It is far easier to play politics

It we consider the role of the UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, who as we know is currently Wes Streeting, then it is worth a brief gander at the complexity of what he is supposed to do. How he is supposed to provide political oversight of the NHS?

For example, the vast size of the NHS AfC workforce as detailed in the Thirty-Eighth Report of the NHS Pay Review Body - all 120 pages of it.

Appendix A Data appendix

Workforce

AfC workforce across England, Northern Ireland and Wales...

2. In September 2024, the most recent date for which data is available for all three countries, there were 1.36 million FTE AfC staff in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, of which approximately 1.21 million were working in England, 61,000 in Northern Ireland and 89,000 in Wales. On a headcount basis there were approximately 1.54 million AfC staff as of September 2024, of which approximately 1.37 million were in England, 69,000 in Northern Ireland and 104,000 in Wales. We also track the trends in the workforce and Figure A.1 shows the change in staffing numbers in each year since 2019.

There is an executive summary of the whole document, but the question of political oversight remains.

It seems vanishingly unlikely that Wes Streeting has time to oversee the NHS in any meaningful sense while at the same time engaging in the the political machinations of the Cabinet, especially if he has his sights on Keir Starmer's position.

It's a small reminder that describing politicians as actors on the political stage is not an excessive exaggeration. The complexity of government is likely to be overwhelming for most government ministers. Even a cursory examination of what the UK government does tells us that. It is far easier to play politics and probably more rewarding.

An incomprehensible post-liberal political order

Commenter dearieme recently passed on a very interesting Daily Sceptic piece about official lockdown justifications. The whole piece is well worth reading but I'll quote just one section to give a flavour of it.

 

The extent to which states can be said to act upon clear motives at all is a further problem. A longstanding Plague Chronicle argument is that modern managerial government doesn’t have goals, motivations or purposes in any human sense. Our countries everyday do all kinds of truly insane things behind paper-thin justifications that bear no scrutiny. A lot of what is maligned as ‘conspiratorial’ discourse, on both the Left and the Right, represents an effort to reimpose logic on state actions, generally by positing that the stated goals are a pretence for some deeper, hidden purpose. Most of the time these analyses just aren’t convincing, and they function to obscure the blunt reality that we find ourselves beset by an incomprehensible post-liberal political order, in which state actions have been farmed out to a vastly complex network of stakeholders, NGOs, academics, bureaucrats and special advisory committees. For every area of policy the constellation of forces will be different, and nobody has any clear understanding of how the system works – not even the most powerful individuals in the midst of it all. Everything the state does is the sum of these thousands of different forces. What complicates this picture even further, is the fact that those responsible for policy formulation don’t act directly to shape outcomes in the outside world. Their motivations are almost always institutionally mediated, and for this reason much more confined and limited in perspective. They want to secure promotion and grant funding, they want to be thought well of by their peers, they want to satisfy their superiors, and many other petty careerist personal things of this nature.

The problem is not new, the Chesterton quote in the previous post is an aspect of the same thing, but the situation is even more complex today. Yet we still don't have concise ways to describe the problem in detail because as the Daily Sceptic piece says - nobody has any clear understanding of how the system works.

Health is Good

Many people seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between true or false on the one hand and good or bad on the other. In many complex situations and for many people, good is true and bad is false. If necessary, true and false simply disappear from the picture.

It appears to be a fundamental political difference, even more fundamental than left and right. Not a line in the sand difference, but a real difference for all the diffuse nature of it. As if our interoceptive signals intervene where any debate is important to us because that is what makes debates feel important in the first place. This is a key point - if a debate is important it must feel important.

Interoceptive signals are projected to the brain via a diversity of neural pathways that allow for the sensory processing and prediction of internal bodily states. Misrepresentations of internal states, or a disconnect between the body's signals and the brain's interpretation and prediction of those signals, have been suggested to underlie some mental disorders...

It seems likely enough that interoceptive signals may be incorrectly interpreted as signals for true or false. Or as far as the interoceptive system goes – correctly interpreted. Giving us the other key point – false can feel true, true can feel bad. Arguments across this particular divide never go anywhere. If the problem is significantly biological then this is hardly surprising.

We see it clearly enough in the passion, vituperation, relentless attempts to silence dissent, the inability to agree to disagree, the rage, placards, violence and even insanity. We see it all the time. Simple observation tells that this problem is real, widespread and intractable. Not only that, but it seems to flare up with particular virulence every generation or so.

The whole area is of course fraught with shades of meaning, but in the main the good/true bad/false idea appears to work. Or at least it goes some way to account for the extraordinary grip false ideas have on huge numbers of people. Much of the interoceptive power of false ideas presumably derives from consensus. Going against a consensus can feel wrong to all of us at one time or another, but sometimes things just get worse and worse until thugs gather on the streets.

Political activists use good and bad but have little use for true and false wherever there is a conflict. In these cases it often seems likely that political elites know what is being done whereas the activists do not. Which is what makes them useful idiots.

For example, the climate change narrative is widely deemed to be good but it is highly likely that some at least of its senior protagonists know it to false. However they still deem it to be good for reasons largely hidden from public view. It is also likely that some enemies of the developed world deem the climate narrative to be good in the sense that it is bad for us.

Another example is the dubious nature of Joe Biden’s elevation to the US presidency in that the legitimacy of the election is open to legitimate questions. Here we saw the whole spectrum from hysterical joy, passion and rage to cold political calculation mingled in a way which only disinterested outsiders have a chance of disentangling.

We now see another example. Health is good…

The rise and rise of stupidity

Six years ago I wrote this post about a link between constantly rising complexity and a corresponding rise in general stupidity. This was the introduction –

As the world becomes more and more complex, we are presumably obliged to become more intelligent in order to cope. Otherwise, relative to a general increase in social, political and economic complexity, we might expect to see a corresponding rise in stupidity.

Oh dear!

If I’d chosen to write an updated version today, I would have phrased it differently and taken note of the comments on the original, but the gist of the post would be much the same. As complexity increases we cannot expect to increase our intelligence to cope with it. In which case, six years on we might just about expect to see signs that stupidity really is increasing. All this is subjective of course but the signs are not encouraging. For one thing a list was too easy -

• Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.
• Woke culture.
• Climate change still with us.
• BLM riots.
• Beating up statues.
• Social media censorship.
• Coronavirus response.

And tomorrow the bar rises again.

In the end leaders have to guess

The number of deaths from coronavirus could reach 100,000 in the UK by the end of this year if a gradual lockdown is implemented just to shield the elderly, Professor Neil Ferguson warned yesterday.

The Imperial College epidemiologist said it was impossible to send the young and healthy back to work while keeping the vulnerable in lockdown without seeing a huge increase in deaths...

Professor Ferguson said some degree of social isolation will continue to be required until a vaccine to the killer bug is released, which Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab today said was unlikely to happen until 2021.

He was asked if young people could be allowed out of lockdown if the tough measures have suppressed the infection rate enough and the Government has increased NHS capacity to a sufficient degree.

Professor Ferguson told UnHerd: 'In practical terms, you would require a very high level of effective shielding for that to be a viable strategy.

Not wishing to be too cynical and scientifically it is a very difficult position, but this has the flavour of a ploy to me. Politically, lockdown until a vaccine is developed is a hopelessly unattractive option. Many more deaths will happen anyway so this take on the situation is most unlikely to be proved entirely wrong. A ploy? Feels like one to me. 

In the end decision-makers have to take a sideways look at what everyone else is doing then make a guess as to the best policy move. Experts can be remarkably unhelpful.

Coronavirus lessons

An odd thing about the coronavirus debacle is that it is both ferociously complex yet it is not difficult to understand where the problems are – at least in a broad sense where uncertainties are acknowledged.

As we all know, some subjects are both interesting and exceedingly complex. As we also know, however complex they may be they have an irresistible attraction for those who insist on their ability to guide us through the complexities. Over-confident experts, journalists, assorted pundits and political actors are the main culprits although celebrities often like to join in too.

All this is familiar enough, but suppose some interesting and important subjects are so complex that nobody actually understands them in a completely comprehensive way. Suppose some of them are so complex that nobody ever will understand them comprehensively because they will always be a patchwork of specialisms. History for example.

In other words, a unifying and overarching narrative may be impossible beyond some procedural guidelines and standards. Some subjects have levels of complexity which cannot be resolved into to any narrative we would recognise as a comprehensive overall conclusion.

We could add to this by supposing that all these complex subjects can be summarised inexactly but usefully and huge numbers of ordinary non-specialists are capable of understanding those summaries. Not only that but they are capable of detecting spurious summaries which go beyond a valid specialism. Non-specialists can see specialist boundaries being breached, they can detect dubious specialist summaries which claim too much.

To my mind this is what the coronavirus is showing us.

Crap idea

source

From the Telegraph comes news of technological insanity.

LG has wowed the crowds at this year's CES with the self-opening fridge, which senses when a human moves past it and cracks open its door.

The door cracks opens automatically when a human puts their foot in front of its low embedded sensor, meaning it can't be opened by opportunistic passing pets. However, you still need to fully open the door yourself.

I'm no technophobe but the search for novelty doesn't always take us anywhere worthwhile. Maybe the fridge is journalist bait, a product to write about rather than anything more practical. 

Or maybe not. Somebody will probably buy the thing. Midnight snackers for example.

Equally ignorant

source

With regard to social problems, owing to the number of unknown quantities they offer, men are substantially, equally ignorant.

Gustave Le Bon - The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)

Something happens when we try to get closer and closer to the more complex aspects of human life. Somehow we seem to lose focus, the overall picture fragments into lots of vignettes. What we want from more detailed scrutiny is the limpid clarity of unclouded understanding. What we often end up with are reasons why the other lot keep getting it wrong.

As time goes by problems multiply, wrong conclusions pop up, exaggerations creep in, useless predictions infest debates, celebrities muddy the waters, charlatans gather in the gullible. In short, it is often unclear if anything worthwhile has been achieved apart from an enormous amount of activity. Paid activity at that.

It’s as if complex human issues have an optimal focus. Get too close and the thing becomes blurred and fragmented, stand too far back and important features disappear.

Economics seems to be like this. For non-economists it is a matter of finding someone to trust because the alternative seems to be standing on the sidelines forever. Yet a suspicion remains that the sidelines are where one has the best view.

I think many political people, know this perfectly well. They know there are few firm conclusions to be had in the ebb and flow of human complexities. They also know that this gives them scope for a secure political standpoint where with a dash of luck, only the most glaring failure will sink their boat.

Meanwhile we voters tend to ignore the debates and vote by habit or instinct. Nobody is ever likely to tell us where the optimum standpoint is anyway. That’s not how politics works.

So maybe useful analysis cannot flourish in political debates because the optimum standpoints are too obvious, too easily grasped for anyone to claim as their own and make political capital from them.

Coincidence

Source nonglish.com/comic/173/What-a-Coincidence.html

Every life is a series of coincidences. Nothing happens that is not rooted in coincidence. All great changes find their cause in coincidence.

Arnold Bennett - The Card (1911)

There are obvious issues with the complexities of daily life. On all scales too. From cooking a meal to international politics, the unexpected always seems to be looking over our shoulders. Saw a near miss on the road today for example. One guy didn't expect the other guy to cross his path while he was doing fifty.

I don’t think we have a good handle on complexity, especially our ability to make collective decisions on complex issues. There are too many cases where vested interests grab the narrative and common sense is elbowed into  a lonely ditch.

So back to Bennett. Imagine life as a vastly complex bundle of threads where each thread is a series of connected events. Sometimes two threads come into contact and their interacting events spin off a series of new threads. Sometimes they don’t come into contact at all even though it may have seemed likely that they would. Like cars on a busy road.

It is usually impossible to predict if events will touch or not. When they do it seems like chance, misfortune, good luck or the inevitable outcome of favoured forces. The latter occurs when partial hindsight casts its eye over what happened.

To a large extent Bennett was right. New and unforeseen situations dump on us from clear blue skies when we least expect them. Yet politics is based on the unspoken notion that enormously complex events can be predicted by superior people.

Elect me and we’ll put things right.

Strewth. Or even strewth with exclamation marks!! It’s a mind-bogglingly naive message isn’t it? Goes against all we know of them and all we know of complexity yet we waste millions of votes on the lying creeps. We could vote for folk who try to think things through from a position of humility, but on the whole we don't.

So some things are predictable. Voting behaviour for one.

There’s gold in them thar complexities

There are two basic reasons for analysing complex phenomena such as economies, human health, societies, the environment and so on.

1. To increase our knowledge.
2. To increase our knowledge and decrease yours.

It all hinges on the phrase "our knowledge".

There is enormous value in many familiar complexities, but extracting it can be either altruistic (option 1) or selfish (option 2). The value extracted is obvious, being mainly professional, financial and political, but them thar complexities must stay complex or the gold runs out.

The value of complexity lies in the way it maintains barriers to entry. For most areas of professional life complexity is the barrier of choice. Complex language and dubious but complex rationales are the building blocks of choice.

The first move in the game is to gain control over some complex phenomenon such as human health. Here the controllers are big pharma, medical professionals, insurance companies, medical equipment manufacturers and so on. It’s a long list but we are all familiar with the big players.

We should add politicians and health bureaucrats too. Politicians can stay on the sidelines and facilitate or they can churn the complexities for political advantage as the UK Labour party does. It depends on political history, but politically the traditional left tends to extract as much value as possible from health complexities. No surprises there.

Sticking with politics, both the traditional left and right tend to extract value from economic complexities, but in different ways, although both pursue an option 2 strategy.  As far as I can see, almost nobody on the inside wants to discover economic policies that actually work. That would lose economic policy to option 1, so it isn’t going to happen.

Tax policy seems to be similar. Almost nobody on the inside wants transparent and easily managed tax policies which are fair and which promote economic activity. That would also lose tax policy to option 1 so it isn’t going to happen.

From drugs policy to speed limits, from education to agriculture, almost nobody is guided by option 1, particularly when it comes to government policy. Barriers to entry would crash to the ground like the Berlin Wall. There is too much gold to be lost.

Honesty cannot win

It might seem ignominious to believe something on compulsion, because I can’t help believing it ; when reason awakes in a man it asks for reasons for everything. Yet this demand is unreasonable : there cannot be a reason for everything. It is mere automatic habit in the philosopher to make this demand, as it is in the common man not to make it.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith

I think Santayana was right, there cannot be a reason for everything and it is unreasonable to assume otherwise. The world is exceedingly complex and full of rational voids over which human reason cannot, and in some cases may never build bridges from cause to effect.

In many ways this is our biggest unsolved problem - our penchant for inventing spurious bridges across rational voids. I don't mean your penchant of course, nor mine. I mean their penchant - those creepy charlatans who spoil every decent human endeavour. Human nature abhors rational vacuums, so charlatans fill them to overflowing with an infinite cascade of sweet nothings.

Unfortunately rational voids have features and regularities which seem to promise rather more than they deliver so yet again charlatans jump in with both feet, muddying the waters for the rest of us. Yet if we could devise a science of imperfect knowledge then maybe we'd make some progress.

Aspects of the same situation may even contradict each other while remaining valid within certain caveats. To take a rather weak illustration, I could say it is pitch dark outside. You might say I’m going for a walk – I love walking under the stars.

Two aspects of the same situation, both valid but mildly contradictory in that they stress different aspects of a dark night. It may be dark, but there is enough visibility for a walk beneath the stars. 

Does it all begin in childhood when we reward children who give answers over those who don't? Do we condition ourselves to give answers and carry it over to situations where no answer can be given? Are we hopelessly entangled in our own conditioning?

Maybe we are, but the question itself is too complex for simple answers like this. To avoid being hoist by our own petard, we have to be tentative over the diagnosis and recognise its incomplete nature. So it isn't even possible to diagnose the problem with assurance.

Complexity may be a battleground where honesty cannot win.

The Game

Imagine a board game rather like chess, but with a vast number of interconnected boards. Not only that, but all the boards are different with different shapes, different numbers of squares, different pieces and different rules.

The squares aren’t all square either, but triangular, pentagonal, hexagonal and irregular. Not only that, but some pieces can move from board to board. Sometimes these inter-board pieces take their rules with them onto another board and sometimes they don’t. It depends on the piece and inter-board rules.

This is the Game where the consequences of any move, tactic or strategy are so complex that no human player has a hope of mastering all of its ramifications. Unfortunately there are other difficulties too.

Game Officials

Game officials control how the Game is played and oversee its development. Among many other duties, some of which are secret and most of which are mistakes, they add more boards, amend rules and invent new pieces.

Game Rules.

Some Game rules are also secret, known only to Game stars and certain Game officials. This is obviously a problem for ordinary players and a dwindling band of Game officials still trying to make an honest go of it.

Game Fees.

Some Game rules may be amended or suspended for a fee. There are many possibilities and many and varied are the fees applying. Fees may even depend on a player's personal appearance, parents or accent. Naturally the scale of fees is secret which may be a problem for ambitious players unable or unwilling to be bound by the fee structure.

Game Pundits

Game pundits provide a running commentary on the personal lives, tactics and strategies of Game stars. However Game officials do not allow Game pundits to use inside knowledge of secret rules and fees, so pundit commentary tends to be somewhat disingenuous. It is not a guide to the state of the Game, although often mistaken for exactly that. In fact there are no guides to the Game apart from low cunning.

Game Stars 
Game Stars are those players willing and able to afford the fees and with personal qualities (see reference to low cunning above) suited to the discovery of secret rules and the friendship of Game officials.

Even so, a large number of non-star players manage to master one board or even a few interlinked boards to play local versions of the Game with varying degrees of success. Professionalism flowers while Game pundits pick over the personal life of Game stars.

So we have a popular Game with a defined structure and partially defined rules, but only Game stars are able to play it in anything other than a limited and rather uncertain manner. Some admit these limitations and some don’t because that is human nature.

Wannabe stars must cheat, make up their own rules or take advantage of the secret rules and secret fee structure. There is of course a complex fee structure for cheating.

The Game is merely an analogy of course, but an analogy of what?

Yoga paper

Not me

We went to sign on for a yoga course recently. My wife has been doing yoga for a while, so I thought I'd have a go. I enjoyed it too, but the paperwork we had to fill in beforehand - ten sheets of A4 including copies.

We had to fill in our name and address twice, which considering they already had it from when we paid for the course seems a little over the top.

What is it with local authorities?

Yes I know they are merely creating work for themselves, but don't they find it boring? Doesn't it lead to dissatisfaction? You know what I'm getting at of course - they should enrol on their own yoga courses. Maybe then we'd be better served.

Casual

One of those things I tend to notice and pick up on is an apparent increase in casual behaviour. Maybe it’s an age thing, but it seems to me that a meticulous attention to detail isn’t as common as once it was.

It’s a diffuse thing where it is too easy to become bogged down in examples of poor grammar, spelling or lax manners without bringing out the general nature of the issue.

A startling example is Prime Minister David Cameron who makes a point of avoiding the point. All politicians do that of course and have done for as long as I remember, but in a supposed age of technical politics one might expect... well some technical politics.

What would technical politics look like? How about attention to detail, better use of real data, structured arguments. Gosh - maybe even telling it as it is.

Instead, I see Cameron as a product of our age in that he is essentially casual in spite of the shiny veneer. He does not appear to value either facts, consistency, reliability or even logic. Not only that, but he seems unaware of the problem and unable to hide his casual grip on the essentials of his own job. Which one day he'll lose of course.

Does he care? I doubt it. A casual attitude to the role of Prime Minister - now there's a thing we didn't expect a few decades ago. As I say, it’s a somewhat diffuse issue, but I’m sure there’s something to it.

Climate change is another high-profile example where numerous scientists appear to have a most casual grasp of scientific philosophy – the difference between science and astrology for example. Many quite genuinely don't get it - or choose not to because they can get away with it in a more casual age.

The BBC is an old-fashioned institution which seems quite incapable of adopting a meticulous impartiality and a finely-judged approach to social standards. Probably it never did and maybe it is impossible, but I suspect casual is the preferred option anyway.

I’m sure the problem, if it is a problem, is an aspect of increasing complexity. We probably cannot expect people to cope with ever more finely adjusted social controls without relaxations elsewhere.

What the consequences will be I’m not sure, but a casual attitude to moral questions, social standards, political probity and scientific rigour will all have their consequences. 

Yet another example is how the gay marriage issue suddenly popped up out of nowhere. To me it was the result of a essentially casual attitude to both the institution of marriage and the wider issue of how personal relationships are defined in law. 

Again, maybe it’s an age thing, an aspect of adapting to complexity, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s all to do with our social reactions to increasing complexity. If so, then it would be entirely understandable, because something has to give.

How many hi-vis jackets do we need for travelling in France? Well I suppose I can find out easily enough, but if I’m doing that I’m not doing something else am I? Do I care?

No dude - it's cool.

Chains of unreason

If we accept that reality is so complex that it is not fully susceptible to rational analysis, then what is the rational person to do? 

It seems to me that we have two approaches to the problem, one rational and one irrational.

The first, irrational approach is to ignore the limits of rationality by adopting a covert axiom that reality is entirely accessible to rational analysis. We might call this the over-rational position.

The second, more rational approach is to see treat first approach as irrational. We might call this the nuanced rational position.

It isn’t difficult to see the value of the nuanced approach when we consider what rationalism has delivered, from antibiotics to traffic lights, from the theory of evolution to nuclear weapons, from clean water to chemical warfare, from money to taxes.

It’s a mix of solid benefits, mixed benefits and things we might be better off without. Rationality has not been a universal blessing.

However, an over-rational approach to political and social issues has also delivered numerous malign political inventions. In particular, via impeccable chains of reasoning, it has delivered endless state interference in all aspects of our lives.

By the way, I originally wrote almost all aspects of our lives, but deleted the word almost to better represent a complex but generally threatening reality. Not quite as accurate if one is over-rational, but possibly more apt if one has a nuanced view of these things, being concerned to highlight a genuine threat to rationality itself. 

This highly pervasive example of over-rational policy-making derives from an official presumption that we should all live our lives in complete safety, free from all anxieties, risks, threats, discomfort, illness and even personal responsibility.

Surely such nonsense is a result of a narrow, over-rational calculation, a desire to maximise the mechanical security of human life? Surely it is being done at the expense of everything we once valued, from personal freedom to spiritual consolations, from a personal philosophy to the simple joy of living? 

Yet many of the modern world’s problems seem to be due to over-rational chains of reasoning without a single mitigating nuance to stem the fanatical, controlling tide.

In fact many would-be rationalists appear to be part of some kind of rational crusade where the enemy is anyone who might possibly be sceptical of their brand of over-rational dictatorship. Especially unwelcome are those naughty souls who toss nuance-bombs into their neatly painted trenches.

Their perceived enemies are legion, from religious believers to environmental sceptics, but essentially it is any form of scepticism they deplore with a fanatical hatred which at times seems to verge on madness.

Not quite madness perhaps, but there does appear to be something a little unhinged about over-rational folk. Something excessive and lacking in humility and humanity. Lacking common sense too, but we never had a surplus of that.

The real danger to our very concept of rational thought is the incessant tendency of the state to sponsor over-rational solutions to all problems. Even where their supposed solutions are nothing but fantasies – clouds of over-rational nonsense worked out in exact detail by narrow, blinkered and fanatically over-rational minds.

Chaos 2

What broad conclusions do we draw from chaos theory I wonder? It seems to me that the discovery of such enormous complexity arising from simple iterative processes must tell us something about how we describe the real world.

There are all manner of threads to follow, but where do they lead? Is it anywhere significant and how much credence do we give to the experts?

It’s hard to say. As with much modern science, a huge amount of work is shrouded in its own vastness and complexity. Who benefits from the scope and complexity of arcane research isn’t always clear, but there are enough examples to suggest it may often be the experts.

Strongly mathematical experiments are limited in number and range of applicability. Huge areas of science are not strongly mathematical, if at all. Yet somehow we have been fed a notion that they should be at some fundamental level we can’t quite define, but it generates a vast amount of literature and discussion.

 Some scientists have claimed and still do claim that the universe is mathematical, a notion impossible to prove by experiment which strictly speaking makes it unscientific.

Even worse, it seems incoherent. If our contact with reality is mediated by symbols, then beyond the symbols there is a logical void. No symbols, no logic. Identifying reality with the symbols seems both anthropocentric and incoherent to me.  

Standing back, I tend to wonder if chaos theory may be another hint that the universe is not mathematical even if bits of it are well described by mathematical symbolism. Maybe that should be no surprise because mathematics is probably best seen as a kind of language - a symbolism which may or may not be a useful way to describe some aspects of reality. 

If the universe is not wholly mathematical, it may not be wholly scientific either. That would imply that we need non-scientific language to describe it more fully, a conclusion not at all unfamiliar to those of a religious or artistic persuasion.

In the end, I think chaos theory begs an important question. An assumption seems to be implied in the word theory – an implication that we have resolved something merely by naming it. As if we have cleared a path to new discoveries, albeit a difficult path.

Maybe it isn’t so. Maybe chaos theory marks a boundary across which we cannot carry the exact sciences without some genius of a philosophical bent to show us how to adapt our symbolism. Or maybe that putative genius will show us why it can’t be done. Maybe we already know but don’t like the implications.

Chaos 1

Many of us must have looked into chaos theory because it seems so mysteriously promising, but how are we supposed to relate it to the real world? After all it can seem somewhat remote, complex and mathematical.

What helped me with the what does it all mean aspect of chaos theory was putting the logistic map into MS Excel.

Xn+1 = rXn(1-Xn)

Very easy to do and just fiddling* around with it brought home to me how a simple equation can become amazingly complex when the next result depends on the previous value. As we see in natural systems of course.

* fiddling - a mathematical term.

I use a bubble graph because I think it highlights certain features such as bifurcation quite well. Here are a few Excel bubble graphs for different values of r with a seed value of X = 0.3.

Firstly a simple plot with r = 2.00

Next we increase r to r = 3.20. X increases then we see a bifurcation where X settles into an oscillation between two stable values.

When we increase r to r = 3.50, we see two stable values of X split into four. A rapidly progressive series of bifurcations being characteristic of the onset of chaotic behaviour.

Increasing r to r = 3.55 leads to more pronounced bifurcations.

Increase r to r = 3.60 and we see the onset of chaotic behaviour. Remember that this is a plot of a very simple equation in MS Excel. 

Increase r to r = 3.70 and the graph is more chaotic, although there are obvious patterns such as an upper and lower boundary imposed by the mathematical structure and values chosen. 

Round about r = 3.82 to 3.86 we see an island of regularities such as r = 3.851.

If we then plot two graphs with r= 0.390, X = 0.300000000 and X = 0.300000001 we see the graphs diverge after about 30 iterations. The red bubbles are initially hidden by the blue, but soon become visible as values of X diverge. This is a graphical illustration of the so-called butterfly effect - major changes evolving from minutely different starting values.

More on reliability

You probably haven't noticed, but I've been slow responding to comments. Our BT broadband has been down for protracted periods over the past few days so I've been offline - reading books! Kindle actually, but it amounts to the same thing.

We are on their fibre optic thingy too - supposedly more reliable than their old ADSL. Ho ho.

Old boiler

from Wikipedia

We are looking for a new central heating boiler. The old one, a Worcester Bosch, hasn’t failed, but after a couple of hours it sounds as if it intends to launch itself into orbit. It hasn’t been amazingly reliable either, even though it is only eight years old.

It’s not a condensing boiler, so if we install a new one we'll presumably save a king's ransom on gas and cause global cooling. Not enough to cover the cost though.

It all depends on reliability doesn’t it? The boiler at our old house was a Potterton which lasted 22 years without being serviced. During all those years it had one minor repair.

However, as soon as I began to research central heating boilers, I discovered that they are all dodgy if internet reviews are any guide – which of course they may not be.

Maybe we have a tendency to write reviews only if we’ve had a bad experience, but I’m also inclined to wonder if domestic gadgets are more complex and less reliable than they were. Or maybe internet reviews just highlight the inevitable difference between glossy brochure and reality.

One chap who came round to give us a quote told us that with all the regulations for gas appliances, there wasn’t really much difference between them.

Maybe the increased complexity of modern designs reflects an inevitable bureaucratic push towards standard, unreliable complexity - SUC.

Those in the trade should know the score, but they seem to have differing views on quality, reliability and so on. Meanwhile we have the Great Boiler Conundrum to settle.

Maybe I’ll toss a coin.

Holding them to account

Presumably economic predictions require economies to be mathematical in their behaviour. But are economies mathematical entities? Surely they are not. For example, even though the Laffer curve is inexact, it is assumed to be some kind of semi-quantitative economic law. Semi-quantitative law? Is that good enough?

Fiscal policy, budget deficits and so on - it seems to me that too many people are too convinced they understand this stuff well enough to make predictions. Yet maybe economies are not even understandable in a quantitative sense at all because cause and effect are too complex and non-linear. Economies are not mathematical structures, but if not, then what are they? Are they chaotic?

In many ways I think we’d be better off if our economic ideas were to be subsumed within accounting. Do the accounts, draw the graphs, eyeball them, stick a finger in the air and draw your conclusions. Often you’ll be wrong if you try to predict the future, but maybe with a bit of good fortune only partly wrong.

So for me, the absolute prerequisite for any economic policy is that it should improve transparency and make the accounting simpler. Say we begin with taxation. For our political health, if for no other reason, taxation could be much simpler- much simpler for everyone.

Over the past year or so I’ve become convinced by MarkWadsworth’s blog and others and in my non-economist’s simplicity that LVT or Land Value Tax is the way to go. Replace the lot with LVT and open your arms to transparency in the national accounts.  

To me, the economic arguments for LVT seem strong, but I tend to see the argument more in behavioural terms. That’s just my take on it, because if I believe in anything, I tend to believe very strongly in the malign influence of complexity. It is absolutely essential that we understand ourselves and what we are doing. Unfortunately we don't and it's largely our fault.

Excessive complexity is bad news. It is used to promote and entrench unearned advantage, an unwholesome, unfair and destructive situation.

People of my age have seen this for real in the inflation of house prices. Personally we tended to miss out on this because of work-related house moves at the wrong time, but many people of my age saw property inflation melt away their mortgage in relation to the value of their house. A capital gain which was never earned or taxed.

Next is government borrowing. It seems to me that MMT guys have something important to say here. I’m not wholly convinced by what they say, but again they seem to be promoting a simpler way of looking at economics by concentrating on national accounts. What actually happens to the money? In their eyes, money is simply an accounting token, a record of who owes what to whom.

So forget economics. We’d be better off with transparent and radically simpler tax and national accounting – better off voting on the accounts rather than empty promises.