Johann Hari is back and he's actually saying something sensible

But while Johann Hari is back and he is saying something sensible he's not, as so often, actually saying anything original. He's back with a book about drugs and the War on Drugs. This is not even remotely true:

Hari’s book turns out to be a page-turner, full of astonishing revelations. I had no idea that the war on drugs was single-handedly invented by a racist ex-prohibition agent, who needed to find a new problem big enough to protect his departmental budget. One of the first victims of his ambition was Billie Holiday, whose heroin addiction enraged him to the point where he hounded her to death. After he’d had the singer jailed for drugs, she was stripped of her performing licence, and as she unravelled into destitution and despair, his agents continued to harass her, even summoning a grand jury to indict her as she lay dying under police guard in a hospital bed.

That specific harrying of Billie Holiday might be, we don't know, but that's not the start of the War on Drugs by any means at all. As Chris Snowden has explained at book length the attempts to fight a War on Drugs begin long before Billie Holliday was being harrassed. Back to neat the turn into the Twentieth Century in fact.

However, this is true:

But something didn’t add up. “Every day, all over the world, hospital patients are given medical heroin, diamorphine, very often for long periods. And virtually none of them afterwards goes out and tries to score on the street. Which made me think, the issue here can’t just be the drug.”

Hari went to Vancouver to meet a psychology professor, Bruce Alexander, who had been similarly puzzled, so had replicated the original experiments. This time, instead of experimenting on solitary rats locked in empty cages, he offered the choice of clean or drugged water to rats kept in what he called Rat Park, a kind of rat heaven full of wheels and coloured balls and delicious food, and other rats to play and mate with. When these rats tried heroin, they weren’t very interested.

“They just didn’t like it. None of them overdosed. Even more strikingly, he then took rats that had become addicted in the isolated cages, and put them into Rat Park. And they almost immediately stopped using. What Alexander had found is that we’ve fundamentally misunderstood what addiction is. It isn’t a moral failing. It isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation to your environment. It’s not you; it’s the cage you live in.”

It's not, however, remotely original. Much the same has been pointed out by Stanton Peele for some 40 years now. Most notably in pointing out that the vast majority of those American troops who used heroin in Vietnam came home and simply stopped using it, as various official reports have pointed out.

We'll have to wait for the book itself to see whether he properly attributes his sources, eh?

Something a little odd in Russell Brand's Revolution

We clearly weren't going to get a deep and complex understanding of economics in Russell Brand's little manifesto for a better world, Revolution. Nor, given that his amanuensis appears to be Johan Hari, should we have expected one. But to get the result of one of the more famous psychological/economic experiments the wrong way around is still pretty impressive:

Slingerland explained, between great frothing gobfuls of munched hazelnut, that this inherent sense of fairness is found in humans everywhere, but that studies show that it’s less pronounced in environments where people are exposed to a lot of marketing. “Capitalist, consumer culture inures us to unfairness,” he said. That made me angry.

The anger there is justified. For all of the experimental evidence points entirely the other way, that capitalist, consumer (the two being linked because only this capitalist free marketry has ever produced a society where consumerism is even possible) cultures show vastly increased senses of fairness. It's actually one of the things that makes them work.

In the closely related ultimatum game one player is given some sum of money to split (say, $100). Player one can decide how that split is to work, 50/50 or 99/1 and anything inbetween or the other way, their choice. Player two the decides whether to accept that split at which point both participants get their cut of the cash. If player two rejects the split as being "unfair" then no one gets anything.

The standard results (usually those results come from rather rich Ivy league students playing each other as that's the group that professors tend to have access to) indicate that there is an inherent "fairness" bug built into human behaviour. If player one moves to something like a 70/30 split (and it's worth noting that no one ever offers better than 50/50, there's just no 40/60 splits out there) then the odds of the deal being rejected soar.

People really are willing to punish themselves to enforce some idea of fairness.

And that's where the usual analysis stops: people are fair so capitalism Yah! Boo! Sucks!

However, some researchers have started to play this very same game with people who are not rather rich Ivy League students. And the results in non-capitalist, non-market and non-consumer societies are very different. Here people act more like the conventional game theory would expect: when offered a 98/2 split player two will take it. Heck, it's 2 free dollars, why not? People in non-capitalist and non-consumer cultures do not seem willing to pay a price themselves to punish perceived unfairness.

All of which shows us that capitalist consumerism brings with it (or, as certain researchers posit, the behavioural change is what makes capitalist and free market societies work, that understanding about the quid pro quo) a heightened sense of fairness and equity, not a lowered one.

As I say, we'd not expect Brand (or Hari) to get their economics correct but to get it 180 degrees the wrong way around is still pretty impressive.