Cuttings: February 2019

What’s the best way to halt the march of urban decay? Playing SimCity - column by John Naughton in The Observer. "The only computer game I’ve ever played ... was called SimCity and involved developing a virtual city from a patch of undeveloped land. The game enabled you to determine where to place development zones, infrastructure (like roads and power plants), landmarks and public services such as schools, parks, hospitals and fire stations. You could decide the tax rate, budget and social policy for your city – populated by Sims (for “simulated persons”, I guess) who had to live and work in the three zones you created for them: residential had houses and apartment buildings, commercial had shops and offices and industrial had factories, warehouses, laboratories and (oddly) farms.... What you discovered early on ... was that your decisions had consequences. Forget a fire station and one day a fire would get out of control and raze a city block. Set taxes too high and the inhabitants might emigrate. What you were learning was your city was a dynamic system in which hidden feedback loops determined its behaviour and apparently innocuous policy ideas had unanticipated consequences.... It’s at least 20 years since I played the game and I had more or less forgotten about it. But last week, I stumbled on Model Metropolis, a remarkable essay by Kevin Baker, a science historian. Baker answers a question I’d sometimes thought about (but never answered) when playing SimCity: where did the theoretical model underpinning its feedback dynamics come from?... The answer is Jay Forrester, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology technocrat... Forrester called [his] model 'urban dynamics', declaring that he had reduced the problems of the city to a series of 150 equations and 200 parameters. ... Some of his simulations produced alarming conclusions, suggesting, for example, that the worst thing you can do for a city that is beginning to decay at its core is to build affordable public housing: that just attracts more poor people, erodes the tax base and sends the city into a death spiral... [It is not] clear how much of Forrester’s urban model was incorporated into SimCity. But with hindsight it’s suddenly clear why it often seemed impossible – at least to this player – to design planning policies that embodied social justice. In fact, the most successful policies always seemed to be ones that maximised economic growth. Perhaps this was a measure of my incompetence. Or was it just a reminder that the technological is now political too?"

Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "Medieval idealists imagined a land of plenty – Cockaigne – where rivers ran with wine, everyone was equal and partied and drank all their lives. The trouble with today’s liberals – witness Hillary Clinton or any of Labour’s recent past or present leadership – is that they have lost any comparable vision, however far-fetched or unrealistic. Utopia has become the preserve of the right. It is Mr Trump and Mr Farage who dream of a world of America and Britain first, revelling in low taxes and little or no state, liberated from the dark forces of the UN, World Trade Organisation and the EU. The liberal left, declares Rutger Bregman, a 28-year-old Dutch historian, has no comparable vision. Working family tax credits or spending 0.7% of GDP on aid simply don’t cut it. Liberals can hardly inspire themselves, let alone the electorate. Gone is a belief in socialism, science, great international institutions or even a willingness to experiment with new ways of living. But if this is the book’s big insight, much of the rest fluctuates from the genuinely challenging to politically correct tosh. ... So what about other utopias if those offered by Bregman are pie in the sky? Why not try to inject some moral purpose into today’s capitalism? Couldn’t ordinary people band together into newly legitimate trade unions to insist on better and more rewarding work? And how about creating a union of neighbouring states on our continent? We could call it the European Union. You may not dream the same dreams as Bregman – but he invites you to take dreaming seriously. For that alone, this book is worth a read.

The Money Saving Expert: how Martin Lewis became the most trusted man in Britain - article by Daniel Cohen in The Guardian. "At a time when money has become the measure of everything – when people often think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens – Lewis has become the most trusted man in Britain. In 2015, seven months before the EU referendum, a poll found that 71% of people trusted him when he talked about Europe, putting him ahead of any other public figure. He has achieved that status through an unusual combination of journalism, campaigning and light entertainment, without falling victim to the public’s suspicion of journalists, campaigners and entertainers... Lewis’s success depends on the trust he has built with the public, and he tends to this like an anxious parent... Lewis applies that same care to his campaigns and public pronouncements. He has based his career on just about the last thing we all have in common: the wish to save money. And he tends not to weigh in on the most contentious issues of the day, for fear of dividing opinion and undermining his sway.... With his fiery rhetoric, his efforts to defend the little guy against vested interests, Lewis may look like a populist. But, at heart, he has a technocratic temperament: he identifies specific problems, and tries to solve them with tweaks. On the rare occasions when he does speak out, it’s because he has decided the system has stopped working properly. Lewis is, in short, a centrist – perhaps the only truly popular centrist in Britain. Instead of seeking structural change, his formula combines educating the public with campaigning for small adjustments to the system. But at a time of growing inequality, with politicians unwilling or unable to hold corporations to account, is this enough? What is needed, the economist John Kay told me, 'is not more information from the financial services industry, but actually an industry that is trustworthy and reliable'. The question remains whether Lewis’s approach is the best we can hope for, or a distraction from real change.

The class pay gap: why it pays to be privileged - article by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison in The Guardian. "[The] idea of a 'following wind', a gust of privilege, gets to the heart of what we call the class ceiling. It neatly captures the propulsive power provided by an advantaged class background – how it acts as an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort... Equally, the metaphor also describes the experience of the upwardly mobile who, very often, have the wind against them. It is not that such individuals cannot move forward, or never reach the top; just that, generally, it takes longer, happens less frequently and often represents a markedly more labour-intensive, even exhausting experience. ... The key issue is that when the following wind of privilege is misread as merit, the inequalities that result are legitimised. This leads those who have been fortunate to believe they have earned it on their own, and those who have been less fortunate to blame themselves.... Most academics, policymakers, charities and businesses have tended to make [the] mistake [of fixating on access], implicitly suggesting that the baggage of our class origins somehow disappears once we enter the workplace. We wanted to shift the debate – from getting in to getting on. And what we found was striking. In contemporary Britain, it quite literally pays to be privileged. Even when those from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering the country’s elite occupations, they go on to earn, on average, £6,400 less than colleagues whose parents did 'middle-class' professional or managerial jobs – a nearly 16% class pay gap. This is exacerbated for women, people with disabilities, and most ethnic minorities."

The country I walked through deserves better than Brexit - article by Mike Carter in The Guardian. "In May 2016, a few weeks before the EU referendum, I walked 340 miles from Liverpool to London to see what was happening to my country.... People in those former industrial towns spoke of their anger and betrayal, of having being forgotten by Westminster politicians, of their communities having been destroyed as the manufacturing that had sustained them either folded or moved to low-wage economies. Nearly everyone I spoke to in those towns said they were going to vote for Brexit. There was a lot of talk of 'taking back control', and in the context of the industrial wastelands, that sentiment made a lot of sense. But the EU issue was, for a majority, a proxy for their pain.... In Nuneaton (66% leave), I met a man who reeled off the names of closed-down factories like you might your football team’s greatest all-time XI ... and told me he would be voting out in the EU referendum. But that might make the economy even more precarious, I said. He paused for a moment, narrowed his eyes. 'If the economy goes down the toilet,' he said, at least those bastards [in London] will finally know what it feels like to be us.' ... If you asked the vast majority of people what they want, they would say that essential services should be renationalised ... . They want properly funded health and education services, and to live in a country where they are not afraid to grow old or sick. They want jobs with meaning and value and security. They want to feel that politicians are in charge, not their corporate paymasters. And many, whether progressives like it or not, want a conversation about immigration. Brexit will deliver none of this. As driven by the right, it is the final part of the race to the bottom that started 40 years ago."

New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators - article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed 'deepfakes for text' – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse.... The AI system is fed text, anything from a few words to a whole page, and asked to write the next few sentences based on its predictions of what should come next.... When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.... That quality, however, has also led OpenAI to go against its remit of pushing AI forward and keep GPT2 behind closed doors for the immediate future while it assesses what malicious users might be able to do with it.... OpenAI made one version of GPT2 with a few modest tweaks that can be used to generate infinite positive – or negative – reviews of products. Spam and fake news are two other obvious potential downsides, as is the AI’s unfiltered nature . As it is trained on the internet, it is not hard to encourage it to generate bigoted text, conspiracy theories and so on."

Picture books for young billionaires - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "The Very Wealthy Caterpiller. Spot's Offshore Trust. The Cat in the Private Jet. The Tax Consultant who Came to Tea. Frog and Toad are Rich."