music and the brain

Oliver_sacks

Urban legend has it that when a patron fell ill in Carnegie Hall and the call went out for a doctor in the house, half the audience stood up to help. Perhaps the concert was a medical benefit; more likely, it never happened. But there does seem to be no shortage of doctors who are musical, at least in New York, and one of them is Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and author, who has now combined two of his passions in one book.

In his earlier collections of clinical tales — most famously in “Awakenings” (1973) and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1985) — Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.



Pervez Hoodbhoy on the Civil War in Pakistan

Over at ZNet:

An overwhelming majority of Pakistan’s citizens do not want harsh strictures imposed on their personal liberties. They do not want enslavement of their women, their forced confinement in the burqa, or for them to be denied the right to education. Instead, they want a decent life for themselves and their children. They disapprove of Islam being used as a cover for tribal primitivism. But there is little protest.

We must understand this. Why is there no mass movement to confront the extremist Taliban of Miramhah and Waziristan, or the violence-preaching extremist mullah in Mingora, Lahore or Islamabad? This is because ordinary people lack the means and institutions to understand, organise, and express their values and aspirations. We do not yet have the democratic institutions that can give politics meaning for ordinary people. Depoliticising the country over the decades has led to paying this heavy price.

To fight and win the war against the Taliban, Pakistan will need to mobilise both its people and the state. The notion of a power-sharing agreement is a non-starter; the spectacular failures of earlier agreements should be a lesson. Instead, the government should help create public consensus through open forum discussions, proceed faster on infrastructure development in the tribal areas, and make judicious use of military force. This is every Pakistani’s war, not just the army’s, and it will have to be fought even if America packs up and goes away.

It may yet be possible to roll back the Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded our society for over 30 years and to defeat our self-proclaimed holy warriors.

Guardian America

Guardian America launched last Tuesday. Over at Comment is Free, Michael Tomasky discusses this American cousin of the British paper:

So what is Guardian America, what makes a British newspaper think that Americans will want to imbibe its view of America and the world, and why, having decided to undertake such an improbable project, would the paper place it in my hands? Fine questions. Let’s explore.

The journalistic shorthand version is that Guardian America is the US-based website of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK and around the world with content that we originate here to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers. I am sometimes asked what, or who, this means we will try to be “like”; the questioner wants an American reference point the better to slot this project into a known category. The only answer is that we will try to be like … the Guardian.

Which means what?

The Reunion of Hip-Hop and E-Music

Dennis Romero in City Beat:

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Sasha Frere-Jones’s recent New Yorker essay, “A Paler Shade of White,” argues that “rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties” and became, essentially, free from black influence. Rock, as I argue in “Pop’s Living Dead” [CityBeat, October 9, 2003], stopped evolving around 1979, a victim of self-segregation (rock fans burned disco records in Comiskey Park that year) at a time when African-Americans moved on to create rap, disco, and soon, house and techno – new genres far from rock. But with that came a hyperawareness of blackness and masculinity in hip-hop – an almost anti-rock sentiment. As the genre stepped further away from its multicultural roots, it turned its back on its brother, the often-effeminate dance music genre. In the late ’90s, a defiant saying in hip-hop clubs – where men would line the dance floor, arms crossed, and bob their heads as women gyrated – was “n—— don’t dance.”

Today, hip-hop is recapturing the groove.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Nassim Taleb on How A Wing of Economics Hurts Markets

In the FT:

Academic economists are no more self-serving than other professions. You should blame those in the real world who give them the means to be taken seriously: those awarding that “Nobel” prize.

In 1990 William Sharpe and Harry Markowitz won the prize three years after the stock market crash of 1987, an event that, if anything, completely demolished the laureates’ ideas on portfolio construction. Further, the crash of 1987 was no exception: the great mathematical scientist Benoît Mandelbrot showed in the 1960s that these wild variations play a cumulative role in markets – they are “unexpected” only by the fools of economic theories.

Then, in 1997, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for their option pricing formula. I (and many traders) find the prize offensive: many, such as the mathematician and trader Ed Thorp, used a more realistic approach to the formula years before. What Mr Merton and Mr Scholes did was to make it compatible with financial economic theory, by “re-deriving” it assuming “dynamic hedging”, a method of continuous adjustment of portfolios by buying and selling securities in response to price variations.

Dynamic hedging assumes no jumps – it fails miserably in all markets and did so catastrophically in 1987 (failures textbooks do not like to mention).

Later, Robert Engle received the prize for “Arch”, a complicated method of prediction of volatility that does not predict better than simple rules – it was “successful” academically, even though it underperformed simple volatility forecasts that my colleagues and I used to make a living.

[H/t: Saifedean Ammous]

Genes and the Nature of Race

Ziba Kashef in Color Lines:

Instead of focusing on the 99.9 percent overlap in all human genes, the Pharmacogenetics Research Network, a government funded follow-up to the Genome Project, honed in on the 0.01 percent difference as a source of the new discoveries and therapies. And several scientists and researchers sought further funding for investigations into possible genetic causes for racial disparities in disease and drug responses.

Their faulty reasoning, however, is illustrated by the controversial race drug BiDil. Developed to address the greater mortality from heart failure among African Americans, the drug has been met with both celebration and skepticism. While it is true that Blacks ages 45 to 64 are more than twice as likely to die from heart failure than whites, Duster points out that the disparity narrows after age 65. The disparity may have less to do with biology and race than other documented factors in heart disease, such as diet, stress and lifestyle. Evidence outside of the U.S. also undermines the rationale for a race-based approach to the condition. Citing the data of epidemiologist Richard S. Cooper, who compared hypertension rates worldwide, Duster explains, “Germany has the highest rate of hypertension, and Nigeria has the lowest rate. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in epidemiology to figure out what might be the issue there. It can’t be race and genetics.”

Scientists do, of course, acknowledge the influence of environment and lifestyle on disease and disparities. The laser-like focus on, and blind faith in, genes as the source of understanding and treating disease has been tempered by technical challenges and other trends in medicine. But the damage to our society’s understanding of race may be done.

The Undiscovered Planet: Microbial science illuminates a world of astounding diversity

From Harvard Magazine:

Bacteria “Our planet has been shaped by an invisible world,” says Roberto Kolter, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS). “Microbes mediate all the important element cycles on Earth, and have played a defining role in the development of the planet,” says Kolter. They form clouds, break down rocks, deposit minerals, fertilize plants, condition soils, and clean up toxic waste. Among their ranks, explains Cavanaugh, are the photosynthetic “primary producers” that use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to form the broad base of the food chain, and together with plants make up the earth’s largest source of biomass. The earliest life on our planet was entirely microbial, and if life exists on other planets, it is surely microbial there as well.

In the realm of human health, microbes help us digest food and produce vitamins, protect us against infection, and are the main source of antibiotic medicines. The human cells in your body number 10 trillion, but that pales by comparison to the estimated 100 trillion microbial cells that live in and on you. “Without them, you would be in trouble,” Kolter says: animals experience abnormal growth and become sick if deprived of their microflora during development. Although a few microbes are known to cause disease, the precise role played by the vast majority is essentially unknown.

The same could be said for microbes around the planet. There are a billion of them in a gram of soil, and a billion per liter of seawater, but we know neither what they are nor what they do.

More here.

Nothing You Can Know That Isn’t Known

From The New York Times:

Beatles So what on earth does Jonathan Gould think he’s doing by adding to the flood with “Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America” — aside from guaranteeing himself a floor audience of completists and getting to write off bootlegs on his tax returns? Is there anything left to say, any detritus left unpicked through? Well, I for one didn’t know that Linda McCartney’s sobriquet in her high school yearbook was “Yen for Men.” Intrigued yet? Here is his take on “Something,” George Harrison’s second-finest moment as a Beatle (I’m an “If I Needed Someone” fan):

“Though it gives the impression of being highly melodic, the tune in the verse is actually very narrow, moving in a range of five notes, which allows George to sing it with great relaxation and force. What gives the song its melodic flavor is the pining electric guitar riff that introduces the verse and the bridge. … This memorable hook not only adds ‘top’ to the tune; it also provides a tangible expression of the ‘something’ that the lyric wisely leaves unsaid (much as McCartney’s extraordinarily active and expressive bass line suggests an undercurrent of powerful emotion beneath the self-possessed surface of the song).”

(Contrast that with the totality of Pattie Boyd’s assessment in “Wonderful Tonight”: “I thought it was beautiful.” And George wrote the song for her!)

More here.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Editing Raymond Carver

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

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Because life is so utterly elusive all the way down to the end, you have two basic choices if you want to say anything about it. You can say a lot, too much even, and be satisfied that at least you’ve dumped as much clutter on the matter as you could. Or you can withhold, take little tiny pecks at the thing, and be satisfied that the gaping silences are doing the job.

Raymond Carver came out with Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in 1976 and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981. The stories are a revelation in pecks and silences. Stripped down, punchy sentences did just that: They punched your guts out. The human landscape of his stories was so rich for being so bare. It seems impossible that literature can be this honest, this true. But there it is. If your hands don’t tremble a little when you read Raymond Carver then you’re lacking something essential in your make-up: You’re flat, you’re a goner, you won’t do.

The trouble (if such things trouble you) is that the stories in both those volumes are what they are not just because of Carver, but also because of the rough hands of a certain Gordon Lish, Editor. Mr. Lish, working at Knopf, took the stories that Carver sent him and he hacked away at them, mercilessly. He liked the stories as they were, no doubt, but he saw something else in them as well, something harder and more pure. He saw the power in Carver’s natural restraint and he wanted to push it to the very limit. He saw a compact emotional explosion in each story, and he pared away at the language until each one was a mean package of terrible beauty. It worked. The stories are brilliant, devastating. There is nothing like them.

But Carver never felt very good about what had happened.

On the Importance of Being Coltrane

Travis Jackson reviews Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound in The Nation:

here are few areas of music where repetition in its myriad forms assumes a greater significance–and holds greater promises of joy–than jazz. Despite the changes presented and challenges posed by many jazz recordings released in and after 1959 (Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps were all released that year), the essential core of jazz coalesces around group interplay over successive sonic cycles from twelve or thirty-two bars in length. The repetition and moment-to-moment alteration of harmonic progressions and melodic fragments, even when they recur in tunes with different names, provide a ground for further exploration. When alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley begins his fourth solo chorus on “Straight, No Chaser” (from the Davis album Milestones) with a blustery one-bar figure that Charlie Parker frequently used on blues-based tunes, we hear both possible results of repetition at work. Adderley doesn’t merely reproduce Bird’s tones and phrasing: he worries the line, twisting and transforming it almost as though he has caught himself falling back into old habits and is trying to break their hold.

The other saxophonist featured on that track, John Coltrane, had his own struggles with repetition. Indeed, one way of understanding Coltrane’s music and life is to see them as meditations on how to embrace and escape repetition. The tenor player’s lengthy practice routines, for example, are the stuff of legend. His previous biographers–including Bill Cole, Cuthbert Simpkins and J.C. Thomas–have detailed how Coltrane worked methodically through étude books like Sigurd Rascher’s Top-Tones for the Saxophone (1941) and Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947). Noting that musicians, too, are fascinated by these stories, Lewis Porter writes in Coltrane: His Life and Music (1998) that they “are told with apparent love, respect, and admiration. But there is often a suggestion that Coltrane’s practice was obsessive, that it was not a simple matter of working to improve, that there was an emotional desperation and drive in it that was somehow beyond the norm.” When Coltrane kept returning to the woodshed, he seems to have been reaching for something harder to achieve than instrumental mastery. It’s little wonder, then, that, like Porter, Coltrane’s other biographers and fans describe him as an ascetic treading difficult musical pathways in search of some greater truth.

Another Step Towards a Neuroeconomics: Combining Neuroscience and Game Theory

Alan G. Sanfey in Science:

Our lives consist of a constant stream of decisions and choices, from the everyday (will I respond to this e-mail?) to the highly consequential (will I have a child?). Essentially, the study of decision-making attempts to understand our fundamental ability to process multiple alternatives and to choose an optimal course of action, an ability that has been studied by various disciplines with different theoretical assumptions and measurement techniques, although with relatively little integration of findings.

The emergence of an interdisciplinary field, popularly known as neuroeconomics (1, 2), has begun to redress this lack of integration and offers a promising avenue to examine decision-making at different levels of analysis. Its proponents seek to better understand decision-making by taking into account cognitive and neural constraints, as investigated by psychology and neuroscience, while using the mathematical decision models and tasks that have emerged from economics.

Most experimental studies of decision-making to date have examined choices with clearly defined probabilities and outcomes, such as choosing between monetary gambles. Given that we live in highly complex social environments, however, many of our most important decisions are made in the context of social interactions, which are additionally dependent on the concomitant choices of others—for example, when we are deciding whether to ask someone on a date or entering a business negotiation. Although relatively understudied, these social situations offer a useful window into more complex forms of decisions, which may better approximate many of our real-life choices.

As part of the neuroeconomic approach, researchers have begun to investigate the psychological and neural correlates of social decisions using tasks derived from a branch of experimental economics known as Game Theory.

The Art of Kashmir

Holland Cotter in the NYT:

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Beginning in the late 1980s hellish sectarian violence between the Indian army and Kashmiri separatists, Hindus and Muslims, swept through the valley, scorching its beauties and sealing it off from the rest of the world. Few travelers came; some who did lost their lives. This story was not new. These storms regathered many times over the centuries.

“The Arts of Kashmir” at Asia Society adds to these two perspectives a third: a land in creative tumult. Set amid Afghanistan, China and India, the region underwent constant cultural fermentation, taking influences in, sending them out. Sacred to Hinduism, home to early Buddhism and a favored retreat of Muslim rulers, it was forever either struggling to sustain social balance or heading into conflict. And this perpetual play of opposites produced, through molding or friction, some of the most beautiful art in the world.

Despite that beauty, art from Kashmir remains relatively unfamiliar here, and the Asia Society show, assembled by the art historian Pratapaditya Pal, is the first full-scale New York survey. Why the wait? Mistaken identity has been one reason. Kashmiri metal sculptures and paintings often arrived in the West with salvaged monastic holdings from Tibet, and were assumed to be Tibetan.

Leiter on Joseph Massad on Homosexuality in the Middle East

Leiter over at Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports:

In the case of his latest attack on Professor Massad of Columbia University, Professor Bernstein claims that, like the Iranian President, Massad denies that there are homosexuals…

My suspicion, upon reading this, was that Massad’s thesis was inspired by Foucault’s thesis in The History of Sexuality that homosexuality does not mark out a “kind” of human being, and thus had nothing at all to do with the bizarre delusions of the Iranian President. Since the article in question is accessible from my university computer, this was easy enough to confirm. Foucault’s History of Sexuality is cited in notes 45 and 73 in Massad’s article, and the accompanying text makes clear that Massad is endorsing Foucault’s thesis. (Indeed, the longest section of the article has its own subtitle, “Incitement to Discourse,” a phrase taken directly from Foucault, as Massad acknowledges.) Foucault’s (and Massad’s) thesis does not deny that there exists same-sex contact by numerous individuals in the Arab world (as Bernstein manages to note, though seems not to understand its import); rather, it denies that engaging in same-sex contact marks out a kind of person about whom there are meaningful, lawful (or law-like) generalizations to be made (e.g., that homosexuals are mentally ill; or that homosexual men had bad relations with their father; or that homosexuals only have sex with people of the same sex, and so on). The “kind” of person we call the “homosexual,” and with whom certain traits are said to be correlated, is really a social and cultural construct, not a set of interlinked facts about sexual identity that hold invariant across societies and cultures.

Suad Amiry

21suadeng

Travelling in the West Bank you can easily notice boys of 14, or even less, reading newspapers and debating passionately in bars. In Palestine young people seem seriously interested in politics, whereas in Western countries, more and more often, adolescents are bored and detached.

Politics is our life. That’s the truth of the matter. But now there is no leadership, the PLO really doesn’t talk to the people, doesn’t direct them. When I was their age, there were many political parties or movements: Fatah, the Democratic Front, the Communist party, the Popular Front, and they all bombarded us with discussions about one or two state solutions, being pro or anti violence, on the arms struggle, on social liberation, on the role of women, who had a very strong position remember, in particular, in the popular and democratic front; we were approached and taken inside the political parties. Now, I know this from my job as a professor, nobody talks to them, the only one that does this job is Hamas. We have to realized this: right now Hamas is the only real grass root organization in Palestine.

Hamas is considered by the US and the EU a terrorist organization. It is not a reliable interlocutor. What do you think?

I don’t like the Hamas political programme, but they are the only ones who speak to people…and you know what, to be frank, at this point, we should give Hamas the opportunity to govern, in Palestine we are making a great mistake not allowing Hamas to get into power. Let them govern and then let people realize that Hamas will fail with their unrealistic politics of isolation. Yes, of course, they are able to open a kinder-garden, but it’s very different to be responsible for the economy, for the unemployment. Hamas should be given a chance…to fail.

more from Reset here.

inshallah

Inshaallah06

For better or worse, philosophical acceptance has rarely been America’s default frame of mind. As the Historical Analogy Police might hasten to note, here’s one place where analogies with a previous superpower, imperial Rome, break down badly. The Roman elites were a supremely self-satisfied lot whose motto might well have been the old advertising slogan “It doesn’t get any better than this.” With a faith that’s sometimes messianic, sometimes endearing, and often very destructive, Americans believe they can always make it better than this. From diets to diplomacy, we’re suckers for regime change. Is it possible that a little less faith in our convictions, and a little more skepticism toward our capacities, would itself be a form of self-improvement? It may yet be a while before Waking the Tiger and Getting to Yes are knocked off the shelves by If It Happens, It Happens and The Seven Habits of Humbly Accepting People. What we can say for sure is that many hundreds of thousands of Americans have endured tours of duty in Iraq. They are writing blogs and e-mails with a new word at their fingertips. They are returning home with a new word on their lips. It will have an impact on the American Experiment, inshallah.

more from The American Scholar here.

looking to sol

Sol

Last summer we were regaled with stories about a brash art-worldling who had been sticking diamonds on somebody else’s skull. We were also told that he hires people to do his work for him, collects art in bulk and shows it in hot venues. In short, he is just the kind of guy the popular press loves to hate, and defenders of the true Bohemian cross harrumph about in choral harmony while awaiting deliverance that never comes. Comparatively little notice was paid to the passing of another artist who trained assistants to realize his projects and who collected art in depth and showed it when asked. His name was Sol LeWitt.

Yet it was LeWitt who first took the heat for defying the old-guard belief that the visible trace of the artist’s hand was the ultimate criterion of aesthetic authenticity and value. Of course, László Moholy-Nagy had challenged that notion back in the 1920s by phoning in the design for an enamel painting to a factory that then made two versions in different sizes. In the ’60s LeWitt went further in legitimizing such practices by establishing the principle that art should be judged by the quality of the idea behind it. ‘Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution,’ he wrote.

more from Frieze here.

How Not To Be Racist

From Discover:

Race About 7 percent of white people, though, actually show a distinct lack of racism on probing psychological tests, says psychologist Robert Livingston of Northwestern University. Recently Livingston and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin studied these people to find out why they’re not racist and, by implication, why the rest of us are. It turns out that the nonracists share a unique emotional style: They rarely form any negative associations, whether they’re thinking about meaningless symbols or real human beings.

In their experiment, the researchers tested people’s tendency to form positive and negative associations by showing them written Chinese characters followed quickly by pictures of “good” things—like baby seals, flowers, and waterfalls—or pictures of “bad” things, like mutilated faces, snarling dogs, and feces. (Previous research has showed that Chinese characters are meaningless and appear neutral to English speakers.) The researchers presumed that the characters would take on positive or negative traits depending on what images they were paired with. And indeed, most people liked the characters that were paired with good pictures and disliked those linked to bad images.

A select few, though, did not form negative associations with Chinese characters. They made positive links just as often as anybody else, but the negative images didn’t stick in their minds. They seemed not to pay as much attention to negative information as others did and were less likely to form negative associations between two things. “They have rose-colored filters,” Livingston says.

It turns out these people are generally the same people who show no prejudice on the implicit racism test.

More here.

Watson Retires From Cold Spring Harbor Lab

From Science:

Watson Ten days after sparking controversy with comments on race and intelligence, James Watson today announced that he is retiring as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, New York. The decision appeared to be the result of negotiations between Watson and the lab’s Board of Trustees, which suspended him from the chancellor’s post last week. The 79-year-old Nobelist, who has led the lab in various capacities for nearly 40 years, will continue to live on the CSHL campus.

Watson was widely condemned after The Sunday Times quoted him on 14 October as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours–whereas all the testing says not really.” Watson subsequently apologized, but the damage had been done. London’s Science Museum canceled a talk he was supposed to give on 19 October; CSHL’s board issued a public statement rejecting Watson’s remarks and suspended him.

Watson cut short his tour of the United Kingdom, where he was traveling to promote his new book Avoid Boring People, and returned to Cold Spring Harbor to deal with the fallout. “I’m going home to try to save my job,” British press reports quoted him as saying before his departure. Board members were engaged in negotiations about his fate, a trustee told ScienceNOW.

More here.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

The New Kitsch: Two-Minute Art

Alan Behr in Culture Kiosque:

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The appearance of two new books of contemporary art allows us to pause and consider the power of New Kitsch. We needn’t pause that long, however, because true to the aesthetic of New Kitsch, each of those books takes no longer than two minutes to absorb. Given the time pressures and multiple distractions of contemporary life, two minutes may be all that a book on any subject can hope to obtain from a modestly attentive reader. When, after all, was the last time that anyone other than academics or students carved out time for a serious novel? While sharing the speakers’ platform at the New York Public Library with Günter Grass recently, Norman Mailer remarked that the people who trouble themselves even to write those novels will soon be regarded as eccentric as the authors of verse plays.

Extrapolating from Mailer’s prognosis, it won’t be long before all books will completely reveal themselves in less than the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee, but in the meantime, we have the contemporary art world—that charmed coalition of aesthetic social climbers—to bring us our quickie reads. Two recent entries stand out: one from Marilyn Minter (b. 1948, Shreveport, Louisiana), an artist who seems unafraid to try her hand at any two-dimensional medium, and the other by Charlie White (b. 1972, Philadelphia), a photographer first and last.

We must distinguish the New Kitsch sensibility of these two artists from that of the masters of Old Kitsch (formerly known simply as kitsch). Old Kitsch emphasized technique over content—or form over substance, if you will. It was characterized by excessive sentimentality and typified by once-respected, later passé (and now somewhat resurgent) painters such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Paul-Joseph Jamin. It was academic, simplistic and so 1890.

The New Kitsch is not sentimental. It is self-knowingly cool; but coolness, like sentimentality, is about showing off at the expense of perception and engagement.

Time to ditch Kyoto?

In news@nature, Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner argue for abandoning Kyoto:

Kyoto has failed in several ways, not just in its lack of success in slowing global warming, but also because it has stifled discussion of alternative policy approaches that could both combat climate change and adapt to its unavoidable consequences. As Kyoto became a litmus test of political correctness, those who were concerned about climate change, but sceptical of the top-down approach adopted by the protocol were sternly admonished that “Kyoto is the only game in town”. We are anxious that the same mistake is not repeated in the current round of negotiations.

Already, in the post-Kyoto discussions, we are witnessing that well-documented human response to failure, especially where political or emotional capital is involved, which is to insist on more of what is not working: in this case more stringent targets and timetables, involving more countries. The next round of negotiations needs to open up new approaches, not to close them down as Kyoto did.

Economic theory recognizes the futility of throwing good money after bad. In politics, however, sunk costs are often seen as political capital or as an investment of reputation and status. So we acknowledge that those advocating the Kyoto regime will be reluctant to embrace alternatives because it means admitting that their chosen climate policy has and will continue to fail. But the rational thing to do in the face of a bad investment is to cut your losses and try something different.