We are being encouraged – in some cases, instructed – to maintain social distance. In London, this currently means: wash your hands regularly, wear a mask in shops, and try to keep at least two metres away from others, unless they are part of your household group, which is limited to six people. The rules change frequently and somewhat arbitrarily, depending on whether the government feels a greater need to assuage its libertarian or paternalist critics. The population response varies according to temperament, tolerance for risk, propensity to follow rules, and the extent to which paid work necessitates direct rather then mediated contact with others. Some have made radical changes to their patterns of work, travel, family life, and social interactions, while others have hardly changed their lifestyles at all.
Continue reading “Social distancing”Securing our future
In June of this year, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo Securities led managed a Aaa-rated securitised Social Bond issue, on behalf of the Ford Foundation. The deal raised $1billion, consisting of $300m thirty-year bonds and $700m fifty-year bonds. A decade ago, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the securitisation market faced significant criticism from regulators, policy makers, and many loud voices in the media, who charged that these structures were too complex for investors properly to understand and that securitised bonds spread risk widely and irresponsibly within the financial system. Nowadays, such views have come to be seen as hasty and ill-informed, an over-reaction, a paradigm case of blaming the message-bearer for bringing unwelcome news.
Continue reading “Securing our future”Robots at the opera
Conflict between humans and machines has become a fertile theme for futurist science fiction. The Matrix films explore some philosophical issues about personal and political freedom, within the context of a brutal struggle between the subterranean community of human survivors and, at surface level, the tyrannical empire ruled by their electronic adversaries. By contrast, the Blade Runner films imagine a world in which ‘replicants’, designed and made by powerful corporations, serve humans through their work – mostly collaboratively, but sometimes not – while lacking the status and rights of ‘people’. If Matrix suggests a war for human survival once the machines have taken over, Blade Runner suggests a civil rights campaign for machines, in a world run by humans.
Continue reading “Robots at the opera”Books
How many books have you read, a friend asked, in your life?
Not an easy question to answer, having neglected to keep a list. In the absence of documentary evidence, I resort to a process of estimation. This will require some clarification of each of the terms of the question. Continue reading “Books”
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In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, the Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch described the source of the divergence in forms of art routinely displayed in Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches. The major Christian denominations disagree about a wide range of matters of doctrine and practice, about which they have argued for many centuries, and one area of dispute concerns the appropriateness of certain objects and images in places of worship. MacCulloch pointed out that the varieties of church practice with regard to the display of images stem from differences in the interpretation of Hebrew scripture, in particular disagreements about whether, in the Book of Exodus, the first commandment is really comprised of two commandments, or, to put the contrary view, whether the second in not really a commandment at all, but only a coda to the first.