JG Ballard

I just heard yesterday that JG Ballard had died after a long illness.

As is the way nowadays, his reputation is based on the two books that were made into films. Namely Empire of the Sun, and Crash. Although his fame proper probably began with the publication of Empire of the Sun, which sold very respectably when it came out. It told a slightly fictionalised story of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp during the second world war. For people already familiar with his work, it set his previous stories into a firm context, the sun-scorched deserted suburban environments, the characters struggling to make sense of a fractured reality. The dislocated reality that he wrote about, was here in his childhood.

In a way, pulling back the magician's curtain seemed to diminish his imaginative achievement. But his imagination was about so much more than dried up swimming pools and whale like abandonned Oldsmobiles.

His writing was not about outer space, but about inner space. They were fictions focussed tightly in on the protaginist, generally someone trying to make sense of their world, albeit through some form of personal ritual. They were cyphers, almost devoid of human emotion or feeling, save a desire to understand. The sort of fate that befalls children, destined never to effect much change, but just to try and figure things out.

I have always loved to read, but it was reading Ballard that first alerted me to the subversive, challenging role that writing should occupy. I read through
The Disaster Area,
Low Flying Aircraft
Vermilion Sands,
High Rise, Crash, Unlimited Dream Company, the Drowned World, the Crystal World

greedily. My sixth year studies dissertation was on Magic, Mystery and Technology in the works of JG Ballard, years before anyone had ever heard of him.

Subsequently I have continued to read him on and off. Each piece of writing is very much a small fragment of the larger whole, it is quite repetitive, I would not read everything. But he had a living to make from writing, and who can berate a craftsman for repetition. As his later more autobiographical writings made clear, he lost a much loved wife, and brought up his children himself. For all his literary iconoclasm, he comes across as a pretty decent person, who did his best and was happy to recognise and acknowledge the goodness in others.

We have lost a very fine writer, and a decent human being, but we are the richer for having known him.

Towards a new economy

It is pretty much a cliche of measuring performance, that by setting indicators you end up distorting activity to produce the desired results in your chosen indicators, with the associated risks. For example there are perverse incentives, if you are paid to complete tasks, then you are encouraging people to complete the straightforward tasks that they know they can do quickly.

Inevitably it is very difficult to choose good indicators, or metrics.

You might measure Inputs - that is the amount that you are putting into the system, the amount of spending, work, effort. But there is no guarantee that measuring Inputs will actually tell you anything about how effective any of these inputs actually are. There is no merit in being busy if none of it is achieving anything.

Alternatively you might measure Outputs - that is the amount of things that you are generating. This sounds better, if you are producing lots of widgets, then that must be a good thing. But if they are defective widgets, or widgets that no one wants to buy. But what about services, are you answering lots of phone calls, but doing it very badly. Is it really better to be sending out lots and lots of emails. Should my boss pay me more because I am actually sending him millions of emails?

Alternatively you might measure Outcomes - that is some sort of measure of the change that you are seeking to effect. In business terms it is easy enough, it is profit or market share. In government or a service within a business it is less easy. Obviously the Ministry of Defence wants to win battles, but how can you disaggregate that down to individual contributions. Perhaps there are underlying trends that mean that you will never achieve the high level outcomes, but you still need to direct energy towards them.

Intuitively we can tell when people are working well, it is about commitment, innovation, quality of service, reliability, adaptability, resilience. It is just that a simple set of indicators are very bad at capturing this. They make us think that we can understand something without really understanding it, a shortcut avoiding the effort of doing some thinking and research.

The economy has changed a lot recently. Perhaps part of the problem was that we did not really understand it, but we thought that a few indicators would tell us all we needed to know. But the nature of indicators is that they skew activity.

So we thought that rising house prices were good, and sure enough they went up. We thought that low inflation/interest rates were good, and they stayed low. We thought that low unemployment was good, and it stayed low.

But we were not really thinking about more structural issues like the balance of payments, like the affordability of credit, like the resilience of the economy.

Economics is unscientific in that it tends to assume that all other things being equal doing X will lead to Y. When in real life all other things do not remain equal.

Although we are entering a new era, economic policy has not. It still seems to be fixed on making things go back to the way they used to be, but perhaps we might learn a few lessons, so we don't need to change much, just iron out a few wrinkles and things can just go back to the way that they were.

Why not look at some different indicators, our streets are full of litter, generations of families are disengaged from work, most people have minimal engagement with nature or a wider society, we are slowing killing off other species, and ultimately our planet, we are re-enacting the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.

When we are tackling these issues with all our strength, then perhaps we should worry about house prices and dinner parties. Common sense tells us that the economic progress was destroying our planet. We need to adopt some better perspective, and let that inform what we do.

The Murder Exchange by Simon Kernick

I got this book cheap as part of a promotion that The Times was running. It is a thriller set in London, featuring a former mercenary and a policeman. They take turns providing the narrative, and their stories cross over and come together by the end.

If you are looking for something diverting then you won't go far wrong with this. It is certainly not the best written book I have ever read, the prose is unremarkable, but generally it goes along at a fair pace, and though never terribly wonderful, it is never terribly dull either.

I am sure that there are better thrillers out there, but this is a decent enough potboiler, that manages to feel reasonably fresh and convincing, despite covering what could be very cliched territory.

MacHeist 3

I have just bought and installed MacHeist 3, well as much of it as is available for download today, there are a few applications that might still be unlocked before the promotions closes.

MacHeist is basically a software package of various Mac shareware applications that you can buy for a pretty reasonable all in price, of $39. I had already bought quite a few of the application before, so on the face of it, it was not an obvious decision whether to purchase it. However I sent on the email flyer to the rest of the family, and we eventually agreed to buy the package.

So far the games, World of Goo and Cro Magnon Racer have been huge family hits. I'll probably have a go with Times an RSS feedreader, although I am starting to get to grips with Google Reader, it does seem to shoot up to hundred of unread articles pretty much instantly.

Unfortunately downloading and installing a dozen different applications by a dozen different shareware developers is an experience in itself. I was in correspondence with one developer and he replied

Support is everything.  It's the most costly part of being a developer.  Some larger corporations lose track of this fact, but as a small company (it's just me) it's very easy to notice.  ;-)If I do anything that increases support I will not be able to spend time on development.  If I don't spend time on development then I don't make money.  To function as a business your development efforts need to be spent minimizing your future support load.  It's just that simple.

The better applications consistently seem to be the ones that are easiest to install, I suppose the developers either put their effort into reducing future support calls, or they don't and they end up firefighting. I don't imagine that I will ever earn a living a software developer, but it there is probably a useful principle in there somewhere. It really does pay to anticipate what your customers want.

Supply and Demand

We all know how capitalism works. If demand increases prices go up, if supply increases then prices go down, supply and demand are the real things, while the prices float up and down in response.

But the housing market does not work like that, people like to make a profit on their houses, so they will gladly have their house on the market for a long time, holding out for what they think their house is worth.

But supermarkets don't sell milk like that, they sell it as a loss leader, to bring people into the shops.

But shares don't work like that, when prices go up, people are more keen to buy them. When prices go down, people want to sell them.

Maybe what everyone always knew about supply and demand and prices really isn't so true after all.