Thinking Complete

New York’s nightclubs are the particle accelerators of sociology: reliably creating the precise conditions under which exotic extremes of status-seeking behaviour can be observed. Ashley Mears documents it all in her excellent book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. A model turned sociology professor, while researching the book she spent hundreds of nights in New York’s most exclusive nightclubs, as well as similar parties across the world. The book abounds with fascinating details; in this post I summarise it and highlight a few aspects which I found most interesting. Here’s the core dynamic. There are some activities which are often fun: dancing, drinking, socialising. But they become much more fun when they’re associated with feelings of high status. So wealthy men want to use their money to buy the feeling of having high-status fun, by doing those activities while associated with (and ideally while popular amongst) other high-status people, parti...

A few months before his death, Leonard Cohen, the great lyricist of modern spirituality, sang to God: Magnified, sanctified Be the holy name Vilified, crucified In the human frame A million candles burning For the help that never came You want it darker You're lining up the prisoners And the guards are taking aim I struggled with some demons They were middle class and tame I didn't know I had permission To murder and to maim You want it darker Hineni, hineni I'm ready, My Lord The first lines are a reference to the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the deceased. The million candles - each one in remembrance of a life lost - reminds us of tragedies upon preventable tragedies. So too with the prisoners, the guards, the murders: if these are part of some deity’s plan, it’s a deity which wants the world darker. Finally, hineni is what Abraham said when God called upon him to sacrifice Isaac. It means Here I am ; but with deep connotations: I am willing , or perhaps  I am y...

Liquid democracy , also known as delegative democracy , is a proposed hybrid between direct democracy and representative democracy. In liquid democracy, as in direct democracy, everyone is able to vote directly on every issue. Of course, in a modern society it’d be prohibitively time-consuming for everyone to research every topic well enough to cast an informed vote. In practice, most who vote would end up following the advice of someone better-informed on the topic. Liquid democracy makes this dynamic explicit by allowing any voter to delegate their vote to someone else that they trust. Their delegate can now vote on their behalf, or else delegate again to someone else. Here's one possible set of implementation details for how this system could work: If A delegates to B, and B delegates to C, then C now has three votes. There’s no limit to how many times votes can be delegated (except that forming a cycle returns a vote to its original owner). It’s a real-time system: any de...

Last month I attended a talk by David Runciman, the author of a recent book called How Democracy Ends . I was prepared for outrage-stirring and pearl-clutching, but was pleasantly surprised by the quality of his arguments, which I’ve summarised below, along with my own thoughts on these issues. Note, however, that I haven’t read the book itself, and so can’t be confident that I’ve portrayed his ideas faithfully. Which lessons from history? Many people have compared recent populist movements with the stirrings of fascism a century ago. And indeed it’s true that a lot of similar rhetoric being thrown around. But Runciman argues that this is one of the least interesting comparisons to be made between these two times. Some things that would be much more surprising to a denizen of the early 20th century: Significant advances in technology Massive transformations in societal demographics Very few changes in our institutions The last of those is particularly surprising in light...

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."                                                    W. B. Yeats The idea that things aren't going great these days is pretty widespread; there's a glut of books pointing out various problems. Cowen's achievement in this one is in weaving together disparate strands of evidence to identify the zeitgeist which summarises the overall trend - in a word, complacency. There are at least two ways in which people can be complacent. Either they're living pretty good lives, and want to solidify their positions as much as possible. Or they're unsatisfied with their lives, but unwilling to mobilise or take the risks which could improve their situations. (People in the middle of the economic spectrum showcase aspects of both). What's the opposite of complacency? Dynamism and risk-taking ...

I just came back from a long weekend in Berlin, which I think of as the centre of Europe - not just geographically and historically, but also in its current role as the capital of Europe's most influential country. Although not as popular a destination as London or Paris, it's still a magnet for travellers - it felt like half the people around me on the streets were tourists, and I overheard conversations in English nearly as often as German (along with plenty of French, particularly at the screening of the World Cup final). I also wouldn't be surprised if the average Berliner I talked to were more proficient in English than the average Briton (although my sample was pretty skewed towards intellectuals). Coming from a country where even bilingualism is rare, I am continually impressed by European linguistic proficiency. And not just Europeans - during two recent trips to Morocco, I discovered that virtually all Moroccans are fluent in Arabic and French, plus a Berber diale...

The easiest and most neglected way to make people in the developed world much better off is to fix housing policy. Record high property prices in thousands of major cities are burying people under crushing debt, crippling social mobility, and providing fuel for class divisions and xenophobia. And all of this could be easily avoided! I’ll explain how shortly (with particular reference to London and San Francisco, which are the examples I’m most familiar with, and which showcase widespread problems) but first let’s look at just how bad the crisis is ( graphs from The Economist ). In Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, average house prices have roughly tripled over the last 30 years. This is in real terms, adjusted for inflation; and it's in spite of whatever progress has occurred in construction techniques or materials. This is hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the average person's pocket, a vast and overwhelming expense. And it's even worse than that. Con...