Egalitarianism not quite dead yet shocker

Dave Osler points out that according to a poll in the Financial Times egalitarian attitudes are not yet completely dead in the wider electorate.

Dave sees this as a sign that there is a real base for mass left-wing politics.

Looking at the more detailed version of the results on the Harris site I can't really see that - for instance there is far less support for politicians taking a greater roll in running the economy than there is for taxing the rich.

Thus all we really see is a general feeling that rather less inequality might be a good thing.

I must however say that I am impressed by the prescience of the Italians who are alone in Europe in seeing China as a far greater threat to global stability than the US (apart from for 1% of Germans Israel does not register as a threat at all).

As FT articles are prone to disappear behind subscription walls the original is worth quoting at length:

Globalisation backlash in rich nations

By Chris Giles in London

Published: July 22 2007 18:11 | Last updated: July 22 2007 18:11

A popular backlash against globalisation and the leaders of the world’s largest companies is sweeping all rich countries, an FT/Harris poll shows.

Large majorities of people in the US and in Europe want higher taxation for the rich and even pay caps for corporate executives to counter what they believe are unjustified rewards and the negative effects of globalisation.

Viewing globalisation as an overwhelmingly negative force, citizens of rich countries are looking to governments to cushion the blows they perceive have come from the liberalisation of their economies to trade with emerging countries.

Those polled in Britain, France, the US and Spain were about three times more likely to say globalisation was having a negative rather than a positive effect on their countries. The majority was smaller in Germany, with its large export base.

Corporate leaders fared little better, with 5 per cent or fewer of those polled in the US and all large European economies (except Italy) saying they had a great deal of admiration for those who run large companies. In these countries, between a third and a half said they had no admiration at all for corporate bosses.

In response to fears of globalisation and rising inequality, the public in all the rich countries surveyed – the US, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Spain – want their governments to increase taxation on those with the highest incomes. In European countries, a large majority want governments to go further and to impose pay caps on the heads of companies.

Europeans still overwhelmingly support the principle of free competition within the European Union, contrary to Nicolas Sarkozy’s wishes at the recent European summit, but in France, Germany and Spain, the populations want their political leaders to play a larger role in managing their economies.

The depth of anti-globalisation feeling in the FT/Harris poll, which surveyed more than 1,000 people online in each of the six countries, will dismay policy-makers and corporate executives. Their view that opening economies to freer trade is beneficial to poor and rich countries alike is not shared by the citizens of rich countries, regardless of how liberal their economic traditions.

The issue of rising inequality is now high on the political agenda of every country and will feature prominently in the 2008 US presidential election.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Me and my Avatar...

Actually it's not me (although come to think of it there is a certain physical resemblance and we do apparently have very similar tastes in dodgy cocktails/desserts) but the first in a strangely affecting slideshow at the New York Times.

Also on MMORPGS Charlie Stross attempts the thought experiment of explaining gold farming and suicidal flying gnomes to someone back in 1977.

The Econometrics of Suicide Bombing

Chris Dillow links to a fascinating piece of regression analysis: The Shape of Things to Come? Assessing the Effectiveness of Suicide Attacks and Targeted Killings by David Jaeger and M. Daniele Paserman, which he interprets as proving that 'suicide bombing doesn't work' in that each attack predictably produces an Israeli armed response which kills on average seven Palestinians for each Jew killed in the original attack.

However Jaeger and Paserman are by no means as emphatic in their conclusions as Chris suggests they are.

Rather they argue that yes indeed suicide bombings appear counter-productive in the short term - if the main measurement one uses is a simple ratio of Israeli to Palestinian deaths - but nevertheless finally conclude that it may well have contributed significantly to the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and that as their title suggests suicide bombing is likely to be a feature of similarly asymmetric conflicts in the future.

The true logic of at least Palestinian suicide bombing is to my mind rather different in that it represents not just a desperate tactic in an asymmetrical conflict but a complete and radical inversion of normal military rationality.

While for regular soldiers the fundamental aim is to minimise ones own casualties while maximising those of the enemy, the tactics of Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups are deliberately designed to provoke an Israeli response which maximises the casualties on their own side - as it is these casualties that legitimate and strengthen their struggle, while de-legitimising the occupation (and in the long run the existence of the zionist entity) to the rest of the world.

In a sense they are practising a form of perverted Gandhianism - the justification of their actions is the level of violence that they are able to provoke.

So what Dillow identifies as an indicator of failure is in fact to Hamas and its competitors the clearest indicator of success - a massively negative kill ratio in Israel's favour.

This is shown even more clearly by the data in the new Human Rights Watch report into the Palestinians rocket attacks into Israel and the retaliatory IDF shelling of Gaza.


Between the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and May 2007, Palestinian 'gunmen' (as HRW coyly calls them) fired no fewer than 2,700 home-made rockets in the general direction of Israel which killed a grand total of 4 Israelis and 2 Gazans (the missiles being so inaccurate that many fell short).

Up until November 2006 Israel fired back 14,617 155mm artillery shells into Gaza in retaliatory strikes which killed 59 Palestinians (a remarkably low figure given the huge destructive power of each shell) - but stopped doing so after a single shell killed 23 civilians on 8 November.

Within two weeks of the Israelis declaring that they would no longer respond with artillery strikes the Qassam offensive ended and no further significant attacks were made for 6 months.

Coincidence?

Update:

The current (6 July) fighting in Gaza seems to illustrate the change of IDF tactics from 'indiscriminate fire' (although if 14,617 155mm shells had really been fired indiscriminately into one of the most densely built up areas of the planet, most of Gaza would be in ruins) that was the standard response to Qassam attacks up to November 2006, back to the targeted combined arms operations that were used to retaliate against suicide bombers in 2000-2005.

In a sense this too represents an inversion of normal military logic with Israel effectively accepting the risk of greater military casualties on their side to minimise the (civilian) casualties on the enemy's.

Jaeger and Paserman actually do present some data about the effectiveness of such attacks and cite studies indicating that in 80% of cases the attacks hit the targets they were intended to hit (which raises the question of what is a morally acceptable margin of error).