(Above: click to enlarge).Blake's poem is a handy one for the commentariat, Sydney Anglicans, the Catholic church, and anyone else wanting to propose the world is being ruined, will be ruined, or has been ruined.
Simply insert O world, or O woman, or O environmentalist, and then the worm comes along and delivers payback, destroying everything, and these days - thanks to nanny state government regulation - no one can use DDT.
True, no one gets sick from the random application of DDT, so beloved by my grandfather, but that's hardly the point, is it?
Using this simple (patent applied for) poetic device, the amount of complaining and carry-on could in most cases be reduced to an eight line poem.
Thus the week-old blather of Cardinal George Pell about Embryonic Stem Cells could be reduced to O Embyronic Stem Cells ... the invisible worm ... yadda yadda.
Or you could head off to read an alternative view of the field, long hampered by legal restrictions, limited research funds and the Catholic church in Stem cell therapy: restoring sight to the blind.
The one truly funny bit in the Pellist tract? How faith and reason need each other, and the Catholic church is a strong supporter of science. Yeah right, in the way, the pond guesses, that Pell is such a strong supporter of climate science, and perhaps - apart from Lord Monckton - is currently a dominant figure in cutting edge scientific study in that field.
And if you think about it for a second Blake suits the Calvinist Sydney Anglicans right down to the ground. It seems the Anglicans are feeling abandoned by the forty year old set:
Cue "O forty year olds, thou art sick" invisible worm, yadda yadda ...But our favourite Sydney Anglican bit this week came via Archie Poulos in Preaching to a changing world:
What is frightening is the claim that taking in information in this way changes the way our brain functions and the way we think. There is a loss in the ability to focus on one thing, and to be shaped by an argument.
Yep, Archie is frightened by a claim, never no mind if there's proof, or it's true, or it's simply Susan Greenfield and Miranda the Devine whipping up a storm, but I guess the way the internet has affected the way Archie focuses and shapes an argument must mean there's something to it.
Next week, the Sydney Anglicans get frightened by the claim that if you step on a crack in the pavement a bear will eat you ...
But why stop with the religionistas? If you read Chris Berg, Blake has already provided the template.
Just insert - depending on hour or mood - O bureaucrats, or perhaps O government, or indeed O regulation (especially any regulation opposed by sponsors of the Institute of Public Affairs), throw in the worm, and next thing you know the entire fabric of western civilisation is destroyed.
Berg is at his Blake-ian best in Behavioural economics: an excuse to tax and regulate.
Does he ever pause to think how wondrous and passing strange it is to see him take up a perch amongst the cardigan-wearers at the ABC? Does the ABC ever wonder how it let this particular IPA cuckoo into the nest, as he routinely explains how fucked up public sector organisations like the ABC are? Yes folks the ABC is public sector, despite Mark Scott's best endeavours ...
It's a strange and heady mix, and produces some exemplary Bergisms. (This is equivalent to the study of ice bergs. You get to see the ten per cent of blather, and the other ninety per cent lurks beneath the sea):
Regulators are like the rest of us. They are over-confident, thinking they can understand complex behaviour. Hindsight bias leads them to believe events are more predictable than they are. And, unsurprisingly, they are driven by action bias – a tendency to favour interventionist solutions when faced with a problem.
In fact, regulatory biases could be worse than market ones. Behavioural economics tells us that irrationality is everywhere. But the marketplace provides firms and consumers with instant or near-instant feedback. In a competitive market, psychological bias can lead to failure or loss of market-share. With such feedback, market participants will change their actions. Make a mistake, lose money… do better next time.
Yes, that's what we love to see. Regulatory biases could be worse than market ones. Of course markets could be worse than regulatory biases as well, and never you mind any actual evidence to settle the matter. Just throw the mud how you will, and it will surely stick.
But even better is the wondrous belief in the perfectibility of markets, and infinite human progress.
Markets have been at it for a long time now, and the tulip mania that infected the Dutch in the seventeenth century happily stopped stone cold dead the sort of thinking that might have otherwise led to a great depression in the nineteen thirties, and in turn, having learned from the great depression that never happened, the markets strutted out to prevent the systemic disease of the financial system - that invisible worm - that might have otherwise happened in the first decade of the new millennium, to the great suffering of the United States, Ireland, Greece, Spain etc etc.
O markets, how you trample on the invisible worm etc etc, and now things are completely spiffing, thanks to the wisdom of the markets ...
Sadly, in a generally meaningless life, the pond once studied economic history (yeay, even unto the pond came the dismal art of economics itself), and the notion of the infinite perfectibility of markets and humanity is enough to bring on gales of laughter, and a dash of Calvinism.
But do go on Bergian wonder, explaining to the ABC how flawed it is:
By contrast, regulators receive little feedback at all. They operate in a political world, not an economic one. Regulatory or bureaucratic error is hard to pin down. It's harder to allocate blame for errors. It's even harder to quantify the costs of those errors.
Don't you just love it? If you operate in a political world, where you can get voted out every three or four years, there's simply no feedback at all ... and it seems the Murdoch press's quantification of the cost of having a federal Labor government, on a daily, hourly, by the minute basis simply hasn't nailed the cost of having an NBN, or pink batts, or buildings for schools (oh Piers Akerman, that the Berg could so dismiss your entire life's work so casually and cruelly. How does the poem go? O Akerman, the invisible worm yadda yadda).
Anyhoo, reading the Berg came just after the pond had put down Ian Frazier's Out of the Bronx (sorry, behind the paywall), a study of the fate of the Stella D'oro biscuit company, which dissects - yet again - the role of private equity firms in fucking over a biscuit company generally doing no harm and creating a nice gingerbread odour in the neighbourhood, until it got absorbed into a megacompany, and run into the ground, and then got done over by a mob called Brynwood:
In the second week of October, just days after the factory closed, Goldman Sachs announced that it would pay out twenty-three billion dollars in holiday bonuses to its executives and staff. The amount was the largest pool in the hundred-and-forty-year history of Goldman Sachs. At the highest average salary Brynwood had offered - about seven hundred and eighty dollars a week - the hundred and thirty-four Stella D'Oro workers together would have had to work forty-hour weeks for about forty-two hundred years to earn twenty-three billion dollars ...
The factory closed in October 2009, and in the meantime, the all-wise, all-seeing private sector incarnated in Goldman Sachs stuck out its paw for a US$5.5 billion bail out. Eventually it climbed up to $12.9 billion what with the amount forked out to prop up AIG ...
O Goldman Sachs, invisible worm, etc etc. ...
Meanwhile, the Berg stays off with the pixies and the tulips:
Market participants learn from their mistakes. But regulators are completely isolated from the consequences of their decisions, so it's much harder for them to learn.
Uh huh. No doubt that explains why in 2011 Goldman Sachs bankers to receive $15.3bn in pay and bonuses ...
When will regulators learn that what we need is another great depression to really sort things out ... and with a bit of luck we might then get a third world war ...
No doubt Berg wept tears of blood to learn that in January 2012 Goldman Sachs enjoyed a little bonus market-place correction, and now as with tulips Goldman Sachs has learned its lesson, unlike highly paid, high flying bureaucrats who are isolated, and possibly even live in Canberra and so know nothing of life and the world ...
O Canberra, rose, worm, destroy, fuck fuck fuck, Kevin Rudd ...
But the funniest line by far?
So far, the policy debate around behavioural economics has led with ideological conclusions ....
Yes, the Berg is above mere ideology, and never mind that his entire piece is infested with ideological conclusions and personal bias, against those who think governments should tax, and governments should play a regulatory role in stopping the sponsors of the Institute of Public Affairs fucking over the world without a hint of restraint ...
And so we come to the closer ...
... if we want to fully understand the implications of behavioural economics, we'll have to recognise that the field offers an even harsher critique of government than it does of markets. And the safe money says policy makers and bureaucrats will not enjoy the spotlight on them.
Indeed. And right now the spotlight is on the ABC, which routinely publishes the thoughts of the Berg, a scribbler who thinks the ABC is deeply flawed because it lacks a profit motive:
Yes, yes, because the customer is always right and because Chairman Rupert has done such a spiffing job with News of the World and The Sun, and there's simply no ideological bias, spin or twist in Fox News ...
O Berg, invisible worm, Dutch markets, rush on tulips, roses hot this week, biscuits down, life destroy ...
Thank the absent god he's got a job at the IPA. He wouldn't last a week in the real world ... even real world parrots have more bush craft ...
Meanwhile, speaking of market forces, is it wrong to note that the Heartland Institute and the IPA share Bob Carter as an advisor, and that Alan Moran delivered a heartfelt speech to Heartland's Sydney conference in October 2010?
O IPA, worm, etc, please fill in the rest at your leisure ...
O okay, that's just so this could wrap up with a cartoon from First Dog. Somehow Berg and Pell and science and the perfectibility of markets seems to go together like a horse and carriage, or dinosaurs and Noah's Ark ...
(Below: click on to enlarge, more First Dog here).
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