Search Results for: johann hari

I realised then that I needed to understand what was really happening to him and to so many of us. That moment turned out to be the start of a journey that transformed how I think about attention. I travelled all over the world in the next three years, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, interviewing the leading experts in the world about focus. What I learned persuaded me that we are not now facing simply a normal anxiety about attention, of the kind every generation goes through as it ages. We are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live. I learned there are twelve factors that have been proven to reduce people’s ability to pay attention and that many of these factors have been rising in the past few decades – sometimes dramatically.

I wonder whether it’s going to turn out to be capitalism to blame?

Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.

Looks promising, doesn’t it?

Today, about 35% of workers feel they can never switch off their phones because their boss might email them at any time of day or night. In France, ordinary workers decided this was intolerable and pressured their government for change – so now, they have a legal “right to disconnect”. It’s simple. You have a right to defined work hours, and you have a right to not be contacted by your employer outside those hours. Companies that break the rules get huge fines. There are lots of potential collective changes like this that can restore part of our focus. We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model, which is specifically designed to invade our attention in order to keep us scrolling. There are alternative ways these sites could work – ones that would heal our attention instead of hacking it.

Ooooh, yes!

I think that given this uncertainty, we can’t wait for perfect evidence.

We might in fact get there, yes.

We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies.

Yes, bless the little cotton socks on Minnie Mouse. It is tear power from the corporations, abolish capitalism, and the world will be a better place. Who the hell could see that conclusion coming from Hari?

The leopard is not changing his shorts:

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was — at the same time as the Rat Park experiment — a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.

Stanton Peele was pointing this out 25 years ago. I read him pointing this out 20 years ago. Wonder if Hari mentions him in his new book? Be fun if he didn’t, wouldn’t it? And no, I’m not buying it to find out.

Hmm, according to search inside, he doesn’t. Now isn’t that lovely? Hmm, and hmm again.

I wonder what a detailed comparison would show us all. Of course, it could just be that search inside isn’t very accurate…..

And he’s getting some things right for goodness sake! More on this later elsewhere.

One thing though:

The author used to be the Independent’s star columnist, a prolific polemicist and darling of the left, until his career imploded in disgrace when it emerged in 2011 that many of his articles contained quotes apparently said to him but in fact lifted from his interviewees’ books, or from previous interviews by other journalists. Worse, he was exposed as a “sockpuppet”, or someone who anonymously furthers his own interests online.

I’m pretty sure that “Keith” here at Forbes is in fact Hari. And there’s one or two more on pieces of mine around I think.

I see from Twitter that this is apparently something for me to read.

Further, that Sunny actually refused to publish it: actual evidence of editorial standards no less.

The essential trope is that Johann\’s a lefty and should therefore be forgiven. Heart\’s in the right place therefore transgressions can only possibly be minor.

This amused though:

And yes, some of his economic statistics are occasionally wrong.

One way of putting it: it\’s actually rare to find one which is correct.

On tax evasion, too, he played no small part in the creation of UK Uncut – one of the most exciting activist groups set up in response to Cameron’s axe-wielding frenzy – taking the now-famous story of Vodafone’s 6bn pound tax rip-off from the pages of Private Eye, and writing about it in his column, later publicising the very first action on his twitter stream, telling people to look out for the famous ‘orange umbrella’.

For example, there never was a £6 billion tax bill and Vodafone didn\’t rip anyone off.

But, you know, he\’s a lefty and his heart\’s in the right place so that\’s OK then.

The most important point is that, while you could make a political criticism of Hari, and many people have done so, over the years, what’s done for him is professional criticism. Namely, not his opinions but his basic journalistic standards. In fact, more so as the criticism has centred on the technical journalistic side. Tim Worstall has been saying for ages that Hari’s economic writing was wrong not just ideologically but in terms of basic facts, but that was easily dismissed on the grounds that Tim is one of these mad free marketeers and he would say that, wouldn’t he?

If I can get it back to the top of my pile of things to do there might even be an e-book on this point.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Which I have put up at Forbes.

Hunting Hari: Judging Johann\’s Journalism.

Fair and balanced I think you\’ll find.

Oh this is lovely. Johann Hari\’s defence doesn\’t actually work.

However, when interviewing someone, a journalist uses skill and labour in recording quotes accurately and selecting those most appropriate for publication. So the quotes in an interview are protected by copyright. If any are to be used by another publication then the fair dealing defence would have to be used and the copyright owner, possibly a competitor, would have to be credited.

So, let us review the situation.

1) Hari\’s found using things not actually said to him as part of his interviews.

2) Hari\’s defence (which isn\’t a bad one) is that he\’s providing an intellectual portrait. And to do this it\’s entirely just and righteous to use clips and quotes from earlier writings because, after all, writers do spend some time in their own writings making themselves clear. Speech is always more confusing than considered writings, after all.

3) Ah, but. Some of those clips and quotes come not from original writings by the interviewee, but from other interviews conducted by other journalists. In which case, those carefully considered quotes are copyright of those journalists, not the interviewee.

4) As copyright, there\’s still the fair use exemption. But the use of that requires acknowledgement of the source even if not a request for permission to use the quote.

5) Hari\’s fucked.

I will admit to not really caring very much about all of this. My objection to Hari is that he\’s simply ignorant about economics yet he insists on writing much about economics. Such as this.

Hungary kept on pursuing sensible moderate measures, instead of punishing the population. They imposed taxes on the hugely profitable sectors of retail, energy and telecoms, and took funds from private pensions to pay the deficit.

Stealing peoples\’ pensions is \”moderate\” in HariLand.

So when in 2001 the IMF found out the Malawian government had built up large stockpiles of grain in case there was a crop failure, they ordered them to sell it off to private companies at once. They told Malawi to get their priorities straight by using the proceeds to pay off a loan from a large bank the IMF had told them to take out in the first place, at a 56 per cent annual rate of interest. The Malawian president protested and said this was dangerous. But he had little choice. The grain was sold. The banks were paid.

The next year, the crops failed. The Malawian government had almost nothing to hand out. The starving population was reduced to eating the bark off the trees, and any rats they could capture. The BBC described it as Malawi’s “worst ever famine.” There had been a much worse crop failure in 1991-2, but there was no famine because then the government had grain stocks to distribute. So at least a thousand innocent people starved to death.

At the height of the starvation, the IMF suspended $47m in aid, because the government had ‘slowed’ in implementing the marketeering ‘reforms’ that had led to the disaster. ActionAid, the leading provider of help on the ground, conducted an autopsy into the famine. They concluded that the IMF “bears responsibility for the disaster.”

Unfortunately the Action Aid report seems to be no longer on their site. However:

The worst famine in fifty years has resulted in several thousand deaths in Malawi in early 2002. An in-depth report by Action Aid Malawi places blame on a complex combination of technical failure and political mismanagement. The report calls a \”fallacy\” rumours that the IMF caused the famine by ordering the government to sell its grain reserves; both the Bank and the Fund had a hand, however, in the growing indebtedness of the agency responsible for the reserve, and recommendations to reduce the reserve which were based on inaccurate information on crop yields.

BTW, that 56% rate of interest?

That was the domestic rate of interest on Treasury Bills in Kwacha. And inflation was 57%. Thus the real rate of interest was -1%.

So, do we get to conclude that Johann Hari is a lying toerag?

I think we do, yes. Even the BBC disagrees with him.

And fails, badly.

Here’s what we learned during the Great Depression, when our view of economics was revolutionized by John Maynard Keynes. In a recession, private individuals like you and me, perfectly sensibly, cut back our spending. We go out less, we buy less, we save more. This causes a huge fall in private demand, and with it a huge fall in economic activity. If, at the very same time, the government cuts back, then overall demand collapses, and a recession becomes a depression. That’s why the government has to do something counter-intuitive. It has to borrow and spend more, to apply jump-leads to the economy. This prevents economic collapse. Instead of spending a fortune on dealing with mass unemployment and economic break-down, with all the misery that causes, it spends the money on restoring growth. Keynes called it “the paradox of thrift”: when the people spend less, the government has to spend more.

Wherever it has been tried, it has worked. Look at the last Great Depression. The Great Crash of 1929 was followed by a US President, Herbert Hoover, who did everything Cameron demands. He cut spending and paid off the debt. The recession grew and grew. Then Franklin Roosevelt was elected and listened to Keynes. He ramped up spending – and unemployment fell, and the economy swelled. Then in 1936 he started listening to the Cameron debt-shriekers of his day. The result? The economy collapsed again. It was only the gigantic spending of the Second World War that finally ended it.

Sigh.

No, Herbert Hoover did not cut spending and he most certainly did not pay off the debt. He ran budget deficits as he massively increased federal spending. It\’s true that Roosevelt did more of this than Hoover had done but it just isn\’t true that Hoover balanced the bedget and most certainly isn\’t true that he either reduced spending or paid pof a single penny of the national debt.

However, there is another example from the 30s that could be used. The UK experience. Here there was no large public deficit, in fact, taxation and spending were kept broadly in line with each other. According to the Keynesian prescription, this should have meant that the UK had a deeper recession than the US and a longer one.

The thing is though, it didn\’t. The recession in the UK was shallower than that in the US, was shorter, recovery came sooner and so did economic growth surpassing that of the previous peak.

What the UK did do is come off the gold standard and allow the pound to depreciate. What the UK government is currently doing isn\’t actually all that far from what the UK government of the 30s did. Devalue, (at least try to) keep some close connection between tax and spend, so as not to run huge defiits and thus increase the national debt.

One of the things you need to know about economic history is that there is indede this lovely Keynesian theory. It\’s just that when you look at the economic history of the 1930s, there doesn\’t seem to be any empirical support for it. The US, which followed the prescriptions of the theory, had an entirely shite time of it, the UK which rejected the theory had a dreary but OK time of it.

We were bust when we beat the Nazis. We were bust when we built the NHS.

Quite true. But having gone bust beating the Nazis and while building the NHS, Major Atlee was running budget surpluses. One of the very few times we really have actually been paying off the national debt, as opposed to just not increasing it very fast…..

Young Johann is of course quite free to make his comments…..but facts are sacred you know.

This statement rather surprised me:

But let\’s step back a moment and look at how all this came to pass. The bishops owe their places in parliament to a serial killer. Henry VIII filled parliament with bishops because they were willing to give a religious seal of approval to him divorcing and murdering his wives – and they have lingered on through the centuries since, bragging about their own moral superiority at every turn.

Yes, I know that \’Enery fixed the numbers of Lords Spiritual but I hadn\’t realised that he\’d increased them.

Wikipedia might not be the most accurate of sources but:

Early in England\’s history, Lords Spiritual—including lesser clergymen such as abbots—outnumbered Lords Temporal. Between 1536 and 1540, however, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, thereby removing the seats of the abbots. For the first time and thereafter, Lords Spiritual formed a minority in the House of Lords.

Yes, that accords more with what I had floating around at the back of my mind. Henry reduced, not increased, the numbers of Lords Spiritual.

Some will see this as trivial but accuracy is important, don\’t you think?

In 2008, his successor, Rowan Williams, said it would be helpful if shariah law – with all its vicious misogyny, which says that women are worth half of a man – was integrated into British family courts.

Err, no he didn\’t actually. He said rather that given that Christians insist upon let outs from the unitary system of law on religious/moral grounds (like, for example, religious types not being forced to perform abortions, nor even train to do them while qualifying as a doctor or nurse) then how can we, should we, adapt or provide similar let outs for other relgious and moral traditions?

And given that it was part of a series of letures about Islam in English Law, sharia was an obvious example for him to be using. I\’m not hugely in favour of the beared wonder but that really is a smear from Hari.

Oh, and just for giggles, he says that Iran and the UK are the only places with churchmen, as of right, in the legislature. Not so: Isle of Man has the Bishop of Sodor and Man in the upper house as of right. And as one of 11 members, he\’s 9% of it, as opposed to the roughly 3% of the Lords (26 out of mebbe 800).

So he goes to meet the environmental activists who are trying to stop this poisoning of their children, and watches as – terrified – they are carried away to prison. (Imagine if Al Gore had been imprisoned for exposing Love Canal, and was still in solitary, and you get the idea.)

Oh Aye?

\”I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue,\” Gore said.

\”That was the one that started it all. … We made a huge difference and it was all because one high school student got involved.\”

In August 1978, Gore did chair hearings on the matter by the House Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations – two months after the Love Canal homes were evacuated and President Carter declared the neighborhood a disaster area.

It would appear that Johann doesn\’t realise that the Al and Love Canal story is as true as the Al and Love Story story and the Al and inventing the internet story.

When was the last time Britain\’s public spending was slashed by more than 20 per cent? Not in my mother\’s lifetime. Not even in my grandmother\’s lifetime. No, it was in 1918, when a Conservative-Liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country\’s debts.

Well, as we all know, public spending isn\’t going to be slashed by 20%. Nominal spending will rise, real spending shrink a little bit but not much. Certain departments have 20% cuts, to be sure, and others are getting real increases.

But much more fun is that reference to 1918. For yes, there were indeed large cuts to government expenditure starting in that year. You can see them here.

The total budget in 1918 was some £2,893 million. Of which fully £2,404 million was defence. By 1921, the budget was £1.671 million, of which £297 million was defence.

This in an economy of between £5,000 million and £6,000 million in the money of the time. Do note that the cut in the defence budget was larger than the cut in the total budget….meaning that spending on non-defence matters actually rose in this period.

I do wonder slightly at what anyone expected the government of the time to do really. After all, 1918 was the year that we stopped fighting a world war, wasn\’t it? You\’d think that that really would be an appropriate time to stop spending near 50% of the country\’s entire output on the military really.

Unemployment soared from 6 per cent to 19 per cent, and the country\’s economy collapsed so severely that they lost all ability to pay their bills and the debt actually rose from 114 per cent to 180 per cent.

Demobilisation of the near entire male population of fighting age could indeed have the effect of raising unemployment: and one of the dodgy things about GDP statistics is that we do indeed count manufacturing things to then blow them up as an increase in GDP. Something which perhaps we shouldn\’t, making comparison of war time economies with peace time ones something of a confusion.

When an economy falters, ordinary people – perfectly sensibly – cut back their spending and try to pay down their debts. This causes a further fall in demand, and makes the economy worse. If the government cuts back at the same time, then there is no demand at all, and the economy goes into freefall.

Gosh, that\’s an interesting theory. No demand at all? So, err, what the fuck is that £1.4 trillion of economic activity, that £1.4 trillion of demand, going on out there then?

That\’s why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 – caused entirely by deregulated bankers –

An even more interesting theory. Entirely and purely deregulated bankers? Might be worth having a word with Dean Baker there Johann. For as he never tires of pointing out, there was a property bubble. $7 trillion in wealth disappearing from the American economy, around half of GDP (yes, be careful, wealth is a stock, GDP a flow) is going to cause a recession whatever happens to the banking system.

by increasing spending, funded by temporary debt.

Now we\’re getting into really interesting territory: it\’s worth pondering whether there is in fact debt which isn\’t temporary. Hmm, OK, Consols, so OK, there is such a thing as permanent debt.

Better a deficit we repay in the good times than an endless depression.

Yes, he\’s done it! Confused deficit with debt. We repay the debt created by the deficit in the good times: the deficit itself should have disappeared which is our definition of the good times.

Except when we\’ve got that monocular Scot spending the money of course, he carried on running a deficit at the peak of the longest running good times we\’ve had in over a century. An act which has made the current problems vastly greater: repaying then some of our by then accumulated debt would have left more room for maouvre now.

For the private sector to get all these people into work, as Osborne claims, there would have to be the most rapid business growth in my lifetime. Does anyone think that will happen?

I\’m not entirely convinced that we should be reading the economic tealeaves based upon the personal life experiences of a 31 year old really. Economic history might be a better guide: like, say, the explosive growth in the US economy as they demobilised in 1945/6.

This is absolutely fascinating:

The irrationality of this approach is perhaps plainest when you look at housing. We badly need more affordable housing in Britain. Some 4.5 million people are stuck on waiting lists, and the average age of a homebuyer is now 37. It\’s a cause of constant stress to the real middle class and despair for the poor. By a happy coincidence, house-building is one of the best stimulators of the economy: it employs a lot of people on average wages, who then spend their money quickly in a \”multiplier\” effect.

Yet Osborne has chosen the opposite. There will be on average one new home built per week in the whole of London and the south-east. That\’s one.

I fear that our Johann has fallen over his own rhetoric. Yes, it\’s true, we do indeed desire more affordable housing. And it\’s also true that \”affordable housing\” has become, in certain circles, a synonym for \”council or social landlord housing\”. But when using that synonym you do need to recall that there is also something called \”the private sector\”. And, yes, they too build houses.

It simply isn\’t true that the number of houses built in London and the SE is going to fall from 602 a week (the average in the second quarter of this year) to one. It simply ain\’t.

We\’re not in this together. Who isn\’t in it with us? Them, their friends, and their families. They were asked to pay nothing more in this CSR.

Perhaps someone could explain acronyms to Johann? a CSR is a \”comprehensive spending review\”. Spending, see that word? It\’s a review of where the money goes, not where the money is coming from. Where the money comes from is usually known as the \”budget\”.

To pluck a random example, one of the richest corporations in Britain, Vodafone, had an outstanding tax bill of £6bn – but Osborne simply cancelled it this year. If he had made them pay, he could have prevented nearly all the cuts to all the welfare recipients in Britain.

Err, no, they didn\’t. He didn\’t either. They settled the case for £1.25 billion: a case which had already lasted a decade.

There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses – much of it our money – to reward themselves for failure.

You what? In what manner are the gross profits of banks \”our money\”?

Did Ladybird ever publish a book on economics that we can send to Johann? Or statistics, logic or the overuse of rhetoric?

For over two centuries, Haiti has been effectively controlled from outside. The French enslaved the entire island in the eighteenth century…

Err, no. The island is called Hispaniola and has been divided between the (originally French) Haiti and the Spanish (originally) Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic, since 1697.

To continue his sentence:

….and worked much of the population to death, turning it into the sugar and coffee plantation for the world.

Err, no. They went flat out and killed the population, the Taino, then imported black Africans, sold by their tribal enemies, who they then worked to death.

Now, given that he\’s writing about Aristide, umm, how much belief do we have on his more modern history if he can\’t even get the basics right?

Come on, I mean, geography it can\’t be all that tough, given that it\’s what they always send the sports masters off to teach, now can it?

Update: I think I may have been overly harsh given that Hari has responded both politely and pointing out that it was edited down for space reasons without his knowledge.

Bloody annoying when people are reasonable after you\’ve been rude, isn\’t it?

Blindingly wonderful piece of hyperbole from Johann Hari this morning:

and there are now 20,000 unidentified corpses in Baghdad morgue alone,

Err, no. There are not 20,000 rotting corpses in the Baghdad morgue. There are also not 20,000 carefully refrigerated or even 20,000 frozen corpses, not even 20,000 skeletons.

We can see where he got his numbers from though:

At the morgue, more than 20,000 of the dead, which even sober estimates suggest total 100,000 or more, are still unidentified.

That\’s the New York Times, from only four short days ago.

What there actually is is this series of photographs of these unknowns in the Baghdad morgue. The number of such unknowns having been mounting since the invasion to this total of 20,000. The bodies have of course all been buried as Islamic tradition would dictate.

Those searching for those missing can view the photographs to try and identify their loved ones so that they can visit the grave(s).

Leave aside for a moment whether the war should have happened, whether the number of dead is worth it (or indeed, whether anything would be worth that number) and just admire the hyperbole.

20,000 unidentified dead over a period of five or six years (a figure not all that different I would wager from the results of any modern war), the records of those 20,000 being held so that greiving relatives have at least the possibility of closure, is transformed into a mountain of 20,000 corpses in just one building.

B- Johann, must try harder.

Yes, he\’s absolutely correct that we should legalise drugs. No doubt about it.

Then he puts in absurdities like this:

You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per cent profit margins on offer.

Facepalm. Is it actually necessary for graduates in \”social and political science\” to be innumerate?

You cannot have a profit margin over 100%.

A margin is, by definition, calculated as a percentage of the revenue and thus cannot be over 100%.

What he means is mark up, which is calculated as a percentage of the cost of goods and thus can be over 100%.

Even then he\’s wrong as he\’s got the teenage gangs fighting over the markup/profit from the entire supply chain, from coca leaf in the Colombian forest to the nostrils at the Tory Boy dinner party in Notting Hill. And of course they\’re not fighting over that entire sum, as several Colombian cocaine barons would be only to happy to point out.

countries like the US and Britain – both led by former drug users –

Must admit first I\’ve heard about the tooting habits of Our Own Dear Queen.