- Can Indigenous sovereignty survive colonisation? Pekka Hämäläinen, Aeon
- Is the nation-state the best we got? Paul Emiljanowicz, Africa is a Country
- Dining with Stalin Branko Milanovic, globalinequality
- An assassination in Sarajevo Nick Nielsen, The View from Oregon
Perspective and riches
Sometimes working in the arts can be quite disorienting, especially in terms of what comes out of the mouths of colleagues. For example, a close friend was in rehearsal and an ensemble member, having spent the first hour staring at her, suddenly demanded:
“Are those real diamonds [pointing at a simple crystal strand bought at H&M]?”
“What?! These?! No.”
“Oh, okay. I was trying to figure out how rich you are.”
There were so many things wrong with this actual exchange that it is hard to know where to start. The main, collective reaction was: “Who openly admits to sitting there thinking things like that?” The episode embarrassed everyone except the person who asked the offensive question. Aside from the immediate disruptive effect it had, the incident was indicative of a greater socio-cultural problem, a shameless voyeurism that, while not new, has reached a fevered pitch today.
While one could easily say that reality TV and Instagram are primary causes, there are plenty of examples which predate these media, most memorably Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and its prescient view of tabloid and celebrity culture. What is new, though, is the idea that the envious and their curiosity have any legitimacy. We have come from Flaubert’s view that Emma Bovary was a colossal idiot to articles published by the BBC lamenting “invisible poverty.” The BBC writer’s examples of “invisible poverty” were an inability to afford “posh coffee,” a qualifier which he declined to define, and neighbors wondering if a “nice car” was bought on auto loan or owned outright. Like the question about diamonds, not only should such matters be outside the concern of others, to think that they are appropriate, or even a valid source of social strife, is disgusting and disturbing.
In his book Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell complained about being sent to Eton, where he spent his school years feeling as though everyone around him had more material wealth. The essence of his lament was that he wished his parents had sent him to a small grammar school where he could have been the richest student. He also claimed, in a wild generalization, that his feelings on the matter were universal through the British upper-middle class. Further, he said that it was his time in secondary school, not as commonly claimed his time as a civil servant, which fueled his turn toward Marxism, following the traditional logic of grabbers – “they have so much and therefore can spare some for me.”
The most baffling part for Orwell was the way that the upper-middle class, which included his family, was willing to move to far-flung corners of the globe and live in conditions the lowest British laborer would not accept in exchange for educational opportunity for their children and a high-status, reasonably wealthy retirement for themselves. For a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of self-sacrifice, its role in the development of capitalism, and why only the century upper- and upper-middle classes were the ones willing to make such exchanges, see Niall Ferguson’s Colossus.
It is important today for us to become more critical regarding complaints about society and anecdotes that are presented as proof regarding unfair societal mechanisms that prevent social mobility. An example of the reason we must be careful is art recent article published by written by a Cambridge undergraduate for The Guardian, who identifying as working class and having many problems along those lines, cited as her biggest complaint the Cambridge Winter Ball. Her problem was not that she hasn’t been able to attend, but that she had had to work for an hour in order to get into the Ball for free. This is a questionable example of social immobility. Her complaint about the Ball was that there were others who could pay the £100 entrance fee upfront. From this, she assumed a level of privilege that might not necessarily exist, i.e. “the other students could part with 100 pounds.”
Another example of failure to understand the availability of resources and extrapolating a false conclusion of social immobility is the Columbia University FLiP (First-generation, Low-income People) Facebook page, which was, through 2018, their primary platform. In response to Columbia University’s study on their first-generation low-income population, many of the complaints related to books and the libraries. FLiP students didn’t know that books were available in the library, and so they had purchased study materials while their “wealthier” peers simply borrowed the library copy or spent the necessary number of hours in the library working. Ironically, this complaint is not valid if you also consider that Columbia does an immersive orientation in which new students are taken into the libraries and are shown the basics of the book search system, card operations, checkout procedure, etc. In response to the publicity surround the FLiP drive[1] the university opened a special library for these people where there is no official checkout; all loans are on the honor system. On a hilarious side note, in the middle ages libraries would chain books to lecterns to keep the students from walking away with them.
While we may have moved away from a society that encouraged living modestly to avoid arousing the envy of one’s neighbors, we now live in a culture in which our neighbors’ jealousy is too easily aroused. Chaos is the natural resting state of existence, but people have lost the ability to construct order for themselves out of it. It is possible to argue that modern people have not been taught to do so; after all, no one comes into the world knowing the underlying skills that are the foundation of the “invisible poor” complaints, e.g. social interactions, sartorial taste, self-sacrifice, etc. To tell the truth, mankind’s natural state is closer to the savages of the middle ages whose covetous inclinations necessitated the chaining of library books. On the one hand, we have progressed tremendously past such behavior and in doing so created order from chaos; but on the other hand, the external signs of progress are now under fire as symbols of privilege. Chillingly, the anti-civilization narrative, because that is ultimately what it is, is being incorporated into an anti-capitalist agenda through the conflation of “civilized” with “privileged,” which in turn is conflated with “rich.”
[1] It is also revealing that the sign off for these people while the drive lasted was FLiP [school name]. Yes, one must wonder if even the acronym was picked for its stunning vulgarity.
Joker: an evidence-based criminology review (spoilers)
Last Friday, Joker hit cinemas to much acclaim and some anxiety. Hot takes claim it glamorizes violence while the Slate pitch is that it’s boring. Having seen it over the weekend, I don’t see anything more transgressive about it than the various Batman films to which Joker is a sort of prequel, but it is more entertaining.
The film uses both narrative and moral ambiguity driven by the theme of mental illness. We are not quite sure what’s real and what’s not. And what (if anything) is responsible for catastrophic events that turn wannabe standup-comedian Arthur Fleck into the Clown Prince of Crime. This ambiguity is in league with contemporary criminology. Many researchers now suspect that crimes are typically the result of multiple, incremental causes (little things going wrong) that together add up to sometimes catastrophic outcomes.
So with spoilers already skulking in the alleyways over the fold, let’s review some of Joker’s overlapping narrative alongside some theories of crime (some of which I draw from my forthcoming book chapter on evidence-based policing).
Davies’ “Extreme Economies” – Part 1: Survival
Late to the party, I relied on the quality-control of the masses before I plunged into Richard Davies’ much-hyped book Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure and Future – Lessons from the World’s Limits (see reviews by Diane Coyle and Philip Aldrick). I first heard about it on some Summer Reading List – or perhaps Financial Times’ shortlist for best books of 2019. What really prompted me to read it, however, was an unlikely source: The Guardian’s long-read in late-August. Davies adopted his Louisiana Prison chapter and described the intricate ways prisoners and guards in maximum-security prison Louisiana State Penitentiary (“Angola”) exchange value using the top-up debit card Green Dot and single-use MoneyPak cards. I was hooked.
Davies’ captivating and personal writing in that 4000-word piece made me want to read the full thing. Once I got around to it, I couldn’t put it down – which is the best compliment an author can get. At little over 400 pages of easy non-jargon prose, it doesn’t take too long to get through – and the nine case-study chapters can easily be read on their own. Further attesting to the brilliance of the book are the many questions it raised with me, insights to investigate further.
The book’s structure is simple to follow: three themes ‘Survival’ (“The Economics of Resilience”), ‘Failure’ (“The Economics of Lost Potential”) and ‘Future’ (“The Economics of Tomorrow”), each containing three fascinating places, wrapped between an introductory and a concluding chapter.
The motivation for the book is a mixture of John Maynard Keynes and a Scottish 19th century civil engineer named David Kirkaldy. The latter’s big idea was studying “why materials buckled and bent under pressure” (p. 31); to fully grasp the potential for something, we need to examine why they fall apart. From Keynes Davies took the idea that the future is already partly here:
“We can get a glimpse of the future today, if we know where to look. The trick was to identify a sustained trend – a path most people are following – and look at the lives of those experiencing the extremes of that trend. […] to zoom forward in time, he said, we need to find those whose lives are like this already.” (p. 31)
Davies ventures to nine places of the world, all extreme in some aspect, and investigates the everyday economic challenges that people face and the ingenious ways in which they do – or do not – solve them. By carefully looking at the present, he posits to gauge something about the future.
In this first part – ‘Survival’ – I look at Davies’ three selections (Aceh, Indonesia; Zaatari, Jordan; and Louisiana, U.S.). The next part contains the case studies of ‘Failure’ (Darien, Panama; Kinshasa, DRC; Glasgow, Scotland) and the concluding part looks at ‘Future’ (Akita, Japan; Tallinn, Estonia; and Santiago, Chile). As I have personal experience of living in two of these places while knowing virtually nothing about many of the others, I reserve some complementary reflections on Glasgow and Santiago when appropriate.
Aceh, Indonesia
On Dec 26, 2004, an Indian Ocean earthquake created a tsunami that devastated coastlines from Thailand to Madagascar. Two-thirds of the 230,000 human lives lost were in Indonesia, mostly in the Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra, closest to the earthquake’s epicentre. Pictures taken before and after show how complete the destruction was; except for a few sturdy mosques, nothing was left standing.
A few years later, the busy streets and crowded beaches were pretty much back to normal. How?
Davies’ story does not emphasise aid flows or new investment by outsiders, but “informal systems of trade, exchange and even currency” (p. 49), an aspect that generally “goes unmeasured an unassessed” (p. 65). Aceh’s catastrophe is a story of human resilience and of intangibles.
The people Davies interviewed told him how the ancient Aceh practice of keeping savings in wearable and portable gold – necklace, rings, bangles – provided survivors who had lost everything with a source of funds to draw on. Importantly, a gold dealer told him, as the market price of gold is set internationally, the massive sell orders coming in simultaneously did not affect prices very much. Additionally, the dealer’s knowledge of market prices and contacts in Jakarta allowed him to quickly set up his business again. Buying Acehnese’s gold during those crucial months, way before foreign aid or government could effectively respond, provided people with funds to rebuild their lives. Traditional practices “insulated Aceh and provided its entrepreneurs with rapid access to cash” (p. 49).
Another insightful observation is the role played by intangibles – the knowledge of how and where and when that most of our economies depend on. Sanusi, 52-year-old coffee trader, lost everything: his shop, his equipment, his family. Amid his devastation he realized that one thing that the tsunami had not destroyed was his knowledge of the coffee business – where to source the best beans, how to make it, where and when to sell the coffee. He patched together some spare planks, used his business contacts to provide him with trade credit and had his rudimentary coffee business set-up in time for the arrival of coffee-drinking construction and aid-agency workers.
Davies also gives us a very balanced GDP discussion here, as the years after the December 2004 disaster saw huge GDP growth. Most economists would reflexively object and invoke Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy. Yes, Davies is well aware, but he’s getting at something more subtle:
“GDP aims to capture what a country’s residents are doing now, rather than what they have done previously. [It is] all about current human activities – spending, wages, income, producing goods – rather than the value embodied in physical assets such as building and factories. Far from being a mean or cold measure, economists’ favourite yardstick is a fundamentally human one.” (p. 53, 65)
To GDP, what you produced in the past is of no consequence. Clearly, when the tsunami devastated the coastline of Aceh, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process and wiping away houses, factories and equipment, that made everyone poorer – their assets and savings and capital were literally washed away. Considering the massive construction boom that followed, only partly financed by outside aid and government money, it is not incorrect to say that GDP boomed; it is only incorrect to believe that people were made better off because of the disaster. Bastiat teaches us that they were not.
I think of this as the difference between your total savings (in cash, stocks, bank accounts, houses, jewelry) and your monthly income, a difference between “stock” and “flow”. If, like many Acehnese that Davies interviewed, your earnings-potential depend on your knowledge of your industry, your most valuable assets remain untouched even after a complete disaster. Your savings – your capital, your stuff – are completely eradicated, but the basis for your future income remains intact. With some minor equipment – a trade credit, some furniture, a shop patched together with flotsam – you can quickly approach the production and income you had before. GDP attempts to measure that income – not the current value of total assets.
“The people here,” Davies concludes, “lost every physical asset but the tsunami survivors retained skills and knowledge from before the disaster, and rebuilt quickly as a result.” (p. 66).
Zaatari, Jordan
Following the Syrian civil war and its exodus of refugees, camps were set up in many neighbouring countries. Often run by the UN, these camps ensure minimum survivability and life-support for refugees and are rather centrally-planned; the UNHCR hands out blankets, assigns tents and provides in-kind goods and services (food, medicine etc).
In April 2013, the Zaatari camp in the northern Jordan desert had grown to over 200,000 inhabitants, with daily inflows of up to 4,000 refugees. It was too much – and the UNHCR “ran out of manpower” (p. 70). They rationalised operations, focused on their core tasks – and left individuals alone to trade, construct and flourish on their own. It became a lesson in anarchic cooperation and of the essentiality of markets – and, like the Louisiana prison economy below, an ingenious monetary system. It “did not happen by design, but by accident”, Davies writes, and constitutes “an economic puzzle worth unpicking” (p. 72) only if you doubt the beneficial consequences of markets and free people. If you don’t, the result is predictable.
Every month, the Zaatari camp administrators load up payment cards for the refugees with 20 dinars (£23) per person, spendable only in the two camp supermarkets. Designed to be a cashless economy, the money flowed directly from donors to the supermarkets: “refugees cannot transfer cash between wallets, so aid money designated for food cannot be spent on clothes, and the winter clothing allowance cannot be spent on food” (p. 79).
This extreme and artificial economy teaches us something universal about markets; imposed orders, out of touch with market participants’ demands, malfunctions and create huge wastes. Complete monetary control by outsiders, Davies writes, “fails the basic test of any well-functioning market – to be a place where demand meets supply” (pp. 80-81). Supermarkets lacked the things refugees wanted, and they stocked up on things that reflected kickbacks to donor countries (Italian spaghetti or Brazilian coffee), entirely out of sync with Syrian cuisine and preferences. And the unorganic, artificially-set prices were entirely detached from the outside world.
Yet, the refugee city of Zaatari is a flourishing economy where people build, make and trade all kinds of things. How did this happen? Innovative Syrians found a way around their monetary restrictions: the economy of Zaatari “rests on the conversion of homes to business and flipping aid credit, via smuggling, into hard cash” (p. 88). Informal and free markets, at their best.
Along most of the camp’s boundaries, there are no fences, only roads – and the huge number of children playing ball games on the concrete roads or running in and out of the camp, makes identifying who’s a refugee and who’s a teenage smuggler next to impossible. What the refugees did was:
- buy some item in the supermarket using the e-card credits provided by UNHCR
- sell it to smugglers for less than their outside market value and obtain hard cash in return
- smugglers slip out of the camp and sell the goods to Jordanians and other driving past, taking a cut for themselves.
Bottom line: refugees turned 20 dinars of illiquid and restricted e-credit into hard cash, spendable on anything anywhere in the camp. The productive powers of 200,000 refugees was unleashed. In Zaatari, the presence of smugglers allowed large-scale interactions with the outside world – and so the artificially-created closed-loop payment system did not remain closed. Instead, it was connected to the outside Jordanian economy through smuggling!
The take-away point is to cherish market activities, even informal ones, since they “matter to everyone and are fundamentally human” (p. 102). Governments plan and creates problems; markets solve them.
Louisiana State Prison
Analogous to the Zaatari refugees, prisoners in Louisiana’s maximum-security prison (“Angola”) find themselves in a similar economic squeeze: unsatisfied demand and large shortage of goods, artificial constraints on what prisoners can and cannot own. Prisons are places where official prices don’t work: paltry “incomes” through mandatory work stand in no relation to the officially-mandated prices of goods that prisoners can buy at commissary. Accusations of modern slavery comes to mind. The “official price system,” Davies writes, “has been intentionally broken” (p. 119).
To escape their formal and restricted economy, prisoners have long relied on smuggling. Radford’s famous article about cigarettes becoming money in a WWII Prisoners-of-War camp applied – until Angola officials decided to ban tobacco from the premises. Cash too risky to hold; age-old money banned. What now? Fintech to the rescue!
Louisiana prisons “have a remarkable new currency innovation, something far better than tobacco or cans of mackerel”. Physical dollar bills are not handled, bank accounts that leave digital traces are not linked to individuals: “people pay each other with dots”, says an ex-convict that Davies interviewed (p. 132).
Contrary to the belief that smuggling into prisons happen through corrupt prison guards only, prisoners have some power; they can stage riots or make guards’ everyday-life very hard by misbehaving in every imaginable way. That power gives prisoners and guards alike incentives to trade with another – but prisoners don’t have anything to offer, apart from occasional or indivisible services like car repairs or (like Andy Dufresne in the movie Shawshank Redemption) accounting services. And paying guards in commissary products is not gonna cut it.
Here’s how Angola prisoners solved their monetary constraints, obtaining means of payment to smuggle in items their economy’s participants demanded:
- set up an account with Green Dot, providing a pre-paid debit card without requirements of ID or proof of address.
- buy a second card, a single-use scratch card called MoneyPak, used to load the first card with anywhere between $20 and $500. These cards are usable anywhere that accepts VISA and Mastercards, and easily bought/cashed out at Walmarts or pharmacies.
- Scratch away MoneyPak’s 14-digit number (“the dots”), and transfer those digits to somebody else, be it another prisoner or guard.
- that person goes online, logs into their Green Dot account, enters the combination and credit is added to their debit card.
The dots, Davies describes, “are a currency close to cash: an instant, simple and safe transfer of value over long distance” (p. 134). Even prison economies, argues Davies, “show that the human urge to trade and exchange information is impossible to repress” (p. 136).
The Economics of Resilience
The power of informal economies are great – and essential to people cut off from regular economic processes. Through natural disasters, in refugee camps or in prisons, innovative people find ways around their imposed-upon constraints and “establish a trading system if theirs is damaged, destroyed or limited in some way”. (p. 135)
Aceh, Zaatari and the Angola prison show “three places where markets, currencies, trade and exchange exist despite all odds.” (p. 139).
Be Our Guest: “How to make Brexit Really Worthwhile – Example: Financial Regulation”
Be Our Guest is an open invitation to NOL‘s readers to participate with us. Pretty much anything is on the table. The latest article comes from the Freeconomist, who is following up on his earlier piece about making Brexit worthwhile via information asymmetries. His new piece is on financial regulation through the prism of Brexit. Check out this excerpt:
I do not want to write a lengthy discussion on the question of which alternative is the least costly in dealing with the incentive problems arising from the implicit subsidy by the taxpayer. There are good reasons to believe an incremental, decentralized and evolutionary system of market-based regulation to be superior to centrally designed government regulation. (4)
But even if this is the case, private regulation arising as a response to the incentive problems resulting from explicit and/or implicit government guarantees is still costly. Indeed, the evolved system of private regulation in the UK banking industry was giving the appearance of a restrictive cartel. If my analysis is correct, this “cartel” served a useful social function, namely to deal with the incentive problems created by the implicit government guarantee. Nevertheless, it also involved costs.
At the root of the problem are the taxpayer guarantees.
Please, read the rest. It’s another excellent piece of work.
And don’t be afraid to submit your thoughts to us.
Nightcap
- Neglected works in intellectual history JHIBlog
- Is that you, John Galt? JD Mullane, Burlington County Times
- European law and the myth of English exceptionalism Michael Krauss, Law & Liberty
- Myths of sovereignty and British isolation Barry Stocker, NOL
Nightcap
- South Korea’s Confucianist-capitalist trap Makoto Kajiwara, Nikkei Asian Review
- Stockton’s experiment with Universal Basic Income Sarah Holder, CityLab
- The real Texas Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Review of Books
- For women, running is still an act of defiance Rachel Hewitt, 1843
Creativity of Hong Kong protesters: Protest Songs
The Hong Kong protests are sometimes called “open-source protests”, “decentralized protests” or “water revolution” due to its leaderless and organic nature. It’s a great example of how order can emerge within a decentralized social organization.
The protests may seem chaotic, but if one looks closer one can easily identify the diversity of roles that protesters and different communication tools are playing – making up an harmonious order. Below, you can find the different groups and tools within the movement that I have been able to identify.
| Communication channels | LIHKG, Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, Facebook and more… Communication channels with high encryption standards and servers outside of Hong Kong are preferred as to maintain more privacy and to make it harder for the HK government to close down the servers or seize account information of protesters |
| Protest songs | Glory to Hong Kong, We Will Fight for Hong Kong, Sing Hallelujah to the Lord, Do you hear the People sing, Below the Lion Rock, Boundless Oceans Vast Skies, Raise the Umbrellas, Add Oil etc… |
| Teargas ‘fire fighters’ | Fire fighters whose main role in the protests is to extinguish the police’s tear gas |
| Dunkirk moment | When the police shut down the Hong Kong metro system (MTR) after the protests at the HK Airport, most protesters either had to walk home or take the buses back to Hong Kong central. As buses were checked by the police to find, and in many cases arrest, the protesters, some sympathizers of the protests took their cars to HK Airport and give them a ride home |
| Pro-HK pr | Artists mobilize themselves in Telegram groups – some are as large as containing 200+ artists – to create art and other pr material to support the protests |
| Suppliers and first-aid people | Suppliers donate anonymous travel cards, cash, clothes, vouchers, temporary housing etc… The first-aid people give medical care to those injured in the protests. They carry around first-aid kits |
| Protect the Children group | Elderly that come between the police and young protesters during confrontations to give the youngsters time to flee |
In this post, I’d like to share some protest songs that have emerged in the past few months. Some songs were specifically created during the protests, while others are older songs that have been adopted to emphasize the spirit of the movement.
Compilation of several Protest Songs
Glory to Hong Kong
We will fight for Hong Kong
Be Water
Do you hear the People sing
Boundless Oceans vast Skies
Fly with You (和你飛)
High Wall and Egg (牆與雞蛋)
This song is based on the following quotation from Haruki Murakami’s Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech in 2009:
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals… We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us – create who we are. It is we who created the system.
No Withdrawal, No Surrender, No Retreat (不撤∙不散∙亦不退)
Welcome to the Black Parade
Nightcap
- Do the ends justify the means? Scott Sumner, EconLog
- Is a Catholic schism on the way? Bruce Clark, Erasmus
- Gandhi’s many enemies Faisal Devji, India Today
- Nationalism, sci-fi, and Chinese culture Layne Vandenberg, Diplomat
Where to view live videos on the Hong Kong protests?
I’ve been following the Hong Kong protests very closely since it started. Watching the live videos of the protests gives you a better impression of what Hong Kong is really like at the moment.
In this post, I’d like to share a link where you can view live videos of on the spot journalists:
Nightcap
- Jack Schwartz on the weaknesses of the Mathematical Mind David Glasner, Uneasy Money
- Did the Thirty Glorious Years actually exist? Vincent Geloso, NOL
- A hidden cost of the War on Drugs Vincent Geloso, NOL
- Star Trek did more for the cultural advancement of women than government policies Vincent Geloso, NOL
Declaration of the Establishment of the Provisional Government of Hong Kong
The chief executive of Hong Kong has passed the anti-mask law today, further escalating Hong Kongers’ anger. Large groups of protesters in Hong Kong have now declared the establishment of a provisional government of Hong Kong in several neighborhoods.
The main premise of the declaration is that when a government does not represent the people anymore, the people have the right to establish their own government. The English version of the full declaration is as follows:
In the development of human civilisation it is inevitable for a dysfunctional institution to be abolished and replaced by a better one. This is how progress is made. If a government is not of the people, by the people, for the people, then it is inevitable that the people will establish a government of the people. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government has proved itself to be not of the people, by the people, for the people. We hereby declare the establishment of the Provisional Government of Hong Kong.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ We have always identified with this inviolable principle of truth. The government and the legislature are established by the people to ensure that their rights will be protected against encroachment. All the powers of the government are derived from the people. If a government violates this principle, then the people have an absolute right to abolish it and establish a new one.
The HKSAR government, which is controlled by the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, has turned a blind eye to the demands of the people, deprived the people of their rights, failed to enact laws safeguarding the wellbeing of the people, and taken away the freedoms of the people. Today, against the wishes of the majority of the people, the HKSAR government bypassed the Legislative Council and enacted the Anti-Mask Law in a deliberate attempt to deny people the right of assembly. We believe that the HKSAR government has lost its legitimacy as well as the authorisation from the people. We thereby declare the immediate abolition of the powers of the Chief Executive and the principal officials of the HKSAR government.
The Provisional Government of Hong Kong declares:
- The departments of the HKSAR government from now on shall be placed under the authority of the Hong Kong Provisional Government;
- The chief executive, the chief secretary, the directors and deputy directors of the bureaus, the heads and deputy heads of the departments shall leave office and the new post holders shall be appointed by the Provisional Government;
- All departments shall immediately cease all the new policies promulgated by the HKSAR Government since 2018, and personnel at all levels of personnel shall retain office and maintain the operation of necessary services of the departments until further notice;
- The Provisional Government’s term ends in five years or until the formation of a government under a chief executive nominated and elected by universal suffrage (whichever is sooner); the Provisional Government shall prepare for the election within one year of its establishment and complete the election within three years;
- The chief executive and the appointed officials of the Provisional Government shall not be eligible for appointment as officials of the government or public organisations once they leave office;
- The provisions of the Laws of Hong Kong shall remain in force until new laws are enacted by the Hong Kong Provisional Government;
- The Legislative Council shall be dissolved and the Provisional Legislative Council shall be elected within three months and the Legislative Council shall be elected within one year; there shall be 70 seats in the Provisional Legislative Council: 12 seats each for Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon West constituencies, 10 seats for East Kowloon East, and 18 seats each for the New Territories West and New Territories East.
Nightcap
- Second World soft power Ken White, Asian Review of Books
- Alas my love, you do me wrong Roderick Long, Policy of Truth
- The great fear of 1776 Jeffrey Ostler, Age of Revolutions
- Will no one defend free trade? Shikha Dalmia, the Week
Thoughts on Time from a College Library
Note: This was written by my brother Keith, and he did not originally post it online but sent it to our family members. For being a younger brother, he brings a hell of a lot of wisdom to the table, and I think this thought-provoking epistle deserves to be shared more widely. I am publishing it here, with permission:
From Keith:
I learn a great deal from my family. The facts, figures, and articles that commonly result from discussing and arguing with each other are a reward in and of themselves. As might be expected, many of these experiences and facts are soon forgotten, making way for new debates. Once in a while, however, when discussing a topic, we–or I–stumble upon an insight which radically changes, clarifies, or re-enforces my understanding.
In recent months, I had two routine, incidental, and unrelated conversations, one with my brother, and the other with my sister. The conversation with my sister did not start during some contentious economic debate, but when we were eating dinner together. Offhand, my sister said to me: “Keith, I have really come to appreciate the ideas from your econ classes you told me about, like opportunity cost, especially the opportunity cost of time spent on one task being a loss of all other possible actions. When I applied those ideas to my everyday life, I saw a marked improvement, because I had become more efficient, simply from valuing my time appropriately.” We often complain that few people these days recognize how econ is not a theory of how society works but of how math can represent human reality at any level. This is one case where there are real, personal benefits from understanding the math of limited lifespan.
My second recent conversation of note did not concern this day and age, in fact, it concerned the ideas of a wealthy 2000-year-old Roman by the name of Seneca. My brother had recently been translating his Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (literally “Moral letters to Lucilius” in Latin, courtesy of Wikipedia), and had stumbled upon Roman intellectual gold. Any attempt of mine to summarize the ideas in the letter would be less than adequate, so I shall copy it here. I know that it is long, and rather Latin-ish, but I would encourage anyone to take the time to read it, if only because reading it will pay your time back, with interest:
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Continue to act in the way you described, my dear Lucilius: set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or stolen away, or has merely slipped from your hands. Make yourself believe the truth of my words, that certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem of lost time, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose. What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed, Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.
Therefore, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity: time! And yet time is the one loan that even a grateful recipient cannot repay.
You may desire to know how I, who preach to you so freely, am practising. I confess frankly: my time account balances, as you would expect from one who is free-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss; I can give you the reasons why I am a poor man. My situation, however, is the same as that of many who are reduced to slender means through no fault of their own: everyone forgives them, but no one comes to their rescue.
What is the state of things, then? It is this: I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.
Farewell
After listening to my brother dictate the whole of this letter, I felt genuine chills. The truth it contains is so blatant, a simple calculation could yield the same result: life is made up of a limited number of hours, therefore life is time. Whenever you work, you are giving up your time for money (hence the old adage that time is money). This means that whenever you waste time, or money, you are wasting your life, and wasted life is death. This single fact horrifies me every day, because like most every other human, I waste an obscene amount of time. Time watching a movie I have already seen, trolling through Facebook without really reading any of the posts, or having the same argument all over again: rarely, when I am doing these things do I think about what else I could be doing.
Therein lies the link, which most will have already seen, between my two conversations. Our time is not free. Every moment we spend sleeping, eating, studying, etc., has a cost–an opportunity cost–and once it has been spent, if it was not truly the best way to spend it, then some small part of your life has been lost without reward.
I see this nearly everywhere: students doze off in class or idly check their email or texts, they, when “studying” in the library, will spend a majority of the time effectively idle. Writing this, I am in a college library, and with sample size n=11, I may, without prying too much, say that ~7/11ths of my fellow computer users are not doing what they came intending to do. They are wasting time they will not get back.
And so I say to you, whoever you may be reading this (perhaps idly), much the same as what Seneca might say to you, only I will say it less eloquently, and more directly: value your time. Do not waste it. Work on being efficient not for the sake of productivity, but for the sake of leisure, for we all have our jobs to do, and if we get them done faster then there is more time for enjoyment. If you spent less time complaining, you might spend that time actively addressing your problems, solving them rationally and thus eliminating your cause for complaint.
Vale.
Nightcap
- Napoleon Chagnon, controversial anthropologist, is dead Cornelia Dean, NY Times
- “European defense ministers had better not be superstitious.” Olivier-Rémy Bel, War on the Rocks
- In defense of marriage Bryan Caplan, EconLog
- When being gay is not a big deal Conor Friedersdorf, the Atlantic
- A day of mourning (People’s Republic of China) Ilya Somin, Volokh Conspiracy
Notes On Liberty 