Month: February 2008

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Optimal power structures

I recently wrote that:

Hierarchies [of power] allow for genuine decision making over the endless, cacophonic debates of pure democracy, but they come at the cost of hampering information flow (at an extreme, it becomes unidirectional) and making people at the bottom feel ineffective or inconsequential.  As a society, we seem to have settled on the idea of power being locally hierarchical, but globally competitive between those separate hierarchies.

I hypothesise that hierarchies are the constrained-optimal power structure for most, if not all, collaborative human endeavours. I imagine the optimal height and breadth of the hierarchy to be a function of the two, possibly intertwined, technologies at play: that used to aggregate individual beliefs to arrive at decisions, and that used to combine individual efforts to produce the output.

I likewise hypothesise that social networks are the optimal power structure for most, if not all, competitive human endeavours, with beliefs propagating across the network and decisions being made by individual nodes. I imagine the optimal network parameters (number of links per node, weighting per link, etc) to be functions of how similar the output of individual nodes are and the costs of maintaining each link.

Note that if the aggregate output for collaborative endeavours is a linear function of the output of each individual, then a hierarchy can be seen as a special case of a network with asymmetric link weightings: A takes more account of B’s view than B does of A’s.  This raises the intriguing possibility of the two types of model being able to be nested.  Do linear aggregation functions represent a definition of competitive endeavours?

I argue that these hypotheses are true on the simple basis that they are what we observe.  Collaborative efforts are always hierarchical.  Competitive efforts interact through networks.  I’d invite any examples of counter-factuals.  If there are any counterfactuals – if, for example, a power structure exists that is highly hierarchical (tall and narrow) when the optimal structure is much more network oriented – then the key question is ‘Why doesn’t it change?’.  Why doesn’t the Coase theorem kick into gear?

There’s an obvious question of where and how democracy fits into my framing of the world.  I imagine democracy as being something based on a social network.  For any given shock (i.e. news), once the network of opinions stabilises, democracy is just the formal counting of which nodes believe what.  Within this, though, I make a distinction between two different types of pure democracy. When the network is uniformly connected and every link carries the same weight, then every person truly carries the same value to the overall decision.  By contrast, when the network is not uniformly connected and/or weights are different across links, then even if individuals get an equal vote each in the decision, their opinions will be biased towards those individuals with more links and more weights.  Nevertheless, both situations count as “pure” democracy.  Obviously any type of representative democracy represents a hierarchy.  Even in the upper level where the democracy is played out there are sub-levels of deferred power.  Witness the machinations and power-plays of the UK’s House of Commons.

Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia, Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us represent an interesting experiment here because while they are clearly collaborative to some extent, they each claim, to varying degrees, to be purely democratic.  The users both contribute content and decide which contributions are most important.  There is an ongoing debate over who contributes most to such sites.  One view, from people such as Aaron Swartz, argues that:

[Outsiders] make one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

By contrast, Chris Wilson (of Slate) notes essentially the opposite view:

Palo Alto Research Center’s Ed Chi, the scientist who determined that 1 percent of Wikipedians author half of the content, told me he originally hypothesized that the site’s most energetic editors were acting as custodians. Chi guessed that these users mostly cleaned up after the people who provided the bulk of the encyclopedia’s facts. In reality, he found the opposite was true (PDF). People who’ve made more than 10,000 edits add nearly twice as many words to Wikipedia as they delete. By contrast, those who’ve made fewer than 100 edits are the only group that deletes more words than it adds. A small number of people are writing the articles, it seems, while less-frequent users are given the tasks of error correction and typo fixing.

But the debate over who contributes to Wikipedia and Digg is not of particular concern to me per se.  My concern is the power structures of these sites and that is quite recognisable.  Wikipedia has guiding editors who can lock pages down.  Digg and Slashdot both employ moderators that get veto power over the user-voting.  There is a formalised, structural hierarchy.  What is interesting is that there also seems to be an informal hierarchy based on the volume of user contributions.  The users that contribute more also get more of a voice when decisions are made.  Quoting Chris Wilson’s Slate article again:

The influence of these members was particularly apparent last month. After Digg tweaked its secret sauce, top contributors noticed a decline in influence—fewer of their submissions became top stories. The super Diggers published an open letter of grievances and threatened to boycott the site. The changes in the algorithm, the Digg execs said, were meant to bring a more diverse set of stories to the site, and they begged for patience from the top Digg contributors. (Thus far, a shaky truce has endured.) The takeaway: Digg’s brass believe that the site, which purports to be the product of a broad-based community, will cease to run smoothly if a microscopic percentage of its user base stops participating.

The reasons for this are simple enough:  Without the top contributors, the overall value of these sites would plummet.  They therefore have far more bargaining power with the formal power structures of the site owners.

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Two weeks to go

Continuing on my theme of predicting that the winner among the pledged delegates will win the Democratic Party’s nomination because the super delegates will (probably) flock to the leader among pledged delegates in order to build the appearance of unanimity and avoid a floor fight at the convention (see here and here), I’ve updated my table. I’m now using the data from Real Clear Politics for no particular reason beyond ease of extraction.

Date Barack Obama: running total Barack Obama: share of pledged delegates Hillary Clinton: running total
3 Jan (IA) 16 51.6% 15
8 Jan (NH) 25 51.0% 24
19 Jan (NV) 38 51.4% 36
26 Jan (SC) 63 56.8% 48
5 Feb (Super Tuesday) 906 50.8% 876
9 Feb (LA, NE, WA, Virgin Is.) 1012 52.1% 931
10 Feb (ME) 1027 52.2% 940
12 Feb (DC, MD, VA) 1134 53.2% 996
19 Feb (HI, WI) 1185 53.6% 1024

obama-ahead-08-02-20.jpg

The RCP data still include estimates and don’t include 56 delegates that have nominally already been allocated (26 are with Edwards, 30 RCP aren’t willing to estimate one way or the other, but since 10 of those 30 are in Hawaii, it seems safe to say that they’ll break for Obama overall). For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the 56 break down as 30 to Obama and 26 to Clinton (that’s 53.5% of them to Obama). That gives us 1215 for Obama and 1050 to Clinton to-date.

There are 988 pledged delegates to go (giving 3253 in total). To win the pledged delegates race, a candidate needs 1627. That means that Obama only needs 412, or 41.7%, of the remaining 988 to-be-pledged delegates. Clinton needs 577, or 58.4%, of the remainder.

As an indication of how tough that will be, Clinton’s best vote performance so far was 57% in New York. She has only managed to break 55% of delegates pledged in 9 out of 37 primaries/caucuses so far and that’s including American Samoa that only had three delegates to give. If she is going to do it, her wins in Texas (193 to-be-pledged delegates) and Ohio (141) will need to be huge. I just can’t see it happening.

The polls do have Clinton up with 50.2% vs. 42.6% in Texas and 52.7% vs. 38.0% in Ohio on average. That’s a pretty big undecided gap, but I can’t see it all breaking for Clinton given the apparent movement towards Obama in the more recent polls. By comparison, the betting markets at InTrade put Obama at a 68% chance of winning in Texas and a 49% chance of winning in Ohio. I suspect that the betting market is a little overly pro-Obama, just as it was in the lead-up to New Hampshire, but just like in New Hampshire, I think that although Hillary Clinton will win the headline vote, she’ll barely win in the delegates pledged.

So, my prediction: Come the 5th of March, Obama will still be ahead in pledged delegates and will probably still be ahead after adding in the ridiculously apportioned super-delegates by the Main Stream Media estimates. Look for it to be all over bar the shouting in two weeks.

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Skills vs. Education

I’m no Andrew Leigh or Andrew Norton when it comes to thinking about education and the economics thereof, but what the hell … I wrote the following back in 2005 for some reason and thought it worth sharing:

I see some confusion about the differences between ‘educated’ and ‘skilled’ that I think many people are unappreciative of, unaware of, or quite deliberately gloss over. In part, I guess, it’s affected by the hodgepodge of meanings attached to the word ‘education’ itself. It’s certainly the acquisition of something, but is it ‘skills’, or is it ‘An Education’ (capitalisation deliberate)?

“An Education” is what some people might refer to as intellectual spinach – it’s good for you, eat it! – and is the logical extension of what the US calls Social Studies. It’s a look at history, the make-up of your society, your government, the philosophies that underpin it and so forth. It is, in essence, what used to be regarded as essential in the British upper-middle classes for spitting out a ‘gentleman’ and could perhaps be summarised as “the world and your place in it”.

Skills, on the other hand, are what make you productive and therefore, valuable, to the economy. Skills are what businesses want and to a certain extent, all they’re interested in from their workforce.

The confusion comes about because, by simple virtue of our humanity, technology progresses. The things we do continually require less effort – fewer inputs, less physical work – to produce the same output. As such, the history and future of mankind as economic agents is entirely about a progression away from the physical and towards the intellectual and with that moves the skill-requirements of industry. This has made the acquisition of skills and the acquisition of “An Education” overlap. To excel in either now requires critical reasoning and imagination.

This hasn’t escaped the politicians of the world and when they speak of a skilled workforce being needed to take the economy forward, they’re talking about intellectual skills. They see universities as factories for producing skilled workers and this grates with those in academia who see universities as secular temples – places where supplicants go to seek enlightenment.

As society has progressed and the intellectual demands of the economy have grown, we’ve seen a corresponding increase in the number of years that a person spends in schooling before entering the workforce. I don’t doubt in the slightest that when people complain that two or three extra years is just blocking a person from being productive was made with the same force back when the push first came for most people to finish grade 12 at school rather than stopping at 10. Whatever the extension, the gist of it is to emphasise the intellectual development for longer and postpone the skills training until afterwards. The latest suggestion is just to hold off on the “skills” for a masters and to work on your critical reasoning through your undergrad.

This sounds fine in theory (we live longer and we earn more in real terms, so the cost of delaying our entry to the work force pays off), but it faces an ultimate dilemma in my opinion, and not just that we’re running out of academic levels to force kids through. The years of schooling that we force on our young has now extended well past the time of their physical and, to a large extent, psychological maturing. A kid is no longer expected to buck against the unfairness of the world while welding something in a factory, but to do it at university. That’s fine so long as there’s development of some kind to be had – we’ve always tied education to development – but what about when the person is a physically, psychologically and emotionally mature adult?

The technological progress of the world is not just continuing, either – it’s accelerating. That means that the rate at which the insufficiently skilled lose their value is only going to increase and with it, the demand for mid-life education is going to grow.

Thus, to my mind, there should be an almost fundamental rethink on how we allocate the fraction of our lives in education. Instead of doing all of it in one long burst at the start of our lives, we should be doing a large part of it initially, while we physically and psychologically develop, but then spread the rest out over time as we need it. Make the start-of-life education first and foremost about surviving in society, then focus on essential, universal skills and the development of critical thinking before just touching, broadly, on your career of choice. Then work for a time before returning to study to focus and specialise.

In addition to not forcing people to stay as underling students past their maturity, this allows people to change career direction with reasonable ease and for those people who don’t find what they want at university to not be discriminated against for the rest of their lives because education is a process and not an event that they missed.

Essential skills are the things that we probably all groan about: Typing, computer-use intuition, communication skills, both written and verbal. The things, in essence, that make a productive (though boring and uninspired) office worker.

This also addresses part of the question of university funding. The argument for free education centres around the fact that students have never had a job and so can’t pay for it up-front. The argument for making them pay up-front anyway hinges on an efficient capital market that allows them to borrow against future earnings. [Note added in 2008:  I was pretty clearly ignoring the idea that parents could afford to pay the lot for their kids] Continuing education as I’ve described it would only happen after a person has been working for some time and has had a chance to save, so the problem is moot: Make them pay.

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Paul Krugman: Hanrahan of the Econ-Blogosphere

I’ve got a lot of time for Paul Krugman. People just love to hate the guy, or at least dismiss him as a crank and wonder what he’s going to do when Mr. Bush moves back to Texas, but the man was – for years! – practically the lone beacon of criticism of the Whitehouse in a country that seems to want to beatify its presidents. You can debate the good and bad points of the W. Bush presidency all you like, but the fact remains that America is a country that doesn’t like dissing their sitting president. It seems to make them feel dirty or “unAmerican” or something.  Try asking the Poms to lay off their P.M. for a week.

Anyway, this latest piece by Prof. Krugman got me thinking:

But the plunge in consumer confidence in recent weeks is pretty startling. The chart below shows the University of Michigan index; consumer confidence is now lower than it ever was during the 2001 recession and aftermath, and close to its worst levels during the early 90s, when the unemployment rate went well above 7 percent.

Bit by bit, the evidence is mounting that the wheels are coming off this economy.

I don’t want to dispute the facts of the brief post, just the sentiment. The “wheels are coming off”? Come on. The U.S. is probably entering, if it hasn’t already entered, a recession. That is not the wheels coming off the economy. That is a perfectly normal phenomenon and Professor Krugman knows it. It’s also arguably a necessary phenomenon and I’d be stunned if Professor Krugman didn’t know those arguments. If you want an example of an economy with the wheels off, look at Zimbabwe. Now that, to mix our tired metaphors, is a train wreck.

All of which reminded me of a famous (in Australia, anyway) poem by Patrick Hartigan (1878-1952) writing under the pseudonym of John O’Brien:

Said Hanrahan

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
In accents most forlorn,
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn.

The congregation stood about,
Coat-collars to the ears,
And talked of stock, and crops, and drought,
As it had done for years.

“It’s looking crook,” said Daniel Croke;
“Bedad, it’s cruke, me lad,
For never since the banks went broke
Has seasons been so bad.”

“It’s dry, all right,” said young O’Neil,
With which astute remark
He squatted down upon his heel
And chewed a piece of bark.

And so around the chorus ran
“It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt.”
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

“The crops are done; ye’ll have your work
To save one bag of grain;
From here way out to Back-o’-Bourke
They’re singin’ out for rain.

“They’re singin’ out for rain,” he said,
“And all the tanks are dry.”
The congregation scratched its head,
And gazed around the sky.

“There won’t be grass, in any case,
Enough to feed an ass;
There’s not a blade on Casey’s place
As I came down to Mass.”

“If rain don’t come this month,” said Dan,
And cleared his throat to speak —
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“If rain don’t come this week.”

A heavy silence seemed to steal
On all at this remark;
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed a piece of bark.

“We want an inch of rain, we do,”
O’Neil observed at last;
But Croke “maintained” we wanted two
To put the danger past.

“If we don’t get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

In God’s good time down came the rain;
And all the afternoon
On iron roof and window-pane
It drummed a homely tune.

And through the night it pattered still,
And lightsome, gladsome elves
On dripping spout and window-sill
Kept talking to themselves.

It pelted, pelted all day long,
A-singing at its work,
Till every heart took up the song
Way out to Back-o’-Bourke.

And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“If this rain doesn’t stop.”

And stop it did, in God’s good time;
And spring came in to fold
A mantle o’er the hills sublime
Of green and pink and gold.

And days went by on dancing feet,
With harvest-hopes immense,
And laughing eyes beheld the wheat
Nid-nodding o’er the fence.

And, oh, the smiles on every face,
As happy lad and lass
Through grass knee-deep on Casey’s place
Went riding down to Mass.

While round the church in clothes genteel
Discoursed the men of mark,
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed his piece of bark.

“There’ll be bush-fires for sure, me man,
There will, without a doubt;
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

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Why is the US Fed lowering interest rates?

Continuing on from my previous wondering about how panic-driven and effective current US (monetary) policy is, I notice these two posts from Paul Krugman …

Ben Bernanke has cut interest rates a lot since last summer. But can he make a difference? Or is he just, as the old line has it, pushing on a string?

Here’s the Fed funds target rate (red line) — which is what the Fed actually controls — versus the interest rate on Baa corporate bonds (blue line), which is probably a better guide to what matters for actual business spending.

It’s pretty grim. Basically, deteriorating credit conditions have offset everything the Fed has done. Doubleplus ungood.

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… and Brad DeLong …

Further cuts in the federal funds rate are on the way. Ben Bernanke is talking about how we are in a slow-moving financial crisis of DeLong Type II: one in which large financial institutions are insolvent–“pressure on bank balance sheets”–and in which lower short-term interest rates and a steeper yield curve are a way of providing institutions with the life jackets they need to paddle to shore.

Larry Meyers has pointed out that the BBB yield is no lower than it was in July–that all the easing has had no effect on the cost of capital that the financial markets feed to the “real economy,” and hence that Fed policy today is no more stimulative than it was last summer.

I’m more inclined to agree with Brad’s assessment than Paul’s implicit prediction of gloom, although it depends on what you think the Fed should be looking at.  Paul is clearly hoping for a decrease in long-term rates so-as to stimulate the real economy, while Brad is simply noting that steeper yield curves, manifested here through a drop in base rates and no movement in longer-term paper, are pumping up banks’ profit flows, which will help them deal with the hideous losses from the sub-prime mess, the monoline insurer implosion and all the other nasties out there.

This seems like pretty clear “Bernanke put” behaviour to me.  The banks need the short-term increase in profit flows in order to stay solvent in the medium-term.  Whether Mr Bernanke is pushing down the base rate because the banks can’t lift the yields on long-term debt or because he doesn’t want them to (since that would hit the real economy) is a moot point.

This doesn’t change the fact that Bernanke is slopping out the good times to save the industry from its own mistakes.  It’s probably safe to say that there’ll be no more knuckles rapped (except maybe those of the ratings agencies), so the real question is whether they’ll be allowed to make the same mistakes again …

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Oh please, oh please, oh please

Mr. Rudd, call Andrew Leigh.  Call him now.  Speaking on Indigenous policy, he writes:

  1. School attendance rates are appalling, and as Woody Allen says “90% of life is just showing up”. So pay Indigenous children to attend school.
  2. Literacy and numeracy gaps are large, and part of the difference may be teacher quality. So the federal government should promise bonuses of up to $50,000 to teachers who can get large improvements in performance in Indigenous schools. Teaching disadvantaged kids is the most important job in Australia – so why does no-one doing it earn a six-figure salary?
  3. Indigenous people are overrepresented in Australia’s jails, which do little more than warehousing. Since many are now private, why not rewrite the contracts, making payment conditional on post-release recidivism and earnings? Let’s create incentives for those who run jails to do more education, and less clock-watching.
  4. A major impediment to children attending school is drunkenness in communities. But a ban is a drastic measure. Let’s allow communities to set their own tax rates on alcohol, and keep the revenue (remember, a ban is effectively a tax rate equivalent to the cost of petrol to the nearest no-ban town).
  5. As many Indigenous policies as possible (including those above) should be subjected to rigorous randomised trials. Those that fail should be discarded without sentiment, and those that succeed should be expanded. We know from the headline indicators that many Indigenous policies haven’t worked; it’s time to start sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

Amen.

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The endless, cacophonic debates of pure democracy

Believing in something and being willing to act on it are two different things. It is terribly difficult to confront authority. Confrontation itself is hard. It’s awkward; uncomfortable. Your face may flush, you might sweat, or stammer. Worse, you can find your mind slipping. Your memory may fail you, the speed or rigour of your thought may lessen and the strength of your argument weaken as a result.

When the confrontation is with authority the difficulty is even worse. Many people have an instinctive acquiescence towards figures of power or authority. It can feel wrong in the gut to openly disagree with them. If you fear that the confrontation may result in bridges being burned, or if you feel that you owe the figure of authority in some way, it can be impossible.

Understand that I am not referring to the discussion of something that you feel ought to change with people you consider your peers. That is easy and even serves as a sort of release-valve for tension on the topic by letting you know that you’re not alone in your beliefs. A simple suggestion to a figure of seniority can often be comfortably managed by most. I am speaking of a push for change; seeking actively to change the actions, if not the very mindset, of an authority figure who may be reticent to the idea.

This is one of the reasons, if not the ultimate justification, for anonymous ballots. The safety of anonymity can free people of their inhibitions and allow them to speak as they truly feel. But what of organisations that do not have a democratic structure? What of the hierarchical power structures of firms and government agencies, of schools and universities and charities?

Hierarchies allow for genuine decision making over the endless, cacophonic debates of pure democracy, but they come at the cost of hampering information flow (at an extreme, it becomes unidirectional) and making people at the bottom feel ineffective or inconsequential.

As a society, we seem to have settled on the idea of power being locally hierarchical, but globally competitive between those separate hierarchies. This concept works best when those hierarchies compete not just in the ideas that they represent, but also for the individuals that they are made up from. The competition for individuals should mean that there is a countervailing force to the negative aspects of hierarchies: in order to attract and keep the best people, the hierarchy must work to involve those people in its thinking.

I am fine with this concept – I do not support radical decentralisation – but we need to recognise that people are not free to costlessly move between hierarchies. This means that the incentive to involve them in the hierarchies’ thinking processes is lessened. It seems reasonable to assume that as the cost of moving to another hierarchy as a fraction of individual benefit gained goes down, the more involved a person will be invited to be. In equilibrium, we would therefore expect the degree of involvement to decrease monotonically as you move down any given hierarchy.

While I do not wish for a pure democracy in everything, I think that the optimum would involve deliberate mechanisms for allowing ideas and information to pass upwards through a hierarchy. Perhaps an open market for ideas on each level, with those “voted best” being passed up to the level above?

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Are we at the tipping point?

Just after the Maine primary, I wondered whether Obama may have been in front all along on the basis that he has been ahead all the way in pledged delegates and the super delegates will probably flock to the leader among pledged delegates in order to build the appearance of unanimity and avoid a floor fight at the convention.

We’ve just had the primaries in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia and as expected, Barack Obama appears to have won all three by strong margins. Here are the updated table and graph, although the data for the 12th of February are still very much estimates:

Date Barack Obama: running total Barack Obama: share of pledged delegates Hillary Clinton: running total Hillary Clinton: share of pledged delegates
3 Jan (IA) 16 51.6% 15 48.4%
8 Jan (NH) 25 51.0% 24 49.0%
19 Jan (NV) 38 51.4% 36 48.6%
26 Jan (SC) 63 56.8% 48 43.2%
5 Feb (Super Tuesday) 903 50.1% 898 49.9%
9 Feb (LA, NE, WA, Virgin Is.) 998 51.4% 944 48.6%
10 Feb (ME) 1013 51.5% 953 48.5%
12 Feb (DC, MD, VA) 1111 52.5% 1006 47.5%

obama-ahead-08-02-13.jpg

And just as I predicted (well, Chris Bowers predicted and I agreed), we are starting to see twitchy movement in the super delegates. On the one hand, we have people calling for them to vote according to the will of their constituents. Ryan Avent is typical:

[I]t seems that Obama has an excellent chance at winning the District primary tomorrow. Should that be the case, it would be incredibly unfortunate if the District’s superdelegates essentially undid the wishes of the voting public … It is especially galling that D.C. Councilmembers, so familiar with the frustration of disenfranchisement, would contribute to the further erosion of the District’s electoral clout.

… and the super delegates are listening. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives and one of the most influential of currently-neutral super delegates, is “leaning” towards Obama:

A senior adviser to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, has suggested that she – along with other “party elders” – will step into the ring to end this extraordinary contest if it threatens Democratic hopes of winning back the White House or maintaining control over Congress. Ms Pelosi says that she is “torn” and that “the people will speak – that’s the beauty of a democracy,” before adding: “My focus is on re-electing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.”

Her voice would carry great authority among uncommitted super-delegates on Capitol Hill – and she is said to be “leaning” towards Mr Obama. “The party Establishment is not going to turn its back on a candidate who is generating this tremendous excitement and bringing all these new voters into the political process,” said a source close to her. Mr Obama’s team are pressing the same message, especially to members of Congress in districts where he has already won and who may not wish to alienate their core vote in an election year.

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Tyranny and the ethical removal of children

I promise this’ll be my last post on the whole apology business for a while. 🙂 In response to my entry, “An apology for what?“, Cam Riley posted this comment:

Tyranny is tyranny – and removing children from their parents due to their skin colour is a tyrannous act. The goal of republican government is to remove all tyranny from the system. Consequently, past tyrannous acts need to be recognized as such.

I responded pretty quickly with:

I’m not denying that it was an act of tyranny (in the sense of oppression, not in the sense of a single ruler), only that the word “tyranny” is one with massive emotional and judgemental baggage in the same way as “genocide”. Its use may be justified in a literal sense, but it will rarely serve to improve the situation in a world of real politik. In any event, I accept the pragmatic necessity of an apology even if I do not fully accept the moral obligation to apologise today for something that was honestly believed to be just at the time.

I was thinking about this over dinner and it seems to me that there are three largely distinct issues at point here:

  1. The disenfranchisement of a people, meaning that any act of government concerning them was an act of tyranny
  2. The ethical question of when it is acceptable to remove a child from its family
  3. The question of whether the policy of forced removal “worked” in the sense of improving the livelihoods of those children

As I previously mentioned, I do not deny that the stolen generations represented an act of tyranny. That is a definitional consequence of Aboriginal disenfranchisement. But a tyrant may make a good decision that benefits people, just as a democracy may make a bad decision that harms them. There is no disputing the injustice of Aboriginal disenfranchisement in and of itself, but it was parallel to and, at worst, an enabler of the tragedy of the stolen generations, not the cause of it and therefore not the source of the moral wrong.

On the second point, society today still accepts that it is sometimes warranted to forcibly remove a child from its family. This is a terribly difficult decision, but as a society, we judge that it is ethical when that child is held to be in considerable danger. In the UK, for example,

A court can only make a care order if it is sure that:

  • the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm
  • the harm is caused by the child’s parents
  • the harm would be caused because of insufficient care being given to the child by the parents in the future
  • the child is likely to suffer harm because they are beyond parental control

I accept as fact that the Australian government’s policy of removal was based, for the most part, on the ethnicity of the children taken and not their individual safety. That on its own was immoral and warrants reparation to balance the damage done. The problem is that, while the act was wrong, it was performed under the honest (but false) belief that it was the best thing to do. At the time, I have no doubt, it would have been widely believed that although the removal of children was regrettable, the ends justified the means.

Which brings us to the third point. I seriously wonder whether the stolen generation would be as much of an issue today if the policy had been a roaring success. What if the democracy, acting tyrannically over the disenfranchised, made a bad decision that nevertheless turned out to be beneficial to all involved, with Aboriginals today enjoying educational, health and income outcomes equal to non-indigenous Australians? It ought to still be as much of an issue, but I suspect that it wouldn’t be.

The difficulty in passing judgement on the drafters of the Aboriginal Protection Act (1869) is that while we have the benefit of perfect hindsight, they did not enjoy the benefit of perfect foresight. Does anyone seriously claim that they still would have gone ahead with it if they had they known – and comprehended – what the full consequences of their actions would be?

All of which means that I find myself (a) supporting calls for reparation and (b) opposing the apology on moral grounds, but supporting the necessity of it on pragmatic grounds.