Monday 1 February 2010
A broken society, yes. But broken by Thatcher (Cameron is right: society is broken. Labour have failed to fix it, but acute inequality is a Tory legacy)
David Cameron is right to point to Britain's "broken society" as an election issue. In his Hugo Young lecture at the end of last year, the Conservative leader cited in support of his thesis our research that found, in his words, that "among the richest countries, it's the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator".
Among 21 developed market democracies, we found that Britain does worst on child wellbeing and badly on teenage births, imprisonment, drug abuse, trust, obesity, social mobility and mental illness. This week brought fresh confirmation of the pervasive and profound inequality in Britain in the form of a 460-page government-commissioned study – An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK – which described a nation in which the richest 10% are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10%.
But where does the blame lie? The evidence shows that almost all the problems that occur most often in the poorest neighbourhoods – including those that make us a broken society – are systematically more common in more unequal societies. Rates are not just a little higher, but between two and eight times higher. Wider income gaps make societies socially dysfunctional across the board.
Last October Cameron rounded on Labour, saying: "Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories. You, Labour. You're the ones that did this to our society. So don't you dare lecture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down."
But the truth is that we are suffering the impact of the massive increases in income inequality under Thatcher, which Blair and Brown have since failed to reverse. In the 1980s the gulf between the top and bottom 20% widened by a full 60% – much the most dramatic widening of income differences on record. Since then there have been only minor fluctuations under Major, Blair and Brown. The result is that the gap between the top and bottom 20% in Britain is twice as big as among our more equal European partners.
Almost all of Gordon Brown's budgets did at least something to redistribute from rich to poor. But because the benefit was entirely offset by the unconstrained rise in top earnings, he can claim no more than having prevented a greater rise in inequality.
What happened in the later 1980s may now seem merely water under the bridge. But broken Britain is Thatcher's bitter legacy. Rather than having instantaneous effects, inequality gradually corrodes the social fabric. It takes a while for greater material differences to make the social hierarchy steeper, for status competition and consumerism to increase, for people to feel a greater sense of superiority or inferiority, for prejudices towards those lower on the social ladder to harden, for prisons to fill to overflowing under the impact of more punitive sentencing, and for people to seek solace in drugs.
Rather than dealing with inequality, some politicians find it tempting to blame "broken families", "bad parenting" and "damaged" children. Science has made huge leaps in understanding how our biology and psychology are affected by early life experiences, both in the womb and after. Children are deeply sensitive to family relationships and the quality of care. However, this sensitivity, and the way it shapes emotional and cognitive development, is not an evolutionary mistake.
It exists because early life serves as a taster of the kind of society that we may have to deal with in adulthood. It prepares children for the kind of society they are growing up in. Are they in a world of rivals, in which they will have to fight for what they can get, fend for themselves and learn not to trust others? Or will they need to gain one another's trust, dependent on co-operation and reciprocity, in a world where empathy and social skills are at a premium?
Whether through maternal stress in pregnancy, depression, domestic conflict or poor attachment, parents' experience of adversity in a more unequal dog-eat-dog society is passed on, with inevitable consequences for their children's cognitive and emotional development. Early intervention programmes may help but will be needed for ever unless we reduce inequality.
Because the children of single parents fare less well than children raised by two parents, it is sometimes suggested that our broken society results from broken families. In the revised paperback edition of our book The Spirit Level, we include an analysis of the effects of higher rates of single parenthood on levels of child wellbeing in rich countries. The proportion of single parents varies from under 4% in Greece to nearly 30% in Britain and the US, but this bears no relation to average levels of child wellbeing.
National standards of child wellbeing seem unaffected by high rates of single parenthood. The explanation is that the disadvantages of single parenthood are largely the result of higher rates of poverty and maternal depression. More equal countries seem to avoid ill effects by providing good services and keeping most of their single parents out of poverty.
The remedy for broken Britain is to reduce income inequality. Prime ministers who proclaim, as John Major did, that they want to create a classless society, will inevitably fail unless they reduce material differences. Similarly for those who want to give all children an equal chance in life: if the social ladder is steeper it becomes harder to climb and social mobility slows.
Greater equality improves the quality of life for everyone – not just the poor. Whatever your income or education, living in a more equal society means you will be likely to live longer while being less likely to suffer violence or have a problem with obesity. In turn, your children have a better chance of doing well at school and are less likely to use drugs or to become teenage parents. This is about the quality of life for all of us.
RePost: Nothing polite to say...
The Tories were today forced to deny that a video clip purporting to show a long-haired party-goer at a 1988 outdoor rave was the party leader David Cameron.The purple-tinted video, set to a hypnotic acid house rave track, shows a man bearing a striking similarity to Cameron with shoulder-length hair and wearing dungarees. The video, called 'Acid House Sunrise 1988 Part 4', has surfaced on YouTube and has been picked up by political blogger Guido Fawkes.
Held during the so-called second Summer of Love in 1988, the long-haired man appears to be joining in the fun at the outdoor event. Tory blogger Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, was Head of PR for the 1988-89 rave party planners, Sunrise. It was Fawkes who received the emails sent by Brown's special advisor Damian McBride about slurs on top Tories which led to McBride's sacking. Posting on his blog, Guido asks his readers to decide for themselves whether the man in the clip really is the Tory leader and Old Etonian. Alongside stills from the video, he says: 'This has been building up for a few weeks and now Guido is getting calls from Dead Tree Press diarists, it is probably time to bring it out into the open. 'Is this a picture of a long-haired 22 year-old David Cameron? 'The pictures are taken from a video of a Sunrise Party held in the summer of 1988. You decide… ' However a Tory press spokesperson 'categorically' denied that the man in the clip was Cameron. Raves, fuelled by dance music, boomed during the late 1980s and were infamous for the widespread use Ecstasy. The all-night parties, frequently illegal, were held at secret locations in warehouses or in fields. In 2007, it was revealed that Cameron narrowly avoided being expelled from Eton after being named by a fellow pupil as a cannabis user. Cameron repeatedly refused to answer questions during his successful Tory leadership campaign on whether or not he had taken drugs. And he has stuck by his insistence that all politicians are entitled to a 'private past' and should not be required to reveal everything of their lives before they enter politics.
Sunday 31 January 2010
Slime mould attacks simulates Tokyo rail network
In a Japanese laboratory, a group of scientists is encouraging a rapidly expanding amoeba-like blob to consume Tokyo. Thankfully, the blob in question is a "slime mould" just around 20cm wide, and "Tokyo" is represented by a series of oat flakes dotted about a large plastic dish. It's all part of a study on better network design through biological principles. Despite growing of its own accord with no plan in mind, the mould has rapidly produced a web of slimy tubes that look a lot like Tokyo's actual railway network.
The point of this simulation isn't to reconstruct the monster attacks of popular culture, but to find ways of improving transport networks, by recruiting nature as a town planner. Human societies depend on good transport networks for ferrying people, resources and information from place to place, but setting up such networks isn't easy. They have to be efficient, cost-effective and resistant to interruptions or failure. The last criterion is particularly challenging as the British public transport system attests to, every time a leaf or snowflake lands on a road or railway.
Living thing also rely on transport networks, from the protein tracks that run through all of our cells to the gangways patrolled by ant colonies. Like man-made networks, these biological ones face the same balancing act of efficiency and resilience, but unlike man-made networks, they have been optimised through millions of years of evolution. Their strategies have to work - if our networks crash, the penalties are power outages or traffic jams; if theirs crash, the penalty is death.
To draw inspiration from these biological networks, Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University worked with the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. This amoeba-like creature forages for food by sending out branches (plasmodia) from a central location. Even though it forms vast, sprawling networks, it still remains as a single cell. It's incredibly dynamic. Its various veins change thickness and shape, new ones form while old ones vanish, and the entire network can crawl a few centimetres every hour.
For a mindless organism, the slime mould's skill at creating efficient networks is extraordinary. It can find the most effective way of linking together scattered sources of food, and it can even find the shortest path through a maze. But can it do the same for Tokyo's sprawling cityscape?
Tero grew Physarum in a wet dish at a place corresponding to Tokyo, with oat flakes marking the locations of other major cities in the Greater Tokyo Area. Physarum avoids bright light, so Tero used light to simulate mountains, lakes and other prohibitive terrain on his miniature map. The mould soon filled the space with a densely packed web of plasmodia. Eventually, it thinned out its networks to focus on branches that connected the food sources. Even by eye, these final networks bore a striking similarity to the real Tokyo rail system.
The mould's abilities are a wonder of self-optimisation. It has no sense of forward-planning, no overhead maps or intelligence to guide its moves. It creates an efficient network by laying down plasmodia indiscriminately, strengthening whatever works and cutting back on whatever doesn't. The approach seems as haphazard as a human planner putting railway tracks everywhere, and then removing the ones that aren't performing well. Nonetheless, the slime mould's methods (or lack thereof) produced a network with comparable cost, efficiency and tolerance for faults to the planned human attempt.
Tero tried to emulate this slime mould's abilities using a deceptively simple computer model, consisting of an randomly meshed lattice of tubes. Each tube has virtual protoplasm flowing through it, just as the branches of the slime mould do. The faster the flow rate, the wider the tube becomes. If the flow slows, the tubes thin and eventually disappear.
Tweaking the specific conditions of the model produced networks that were very similar to those of both live Physarum and Tokyo's actual rail system. Tweaking it further allowed Tero to boost the system's efficiency or resilience, while keeping its costs as low as possible. This, perhaps, is the engineering of the future - a virtual system inspired by a biological one that looks a lot like a man-made one.
Reference: Tero et al. 2010. Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design. Science 10.1126/science.1177894
Lykke Li & Bon Iver - Dance, Dance, Dance
BrandDNA Bon Iver and Lykke Li get together in a park and singlehandedly kickstart the skiffle revival. http://bit.ly/buNVma Kudos to @exilestreet
New Fluxion album due in March
Dub techno artist Fluxion will release his next album, Perfused, this March on Echocord.
The Greek producer has been making tracks since 1998, with over a dozen releases on Chain Reaction, Resopal Schallware and his own label, Vibrant Music. He fell silent for a while in the middle of the last decade, then bounced back in 2009 with two EPs and a full-length album, Constant Limber, which will have preceded his new one by only six months.
We caught up with Fluxion via email to to ask him a few questions about the new album.
How did you choose Perfused as a title? I am always trying to express at least with an album title, how I perceive my way of making music and producing and what it reflects. My music had always the "melting," "flowing" aesthetic. I tend to create sounds that in the course of a track, never exactly repeat themselves. So the title Perfused describes this liquid state, in which I create streams of sounds, moving in time and space, and capturing this live feed. You released three records in 2009, including a full-length album, Constant Limber. What has made you so productive lately? Well to be honest, I haven't stopped making music. There is a big volume of recordings I've made between 2002-2007, which I am considering and selecting for a Vibrant Forms 3 release. I just needed some time off, from discography. I am trying not to release for the sake of releasing. I am trying to release because I have something new to offer. Something I really want to share... The other reason is that I felt in 2009, a strong impulse to release, due to this downfall of the music industry. I want to be a part of the optimism in the music/artist community. If it's a good release, it will prevail, will stand out. Not only because there is a name behind the release. I felt more, in a way, that whoever produces good music today, offering a new perspective, is doing it primarily for the love in what they do. It's more pure, and it shows What's next for Fluxion? After Perfused, it's two vinyl releases (the first with a Deadbeat remix and the second with Rod Modell remix), there is a remix I did on "Soul Is Back" from Soul Designer (Fabrice Lig). It will be out in May on vinyl/digital from Third Ear. It will include remixes by Luke Slater, Marco Passarani, Fluxion, UR Timeline (Mike Banks and Jon Dixon). So I am looking forward to this as well. After those releases, I'm also selecting material possibly for a new Vibrant Forms album.
Tracklist
01.Horizons
02.Waves
03.Tantalizer
04.Inflection
05.Wabbler
06.Elation
07.Fluctuations
08.Inductance
09.Perfuse
Echocord will release Perfused this March.
01.Horizons
02.Waves
03.Tantalizer
04.Inflection
05.Wabbler
06.Elation
07.Fluctuations
08.Inductance
09.Perfuse
Echocord will release Perfused this March.
This is absolutely fugn ridiculous!
Togo have been banned from taking part in the next two editions of the African Nations Cup and hit with a fine following their withdrawal from this year's tournament in the wake of a terrorist attack on the team bus.
The decision was made by the executive committee of the Confederation of African Football (CAF).
Three people were killed in the attack, which occurred while Togo were en route to the team hotel two days before their opening match.
There followed a period of confusion as to whether the players wanted to play on, but they were ultimately called home by their government having decided themselves they wished to stay.
CAF has deemed that move to amount to political interference, leading to today's sanction.
CAF said in a statement: "The executive committee and its president renewed their sincere condolences to the families of victims involved in this tragic terrorist attack which happened January 8, 2010.
"The attack was condemned by CAF and also a total support was given to the Togolese team.
"At that time, CAF said they have understood perfectly the decision of players not to participate in the competition.
"Meanwhile, following a decision taken by players to participate in the competition, the Togolese government decided to call back their national team.
"The decision taken by the political authorities is infringing CAF and CAN (African Nations Cup) regulations.
"Therefore, a decision has been taken to suspend the Togo national team for the next two editions of Africa Cup of Nations, with a fine of US$50,000 handed to the Togolese national football association, in conformity with article 78 of Africa Cup of Nations Angola 2010."
Radio interview with James Stinson (Drexciya) by Liz Copeland (May 2002)
The first & last interview with James Stinson...
...in retrospect it is very sad listening!
("Experience must continue til death"
Saturday 30 January 2010
The Ex + Brass Unbound - UK tour 2010 (Thanx Gary!)
THE EX + BRASS UNBOUND - UK tour dates Jan/Feb 2010...
Absolutely sublime...
Bvdub's stunning 17 minute track 'Will You Know Where To Find Me' from Kompakt's 'Pop Ambient 2010'
Whoah! That was close...was nearly...
Was mucking around with the HTML code and new layouts for the blog and thought I had lost it all...
Sly Stone suing former manager over royalties
Reclusive funk musician Sly Stone has filed a $50m (£30.9m) legal claim against his former manager, alleging fraud and 20 years of stolen royalties.
He also claims Mr Goldstein registered the band's name with authorities as his own and used it borrow money.
Stone is best known for his hit songs Family Affair and Dance to the Music.
The musician - whose real name is Sylvester Stewart - has also asked the Los Angeles Superior Court for the full accounts from royalty collection companies to determine exactly how much had been taken from him.
'Unscrupulous people'
The legal papers said that Stone had been homeless at times and was currently living off benefits. It added the musician depended on Mr Goldstein to handle his financial affairs and had paid Stone some money until 2007, but then stopped.
Stone's lawyer, Robert Allen said the legal action highlighted "a dark side of the music business where some of these artists are being robbed of their intellectual property and the fruits of their genius by unscrupulous people who prey on their trusting nature and lack of business and legal knowledge."
A representative for Mr Goldstein was not available for comment.
Sly and the Family Stone had hits throughout the 1960s and 1970s but the group fell apart because of heavy drug use and erratic behaviour among the band members.
After years out of the public eye, Stone gave his first live musical performance since 1987 at the 2006 Grammy awards in a tribute to the band, but left the stage before his song was over.
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