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It is men who cause war and conflict, not women. Dick Skellington looks at the latest research.

The male sex drive is the cause of nearly all conflict in the world, from football violence to wars between nation states, according to scientists at the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University.

The psychological study found that evolutionary influences shape the male to be aggressive to outsiders. This aggression has emerged over the epochs as we compete for mates. The scientists argue that this aggression drives much natural selection. The scientists claim that the outcomes of this dominant evolutionary trend can be seen in gang rivalries and inter-tribal violence, and especially in religious conflicts.

Women, on the other hand, have evolved a tendency towards peaceful co-existence, in the scientists' phrase, women are programmed to ‘tend and befriend’ in order to protect their offspring providing them with a greater chance of survival.

The study's findings are an example of the 'Male Warrior Hypothesis' in contemporary evolutionary anthropology. This suggests that men are more likely than women to discriminate against others considered outsiders, a tendency apparent across different time periods and cultures.
Over history conflict between rival groups of men provides opportunities to gain access to mates, territory and increased status. Under this theory natural selection in an evolved psychology amongst men initiates aggression.
Emily Cousens, Sarah Pine and Ali Johnson, representatives of the Wadham Feminists, argue that such a theory is misplaced. Society creates and constructs what we think of as masculine and feminine and encourages and rewards different traits amongst males and females. They contend this does not necessarily have a biological basis.
If the research in Oxford is credible it might explain the persistence of conflict as these mindsets become transfixed. They seem relatively resistant to change, according to the researchers. So it seems, if we can rely on the boffins from Oxford, then war and violent conflict sadly will always be with us, especially in those societies, such as Syria, where women are subjugated through centuries of religious dogma, and of course it might help to explain the resistance of a male dominated Anglican Church in England to women bishops.
 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards.

 

 

Economists’ brightest ideas often seem ludicrous; and the most obviously sensible – such as budget cuts reducing debt – turn out to be wrong, writes Alan Shipman.

Despite the mounting pain of ‘austerity’, opposition parties across Europe find it hard to swing voters’ opinion behind alternative, pro-growth policies. That’s mainly because any ‘Plan B’ would require an initial rise in public borrowing. This is difficult to acknowledge: it’s a bit like telling a hitch-hiker you’ll drive them from Birmingham to London, and setting off towards Glasgow. But evading the issue can make the policy look even less credible, as Labour Party leaders discovered just before May’s local elections.

The idea that we can borrow more and end up with less debt is not the Alice-in-Wonderland approach that critics keep claiming. It’s actually the central lesson of modern macroeconomics. So its portrayal as muddled thinking, or strategically self-defeating, is as much a failure of the economics profession as of the political opposition.

‘Spending to save’ is a well-established aspect of present policy. From the Portas Pilots for regenerating Britain’s high streets to the “campaign costing £18,000 which is expected to raise at least £25,000” in the small-print of charity cold callers, it’s normal to incur higher costs now in order to get bigger rewards later. When correctly judged, these changes more than pay for themselves. So no-one thinks it mad to install solar panels or pay more for a hybrid car.

Borrowing to reduce debt is no less logical. It simply recognises that existing debt was incurred on the expectation of a growing economy. The gross domestic product (GDP) has to expand in order for the debt-to-GDP ratio (which determines its sustainability) to decline. If the government borrows more at a time when GDP is stagnant, unemployment high and the costs of borrowing very low, then the further rise in debt will be outpaced by the subsequent growth of GDP. When national output and incomes rise, debt can then be paid back out of the larger tax base. The substantial ‘multiplier effect’ from public deficits in recessionary times is now recognised in almost all economic assessments, including those of top economists at the International Monetary Fund – which therefore also accept the converse, that trying to reduce the deficit in recessionary times will actually deepen the debt problem by worsening the GDP decline.

Reversing the rules
To be fair to George Osborne, and other finance ministers who stick to the micro-economic logic that deficit reduction will lead to debt reduction, the goalposts haven’t just shifted since austerity started. They’ve been moved to the other end of the field. The prevailing belief among economists after the 2008 financial crisis was that even if public borrowing had a ‘multiplier’ effect on GDP in normal times, this broke down when governments were already ‘over-borrowed’. Once the public debt reached 90% of GDP, any further increase undermined the growth of GDP rather than promoting it. At that point, failure to arrest public borrowing – by reducing state expenditure and/or raising taxes – could lead to disaster, with the debt: GDP ratio spiralling upwards into national default.

The calculation behind that 90 per cent limit has now been shown to be seriously flawed. That may eventually prove fortunate for Osborne, and European counterparts on a similar track, since their lengthening delays before re-balancing the budget mean that public debts previously on course to peak below 90 per cent of GDP could end up going above it.

But even before the calculation errors came to light, it was not clear that high public debt was the cause of stagnation. UK experience strongly points towards its being the consequence. The banking collapses which caused a one-off jump in public debt also arrested the growth of GDP, causing a further cyclical rise in the budget deficit. The solution was to allow that cyclical rise in order to rekindle the growth of GDP – not to try reversing the deficit before such growth had resumed.

Before they recognised its inaccuracy, economists tried to explain the apparent association between early deficit reduction and faster GDP growth with a story of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction.’ Public spending cuts (which most have always preferred to tax increases) would release resources to the private sector, which would immediately invest and employ more, spurred by the lower interest rates made possible by lower public borrowing. Contraction was, indeed, expansionary for small countries that implemented it ahead of the rest: so the two Baltic republics (Estonia and Latvia) that savagely reduced their public spending and public wagebill in 2009-10 now have the EU’s fastest-growing economies, and are embraced by the Eurozone while others struggle to avoid being thrown out.

But for larger economies, which embarked on fiscal contraction simultaneously, the results have been disastrous. Italy is now scarcely governable, Spain’s unemployment rate has reached 27 per cent (and 57 per cent for young people); and the UK has avoided a sharp rise in unemployment only by forcing people into unproductive jobs that increasingly fail to pay a living wage, forcing the government into ever larger employment subsidies.

Opposition parties’ problem is that theirs is a ‘might-have-been’ policy. If they had won the previous election and borrowed more then, they would have generated growth, and public debt would now be lower. No-one can be sure that increased borrowing after the next election will be similarly successful in shrinking the subsequent deficits and bringing debt down. It depends on how bad things get as a result of contractionary experiments now under way.

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at The Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world, part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

 

As Voyager One leaves our solar system, Dick Skellington reflects on change and hope in a turbulent world.

In 1977 a workhorse space probe was launched. As you read this Voyager 1 is leaving our solar system. It will soon enter the deep space of our Milky Way galaxy, reaching for the stars. The space craft is over 11 billion miles from our Sun and is now nearing interstellar space. Soon it will negotiate the dangerous turbulent bubble at the very periphery of our solar system. Once through astronomers expect the craft, launched originally to send back information and photographs of Jupiter and Saturn and their moons, will reach a calmer environment. This is an amazing achievement for an instrument that boasts only 68 kilobytes of computer memory. Today's iPad is 100,000 times more powerful. And, Apple Inc, yes, you've guessed, was first established in 1977, the year of the first space walk by a human being.

You may have seen Voyager's marvellous image of the earth, taken on February 1st, 1990 which shows our tiny planet home as a pale blue dot. Voyager took the image when our Earth was 4 billion miles away. Do take a look at how insignificant we are. The stunning image prompted the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan to observe, memorably, in 1994:

'From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand'.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

Voyager has done much to inspire the human imagination, redefine our science, as it did Carl's. Its original aim was to investigate the climates of Jupiter (its big red spot) and Saturn (it's astonishing complex rings) and to explore new worlds, the moons of these vast gas giants. It has beamed back to Earth amazing images of volcanoes on Io, Europa's frozen oceans, and startling evidence of the possibility of primitive life on Saturn's moon, Titan.

Voyager is now so far from us it takes 17 hours for its radio signal to reach our planet. The cameras are now switched off but the craft still has working instruments which study magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and charged particles from the sun called the solar wind. Famously the craft, about the size of a small car, contains gold plated discs containing multi-lingual greetings, music and pictures, and a guide for intelligent discoverers in some future time so they can identify precisely where our pale blue dot is situated in the vastness of the Universe. Voyager has enough nuclear fuel to last until around 2020; by then it will have left our solar system for good. So far the mission has cost $3.7 billion in today's money. Money well spent, just for the photograph.

How has our pale blue dot changed since 1977? Certainly the years have reinforced the truism that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes. The Berlin Wall has fallen, but there is a new wall separating Palestinians from their Homeland. In 1977 USA's President Carter pleaded to the UN for a Palestinian homeland to be established, something which the Palestinians still seek after 35 years of further bloodshed and oppression. Beyond the UK, 1977 saw abortion legalised in Italy, President Carter pardon Vietnam draft evaders in the USA, and riots in South Africa. It also saw Visa launch its first credit card and the World Health Organisation (WHO) announce the eradication of smallpox.

The Cold War may be now be over but there are new divisions and conflicts, fuelled by religious intolerance and dogma, more so in a post 9/11 world where state terrorism and individual terrorism coexist, and of course war is a human constant, as we further imperil the survival of humanity, and the future of the pale blue dot we inhabit.

The headline quotation from the Star Trek series is believed to have been taken from a White House booklet published in 1958 to foster support for a space race: 'The first of these factors is the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before'.

One thing that has changed is greater awareness of the kind of careless sexist language used in the headline for this article. Why, if a petition this year to finally put the Sun's page three girls to bed is successful, we will be spared that further sexist distraction.

Looking at what happened in the UK in 1977 there are parallels with today. The more things change the more they stay the same, so they say. For example, in 1977, the Labour Government announced plans for referenda on devolution for Scotland, and there were tentative discussions about possible independence. 1977 saw the Queen's Silver Jubilee; this year her Diamond celebrations. There were huge cuts to the defence budget as there are today. The Government and then Liberal Party established an agreement on economic recovery (austerity anyone?), and Sir Freddie Laker established the first low cost airline. And, last of all in these simple reflections, the prospect of Gove Levels might herald a return to the kind of elitism we tried so hard to erode way back in 1977.

As Voyager 1 leaves our solar system this is a time for all humanity to reflect, and contemplate Carl Sagan's hymn to the human spirit, and, above all, to remember his warning: 'In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves'.

Find out more:

• Magnificent images of outer space see the winning BBC astronomy photographs of the year

Dick Skellington 11 October 2012

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards