A caristia of labourers

How much suffering can one short, forgotten phrase contain?

"Caristia" is a Latin word, but Caesar wouldn't have understood it. It came into use in English records during the Middle Ages, meaning a "dearth", or shortage. Manorial records sometimes refer to a caristia of labourers.

This phrase seems to have meant both fewer hands than were needed, and increased wages for those that could be found. Both prices and wages were fairly slow to change, in the long term, during the Middle Ages partly because they were often set in terms of long term contracts for tenancy or service, partly because there were strong, especially religious, conventions about the correct levels for prices and wages, and against arbitrage.

But you can't buck the market entirely. Short term price and wage fluctuations were inevitable. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, wheat prices rose gradually from under 3s a quarter to over 6s. But during the bad harvests of 1315-17 the price hit 25s.

That was an extreme case, the sudden onset of global cooling after the wealth and comfort of the Medieval Warm Period. But there would be shortages of labourers from time to time anyway, with the normal fluctuations of the years and their harvests. I have a very heavy crop of cherries this year in my garden. Last year there were almost none. When that happens with cherries in a developed economy, I go to the shop and buy some that were grown somewhere that had a better harvest this year - trade smooths out supply. When it happens with wheat in a peasant economy, people die. During the Middle Ages, some years so many men died that it affected the level of wages.

A moment's reflection on what the reality of this must have been like gave me my opening sentence.

Why did ordinary variations in production have a greater effect during the Middle Ages than they do today? The answers are surprisingly relevant to us now, and to the sorts of arguments put forward by what you might call the neo-primitivists - that odd assortment of people from the green left to the isolationist, protectionist and libertarian right who want to return us to a golden age of disease and starvation.

The problem they had, in the past, is that they didn't trade*, and they didn't try to make profits - they weren't capitalists. This killed, from time to time, sometimes two digit percentages of the populations unnecessarily.

Here's an odd thing: in a tenant-peasant economy, when farmers produce just enough to feed themselves and to pay their dues, rents, tithes and so forth, market forces invert. When the price of a commodity rises (through scarcity) production falls and when prices fall, production rises. Higher prices mean you need less to pay your rents, lower prices mean you need more. This means that price swings, and scarcity and surplus, are amplified to damaging effect.

Capitalism, the investment of resources in trade for a profit within an economy and between economies, restored the positive relationship between supply and demand and gave rise to the stockpiling that buffers us against shortages today. And because we have capitalism, because we have relatively free trade, wages are no longer set by the number of people who died during the most recent famine.



* I wrote this in too much of a hurry. They didn't trade enough. Of course there was trade; without it there would have been no prices. But the classic pattern for the medieval Manor did not include the production of a surplus beyond subsistence and taxes/rents. Trade existed because of surplus production on estates that deviated from this classic pattern.

Moreover, they weren't sufficiently capitalist. Some people did buy grain and stockpile it, holding reserves until prices rose so they could make a good profit (regrating, something that was even illegal at times). As still happens today, such activity was roundly condemned by the Church as immoral.

This immoral practice saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, it saves hundreds of millions.




[No online references for any of this; see Postan pp 257-263.]

Solidarity

They say that's what they want from us - I'm not a graphic artist, but I just did this for my sidebar. Obviously, use it if you want (right click, save as).

Thanks to Azarmehr for the Farsi word for solidarity.

Selling sex

This slipped beneath the radar recently.

How do you make sure you have unanimous agreement at a meeting in the House of Commons?

Simple: stop anyone who disagrees with you from entering the meeting.

The current feminist fascination with trafficked sex workers should be seen in its true context. It is the successor to the Cleveland child abuse wolf crying, and the Satanic Abuse nonsense that followed it. It's a conspiracy theory.

She died in less than one minute

An interview with the doctor who tried to save Neda's life.

Quote of the Day

No display of ass-hattery will be judged excessive in the coming days. If Blair himself read a prayer at Jackson's funeral then led the congregation in an embarrassing dance, I would hardly wince.

I don't think he'll be coming back again

Margaret's anti-burglar policy. Do listen.

Cyber War

I recently passed a fairly arbitrary milestone with my hosting business: thanks to a DDOS attack from a botnet against one particular system, the number of malicious contacts with my servers passed the million per day mark. This did have a slight effect on performance until I introduced a new security layer.

This sort of thing is routine when it comes to online systems. Most of the time, it's just script kiddies. Use of a botnet suggests a bit more organisation, but needn't be more of a problem than the kiddies. Then, sometimes, someone who actually knows what they're doing comes along and has a serious pop at something.

It's debatable what the best response is. Generally, it's better not to get into a war with people. Years ago, I used to redirect attackers to the Disney website, especially the section that was dedicated to Mickey Mouse. That was immature. Now, I prefer to make systems handle the attacks silently, collecting data about the attacker. On occasion, I've tracked the attacks back to the individual concerned. What to do then depends on things like jurisdiction and the nature of the attack, but on the whole, even if it is possible to take action, I often think it's better to be dealing with an attack you thoroughly understand than to be waiting for the next tactic to emerge.

The Telegraph today reports:

Al-Qaeda is intent on using the internet to launch a cyber-warfare campaign against Britain, Lord West, the Security Minister, has warned.

It would be bizarre if they weren't. The report goes on:

As well as potential cyber-attacks from terrorists, Britain faces a real and growing threat from foreign governments such as China and Russia, and from organised criminal gangs, he said.

Well yes, that isn't news. It was quite widely reported, a year ago, that cyber attacks against Georgia coincided with Russian troop movements into South Ossetia. More recently, Iranian opposition geeks took down some pro-Ahmadenijad websites. This is just routine, nowadays.

Targets include key businesses, the national power grid, financial markets and Whitehall departments.

As part of attempts to beef up defences, a new Office for Cyber Security will be set up to co-ordinate Government policy.

Another new development will see the creation of a "cyber-forensics" team based at GCHQ, the Government's eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

The Cyber Security Operations Centre will constantly monitor, analyse and counter cyber attacks as they happen.

You mean... they haven't been doing this already?

Now I am scared.

Burka quote of the day

If I had been forced to wear a veil, I would certainly not be free to write this article. Nor would I have run a marathon, become an aerobics teacher or set up a business.

We must unite against the radical Muslim men who love to control women.

My message to those Muslims who want to live in a Talibanised society, and turn their face against Britain, is this: 'If you don't like living here and don't want to integrate, then what the hell are you doing here? Why don't you just go and live in an Islamic country?'

Saira Khan.

They'd have to choose the right Islamic country to live in, though. Burkas are banned in Tunisia and Turkey.

Secularism and the burka

If modern day Druids decided to stop poncing about in bedsheets pretending they are in Victorian paintings, and started trying to emulate what little we do know of the real historical Druids, they would start sacrificing people by drowning them. This would be a matter for the criminal law, though, not a crisis of secularism.

If a town in Yorkshire were colonised by the descendants of Aztecs, and they started ripping the still-beating hearts from the chests of virgins in the Old Market Square, we wouldn't be facing a crisis of secularism. It would be a matter for the criminal law.

If enclaves were established in European towns and cities, in which women were not educated, were treated as slaves and chattels, sold to men, forbidden social interaction, held powerless, beaten, raped and sometimes killed - even if these things were done in the name of a religion - it would not be a crisis of secularism. It would be a matter for the criminal law.

As Nicolas Sarkozy said, "The problem of the burka is not a religious problem, it's a problem of liberty and women's dignity. It's not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France. In our country, we can't accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity."

Sometimes freedoms conflict. Where it is a voluntary act, the right to wear a burka is comparable to one of two things: the right to walk around in full bondage gear complete with dog collar and leash, or the right to walk around wearing a full Nazi uniform, complete with swastika armband.

Neither type of right trumps the imperative of eliminating slavery from our cities.

Ross was right about what secularism is, which is why I quoted a short extract from one of his posts. Sarkozy is right about the burka.

Incidentally, what isn't challenged enough is the question of some Asian male attitudes. If members of the Ku Klux Klan started threatening and attacking white women who went out with or wanted to marry men from other ethnic backgrounds, we'd have a front-page headline campaign from the Guardian and the BBC. It's no different when Asian men behave in a comparable way.

UPDATE: Credit where it is due: given that I'm implicitly critical of them in this post, it's good of someone at the BBC to link to it from the Reaction from around the Web section of the Today Programme website. (The link will disappear pretty soon, of course).

Remember her

like this:

Ross understands...

... secularism:

Secularism should mean refusing to grant any special place in public life to religion or religious institutions, not actively preventing religious expression.

UPDATE: I've clarified what I think about secularism and the burka here.

I think...

... therefore I am.

Which dystopia?

I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on 1984. Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is.

The philosophy of the ruling minority in 1984 is a sadism that has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World... Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience... The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war—in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Aldous Huxley, in a letter to George Orwell. It might be that while Orwell observed brilliantly a form of tyranny that appeared in the twentieth century, Huxley was closer to the mark in the longer term. His worry about nuclear war was very much a concern of the time he was writing in, and he was not immune to the hyperbole of ideas like "narco-hypnosis". But "infant conditioning" and "suggesting people into loving their servitude"? Absolutely.

Huxley was also correct, I think, in associating licentiousness with practical tyranny. I have no idea why this is - sexual liberty is a form of liberty, of course. Perhaps licentiousness is not. Or might it be that prescribed, approved forms of licentiousness are not?

UPDATE: And when it comes to "[tyrannical] change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency", that really has proved to be true. It has been very effective in Britain over the past ten years to combine the putting in place of very inefficient systems with a perpetual drive for efficiency that mandates the perpetual augmentation of those inefficient systems.

Another green eyed woman

I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.

There were people of all ages. I saw an old man on crutches, middle-aged office workers and bands of teenagers. Unlike the student revolts of 2003 and 1999, this movement is broad.

“Can’t the United Nations help us?” one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. “So,” she said, “we are on our own.”

Full employment

Following on from my last post, about Anatoly Movchan's account of the struggle over competing views of human rights, after WWII, up to the 1970s, another disputed right was the right to work.

In practice, it's hard to distinguish a right to work from a duty to work, and Movchan was more candid about this, the consequence of a state policy of full employment, than anyone I have ever read:

When reports from socialist countries were considered, some Western experts and members of the Human Rights Committee tried, both privately and officially, to argue that dealing with the problem of human parasites who sponge on other people is a phenomenon characteristic only of socialism, and that authorities who seek to prevent it are guilty of violating the relevant Covenant provision prohibiting forced labour.
(p.146)

UPDATE: I should perhaps have added that Movchan had the measure of these Western experts:

in accordance with Art. 8 of the Covenant, "any work or service which forms part of normal civil obligations" is not included in the term "forced or compulsory labour."

There we have the splendour of international jurisprudence, encapsulated in one short phrase. If it is a "normal civil obligation" for you to be sent to a labour camp, then it is not in conflict with the United Nations Covenant that prohibits coercion to forced labour.

Note also, that the advocate of full employment's only concern is whether forced labour is prohibited by the Covenant. He has no doubt it is appropriate for "human parasites".

An old alliance

Nick Cohen is wrong here:

Earlier this year, the dictatorships which dominate the United Nations’ comically named Human Rights Council tried to pass a motion stating that defamation of religion should everywhere be a crime. For obvious reasons, Islamic states pushed the new blasphemy law and abused the language of liberty as they attempted to justify the punishment of Muslims and non-Muslims who criticised or mocked orthodoxy.

Strikingly, states that 20 or even 10 years ago would have been their enemies rushed to their side. Putin’s Russia, which has been engaged in the dirty war against the Islamists of Chechnya, supported the assault on dissent. As did Cuba’s communist atheists, the supposed socialists of Chávez’s Venezuela and the Brezhnevian relics from Belarus. The promise of an attack on the liberal values of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience produced a united front.

As he sat in his condo, nursing his grievances and watching his Mel Gibson movies, James W von Brunn may have seemed a relic of the fascist movements of the 20th century. But in his grubby, instinctive way, he was groping towards the new authoritarian alliances of the 21st.

This is not a new alliance.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has a lower profile than the Council and has been meeting for far longer:

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its first Optional Protocol allowing individuals to submit complaints to the Human Rights Committee were adopted by the General Assembly on 16 December 1966 and entered into force on 23 March 1976. The Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty, was adopted on 15 December 1989 and entered into force on 11 July 1991.

The Human Rights Committee was established to monitor the implementation of the Covenant and the Protocols to the Covenant in the territory of States parties. It is composed of 18 independent experts who are persons of high moral character and recognized competence in the field of human rights. The Committee convenes three times a year for sessions of three weeks' duration, normally in March at United Nations headquarters in New York and in July and November at the United Nations Office in Geneva.

The Soviet delegate to this committee in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s was Anatoly Movchan, and in 1982 (English translation in 1988) he published a fascinating little book called Human Rights And International Relations, an account of the history of the field of international human rights from the Soviet perspective.

From the beginning there were clashes between different world views. For example, the Soviet Union argued that international treaties should exempt ideas of which they disapproved (fascism) from provisions guaranteeing freedom of expression. Capitalist countries rejected these suggestions, Movchan explains:

on the grounds that the notions "fascism" and "organisations of a fascist nature" were allegedly "vague and obscure". Incredibly, that "argument" was advanced in 1947, two years after World War II, unleashed by fascism, had ended...
(p.60)

Movchan's book shows, in example after example, how from the very start the Soviet Union sought alliances for the battle over human rights, and from the start found them with developing countries, especially from Africa and from the Islamic world. This alliance, which had formed by the 1970s, is what we also see at work in the Human Rights Council.

It is an old alliance, and has consciously set itself against the values of the capitalist West for more than three decades now.



(See also here for Movchan on the right to work.)

Rational self interest

In this week's Normblog Profile, Matthew Yglesias replies to one question as follows:

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > That selfishness is more rational than benevolence.

But who puts forward this thesis he wants to combat? It seems like a reference to Adam Smith's famous suggestion that:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

This is a widely misunderstood passage. It does not say "It ought not to be from the benevolence...", nor does it say "It would be less rational were it to be from the benevolence...". It says, quite simple, "It is not from the benevolence". This is not a recommendation, nor approval, nor a comment on rationality. It is an observation of fact.

People behave self-interestedly. They just do. They do in every type of social, economic or political system. Self-interest varies, it isn't always economic (status, for example, can be important and can work counter to economic self-interest), it isn't the only factor in human behaviour, but it is always a motivational force in people. And it happens to be the main reason why the butcher bothers to go to work.

Moreover, there's no suggestion in this passage that the tradesmen cannot or do not behave benevolently. It simply says that they don't go to work out of benevolence.

People - like me - who feel Smith was right in this passage are not trying to combat benevolence or advocate selfishness. We're simply observing that, in the human economy as in the natural world, lots of small acts of self-interest combine to form a rich and robust ecosystem.

John Lee Hooker

And Van Morrison. Glorious - had to share it:

When the wheels

Long silence... but you should hear this:

There's nothing British about the BNP

Embedding is disabled, but click through to watch this adorable little girl wow the audience. If the BNP tried to deport her, they'd have a lot of white middle aged Mums knocking their heads together.

Don't forget, despite the glossy leaflets coming through our doors - one arrived here today - they'd deport English people like this child. I'm starting to wonder where we might be able to deport them to.

British values

The school I went to was pretty traditional. Corporal punishment was part of the disciplinary code, involving slippers, gym shoes or the cane, depending on who was administering it. Latin was compulsory to the age of 12, at which time you could opt to add Greek to your timetable, or drop classics and study astronomy, computer science, geology and something called "Applied Science", taking two of them to O level (there's nothing more traditional in this country than science and engineering). Walking on the cricket First 11 pitch was utterly taboo to the point where bonking on it by moonlight was a coveted rite of passage for the more sexually accomplished sixth formers and their girlfriends. We wore tweed suits during the winter terms, prefects were called Praeposters, Latin grace was said at mealtimes.

And the Head of the History Department took a special lesson, unannounced, for every class when they reached the age of fourteen. A whole 45 minute "period" was set aside for this. He walked in, asked us to sit, opened the book he was carrying, told us this was a true story, and began to read.

By the end of the first minute, the silence from the class was absolute. The teacher read to us the story of a 14 year old, a lad our age (this was a single-sex school), in one of the southern states of the USA. This black boy had been thrown in jail on some trumped up charge and one night the Ku Klux Klan came for him. They took him from the cell, unhindered by the police, and drove him out to some woods. There they stripped him naked and used heavy wire to bind his testicles to a bitumen-soaked log. They handed him a knife and set fire to the log; he could burn alive, or castrate himself to get free.

Then the teacher closed the book, stood, and left the classroom. He said nothing else, there was no attempt to discuss the reading, no redundant moralising, he just left us with something like half an hour of the period remaining.

I don't think any of us had really thought about racism before that. There were more children than usual, at that time, from non-white backgrounds in our school and some were in every class that was read to. For the class I was in, the teacher's departure was followed by silence. We looked at each other, not wanting to make eye contact. The Indian lad in the class who was one of the Chaps was suddenly, and briefly, more isolated than he had probably ever been, and less so than - I believe - any other treatment of the subject could have accomplished. I don't think I ever had the privilege of a more effective lesson. By the end of the half hour we were left to fill, an extraordinarily well-behaved half hour for 14 year olds left alone, we were chatting away in groups and the biggest group had formed round the Indian lad. He was slightly embarrassed but not in a bad way - this was just a spontaneous wish on the part of his classmates to show what I can only call solidarity.

I think we were so well behaved, during that half hour, because it was obvious that the school had as an institution felt this important enough to break the normal timetable; the teacher had read in a quiet voice but with barely-suppressed anger, he was probably the instigator of the tradition. We had been trusted on several levels: trusted to be able to understand this without any elaboration by an adult, trusted to be left alone afterwards. Only one boy sat on his own during this half hour. His mother was a local organiser for the National Front and we knew he sympathised with her opinions.

Charlie Brooker was born around the same time this lesson took place, but nothing had changed by the time he was at school:

[The Headmaster] spoke with eerie, measured anger. He’d fought in the second world war, he told us. Our village had a memorial commemorating friends of his who had died. Many were relatives of ours. These villagers gave their lives fighting a regime that looked down on anyone “different”, that tried to blame others for any problem they could find; a bullying, racist regime called “the Nazis”. Millions of people had died thanks to their bigotry and prejudice. And he told us that anyone who picked on anyone else because they were “different’ wasn’t merely insulting the object of their derision, but insulting the headmaster himself, and his dead friends, and our dead relatives, the ones on the war memorial. And if he heard of anyone - anyone - using racist language again, they’d immediately get the slipper.

The mainstream left and right recently came together to support the cause of the Gurkhas, while the BNP has recently been belittling a hero who won the Victoria Cross serving in our armed forces, because the man is not white.

There's no doubt that there has been prejudice in this country, but most of it has been thoughtless rather than malicious. The malevolence of the British National Party and of other race fetishists stands opposed to the long-standing, quiet traditions of this country. As the new campaign points out, there's nothing British about the BNP.

Blame Thatcher, part 362,673,456

Congratulations to Martin Kettle in the Guardian for figuring out how to blame Margaret Thatcher (and Rupert Murdoch) for the MPs' expenses scandal.

In 1983, when Gordon Brown first went to the Commons, an MP earned just over £15,000. It was an absurdly low figure even then. So what did those who could have changed the system do? They did nothing. Margaret Thatcher refused to give MPs the increase they needed or the framework for future salary review that would have put parliamentary financing on a defensible basis. And John Major, Tony Blair and Brown all followed her lead. Today's £65,000 parliamentary salary is better in real terms than 1983, and it is certainly a good income, but it is not high when compared with legislators in many other countries, or with the professions with whom MPs might sensibly be compared.

I'm not sure about the last part, though. Only the very best of the profession with which MPs might sensibly be compared earn £1,000 a night, and they generally have to split their fee with the agency.

How many boys?

Richard Thompson:

Surface station report

The reliability of data used to document temperature trends is of great importance in this debate. We can’t know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can’t trust the data.

The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.

During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found. We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.

In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

It gets worse. We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.

The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7o C (about 1.2o F) during the twentieth century. Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in temperature that may have occurred across the U.S. during the past century. Since the U.S. record is thought to be “the best in the world,” it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.

Download the full report here (pdf).