Sardanapale

Richard Dawkin’s latest TV series – entitled “Enemies of Reason” – attacks some of the biologist’s pet hates: astrology, spiritualism, alternative therapies and all manner of “New Age” beliefs.

Soft targets, you might yawn. Hardly. A quarter of the British population claims believes in astrology. Half believes in paranormal phenomena.

Homeopathy is subsidized by taxpayers in France and Britain.

Dawkins is not attacking a lunatic fringe of marginal cults, but the extraordinary popular delusions of our time.

These widespread beliefs need to be exposed again and again as the idiocies they are. They distract us from a major source of progress: the exercise of reason.

Dawkins also usefully identifies one of the main mental mechanisms behind superstition: the tendency to establish fanciful connections.

The movements of celestial bodies thousands of light-years away are linked in our minds with the fleeting events of our lives; we make a causal connection between a glucose pill we swallowed and a subsequent recovery from an ailment, etc…

Such associations must not be regarded as the building blocks of sophisticated thought processes.

Far from being specific to humans, the readiness to link simultaneous occurrences, however random, is found throughout the animal kingdom.

Dawkins recalls an experiment carried out on pigeons by the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner.

Placed in front of three buttons, the birds had no problems finding out which one made the seed drop into the feeder.

They made a clear connection between hitting the appropriate button and getting a meal.

But the key to the experiment was Skinner’s next step: he began doling out the seeds at random intervals. The birds still found connections – evidently they were looking for them.

If a pigeon happened to be turning its head to the left when it got fed, it would continue to twist it in the same way over and over again, until the arrival of another seed confirmed the (purely imaginary) connection.

Those who believe in astrology, homeopathy, fortune telling, dowsing and other paranormal nonsense behave just like Skinner’s pigeons.

The noble mental activity – the one that only humans so far have proved capable of – is not the identification, but the testing of connections.

Sure, mediums or alternative therapists may be on to something – a rational mind has to be open.

But to determine whether this is the case they must be willing to submit to proper, double-blind tests.

Very few of the people interviewed by Dawkins were willing to do that, indicating that in their hearts of hearts they did not believe in their own disciplines.

There are two ways of looking at the world: through guesswork and faith or through the observation and logic. The first remains by far the most common.

As I have observed before, most people do not value rationality in itself. They embrace it only in the last resort and when the stakes are high.

Herein lies mankind’s problem: nature gave of both the power of reason and a reluctance to use it.

The start of the Premiership season in English soccer provides me with the theme for this post. I’ve never understood why those who resell tickets outside sports or entertainment venues (“touts” in British English, “scalpers” in American) are so reviled.

By putting those who value money more than the tickets they hold with those who want these tickets at (almost) any cost, they offer a clear service.

As long as the transaction is voluntary, all sides gain.

This leader written by The Economist 16 years ago makes the case for scalping wonderfully:

“In praise of ticket touts

Ticket touts are not known for their flair for public relations. They loiter outside the big match with fistfuls of grubby tickets priced at many times their face value. Their customers are free not to buy. But they do, and then feel cheated. The grandees of sport and theatre are distressed. Real fans, they say, need protecting; profiteering must be stopped. Persecuting the tout – and, if possible, prosecuting him as well – has become a sport in itself…

Such repressive measures are entirely misguided. Perhaps touts spend their free time mugging old ladies and fencing stolen cars. By all means prosecute them for that. But when they are scalping, they are working in the public interest. Touts make money when the demand for their tickets greatly exceeds the supply at the official price. Under such circumstances a ticket can be worth less to its owner than to somebody else; if so, a sale will benefit both parties.

However much the buyer may complain, he acted voluntarily: he is better off than he would otherwise have been. In this transaction the tout is merely an agent. In return for his scalping services, he rightly takes a cut. Remember that the scalper sometimes loses money. He takes risks – that the big stars will be there on the day, that rain will not stop play…

The tout has other costs to cover, too: these include not just his time, but also the capital cost of his initial outlay and the psychic cost of being a social outcast. Remember, too, that he is hardly ever a monopolist: he works in fierce competition with fellow scalpers. So the scalper’s cut is not a monopoly rent, but a fair price for a service efficiently rendered.

The real question is why the scalper’s services are needed in the first place. Sometimes, as with theatres, underpricing happens because organisers choose not to set their prices according to the market-charging the same for tickets on Saturday night as on Wednesday, for instance.

In sports, season tickets set the same price for all events, regardless of popularity. Promoters have their reasons for pricing this way; having done so, they should see that touts provide a useful service. When demand outstrips supply by the widest margin, the reason is usually that the original seller is trying to rig the market… Privileged insiders get tickets at knockdown prices, while others are excluded. Real fans should thank the touts for exposing such wicked goings-on.” (The Economist, 25 May 1991)

Since this article was written, a huge secondary market in tickets has emerged. Websites like StubHub render scalping bans futile.

A recent Econtalk podcast explains how this market works. Big brokers buy tickets in bulk and sell them on the internet. Because of the web’s power to match large quantities or buyers and sellers instantaneously, the market is efficient: the price reflects all the information available at any given time.

This means there are no easy profits. As one scalper explains in the podcast, far from always rising, prices typically drop closer to the event. This is why unsold tickets are picked up by scalpers on the day and sold at the venue.

These guys, in short, take on the risk of offloading a volatile product, so that a father who wants to take his son to the ball game has a chance to get his hands on the ticket given away to the owner’s spoilt kid.

The Economist’s conclusion is as valid now as it was 16 years ago: “Scalpers are fighters for justice, too.”

On the same subject, I also recommend Jeff Jacoby’s excellent column.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that oil never made a country rich.

Just a look at the list of OPEC members: not a single industrialized, or even half-way developed nation, is on it.

On the other hand, no country ever emerged from poverty through oil.

I’m not sure I how many barrels South Korea produces, but it can’t be that many.

The reasons behind what economists call “the oil curse” have been abundantly analyzed.

The stuff fosters idle dependency on easy money, artificially boosts consumption and currencies, entrenches predatory ruling castes, etc.

“I call petroleum the devil’s excrement. It brings trouble… Look at this madness—waste, corruption, consumption, our public services falling apart. And debt, debt we shall have for years.”

Thus spoke Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, a Venezuelan founder of OPEC, during the oil boom of the mid-1970s. Three decades later, his words adequately describe Chavez’s “Bolivarian Republic”.

Wealth has always come from working, not from striking gold. All the bullion of the Americas did not help Spain one bit: it held it back for centuries. All that is well known.

But those seeking recent hard date on the oil curse should read Stephan Faris’s article on foreignpolicy.com.

He quotes, among others, Oxford economist Paul Collier, who has written a study on the historical relationships between commodity prices and economic growth in Africa.

Writes Collier:

“Generally these increases in commodity price produce short-term effects that are positive. And then the long-term effects are just dreadful.”

Thus Nigeria is said to have lost almost $400bn to waste and corruption since it began pumping oil in 1960.

An African giant, Nigeria had a decent income per head well into the 1970s; now it is one of the poorest and most mismanaged countries in the world.

The latest case of crude-induced decline in Africa is Chad.

Ten years after the country struck oil, the only section of its population that is richer is President Idriss Deby’s clique (admittedly, Deby’s dictatorship is not shored up solely by oil: French support also helps.)

Faris points out that since construction on the pipeline began in 2000, Chad has dropped from 167 to 171 on the United Nation’s Human Development Index.

As he concludes, the only glimmer of hope in Africa comes from Gabon (another friend of France, incidentally)

The country will run out of oil in the not-too-distant future.

This is bad news for President Omar Bongo and his oily cronies, but could be good news for the other Gabonese.

Note: Faris’s article is here.