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.

How to be a Fatalist

Of the four worldviews of grid-group cultural theory, the one cultural theorists themselves most often exclude from the discussion is fatalism. They do this by claiming it is ‘passive’ (Michael Thompson), or ‘isolate’ (Mary Douglas), and by claiming fatalism opts out of policy debates, or is excluded by the others by definition. This betrays a real bias and a failure of imagination on the part of researchers.

Continue reading to find out about fatalist activism and the fatal nation. Continue reading How to be a Fatalist

Economic Crisis – perhaps now we’ll have some decent music

A recent article about 1980s British band the Specials makes me ponder the link between economic downturns and quality popular music.

It was an era of strikes, unemployment, recession and a hundred thousand school pencil cases with black and white checks scratched on them…

So it would be nice to hope for better pop now the bottom’s dropped out of the economy. At least in the midst of shipwreck we could be buoyed up by music.

But before getting our hopes up, let’s pause and remember that while Coventry gave us Jerry Dammers, Terry Hall and the Specials, just along the road in Birmingham, gearing up for world domination was – Duran Duran.

Economics of the Singularity

Crooked Timber has been running a ‘book event‘ on the economic ideas of science fiction writer Charlie Stross.

In case you haven’t come across him, Stross is a prolific (300,000 words a year) writer of extravagant ideas who lives in Scotland. His approach to pulp sci-fi is reminiscent of Philip K Dick’s. Sure it’s commercial, but with Stross as with Dick, it’s also art.

Perhaps the thought of economics puts you off an otherwise good read. Or perhaps the thought of science fiction puts you off some otherwise good economics. But for anyone still left in the room, the discussion, including posts by economists Paul Krugman and John Quiggin, as well as by writer Ken MacLeod, is well worth reading.

Warning: cheap joke ahead.

Of course, some might say all economics is fiction…

What the world needs now is… efficiency plus resilience

Economist Bernard Lietaer has an interesting paper on handling the current financial crisis. It’s based on the interplay between efficiency and resilience.

http://www.lietaer.com/images/White_Paper_on_Systemic_Bank_Crises_December.pdf

Lietaer’s main point is that in going all out for efficiency, economic managers have failed to pay attention to the importance of resilience, which requires such seemingly ‘inefficient’ features such as redundancy.

He is also concerned with the very idea of a general equilibrium theory in economics, when financial systems are, for him, better seen as being in dynamic disequilibrium.

As Lietaer notes,

“The misclassification of economics as a system in equilibrium is brilliantly explained in chapters 2 and 3 of Beinhocker, Eric The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Business School Press, 2006)” (Lietaer 2008:15)

Competely independently of this, but on a related topic, the Association of American Geographers has a session at its Annual conference in March entitled:

From Growth to Resilience – Changing Perspectives on Regional Development.

Dear Davos, How much is there?

Rupert Murdoch at the World Economic Forum

News channel CNN is giving ‘influential bloggers’ a chance to ask world business leaders a burning question at the forthcoming world economic forum.

The question Fourcultures would ask is:

How much is there?

This question is deceptively simple. Think about it for a moment, then if you like, take the little poll to the right of this page.

The answers given at Davos would increase awareness of the way our assumptions are conditioned by the four biases described by grid-group cultural theory. Given the context – a meeting of world business leaders – it can be predicted that the most popular answer by far would be:

‘There is plenty, as long as we harness our ingenuity and hard work’.

It would speak of, in Rupert Murdoch’s words, ‘what happens when human talent, ingenuity and ambition is given free rein’. This is the world view of the individualists, for whom the world is a cornucopia, to be unlocked by innovation and personal prowess.

The second most popular answer would be:

‘There is enough, as long as we regulate it properly’.

This is the hierarchical approach, and it is to be remembered that, internally, many large businesses are effectively hierarchical bureaucracies.

Way behind would be

‘There’s not enough – we’ve got to change our values, share more and be more frugal’.

Unfortunately this is the answer of most egalitarians, including a large part of the green movement. I say unfortunately, simply because it’s hard for them to see that when they speak with business leaders they’re often speaking a different language.

Also unpopular would be

‘How should I know how much there is, let’s just spin the wheel and see where the ball lands!’

This is the fatalist worldview, and it’s extremely populareverywhere except Davos. But in their spare time, the business leaders of Davos may well apply exactly this approach to life; indeed there was something of this about the financial markets prior to the recent crash.

These four answers to the question ‘how much is there?’ don’t just contradict each other, they actively compete.

So when the Transition Culture website (a meticulously egalitarian and wonderful endeavour) works out its question for CNN, it’s hardly surprising that the question chosen starts with the words

‘On a finite planet…’

Picture the business leaders at Davos rolling their eyes and saying ‘Let’s just stop right there – who says it’s finite?’

For as long as business leaders think the environmentalists are really just defeatists, we have a big, big problem. Conversely, when the environmentalists learn to translate their words for the benefit of their hearers, we begin to have a solution.