Author: Hafiz Noor Shams

For more about me, please read this.

Categories
Books, essays and others Liberty

[941] Of Burgess’ banned in Malaysia

Roughly a year ago, I wanted to read more of Burgess’ work. Specifically, I was aiming for The Long Day Wanes, also known as the Malayan Trilogy. I looked for it but the search was unsuccessful. In place of the trilogy, I bought Burgess’ The Wanting Seed instead. Interesting read but I wish I had bought The Long Day Wanes. I tried my luck at several other stores looking for it for several weeks but the effort proved futile.

Sure, there’s Amazon. However, the shipping cost is more than 100% of the novel’s price. I’m not willing to pay that much for it.

A few days ago, I found out the reason why it’s hard to find the trilogy through a post by Sharon Bakar. According to a list compiled by local authority, as provided by Silverfish Books, the Malayan Trilogy is banned in Malaysia. More specifically, it is “restricted”.

Interestingly enough, Making Globalization Work by Prize in Economics winner, Joseph Stiglitz is also banned.

Anyway, I and few friends plan to gather together and discuss about book censorship in a few weeks time. The list provided by Silverfish is not the impetus for the discussion however. Nevertheless, it provides a nice background for the discussion. So, here I am, opening the invitation to my readers. If you’re interested, just howl at me.

Nothing concrete has been planned yet. So please be patience at the rate which information flows out.

Categories
Science & technology Society

[940] Of morality is genetic?

From the NYT:

Who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin.

Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals’ feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality.

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.

Also, a statement related to my assertion that morality is independent of religion:

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

If morality is genetic, our understanding of morality — and of ourselves — will be greatly challenged.

Categories
Economics Environment Politics & government

[939] Of climate change and global warming are market failures

From time to time, somebody will point it out to me that libertarianism and environmentalism have opposing ideas in them. Perhaps.

I however manage to merge the two philosophies together because I understand market failure (as well as externality). The concept of market failure is what many libertarians refuse to accept despite the economics behind it. I’d be damned if I ignore market failure and call myself a graduate of economics. I reached to this conclusion when I first encountered tragedy of the commons as an economics undergraduate.

I’m a classical liberal in the sense that I’ll accept market solutions as superior to government solutions as long as market failures are absent, in most cases.

A few days ago, British economist Nicholas Stern published the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change:

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response.

This independent Review was commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, reporting to both the Chancellor and to the Prime Minister, as a contribution to assessing the evidence and building understanding of the economics of climate change.

The Review first examines the evidence on the economic impacts of climate change itself, and explores the economics of stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The second half of the Review considers the complex policy challenges involved in managing the transition to a low-carbon economy and in ensuring that societies can adapt to the consequences of climate change that can no longer be avoided.

The Review takes an international perspective. Climate change is global in its causes and consequences, and international collective action will be critical in driving an effective, efficient and equitable response on the scale required. This response will require deeper international co-operation in many areas – most notably in creating price signals and markets for carbon, spurring technology research, development and deployment, and promoting adaptation, particularly for developing countries.

Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics: it is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen. The economic analysis must therefore be global, deal with long time horizons, have the economics of risk and uncertainty at centre stage, and examine the possibility of major, non-marginal change. To meet these requirements, the Review draws on ideas and techniques from most of the important areas of economics, including many recent advance, including many recent advances.

Climate change and global warming induced by human are forms of market failure and externality, as with many other environmental problems.

Categories
Education Politics & government

[938] Of University of Michigan is Michigan’s midterm election issue

Whether we like it or not, the affirmative action rulings that brought the University of Michigan to national political limelight not too long ago refuse to die. This time, the issue appears on the ballot in form of Proposition 2:

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 25 — Three years after the Supreme Court heard Jennifer Gratz’s challenge to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy, she is still fighting racial preferences, this time in a Michigan ballot initiative.

Leaflets at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor urging voters to oppose the ballot initiative.

“We have a horrible history when it comes to race in this country,” said Ms. Gratz, 29, a white applicant who was wait-listed 11 years ago at the state’s flagship campus here. “But that doesn’t make it right to give preference to the son of a black doctor at the expense of a poor student whose parents didn’t go to college.”

The ballot initiative, Proposition 2, which would amend Michigan’s Constitution to bar public institutions from considering race or sex in public education, employment or contracting, has drawn wide opposition from the state’s civic establishment, including business and labor, the Democratic governor and her Republican challenger. But polls show voters are split, with significant numbers undecided or refusing to say where they stand.

Passage would probably reinvigorate challenges to a variety of affirmative action programs in other states. In California, where a similar proposition passed in 1996, the number of black students at the elite public universities has dropped. This fall, 96 of 4,800 freshmen at the University of California, Los Angeles — 2 percent — are black, a 30-year low.

For the University of Michigan, the proposition would require broader changes than the Supreme Court did; it ruled in Ms. Gratz’s case and a companion case that while the consideration of race as part of the law school’s admissions policy was constitutional, a formula giving extra points to minority undergraduate applicants was not.

This issue seems to unite a lot of traditional foes together:

Opposition to the measure is led by One United Michigan, an unusually broad coalition that includes Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, and her Republican challenger, Dick DeVos, as well as unions, churches, businesses and higher education and civil rights groups. It has raised and spent $3.3 million.

“We have the A.C.L.U. sitting with the Michigan Catholic Conference on the steering committee, which is something you don’t see very often,” said David Waymire, a coalition spokesman. “There isn’t a big Michigan voice on the other side. But it’s tough. Two years ago, the initial polling found more than two-thirds supported the proposition. The miracle is that we’ve gotten it into a winnable range.”

For those unfamiliar with the issue, University of Michigan, my alma mater, was center of debate on affirmative action. Even President Bush commented on the case, as mentioned in an entry (while reading the past entry, please note that I haven’t cemented by opinion on affirmative action in Malaysia at that time. In fact, read this too, where I was trying to take a pragmatic view). From the look of it, Michigan is still the center of debate.

The last time the battle was fought, the result was a draw at best. Wikipedia has a write up on the issue at Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. Bollinger was the President of the University. He’s currently the President of Columbia University. While at Michigan, he was very popular with the students.

Categories
Liberty

[937] Of disband the moral police and strengthen democratic institutions instead

Remember the disgraceful thugs?

Well, the moral police department spokesperson said that the harassment on the American couple was done according to procedures:

ALOR STAR: Religious enforcement officers followed procedures when conducting a khalwat (close proximity) raid at the condominium in Langkawi rented by an American couple.

This shows that the case is systematic in nature, not isolated. So, all the more reason to get rid of it. We better disband it quickly before it hurts our economy further.

All those resources used to support the moral police department should be diverted to effort to build lasting democratic institutions. Like the reinstatement of local elections for instance. The reinstatement of local elections is one of the best ways to prevent councilors and representatives like Zakaria Md Deros from abusing power granted to them.