One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather it becomes a destiny when mixed with certain kinds of choices and chances. In The Longterm Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades, Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has shown that Africa’s exceptional poverty is directly linked to the slave trade:

if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.

If Jared Diamond is right, then Africa’s exposure to tropical diseases and the inadequacy of tropical agriculture suggest that investment in public health is the key to Africa’s future healthy and eventual equilibrium with the rest of the world. This thesis is popular among those who see our responsibilities towards Africa in the light of a the duty of assistance, rather than identifying some deeper obligations like recompense or reparation. It also appeals to our sense of pity, rather than invoking the much messier emotions of guilt and responsibility.

If Nunn is right, slave raiding destroyed institutions in the very most developed parts of Africa, shifting local comparative advantages in the continent away from institutionally stable, politically cohesive, and agriculturally rich coastal and agricultural societies towards remote, rugged, and difficult to access societies. Thus, we should invest in the things we destroyed: institutional stability and political cohesion in coastal and agricultural nations. I have independent reasons for supporting the institutional hypothesis, insofar as I suspect that institutions are the best tools for producing legitimate outcomes and that legitimacy has a greater impact on growth and justice than public health or the forms of production. Still, it’s nice to have some confirmation that the worst thing that human beings have ever done to each other is still the same: not genocide, which is a remarkably modern and weird form for our aggressive nihilism to take, but good, old fashioned domination.

Some short pieces derived from Nunn’s work:
Slave trade and African underdevelopment
The Blessing of Bad Geography

All great philosophical movements need an anthem:

Or buy the t-shirt:

Consider the story of SlimVirgin, a controversial Wikipedia administrator. The last two links tell the story of a troubled young woman, who lost a friend in the Lockerbie bombing of PanAm 103 and was personally involved in the investigation, and perhaps for a time employed by British intelligence, who then went on to create and edit Wikipedia articles related to these events that are “seriously skewed in directions that she has promoted and protected.” Alternatively, the lost friend was a cover and her work for British intelligence was aimed at disrupting the investigation, and now subsequent reports of it.

You know, I think Colbert might be on to something. Truthiness prevails.

DarkForest asks:

Lets say that everything went electric. Cars, power plants, factories, everything. How many nuclear plants (using current technology) would we need to produce?

The first answers are straight mathematical computations from the backs of napkins, and we get estimates ranging from 1000 to 4100 regular nuclear plants, to 200 thorium plants. Then somebody chimes in with the energy efficiency argument. Basically, increasing efficiency is cheaper than increasing capacity, and the return on investment for energy-efficient light-bulbs is three times as high as the most efficient solar installation. He advocates:

[A]doption of public policy that rewards end-use efficiency and penalizes inefficiency, so that we actually end up with the same or better end-use services [than increased carbon/nuclear production] while driving total energy demand down.

This is straight out of Amory Lovins’ Soft Energy Paths. I love this argument, because I love the clever turn back to economic efficiency justifying green policy, rather than pitting industry against the environment. But it doesn’t stop there.

Someone with the deeply satisfying screenname ‘Dasein‘ chimes in to argue against efficiency. “Money that is saved through efficiencies is reinvested in new energy-intensive applications,” he says. He goes on to explain:

You change your old appliances for new, energy-efficient ones. You change all your lightbulbs to compact fluorescents. As a result, you save $200 a year on energy, say. Do you just put that in a bank account? No, you buy a flight to Hawaii. Has your CO2 footprint gone down? If the power had been produced by a nuclear station, it might just have gone up.

A business invests in energy efficiency and saves a million dollars a year at its factory. What does it do? It drops prices on its products, allowing it to sell more for the same profit, and put the savings towards expanding capacity. Lower prices mean more people buy more of the product. Gains in efficiency are offset by increases in absolute production enabled by the efficiency.

I have to be honest: I’ve never thought of this before. It’s an extension of the basic Heideggerian argument about efficiency, which is that when we get into the mode of treating things like ‘standing reserve’ we’re completely constrained by this limitless attempt to store and harness the world, rather than letting it be. I think that might be right… but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it translated back into economics! The same thing seems to hold for gasoline usage, which is actually responsive to prices and thus cannot be curtailed through hybridization alone. Economists call it the ‘rebound effect,’ and the initial Lovinsian (who goes by flabdablet) responded with this report: apparently, no more than 40% of energy saved through efficiency is reinvested, and with automobiles it’s less than that: 10-30%, probably.

Sadly, that report depends on single sector evaluations of energy usage. It doesn’t measure the increased usage of gasoline due to space cooling efficiencies, for instance. While some people might work less if their energy bill was smaller, markets in general find ways to absorb efficiencies into increased productivity. This is easiest to see in industrial increases in efficiency, but it’s really just an effect of the way currency circulation constantly invokes energy expenditure, usually through the increased production and transportation of goods.

During weeks two and three, I watched the first three seasons of The Wire (something I might have done anyway). I subscribed to the New York Times and spent almost two hours every morning reading it from cover to cover. It was only in the fourth week that things started coming together. I wasn’t just breaking the Internet habit, I was breaking the habits I had learned on the Internet: that addiction to continual bursts of small information.

The advice he gives seems unlikely to be of any use until you’ve already gone cold turkey; moderate your access, refuse to distract yourself when the work is going badly… it’s well and good for a man who’s broken the habit, but I don’t see it working for the rest of us.

Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity. As long as you read your e-mail and respond once every twenty-four hours, nobody is likely to notice. Dedicate at least half of your day to handling non-Internet tasks exclusively. Write a list of things you need to do when you do get online so your Internet time will be more productive. If the main thing I was doing in my life was writing a novel, I would resolve not to be online at all. I know people who have moved “off the grid,” to rural areas to escape any distractions to their work. But the reality is you don’t need to go anywhere, you just need a computer without a Wi-Fi hookup. The urge to screw around is always strongest when the work’s not going well. And if you work at a computer, screwing around is only a click away. But when the work’s not going well is exactly the time to turn the Internet off.

Sound eminently reasonable, but much, much too hard. Then, too, I seem to recall he’s some sort of masochist; didn’t he write My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up? Oh sure… discipline, of course a masochist would advocate discipline! We don’t all love pain, man.

Necessity is the mother of invention, but ingenuity is its own reward. This site gives me joy.

Check out his Inventions Wish List to get started.

Still, a few weeks ago, I got into a dust-up on metafilter about white supremacy. It started here, where I noticed that a character by the name of Milliken was engaging in some heavy-handed, long-winded, over-broad generalizations about black people. In response, I posted this callout on metatalk, which is the meta-space devoted exclusively to snark and personal attacks, but also the place where important discussions about the constitution of the community get fleshed out. The discussion did not go well at first… see here, here, and here.

But I eventually managed to coax Milliken himself into responding, and he quickly proved what I had already concluded: that he fervently believed some of the worst rhetoric of white nationalism. As he wrote in one of his last screeds: “I really am not racist. IM NOT. I am more upset and care to be more involved in the deconstruction of the liberal mindset towards minorities because I have read about and seen the results of things like affirmative action.” I managed to find versions of his arguments over at stormfront.org, which I won’t link because it just makes them more popular on google and would connect -me- to white supremacy. So Milliken was banned. What I still haven’t settled, despite the callout, is whether it’s really better for a community to exclude its most intolerant members, or whether the real goal of such experiences is to shame them into self-reappraisal.

Then, too, I’m interested in the operation of a self-policing community that can do all this on its own. It truly is a fairly homogenous community, not insofar as it excludes conservative views (by far the most popular/reviled character there is a guy named dios, who is fairly anti-liberal,) but because everyone who remains manages to preserve a level of civility and respect that’s surprising for such an online community. Or… perhaps not civility… but a toughness that makes civility possible. People who take offense when insulted are not respected, while those who respond well and wittily to the general tenor of snark are treated like local heroes. In the midst of this, we have a fairly high-brow discussion. It’s no wonder I spend so much time there.

With that in mind, take a look at this incident, recorded by camera phone in Powell Library at UCLA: youtube link. Mr. Tabatabainejad allegedly went limp while being escorted from the library by police officers, who were removing him because he was not carrying his student ID. He was verbally combative, as is customary when bureaucratic requirements are being violently enforced, but the result is, to my eye, quite clearly excessive force. As many of my readers know, I have worked as a civilian investigator of police misconduct, so I will claim some authority on this matter. Frankly, though, the video testifies with greater authority than I could ever muster.

Here is a link to a Lancet study: “Effects of stun guns and tasers.” It establishes the demobilization effects that tinged this incident with such sadistic ignorance.