these kinds of characters in the cyberpunk world (I think Idoru is the most apt, though I haven’t read it): women whose celebrity depends on their embodying all of the ideals of femininity of their time, and whose personal lives are warped or ruined as a result of it. So let’s hear it for Minami Minegishi, embodiment of all the trials and tribulations of modern womanhood – and of the complexities of the cyberpunk era. Ganbare, Minegishi san! The hopes of a generation, and the weight of an entire society’s sexist expectations, are resting on your skinny shoulders …

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fn1: though maybe not anymore: watch the video of the coach apologizing and listen to the cameras – the girls he bullied weren’t willing to tolerate it and his humiliation is pretty much complete. These guys’ world is changing, and it’s apparent that they aren’t catching up…

 

Peter Jackson’s Hobbit: Too Many Goals for One Movie?

In the last week I have watched the Hobbit twice, first with my partner and then as part of an end-of-year party with my players. In both cases, the people who attended the movie with me gave it the thumbs up – we all really enjoyed it – and I can definitely say that it maintains Peter Jackson’s tradition of getting Tolkien right. However, it got a much more mixed critical reception from my friends than The Lord of the Rings did, and although it was very good I think there was a lot wrong with it as well.

The first thing to say is that Jackson appears to have taken on the special – and in my opinion exemplary – project of properly binding the two stories together. He has taken crucial material from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and incorporated it into the movie, so that there are actually a lot of scenes in the movie that aren’t in the book, but are taken from cross-references in other parts of Tolkien’s work. In my opinion this is an excellent idea, and it improves the story, since instead of being a stand-alone adventure with hints of background darkness, it meshes into what we already know about the war of the ring. When we first read The Hobbit we blundered through all that stuff, not even knowing it was there, but Jackson has made a wise decision in not pretending that the previous movies weren’t made, and explicitly linking the two stories. The extra material he puts in is related to the larger plot: it shows how the timeline of The Hobbit links in with events in the appendices and the other books (I think the Unfinished Tales) by inserting events like Radagast the Brown’s investigations of Mirkwood, and Gandalf’s councils with Elrond et al, into the narrative flow of the main story. He also gives lots of hints as to the nature of Gandalf’s schemes and plans, so that we now know that certain actions he took were not simply due to happenstance, but part of his bigger plan.

The downside to this project, though, is that the movie doesn’t stand alone, and the main story of The Hobbit sometimes takes second place to the bigger events of Middle Earth. Precisely one of the charming points of The Hobbit is its sense of stand-alone adventure, that nothing really grand is happening and it’s just a bunch of bumbling dwarves getting on with their lives. In this movie they’re a bunch of bumbling dwarves whose desire to get on with their lives is being manipulated to a bigger purpose by Gandalf. It’s not an innocent “adventure” anymore, but a grim and serious quest being played out by a group of innocents.

For those of us who enjoy the broader sweep of Tolkien’s history, this is just grand. But for The Hobbit‘s original audience – children – and all those people who see fantasy movies as a pleasant distraction, this bigger picture stuff may be a little tedious. It also runs against the other chief artistic goal of the movie: to make it accessible to children. Because the reality is that a movie with Gollum in it is not for children, but the book was written for kids, and Jackson obviously intended this movie for a youthful audience. It doesn’t have the grimness and sense of hopelessness of The Lord of the Rings, and there is no gore: the party mash their way through a thousand trillion goblins but you never see a drop of blood, and even the trollish grotesqueness tends towards the hilarious rather than the disturbing. It is carnivalesque rather than grotesque, which is fine – until you meet Sauron or Gollum or Smaug, and then suddenly it’s nasty as hell, and not for children. The scenes with Gollum, particularly, are very disturbing, and Gollum – done brilliantly as ever – is if anything scarier than he is in The Lord of the Rings. At times he is close to being as horrifying as the grey men in The Descent, killing in cold blood and openly contemplating cannibalism, balancing on the knife edge of his two personalities and always close to doing bloody murder with his bare hands. So the movie is swings and roundabouts, taking us from silly Sinbad-style adventure thrills to sudden bubbles of grim darkness, and no real way to balance the two. I guess if he had made the whole thing genuinely grim and perilous he would have been criticized, but in attempting to convey hints of the bigger and darker story to come, he creates occasional jarring shifts in tone and theme. Maybe this is a flaw of the book as much as the movie, but I found myself wishing for the whole thing to have been grim and perilous – not just the odd moments.

One thing that Jackson has done to rescue the book from its more foolish moments, however, is he has made the dwarves genuinely steely, adult figures rather than the laughable stereotypes that they have always previously been portrayed as. There was a lot of complaining on some websites about how terribly wrong the dwarves are, but the source material gives us precious little to go on, and it certainly seems like a lot of fanboys’ images of Tolkien’s dwarves are based on how they imagined dwarves when, as 12 year olds, they read the book. i.e., their image of Tolkien’s dwarves is heavily corrupted by Disney. But Jackson has escaped that trap, and gives us real, serious dwarves. Dwalin, particularly, is excellent: he looks, sounds and acts like he is from a race that was spawned from stone and spends its life working in iron. Thorin is genuinely a warrior, and those who are not warriors are genuinely not warriors. It’s a motley bunch, well aware of its own limitations, but united in a quest and doing its best in a hard world. The dwarves are not comedy figures like Gimli sometimes was, and they are designed to make us respect them as wandering heroes looking for their home.

The same probably couldn’t be said about Radagast the Brown…

A few other minor points about the big problems with this movie are below, with dissenting views from my friends where I remember them.

• 48 Frames Per Second is bad: I have seen the movie with and without this “innovation,” and all I can say is that in 48fps it looks like you’re watching a fantasy version of The Bold and the Beautiful. Many of the scenes look like they’re on a cheap set, and Jackson’s penchant for facial close-ups really works against him when the film medium has the effect of making everything look like a soap opera. Avoid 48fps if you can. One viewer disagreed with me on this and thought 48 fps was better, but he is a designer, so what would he know about art?
• Smaug is great: One of my pet hates about big budget movies is they always fuck up the dragon, but Jackson has avoided that. You don’t get a clear look at Smaug but it’s clear that he’s huge, hideous, and evil. This is a dragon that will terrify you to death, not a wagon-sized lizard with Sean Connery’s face.
• The troll scene is disappointing: there are two moments in the movie where Bilbo has a chance to prove himself and rescue the group, and on both occasions Jackson fluffs it. The troll scene has some great parts, and the trolls themselves are hilarious, but Bilbo’s role was disappointing. Others in my group said the trolls were not so great, either, and one viewer suggested Bilbo’s agency had been stolen from him in these scenes in order to enhance the sense that he didn’t fit in …
• Bilbo was controversial: I really like the actor who plays Bilbo, and I think he was great for the part, but others said he had overdone the depiction of Bilbo as reluctant adventure. The consensus appeared to be “Yes! Alright! I get it! You don’t like adventuring! We know that! Now can you start doing stuff???!!!”
• Galadriel and Gandalf’s relationship is great: Jackson really has an eye for the things that Tolkien hinted at but didn’t deliver on. His depiction of gollum as evil but pathetic is superlative, and he really explored Frodo and Samwise’s relationship beautifully. In this movie he gives us more hints of the long and special relationship between Gandalf and Galadriel, and also of her unique power and influence; this is one of those times when overdoing the facial close-ups works. Cate Blanchett is perfect as Galadriel and Ian McKellen has really got Gandalf down to a T. The two of them together are electric.
• The orcs haven’t lost it: Orcs in Middle Earth are not cannon fodder, and the orcs in this movie are really tough, scary bastards. The worgs aren’t as good as those in The Lord of the Rings, though.

So, overall I don’t think those who enjoyed The Lord of the Rings will be disappointed with The Hobbit, but I do think it tries to do too many things at once: it tries to be a rollicking kids’ adventure, an insight into the machinations and schemes of those who fought the growing shadow, and a grim and stern introduction to a great battle between mighty powers, all at once. These three things don’t fit together, and I would have much preferred it was the last two rather than the first one. A truly mature version of this movie would be as sinister as The Fellowship of the Ring, and just as desperate, but this movie flits between that world and the sunny children’s adventure too much. I shouldn’t really complain because I wouldn’t have liked it that much if it were just a Disney-esque romp (though it would still have been fun). Nonetheless, I don’t think it works entirely to mix the three themes.

Still, it’s a worthy addition to the canon and arguably rescues The Hobbit from itself (and Tolkien’s bad sense of content placement, as well) by moving the bigger story into the interstices of the plot. I recommend you don’t miss this movie!

 

Rushdie vs. le Carre: the Battle from the Land Before Time

Today’s Guardian reports on an exchange of letters between Salman Rushdie and John le Carre, from 1997, in which they disagree vehemently about the limits of free speech. At this point in his career Rushdie was in hiding from Islamic fundamentalists, and le Carre was in trouble for criticizing Israel – which of course put him in line for claims of anti-semitism, about which he was most outraged. Unfortunately, 10 years earlier he had apparently claimed that “Nobody has a god-given right to insult a great religion,” and Rushdie was apparently incensed that le Carre should suddenly be demanding victim status after the religious “thought police” turned on him.

The subsequent exchange – which the Guardian now reports both sides have declared they regret – is a hilarious example of how debates on freedom of expression were conducted before the existence of blogs. Apparently, they are conducted viciously through the medium of newspapers. But the letters themselves read like something straight out of a modern blog flame war – further proof, if any were needed, that the medium has not really changed the message or its tone.

Some of these exchanges are quite pretty, though. le Carre goes in heavy with his concerns about the girl in the mail room getting her hands blown off, and demands a less colonialist approach to the topic of freedom of expression (though thankfully he doesn’t apply this to Rushdie himself, just his admirers). Less colonialist? Since when is it colonialist to criticize the Iranian regime for putting a price on a writer’s head? Rushdie may be a self-canoniser, but a threat to the Iranian regime he is not. Were he some lunatic militarist with actual political power, pushing for the reoccupation or isolation of Iran, le Carre might have a point – but a religious critic?

In reply, Rushdie thanks le Carre for “refreshing our memories as to what a pompous ass he is” and adds that “‘ignorant’ and ‘semi-literate’ are dunces’ caps he has skilfully fitted on his own head.” Isn’t it just like reading an exchange on one of the better major bloggers’ sites, when they have one of their blog wars? Only all of it in the Guardian letter’s page.

I haven’t read Rushdie’s work, but I find it hard not to take his side on the matter. I’ve no doubt that le Carre’s experience of drawing the ire of the Jewish “though police,” as Rushdie describes them, was much less frightening than Rushdie’s, but one would have hoped it would have given him a hint as to how hard it might be to be in the firing line, whether figuratively or literally. Whether you think his attack on Islam was warranted or not, and whether you think it deserves the ire of Muslims, the fatwa was an outrageous response and even if purely symbolic is still a Very Bad Thing. I would have thought one could have a nuanced debate about colonialism, revolutionary defensiveness, and the responsibilities of western authors, without ignoring the egregious nature of the response, or belittling Rushdie’s genuine difficulties after the fatwa was declared. And if I were Rushdie, I’d certainly be mighty wrathful with writers who failed to defend my rights.

All of which makes for some entertaining reading, 15 years after the fact, and reminds us that modern blogwars do not necessarily have a lower tone than public debate showed before the invention of this anonymous medium. I guess it just significantly increases the amount that gets said (and thus, but application of basic theorems, the number of debates that get Godwinned). In the case of your average blogger, this is probably not a net positive for the world – but had Rushdie and le Carre been blogging between 1985 and 2000, it would have been quite fascinating, I’m sure.

If only the internet had been invented sooner, we could have been given the pleasure of blogposts by such luminaries as Orwell, Rushdie, Abbie Hoffman … imagine the colour and light such blogs would bring to the medium. Imagine if Steinbeck had a blog during the Great Depression, or Dr. Seuss in the lead up to world war 2. I doubt it would have changed anything, but it would certainly have been great reading…