Category: metaphors

Review of The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the PoorThe Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Easterly is well known economist, who used to be one of the people he characterises as a “Development Economist” in the book. His central thesis is that experts think that the world’s poor don’t worry about their rights; they’re far more worried about their poverty and must be “helped” by the experts’ expertise to get out of poverty. Only then do their rights matter.

Easterly demonstrates with masterful strokes how, in fact, respecting rights is the cornerstone of sustainable growth. You won’t put effort into something if the government can arbitrarily turn up with a truck full of soldiers and take it away from you. If a king can just confiscate what you make you won’t make much, or trade with other people, because what’s the point?

Once the individual’s rights are respected, only then, can growth happen.

He goes right back to Adam Smith’s invisible hand from the wealth of nations and gives a far more nuanced reading of Smith than the current dogma about markets would lead you to believe is the case. For example, Smith would have been appalled by the monopolists cartels that run much of our economy. The invisible hand is, instead, people working in a self-interested way with the limited knowledge at their disposal, with each other, to create an economy that works for them. There is no expert saying how it should work in an abstract sense. There is no way an “expert” can possibly have all of the knowledge needed to create an economy, or have a deep understanding of people’s individual needs. It’s simply too big a problem. The knowledge needed is in no single head, and creates a different structure with a different history depending on what the individuals knew or discovered when they collaborated with each other. Of course, there can’t be any miracles caused by some anointed leader either.

His other target is what he calls the “blank slate” approach. Experts and the dictators that appoint them start from the assumption that whatever poor country they are about to blight is a blank slate, with no history, no already operating, particular, invisible hand that gets things done. So they proceed to impose a way of doing things on people instead of letting them find it out for themselves, and also trample on the rights of those people in the process “for their own good”.

He also discusses at length the works of Friedrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. Hayek has been somewhat hijacked by later thinkers such as Milton Friedman but in The Road to Serfdom he outlines why the old state-socialist vision of experts telling us how to live our lives is deeply flawed, if not fascistic, and he also defended the right of the individual to not have their lives decided for them by the state. In contrast Myrdal’s vision of removing children from their families and having them brought up by more “efficient” state-controlled organisations is frankly terrifying. Myrdal’s vision for what we now call the third world suffered from the benevolent expert illusion. He wrote a huge treatise Asian Drama An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations without once mentioning anything to do with the history and culture of the place or the needs of the people there, but instead talking of them like they are children. Myrdal’s work invented the so-called science of development economics that Easterly’s book is a polemic with.

Easterly makes the point that local custom and democratic tradition meant that Myrdal’s vision in his native Sweden made his ideas about reorganising the family not start. People wouldn’t let this happen because democracy and basic rights mean such harebrained ideas can’t take root. However, in the non-democratic, less developed world they can, due to the lack of individual rights and the dominance of dictators. Of course, the custom and tradition is the product of many generations of trial and error, it won’t be perfect, but the best people have come up with so far. It will almost definitely be better than something just made up in the mind of a Myrdal, because it has been tested by the people living with it.

There is a detailed discussion debunking the myth of dictators promoting growth, and what is a mountain of evidence pointing the other way. Also, evidence of growth is called into question. In the long run you will get periods of apparently high growth for purely statistical reasons followed by low or average, but our human propensity for seeing patterns will credit it to an individual or government because it makes a better story, even when the dates don’t overlap. A far better measure is to look at the growth on average for a region and see if it matches that of neighbouring countries, then see if there is a significant difference that might be caused by the dictator. This explains the miracle of Singapore far better than any story about Lee Kuan Yew being responsible for it.

One of the most striking examples Easterly covers is that of Korea. People living in an area where the land was awful for growing food, and where “experts” may have spent a lot of time and energy getting the crop yield from terrible to bad instead gained skills servicing motor cars, they swapped these skills with the people who had land that could grow food. This became the motor for the massive technology companies in Korea, but if the experts had arrived they all would still be subsistence farmers growing slightly more food than they might have done otherwise on marginal land.

One of the most telling arguments about the abuse of statistics comes when the Gates foundation are taken to task for claiming they reduced infant mortality in Ethiopia. In essence the figures are made up from guesses looking at what might have happened and have no rigour. The Ethiopian government are also rights abusers on a grand scale, and use British aid to drive people of their land and pay for their political prisons, as well as hold people to ransom (vote for us or starve) over political reform. The book opens with the story of some farmers in the USA being forced off their land and moved to model villages so a British company can grow wood there. Of course, this could not happen in a democratic country like the USA, but it did happen in Ethiopia and Easterly uses this to make the point that individual rights against the government are paramount if you want economic progress. They are not a nice to have, at some undefined point in the future. I am personally very angered that my government’s much lauded ethical foreign policy was a smokescreen for this. Of course the government has changed since then, but I am sure the same ignorant, condescending, rights ignoring view holds.

I have used some quite emotional language writing this review, but in fact Easterly is scrupulous in making sure the evidence speaks for itself and does not make any polemical points the way I have here for brevity’s sake. He also goes into some depth looking at an area in New York that is now one of the most desirable places to live that was left alone by the zealous bureaucrats by a process of accident and prevention by protest, and how it was transformed because it was left alone while the invisible hand found a better use for it, this is fascinating and also calls into question the current zeal for tearing everything down and evicting people from perfectly good houses because of some grand plan.

To sum up, this is a well written, engaging book. It recasts some writers who have been unjustly hijacked by some of the more extreme political views of the last half century and lets their ideas breathe. The central thesis, that people find excellent solutions themselves when not interfered with or stolen from by the state, is valid. It also calls into question the grip the monopolists have on our economy, to create a metaphor of my own, the invisible hand has become a strangler’s and Adam Smith would have had no truck with it.

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Survivor bias: an experiment

I write a simple computer program that randomly selects one of two outcomes. I send out letters telling people I can pick stocks and shares that will go up. About 50% of the people I write to think I know what I’m doing and think they might buy subscriptions to my stock picking service.

I do the same thing with the 50% that got the right answer, each time making an ever smaller group think I’m a stock picking genius.

Eventually I will run out of people, but right up to the last two it will appear to them that I really knew what I was doing, when I was effectively tossing a coin.

In the mean time quite a few of them may have subscribed to my stock picking service. Good for me, not so much for them.

The people at the end of this chain of probabilities will think that they are kings of the world, when they are only survivors of a simple process that could have picked anyone from the original group of stock buyers.

I recently attended a virtual course on complexity and discovered the fun simulation language Net Logo. For historical reasons the little actors displayed on the screen are called turtles. I could just as easily build a program that has a population that halves every turn. Is the lone turtle left blinking on the screen at the end a special turtle, did it somehow avoid the grim reaper against the odds? No, obviously not.

If that turtle was instead a person? The story it had to tell would be a story the rest of us would want to emulate because it was a survivor. This is why the biographies of the heroic entrepreneurs are often not that surprising. This is why their opinions quite often don’t differ a lot from those of others in the same cohort.

I used to work for Oracle and read the unauthorised biography of Larry Ellison – it’s an entertaining read and certainly not very complimentary. One of the things that comes through is luck, Oracle came close to going over several times, literally so close that a single large order from Japan saved it. I was talking about Richard Branson with someone recently. If I remember it right he originally had the idea of opening his record stores near tube stations late at night so people travelling home could buy records, he also had an aunt who lent him the money to open these stores. Great idea, but he didn’t have to go to a bank and get laughed at. Again, when Steve Jobs early Apple got some venture capital so they could make things happen – whoa, things started happening! (Thanks to Tim Spencer for this one).

There is an unknown population of other people and businesses that didn’t make the cut, or that stayed small service companies that are still around but not mega corporations. Probably 99.99% of them. Jobs himself acknowledged this with the famous analogy that the things joining the dots together are only apparent when you look back and make a story of them. In my last post I talked about pareidolia, which is the human tendency to invent patterns where none exist. We can all find stories up like this; if I hadn’t answered a job advert in the Independent I wouldn’t have met my wife, my kids wouldn’t exist and, like, wow man (sarcasm off). We make a causal chain of events but forget the massive part that chance plays in what happens to us. If the University had placed the ad in a different paper on a different day, who knows?

Survivor bias makes the winners’ stories compelling, but there are another 9999 (or many more) stories of other people we never hear. Remember this, next time someone tells you that you must emulate this or that hero of theirs. Success needs an element of luck, and the same person may not be lucky twice. Napoleon used to ask of a general is he lucky? He was no fool. We all love 37 signals’ (now Bascamps’) story, but there was luck there. Lots of people have tried their formula without getting what they have, or even losing everything.

This isn’t meant to sound like a doom and gloom principle, far from it, what it is saying is you need to find your own way that works for you. You also need to take that opportunity when it falls into your lap and do something with it. But you aren’t any more special than anyone else. It doesn’t matter. What matters is being clear about what you want and sticking to it.

Generic is the wrong answer

Dear reader, cast your mind back to the time when you first wanted to put some information on a website.

You had to trust the crusty programmer types, and if you wanted changes they wouldn’t necessarily be able to do them at any great speed. This was fine in the stone age, around the year 2000 or probably earlier. Then, one day, the technology started to catch up with the aspirations and everything had to be done at internet speed. So crusty developed less crusty tools that let things happen quite a bit quicker.

We suddenly had content that people created for themselves. Never to be outdone the constant search for simple generic solutions to be everything meant that the companies that made the very expensive PC based tools for document management had a go at creating something. Some of their original big corporate customers kept on with them. These systems don’t work for the internet, except when you are creating some kind of library, which is the metaphor they started with.

The more considered approach was to treat managing content like it was a solved problem. The content management system (CMS) was born (or at least became more mainstream) and allowed you to manage your catalogue in one place so you could, you know, sell your stuff to people that wanted it.

Then we fell victim to the illusion of best practice. Problems are in a space where they seem to be the same, so we (software engineers, academics and other people who should know better) develop generic solutions. I mean, content is just abstract stuff that we let those tricky user types create so they can pay us. We can just pull something open source or off the shelf and say off you go to them and get back to important stuff like arguing over which 20 year old text editor is best.

But here’s the thing. The pattern user -> catalogue -> put catalog on the interwebs in front of customers is the same, but the user / business / enterprise is most definitely not. Most (not all) open source CMS were created for a small community to share info – they do that really well. However, a commercial company that sells white goods does not have even remotely the same needs as one that sells online holidays where the stock is a multi lingual database of hotels they have a relationship with. They need content management, the thing, but not in the same way, and the OSS solution is probably completely wrong. Also – you don’t want your site to look exactly like your competitors or you are competing on price, which is suicide.

Human beings are subject to pareidolia. Seeing patterns that aren’t there in the data. This is also related to clustering, confirmation and congruence biases. When it meant running away from the wind in the grass because you thought it was a lion that was ok. Now we look for levers to fix and change things that often don’t exist. Eric Reiss calls this robots in the Lean Startup. He cites the case when the US manufacturers couldn’t work out how the Japanese were getting such massive productivity gains so they went to see and saw robots. After a robot installing frenzy the US was still far behind. The Japanese spent a lot of energy understanding how they did things first and put the automation in where it made sense, gradually, and always testing the results, for their specific needs. Good practice, but hard to emulate without a complete culture change. Pareidolia (and the other biases) put robots inside processes that were still broken. In knowledge work this is even easier because adopting the latest fad is only the cost of a couple of books and some (more) training, until your organisation fails catastrophically. Danger, Will Robinson.

Best practice only works in very simple environments where all of the problems are completely understood. Buying a CMS from someone assumes that they understand your needs properly. They probably don’t. It’s dangerous.

Good practice means the using the skills of analysing the problem properly and divining the principles you should follow. A company should control its own content; after all that’s what it’s selling. This means layout, search, everything. However you might use a markup language and a standard group of elements for layout to make it easy for non-web heads to create that content. Find levers for the easy stuff, for the things that do have generic solutions that work.

Startups don’t want to spend money on stuff like a CMS that is tailored to their needs and will tend to go for the OSS solution. I think that they need to start small and find out what those needs are, just like everything in the lean approach. So don’t buy one, and don’t slavishly pull in an OSS one that will bite you and turn out to be an expensive mistake. Create something as simple as possible that meets your needs, then you will know what the needs are and where the pain is. Then you can use good practice to get to where you want to be. Then you can find the metaphor that works for you, and let your competitors try and shoe horn someone else’s into places they don’t work.

Best practice implies generic – generic means cheapest and also (face it) BORING.

Good practice is searching for the right metaphors and being patient enough to wait for them to appear. And, of course, those metaphors are the ones that work for you, might not be right for someone else.

Why I hate todo list apps

I recently had a twitter discussion about why I don’t like using Basecamp.

It’s a bit weird, I love Rails and it originated from the need to create a stable framework to create Basecamp. DHH and his colleagues were generous enough to share it with the rest of us and I’ve been using it for years to great effect. I admire DHH and the guys at the company and have read their books. But I hate their product. Using it makes me feel depressed.

I can’t see the flexibility others see anywhere. They are a poster child for great design and easy UI and it’s pretty dull and obvious, maybe that’s what the fuss is about. I’ve used it off and on for years and it doesn’t seem to have substantively changed in all that time, yet there are allegedly changes and improvements happening to it constantly. It’s also boring, even more boring than the bazillion sites you see built on top of Twitter Bootstrap – because they usually have some metaphor the coders are exploring and bootstrap’s a quick way to make it presentable while they experiment.

But the main thing is I can’t stand todo list apps.

This comes out of the way I work and think. I will write todo lists on paper and cross them off, but for anything bigger than just me (and up to 5 items) I need to visualise it and look at the flow and commitment of work. You can’t do this with static text-based lists without doing a lot of counting in your head. As far as I can work out you can’t create a different visualisation (in Basecamp) where you have a private list taken from other lists of things you care about today in the order that matters to you without creating another list that isn’t linked to the original tasks so you’d have to close everything twice. It hasn’t changed in years.

In the physical world you can do this with sticky notes or file cards and a bit of blu tac to put each piece of work into something that can be visualised and moved about. It doesn’t have to be complex, but nicking ideas from scrum and kanban around allocating points for pieces of work and limiting your work in progress (WIP) you can come up with something that lets you look at your pipeline and your commitments so you can start to have grown up conversations with other people about priorities and schedules. Limiting your WIP also gives you a far better chance of actually getting something worthwhile done. This is a big win over boring lists, but harder to understand at first.

Todo lists are, I think, a great tool for linear thinking and controlling.*

The metaphor lists give you is the linear instruction manual, codes, all you can do is change their priority and create more items. They also suffer from being unbounded, so you can just keep adding to them and never finish. There’s a very interesting time management book by Mark Forster called Do it Tomorrow. In it I found the idea of a closed list. This is a list you don’t add to and work on until it’s done – he’s discovered this makes you more productive and also you start tackling the tasks you really don’t want to do because you can’t close the list off until you’ve done them. This is a great antidote to procrastination. It’s also limiting your WIP. In fact it’s a different take on the same idea as a personal productivity booster.

So, in essence, for me the list metaphor stifles your ability to think and visualise without a lot of effort breaking out of the mental straightjackets it puts you in. There are better metaphors that allow you to easily move work about and discuss it properly with stake holders. So use them a little for small tasks, but for the big stuff – use bigger metaphors. I also think gantt charts cause similar cognitive blindness when you use them for anything other than checking if you are still on track.

* Aside: I was going to use the phrase command and control. The original meaning of this was simply that military operations have a designated officer who is responsible for seeing the mission through. How that officer does it is not defined. Some systems thinkers, for example John Seddon, use this term to mean enterprises where the people doing the work are not expected to show any initiative and be told what to do all the time so everything costs a fortune and is badly done by people who could do a much better job if left alone to do it properly. Military operations don’t work like this, people are trusted to do what their training tells them so they can achieve their objectives, see commander’s intent. Seddon’s meaning seems to have triumphed in systems thinking debates, however.