Author Archives: Charlie Whitaker

About Charlie Whitaker

Charlie is an architect living and working in London. Increasingly, he is also a philosophy graduate of Birkbeck, University of London. When he is not doing his real work, he puzzles needlessly over news stories and current events.

Are the Rand times here?

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In 2006, the German architectural practice Gerkan, Marg & Partners (GMP) took a client to court. The client was the German national rail company, Deutsche Bahn. The architects argued that their design for the new central station in Berlin had been changed without their knowledge: Deutsche Bahn had hired new architects – Winkens Architekten – to substitute flat ceilings for vaulted ceilings over the lower level platforms. The change allowed Deutsche Bahn a cost saving; GMP took the position that cost shouldn’t come before design integrity. The Berlin District Court ruled in favour of GMP and ordered Deutsche Bahn to demolish what it had built and implement the vaulted ceilings instead. This decision surprised just about everybody.

It might even have surprised your typical Ayn Rand reader. Even the most heroic of architects isn’t supposed to win in court quite like that. In the Rand world, those who create will inevitably have their designs interfered with by those who don’t create. Creators aren’t expected to take it lying down, though, just like von Gerkan didn’t. In The Fountainhead (1943), the inner-directed and incorruptible Howard Roark is hired (on condition of anonymity) by the self-serving, wonkish and manipulative Ellsworth Toohey to design a public housing project: Cortlandt Homes. From the beginning, it’s Toohey’s intention to mess around with Roark, and so Toohey has it that architects with less integrity than Roark are secretly hired to make modifications. Roark moves to sue the client, but is rebuffed. With the help of Dominique Francon, he moves to physical intervention; he blows up the altered housing project. Only then does he get to go to court; he’s prosecuted. After making an inspired speech to the jury in his own defense, he gets off. Although the drama of the novel is more or less unaffected by this decision, Roark’s acquittal is still important for Rand’s purposes. She wanted everyone to know that the universe isn’t malevolent; by extension, neither are the people in it. Not all of them, at least. Continue reading →

Hidden away in a sunlit mountain valley …

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The Wall Street Journal carries a review by Trevor Butterworth of The Enlightened Economy by Joel Mokyr, former editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. This is a book which aims to explain why the industrial revolution happened in Britain before it happened anywhere else. Thoughts on the book itself will follow, perhaps. Right now, I’m more worried about the review:

The reason for Britain’s exceptionalism, Mr. Mokyr says, lies in the increasing hostility to rent-seeking—the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth—among the country’s most important intellectuals in the second half of the 18th century. Indeed, a host of liberal ideas, in the classic sense, took hold: the rejection of mercantilism’s closed markets, the weakening of guilds and the expansion of internal free trade, and robust physical and intellectual property rights all put Britain far ahead of France, where violent revolution was needed to disrupt the privileges of the old regime.

This is the first time I’ve seen ‘rent-seeking’ defined as ‘the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth’. It’s a bad definition, since we naturally tend to think of ‘political power’ as something wielded by government; this particular definition, then, will lead us to think of ‘rent-seeking’ as primarily an activity of government. Which it ain’t. Things like ‘robust physical and intellectual property rights’ may privilege any suitably placed individual or private company: Sky TV, for example. But let’s take the main point as given: at one time, Britain was comparatively liberal, France was comparatively regressive. And France did indeed experience revolution. Of course, you’d think that revolution might allow France a bit of a catch-up opportunity. Apparently not:

Such political upheaval in Europe, notes Mr. Mokyr, disrupted trade, fostered uncertainty, and may well have created all kinds of knock-on social disincentives for technological and scientific innovation and collaboration with business. Much as we might deplore too many of our brightest students going into law rather than chemistry or engineering, it is not unreasonable to think that many of France’s brightest thinkers were diverted by brute events into political rather than scientific activism (or chastened by poor Lavoisier’s beheading during the Revolution).

Admit it, people, the real thesis here is: heads the Anglos win, tails the Euro-weenies lose. I note also that ‘France’ and ‘Europe’ are treated as synonyms, but hey.

I suppose it’s mostly fairly difficult to untangle the prejudices of the reviewer from the subject, where the subject itself is a representation in writing of someone’s thoughts, but I suspect this particular review gets close to the limiting case: i.e. the case where everything you see is the prejudice of the reviewer. Stock tropes only; nothing substantial or falsifiable to be given away.

Incidentally, I think there’s a way to understand the Murdoch publications paywall: it’s journalism going Galt. They’ll come out as they went in; how else could it be? I think it’s a shame Rand had the first-handers hide themselves away in the Rockies, though; I’m imagining a South American tepui, Conan Doyle Lost World style.

Update: I’ve realised that there is a reading of ‘the use of political power …’ which brings it more into line with how rent-seeking is usually understood. This is the reading in which political power (of government) is held ready for someone outside government to make use of: government as a utility, if you like. Even on this reading, I still think it’s a poor definition. It’s understood that it costs a petitioner something to engage with government – hence there’s an efficiency argument to be made in connection with rent-seeking – but terms like ‘use’ and ‘manipulate’ suggest that policy can be flipped on and off like a light. So, how would I define ‘rent-seeking’, you might ask. Perhaps like this: rent-seeking is the attempt to influence public policy in search of policy privilege.

And a welcome to readers from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also.

Well, we’re all good at something

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Chris says he doesn’t like hierarchies:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated hierarchies. I didn’t like school, for example, until I entered the less hierarchical sixth-form. One reason I wouldn’t want to be an academic or a civil servant is that I’d be uncomfortable with their endless gradations of status.

Discussion follows, in which a fair few people have a go at Chris for wanting to differentiate himself as an inventive blogger: i.e., he’s just as status-seeking as anyone else.

Chris’s original intent, though, was to get a bit of traction on an argument that’s come out both against The Spirit Level and against the leftish commentary that’s gone along with it. This is the argument that status differentiation is inevitable; it’s a natural extension of our heterogeneity. We are diverse to begin with – each of us is a different mix – and status is built on that, in various corresponding ways. This isn’t a particularly new story. Howard Roark isn’t the only hero of The Fountainhead; there are others, themselves to be admired for what they do. The hotelier Kent Lansing, for instance:

I want a good hotel, and I have certain standards of what is good, and they’re my own, and you’re the one who can give me what I want. And when I fight for you, I’m doing – on my side of it – just what you’re doing when you design a building. Do you think integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? … Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

Ian Fleming extends the range of ideas somewhat:

Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He’s fired rockets at the Moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavour … except crime!

Auric Goldfinger strives non-virtuously and revels in it, hence the humour. But the each-to-his-own-field-of-excellence sentiment – as diffused into contemporary society – takes a where’s the harm? tack. It goes: so what if some people are wealthy? There are some really cool skateboard kids in Pasadena; you might envy my wealth, but money just happens to be what I do. Actually, I envy the skateboarders. It’s self-consciously and defensively earnest, and I reckon it owes quite a bit to the Rand version.

Anyway, the distinction I want to remind everyone of is that between hierarchies with consequence and hierarchies without consequence. It’s not an absolute distinction, but it’s there.

For example, when it comes to golf, I’m at the bottom of the heap and I know it. Almost everyone is better than me. I hate golf, come to that, and never play. But the cause of my hatred isn’t that my options in golf (or in anything else, more or less) are constrained by other golfers (as golfers). In fact my options are almost wholly unconstrained by other golfers. Perhaps I couldn’t enter any tournament I wanted to, but I still get to have a go at just about anything else golf-related that I might fancy. It’s ‘no skin off my nose’ that other golfers are better than me.

Contrast with the hierarchy of wealth. Not the same. Your wealth – as part and parcel of our social arrangements generally – is made a condition of many, many activities. Including access to golf courses, as you may have muttered to yourself when reading the paragraph above. It’s a commonplace that other wealth-holders do tend to constrain your options; typically, they constrain you in that they outbid you in seeking something scarce. The hierarchy of wealth is a hierarchy with consequence; it is skin off your nose, it’s a hierarchy that often matters, and this is why it’ll tend to get brought into any discussion of social inequality. And perhaps this is only something odd about me, but I tend to think that if a person is constrained almost every which way he or she turns, then that person will start to feel just a little bit beaten down.

As a part-aside; apparently Nero’s palace in Rome got to be so big that other Romans had to take huge detours in order to get from one side of the city to the other. In the end, the lawful resident of the Domus Aurea pissed off other Romans so much that they did him in. Just saying.

Kizuna West

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A bit more on the Big Society. I mentioned that Rory Stewart wants faster broadband for his constituents in rural Cumbria. Now Rory is a decent guy – I knew him at school – but I don’t think he’s on to anything much with his play to relate the issue of rural broadband provision to Cameron’s Big Society. We might eventually end up with better broadband in Cumbria, but we’ll have gotten there by the hard road: the plan doesn’t do much for the idea of little platoons. The Guardian has a bit more about how Stewart describes his project. Apparently there are three components to it:

1) The government part. The government is going to open up its public infrastructure. It is going to allow us into the fibre optics thick pipes that run to the schools. It is going to put pressure on Network Rail to let us into the thick pipes that run along the Carlisle Settle line.

2) We, as communities, will get a very small government subsidy equivalent to what they would have given us in terms of their universal service commitment. You roll out a parish pump which is to say you go into that thick pipe at your school or on the railway and you bring out a little fibre optic cabinet. Then, and this is the key point, the parish comes and puts together its own plan to get the stuff from the parish pump into their home.
Many of our communities will want to go for fibre optics to the home so they can have super fast stuff. Others will be content to put a wireless hub on top of the pump that will give them two megabytes.

3) The final government support for the community is to provide a loan. If it costs a £1,000 to put broadband into your house, if you have a soft loan over 15 to 20 years that is only costing you £50 a year.

Now there’s not quite enough technical detail here to comment on viability. What we can do, though, is make a quick comparison with the way Japan has set about solving the same problem. In 2008, JAXA launched a satellite – Kizuna – which allows any rural Japanese household to connect to the internet at 155 Mbps download and 6 Mbps upload. That’s the domestic transmission rate. Small businesses get 1.2 Gbps download. Compare this with the default 2 Mbps rate mentioned in the Cumbrian plan. Note, that’s megabits. Rural Japanese already get between 75 to 600 times the data rate planned for Cumbria, once the parish meetings are held, and the thousand small disagreements about what to do have gotten thrashed out.

In terms of subscriber requirements, the Japanese subscribers only need to install a satellite dish (45 cm at the lower data rate) to get connected. The Cumbrians are expected to raise loans to get cables laid to their houses (note: wouldn’t line of sight microwave be better in some cases?).

In terms of scope and timescale: Kizuna gave coverage to the whole country from launch day onwards. The Eden Valley Big Society plan, once implemented, will cover part of one county of England.

The talk of parish pumps and railway lines is charming, but I think it’s a shame to be literally parochial about something like this. There are situations where a society needs to amass all of its resources to be effective. Communications infrastructure is one of those situations. What’s more, investment in satellites, specifically, is consistent with fiscal stimulus as generally understood (there are British satellite manufacturers). The Big Society talk is surely better saved for the human-to-human stuff, if we’re going to hear about it at all.

Anway, what do Fistful readers suggest vis-a-vis rural broadband. How has this been solved elsewhere?

Avoid overlap in your answers

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I think we’re seeing emergent modes of behaviour with respect to the current UK coalition government. There’s some decent champion-of-the-people stuff happening in the margins. Vince Cable thinks the retail banks are ripping off consumers: he’s probably right to think it. Rory Stewart wants better broadband in Cumbria: he’s probably right to want it.

In the centre of things, though, there’s now a queue of ministers making articulated policy statements. If this were going well, we’d be looking at some systematic law-making; something a Tory supporter could, with a straight face, call reform. What we’re actually getting is a stream of crap. There’s no coordination to any of it. Call it government by assignment. This is a model of government where ministers go away at the beginning of long leave the holidays with a homework topic; on the first day of term, they return each having prepared a presentation, which they then deliver. Conferring is strongly discouraged; ministers should show their own work. Conferring, though, might at least have uncovered some of the obvious problems.

For example, IDS has been doing welfare and benefits, but his department has just given him a D; his proposals are considered both too expensive and too socially destructive by those who’d be put in charge of implementing them. Andrew Lansley’s been doing health: we’ve more to hear on this, but the doctors themselves, as represented by the BMJ, don’t much like what they see. Interestingly, nothing much of Lansley’s presentation was foreshadowed in the Tory election manifesto; it’s good to be the one person to advance a new idea, except of course for those occasions when what’s wanted is a mandate for that idea. At those times, originality bad.

And David Cameron is about to give a presentation on what he calls the Big Society. This is Cameron’s dissertation topic, and we’ve heard about it before. Officially, the main idea is redistribution of power.

The big society … is about liberation – the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.

Snark aside, there are basically two kinds of power when it comes to public services. The first kind of power is control over a budget. The second kind of power is direct authority over people in the community served (i.e. the sort of power the police, social workers, or local authority officers have).

Does the Big Society grant either kind of power to anyone who doesn’t already have it? To a first approximation: no. It might well remove some local authority power, though. In that light, the Big Society is simply wrongly named: what’s envisaged is the Smaller Society. Charities existed before the welfare reforms of the twentieth century; did they constitute a Big Society then? And charities still exist today, with tax concessions attached. Charities are doing fine, but if charities don’t already make a Big Society, they’re not about to get made into one. Access to a couple of hundred million from forgotten-about bank accounts (reminder to self: call the building society tomorrow) won’t render charities significantly more empowered. On the contrary: UK charities are themselves susceptible to fiscal austerity; they get around a third of their funding from the government. What’s being pushed at us is a deliberate enlargement of the charity domain. Normally, when we think of charities as having plenty to do, we think of earthquakes and other disasters as visited on poor and unequal societies. To be honest, we’d probably all prefer it if charities had less to do. And better societies – to my mind at least – call less for charity.

Of course, we’re likely to be shown a handful of exemplar schemes. Here the precedent of city academies almost obliges us to watch and see whether or not budgets have been discreetly and conveniently allocated. We’d be mugs not to.

Cameron is spinning and presenting this shtick like he’s got until he end of the week to get it into law. And it’s not just him. As Jamie says, all of this stuff is getting rushed. Collectively, the coalition comes across as deeply and dismally unserious. On the upside – and it’s the IDS situation that suggests this to me – there still exist those with the chops to have gotten to be senior in the civil service. The penalty for causing civil service dismay, most likely, is that your ideas are soon shown to be unimplementable. So I give the show and tell-ers two years of this.

You can’t expect much from a journalist at that level

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Alex Perry, an Africa correspondent Africa bureau chief for Time magazine, writes on China’s involvement in Africa. In the process, he describes the DRC as a “sucking vortex”, citing the corrupt rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. Julie Hollar at FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) takes Perry to task for failing to mention US / Belgian involvement in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba (and their subsequent support of Mobutu). Perry then makes the terrible mistake of responding to Hollar in comments while not in full control of his own sense of self-importance. Self-harming behaviour (not to mention Time-harming behaviour) then follows.

Jonathan Schwarz (Tiny Revolution) summarises the Perry / Hollar spat and takes the opportunity to quote an apposite passage from Devlin’s book about his time as CIA station chief in the Congo. It’s good, so I’ll quote it myself here:

We moved onto Ambassador Houghton’s office where we were joined by Ambassador Burden for more detailed talks concerning the Congo and its problems…During our discussions, Tim brought up a delicate matter: “Time magazine plans to do a cover story on Lumumba with his picture on the front of the magazine.” He continued, “Celebrity coverage at home will make him even more difficult to deal with. He’s a first-class headache as it is.”

“Then why don’t you get the story killed?” Burden asked. “Or at least modified?”

“I tried to persuade the Time man in Leopoldville until I was blue in the face,” Tim replied. “But he said there was nothing he could do about it because the story had already been sent to New York.”

“You can’t expect much from a journalist at that level,” Burden said pulling out his address book and flipping through the pages. He picked up the phone and put a call through to the personal assistant of Henry Luce, Time’s owner.

So: Time. Apparently at the beginning it was going to be called Facts. May I just say at this point that if news reporting on the internet as we currently know it should happen to get wound up in favour of dedicated news magazine ‘apps’ running on tightly controlled platforms, then – since you can’t link from the web to the content of a proprietary app – no one will be linking to the bullshit with an explanation of why the bullshit is bullshit. It’s pretty obvious that Steve Jobs is nostalgic for the corporate futurism of the 1960s – only now he gets to implement it, woo-hoo – and it just doesn’t look as though end user selectivity features large in any part of the Jobs vision. You’ll get what you’re given and call it knowledge.

Pretty much the only part of Africa I’ve spent any time in at all is Madagascar. I’ve visited twice. They’ve just celebrated fifty years of independence from France. Andy Rajoelina has failed to gain international recognition since he took over (with the support of the army): for what it’s worth, celebrations are reported to be muted as a consequence. I think you have to give the Malagasy population credit for two things. First, they know a stitch up when they see one. Pre-Rajoelina, a South Korean chaebol had some deal under negotiation where (in broad terms) they’d produce corn and bio-fuel on some immense percentage of Madagascar’s arable land (half of it?) and then get to keep all the corn and all the fuel. In return, the Malagasy at large would get, not rent exactly, but at least the promise of being allowed to work as agricultural labourers for the South Koreans. News of this ‘deal’ prompted the ouster of Ravalomanana. You wonder if even Philip K. Dick could have foreseen it. As it happens, Alex Perry sees good things in the ‘deal-making approach’ for Africa:

For all the heat, IMF officials admit that the Chinese model for African development has some advantages. First, it’s quick. Loan talks with multilateral agencies take years. The China-Angola discussions took weeks. “With the West, there are studies, analyses and bureaucracy,” says the Western official. “The Chinese just ask what the government wants, and they don’t question or comment or judge. They just do it.”

My understanding is that the South Koreans took a similar approach: they just asked the then president what he wanted. Lickety-split …

The other thing about the Malagasy is this. When they have a coup, they generally do it with the minimum of violence and fuss. Madagascar is not a wealthy country but it’s smart enough not to waste too much time and effort on civil war when what’s wanted is a change in the administration.

Extra cooks wanted for hot kitchen

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It’s dawning on me that everyone is off on their holidays just at the moment, or is otherwise enjoying the nice summer weather, far from the screen of any computer or mobile device. Which is why it’s so quiet. Anyway, that must mean that I get to play the role of late night radio DJ for afoe, except that instead of lining up a few gentle Isabelle Boulay tracks for the benefit of Norbert Dentressangle truckers, I’ll be putting up a post every couple of days for y’all, mostly on an extremely dry topic of my choosing.

But now, back to the ArcelorMittal Orbit. It was announced today that architects Ushida Findlay have designed a ‘silver coil’ to wrap around Kapoor and Balmond’s Olympic tower of sadness. At first I thought this was a guerrilla publicity move by Ushida Findlay – a bit like the stuff the Smithsons used to do when some major project was announced and they weren’t invited to contribute – and I was quite excited. I like the idea of designers piling onto a failed project in an attempt to effect some positive change, or alternatively perhaps a terminal subversion. But turns out Ushida Findlay are part of the official team. You can see their contribution here (link intermittently paywalled, but there’s also some images here, apparently gotten from the official planning application).

And it has to be said there’s not much new to see. The ‘silver coil’ seems to have been there all along, clashes and bad geometry and all. What’s more, it’s not even very silvery.

Our organisation does not tolerate failure?

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Re my earlier post, in case you were wondering if there were any actual cases of politicians making ambiguous calls for market reassurance, well, here’s a nice example from the G20 Toronto Summit Declaration:

There is a risk that synchronized fiscal adjustment across several major economies could adversely impact the recovery. There is also a risk that the failure to implement consolidation where necessary would undermine confidence and hamper growth. Reflecting this balance, advanced economies have committed to fiscal plans that will at least halve deficits by 2013 and stabilize or reduce government debt-to-GDP ratios by 2016.

Whose confidence? And (fiscal) consolidation is necessary where? Halving deficits by 2013 is no small aim. It’s also a highly political aim – affecting many people in many constituencies – and so it seems to me that explicit justification is needed; not hand waving and vague talk of ‘confidence’.

Incidentally, the G20 organisation seems to talk quite a bit about ‘taking steps’ and ‘delivering concrete outcomes’. What, if anything, gives them legitimacy to even attempt to ‘take steps’? Many national constitutions require governments to ratify international treaties as and when they’re negotiated. Shouldn’t the G20 ‘steps’ count as treaties? My question here is only partly facetious. Shouldn’t they?

Hey, why don’t we requisition the Royal Hospital Chelsea for productive workers?

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Some telegraphery from Iain Duncan Smith here. In short, IDS thinks we need to physically move people of working age on benefits to where employers want them; to make space, we need to relocate pensioners in council houses to smaller homes.

It looks as though the guy has swallowed his own rhetoric about the state sector constituting some sort of ‘command economy’: we need to shrink it, all right – he seems to be saying – but as long as it exists there’s going to be some god damn commanding going on. Is it that he was in the army once? It used to be that ‘the command economy’ meant putting vital-to-the-nation industries into the regions (like building submarines in Barrow); now we look to be working up a policy of putting the regions into the industry; specifically, that of west London and Bristol, the two places IDS seems to have on his radar.

Whatever. I think he’s basically incoherent on this one. To put things in the simplest terms, either recipients of benefits have agency – which implies that while some will ‘get on their bikes and look for work’ (or relocate, or whatever), some won’t – or they don’t have agency, in which case you can’t expect them to exercise it. If it’s the former, then benefits should come with few strings attached, should not be excessively and repeatedly assessed, conditions of receipt should not be changed at short notice, etc. In essence, benefits – within the obvious and accepted-by-everyone constraint of affordability – should be a matter of entitlement rather than grant. And it might be that one of the things IDS is missing here is a recognition that it’s not only the current recipients of benefits who take notice of what the benefit terms and conditions are, it’s just about everybody; that is, the whole of the private sector as well. We – the everybody – make our life plans accordingly. If we think that the safety net is going to be a certain way rather than another way, we plan for that. And if you – Iain Duncan Smith – relocate pensioners without warning, you’re in effect sticking two fingers up at whatever choices they’ve made in the past. How do you know they haven’t planned responsibly? Perhaps they chose to do a lower paid but socially useful job, trusting that there’d be a certain minimal support in retirement. Perhaps, if they’d thought they might risk getting booted out of their home in retirement, they might instead have chosen a less socially useful but better paid line of work. These are the sorts of counterfactuals relevant to this sort of policy-making. (You may want to question ‘socially useful’, but I’d bet that IDS himself recognises at least some occupations as socially useful. What’s more, the comparable ‘key worker’ category is one recognised in current housing policy.)

Bear in mind that IDS is no longer just some harmless former Tory leader: he’s Work And Pensions Secretary. It’s only been what – a month – but he looks to have had a full on Blunkett-style ‘machine gun the bastards’ moment.

Why should we reassure markets?

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Paul Krugman asks: does fiscal austerity reassure markets?. Well, maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t (For Krugman, it pretty much doesn’t). But why should we reassure markets? And what sort of reassurance should we give? I can’t give a very full or convincing argument by way of answering this question, but I’ll sketch out the way I think an argument might go.

For a start, it’s possible that ‘the markets’ aren’t part of our community: that is, there’s room for doubt as to whether they are or whether they aren’t. I’d suggest that it’s our coming to terms with this possibility that’s largely contributory to the sense of social obligation that we’ll develop with respect to ‘the markets’. So how do things work with this ‘coming to terms’?

On the way to answering this, we need to give ‘community’ itself some definition. What counts as a community? G. A. Cohen suggests that a characteristic of community is that ‘comprehensive justification’ can be applied to the policies of that community. Comprehensive justification takes all points of view into account: it’s a condition where any member of the community is able to defend a policy in the sight of any other member of that community. This seems to be a good fit for our intuition. Consider, says Cohen, a case where someone kidnaps your child. The police may say that it makes sense for you to pay the kidnapper, because then they’ll return your child. The police may be right; it may be sensible to pay up. But if the kidnapper were to say that it made sense for you to pay them, then, even though they too may be right – that is, it would be sensible to pay up – it’s very unlikely that we’d accept their claim as justification, with the result that we felt we ought to pay them. The only obligation you’d feel is the obligation – there all along, most likely – to try to do right by your children. There can’t be a comprehensive justification of the kidnapper’s demands; kidnap (fairly obviously) doesn’t make for community.

And this is where the notion of foreign-ness comes in. Apart from anything else, we might consider a kidnapper to be foreign to our community, simply in virtue of the fact that they’re prepared to do what they do. Now, take ‘the markets’. Harold Wilson (as Cohen reminds us) called them the ‘gnomes of Zurich’. I see three ways things might go.

(1) We assume that the gnomes are not part of our community (in Wilson’s view, the gnomes were clearly foreign). We may take account of what the gnomes say – it might be prudent to do this – but we won’t look to what they say as justificatory and we won’t feel obliged to them.

(2) We aren’t sure whether or not the gnomes are part of our community. Then, since we may believe (with Cohen) that comprehensive justification is indicative of community, we’ll look to see whether what they advocate is defensible when said by any member of our community. If it is, our belief that the gnomes are part of our community will be reinforced.

(3) Finally, let’s say we fully believe that the gnomes do belong to our community. In this situation, we’ll expect them to say things that are comprehensively justified. Further, since comprehensive justification is reflexive (in the social sense), membership of our community obliges them to engage principally in advocacy of this sort.

Needless to say, I don’t see these three situations as absolute: I think we can assume that, most of the time, we have a mix of (1) through (3).

That then, gives us one way to answer the question: why should we reassure ‘the markets’? Above and beyond simple prudence – which might, note, involve no reassurance – we should reassure them to the extent that we understand them to be part of our community, and not foreign. This understanding will be driven by the kinds of demands that are made. What would partial reassurance look like? I don’t know. I don’t have any recommendations for how to go about rationing out reassurance.

Perhaps this is all too simple to need saying. But I think it’s worth spelling out, since there are plenty of commentators on this issue (that is, politicians and a spread of pundits) who are guilty of exploiting an ambiguity. On the one hand, they’re exhorting us ‘to take account of what the markets say’ because ‘the markets’ are not foreign; on the contrary – we’re told – they form a key industry, a critical part of us. And so we’re obliged. On the other hand, they’re pleading with us ‘to take account of what the markets say’ because they are foreign; there’s no stopping them; they must be placated. They’re the gnomes of Zurich.

However, as I’ve said, if ‘the markets’ are part of us, there are standards that apply. We can expect certain things of them. If not, it doesn’t matter to us what happens to them. Given that we are capable of articulating the difference, I think it’s reasonable to expect a politician who talks ambiguously of ‘the markets’ to be able to resolve that ambiguity: they should be able to tell us which view of ‘the markets’ they intend. In default of that, feel free to ignore.