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I’m not quite sure what the moral of this report might be, but here is how it starts:
More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released today.
The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record-keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.
It’s an interesting way of looking at countries to ask: What statistics do they get wrong, and in which direction? (Also, which countries admit they got things wrong? Good for the government of Japan for noting their own error.)
For instance, it is now a cliché of Russia-watching that life expectancy there has nosedived, especially among men. Rather than move on straight away to speculating about why that might be (alcohol being the usual suspect) I find myself wondering if at least part of that story might be that the incentives to report deaths, conceal deaths, invent deaths, and so on, have changed, while the death rates themselves have changed rather less. Is there now perhaps some government scheme in Russia to “support” those who have lost a breadwinner, with a cash lump sum, which causes many families to become, as it were, impatient? Did communism cause people to claim the dead to be still alive, like in Japan, and has that incentive now been switched off?
I definitely recall reading about how, in India, before they allowed something more nearly resembling a free market, the tendency was for everyone to claim to be poorer than they really were, to avoid tax, which skewed poverty calculations dreadfully, and made the rest of us feel even sorrier for Indians than we should have.
Publicly acknowledged suicide rates are definitely going to vary according to how much pressure doctors face to call suicide something that is less of a reproach to those who were caring for the deceased. A higher “suicide rate” could accordingly mean that, in that particular country, suicide is considered less of a scandal.
We in Britain keep being told by our rulers that property crime has gone down, and we tell each other that we don’t think it worth reporting crimes any more. Hospital waiting lists, and all the perverse incentives associated with them, are another current British bone of contention.
My preferred moral is that one of the good things about free societies is that they are somewhat less likely to perpetrate permanently bogus data sets, because falsehood is, eventually if not immediately, bad for business. Government, unchecked by power centres beyond government, is liable to emit such falsehoods for far longer.
But it could just be that governments, by their nature, just love to gather statistics and to publish them, as proof that, one way or another, government is necessary. And more published statistics inevitably means more mistakes.
My original thoughts having been here.
First: The Pakistani tour bosses have been saying that because there has as yet been no decision under British law to prosecute anyone, no wrongdoing has yet been proved. But the legal problem is that there has to be someone who lost a fraudulent bet, and finding such a person may be difficult, even impossible. But just because the British law may do nothing, that doesn’t mean that cricket doesn’t have any problem. Already, the News of the World has proved to almost everyone’s satisfaction (if that suffices as the word) that no balls were bought and paid for, from Asif and Amir, if only to prove that they could be. That Pakistan test match captain Salman Butt and current Pakistan cricket boss Ijaz Butt refuse to acknowledge this only makes them look guilty also.
Second: Kudos to the British tabloid press. Sport often has reason to resent British news hounds. I was reminded recently, when reading this book, that ace Dutch soccer manager Guus Hiddink (who, unlike current England boss Fabio Capello, is fluent in English as well as soccer) turned down the England job that he would otherwise have loved to do, simply because he couldn’t face his love life being done over by these ghastly people. But this time, a British tab picked a target truly worthy of its ruthless attentions. They nailed down and publicised beyond doubt, within a few weeks, what all the cricket anti corruption units and police forces of the cricket-o-sphere couldn’t in over a decade.
Third: “Innocent until proved guilty” only applies to the legal system. If English cricket fans like me now regard Pakistan cricket as guilty until proved innocent, and most of us now surely do, we can impose our own sentence upon it right now, by refusing to pay to attend any more Pakistan cricket games in our country.
Fourth (the order of these points has now become rather random but I will bash on anyway): It surely doesn’t stop at “spot fixing”, i.e. at just a few no balls that don’t affect the result. Match fixing is surely also involved, still. The Sydney test last winter in Australia, when Pakistan mysteriously threw away a dominant position, and the Lord’s test recently concluded where, whatever official England cricket now says, the Pakistanis did the same thing again, both now look bent. Trott and Broad (who shared in a record stand for England), and the England team in general, understandably don’t want to think this and have said in public that they don’t. But they probably do, just as the rest of us do.
Fifth: England cricket is now busy demonstrating, in concrete and steel, the truth of the Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, being now deep into a major historic costs swamp. Numerous expensive new stands have recently been built, or at least expensively refurbished, but they mostly can’t now be filled at prices that will pay for all the work that’s been done. Meaningful cricket games cannot be conjured out of thin air even at the best of times, which these times are not, and demand even for good contests is limited. Thus, to cancel the few remaining one day games fixed between England and Pakistan would, just now, be a particular disaster for English cricket. These games will be a disaster anyway, because they are now pretty much meaningless except as a way for the English press to carry on hammering away at this fiasco, but not as big a disaster as they would be if they had been cancelled, because this would have meant all the ticket money so far gathered for them having to be handed back. But, the Pakistanis should not confuse the deeply insincere welcome they will now get for their remaining games here with a general willingness on the part of England cricket to forgive them, i.e. arrange more games with them, or for them, in the foreseeable future. (Whoops. I nearly put “fix” more games.) If the Pakistanis want to go on playing international cricket with England, or in England against anybody else (which is their current arrangement on account of Pakistan itself being too terrorist-menaced for anyone else to visit), they will have to clean up their act.
Sixth: This ruckus here in England has caused a general raking over of the recent history of Pakistan cricket and its various rows. I have already mentioned how the recent test series in Australia is, as Michael Jennings said in connection with my earlier posting about this, being, as it were, re-evaluated. The same applies to things like the big row at the Oval four years ago, which ended prematurely amidst loud Pakistani protestations of complete innocence, this time of ball tampering. Even that run in all those years ago, between England captain Mike Gatting and that Pakistani umpire, starts to look a bit different. So, more significantly, do all the much more recent rows within the Pakistan camp. Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan one day captain for the remainder of the tour, who is said to be a particular hold-out against corruption, behaved very strangely when he recently (a) played like a loon in earlier games in this tour, and then (b) abruptly resigned as the test match captain. It looked crazy at the time. I now suspect that the true behind-the-scenes story might present Afridi in a rather better light. [Later: see also, as explained in the comments: Bob Woolmer, death of.]
Seventh: I have read recent internet comments from Pakistan fans saying that Pakistan has the best fast bowlers in the world, and that the only reason they are being accused of cheating is because the rest of the world, England cricket fans like me in particular, can’t deal with this. Rubbish. If anything, these latest accusations embody the claim that actually, the likes of Asif and Amir are even better than they have recently seemed. They had Australia and England on the ropes recently and could have finished them off. They merely chose not too. How skillful is that?!? Which just goes to show how much is at stake here. A potentially world beating cricket nation, on a par with the West Indies in their pomp towards the end of the last century, and Australia since then until about now, has been brought down from hero to zero by all this.
Eighth: Although the attitude of fans elsewhere in the world, most notably in India, Australia and England, will be very important, the decisive factor in all this will probably now be the attitude of Pakistan’s own cricket fans. What they now demand of their cricketers will determine whether Pakistan cricket now embarks upon the painful and difficult climb back towards cricket respectability, or just gets wiped out as a serious cricket force by its inability or refusal to do this. If the “they only say we cheat because we’re better than them” school of thought triumphs in Pakistan – if, that is to say, they all bury their stupid heads in the sand – then it’s goodnight Pakistan cricket.
On the other hand, England cricket officialdom had hoped that the recent England Pakistan games would attract large numbers of Pakistani fans living in England. But these fans have been notable only for their almost total absence. At the time, commentators said it must have been the prices being charged. But what if Pakistani cricket fans in England, who will have been paying far more attention to their team than I have until very recently, had already concluded that their cricket team was bent as the proverbial nine bob note, and had decided that they simply could not bear to watch it throwing games away any more? It makes sense to me.
Ninth (this has become like that joke about two Oxford philosophers overheard in debate, but never mind): What Michael Atherton said (Times so forget about a link), as flagged up here by Natalie Solent on Monday, about the illegality of betting in large parts of Asia, and the consequent extreme nastiness of the people who run it.
I do not underestimate the difficulties involved in cleaning up Pakistan cricket, and I strongly agree with all those who are saying what a particular tragedy it will be if Amir now has his career taken from him, as will, I think, have to happen. Either Amir will now get banned for long enough to really hurt his career, or they will just prove they aren’t serious. But do not for a moment imagine that not cheating, if you are a Pakistan cricketer of talent, is a mere matter of Just Saying No. Threats are involved, not just bribes. If they can’t charm and smarm you into doing their bidding, the gangsters are all too likely to try violence, not just against you but against your family. So, it absolutely won’t be easy. It just has to be done if cricket in Pakistan cricket is to have much chance of surviving as a force in the world.
Either that, or we will all have to wait for Pakistan to stop being a totally failed nation, full of gangsters, and of religious maniacs who don’t have a clue how to stop gangsterism but only make it worse (e.g. by banning all betting) and many of whom are gangsters themselves, and hope that when that has been accomplished (I give it half a century at the absolute minimum), they still remember cricket.
A couple of the best players in the Pakistan cricket team, their two best bowlers, have been accused of match fixing by a British newspaper, and the story is now front page news in all of them. What they have been accused of is bowling “no balls” at pre-specified times, concerning which bets were then taken. All concerned have been at pains to insist that the “result of the match was not in any way affected”, which is all part of how subtle this particular corruption was.
You can just hear them saying it. “It’s nothing, just a few no balls. You get lots of money and look after yourself and your family, and nobody else suffers.” Add to all that a dash of menace (perhaps including some peer pressure) concerning what just might happen to you and yours if you don’t oblige, and it must be hard to resist. Then, once the bait has been taken, the tempters have got you by the throat, and can move on to more substantial rearrangements of the results of games. That one of the most promising young cricketers in the world, the eighteen year old fast bowler Mohammad Amir, is one of the players in the frame just makes it that much worse.
I know, it’s all still at the stage of “allegations”, but the accusations are that no balls were demanded at specific times, no balls which duly occurred. It looks very bad.
The Pakistani second innings is disintegrating as I write this, with Mohammad Amir having got out for an ignominious zero, greeted by the Lords crowd with embarrassed silence. England’s spinmeister Graeme Swann and swing ace Jimmy Anderson would this morning be a handful for any batting side with their minds wholly applied to resisting them. For the Pakistanis in their present frame of mind they are irresistible, although a bit of meaningless slogging is now happening. And you can’t help wondering if the comparable disintegration of the first Pakistani innings yesterday afternoon was similarly influenced by this catastrophe, which they perhaps already knew was about to explode. Nine wickets have already gone, and it can’t be long now for this tainted test match.
What next? Will the one day games now fixed between England and Pakistan proceed? Who knows? Worse, who will care? Will anybody want to come?
The general opinion radiating from England’s cricket commentary boxes this summer has been that England cricket has done a fine thing providing Pakistan with a second cricket home, what with Pakistan itself having become an impossible place to play international cricket. I wonder if England’s cricket’s higher-ups are starting to regret their generosity, if that is what it was.
More positively, I also wonder if the rather fiercer legal environment of the UK might serve to administer the necessary clean-up upon Pakistan cricket that Pakistan’s own authorities have, over the years (this is by no means the first such drama), proved themselves incapable of imposing. That’s probably far too optimistic.
This is not the first time I have here noted allegations of cheating by Pakistani cricketers. A few years back some of their bowlers were accused of ball tampering and they refused to carry on playing. That was pretty bad. This is far worse, and for cricket fans like me, profoundly depressing.
Guests can no longer carry guns and/or ammunition on flights to or from Indonesia.
– One of the terms and conditions found in the fine print when booking a flight on the splendid Air Asia. This is, of course, an outrage.
By the way, when did “customers” or “passengers” turn into “guests”? Surely “clients” was bad enough?
The North Korean football team has aroused the ire of the Dear Leader.
Early this month the players were summoned to an auditorium at the working people’s culture palace in Pyongyang, forced onstage and subjected to a six-hour barrage of criticism for their poor performances in South Africa, according to the US-based Radio Free Asia.
Only Jung Tae-se and An Yong-hak were spared a dressing down as they flew directly to Japan, their country of birth and where they play club football, according to an unnamed Chinese businessman the station cites as its source.
The “grand debate” was reportedly witnessed by 400 athletes and sports students, and the country’s sports minister. Ri Dong-kyu, a sports commentator for the North’s state-run Korean Central TV, led the reprimands, pointing out the shortcomings of each player, South Korean media said.
In true Stalinist style, the players were then “invited” to mount verbal attacks on their coach, Jung-hun.
The coach was reportedly accused of betraying the leader’s son, Kim Jong-un, who is expected to take over from his ailing father as leader of the world’s only communist dynasty.
Radio Free Asia quoted the source as saying he had heard that Kim Jung-hun had been sent to work on a building site and there were fears for his safety.
North Korea watchers said the regime had been hoping to attribute the team’s success to Kim Jong-un as it attempts to build support among military and workers’ party elites for a transfer of power.
It’s weird, this thing dictators have for sport. You spend decades building up your own and your dynasty’s power, and where do you end up? Wiith its continuation being significantly dependant on the outcome of some football matches, apparently. One almost feels sorry for Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, prisoners of their own despotism. Of course the list of people to be sorry for in North Korea as a result of that despotism is long, and their names come last upon it.
Here is a report about progress, so to speak, in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China.
This dam, just as was earlier prophesied, is causing lots of environmental problems, as in real environmental problems, as in: people are finding themselves living in buildings that are collapsing, beside roads that are cracking up, on land that is sliding into the water. We are not talking imaginary rises in sea level here, but real damage to real human habitats. Earthquakes are now happening.
That Telegraph piece links to this Times report, which explains things thus:
As the water rises, it penetrates fissures and seeps into soil. Then it loosens the slopes that ascend at steep angles on either side of the river. Eventually, rocks, soil and stone give way. The landslides undermine the geology of the area. That, in turn, sets off earth tremors. It may be the world’s biggest case of rising damp.
The Times report also includes this choice little paragraph, concerning some crumbling building that was hurriedly vacated by government officials and allocated instead to mere people:
“What kind of dogshit government moves itself out and moves us into somewhere like this?” one of them complained.
A key point made by the Telegraph piece above is that less is now being done than you might expect by Chinese higher-ups to suppress such reports:
Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks.
This all made me think of a book I read a year or two ago about the Western Way of War, or some such title, by Victor Davis Hanson (I think it was this book, although I believe I read a proof copy with a different title). The connection? Well, Hanson identifies one of the strengths of the Western Way of War to be the way that western war efforts are often preceded by almighty rows, often woundingly public, about how to set about, or even whether to set about, doing whatever it is they are attempting, which typically continue after the effort has begun. One of his major points being: this is not recent, it’s always been like this.
The result, for all the mess and unpleasantness and unfairly ruined careers, tends not to be the division and confusion that you might expect, or not only that, but also (a) better decisions, and (b) better understood decisions. Even the losers of such arguments at least understand the plan the others fellows are now making everyone follow, so even they follow it better. Both decision-making and decision-implementation are improved. Then, often with even greater doses of injustice, wars, even successful wars, are then raked over and argued about yet again, afterwards. It’s all very indecorous, and “debate” doesn’t do justice to the chaotic nature of such public rows. But the result is better decision-making and better informed and better prepared decision-makers, at all levels.
And for war, read: everything else big and dangerous also, like mega-engineering projects. Tyranny, aka dogshit government, in war and in everything big, imposes bad and un-thought-through decisions on baffled subordinates, decisions which still might have worked after a fashion if implemented properly, but not if even quite senior subordinates don’t really have a clue about what they are supposed to be doing and are just following orders blindly, or worse, perhaps not even doing that, because, you know, who gives a shit.
It must now be becoming clear to quite a few Chinese high-ups that had they had a big, messy, public ruckus about how exactly (or indeed whether at all) to build this damn great dam, then it might at least have been a damn sight better dam than it now looks like being. It might have been messier and more difficult and more stressful deciding about it all beforehand, but far better afterwards, once all the dust, and in this case also all the mud and all the various bits of collapsing land and roads and buildings that are now sliding and tumbling hither and thither, had settled.
And even if they failed to argue about the Three Gorges Dam properly beforehand, it would be better than nothing to at least have a bit of a public row about it now. At least that way, some harsh lessons might be learned and spread around, and such things might be done a bit better in the future.
Here is a sharp item over at Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog about the sort of credulous characters who go to various collectivist places and write gushing prose about how marvellous these places are. What is particularly satisfying is that it focuses on Matthew Yglesias, one of those bloggers whose reputation I have never been able to fathom.
For readers interested by the “ship of fools” headline, I got it from a wonderful piece by PJ O’Rourke, about the sort of tourists who used to go to the old Soviet Union to witness the many delights of central planning. It is in his classic, Republican Party Reptile.
Last night I dined at chateau Perry, and in connection with nothing in particular I found myself asking the above question. Can you, I asked my hosts, think of a worse decision? Both in its consequences for the people who made the decision, and morally, in terms of its consequences for the people it was inflicted upon? I mean, this lunatic policy might well be in the process of taking out an entire civilisation. Thanks to this insanity, to quote the cliché (because dramatic and very quotable and likely to be all too true) about China that has been doing the rounds for a year or two now, they’ll get old before they get rich, a soundbite which was launched by this publication.
And they are still bashing ahead with this policy, as I serendipitously discovered when I got home last night and was browsing through an internet site called Weird Asia News. Mostly this site features weird headlines concerning weird stories like: Papuan Police Recruits with an Enlarged Penis Denied Job; and: Britons Suffer Chemical Burns From Chinese Sofas, which I suppose I ought to care about more than I do what with me having bought a sofa myself not that long ago; and: South Koreans Revolutionize iPhone Market with Sausage Meat Stylus, the last one being a lot less interesting than it sounds. But in among such drollery is to be found this report, entitled Thousands Sterilized In China Population Crackdown, about how they are even now, still – well, as of last month anyway – enforcing this exercise in national suicide.
A 20-day campaign was begun on 7 April to sterilize 9,559 adults in Puning county, which with a population of 2.24 million is the most populous area of Guangdong Province. On 12 April local officials said they had already achieved about half their goal.
Doctors have been working 20 hour days to complete the massive round of surgeries. Local officials are so determined to reach their target they have been detaining relatives of those who resist the operation, potentially in violation of Chinese law.
Some 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions around the county and forced to listen to lectures about the one-child policy while their relatives refuse to submit to the surgery.
At Perry’s, conversation later ensued about why they unleashed this madness. What were they thinking? What are they still thinking?
My guess was that this began as a classic communist response to shortages. Communism always causes shortages. Faced with their shortages, the Chinese Communists figured that if they could only reduce the number of people suffering from these shortages, the shortages would go away. If that’s right, then, as Perry said, this was another of those Fixed Quantity fallacies in action. Also a classic case of a doomed attempt at economic calculation under Socialism.
My further guess now is that this has become a pissing contest between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, with the government now being too bloody stubborn to back down. If they give up on this policy now, that will suggest either (a) that it was wrong for them to have persisted with this for so long, and maybe even wrong for them to have done it at all; or else (b) that they no longer have the power – the balls, you might say – to enforce such arrangements.
I have heard it suggested that it is simply that the Chinese government fears the Chinese people and wants to thin the numbers down. When this policy got started, the Chinese government was much more completely in charge than it is said to be now. But if that is the thinking, why impose a policy that results in millions of sex-starved men wandering around? That’s not going to keep the peace.
Just a quick link on an interesting story about how the growing, affluent middle class in China is taking the view that it likes taxes as about as little as the Tea Party campaigners in the US.
I was in a (US) bookstore when a group of young Chinese (15 – 25 years, I’d guess) tourist/students entered. While I was there, they bought a stack of Dalai Lama books, saying they were not available in China. They also bought several recent histories on China, saying that they liked to be able to compare with the histories they got in China, to keep track of what the government was changing/denying. Additionally, they said they were getting in less sight-seeing than they had planned, as they were enjoying the web w/o government filters, especially on searches.
There are a lot of implications there.
– commenter “J2” on this
When I was in Vietnam last week, I caught up with fellow Australian expatriate Samizdatista James Waterton. James presently works teaching English in Vietnam to people preparing to attend Australian universities, and prior to moving to Hanoi lived in Beijing for several years. During this time he wrote for us about both Chinese, other Asian, and Australian affairs. Really good anonymous stuff on China was occasionally known to appear on this blog during this period, also.
After James guided me to a number of fine culinary establishments (as one would expect from one of the world’s great authorities on soy sauce) and gave me a tour of the main sights of Hanoi from the back of his motorbike, the two of us sat down in a cafe on the second floor of a building mysteriously shaped like a ship in central Hanoi, where we recorded a conversation about what was on our minds. This included our experiences as expatriates and our opinions on economic growth in Asia in general and China and Vietnam in particular, the outlook for the Chinese nation and economy, the differences between the the authoritarian habits of the Chinese and Vietnamese governments, ways in which people in poor countries now in some ways have greater and easier access to modern technology than do people in rich countries, and (surprisingly related to this) the correct etiquette for visiting the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh.
There is a little bit of background noise in this recording, much of which is the honking of motorcycle horns and other street noise coming from outside the cafe. I think the conversation is quite easy to follow despite this, so I shall just refer to this as “ambience that adds to the listening experience”. Enjoy.
Update: The link pointing to the post on soy sauce was incorrect. This is now fixed.
A North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean.
– Christopher Hitchens writes about A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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