A Bit More Detail

Looking east on the platform for the 512 St. Clair streetcar at St. Clair station on the evening of the 30th, I saw an alignment.

Earlier this month, an article published in the New York Times written by one Eamonn Fingleton, “The Myth of Japan’s Failure”, achieved wide circulation online. Briefly, Fingleton argued that the prevailing picture of Japan as a country stuck in a slump for the past two decades is wrong, that by many measures Japan is thriving–he cites the Japanese trade surplus, growth in life expectancy, and the increasing number of skyscrapers for instance–and that in fact Japan is a stronger country, relatively even, than before.

Spike Japan has none of that. In a very thorough fisking, that Japan blog argues that Fingleton has either cherry-picked evidence to support his case or is an incompetent commentator. For instance, on Fingleton’s report that “of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet service, 38 were in Japan”.

Our first lesson is on the use and abuse of statistics. That the Japanese city with the fastest average Mbps, Shimotsuma, ranked 3rd in the world, is a small Tokyo dormitory community to which very few Japanese could point on a map, and that one of the Japanese “cities” in the top 50, Marunouchi, is not a city, nor even a ward of Tokyo, but a few blocks of office buildings clustered around Tokyo station, make it readily apparent that if you are a largish country for which Akamai has a lot of data collection points and you have a highish average connection speed, then of course you are going to dominate the city rankings. For a more truthful picture of Internet infrastructure, we need to turn to a country-level analysis.

In 2011 Q2, Japan ranked third for average connection speeds, at 8.9Mbps, behind South Korea at 13.8Mbps and Hong Kong at 10.3Mbps. Impressive, to be sure, but not quite the picture of global leadership that Fingleton insinuates it has. Indeed, the broader the metric becomes, the worse the picture looks for Japan: for high broadband connectivity (above 5Mbps), the Netherlands ranks first at 68% of all connections, Japan ranks 6th, at 55%, and the US 13th at 42%, while for good old-fashioned broadband connectivity (above 2Mbps), 10 mostly European countries have penetration rates over 90%, the US ranks 35th at 80%, and Japan is actually behind the US, coming in 39th place at 76%. What’s more, Japan’s high broadband connectivity actually fell 8.9% YoY and its broadband connectivity fell 12% YoY, while the rates of almost all other countries surged. Not all that stellar a performance at the broadest end of the spectrum, especially given how suited relatively small, very densely populated Japan is to the build-out of broadband.

Fingleton goes on at length. Is the number of skyscrapers more relevant a figure than the square footage of real estate that is being used? Can the low Japanese birth rate really be put down to a canny plan to maximize Japanese food security? Why would anyone think that the number of restaurants in Tokyo highly rated in the Michelin guide has any particular relevance to general standards of living, likewise growth in electricity use per capita?

Read the whole post. It’s a devastating, brilliant, fisking of a man whose views on Japan are almost humourously off-kilter. It’s also very good journalism.

Walking up Jersey Avenue, an alley north and east of Harbord and Grace, one night last week, I was struck by the cool dim silence.

Elaborating on a theme from my previous post, I’m curious this evening about what people think about the way things get missed because they’re communicated in language communities that are less prominent than other language communities.

Here in Canada, for instance, the predominance of English over French with the asymmetrical bilingualism that’s a consequence still means that speakers of English are rather less familiar with the culture and opinions of Canada’s speakers of French than vice versa. Things get missed. Arguably the missing of these things goes some ways towards explaining Canada’s ongoing if recently quieted existential issues.

Then again, does it really matter that much? Arguably, if speakers of English in Canada were more familiar with what was going on in French Canada, tensions could be greater. Many of the successful multilingual countries of the world–Switzerland, say–have survived with relatively little contact between language groups, each having its own secure territory and happy to cultivate its own gardens.

What say you about all this?

I’ve a post up at History and Futility noting the challenges faced by a particular language community–the users of N’Ko script, used by the Manding languages of Africa–and wonder briefly about the effects of the marginalization of relatively disadvantaged language communities. What’s getting missed?

Looking west at Bloor and Dufferin after leaving the Bloor-Gladstone branch of the Toronto Public Library on the late afternoon on Sunday the 22nd, I looked west at Bloor and Dufferin and liked what I saw.

Towleroad’s legal issues contributor Ari Ezra Waldman defends the logic of employment anti-discrimination laws against the arguments of opponents who argue that such laws are unnecessary, since workplaces which unfairly discriminate against people for reasons unconnected to their work performance will suffer relative to workplaces which don’t. False premises, he argues; even excluding neo-classical economics’ lack of connection with reality in assuming that people will always act rationally, this assumes that the workplace will be able to identify these costs and care about them. The employer may not.

First, the revenue drop must be sufficiently significant to cause an employer to change his behavior, and second, the loss of utility (or, happiness) caused by the loss of revenue must be higher than the utility the employer gains by discriminating. I address the first below in point 2; the latter point once again assumes that an employer would act rationally when comparing utilities and ignores the special animus that one might hold toward a victimized group. That is, what if hate overpowers money? Let’s say my business, Super Straight, Inc., wants to make more Very Straight Widgets, so I need to hire more people. Even though Les B. Ian can make one thousand VSWs per day, causing a 100 jump in my revenue, I would be 200 points angrier just knowing that Ms. Ian is around. A rational actor would still discriminate. But, even if the change in utilities were equal, or even reversed, a rational model assumes fungibility where some people might value their adherence to bigotry stronger than any increase in mere money.

More to the point, relatively smaller minorities will plausibly lack the demographic heft that would get larger minorities noticed.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual employees are, on average, just as productive as their heterosexual counterparts. But, there are a lot fewer of them. This means that even assuming the veracity of the rational behavior model discussed above, discriminating against such a small minority may not have the kind of negative economic effects that would drive a discriminator to change his behavior or close up shop. In fact, in order to push a discriminator into economic ruin (or, even, a statistically significant loss of revenue or market share), the group victimized by discrimination must be large enough to have its best and brightest, a small subset, have enough of an impact. If you discriminate against women, you exclude 50 percent of your applicant pool; if you discriminate against African-Americans or Latinos, you exclude roughly 13 and 17 percent of your applicant pool, respectively. But, gays make up only about 1.7 percent of the US population. Discriminating against the 2 percent of Americans that are natural red heads is more likely to negatively impact your business than discriminating against gays.

The free market forces incentivizing nondiscrimination, therefore, do not exist with respect to small minority populations. So, even assuming the truth of the economic premise, the market fails when it comes to gays. That is the exact moment when the law should step in.

And, of course, anti-discrimination laws play important roles as norm-setters.

[T]he free market hypothesis discounting the need for anti-discrimination laws ignores the cultural and expressive impact of non-discrimination laws. Before discrimination against women was taboo or before discrimination against African-Americans was taboo, it may not have occurred to businesses that women and blacks could offer them competitive advantages. That is, again even assuming the truth of the economic theory, if the zeitgeist of the time accepts discrimination, the first step toward non-discrimination may only happen at the whim of a pioneering iconoclast. Equality should not be left up to such luck.

Most laws have an expressive angle. Some are simple: a law banning murder expresses society’s view that your rights to do what you want end at someone else. Some are more subtle: a progressive tax regime shows that society is interested in equality and fairness.

Employment non-discrimination laws are not exclusively about ending the trappings of insidious bias in the workplace; they also enshrine a progressive society’s commitment that members of minority groups are not second-class citizens. They help change the mind of society as a whole about the value and rights of those that are different. Sure, true reform may take a generation or more; but, non-discrimination laws create a background of fairness, equality, and respect in which we raise our future business owners, future workers, and future policy makers. This long run cultural impact may qualify as what economists call “social welfare,” but it is absent from the free market theory in employment discrimination.

Go read the post in full, and the comments.

This. Denis Des Chene at New APPS Blog is dead on about the self-fulfilling prophecies involved with limited franchises.

Intellectual capital tends to track social and economic capital. Enfranchising only well-informed voters would have the effect of cementing into place existing inequalities. To show that I am not merely drawing on “intuitions”, let me quote a few passages from the suffrage debates. The quotations come from Selected Articles on Woman Suffrage (Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1910). It is perhaps worth noting for those who don’t know the history of the women’s suffrage movement that after half a century of “agitation”, women in the US received the franchise in Federal elections in 1920; at the time the volume was published, whether women should have the vote was therefore very much a live issue. The authors I cite are against giving the franchise to women, and one of their arguments concerns women’s relative ignorance, on the basis of which the franchise ought to be withheld from them.

The first is from Charles Worcester Clark, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1890:

Women have, on the whole, less information on political subjects than have men. As their powers are of the domestic rather than the political sort, so their ordinary course of life is not such as to give them much knowledge of public questions or of the character of public men. They need special preparation in order to vote intelligently. So, it made be said, do men. Nevertheless, very few men do make a study of politics. The great majority, except for the questionable information furnished by the partisan press, go to the polls with only such knowledge of the issues and the candidates as comes to them in their everyday life. But, fortunately, this is considerable. It is much more than women have. The average man understands the difference in functions of national and state governments, and knows what part the candidate for whom he votes will have to play if elected. The average woman knows nothing of this. Neither has she any idea what the tariff is, though she may applaud or denounce it with all the vehemence of the party newspaper she occasionally reads. This ignorance is not discreditable to her, ‖ for she has enough to do already, but it exists. There is, of course, a large number of women of high education and comparative leisure, who are well informed on public questions; better informed, perhaps, than any corresponding number of men, except it be those whose profession is politics, and in impartiality women must be much superior to these. There is, however, no possible way of making selections from the mass. Some one has contended that all women ought to be allowed to vote, because Mrs. Julia Ward Howe is far better fitted for citizenship than is the average male voter. This sort of argument proves too much, for by the same token we would all gladly submit to a despotism—if only Mrs. Howe were to be the despot. There is no reason for believing that the average woman would take any more pains to fit herself for the duties of a voter than the average man takes; and the information which comes to her without special effort is certainly less, as is consequently her interest in public affairs, unconnected as they are with her daily life. It is very likely that on their first enfranchisement only the best qualified women would vote, as is said to be the case in Kansas [where women had had a partial franchise since 1861]; but the exigencies of party politics would never permit such a state of things to continue long. Thus, to enfranchise women would be, in the end, to diminish, if not the average sound judgment of the body of voters, at least the average information and the average interest in public affairs (209–210).

The second is from Mrs. Humphrey (Mary Augusta) Ward, one of the most famous novelists of her time, writing in Nineteenth Century (1908):

Women are ‘not undeveloped men but diverse,’ and the more complex the development of any state, the more diverse. Difference, not inferiority—it is on that we take our stand. The modern state depends for its very existence—and no juggling with facts can get rid of the truth—on the physical force of men, combined with the trained and specialized knowledge which men alone are able to get, because women, on whom the child-bearing and child-rearing of the world rest, have no time and no opportunity to get it. The difference in these respects between even the educated man and the educated woman—exceptions apart—is evident to us all. Speaking generally, the man’s mere daily life as breadwinner, as merchant, engineer, official, or manufacturer, gives him a practical training that is not open to women. The pursuit of advanced science, the constantly developing applications of sciences to industry and life, the great system of the world’s commerce and finance, the fundamental activities of railways and shipping, the hard physical drudgery, in fact, of the world, day by day—not to speak of naval and military affairs, and of that diplomacy which protects us and our children from war—these are male, conceived and executed by men. The work of Parliament turns upon them, assumes them at every turn. That so many ignorant male voters have to be called into the nation’s councils upon them, is the penalty we pay for what on the whole are the great goods of democracy. But this ignorance-vote is large enough in all conscience, when one considers the risks of the modern state; and to add to it yet another, where the ignorance is imposed by nature and irreparable—the vote of women who in the vast majority of cases are debarred by their mere sex from that practical political experience which is at least always open to men—could any proceeding be more dangerous, more unreasonable? The women who ask it—able, honorable, noble women though they be—are not surely true patriots, in so far as they ask it. There is a greatness in self-restraint as well as in self-assertion; and to embarrass the difficult work of men, in matters where men’s experience alone provides the materials for judgment, is not to help women. On the contrary. We are mothers, wives, and sisters of men, and we know that our interests are bound up with the best interests of men, and that to claim to do their work as well as our own is to injure both (259).

The argument is straightforward. It is presumed that ignorance among voters diminishes the “sound judgment of the body of voters”, and thus (by implication) the likelihood of good results from elections. Even if some men are ignorant too, nevertheless the situation of women, taken by both authors to be natural, tends to prevent their acquiring the “practical training” requisite to a wise exercise of the franchise. It is therefore reasonable to deny women the franchise.

Needless to say, in a system where males only have the vote the perpetuation of inequality—in particular the confinement of women to the domestic sphere, and thus the condition of ignorance on the basis of which they are held to be incompetent to vote—is likely.

[. . .]

The moral is that you cannot in fairness merely observe existing conditions of relative ignorance and decide on that basis who is to be granted the franchise. Those conditions are almost certainly not natural, and thus not inevitable; and to grant the franchise only to the relatively knowledgeable under such conditions will perpetuate the inequalities that have generated some, and perhaps a great deal, of the variation in knowledgeability. It seems to me that rather than return to notions whose history is checkered, to say the least, the better answer to the problem of ignorance is to agitate to improve education, the quality of news media, and so forth.

As part of Geocurrents’ ongoing series on the Caucasus, Martin Lewis has a post up taking a look at linkages between the exceptional linguistic diversity of the Caucasus and ancient polities. It turns out that there are Albanians in modern Azerbaijan–or that there were, at least–and that these Albanians ended up assimilating into the Armenian community. Naturally, nationalistic historiographies intervene to make these complicate the present hugely/

The linkage between NE Caucasian languages and ancient kingdoms is strongest in Caucasian Albania, a state that covered much of what is now Azerbaijan from the fourth century BCE to the eighth century CE. Like Armenia and the Georgian kingdom of Iberia, Albania was politically caught between, and deeply influenced by, the Persian world to its east and the Greco-Roman world to its west. We know from ancient Greek writers that the Albanians eventually acquired their own script, but knowledge of this writing system was lost until 1937. At that time, a Georgian scholar discovered a reproduction of the Albanian alphabet in a medieval Armenian manuscript. Subsequently, a few stone inscriptions were found that used the same script, but the language itself basically remained a mystery until the early 2000s.

The story of the recovery of Albanian writing begins in 1975, when a fire damaged a number of manuscripts in a neglected basement cell in the famous Eastern Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine’s in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The heating of the manuscripts helped reveal the fact that some were palimpsests, parchment manuscripts that had been scraped over and then re-inscribed. Fifteen years later, unknown letters were noticed under a Georgian text in one of the documents. In 1996, the Georgian scholar Zaza Alexidze determined that the underlying passages were in Albanian. After several years of concerted effort, he recovered and translated the entire hidden layer of the palimpsest. What he found was an Albanian Christian lectionary, a church calendar with specific scriptural readings keyed to specific dates. Some scholars believe that this long-forgotten and thoroughly erased text, which dates to the late forth or early fifth century, is the oldest Christian lectionary in existence.

Alexidze’s translation was facilitated by the existence of a living tongue strikingly similar to the language used in the lectionary. The literary language of the ancient Albanians, it turns out, lived on among the Udi, a group of eight thousand persons inhabiting two villages in Azerbaijan. As the years passed, the Udi language diverged from old Albanian, but not by much. The surviving Udi people also retained the faith of their ancestors. Although they live in a largely Muslim area, the modern Udi belong to their own Udi-Albanian Christian church.

Christianity originally spread to Albania from Armenia. The Albanian church eventually separated from the Armenian, affiliating instead with the Orthodox Christianity of the Greek world. After the Muslim conquest of Albania in the 600s, such an affiliation became politically fraught, as the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire was the main principal rival of the Muslim Caliphate. As a result, the Albanian Christian population was again placed under the ecclesiastical authority of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Over time, it seems, much or perhaps most of the Albanian population assimilated into the Armenian community. Those who resisted Armenian religious control seem to have evolved into the modern Udi. Yet the Udi population continued to decline, as many members adopted Islam and were absorbed by the Azeri community. Today, the Udi language is regarded as gravely endangered.

As might be expected, the Albanian heritage of the eastern Caucasus has generated a contemporary political controversy among Armenian and Azerbaijani partisans, focusing on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Eastern Armenians, according to some Azerbaijani stalwarts, are not so much genuine Armenians as transformed Albanians—like much of the Azeri population. Armenian scholars charge Azerbaijani historians with greatly exaggerating the extent of Albanian assimilation, and with trying to “de-Armenianize” much of the historically constituted Armenian region.

To the neutral bystander, the issue might seem moot; ethnic groups and nations often expand by assimilation, and the mixing of peoples is more the norm than the exception over the long term. Primordialist nationalism, however, retains a strong hold on the imagination, especially when faced with intractable military conflicts. As the “frozen war” between Armenia and Azerbaijani is now going into its third decade, it is not surprising that the ancient Albanians would be recruited into the conflict.

Commenters note that apparently the Udi have been driven out of Azerbaijan along with Armenian Christians.

At anthropology blog Savage Minds, Alex Golub makes the claim that Wikipedia is superior to encyclopedia because of the engagement with material that Wikipedia requires of its users/contributors.

To prepare for writing my encyclopedia entry I went to the library to see what actual encyclopedias look like. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. As a student I spurned encyclopedias as ‘secondary sources’ and plowed through texts. As a result, I have an invaluable knowledge that can’t be duplicated by reading secondary sources, and a keen awareness of how exhausting not using secondary sources is! Reading the high-quality, professionally edited entries in my library’s encyclopedias was an eye-opener and a guilty pleasure — you could learn so much with so little effort! And you don’t have to work as hard untangling the entries the way you do with Wikipedia!

But this is exactly the problem with closed, for-profit encyclopedias: they require no work. In fact, they require just the opposite: submission to authority. The writing guidelines for my encyclopedia entry insist that there be no quotations or citations — just a short list of additional readings. Encyclopedias give us no reason to believe their claims are true except the arbitrary authority of those who write them. They are the ultimate triumph of the authoritarian impulse in academics.

Compare this to Wikipedia, which has gotten so persnickety about insisting on citations and references that much of the charm of its early days has gone. Every wikipedia entry is an argument between its composers, spilling out of the discussion page and into the entry. Accuracy and verifiablity are there on the page to see. In other words, Wikipedia is the ultimate realization of academic ideals of argumentation, presentation of evidence, probing claims to logical coherence, and the deliberative use of reason. There is no better place for people to cut their teeth on the life of the mind, or to begin to learn the fundamental skill of close and critical reading of a text.

It is this refusal of arbitrary authority that really scares encyclopedia types, not worries about accuracy. Wikipedia is a place where you must learn to think for yourself, encyclopedias are places where you are told what to believe.

Of course, there is a lot to like about the arbitrary exercise of authority if you have faith in the authority in question: the gullible are not duped, the conspiracy theorists are silenced, and the trains run on time. The down side of intellectual debate is the possibility of intellectual chaos — and there’s certainly a lot of that on Wikipedia! If you are pessimistic about the capacities of your students to know and learn then feeding them the party line is, to you at least, the best way to protect them.

But we as educators can and must believe that our students — and everyone else! — is capable of more than this. Our fundamental principles and highest aspirations lead us ineluctably to the conclusion that attaining intellectual maturity requires immersion in the rough waters of public debate, which is exactly what Wikipedia is. The real danger of Wikipedia is its use by people made gullible by a system which promises them that someone, somewhere knows The Truth, exactly the belief that college teachers try to educate their students out of rather than into. We’d have less uncritical reading of Wikipedia if there were less people trained to be uncritical readers.

[. . .]

Wikipedia is flawed, human, complex, and ultimately deeply worthwhile. It is real life, not a child-proof playroom. What sort of educators are we if we believe the latter is better for our students than the former?