Letters

David Goldblatt (August) may believe that "the winter Olympics have only ever been hosted in Europe, the US and Japan," but there are 30m Canadians who recall that in 1988, when Calgary hosted the winter games, they were most definitely a nation independent of the US.

Stephen Weavers
London SW11

The happy Danes
1st September 2008

I have lived in Denmark for five years, and agree with Sally Laird's sentiments (September). However, there is something else at work behind the "happiest country in the world": national pride. The Danes genuinely believe they live in the best country in the world, and that being Danish is a higher state of being. While this often results in xenophobia and smugness, it helps to explain why Danes say they are so happy. It can make it hard to be a foreigner here, but the advantages—healthcare, education, transport and the general safety and efficiency of society—far outweigh it.

Violet Nutting
via the Prospect blog

Solzhenitsyn's shame
14th September 2008

Arkady Ostrovsky (September) fails to register that Solzhenitsyn is himself part of the reason Russia is unable to accept its guilt for Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn considered Bolshevism the heir of the Enlightenment, concluding that the Soviet system was something done to a passive Russia by guilty westernisers. He is the original source of the myth of the Russian people being the first victims of communism.

Frank Roberts
Teddington

A neglected Barber
24th August 2008

David Perry's piece on Chris Barber's unmatched contribution to British jazz and blues (August) somewhat compensates for the neglect of our media, but Barber's achievement—running a top band for over half a century—deserves more recognition. The culmination of his 54-year partnership with trumpeter Pat Halcox would have made headlines if Barber had been a rock star, but it received no major coverage at all, a sad reflection of the way true jazz is treated by the so-called arbiters of musical taste.

Michael Pointon
London SW19

The Islamist idea
11th September 2008

In his response to my article (September), Ed Husain does not rebut my arguments and only reasserts his own, insisting that all Islamist roads lead to the single destination of jihadism.

If this were true, Islamist ideas should not merely be challenged, but proscribed. Every liberal democracy outlaws incitement to violence. But how are we to decide which ideas are impermissible? If certain ideas lead to political violence, why single out Islamism? Certain species of racism are as bigoted and dogmatic as some of Islamism, but not all racists become militants in far-right groups. If we don't assume that racism inevitably leads to violence, why is Islamism any different?

Political legitimacy in a pluralist society must be determined not by what one thinks or believes but by one's actions, which is why the limits of political rhetoric are defined by specific acts of incitement, and not by ideas themselves.

Anshuman Mondal
Brunel University

Make John O'Groats thrive
12th September 2008

Ed Glaeser (September) is correct to argue that Policy Exchange's report on decaying cities warrants mature debate and that "investing in people" should be the first response to urban decline. But he is wrong to dismiss the role of industrial policy and infrastructure development. Edinburgh is not wealthier than Glasgow simply because its citizens are better educated. For historical reasons, Edinburgh retains the bulk of Scotland's highest-paying financial services and public sector jobs. Glasgow is seeking to build its own priority sectors, and its recent progress has been impressive, if insufficient.

US cities may have wasted much on failed schemes, but this doesn't mean investment in regional British cities is pointless. Glaeser mockingly asks whether it could "make sense for the government to spend billions trying to bring manufacturing plants to John O'Groats." Well, in 20 years the closure of the Dounreay nuclear facility will result in the loss of 2,000 skilled jobs, putting the entire Caithness regional economy at risk. With this in mind, perhaps it does make sense for government to exploit the region's comparative advantages by subsidising the development of marine technologies in the Pentland Firth. Is this so ridiculous?

Stephen Boyd
Scottish Trades Union Congress

Where to find virtue
31st August 2008

Edward Skidelsky (September) deplores the demise of moral discourse in public life. The sole green shoot he cites is radical environmentalism. But there are others. Buddhism, a "religion without God." Zen, with its emphasis on compassion and the inevitability of suffering. The English gentleman may be dead, but the gentlemanly Confucian virtues of tolerance and emotional restraint are being revived in China. Among other things, psychoanalysis helps people trust others and reduce self-preoccupation. This, surely, is a way of promoting the ancient virtue of wisdom in a contemporary guise.

Jeremy Holmes
Exeter University

Cosmological spat
2nd September 2008

John Gribbin (Letters, September) made three criticisms of my article (August) on the revolution in cosmology. Two are wrong. Hubble's early appreciation of the possible use of galaxies as standard candles is made clear in his book The Realm of the Nebulae. And it is just intellectual posturing to argue that the discovery of accelerating universe expansion did not come as a surprise to many cosmologists—the brightness of the distant supernovae was the first evidence for a phenomenon that we are still a long way from grasping.

But Gribbin's other point—that the redshifts of the galaxies do not really have the same explanation as the terrestrial Doppler effect—is fair. I have always used this rather than Gribbin's alternative—that redshifts happen because of the stretching of space—because the latter gives an equally misleading impression that space is a tangible medium. Since we cannot look at the universe as a whole, the only meaning of the term "expanding universe" is that all dimensions within the universe are increasing (unless the dimensions are of objects held together by some force like gravity). Therefore, planets and galaxies do not expand, but the distances between the galaxies and the wavelengths of photons do increase. The redshifts of the galaxies are therefore implied by the universe's expansion, rather than caused by it.

Stephen Eales
Cardiff University

Rights and responsibilities
1st September 2008

Alexander Fiske-Harrison (September) writes that animals cannot have rights because if they did, they would "have duties to uphold them." Whatever the rights and wrongs of bullfighting, vivisection, vegetarianism and so on, rights cannot depend upon responsibilities—otherwise we could not confer them upon the very young, mad, simple or senile.

Michael Hanlon
London SE5

Behavioural economics
5th September 2008

The debate between Pete Lunn and Tim Harford (September) brings to mind a joke made when Danny Kahneman and Vernon Smith jointly won a Nobel prize for their work on experimental economics. Kahneman was said to have won for showing that economics doesn't work in the lab; Smith for showing that it does.

The truth is that traditional economics works quite well in certain situations, like markets or auctions. In 2000, I helped design a telecom auction that made £22.47bn for the British taxpayer. Its design was based on traditional economics principles, but we tested it beforehand to make sure it would work. There are other situations where traditional economics fails, and these are seized on by extremists to decry traditional economics altogether. Harford is right that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We must use traditional economics where it is shown to work, and not where it is shown not to.

Those advocating the use of behavioural economics as an instrument of public policy are often unreliable. It is true that what one sets as the default when workers sign up for a pension scheme matters a lot, but this is not a discovery of behavioural economics. Even if it were, there is no reason why it should endorse other claims made by behavioural economists who have a political axe to grind.

Economic science has advanced far enough that it makes sense to speak of economic engineering. Al Roth has saved thousands of lives by designing incentive-compatible kidney exchange mechanisms. But for every sound economic scientist like Roth, there are numerous crackpots seeking to advance their careers by telling us what we want to hear. Our defence is to be found in the book of Matthew: "By their fruits ye shall know them." But taste the fruit very cautiously before feeding it to your children.

Ken Binmore
University College London

Hutton's housing howler
9th September 2008

Aside from economic madness, Will Hutton (September) fails to recognise the gravest flaw in his call to prop up the housing bubble—it would be grossly socially regressive. Growing disparities in housing wealth have been one of the main drivers of inequality in Britain in the past decade. Sky-high prices have enriched older, wealthier homeowners at the expense of younger, poorer potential buyers. Now that boom has turned to bust, those without homes are expected to cement this disparity, as taxpayers have to shell out for an open-ended state bailout to banks.

Hutton also overlooks the benefits to the economy from a fall in house prices. For many, lower prices are a blessing. In what other country could it be seen as sensible to artificially inflate an asset that creates no wealth and is a long-term drag on competitiveness?

Panic has clouded Hutton's moral compass. It seems odd for one of the excluded asset-poor to say this—but thank God for Mervyn King.

William Griffith
London, SW9