Feb 2009 – Page 3 – Four Cultures

Fatalist economic policy in Australia

As part of an economic recovery package worth $42 billion, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is going to give handouts of cash to Australians to the value of $12.7 billion. This has been derided by sceptics as ‘the next blind throw of the dice‘.

It could perhaps be more helpfully seen as another example of fatalist activism – a throw of the dice, but not necessarily blind. Faced with a seemingly intractable and capricious situation which Australia has little control over (the global economic downturn), government policy in the Fatalist mode seeks to introduce yet more capriciousness – ‘contrived randomness’ is the phrase coined by Oxford Professor of Government, Christopher Hood. Perhaps it is some good luck meant to balance out the prevailing bad luck.

Certainly, to this recipient of the ‘bonus’, the world seems a little more capricious than it did yesterday. The effect of the handout is similar to the feeling of winning a very small lottery prize. As an unexpected windfall it devalues just a little the idea of budgeting. Should I expect another handout later in the year – or not?

Is this a good use of public money? One newspaper article claimed that after the last such ‘economic stimulus package’, spending on gambling rose by $40 million. I find it almost impossible to see how it can contribute effectively to improving the economy. But then, I’m not persuaded by the Fatalist worldview, so the logic of this move seems incomprehensible to me.

In Australia, the original Fatal Nation, this kind of thing happens all the time.

See also:

How to be a Fatalist

Fatalist policy in action

How to resolve the GM debate

There are many contemporary issues where the four cultures can be seen hard at work, jostling with one another to claim the high ground, to dominate the debate, to shape our understanding of reality. One such arena is the polarised issue of genetically modified crops.

A report has been issued by the UK think tank Chatham House warning that the nation needs to pay more attention to food production if it is to address potential future food supply constraints.

As part of this discussion it is argued that the public should now drop its unsubstantiated opposition to GM crops to enable more people to be fed. Any other course of action is regarded as no more than elitist privilege.

The analysis suggested by grid-group cultural theory is that when facing the facts as a matter of urgency is advocated, what people are really trying to do is to shape the world to be more in keeping with one of four basic worldviews, or cultural biases.
Continue reading How to resolve the GM debate

If you only read one Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech this week…

…you could do worse than to make it this one:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahneman-lecture.html

Economist Daniel Kahneman at his most accessible (not particularly) and relevant (very). You can also watch it.

“people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgemental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors.” Tversky & Kahneman, 1974: 1124

If you prefer your behavioural economics a little less dry, you could try instead, Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational – apparently there’s an expanded edition coming out in May, but I suspect that as a behavioural economist he’s pulling a fast one on us. “Expanded? Must be even better!!”

http://www.predictablyirrational.com

The Institutional Dynamics of Culture – a review

For those with a serious interest in Grid-group cultural theory, an indispensable anthology has recently been published in two volumes extending to 1134 pages.

Part of Ashgate’s International Library of Essays in Anthropology, The Institutional Dynamics of Culture is edited by Perri 6 and Gerald Mars (professors of social policy and anthropology respectively) and includes 52 of the most important essays from the field published between 1980 and 2004.

The first volume groups together essays covering Theory, Methods, Politics and History, while the second volume covers Business, work and organisations, Environment, technology and risk, Crime and, lastly, Consumption.

Some of these are reprints of leading chapters in seminal books or reports (for instance Mary Douglas’s essay ‘Risk and Blame’, from her 1992 monograph of the same name). But on the whole the book is a careful herding together of more or less dispersed papers from a wide variety of scholarly and professional journals – a fact with in itself demonstrates the sheer breadth of dissemination of the theory across disciplinary boundaries and its potential and actual application in a wide variety of settings.

But the entirely laudable breadth of intellectual reach of The Institutional Dynamics of Culture does present a few questions.

First, what exactly is it that links all these ideas together? Does the appellation neo-Durkheimian, favoured by co-editor Perri 6 (see Vol. 1, chs 6 & 9), do full justice to a theory which has suffered somewhat for going under a number of different monickers over several decades (Mamadouh 1999)? That the same could be asked of the term, institutional theory of culture, foregrounded here, demonstrates that the naming issue – and by implication the coherence issue – has not yet gone away.

Second, while the breadth of interests represented in the collection is surely a great strength, there is the age-old danger that a theory of everything ends up explaining nothing (but see Rescher 2000). The collection makes one wonder what grid-group cultural theory can’t explain (c.f. Boudon 1983).

This leads to a question about dissent. The anthology could perhaps have been strengthened by including a section of Critique. There remains no single location where one may consult those cultured despisers of grid-group cultural theory, of whom there are more than a few (Boholm 1996; Sjöberg 1998, for instance).

While the high price of the two volume set is likely to put off all but institutional purchasers, this gathering and sorting of key materials nevertheless represents the most important publication of this type in the field to date. It is likely to prove indispensable to teachers and researchers, as well as to advanced students. That no essays published after 2004 are included in the collection does nothing to detract from this. For making such a diverse and important body of work accessible for the first time in one place, the editors are to be applauded. No doubt this collection will stimulate the further development and application of the grid-group paradigm in social science and beyond.

Perri 6 and Gerald Mars, Eds, (2008 ) The Institutional Dynamics of Culture (2 volumes). London: Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-7546-2617-6

A. Boholm (1996) Risk perception and social anthropology: Critique of cultural theory, Ethnos 61 (1-2): 64-84.

Raymond Boudon (1983) Why Theories of Social Change Fail: Some Methodological Thoughts, Public Opinion Quarterly 47:143-160.

Virginie Mamadouh (1999) Grid-Group Cultural Theory: An Introduction, GeoJournal 47(3): 395-409 .

Nicholas Rescher (2000) The Price of an Ultimate Theory, Philosophia Naturalis, 37:1-20.

L. Sjöberg (1998 ) World views, political attitudes, and risk perception. Risk: Health, Safety and Environment, 9: 137-152.

Contents page:

Click to access Institutional_Dynamics_of_Culture_Cont.pdf

Fatalist Policy in Action

Fourcultures recently noted how Australia is a good example of a fatal nation – a country where policy is in danger of being dominated by fatalism, to the exclusion of other worldviews.

Now an article in the Sydney Morning Herald provides a clear opportunity to see how this works in practice.

According to the article by Debra Jopson, NSW farmers have lost confidence in official weather forecasts because they do not perceive them to be reliable.

[Professor] Kevin Parton, of Charles Sturt University’s Institute of Land, Water and Society, said the most widely used forecasting system was the CSIRO’s Yield Prophet, and the bureau’s charts “are a vague guide but of little use to actual decisions”.

There are three moments in the construction of fatalist policy.

First there is the perception of control by fate, that life is a game of chance, that the world is capricious and there is little to be done to change this. With the Australian climate, the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is largely to blame. This alters weather patterns every two to seven years, and is notoriously difficult to predict, making the weather even more fickle than elsewhere:

The [meteorology] bureau’s acting chief climatologist, Michael Coughlan, said the criticism was fair. The statistically based forecast system used for more than two decades was flawed because the influence of El Nino bringing predominantly dry weather and La Nina bringing rains was not understood well enough.

But this recognition of randomness is only the first step in the construction of fatalist policy.

The second crucial step is to act in ways that compound the randomness, as though to prove the point: life indeed is a game of chance and we will make it more so. Oxford professor of government Christopher Hood has termed this ‘contrived randomness’ which can

‘turn public organization into something less like a predictable slot-machine than a gaming machine, making it difficult to predict in detail where the chips will fall at any one time’ (Hood et al 1999:16).

In this case the Bureau of Meteorology itself is engaging in fatalist activism by making the weather forecast mimic the elements of a game of chance:

THERE are “mixed odds” for rainfall across the nation being above the seasonal median in the three months until the end of April, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s latest long-range forecast.

Using its cautious approach of stating the odds, it says that in NSW the chance of exceeding median annual rainfall during February to April is 40 to 60 per cent. This means “above average falls are about as equally likely as below average falls”, it said.

The result of this active fatalism, the third moment, is that with the situation of randomness having been compounded by policy, the subjects of such policy now find it harder to operate in any mode other than fatalism:

Weather forecasts were as reliable as a Lotto draw, Coonamble Shire Council said in a submission to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into government drought support.

A vicious circle of fatalism is thus constructed, seeking to promote its own worldview and to exclude all others.

The Fatalist policy process can now be described thus:

Perception of control by fate;
Fatalist Activism produces contrived randomness;
Vicious circle of Fatalism increases perception of control by fate.

As it happens, the other worldviews described by grid-group cultural theory – individualism, hierarchy and egalitarianism – also operate like this. They too seek to create vicious circles in which only their own perspectives have credibility. But it is important to recognise that Fatalism is no different from the others in this respect. In promoting itself Fatalism is no more passive than any of the other worldviews. Fatalism does not vacate the policy arena because it perceives it all to be a game of chance. Instead it seeks to make policy even more fatalist than it otherwise would be. This can easily be overlooked because it operates in fatalist, not individualist, hierarchical or egalitarian, ways.

Hopefully, the case of the Australian weather forecasters makes it clear what this means in practice.

More at how to be a fatalist.