Jeremy Corbyn is being criticized for claiming that immigration cuts wages. I suspect his critics are right, if not quite for the reasons some of them might think.

Corbyn said he wanted to

prevent] employers being able to import cheap agency labour to undercut existing pay and conditions in the name of free market orthodoxy.

One can read this not as a call for immigration controls but for restrictions on employment agencies.

Such a reading, however, doesn’t exonerate Corbyn.

For one thing, social pressure and market forces have already reined in bad agencies. Transline – the supplier of labour to Amazon and Sports Direct memorably described by James Bloodworth in Hired – lost those contracts and went into administration last year.

And for another, he must have known that statement would be read as a claim about immigration.

And it’s here that he’s wrong.

It is the case that immigration does reduce the wages of some unskilled workers. But the effect is puny. As Jonathan Portes has said:

Immigration may have some, small, negative impact on wages for some low-paid workers.  But the idea that immigration is the main or even a moderately important driver of low pay is simply not supported by the available evidence.

And this small downwards pressure on the lower end of wages is offset by upward effects upon higher wages. Net, immigration is not bad for the economy.

Now, Corbyn’s centrist critics will stop here. But they shouldn’t. It’s here that my complaint with him begins.

In one sense, politicians are like generals; one of their great skills is to choose the terrain on which to fight their battles. And in these words, Corbyn is shifting the battle to the wrong field. He is, in Gramsci’s words, taking a wrong move in the war of position.

What he should be doing is to argue that wages are being depressed not by immigration but by fiscal austerity and by dysfunctional capitalism: stagnant productivity; financialization (pdf), power-biased technical change; deunionization and so on*.

Even the slightest talk of immigration shifts the agenda against this. It moves the political battle onto the terrain that capitalists and Tories want it to be on. They want to distract us from the failures and injustices of austerity and (neoliberal?) capitalism by scapegoating immigrants.

The more we talk about immigration, the less we talk about capitalism. Labour cannot win a battle on this terrain. Once you concede that immigration depresses wages, you are allowing the right to offer tougher and more credible policies to combat it than you can. And you are distracting people from the real reasons why wages are low - reasons that Labour has some policies to combat.

Labour’s attitude to immigration should be much the same as its attitude to government borrowing: it should be silent about it because it doesn’t matter. In fairness to Corbyn, one of his great achievements in last year’s general election was to do just this.  

The right, of course, already has a massive advantage in choosing the terrain; the right-wing press sets the agenda and the BBC follows. Labour therefore needs to be very careful not to add to this advantage. In this sense, Corbyn has failed.

* I’m not saying Corbyn should use these exact words. Another of the great skills of a successful politician is to translate technical economic language into words that resonate more with people.

Sean Howe has a nice article in the New York Times about Billy Graham…and no, not the evangelist who just left us. This Billy Graham was a comic book artist who worked for Warren and Marvel and a few other places…and as Howe reveals, also did a lot of other things besides drawing for comics. He worked at a time when there weren't a lot of other black artists in the field and so was assigned to a lot of strips starring black characters, including Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and Black Panther.

I never met the man so I have little to add to what Sean writes other than that his teaming with writer Don McGregor was fortuitous for both of them. And I'm sure Don agrees.

This reminds me of something I've been meaning to write about here for some time. There is much wonderful scholarship going on about old comic books. I can't believe some of the data and info that some have dug up about the history of the form and the people who wrote and drew the comics. But there is a tendency to ignore the unknown.

There are men and women who worked in comics who never or only rarely signed their work or got their names in any credits. I've written here about a man named Owen Fitzgerald — a great talent who drew hundreds of comic books. I think he got credit on about six of them. Pete Alvarado, who may have been one of the ten most prolific comic book artists who ever lived, probably got his name on even fewer. This was true of folks who worked mainly for Dell, Gold Key, Harvey, Archie or other companies that rarely or belatedly gave credit. There are even writers and artists who worked for DC and Marvel who are still unidentified.

Those who write about comics sometimes forget that we don't know who did some comics. When Billy Graham was active in the field, I occasionally saw him called "The only black artist currently working in comics." I don't think he ever was. Some people knew about Wayne Howard (who worked mostly for Charlton) and a few others but hardly anyone knew about Joe Prince, who was inking several comics for Western Publishing's Gold Key line including Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Donald Duck.

I employed Joe occasionally when I edited comics for Hanna-Barbera and I suspect the credits we gave him on those books were the only ones he ever received during a long, usually-employed career. They seem to be the only credits listed for him in the Grand Comics Database and I'll bet he worked on hundreds of other issues of mainstream comic books. (I lost touch with Joe in the seventies. If anyone knows his whereabouts, there are those who'd love to do interviews and research.)

In the same way, when articles are written about the insufficient number of women who've worked in comics, I almost never see any awareness of Eula Mae Hardesty Liggera, who surely inked well over a thousand issues of Disney, Warner Brothers, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera comics during her lifetime. Here is everything I know about her…

Eula Mae Hardesty Liggera

She was born May 15, 1925, possibly in Indianapolis. She attended various art schools and worked in commercial art. In either the late forties or early fifties, she married John Liggera, who had worked in animation for Disney, M.G.M., Walter Lantz and the Ub Iwerks studio. Mr. Liggera began moonlighting from those studios drawing comics for Western Publishing around 1940, probably commencing with stories of Barney Bear, whose cartoons he was concurrently animating.

John segued from animation into full-time work for Western on their Dell Comics, eventually doing a lot of inking of other artists' pencil work. He never stopped drawing but after he married Eula Mae, the two of them team-inked several comics per month for Western throughout the fifties and sixties. One editor at Western told me that between the two of them, they sometimes inked the equivalent of 4-5 comics a month.  After John died in 1972, Eula Mae continued inking on her own until the early eighties when Western shut down.

My entire contact with her was that around 1977, I got her phone number and called to offer her work on the Hanna-Barbera comics I was editing. She very graciously thanked me but said that she had all the work she could handle from Western…and that, as we say, was that. She died October 12, 2016.

I can't fault historians for not knowing more about her.  I just wanted to point out that when someone writes "Marie Severin and Ramona Fradon were the only two women doing art for comic books in the sixties," that's not quite accurate.  Same situation with those who wrote about black artists and hadn't heard of Joe Prince.  Just because you don't know about someone doesn't mean they never existed.

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Yesterday on Twitter, noted astrophysicist and Pluto killer Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote:

And, well. No. I responded:

This excited at least a few people, who were hoping that this meant that me and Tyson would now commence to fight. But sadly for those folks, there will be no fighting. One, despite his Pluto-murdering ways, I am an admirer of Tyson for his tireless championing of astronomy and astrophysics and science in general. Two, I think Tyson is simply falling prey to a common misconception about both art and entertainment, which is that the former is (mostly) exclusive of and (mostly) superior to the latter. In both cases, it’s not true.

To begin, “art” is not a rarified thing, or at least I don’t think it is. It is, simply, the product of the creative exercise. When you write a story or play a song or draw a picture or act on a stage, you are making “art.” Whether it is good art or bad art is another thing entirely — when I write, I can say I am (generally) creating good art, but when I draw, I am mostly creating bad art. But it’s still art, good, bad or indifferent. What makes it art is the act of creative production, not its quality.

Likewise “entertainment” is also not particularly rarified. It’s that which aims to amuse and engage people (or more widely, that which amuses and engages people, whether intentional or not). In a basic sense, if you are writing or composing or drawing or whatever with the intention or hope that other people will apprehend and appreciate what you are doing, that’s entertainment. And again, you can succeed or not succeed, depending on your skill and also the interest and taste of the audience. What makes it entertainment is the intention, not the quality.

It’s worth pointing out here that in the cases of both “art” and “entertainment” there are two, mostly unrelated components: The act of the creator, and the apprehension of the audience. I may create art, or aim to entertain, or both, but it’s generally up to others to decide if I’ve done a good job in either case. I have my own internal critic in both cases, who I think usually has a good bead on both. But ultimately the success of art depends on the individual, and their take on the created thing. We can further declare that someone has good or bad taste, or doesn’t know enough to appreciate art, or whatever, and those are arguments that can take us down a long and contentious road. But at the end of the day, apprehension of art is subjective, and you either accept that or don’t.

Tyson’s formulation of “art” — that it’s somehow effectively better or more challenging than mere “entertainment,” is not that unusual; it’s at the root of the old question “Well, I know I like it, but is it art?” For the person for whom is this is a serious sort of question, the answer of “Yes, it was art the moment the creator started producing it, and your liking it is valid in itself” possibly seems facile and a little vapid. Likewise, the devaluation of “mere” entertainment, as if something that succeeds in amusing and diverting you, and making you happy, cannot have the value of (or inherently has less value than) something that confronts you and aims to make you think.

Well, that seems a bit silly to me. Alt-right trolls aim to “challenge and disrupt my world view” with what passes for their cogitation; it doesn’t mean what they’re doing has an inherently higher artistic value than, say, an essay by Roxane Gay, whose worldview is rather more in alignment with mine. Fascist-aligned punk bands are not inherently more artistic than the Dead Kennedys, who have rather pointed things to say about Nazi punks.

(“But those are extreme examples!” Yes, they are. And? There were no qualification on Tyson’s initial statement; it’s not “Except in cases involving fascists and thugs…” And even if it were, we could still find more than enough examples to dismiss the hypothesis.)

Likewise, the one thing “art” has over “entertainment” is not quality, it’s intentionality. Art results from the creative drive of humans, and a purposeful act of creation. Entertainment can be, but does not have to be, intentionally created. I can be entertained by cats playing or by clouds rolling along in the sky, but neither the cats nor the clouds do what they do in the hopes of entertaining me. On Youtube, you can watch hours of logs burning in a fireplace or trains rolling through Scandinavia. It’s entertainment but I think not really art (unless you count pointing a camera at a fireplace to be art, which, meh).

“Entertainment” is not a lesser state of “art”; they are separate conditions with substantial but not perfect overlap. Much if not most of what we think as entertainment starts off as art; most art we eventually see is intended to have an audience (i.e., is “entertainment”). The subjective entertainment value of something may not be the same as the subjective “artistic” value of the thing. I can recognize art has been finely crafted and speaks well to an audience, and also recognize that audience is not one with me in it (which is to say, not be well entertained by it). I can likewise recognize that something which amuses me vastly can be something I also find sloppy and junky and not something I’d recommend to other people — or alternately, speaks so particularly to me that I don’t expect others to have the same reaction to it.

Also, and importantly, we don’t have to excuse or rationalize or dismiss art that exists within our “world view” (and let me note that I could spend a whole other essay deconstructing that phrase) as “mere” entertainment. One, “entertainment” is not mere — the ability of anything to transport you out of your own worry cycle for even a few minutes is a pretty great thing. Two, that entertainment is (usually) art. And it’s art that is working for you, however it works. Enjoy it and celebrate it. This is why there should be no such thing as a “guilty pleasure.” You shouldn’t feel guilt about enjoying art, whatever it is.

Now, what I think Tyson may have been trying to say, and if so is a thing I would agree with him on, is that one’s entertainment and/or artistic diet shouldn’t be only what you already know that you like — it’s worthwhile to make a stretch here and there and try things that you don’t know if you like, and on occasion to learn more about art (of whatever sort) so that when you approach new and unfamiliar art, you have tools to better understand and apprehend what you’ve got in front of you. Always be reaching for the new and always be learning — and as a result, what art speaks to you, and entertains you, will be a larger set than what’s come before. And sometimes you won’t like the art, and won’t be entertained, but that’s all right, too. You’ll know more about yourself through the process.

This is why, fundamentally, I don’t need to fight Tyson — I’m pretty sure he and I agree on the important things regarding art and entertainment. We’re just using different words (and definitions of words) to say it. Mind you, I think I’ve said it better here. But then, I’ve just used 1,250 words, and he used a tweet.

Spoilers Follow. Spoilers for the movie “Annihilation”.

(The following review might also go down easier if you’ve read the book.)

The novel was a bit less literal about the whole “Annihilation” part.

I’ve always been amazed that Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy became a massive best-seller. Truth is, I’m kind of amazed it even made it past the small presses.

Don’t take this as a criticism of the novels. Take it, rather, as an indictment of the North American reading public. Vandermeer is, after all, one of the pioneers of New Weird:^[1] literary, cryptic, unapologetically off-kilter. Have you read Southern Reach? Would you have expected it to climb to the top of a pile that holds up Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Dan Fucking Brown as role models?

The fact that it did fills me with wonder (Awesome! The genre made it without having to dumb down!), and hope (hey, if Southern Reach can own the bestseller lists, maybe I can too), and resentment (WTF? Annihilation is a household word and people say my stuff is too inaccessible for the mainstream market?). Then again, sneer as I might at readers of The da Vinci Code, at least those people are reading books. Most of us don’t even do that much.

Most of us go to the movies, though. So maybe the real test is whether a movie based on the book, a movie that respects the spirit of the book, can make it when thrown into the ring with Marvel and Pixar and LucasFilm and 20th-Century F— ah, let’s just keep it simple: with Disney.

As I write this, it doesn’t look good for “Annihilation” (the movie— henceforth distinguished from Annihilation, the novel). Box Office Mojo reports that it debuted at #4 (losing out to Peter Rabbit at #3)— which makes it a bomb, financially, but no worse than you could expect from a movie that test audiences found “too intellectual” and “too complicated”. That part actually gave me hope; that hope grew when director Alex Garland and producer Scott Rudin stood firm and told Paramount to fuck right off, when the studio wanted to make the film more “accessible”.

Paramount retaliated by cancelling plans for overseas theatrical distribution (except for China) and dumping those rights onto Netflix.  I didn’t care; all signs pointed to a good film, a smart film, and the fact that it was too confusing for your average Transformers fan only proved the point. A lot of people hated “2001” when it came out; “The Thing” nearly killed John Carpenter’s career. And unlike “The Thing” on first release, the critics love “Annihilation”: 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, 79% on Metacritic. One of the few exceptions was science fiction’s own Annalee Newitz , who thought it sucked.

I believe I may fall somewhere in between.

Garland’s movie perfectly evokes the weird, skin-crawling dream-fever I experienced while reading the book. You can feel the air pressing down like invisible treacle. You sense the things watching you from just out-of-frame, you wonder at the skewed strangeness of the things right before your eyes. The acting is top-notch, and the science— well, you don’t go into a movie about an expanding paradimensional soap-bubble-o’doom expecting a list of technical citations. But the movie is science-savvy enough to know when it’s breaking the rules— at least, the rules we talking apes have discovered up to this point— and I’m fine with that.

Actually, kudos to the physicist for even knowing what Hox genes are.

Case in point: strange natural scarecrows springing up in lawns and meadows, shrubbery spontaneously assuming humanoid shape. The physicist (not being a biologist) speculates that you’ll find human Hox genes in that foliage, because Hox genes are what tell the tissue how to arrange itself during development. It’s both reasonable (that is what Hox genes do) and wrong. (The plants are not growing, Ent-like, into solid humanoid shapes, as they would even in the unlikely event that the humanoid recipe had somehow been ported between Kingdoms. They’re just the usual tangle of vines and twigs and branches— simply confined, bonsai-like, to a human-shaped jar. There’s some tertiary metaprocess involved here). The biologist immediately responds: “literally not possible”— leaving us not with a scientific boner, but with a scientific mystery that happens to go unsolved (along with pretty much everything else in this movie, admittedly). The idea of genetic refraction— presented not just as mechanism but as metaphor, as literal visual ambiance— kind of appeals to me.

Newitz seems to have missed this deliberate bit of ass-covering when she decries “Annihilation”‘s “painfully bad representations of how DNA works”. Or maybe she got it, but just didn’t buy it. Either way, I think she’s being too harsh. Obviously there’s more than DNA at work here; obviously we’re dealing with alien forces beyond our comprehension.  Kubrick didn’t provide technical specs on how the monolith worked, either— and for all the folks who had trouble with “2001” when it first came out, I don’t remember anyone complaining about that fact.

Which makes this a good spot to talk about the ending, which Vandermeer himself has compared to the end of “2001”. I am not convinced. No matter how opaque Kubrick’s ending might have seemed at first glance, there’s no question that it resolved the plot: a specific thing happened to finish the story, whether it was obvious or not. Kubrick did, after all, have hard-SF maestro Arthur C. Clarke riding shotgun, to keep him from venturing too deeply into the woo. They knew what they were doing, even if audiences didn’t.

Not so sure that’s the case here.

The ending Garland stapled onto the movie is utterly unrelated to anything in the novel. He really had no choice about that. The novel doesn’t even have an ending— at least, not one that leaves us any wiser about all the mysteries laid out in the preceding pages. The book doesn’t so much end as go on hiatus, which is something you can forgive in the first act of a trilogy.

Garland obviously had to stick something before the credits. I’m not entirely sure he knew what it was, though. You’ve got a scaled-down version of the interior of the derelict alien ship from Alien. You’ve got twinkly Human/energy metamorphosis a la “Star Trek: The Motionless Picture”. You’ve got that humanoid oil slick from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”‘s execrable “Evil Skin” episode. And you’ve got some kind of mirror-mode marionette that inexplicably mimics every move our lone survivor makes, while in the process becoming her “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” doppelganger— which isn’t really in keeping with anything we’ve seen in Area X up until now (the Shimmer refracts things, it doesn’t reflect them— this whole pod-person element just comes out of nowhere).

Garland’s a smart guy; I really liked “Ex Machina” (although maybe a bit less than most). He seems to be pretty scrupulous about thinking things through— or at least he learned to be, sometime after making “Sunshine”. But I can’t shake the feeling than in this case, he just grabbed a bunch of random stuff and mooshed it together, hoping against hope that we’d read profundity into chaos.

I have to wonder how much that ending changed the middle, how many vital elements of the novel were jettisoned solely because the movie had to converge on some arbitrary endpoint thumbtacked to Garland’s corkboard. Is that why we lost the inverted tower spiraling down into the earth, the weird mutated Crawler scratching its endless prose into those walls? Is that why we never found how just how massively corrupt the Southern Reach was, why the lies and deceptions and all those unacknowledged previous expeditions never made it into the script? Is that why the very name of the story was changed so utterly in meaning, even if every letter was left in place?

Again: Alex Garland is a smart guy. At this stage in his career, he might not even be capable of making a bad movie, and “Annihilation” is not one. “Annihilation” is, at the very least, a good movie; it is an undeniably beautiful movie. It is even a brave movie, a movie made in defiance of lazy viewers and nervous distributors. I think the ending keeps it from being a brilliant movie, but I can’t be sure after one viewing (I’ll have to catch it again on Netflix).

I can be sure of one thing, though:

“Annihilation” is not Annihilation.

Am I sick, or is this kind of beautiful?

^[1] Although it’s been around long enough that we should probably be calling it “Middle-Aged Weird” by now.

I am working (for reasons of my own) towards a comprehensive list of plausible technothriller plots from 2010 where the MacGuffin is named Satoshi Nakamoto.

Before you go off prematurely: a MacGuffin in fiction is ... "a plot device that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation". Can be a person as well as a thing. "Satoshi Nakamoto" is the pseudonym of the entity who designed BitCoin and the blockchain database. Whoever they are, they're anonymous and they own a bitcoin wallet containing one million bitcoins (worth approximately $19 billion at present market rates), making them the 44th richest person in the world—if they dared spend them, because if they spend any of their bitcoins they'll risk exposure. And "technothriller plots from 2010" is the deadline because that's the year when Nakamoto went inactive, roughly 12 months after the initial release of Version 0.1 of the bitcoin software via SourceForge (January 2009). (If I'd picked an earlier year—say, 2008—the subsequent BitCoin mania could only be described in science fictional terms.)

So, here are some plausible technothriller plots about "Satoshi Nakamoto", from 2010—all of them entirely fictional, of course. Feel free to add your own in coments.

1. BitCoin has become popular with neo-Nazis and the alt-right because they believe banks are part of a worldwide Jewish consipracy, and—as a decentralized anonymous cryptocurrency—by using BitCoin, they're sticking it to The Man. (This much is, sadly, non-fiction.) Technothriller plot #1 assumes that Satoshi Nakamoto is a mildly autistic American cypherpunk of Jewish ethnicity. Due to a "Breaking Bad" style medical mis-hap he's had to sell a couple of coins to cover his medical expenses ... and now he's on the run, pursued by angry neo-Nazis who want to steal his wallet, kill the Jew, and reclaim bit-coin for the Alt-Reich.

   a) Variant: Satoshi Nakamoto is George Soros.

2. Nakamoto is being hunted by rival CIA, KGB, Mossad, and Chinese assassination squads who want his BtC wallet (because one meeelion bitcoins, Mr Bond).

   a) Variant: "Nakamoto" is a false cover identity for a CIA, KGB, Mossad, or Chinese spy operation (aimed at infiltrating and co-opting illegal black markets by subverting their currency arrangement); they are now being hunted by (insert rival conspiracy here).

3. Nakamoto is an alien scout trying to destroy the human global economy to lay the groundwork for the arrival of the alien invasion fleet.

   a) Variant: Nakamoto is trying to seize control of the "black" economy (those goods and services for which massive demand exists but where supply is illegal) in order to gain blackmail leverage in preparation for the arrival of the alien invasion fleet.

4. Nakamoto is a time-travelling agent from our fully automated luxury gay space communism future, trying to expedite the crisis of capitalism. Nakamoto is being hunted by (insert rival conspiracy here).

   a) Variant: Nakamoto is a time-travelling Objectivist terrorist on the run from our fully automated luxury gay space communism future, trying to expedite the triumph of capitalism in an attempt to prevent that future.

   b) Variant: Satoshi Nakamoto is Sarah Connor. BtC mining will eventually consume all planetary electricity supplies, thereby causing a worldwide blackout, which will prevent Skynet from going live.

   c) Variant: Satoshi Nakamoto is The Terminator. Skynet needs her BtC wallet in order to pay the electricity bill.

   d) Variant: Satoshi Nakamoto is a time traveller from the past: specifically, Adolf Hitler, who escaped from his bunker and invented BitCoin in order to fund a revived Nazi movement. (File this one in the folder "Plots that rely on Hitler being Satan in disguise.")

   e) Nakamoto is Doctor Who, the Daleks are Space Nazis, and they nuked Gallifrey because of the trans-temporal intergalactic Jewish banking conspiracy. (Time Lords are Jewish. This makes as much sense as anything else on Doctor Who, OK?)

5. Nakamoto is dead and his wallet and keys are at large on a 1Gb USB memory stick backup from 2009. The memory stick is thus a MacGuffin with a street value of roughly $19Bn, except that if you try to monetize it the CIA drones will probably kill you before the KGB Spetsnaz squad abducts you or agents of the international Jewish banking conspiracy offer you an annuity.

   a) Variant: Nakamoto is missing presumed dead, with amnesia, and his memory stick has gone walk-about. However, Nakamoto is the sole survivor of the CIA false flag operation that invented Bitcoin in order to take down the (insert one of: drug cartels, Vatican bank, Dr. Evil), and he's determined to get his memories back. In other words, Satoshi Nakamoto is Jason Bourne.

6. Satoshi Nakamoto works for (insert conspiracy A here); BitCoin was designed to fail in order to discredit (insert rival conspiracy B here) but inadvertently succeeded: Nakamoto is now on the run from conspiracy A.

   a) Variant. Satoshi Nakamoto works for (insert conspiracy A here); Nakamoto was inserted into (insert rival conspiracy B here) and invented BitCoin as a hoax in order to discredit conspiracy B: however he screwed up. The hoax was so superbly executed that everybody believes in it and Nakamoto is now on the run from conspiracy A until he can prove that it's trivially easy to hack the blockchain and bitcoin is a hoax.

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In his latest book, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker claims that the Enlightenment has worked, and that “health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise.” I have a problem with this.

I don’t doubt at all that life has become vastly better in the last couple of centuries, perhaps especially for oppressed groups such as workers, women and ethnic minorities. Instead, my question is: what progress has there been in the last ten years?

None at all, by one important measure in the UK. Real wages are now lower than they were ten years ago, and younger people have far less hope of ever owning property.  

Of course, as Mill wrote, a stationary state of incomes need not imply stagnation in other aspects of human flourishing. But what progress have we had here recently? Yes, crime has fallen – albeit less so than in the 90s. But there can be little doubt that our political culture has declined. We’ve seen a rise in fake news (and misplaced allegations thereof), asymmetric Bayesianism, shrillness, intolerance and xenophobia.

Centrist and liberal values are under threat (though as John Gray points out, it would be misleading to call these “Enlightenment values”.)

This, of course, is no coincidence. As Ben Friedman has shown, economic stagnations create intolerance and closed-mindedness. The anti-Enlightenment trends that Pinker identifies – “tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking” – are on the rise not because people have suffered a collective bang on the head, but because centrism is no longer putting money on the table. Brexit is, in large part, the product of stagnation and austerity.

From this perspective, I’m inclined to agree with Gray that celebrating the Enlightenment is an “intellectual anodyne” for centrists. This is because it misses the point.

Which is that the fact that a long history of progress has stalled is consistent with the Marxist narrative.

Marx saw that capitalism was a force for progress. It has, he wrote, “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”, “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life” and “created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations.”*

But, he added, this would eventually cease to be the case. Capitalistic property relations would, he thought, eventually become “fetters” upon material progress. And, pace Friedman, a lack of material progress means moral and intellectual regress.

If this is right, liberal centrists are doing what Tom Paine accused Edmund Burke of: they are pitying the plumage of liberal values but forgetting the dying bird of the prosperity that fostered them.

Rather than simply assert the virtue of Enlightenment values, they must instead recognise that the threats to these are a product of capitalist stagnation. They must give us good reasons to believe this stagnation is temporary or – better still – come up with convincing ideas for rescuing capitalism. The fact that many of them acceded to Tory austerity means they have, so far, been unable to do this.

Unless they engage intelligently with the fact of capitalist failure, centrists will remain irrelevant. In fact, it might be that it is we Marxists rather than they who are the better defenders of values such as liberty and rationality.

* We must remember that capitalism was a force for progress in the 20^th century in large part because it embraced anti-capitalist elements – a welfare state, mixed economy and progressive taxation – and began to stagnate as these elements were whittled away by neoliberalism.

Was Kaldor right after all, at least for the UK? This is one question posed by today’s GDP data.

Kaldor proposed as a “stylized fact” that the shares of wages and profits in GDP are roughly stable over time. Today’s figures confirm that this has been the case in the UK, at least in recent years. They show that the share of profits in GDP has been stable at just over 20% since the early 00s. The share of employees’ compensation* has also been quite stable; it fell between 2009 and 2013 which was (arithmetically) the counterpart of higher taxes rather than rising profits.

Yes, we did see a massive shift in incomes from wages to profits between the 70s and mid-90s. But that was partly reversed in the late 90s. Since then, not much has happened to factor shares. This means the wage share is higher now than it was in the 90s and the profit share is lower.

All this is a stark contrast to the US. There, we’ve seen an increased profit share and increased (pdf) mark-ups since the 90s, and a decline in wages relative to productivity, all of which are symptoms of increased monopoly and monopsony (pdf) power.

Stock markets tell us a similar story. Since the mid 00s US shares have significantly out-performed UK ones**. There are several possible reasons for this. One is that investors believe that US companies have more monopoly power than UK ones – what Buffett calls economic moats – which means their profits are more sustainable and this justifies higher valuations.

Quite why this should be is another story. One possibility might be that US firms are more intangibles-intensive and hence benefit more from economies of scale than their UK counterparts. As Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake have pointed out, intangibles can increase inequality.

Now, in saying all this I am not denying that the UK has a problem with inequality: a stable share of wages in GDP tells us nothing about the distribution of those wages. Nor of course am I denying that British workers are exploited. They are. But in aggregate they seem to be no more so now than in the 90s.

Instead, my point is that in the UK stagnant wages since the mid-00s has had more to do with flat productivity (until very recently) than with employers grabbing a bigger share of the pie. British capitalism is not like American capitalism. Whether this will remain the case is another matter.

* This includes employers’ pension contributions as well as wages.

** My chart compares the FTSE small cap index to the S&P 500 because small caps are a better measure of domestically-based stocks than the All-share index which is dominated by multinationals. Given that the small cap index has out-performed the FTSE 100 since the mid-00s, the UK’s under-performance would look even worse if we took the All-share index.

Good news! Brexit won’t be happening in our lifetimes!

At least, that’s the best conclusion I can draw from recent news.

It has been 19 years since the House of Lords Act 1999, which abolished most of the hereditary peers*. Phase 2 of those reforms was due to introduce elected members of the Lords, but despite the Wakeham Report being published in 2000 we are still waiting.

A widely recognised problem with a simple and democratic solution.

But Theresa May wants more time to think about it. 19 years is not long enough for the level of “careful thought” regarding such obvious reform.

Compare this with Brexit. A complicated piece of work, with no obvious solutions to problems like the Good Friday agreement, Gibraltar, Trade. And over which the country is deeply divided.

My best guess is that the thinking time for that will be at least 100 years.

*Fun Fact: Hereditary Peers are the largest group of elected members in the House of Lords, followed by the CofE Bishops and then Liberal Democrats. The caveat is that in every case the electorate is quite small – the remaining hereditary peers elect each other, and the Bishops are elected by various Synods.

The post Brexit not happening in our lifetimes appeared first on Complicity.

For some time, I’ve asked that journalists leave the Westminster Bubble and look instead at ground truth. I’m delighted, therefore, that James Bloodworth has done just this. His latest book, Hired, describes his experiences of working on low wages – at an Amazon warehouse in Rugeley, a call centre in South Wales, as a care worker in Blackpool and as an Uber driver in London.

Of course, he’s self-aware enough to acknowledge that he’s a tourist. His experience necessarily misses a lot: the sense of despair that comes with knowing that low-wage work is for life; or the difficulties of juggling such work with care responsibilities, for example. However, when so much journalism consists of smears, prejudice and idle gossip whilst the voice of workers goes unheard, James’ story is essential reading.

It raises many issues, which should challenge both left and right. I’ll list just a few.

One, sad to say, is immigration: especially at Amazon, James is surrounded by Romanians. The issue here isn’t just the perception, fuelled by employment agencies wanting to screw down pay and conditions, that there’s a vast reserve army of migrants. It’s also perhaps that migrants contribute to a lack of class cohesion at work.

Secondly, James shows that a big problem for the low-paid is not just the level of wages but the insecurity. You can get by on the money James made, albeit joylessly. But there are many possible disturbances to these: “mistakes” in calculating wages (surprisingly common); changes in hours; unexpected expenses; or trivial misdemeanours at work that get you the sack. Any of these can force you into to the world of loan-sharks or homelessness.

For me, this strengthens the case for a citizens’ income: it provides security against such shocks.

Thirdly, low wages are unhealthy. James says he put on a stone whilst working at Amazon despite walking ten miles a day. The stress of work compels you to want a “momentary morale boost” such as a cigarette, chocolate or junk food. Add in the difficulties of fitting meals around irregular working hours, and the fact that low-wage work steals (pdf) cognitive bandwidth, and we’re left with the fact that demands on the poor to eat well are simply unrealistic.

What’s more, poverty is oppression. James says:

Whether it was the employment agency underpaying you, the job centre messing you about or the rent-to-own store trying to bamboozle you there was often this running battle with the authorities.

This continues in the workplace. James describes how workers face intense distrust and constant surveillance by either technology or “petty fuhrers”.

This oppression, however, doesn’t come (directly) from fat plutocrats in top hats grinding the faces of the poor. Job centre staff who “treat you like scum”, yobs who attack the homeless and the shop-floor tyrants at Amazon probably earn less than average wages. And yet they contribute massively to the misery of the worse-off. Yes, such people are under stress from those above them. But it’s possible that they have, in James’ words, “internalized the objectives of their gaolers.”

And herein lies a depressing theme of Hired – the lack of class cohesion. James says: “Thatcherism’s greatest success was probably in the gradual erosion of class solidarity.” You get no sense in his book that his colleagues are active supporters of Corbyn or (worse still) that they have dense networks of friends or family to help them through the hard times. 

Granted, there’s a danger here of romanticizing the past. The lack of class solidarity was a theme of Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and we must remember that trades union militancy was used to “preserve differentials” and to support Enoch Powell, as well as for more benign ends. Nevertheless, this reminds us of Marx's biggest error - the belief that class consciousness would increase over time.

Rightists like to tell us that there’s more to poverty than a lack of money. They might be right, if not in the way they intend.  

Sometimes the Doctor vanished loudly, with a comforting little yell as he fell into something.

6. LORDS CRICKET GROUND

(In the radio commentary box, two commentators, Trevor and Scott, are watching England play a test match against Australia.)

TREVOR: Well, the English batsmen are really fighting against the clock now, Scott.
SCOTT: My word, yes. Seventy eight runs in forty five minutes to win.
TREVOR: It really has been an exciting game, hasn't it, Scott?
SCOTT: Very exciting.
TREVOR: Well, let's have a look at the scoreboard, shall we?

(The TARDIS materialises on the outfield.)

TREVOR: Now, you'll see... Goodness me, take a look at that, Scott.
SCOTT: Take a look at what, Trev?
TREVOR: There's a Police Telephone Box on the pitch.
SCOTT: My word, yes.
TREVOR: Well this really is extraordinary. You don't remember anything like this happening before, do you, Scott?
SCOTT: No. (pauses to think) No.
TREVOR: (looks behind him to where a researcher is hastily poring over cricketing manuals) Well, anyway, Ross is looking through the record books and if there has been anything like it before, I'm sure he'll find it for us.
SCOTT: You know, Trev, this puts a new light on the game.
TREVOR: What light's that, Scott?
SCOTT: Well, I know your ground staff are excellent, but even assuming they get rid of it in say, ten minutes, England will still have to get their seventy eight runs in... thirty five minutes.
TREVOR: Yes; yes well I think we can safely say this has been a very bad break for England.
SCOTT: A very bad break. Especially as the weather's been holding off so well.
TREVOR: Yes it has, hasn't it. Been holding off remarkably well. Well, let's have another look at the scoreboard shall we, although not very much has been happening these last few...
SCOTT: It's making a funny noise.
TREVOR: What's that, Scott?
SCOTT: A funny noise coming from the Police Box.

(The TARDIS dematerialises.)

SCOTT: It's gone again, Trev.
TREVOR: Yes, so it has. Well that wasn't too bad was it, Scott?
SCOTT: Two and a half minutes, I make it, Trev.
TREVOR: Yes, well there's the position. England wanting seventy eight runs in forty two and a half minutes to win.

7. INSIDE THE TARDIS

THE DOCTOR: Yes, it's definitely some sporting occasion.
SARA: Oh, I hardly think so, Doctor.
STEVEN: Was it on Earth, do you think?
THE DOCTOR: Oh, possibly, my dear fellow, possibly.

Looking beyond March 29 2019

Earlier this week I wrote about the likelihood that Britain will leave the EU on the current scheduled date of 29 March 2019. My logic was simple: the timetable is preset, adjusting it requires the consent of a lot of different parties and there is no sign yet that many people in Britain have changed their minds. You can still back that proposition at 5/4 on Betfair and it still looks to me to be outstanding value.

For the last few months, the polls on the referendum have shown a pretty consistent picture. With the benefit of hindsight, the public is evenly split but on balance thinks that leaving the EU was the wrong decision. Few have changed their minds. Slightly more Leave voters than Remain voters are open to the idea that they got it wrong but the shift has been caused by non-voters at the referendum breaking decisively for Remain.

In the short term, this doesn’t really have any significance. Unless public opinion moves far more decisively towards a change of heart, the momentum from the referendum vote will comfortably carry the country over the precipice of leaving the EU next March.

Then what? Imagine a Britain where no one ever changes their mind about Brexit. It’s easy if you try – social media is full of hardcore supporters on both sides yelling at each other across a chasm of values. The public has had over two years of hearing the arguments on both sides. Perhaps it’s not that surprising if most people should have reached a firmly settled resting point.

If everyone has picked their side in the Brexit values war, how does the war end? It’s a war between young unhappy metropolitans and old uneducated provincials: the blue and the grey, if you like. In this war of attrition, the young have time on their side.

In a very few years with no one changing their mind, Leave supporters will die off disproportionately, leaving a substantial structural majority for the pro-EU side in a surprisingly short space of time unless the members of the Leave Majority who have joined the Great Majority are replaced by new recruits. A country that eventually decisively believed that leaving the EU was the wrong decision would be highly likely to explore rejoining it at some point in the future. More than one clock is ticking.

What this means, therefore, is that Leave need not just to take Britain out of the EU but to start the process of changing their erstwhile opponents’ minds. They have three possibilities: the facts change to an extent that reachable Remain supporters change their minds, the public decide that regardless of who’s right or wrong they don’t want to think about Europe any more or Leave are able to reposition Brexit in a different place in the values war.

Leave supporters have done their best to minimise their chances on all fronts. What have Remain voters heard since the referendum? Accusations that opponents of Brexit are enemies of the people, saboteurs and traitors. Leave advocates have done everything to ensure that the public are forced to pick a side.

Those that have already picked Remain have been entrenched in that decision ever since. Leave supporters rightly note that dismal economic projections are not going to shift anyone from Leave to Remain. They seem unaccountably optimistic that good economic news might do the reverse. Values trump facts. This is not a one way street.

What of a charm offensive? Leave have gone in the opposite direction, claiming ever more stringent versions of Leave are required if Britain is not going to Brexit in name only. Boris Johnson supposedly sought to reach out to Remain supporters in his recent speech advocating a liberal Brexit, which, however, was trailed in advance with the use of the word “betrayal”. You have to wonder what is going on under that blond mop.

If Leave supporters really are going to make the case for a liberal Brexit, they are going to need to choose their language carefully. One-off speeches aren’t going to do the trick. Until you’re sick of the sound of your own voice, you haven’t said it enough. The most prominent Leavers, however, have the problem that many Remain supporters are already sick of the sound of their voices.

In practice, however, Leave cannot make the case for a liberal Brexit because a large part of Leave’s own supporters want no part of that. So a repositioning of Brexit looks predestined to fail.

Right now Leave’s best bet is sheer fatigue. But that would still leave the country in the long term believing that it had made a wrong turn in 2016 and was just making the best of a bad job. Even if that works, that’s not a very auspicious legacy, is it?

And that looks the likeliest best case scenario. At least as likely is a scenario where the public in time comes decisively to reject Brexit, rejoin the EU (presumably on worse terms than Britain left it) and where Leave becomes synonymous with a reactionary disaster.

So, how do Leavers propose to take things from here? They’ve spent far too long fighting the last battle. The next one is going to require a strategic genius.

Alastair Meeks

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Is good behaviour more fragile than generally supposed? For me, this is the question posed by the unpleasant controversy sparked by Mary Beard’s tweet:

I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain “civilised” values in a disaster zone. 

One interpretation of this seems to me plain wrong – that it is an attempt to justify the wrongdoing at Oxfam.

Another interpretation is that there’s an undertow of racism here. Even in quote marks, that word “civilized” echoes imperialist talk of white men “going native” – of “white aid workers as Mr Kurtz figures caving in the strain of ‘The horror, the horror’” in Priyamvada Gopal’s words.

But I wonder, might there be another reading of that tweet? We could read it as meaning that decent behaviour – civilized behaviour if you must – is not hardwired into us, and that many of us have darker tendencies

One reason for this, as I said recently, lies in a mix of ego-depletion and self-licensing. We cannot maintain full self-control for long under stress: we have to let off steam. And a belief that one is a good person doing good gives one a self-licence to behave badly. If you've just saved a few lives, you can convince yourself that it's OK to see a young prostitute, just as colonialists justified greed and brutality to themselves in the belief they were bringing Christianity to ignorant people, for example. Self-serving biases are powerful things.

But there’s something else.

It lies in Adam Smith’s idea of the impartial spectator. What keeps us behaving well is the suspicion that there is someone watching us. When we play outside as children, we might think we are only with other kids. But often we’re watched by family friends or neighbours, so our parents learn of our misbehaviour. That keeps us honest. As D.D. Raphael writes in his exposition of Smith:

The approval and disapproval of oneself that we call conscience is an effect of judgments made by spectators. Each of us judges others as a spectator. Each of us finds spectators judging him. We then come to judge our own conduct by imagining whether an impartial spectator would approve or disapprove of it (The Impartial Spectator p 34-5)

When this impartial spectator is fully internalized it becomes God or conscience. But it isn’t always so internalized. When it isn’t, it is the fear of actual real spectators that keeps us well-behaved. There’s always the danger that our spouses or bosses will hear of our misdeeds.

When we go overseas, however, we leave the most influential spectators behind, which lessens the constraint upon us. The only observers we have are foreigners who are, at best, less likely to report us to our employers or partners*.

The result of this is that there is a massive tradition of white men behaving badly outside their own countries, from imperialist brutalities to war crimes. We see faint echoes of this today. Men who go on business trips often behave worse than at home; West Brom footballers are more likely to steal cabs in Barcelona than Birmingham; there’s a reason why stag parties go to Amsterdam or Prague rather than the fiancee’s house; and what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. As Paul says, “rampant power to abuse was part of the ‘expat’ tradition, even folklore, alongside its hard-drinking culture.”** Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies both speak to this tradition.

In other words, what we call “civilization” is not some property of individuals. It is, instead, emergent; it arises from social pressures upon us and might evaporate when those pressures are absent, depending upon how much the impartial spectator is internalized.

Which brings me to a paradox. Although Professor Beard’s tweet has been interpreted as having an undertow of racism (perhaps rightly if inadvertently) it might also bear a very different interpretation - that white men are not as “civilized” as they pretend. And there’s a lot of history to support such a view.

* There is, of course, often a baser motive for discounting their opinion, which is that the opinion of people who aren’t like us counts for less – which is one reason why we should be so wary of “othering” other people.

** It shouldn’t need saying, but I fear it does: I’m not claiming any moral equivalence between these examples but merely suggesting that a similar mechanism is at work.

In the midst of this latest attempt to persuade Americans to do nothing about their gun problem, I was struck by someone asking:

“Explain exactly HOW you intend to get America's numerous owners of guns to surrender their arms should the qualifiers for ownership be chsnged, without riots or causing civil war?”

And that got me thinking.

How do I intend for it to happen? Exactly the way it happened in Australia, for the most part — or indeed the way Americans generally actually *do* respect laws when they change, and are willing to comply with them even when things which were previously legal become illegal (from CFC-spewing fridges to the previous assault-weapons bans).

But what about the cold-dead-hand crowd? What about the people who the authorities know are outright determined to violate the law? What do I think should happen?

What do I want?

I want the Feds to treat them with all the grace and dignity they use when they swoop in on a brown-skinned man stockpiling fertilizer.

I want them to see the world respond to them not as American patriot martyrs, but as new names on the short list of ratbags headed by the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh.

I want peoples’ alarm to focus on what those nuts were planning to use all these guns for.

I want law-and-order conservatives to respond to their shrieks of mistreatment with the same disdain they use for guys arrested for drug possession, undocumented immigration, or anything else that actually is against the law. I want the same “you see you have to recognize there are limits to your rights” attitude that’s taken towards the *other* Amendments taken towards the second.

In short, I want these criminals to be treated the way America treats other such criminals. That ought to be punishment enough.

Plus, I want their inevitable protests, about how persecuted they are cause the government won’t let them own every last kind of murder machine, to be responded to with the same attitude given to Black Lives Matter. The same chorus of “Why can’t they protest non-violently? But not by taking a knee for the anthem, that’s just direspectful.”

If they do start a fight? I want to see their quick, decisive defeat. Because there’s no way it ends with them winning, any more than it ended that way for any other mass shooter who opened fire on cops.

I want them to realise, that for all their macho fantasies about another civil war which parts of America have been nurturing for all this time since the South first failed to rise again, most of America will *not* stand with them on this. That if they open fire on American police, American soldiers, America will see them as criminals. As terrorists.

I want them to realise that their whole Second Amendment fairytale, imagining an armed rebellion overthrowing the single greatest military machine ever built using its own cast-off second-tier weapons — that an amateur militia could win against a *nuclear state* if it actually decided to crush them — has been a comforting fantasy security blanket from the word go.

I want them to realise that if America ever *does* go tyrannical, fighting them that way would be a lost cause from the word go, so they’d better start working on other ways of protecting peoples’ rights.

And if they do start shooting?

If they do decide that they can’t respect law, and democracy, and the overwhelming popular calls for tighter gun laws, and want to take it out on the Feds like terrorists?

Then at least I’ll know that the rounds from their AR-15s are being directed at trained soldiers, who know how to react and handle the situation — rather than at office-workers and nightclubbers and schoolkids, who have been the targets in their war on sanity for too fucking long.

By-election gains may well be yet another false dawn

Up until last year, Sunderland had carved out for itself one, and only one, niche in British political life: it counted its votes at general elections faster than anywhere else. For six successive elections from 1992 to 2015, the southern Sunderland seat was the first to declare in the country. Other than that, the city was politically unremarkable: it’s returned two Labour MPs ever since the 1960s and the Red team is similarly dominant at local level.

2017 saw a bit of a turnaround on both scores. Local rivals Newcastle won the race to be the first to declare at the general election, while five months previously the Lib Dems gained a local by-election on a massive 36% swing. That was admittedly back at a time when Labour was very much struggling for support nationally, polling in only the upper-twenties, but it was still an extraordinary result.

Nor was it a one-off. In the first two months of the year, the Lib Dems gained two seats from Labour and no fewer than six from the Conservatives, despite the national polling showing the Tories up in the 40s while the Lib Dems remained marooned on around 10% with most firms. Against that, they lost just the one seat (to an Independent). They’d had similar success in 2016 by-elections, gaining 30 councillors that way and losing just four.

And yet come the local elections in May, Tim Farron’s party lost a net 42 seats, with net losses in each of England, Scotland and Wales. The tremendous by-election successes were simply not replicated when there were a large number of simultaneous elections, when voters’ attention was focussed more nationally, and when there was a larger turnout. The fact that the general election campaign was already underway no doubt played a part in the Lib Dems’ relative failure there but only a part. After all, activists will still work where they are most effective and given the relatively small number of target seats, in many areas, those priorities would be local rather than national.

So what of this year? Well, in a carbon copy election, the Lib Dems once again pulled off a Sunderland spectacular, gaining Pallion ward on a 33% swing, and followed that up this Thursday with three very impressive gains from the Conservatives (two in Teignbridge borough, proving that it’s not all down to targeting).

And yet. The national polls are worse for Vince Cable’s party than they were in May last year, and while the Tories are off even more (they were in the high-forties in early May 2017), Labour is far better off.

Not that that’s the best comparator. Local elections run on a four-year cycle and those being contested this time were last fought in 2014, give or take the odd boundary review. Back then, Ed Miliband’s Labour held about a two-point lead over David Cameron’s Tories, with Nigel Farage’s UKIP in the mid-teens and Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems around 8-9%. The local elections were no doubt affected by the simultaneous Europoll, contributing to the election of 166 UKIP councillors. The Westminster VI polls translated directly to the local election NEV, with the Labour gaining a 2-point lead in the NEV, UKIP on 17% and the Lib Dems as usual outscoring their Westminster share, taking 13%.

What can we expect this time? The battlefield in this round has thrown up the curious possibility of all the main parties doing well and badly at the same time.

UKIP is not a main party any more and will be annihilated at the election. They may well lose every single seat, though there’s the possibility of isolated exceptions clinging on due to a local profile. That means that the other parties effectively start off with net gains of over 150.

Labour will be most pleased about London being the main battleground. More votes might be cast elsewhere but the capital always attracts disproportionate media attention, which will suit Labour very nicely given how they gained a swing in the multicultural, pro-Remain world-city three times that of the national average at the general election.

By contrast, while the Tories might worry about their prospects in London, the rest of the country (that country being England – there are no Scottish or Welsh elections), looks more fertile ground given the direct windfall from UKIP and the polls showing a small swing from Lab to Con and a larger one from LD to Con since May 2014. The Blue Team should reasonably expect to make net gains – something which a government party has only achieved once since the 1980s, and that previous exception (2011) being mainly at the expense of a different governing party.

As for the Lib Dems, they, like Labour, have opportunities in London – albeit in far more restricted areas – but after that can expect a tougher fight. They do, however, have one of their two mayoralties to defend in Watford, where Dorothy Thornhill is seeking, and should comfortably win, a fifth term. But that should be one of the few high points. The Sunderland or Teignbridge results remain much more likely to be another false dawn than a yellow sun rising.

David Herdson

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The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

G.K. Chesterton

Simon says Labour should stop faffing around and declare support for the UK staying in the Customs Union. I’d like to amplify and caveat this.

First the amplification. Labour is missing a trick here. It should be linking its policy on Brexit to its wider critique of British capitalism.

It should be pointing out the raw fact that Germany exports much more to countries outside the EU than the UK: half as much again (per person) to the US; 2.5 times as much to Japan; almost four times as much to China; and so on.

This tells us that it is not membership of the Customs Union that is stopping us from exporting more. Instead, the obstacles lie in the short-comings of British capitalism: poor management; lack of entrepreneurial spirits; insufficiently skilled workers; lack of investment; credit constraints; financialization; a lack of price competitiveness; and so on.

Labour should be highlighting these, and its policy responses to them. It should be saying:

Rather than wasting time on free trade deals, we should stay in the Customs Unions and focus on fixing Britain’s real economic problems, not the imaginary ones that exist in Brexiters’ fantasies. Only by doing so can we make the UK the truly outward-looking global trading nation that Boris Johnson claims to want.

That said, here’s the caveat: Labour’s vagueness on Brexit is much more forgivable than the Tories’.

What I mean is that there some Labour issues and some Tory issues. Tories, for example, have traditionally been more interested than Labour on defence, as there tend to be fewer military minds on the left (which reflects no credit on the left). But Labour has been stronger on health and welfare policy, for example.

Brexit, however, is almost entirely a Tory policy. I don’t just mean that Brexiters tend to be on the right. I mean that it has for years been a much more salient issue for them than it has for the left. For some it has been one of their top priorities for years. Most of the Labour party (with some exceptions!) by contrast made their peace with the EU in the 1980s and didn’t give it much more thought. I, for example, had barely considered the UK’s role in Europe until a few months before the referendum. I suspect that even most Lexiters have regarded Brexit as a bit like many lefties regard republicanism; if the issue arises, they support it, but they have higher priorities. 

Labour’s ambivalence about Brexit is, therefore, understandable. It has pretty much no tradition of even thinking about the subject. For some Tories, however, Brexit has been their desire for 30 years. One would expect them, therefore, to have somewhat more than the vague hint of a slight clue about what it entails.

So yes, by all means criticize Labour’s vagueness. But remember, Brexit is above all a Tory mess. It’s their shit; they should shovel it.

Britain's interest in Europe appears to rise (and fall) when the Conservatives are in (and out) of government. @ipsosmori pic.twitter.com/DKlfcFIepI

— Alistair McQueen (@HelloMcQueen) February 14, 2018

Polls show that concerns about Europe/EU are linked to whether the Tories are in power or not

I like the above chart which makes a strong point that the EU becomes an issue amongst voters when the Tories are in power.

The data comes from the Ipsos-MORI Issues Index in which those sampled are asked unprompted what they think the major issues facing the country are. It has operated like this for more than 40 years and it is widely regarded as a good measure of salience.

What is striking is that the main developments of Britain’s relationship with what became the EU happened when the Tories were in government. Ted Heath in the early 70s took the UK in and it was his successor as CON leader, Mrs Thatcher, who played a big part in the evolution of the single market.

John Major’s period in office from 1990—1997 was totally dominated by the EU which exposed the huge fault lines within the party.

It was Cameron, of course, with his commitment to a referendum that had led to Brexit and the current divide within the party over the shape of that. Brexit cost Cameron his job as Europe/EU played a huge part in the departures of Thatcher and Major.

This has totally dominated the news for several years and will go on doing so.

The Conservative party had most of gain and most to lose from the success of Brexit.

Mike Smithson

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• The Uninvited, by Dorothy Macardle (Goodreads)


• Gobbolino The Witch's Cat, by Ursula Moray Williams (Goodreads)


• Twig, by Elizabeth Orton Jones (Goodreads)


• Henrietta's House / The Blue Hills, by Elizabeth Goudge (Goodreads)


• Eyes of Horus, by Joan Grant (Goodreads)


• Follow The Drum, by Andre Norton (Goodreads)


• Grand Canyon, by Vita Sackville-West (Goodreads)


• Iron and Gold / The Fair Woman, by Hilda Vaughan (Goodreads)


• Dreadful Hollow, by Irina Karlova (Helen Mary Clamp) (Goodreads)


• Then We Shall Hear Singing: A Fantasy in C Major, by Storm Jameson (Goodreads)


• Moloch, by Marjorie Livingston (Encyclopedia of Fantasy)


• City of a Hundred Gates, by Isobel Stone (Heritage Auctions)


• The Fetch / The Spectral Bride, by "Joseph Shearing" [Marjorie Bowen] (online)


• The Pink Egg, by Polly Boyden (Lorne Bair)


• Village of Glass, by Frances Frost (Kirkus Reviews)

• Monkey: The Journey to the West (abridged from 西遊記) by Wu Cheng'en, translated by Arthur Waley (Goodreads)


• My Lives and How I Lost Them, by Countee Cullen (Goodreads)

At 57, I’m finding myself in a strange position in life.

My mentors are dying.

Last month, Ursula K. Le Guin left us. I’ve known Ursula personally for more than twenty-five years. I never knew her well. We sat on panels together in the Northwest, although never (to my recollection) at a convention. We’d done bookstore events side by side over the years, and whenever she showed up in a town near me or in my little town, I went to listen to her.

I never studied with her because, frankly, I was too intimidated. Ursula was one of a handful of people who could make me tongue-tied. I told her several times how much I enjoyed her work, but that wasn’t really the depth of my feelings for her as an artist.

I read The Left Hand of Darkness for a science fiction class offered by the Linguistics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Yes, linguistics. The instructor was a big science fiction fan, and she offered a class on science fiction in translation just so she could spend days talking about her favorite subject.

I adored The Left Hand of Darkness. Loved it more than I can tell you. (Which is more than I can say about some of the class’s other books, although I did learn a lot about the importance of the translator in that class as well. A good translator is one reason I like Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Dean doesn’t.)

I don’t know if I went from Ursula’s novel to her essays or the other way around, but her essays in The Language of The Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction had a profound impact on the way I think about writing, science fiction, fantasy, and being a female writer. Those essays led to me to another majorly influential book for me, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens by Alice Walker, and all of that went into the subconscious stew that ended up creating me as a writer.

I worked with Ursula a few times as an editor, first at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and most recently in Women of Futures Past. Ursula, who was in her mid-80s at the time, was the most professional and most responsive of all of the living writers in that volume. She reviewed her proofs in a timely fashion, helped us make changes (the story has a map), and handled each detail with incredible swiftness and aplomb.

One other living writer in that volume, decades younger, couldn’t be bothered with answering emails or reading her proofs. She didn’t even have a digital copy of the story I wanted, and told me I could scan it. Which meant (even now) that her story is the messiest one in the volume because three different copyeditors and two proofers couldn’t clean out all of the errors in that scan.

Ursula is…was…is…the writer I wanted…want…wanted to be when I grew…grow…grewup.

Joyce Carol Oates also falls in that category. She’s still with us, making people angry on Twitter, and writing kick-ass fiction. I suspect when she goes, I’ll be shaken. I’ve met her a few times, but have never really talked with her. I’ve also been an editor for her work, again at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and with a mystery best-of that I did a few years ago, but like Ursula, Joyce Carol Oates doesn’t need any editing at all.

I don’t have a lot of mentors left. And by that, I mean, mentors whose work I adore and who also show up at gatherings and give talks or write real-time responses to the things going on in our world.

I have had many other kinds of mentors. Writers who taught me how to write prose. Writers who taught me how to be a professional writer—how to handle money as a writer, while being an airhead creative type.

Then there were the non-writer mentors, the women who showed me how to remain strong in a world unfriendly to women. They’re gone too. I learned about another one the same week as Ursula—Midge Miller, one of the strongest women I’d ever met, who fought for causes I believe in during a time when women had difficulty finding a platform in regional government.  She died years ago, but I had just heard about it. She was Ursula’s generation, and she was just as tough, just as fair-minded, just as strong.

I have no idea if either of those two women were strong at home, if they broke down in tears after a day of dealing with incredible crap (the kind that’s just starting to become clear to the broader [read: white male] world with the #MeToo testimonies), but if these two did, they did so in private. And then they got up again, and lived to fight another day.

I’m glad I had such mentors. I’m fortunate that I came of age when I did.

But now I find myself standing on the hill, looking at the horizon of the last third of my life (or last almost half, if my life lasts eleven or so years longer than my grandmother’s—also a mentor), and I realize that the people who left the markers, the people who helped me invent myself, are behind me now. Not in rank or ability or talent. But in time.

They are not moving forward in time, and I still am. Their memories sustain me. Their courage braces mine. And their writings—if they were writers; or their speeches—if they were politicians; or their actions—if they were activists—still inspire me. They make me want to be better than I already am.

I know they stood on this hill too. And I know that all of them reached out to the next generation, usually as teachers. I do that. But some of them, like Midge, also turned to the younger generations for inspiration.

It’s a different kind of inspiration. It’s not aspirational. It’s a kind of tiny explosion: I’ve been doing things this way for decades. Maybe it’s time to try a new path.

It’s an acknowledgement of the fact that the world moves forward, always, whether we like it or not. I see how easy it is to get locked into the old ways or to feel nostalgia for the way things were.

Really, the nostalgia, at least when I succumb to it, isn’t for a better world in the past. It’s for the world I first learned, the world I thought, with a child’s short-sightedness, was permanent. I learned that world, and sometimes, I don’t want to learn this one.

Although that’s mostly not true. I have worn a watch since January 1 or so, and that’s only because it’s not a watch, but a tiny computer attached to my arm. I never look at the time on it. I use it for other things. The only watch-like function I seem to use is the alarm function, but I give it a verbal command to set it up—and the verbal command makes it fun for me, makes me feel like I really am living in the imagined future.

That’s the trade-off, of course. I’m living in a future most of my mentors never saw. Some of them imagined it, but imperfectly, like we always imagine the future. And I have no idea how they would have reacted to it, either, although I have guesses.

It’s strange to me that the part of this world I find myself in, the part I’m having the most trouble dealing with, isn’t the gadgety, 24/7, tweeting non-stop pace of this world. It’s the personal things, the things that every single person in every single generation goes through at some point in their lives—if they’re lucky to live long enough.

The changing of the guard is dramatic, but foreseen. My grandmother warned me of it one afternoon in her dining room. Another mentor who had both a negative and positive impact on my life spent the years I knew him describing a world long-gone to me. Once we were sitting in the U.N. Plaza Hotel across from the United Nations in New York City, a building he remembered being built, and he described a completely different neighborhood that used to exist there, a neighborhood that contained the offices of Astounding Magazine and many of the sf publishers.

I wish I had taken notes. Because those memories might exist in dusty retrospectives, but they no longer exist in his living memory, since he died more than ten years ago.

Sometimes I tell stories like that as well. Just yesterday, I had a conversation with a group of writers about my #MeToo experiences—which, as the first female editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—were both ubiquitous and multitudinous. What I have realized in the past few months, as the movement gained steam, was that most of my stories in the sf field—the men who grabbed or tried to force themselves on me or were physically inappropriate in other ways—are about people who are dead. They are no threat to anyone.

The stories I have about living writers are few, and involve humiliation and other verbal abuse, and, frankly, I’m still grappling with whether those stories are worth telling, considering how badly they would upend my life. I don’t believe other women are in danger, and all but one case, the men involved are no longer in positions of power or influence.

That’s the dark side of being part of a younger generation, and the difficult side of being part of the older one. Some of the stories I could tell were things I had to live with, because the laws did not protect me. In fact, in one instance, I angrily shouted at the publisher of F&SF for failing to tell me about a known lech, and the publisher laughed at me uncomfortably, saying he thought everyone knew.

Turned out, everyone except the younger writers knew. The most likely victims were the ones who were never warned.

I like that both women and men have become outspoken now, so that the warnings are no longer whispers in the corridor. I hope that this change remains, because almost every woman I know has at least one story, one encounter that should never have happened.

But…back to mentors.

As I said, the changing of the guard was foreseeable—and is foreseeable for those of you in your twenties. At some point, if you live long enough, your mentors will be gone. Your teachers will be faces on old photographs or memories of a single pearl of wisdom. Your roadblocks—the antimentors, for lack of a better term—will be gone as well.

And sometimes I find myself missing those roadblocks just as much. It’s great to have something to push against. For me, pushing against a person who told me you can’t do that was a fantastic motivator. I can’t think of the last time someone told me that.

Or, at least, someone with authority or someone I respected told me that. I have had a lot of people, who don’t know who I am or don’t know my history, tell me that in the last few years. A new joy is the look on their faces when I tell them I already did whatever they said I couldn’t, sometimes before they were born. Not as satisfying a joy, not as motivating, but something different.

And foreseeable again.

I’ve thought—and written about—what it must be like to have the older generation scraped off the world. I had parents who were in their forties when I was born, so I always knew that I would live most of my life without them in it. And sure enough, my father died when I was thirty; my mother when I was thirty-seven. But my siblings are still here, and so there’s still an older generation for me (since they were all adults when I was born).

I know that one’s coming.

The loss of mentors, though. That’s strangely frightening and oddly freeing. Frightening because I no longer feel the need to impress or catch up or prove myself to anyone—except to myself, and I’m just not as interesting or as challenging as they were.

Freeing, because like it or not, mentors—at least the ones who become a bit of your training—are judgmental. In real life, they might not have been. In real life, they might not have noticed anything that you did after you left their class. In real life, they might not even have remembered your name.

But in the imagination and the memory, where the real benefits (and downsides) of mentors live, that judgment remains. What would that mentor say if she reads this? Would she know that I’m not following her advice? Would she see the influences of her work in mine? Would it matter?

A critic and friend who died in 2017 said some very unkind things about my writing more than 25 years ago, and I didn’t realize I carried those words with me until I read that he had passed. I realized, a few days later, that I would never have to apologize for writing the material he thought “unworthy” of me ever again.

And that was freeing.

I’m sure I serve the same function for a lot of people. I’m the mentor now. Or the authority figure that they need to push back against. I’m the teacher who was completely wrong about what they needed to do with their lives. Or the catalyst that got them off their butts and turned toward the writing career.

I’ve had people tell me that I’m their mentor, which shocks me to the core. Because at heart, I’m not mentor material—not like Ursula or Midge or Kathryn Clarenbach or all the people I’ve looked up to. I’m a woman getting through the day. I offer advice a lot because I’m hardwired that way. I love teaching, I love sharing, but a deep tenet of my philosophy is that we are all responsible for ourselves, our actions, and our lives.

When I teach, I tell writers that they are responsible for their own careers. So I don’t claim their successes, the way that some teachers do, nor do I claim their failures.

In fact, I find that to be a deeply offensive practice by my peers. They claim a piece of someone else’s major success. Big Number One Bestselling Really Famous Writer took my workshops and became the famous person you see before you. You too can become just like Big Number One Bestselling Really Famous Writer if you too take my course.

To which I always want to add—or you can take my course and be like the other 100 people who have done so who never became Big Number One Bestselling Really Famous Writer.

Because if you claim someone else’s success, then you need to claim the failures too.

I have trouble enough with my own failures. I’ve made mistakes as a teacher—some real major ones, things I regret telling writers or that writers took the exact wrong way. I’ve made mistakes as a writer, and I own up to the ones I see, because I don’t want other writers to make those mistakes. I want them to make different mistakes. (No one gets out of this life mistake-free.)

I never talked to my teachers or older friends/relatives about this stage of life. They tried to talk to me. And some of the conversations we’ve had come back to me now.

I realize that when many of them asked what I was doing, and then they asked me to explain in more detail or wondered aloud how it all worked, they weren’t necessarily trying to find out more about my life, and they certainly weren’t sitting in judgment. In many instances, they were trying to understand the new world they were living in, the one I—as a young woman—was navigating much more freely than they were.

They were trying to move forward and to understand the world they were in.

With Ursula’s loss last month, I realize I have very few living mentors left. I can settle into my position as one of the survivors of the literary field, someone who has been around for a long time, and tell stories about the way we used to do things. I can adopt the mantle of the Grand Old Dame, the one who has some wisdom to impart, but who is mostly irrelevant.

Or I can keep my head down and keep doing the work, just like Ursula did. So many of my mentors gave up in their fifties. They stopped writing, stopped working, stopped learning, and settled into that Old Wise One position.

I’d rather be the one who kept writing, kept striving, kept trying—and occasionally found ways to share what I’ve learned with others.

What really stuns me, though, is what I can’t do. I can’t find the same kind of mentor that I had in my youth. Not because those people don’t exist. But because learning is different as an older adult. Somewhere along the way, the choices narrow. I’m not going to sing professionally. I’m not going to run a newsroom (again).

So opportunity for some of the valuable life lessons I learned when I was trying out those careers are simply unavailable to older me. I like my career. I might strive for another one, but I am not going to look at someone as the be-all and end-all of that career any more, whatever it may be.

Unfortunately, one of the things you get as you get older along with gray hair is the understanding that all of us, even the best of us, are fatally flawed. We all have good and bad sides, strengths and weaknesses. The unstinting admiration that I felt for some of my mentors isn’t something that’s attainable for me any longer. I know that all humans have moments they’re ashamed of, or have done things they don’t really want someone to know.

That’s why forgiveness becomes more important to older people; we all figure that we’ve done something somewhere that we might not even remember but that we might need to apologize for along the way.

Realizing that the living mentors are disappearing is a strange spot to be in creatively. It’s as if you start out working in the dark dank basement of a city high rise. Slowly you work your way up to the first floor with an exterior door, then a higher floor with beautiful views.

But somewhere along the way, those views become clearer, and you realize the walls are gone. And so is the ceiling. And you’re no longer in a city that you recognize. You’re in the rooftop garden of a building you might not even like. And if you want to understand the world you’re in, you need to work your way back to the ground level, talking to everyone you meet along the way.

It’s counterintuitive. A lot of people like staying in that rooftop garden, where it’s safe and familiar.

But that stifles creativity—at least for me.

So I’m working my way to a new creative focus, figuring out how to be a person who admires a lot of other adventurers on this life journey, but who recognizes that the journey is personal. I can’t walk the road Ursula K. Le Guin walked, no matter how hard I try. Even if I had a map, I would walk that road imperfectly because she walked it decades before I ever thought of writing science fiction.

The world is a different place.

And it will be different next year, ten years from now, twenty years from now.

The key is figuring out how to live in the world of now—in each day, each year, each decade.

And to find inspiration in the places that we never used to think of looking for inspiration.

It’s a challenge, but a cool one.

And one I’ve only recently realized that I need to face.

“Business Musings: Mentors, Inspiration, and the Future,” copyright © 2018 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / Aleutie.

In the crisis at Oxfam, I fear some general points are being under-appreciated.

One is that motives are sometimes over-rated. It is the case that some of Oxfam’s critics are animated by a hostility to its campaign against inequality and by an antipathy to foreign aid. And it’s also true that, as Simon says, they are more censorious of Oxfam’s failings than of the underfunding of the NHS which is perhaps even more damaging.

But facts are facts, whoever utters them. We cannot avoid nasty truths simply because we don’t like who says them.

Sometimes bad people do good things, such as alert us to the facts.

And of course, the converse is also true. As Oxfam has shown, good people can do bad things. There are at least two mechanisms at work here.

One is ego-depletion. Working in the most Godforsaken parts of the world is hugely stressful and requires great self-control to carry on the job. Self-control, however, is limited: if we use it all up in one place, we lack it elsewhere. “Work hard, play hard” and the need to “let off steam” are clichés because they are true. Some of Oxfam’s workers are extreme manifestations of this.

Another is moral self-licensing. If you can convince yourself you’re a good person – perhaps even by being a good person - you give yourself a licence (pdf) to behave badly.

On top of these, there might be a selection effect. Aid work doesn’t just attract those with a desire to do good, but those who get off on blood, gore and drama.

There’s something else, though. Organizations (or parts thereof) can and do drift away from their original purposes, because the interests or passions of incumbents can over-ride them. This was the gist of Martin Luther’s opposition to the Catholic church. It was expressed in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, where Jesus Christ returns to the world to be greeted by the Grand Inquisitor: “Why shouldst Thou now return, to impede us in our work?” Niskanen’s model of bureaucracy, the iron law of oligarchy and Alex’s description of how Capita was in effect run by its salesforce are all different manifestations of this.

All this has a troubling implication. It suggests there might be nothing unique about Oxfam, but perhaps that there are general mechanisms at work here rather than a few bad eggs. And it suggests that organizations need very strong measures in place to check these mechanisms.

Which do people choose – more money or less? If you think the answer’s obvious, you’ve been too influenced by economism and not enough by science. Sigve Tjotta shows that, in a variety of experiments, a significant minority of people choose the smaller sum over the larger.

This would not have surprised the Adam Smith who wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments. “To restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature” he wrote (TMS I.I.44). Our sense of propriety, or our desire to look good to others, he thought, reined in greed:

Though it may be true…that every individual, in his own breast, naturally prefers himself to all mankind, yet he dares not look mankind in the face, and avow that he acts according to this principle. He feels that in this preference they can never go along with him, and that how natural soever it may be to him, it must always appear excessive and extravagant to them…In the race for wealth, and honours, and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors. But if he should justle, or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of. (TMS II.II.11)

Which brings me to a theory. One feature of neoliberalism is that restraint in the pursuit of self-interest is now absent. Bosses lack Smith’s “impartial spectator” which tells them to hold back, and instead feel no compunction about jostling others. They are content to plunder customers, pensioners, sub-contractors, workers or future workers.

Among her many claims for expenses, Glynis Breakwell, Vice-Chancellor of Bath University, claimed £2 for biscuits. Many of us would not have done so, thinking it too petty-minded to bother. Neoliberals, however, not only are petty-minded but don’t mind being seen as such by others.

In this context, critics of mainstream economics have a point. Economics’ language of optimization serves to normalize the maximal pursuit of money. What it misses is the potential trade-off which Smith identified, between greed and the good opinion of others. Randian talk of the rich as heroes also plays an important role here, as it functions to counter-act the stigma which greed would otherwise attract.

From this perspective, neoliberal bosses have something in common with child molesters. Both lack restraint in the pursuit of their own self-gratification in situations where they think they can get away with it.

And there’s the rub: where they think they can get away with it. My story here is not just about morality. Perhaps there never was a golden era of benevolent paternalistic bosses. What’s happened since around the 1970s is that the restraints upon bosses – from law, social norms and trades unions – have diminished. The problem isn’t just greed, but power.

Update. On Twitter, I’ve been asked to withdraw that analogy between bosses and CEOs. On reflection, I’ll not do so.

I can see why I should. It is insensitive to survivors of child abuse and would upset them, the more so for being unexpected. I apologise for that.

There are, however, offsetting considerations. One is that I think the analogy holds in the sense I meant it. You can draw an analogy between two things without saying there is moral equivalence. I’m not attributing to bosses the same evil intentions that child abusers have.

That said, bosses’ excessive power does do real harm. It contributed to the financial crisis; had Goodwin had less power, RBS might well not have taken over ABN Amro. It might well be one factor (of many) behind stagnant productivity and hence flat real wages over the last ten years. And oppressive working conditions and exploitative pay impose stress and hardship upon millions. Granted, the pain per person isn’t as great as that caused by child abuse. But pain there is.

I had another reason to draw the analogy. We need stronger social norms against bosses rent-seeking. (This is not a uniquely leftist view: Jesse Norman complains (pdf) about the “legitimating culture” behind crony capitalism). Maybe intemperate language to demonstrate our strength of feeling is one way to build such norms. I was using the Economist’s approach: “simplify then exaggerate.” I’ll concede that it’s an open question whether this approach will work. But we need something – and that something is certainly not silence.

Which raises another point. Calls for me to withdraw that analogy don’t come only from survivors of child abuse, whose voices must be heard. They also come from a Guido-inspired mob whose censoriousness is selective: those who oppose students’ safe spaces suddenly aren’t so keen on free speech when it’s used to attack the rich. I will not kow-tow to rightist hypocrisy.

Council by-election vote share changes with previous winning party:
(That UKIP-LDM swing tho…) pic.twitter.com/ENb5KEutC4

— PolitiStatsUK (@PolitiStatsUK) February 10, 2018

I’ve just come across the above chart which shows an interesting picture of vote movements in council by-elections since GE17.

Clearly the collapse of UKIP is having a big impact and in almost every segment of seats, based on the defending party, LAB, CON and the LDs have moved forward.

What is striking is that in the former UKIP seats the biggest gainer has been the LDs vote increase which, on the face of it seems counter-intuitive.

My reading is that what is happening I is that as memory of the coalition fades the LDs are returning to their traditional role as “none of the Above”.

Mike Smithson

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3.3.5: Best Series. A multi-installment science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, appearing in at least three (3) installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the previous calendar year, at least one (1) installment of which was published in the previous calendar year, and which has not previously won under 3.3.5.

3.3.5.1: Previous losing finalists in the Best Series category shall be eligible only upon the publication of at least two (2) additional installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words after they qualified for their last appearance on the final ballot and by the close of the previous calendar year.

• Oz, by L. Frank Baum, Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neil, qualifying installment is Lucky Bucky in Oz by John R. Neil. This series was long past its glory days by 1942.


• Pellucidar, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, qualifying installments "Return to Pellucidar", "Men of the Bronze Age" and "Tiger Girl", all published in Amazing Stories and collected much later in Savage Pellucidar. Again, a series that had been going for decades.


• Amtor / Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, qualifying installment "War on Venus", published in Fantastic Adventures, which later became the last part of the fourth book of the series, Escape on Venus.


• The Ki-Gor series, by John Peter Drummond, qualifying installments "Blood Priestess of Vig N'Ga" / "Slaves for the Renegade Sultan" / "The Cannibal Horde" / "The Devil's Death Trap", which were the twelfth too fifteenth stories in the series. The first three collected Ki-Gor volumes, the thrid of which includes three of the above stories (but not "The Devil's Death Trap") total almost 1100 pages, so it surely qualifies on length.


• Captain Future, by Edmond Hamilton, qualifying installments Quest Beyond the Stars / 10 Outlaws of the Moon / The Comet Kings / Planets in Peril. These are the ninth to twelfth installments of the series, each of them about 80 magazine pages; so they may fall short of the required word count


• The James Armitage trilogy, by Franklyn Kelsey, qualifying volume The Prowlers of the Deep. Total pagecount well over 800, which probably means it qualifies on length.


• Edited to add: oops, forgot The Lensman series, by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, qualifying installments parts 3 and 4 of Second Stage Lensmen as first published in Astounding. Again, pagecount for Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman and Second Stage Lensman is over 800 so it’s probably OK.


• Edited again to add: someone else points out the eligibility of Doc Savage, whose 107th-118th installments were published in 1942; it certainly satisfies the length criteria.


• Edited once more to add: An anonymous commenter below suggests the following additions, which all have sfnal elements, though I feel some only barely scrape into being sf:
  • The Shadow by William Walter B. Gibson: Qualifying installments: The Room of Doom\The Book of Death\Vengeance Bay. I believe this was around the 16th novel length Shadow story
  • The Avenger by Paul Ernst: Qualifying installments: The Green Killer\The Happy Killers\The Black Death\The Wilder Curse. I believe this is the 24th novel length Avenger story
  • The Spider by Grant Stockbrige: Qualifying installment: Death and the Spider. This had around 30 novel length installments by this point as well as various pieces of short fiction so should be eligible.
  • Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn: Qualifying installment: Stoneman's Memorial. This had around 50 installments (mostly novelette length) by this point so I think this is fine.
  • Jorkens by Lord Dunsany: Qualifying installments: The Khamseen\ The Welcome\ On the Other Side of the Sun. There were around 67 pieces of short fiction by this point, probably reaching around 1000 pages by the size of the collections.


• Edited yet again to add: Cora, below, alerts me to G-8 and His Battle Aces, a WWI aviation pulp with plenty of SFF and horror elements such as zombies, sentient gorillas, ray guns, masked masterminds, etc... The 100th issue was published in 1942, featuring a Japanese scientist who had found a way of making planes invisible.

Rick says that UK companies are too short-termist, and that Carillion – which paid big dividends until soon before collapsing - is a manifestation of this. I’m not so sure.

Of course, some firms, like Carillion, have short-termist bosses and subsequently collapse. But is the collapse because of the short-termism? Or might it be instead that short-termism is a response to the prospect of collapse, and that rational managers, sensing their business is destined to fail, take money out of it?

And very many businesses do fail. The ONS shows that around 10% of firms cease trading each year, and less than half of them survive five years. Granted, failure rates are much smaller for larger or older firms. But in the long-term they are still considerable. For example, only three of the UK’s largest employers in 1907 are independent stock market-listed firms today. And a list (pdf) of the original constituents of the FTSE 100 when it was formed in 1984 contains plenty of firms that subsequently declined. A failure rate of only 3% a year means that firms have a less than 50-50 chance of making it to their 25th birthday. 

If you’re not going to survive into the long-term, why not be short-termist?

And in a healthy dynamic economy, we should see lots of failures as competition and creative destruction eliminate profits. It’s only monopolies or near-monopolies that can fight off competition for many years and afford to be long-termist. Do we really want that?*

What’s more, creative destructive means there’s uncertainty even for firms that do (with hindsight) survive. This uncertainty compounds over time. On a two or three year horizon, most decent firms have a reasonable idea of where the threats from rivals or new technology come from. On a two or three decade view, however, they have no clue. Faced with that uncertainty, why not focus upon managing the company well in the short-run?  

In this context, long-termism isn’t necessarily a virtue. It might instead reflect merely irrational overconfidence. Yes, short-termism might well be one cause of low capital spending. But high investment doesn’t guarantee success. As Charles Lee and Salman Arif show, it often leads instead to lower profits. This is consistent with high investment being a sign not of rational long-termism but of irrational over-optimism.

We have some more empirical evidence here. Let’s say that stock markets were too short-termist. In such a world, we’d expect them to under-price growth stocks and pay too much for stocks that pay high dividends. Generally speaking, though, the opposite has been the case. For most of the last 30 years, high-yielding shares in the FTSE 350 have out-performed lower-yielding ones: the main exception came between 2003 (when tech stocks were under-priced) and 2010**. And the FTSE Aim index – which contains many “growth” stocks” has horribly under-performed the All-share index since its inception in the mid-90s. This tells us that stock markets have generally paid too much for growth and too little for dividends. They have been too long-termist, not too short-termist.

Of course, managers can be as irrational as the rest of us. But it’s possible to be too long-termist as well as too short-termist.

The biggest problem with corporate governance – as highlighted by Carillion - is not that bosses are too short-termist, but that they have too much power to plunder firms for their own private gain.

* There’s a big difference here between the UK and US: the rise of monopoly power is more pronounced in the US than UK.

** In fact, given the big decline in long-term interest rates we should have seen growth stocks boom in the 00s as investors discounted future cashflows less heavily. That this didn’t happen is yet more evidence that growth stocks have been over-priced.