Book Review: Thieves of State

Sarah Chayes

Former NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes wrote Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, largely based on her years of experience in Afghanistan working with average Afhgani people as they struggled to build normal lives in the wake of years of war and systemic kleptocracy. Chayes, now at the Carnegie Endowment, has spent years surrounded by and trying to work within the systemic kleptocracy that is the government of Afghanistan. She came to Afghanistan as an NPR correspondent and shortly thereafter abandoned journalism to work as a free agent trying to rebuild civilization.

Chayes observes that over the centuries, many commentators on government, e.g., from Nizam al-Mulk in the 11th century to Erasmus and Machiavelli in the 16th century, repeatedly pointed to corruption and the injustice it inflicts on the innocent is the single most potent threat to stable governance and peace. al-Mulk, an influential 11th century administrator wrote The Book of Politics (Book of Government), which, among other things, (1) argued the need for a racially integrated army, and (2) proposed confiscating property of corrupt officials who take too much and repay those who were stolen from. Chayes: “Now there was an anti-corruption measure that would make an impact.”

Coming to see just how pervasive Afghan government corruption actually was took time. For example, Chayes co-founded a charity “of unclear mission,” that was run by President Hamid Karzai's brother, Qayum. Chayes had no idea that he was corrupt to the core: “At first I believed Qayum’s description of himself as constituting a ‘loyal opposition’ to his younger brother the president. . . . . Not for years would I begin systematically comparing his seductively incisive words with his deeds.” A chagrined Chayes finally came to understand that “I had, in other words, been an accessory to fraud.”

It turns out that kleptocrats like Qayum and his kleptocrat brother, president Hamid Karzai and the rest of the entire Afghan government know two things very, very well. First, they present themselves as a safe, rational, sincere refuge in the face of a vicious throat-cutting population. Chayes was terrified for a long time and another Afghani kleptocrat Chayes worked with did that number on her to keep her on a short leash. Kleptocrats need to keep outsiders like Chayes from directly interacting with average Afghanis as much as possible. Outsider and even leaders speaking directly to the people that non-leader kleptocrats have feared for centuries.

Second, all high level kleptocrats learned to speak English. They work hard to learn the jargon and acronyms that Western minds want to hear. On other words, they tell us exactly what we wanted to hear. The poison sounded so true and rational because it sounded so much like us.

The money pit bridge – finding the shallowest place to cross the river: Referring to a bridge outside Kandahar that foreign aid kept rebuilding “That bridge kept springing holes. And the foreigners kept paying more money for more repairs. And no one, as far as we knew, was called to account.” It’s not the case that ordinary Afghanis were blind to the corruption. One person ‘from the orchards north of town once told me’: “We all know this money is coming in. We just don’t know which hole it is spilling out through.”

The way it worked was simple. Foreign aid to fix the bridge would be awarded to an Afghani contractor. That contractor would then award the job to a subcontractor, but take a cut, and the sub would take another cut and award to job to another sub who took another cut and so on until there was little left of the money to fix the bridge. What repairs that were done was temporary band-aid. People got used to driving their cars and trucks off the road and through the river to get to the other side. The holes in the bridge afforded good, unobstructed views of the river below.

Chayes came to see the entire Afghanistan government as a vertically integrated criminal organization. Later, she came to see about the same thing in other countries, including Russia, Nigeria, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia and so forth. If fact, if one looks at Transparency International’s transparency map, most countries are kleptocracies of some form or another.

So what? Where’s the security threat?: The central point that Thieves of State makes is that at some point, systemic corruption isn’t just a by-product of the war, but it morphs into a force that fosters and maintains global conflict. Corruption simply cannot be ignored as a serious source of international instability and conflict. The injustice and economic inequality of it enrages people. Chayes comments: “Abusive government corruption prompts extreme responses and thus represents a mortal threat to security.” She watched NGOs, NATO, and U.S. Army anti-corruption programs repeatedly fail.

The security threat comes from the rage and hate that grows in the soil of corruption. Citing cognitive science research on the point and her direct observations, Chayes points out that people who feel abused or cheated often do not always react rationally. Sometimes otherwise normal people moved into the arms of the hated Taliban because the government was so outrageous and the Taliban, speaking like normal Afghanis, began to sound rational and comforting enough. Screw democracy, Afghanis wanted justice. And, America and Western countries were seen by average Afghanis as complicit in and accepting of massive corruption because they allowed it to go unchecked, the thieves going unchecked. Chayes’ book is full of examples of how utterly inept and clueless American and Western diplomats, military, NGOs, aid groups and just about everyone else really was for a long time.

Chayes efforts as an official US military advisor finally began to sink in. Admiral Mullen (chairman, joint chiefs of staff) wasn’t stupid enough to let personal arrogance get in the way of seeing reality for what it was. But to finally get to that point, Chayes had to fight tooth and claw to get past the smug, clueless arrogance of US (and Afghani) military and diplomatic officials who fought her every step of the way. The CIA was a special sort of hell for Chayes – always quietly trying to undermine her to protect their ‘assets’. Some years after the US military woke up, the US State Department also started waking up. Everyone was now beginning to see just how serious and counterproductive US lives, efforts and money really had been. Systemic, pervasive corruption, not Islam or Afghani culture, was what made nation-building impossible. American efforts were doomed from the get go due to cluelessness.

Bin Ladn and 9/11: Just to make this strike home a bit more, Chayes argues that a significant driver of Bin Laden’s hate of the US and the West generally had nothing to do with religion. It was Bin Ladn’s white hot rage and hate flowing from decades of kleptocracy and what appeared to be, and often in fact was, decades of Western support and complicity in the moral outrage called corruption.

Although it’s not a full-blooded kleptocracy (yet), Chayes sees cause for concern even in America, pointing to the causes of the 2006-2007 financial meltdown and president Obama’s failure to see it for what it was and his failure to prosecute the responsible criminals. Of course, these days, there’s more than just Obama’s unfixable failures to be concerned about.

Solutions: Chayes isn’t naïve. Fighting corruption is hard and complex. There can be directly competing goals and priorities. Nonetheless, she does give a list of practical things that governments, multinational companies, Western militaries, diplomats even average citizens can do to fight global corruption.

In the overall scheme of things, corruption arguably ranks with the threat of nuclear war, catastrophic climate change, wealth inequality (significantly a function of corruption) and global overpopulation among serious threats to civilization and the fate of the human species.

For people wanting to learn about some reasons to reject isolationism and embrace proactive international engagement, this book is an excellent place to start.

B&B orig: 11/30/17

Book review: The Despot's Apprentice

In the 2017 book The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack On Democracy, Bryan Klass, an expert on authoritarianism and democracy, argues four plausible outcomes are possible from a Trump presidency. The worst case scenario is a slide into some form of American authoritarianism. Klass sees authoritarianism as the least likely outcome in view of the relative robustness of American institutions that are built to resist demagogic tyrants and despots.

The most likely outcome, democratic decay, leaves democracy weakened after endless attacks in the form of lies, polarizing rhetoric, social divisions and undermining democratic institutions. In this scenario, Trump's administration may mostly succeed or fail, but in any event it leaves millions of Americans with an authoritarian mindset. In that scenario, if the the damage can be repaired, the fixes will take decades.

In another outcome, Klass calls the forerunner, a more intelligent, sophisticated successor to Trump rises to power. This successor, Trump v. 2.0, has some combination of Trump's authoritarian instincts, Obama's rhetorical skill, and Reagan's people skills. The forerunner will benefit from Trump having normalized authoritarian behavior and politics. Klass doesn't say it, but forerunner seems best suited to usher in American authoritarianism. Right now, this observer is aware of no such personality, but some surely exist.

In the last outcome, the “Trump Vaccine” scenario, Trump causes a backlash. People re-engage in politics and civics in a democracy-promoting way. Here, political norms are enshrined in law, e.g., making conflict of interest laws apply to the president. In essence, people rise up to defend and repair their damaged democracy.

Klass has studied the tactics of tyrants, demagogues and kleptocrats. “Demagogues are nothing new. . . . . In ancient Athens . . . . they thrived on division and anger. Enter Cleon in the 420s BCE, a crude but charismatic demagogue. Cleon talked tough, offered simplistic solutions, fabricated claims about his political enemies, and used litigation to attack his rivals.” Referring to Trump, Klass observes that “He has followed in the footsteps of countless autocrats by stoking racial animosity to divide and rule.” Does any of that sound familiar?[1]

“Dictators throughout history have blurred the line between fact and falsehood for three main reasons.” Klass asserts that constant lies (i) help obscure and deflect from a dictator's poor performance, (ii) undermine sources who try to correct the record, and (iii) help build a cult of personality by misrepresenting the dictator's nonexistent virtues, honesty and competence.

Klass argues there is blame to go around. He points out that in the 2016 primary elections, a small proportion of adults voted. Once the primaries are over, the choices are made whether people like their general election choices or not. “Citizen apathy allows politicians to subvert democracy. . . . Democracy is withering from our collective indifference.”

Klass argues more civic engagement and more openness to opposition is needed to combat Trump's attacks on democracy, which he rightly sees as an American problem, not a partisan political problem. “Democracy is worth saving. Right now, in the United States, it needs to be saved -- before it's too late. It's far more difficult to resurrect democracy after it dies than it is to heal it when it's sick.”

Whether one sees this as unreasonably alarmist or reasonably accurate will, of course, depend on one's view of Trump and America's situation.

Footnote:
1. Trump hasn't sued his attackers or political opponents yet, but he threatened lawsuits against women who accused him of sexual assault after the 2016 election. So far, he has not acted on that threat.

B&B orig: 12/10/17

Book Review: The Influential Mind

“The manipulation was so powerful that half of our volunteer's memories are changed forever - they now have inaccurate recollections of the movie and are stuck with the wrong answer. When asked if they thought they were still being influenced by the fake answers we had shown them before, almost uniformly their response was ‘No!’” - Tali Sharot on the power of fake social opinion or, more precisely fake social pressure, to change memories from true to false – implanting false memories in people is disturbingly easy to do

“. . . . facts and logic are not the most powerful tools for altering opinions. When it comes to arguing, our instincts are wrong. . . . . The problem with an approach that prioritizes information and logic is that it ignores the core of what makes you and me human: our fears, our motives, our hopes and desires. . . . . Established beliefs can be extremely resistant to change, even when scientific evidence is provided to undermine those beliefs.” - Sharot’s understated case for the weakness of fact and logic in some social contexts – established political beliefs can be and often are impossible to change

Tali Sharot’s 2017 book, The Influential Mind, focuses on the biology of how and why opinion and behavior can change. The book is written for a general audience. Technical jargon is used sparingly, mainly referring to portions of the brain involved in regulating opinion and behavior. The book is a popular psychology text written at about grade level 12 based on an analysis of a portion of the book using an online text readability consensus calculator (range: 10th grade to college level).

Sharot is an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. She holds degrees in economics and psychology. She founded and operates UCL’s Affective Brain Lab, which operates at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience. A list of her publications is here. Her main research interests are the biology of dishonesty and lying and the human optimism bias.

Sharot’s book posits ways to influence other minds by playing on the biology of belief change and formation. Despite that intended message, this reviewer’s take-away lesson is basically the opposite. At least when applied to politics, political minds and beliefs are very hard or impossible to change for nearly all people. That is in part because of the separate, competing realities that are now easily available online and via social media. Those separate realities provide all the social context, facts and logic needed to cognitively build and believe in differing world views. There are utterly incompatible world views and beliefs based on utterly incompatible facts and logic, e.g., liberal, conservative, capitalist, socialist, populist, Christian, anarchist, etc. Despite vast differences in perceived political realities based significantly on misinformation and false beliefs, all of those competing world views are very, very real in the believer’s mind.

Sharot does not squarely address the reality of separate political realities as a powerful confounding factor in influencing other minds with fact, logic and biological factors. From this observer’s point of view, that’s a disappointment.

That aside, when it comes to other aspects of life, what Sharot gives useful insight into what leads people to believe and act in certain ways based on biological mental imperatives. Sharot identifies seven biological factors that variably influence whether belief and behavior will stay the same or change in the face of efforts to coax change: (i) existing belief, (ii) emotion, (iii) incentives to change, (iv) perceived agency or perceived personal control of situations, (v) curiosity, (vi) the listener’s state of mind, e.g., relaxed, stressed, bored, angry, etc., and (vii) social context or, as Sharot puts it, ‘other people’.

Regarding existing belief, one can try to find common ground, for example, to convince a parent vaccinate their children by focusing on vaccine benefits. Due to existing beliefs, there is no point in trying to debunk vaccine myths because that approach fails and often makes matters worse.

Regarding emotion, arguments that appeal to emotion are far more effective than fact- and logic-based arguments. This is a significant factor in Donald Trump’s power to persuade. In this regard, Sharot is in agreement with social psychologist Johnathan Haidt, who has argued intuition and morals are major influencers in the context of politics: “. . . . our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. . . . . Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Their slogans, political commercials and speeches go straight for the gut . . . . Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions [emotions] described by Moral Foundations Theory.”

Implanting false beliefs – the power of lying: The power of social context or Sharot’s ‘other people’ presents examples of how easy it is to implant false beliefs in many or most people. By simply telling people that other people, or even one person, believes X is true, significant numbers of people without any or strong opinions about X, or even a belief that X is false, will tend to believe X is true. That is the biological situation, even if X is false. That false belief can persist even if objective evidence that proves X is false is presented to correct the false belief. In this observer’s opinion, this is probably the most influential human trait that allows changing perceptions of reality simply by asserting real or fake social pressure. The effect is more powerful when it is repeated. It is yet more powerful when a person is told, truly or falsely, that most people X is true.

That is why telling and repeating lies in politics is so popular and effective. Political lies are often accompanied by false assertions that what a partisan or special interest argues is majority opinion. We all know it: Politicians, special interests in fact, often claiming their policy is what “the American people want”, even when that is a blatant lie. It happens all the time in politics because it is an effective tactic that plays on human cognitive biology.

For people who want to gain insight into what cognitive cues or inputs tend to be most influential, this book is the best general audience book in this observer’s experience.

B&B orig: 12/17/17

Book Review: Expert Political Judgment

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along. — Bertrand Russell, philosopher commenting on the incremental nature of progress in human knowledge and understanding

“People for the most part dislike ambiguity . . . . people find it hard to resist filling in the missing data points with ideologically scripted event sequences. . . . People for the most part also dislike dissonance . . . . [but] policies that one is predisposed to detest sometimes have positive effects . . . . regimes in rogue states may have more popular support than we care to admit -- dominant options that beat all the alternatives are rare.”

“The core function of political belief systems is not prediction; it is to promote the comforting illusion of predictability.”

“Human performance suffers because we are, deep down, deterministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that accept the inevitability of error. We insist on looking for order in random sequences.”

“. . . . we have yet to confront the most daunting of all the barriers to implementation [of an objective system to evaluate expert performance]: the reluctance of professionals to participate. If one has carved out a comfortable living under the old regime of close-to-zero accountability for one’s pronouncements, one would have to be exceptionally honest or masochistic to jeopardize so cozy an arrangement by voluntarily exposing one’s predications to the rude shock of falsification.”

“Human nature being what it is, and the political system creating the perversely self-justifying incentives that it does, I would expect, in short order, faux rating systems to arise that shill for the representatives of points of view who feel shortchanged by even the most transparent evaluation systems that bend over backward to be fair. The signal-to-noise ratio will never be great in a cacophonously pluralistic society such as ours.” -- Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 2005

Context: For the most part, this channel is devoted to advocacy for a new, science-based political ideology and set of morals that recognize and accept human cognitive and social biology as sources of (i) disconnects from reality (facts), and reason (logic), and (ii) unwarranted inefficiency, unwarranted intolerance, unwarranted distrust, unwarranted conflict and etc. To this observer's knowledge, this book is the single best source of data for proof of the power of political ideology to distort fact and logic. Measuring expert competence (or more accurately, incompetence) is this book's sole focus.

Book review: Social psychologist Philip Tetlock's 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, summarizes about 20 years of his research into the question of whether it is even possible to reliably measure how good expert opinions are, and if so, how good are they. For his research, Tetlock focused mostly on measuring the accuracy of thousands of expert predictions about global events to see if that could afford a way to measure competence of expert opinion.

After a massive research effort, two answers came back: (1) Yes, their opinions can be measured for accuracy, and (2) all experts are dreadful. Tetlock's research shows that a key reason experts rise to the level of expert is because (i) they are fluid in simplifying problems and solutions and (ii) their presentations sound authoritative. But for the most part, they're wrong about 80-90% of the time. In other words, expert opinions are about the same as opinions of average people. In fact, there's barely any statistically detectable difference between most experts and random guessing. That's how good our experts, pundits, politicians and other assorted blowhards really are, i.e., they're worse than worthless. That assessment of more bad than good includes the damage, waste, social discord and loss of moral authority that flows from experts being wrong most of the time. One cannot be fair about this if one ignores mistakes.

Arrrgh!! The computers are coming!: Another mind-blowing observation came from Tetlock's use of several algorithms to see how well computers do compared to human experts. The data was sobering. One simple algorithm performed the same as human experts. No big deal. But, more sophisticated models, autoregressive distributed lag, performed about 2.5-fold better than the very best humans. That is a massive difference in competence. Tetlock commented: “whereas the best human forecasters were hard-pressed to predict more than 20 percent of the total variability in outcomes…, the generalized autoregressive distributed lag models explained on average 47 percent of the variance.” One can imagine that with time, algorithms will be improved to do better.

Tetlock doesn't advocate replacing humans with computers. He is suggesting that when a validated algorithm is available, experts would be well-advised to use it and take what it says into account. That seems perfectly reasonable.

Foxes and Hedgehogs: Tetlock identifies two basic mindsets and their cognitive approach to analyzing issues and making predictions, liberals and conservatives. The liberal mindset, the Foxes, to a small but real degree, does better than the conservative mindset, the Hedgehogs. Hedgehog thinking can be accurate depending on the issue at hand. But over a range of issues, its focus on key values or concepts limit its capacity to do well in the long run. By contrast the Fox mindset is more fluid and less ideologically constrained. Regarding political ideology, Tetlock comments: “The core function of political belief systems is not prediction; it is to promote the comforting illusion of predictablity.”

Regarding motivated reasoning or cognitive dissonance: “People for the most part dislike dissonance, a generalization that particularly applies to the Hedgehogs . . . . They prefer to organize the world into evaluative gestalts that couple good causes to good effects and bad to bad. Unfortunately, the world can be a morally messy place . . . . regimes in rogue states may have more popular support than we care to admit -- Dominant options that beat the alternatives on all possible dimensions -- are rare.”

Does some of that sound at least vaguely familiar? It ought to.

Why do bad experts persist?: Tetlock's data shows that bad experts persist for a range of reasons:
1. No one keeps track of their performance over time and they're never held accountable for mistakes. No one measures and grades experts (except Tetlock).
2. They are expert at explaining away their mistakes, sometimes incoherently, e.g., (i) I was almost right, (ii) I was wrong, but for the right reasons, (iii) that intervening event was unforseeable, it's not my fault, (iv) etc.
3. They appeal to people's emotions and biases that make them appear right, even when there is plenty of evidence that they are wrong.
4. The unconscious hindsight bias leads most experts to believe they did not make their past mistakes, i.e., they deny they guessed wrong and instead firmly believe their prediction was correct.
5. Experts are expert at couching their predictions in language that makes measuring accuracy impossible, e.g., (i) they don't specify by what time their predictions will come to pass, (ii) they use soft language that really doesn't amount to a firm prediction, ‘it is likely that X will happen’ without specifying the odds or what ‘likely’ means.
6. Etc.

Tetlock's book is not easy to read. It could be part of a college course in social psychology or political science. The data is often expressed in terms of statistics. Nonetheless, there is more than enough general language for the lay reader with a high school education to fully understand the book's main point about the discomfortingly rare expert competence in politics.

When it comes to politics, Tetlock isn't naïve: “Human nature being what it is, and the political system creating the perversely self-justifying incentives that it does, I expect, in short order, faux rating systems to arise that shill for the representatives of points of view who feel shortchanged by even the most transparent evaluation systems that bend over backward to be fair. The signal-to-noise ratio will never be great in a cacophonously pluralistic society like ours.”

Remember, that was 2005. This is 2018. The weak signal is fading in the increasing roar of blithering noise in the form of lies, deceit, character assassination, unwarranted fear mongering and other forms of nonsense.

Question: Was Tetlock's 2005 prediction that faux rating systems would arise in ‘short order’ to hype the reputation of inept experts mostly correct, or, has it sufficed for dissatisfied people to simply deny the existing ratings systems are credible?

Note: In 2017, Tetlock published a second edition. The first chapter is here.

B&B orig: 2/12/18