Dropping the past

 

Stephen Jones recently put out his list of the best rugby union teams of all time. Like a lot of these 'best of' lists, it doesn't seem to be based on much more than Jones' impressions and memories. His list doesn't go back further than the 1970s. Can we do better?

To start with we'll need to think about what we mean by 'the best.' Does that mean the 'with the best record'? In that case we'll need to bear in mind how much teams played - winning 15 matches in a year is harder than winning 5. Do we mean 'the best relative to contemporary rivals?' If so we'll want to have a sense of how strong the teams of various different eras were. Or do we just mean 'the best at rugby'? The problem with that approach is that it's no fun, since the pro teams of today would clearly have destroyed the amateur sides of yesteryear. 

And anyway, rugby teams play against other teams around at the same time, not against teams from 50 years ago. Supremacy in the present is the name of the game. So let's go with 'best relative to their contemporary rivals.' Note that if we're really focused on who's the best - as in, most likely to win - we'll have to be disciplined and not care so much about who has the most iconic players, who won the most memorable series, who had the most positive cultural impact, etc. Those things might be more important in saying which teams were the greatest, but not so much which were the best.

The next thing to think about is what we mean by a 'team.' Teams change over time. There's probably some form of fancy analysis that could be done tracking the similarity of teams over time, but I don't know how to do it. And some teams are clearly more stable than others. Touring teams and tournament sides probably produce the most similar lineups, since they're drawn from a squad that's brought together for a particular period of time. 

So, for what it's worth, here's my list. 

1. New Zealand 2011-17. An 100% record in tests in 2013, 17 consecutive victories up to June 2014, 1st place in the Rugby Championship six times, plus a couple of World Cups. Thrashed the Springboks 57-0 in 2017.

2. South Africa 1949-52. Won test series against All Blacks 4-0, and then went on their own tour of the five nations, beating them all (including Scotland 44-0) and losing only 1 of their 31 matches overall. 

3. New Zealand 1905-6, the original All Blacks. Toured Britain, France, and North America winning 35 out of 36, scoring 976 points and conceding 59. 

4. England 2002-3. They didn't win the 2002 Six Nations, but won the Grand Slam in 2003. Beat the Springboks 53-3 at home and the Wallabies and All Blacks both home and away. Beat Australia again in the final to take the World Cup.

5. The 1924-25 All Blacks, dubbed The Invincibles' after winning all of their 32 matches (including one against each of the home nations). Points for: 838. Against: 116.

6. The 1937 Springboks, also dubbed 'The Invincibles,' slightly less deservingly, after suffering only two losses on a 29-match tour of Australia and New Zealand. 

7. New Zealand in the late 60s. A series victory against the Springboks in 1965 kickstarted a 17-match winning streak that was ended only in 1969 by Wales. 

8. South Africa 1995-1998. After the World Cup victory they lost a test series at home to the All Blacks for the first time in 1996, but they then swept the Tri-Nations in 1998, winning 17 consecutive matches. 
 
9. Australia 1999-2001. Two Tri-Nations victories following on from the 1999 World Cup. 

10. Wales in the 70s. Won 7 Five Nations championships including 3 Grand Slams. Lost both tests against NZ in 1969, and could only draw against South Africa the following year. Lost to NZ again in 1978. Formed the core of the British Lion team that won the test series in NZ in 1971.

Lockdowns and liberalism

For all the different forms the debate over the lockdowns has taken, it's the absence of one argument that's surprised me the most. At least until recently (as the lockdowns have dragged on), I was aware of very few people, at least in mainstream media, emphasizing that the lockdowns were a violation of our civil liberties.

That's surprising, because they clearly did restrict our liberties to a degree that's probably not been paralleled since the Second World War. Putting the whole population under house arrest is quite a serious move, not only virtually cancelling freedom of movement, but also related rights (some of which are constitutionally enshrined in the US) like freedom of assembly - at least until the 'Black Lives Matter' protests.

Come to think of it, though, maybe the reason the civil liberties argument hasn't had much of an airing is simple: it wouldn't be particularly convincing in the context of a global pandemic. That's because a pandemic is a situation in which my freedom clearly impacts others. My going about the place risks spreading a disease to others, and thus doing them harm.

In other words, it violates John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle,' perhaps the essential principle of liberalism. The idea is that people should be free to do as they like as long as they don't harm others. The only problem with this famous principle is that it's no help at all.

Everything we do harms others in some way; even if all we do is sit at home and meditate we're using up space and resources that might have gone to somewhere else. And besides, someone might find my sitting at home and meditating annoying and hence (so the complaint might run) psychologically harmful. So where do we draw the line?

As an objection to Mill's principle as a philosophical principle this seems pretty devastating. But it may retain its usefulness as pragmatic principle or as a rule of thumb. Most liberal democratic societies have in fact operated more or less on the principle that people shouldn't do things which clearly cause others serious harm (on a reasonable definition of 'harm'). Who decides what clearly constitutes harm on a reasonable definition? We do, through our democratically-enacted laws.

This isn't the blog post where I tell you whether I think the lockdowns did more good than harm. At least not at any length: my sense at this point is that, while Covid-19 is clearly dangerous (killing something in the region of 0.1% of people it infects), it's significantly less dangerous than some thought (this widely-read article depended on a 3-4% fatality rate, for example). Against this danger we have to stack all the negative health effects of the lockdown.

Part of those will flow from the economic downturn caused by the lockdowns. But part of them will flow from the suspension of our freedoms. And they'll do so in a way which sheds light on the value of those freedoms.

Simply put, freedom isn't simply a matter of the consequences of what are sometimes taken to be natural entitlements. Besides its moral claims, it also has pragmatic ones. One of these is that it allows decisions about individual lives to be made by the people who know the most about those lives - those individuals themselves.

The lockdowns effectively prevented people from making decisions in reaction to the circumstances of their own lives. My own parents are an example: my father suffers from a medical condition that benefits from him going to the gym, something that also helps release my mother from the strain of being a care-giver for a time. But the British government decided that it would be best for them to stay cooped up at home.

This is a version of a problem Joanna Williams touched on in her piece on domestic violence and the lockdown. She concluded that that problem could easily have been eased if the government had simply decided to trust those who needed 'to take a second walk or go and sit on a park bench for half an hour.'

The point is that liberalism doesn't just function as a system of moral entitlements. It's also partly a solution to problems of information. How do we know who needs to go sit on a park bench, get out and exercise, or whatever? The government could try to gather all that information itself, but it's far simpler just to let individuals make their own choices. They know their own circumstances better than anyone else, and they're more motivated to take care of themselves.

This is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the points at which we can see liberalism and democracy intersect or overlap. Democracy, too, can be seen as the consequence of moral entitlements (the idea that people should be political equal). But it can also be seen as a way of gathering individual preferences in the most efficient way - by allowing people to express them, and then counting them up.

Of course, one of the things people have long seemed to want is a stable state that can ensure a basic level of order. That usually involves imposing some minimal rules. But there's a danger of the state overstepping its bounds, like a clumsy Gulliver, keen to help, who ends up squashing whole footprints of Lilliputians. The trouble is precisely that he's too big, and too far away, to see what the the smaller people are up to, or to hear everything they are trying to say to him.

There are obviously only two solutions: Gulliver knows his place, or he's replaced by a more nimble giant composed entirely of Lilliputians, a millions-strong Megazord. This is something we will come back to. In the meantime, a well-meaning Gulliver is stalking the earth - lovingly and crushingly.

Why is chess stressful (but the Eucharist is not)?

Despite its image as a sleepy past-time, chess can be stressful. Players' heart-rates rise and fall dramatically during games. Top grandmasters can expend thousands of calories during tournaments, shedding alarming amounts of weight as a result. Players have even died of heart failure in the middle of competitive matches, crushed by the pressure they were putting on their system.

What makes this sedentary pursuit so stressful? Two things. One is the presence uncertainty and of threats - to your position, to your King, and ultimately to your pride - something which is bound to activate our hard-wired 'fight or flight' response and everything it brings in its train (like an increased heart-rate). The other is the need to make decisions.

Decision-making is, of course, the stuff of life. And it's exhausting - in a way that has now been tracked, measured, and given a label: 'decision fatigue.' The more decisions you make, the more tired the 'executive' parts of your brain get, and the worse you get at decision-making. It's why even top top chess players can make embarrassing blunders near the end of grueling matches. It's also why busy executives have taken steps to reduce the number of decisions they make in a day. President Obama had a chef decide his food for him. Steve Jobs always wore the same clothes.

If we find uncertainty and threats - and the related need to decide how to react to them - unpleasant, it should be no surprise that we also find environments in which we don't have to deal with these things more amenable. This is what a lot of rituals and religious practices do: they set up a programme of repetitive movements or phrases, repeated over time, which are almost completely predictable. That predictability removes any uncertainty. It removes any threats. And it removes the need for us to make, or take, any decisions.

The problem is, we actually like making decisions. More precisely, though we don't always enjoy the actual experience of having to make our minds up, especially when there's a lot at stake, we like being able to make decisions for ourselves, especially when there's a lot at stake. That's basically what autonomy or freedom is, something people often want to defend, even to the point of extreme hardship or death.

This, then, is what makes chess stressful and the Eucharist not. One presents us with threats (even if of a purely intellectual kind) and forces to make a series of difficult decisions quickly. The other temporarily suspends our decision-making, banishes all threats, does away with uncertainty. The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that this is also why we enjoy music. Listening to a sequence of notes, in fact, involves even less activity on our part. It is, in a sense, pure ritual.

But it also involves a suspension of our agency. And agency or autonomy, as we've seen, is also something we want. It's crucial, then, to find a balance between activities that allow us to rest by putting our agency in cold-storage, and those that force us to do things in the world - stressful as that is. And it might be crucial not just for individuals, but also for societies.

That's not just because both things are good, but because in this as in other contexts, rest, besides being pleasant in itself, improves and freshens action, and action, in the final analysis, is what life is made of. Occasionally surrendering our freedom - if only in specific, tightly-constrained ways - might allow us to defend and exercise it all the more energetically.

Wealth and health

One of the tropes of the current crisis has been that to re-open the economy is to sacrifice lives on the altar of profits. It's also been widely pointed out that this is a false dichotomy. In fact, wealth and health tend go together. Economic downturns lead to deaths as predictably as viruses. In this post I just want to re-state this view one more time, since I think it's a crucial one to grasp if we want to react sensibly to this (or any other crisis).

As the above graph suggests, there's a positive association between longevity and GDP. GDP and child mortality seem to be inversely related. Deaths from the five most lethal infectious diseases have declined as the global economy has grown.

Correlations like this aren't a slam-dunk case that wealth causes health. Studies that have looked at the association in detail have found it to be a slightly complicated one. But even if the exact causal mechanisms at various stages of growth can be difficult to disentangle, the basic picture seems clear: wealth and health tend to go hand in hand. That's the case not only if you look at individual countries through time, but also if you look the set of countries at a particular point in time and compare the well-being of people in richer and poorer parts of the world (even controlling for other factors).

Moreover, unlike in the case of spurious associations (scores for M. Night Shyamalan's films going down on Rotten Tomatoes in line with newspaper sales, for example), it's not hard to think of reasons why these two variables might be linked, and why the wealth of a country might help its people be healthier. Richer countries can give more funding to health services. They can invest in better-quality housing, safer infrastructure, and a more comprehensive social safety net. Its citizens are wealthier, and they can spend more money on their well-being.

So far we've been looking at the positive side of the story, with better wealth being associated with health. But there's also a dark side to the association, with poverty being associated with disease and shorter life-spans.  You can see this effect with economic downturns even in the rich world: opioid deaths rose by 85% in parts of the US where car factories had closed down (and here too it's easy to think of how this might have happened, with unemployment leading to despair and addiction). A 1% rise in the unemployment rate makes working-age men 6% more likely to die of any cause.

And that's in the rich world. Economic growth is even more vital to the developing world, since increases in wealth just make the citizens of rich countries even healthier, whereas people in poor countries live much closer to death and disaster. They're highly dependant on trade and exchange with the rich world. It's no surprise that UNICEF is now predicting a 45% rise in child mortality because of lockdown-related disruptions.

The relationship between economic downturns and health does have its complications. Some studies suggest fewer people die in the actual course of recessions than normal (although more people die of particular causes, like suicide), but there are lasting health costs over the longer term. So even if the coronavirus lockdowns are followed by a V-shaped recovery, with locked-up demand immediately bursting out again, then we might expect our health (on average) to be slightly worse than it otherwise would have been over the next few decades.

There probably are a few people out there who would put profit for themselves ahead of other people's lives. But most of the people raising warnings about the lockdowns are probably just trying to draw attention to the harm we can do to ourselves if do too much damage to the economy. Whether Covid-19 is dangerous enough to justify the public-health costs associated with the economic downturns that are now starting to bite - that's a different question, and one that's best left for another day (and maybe even another website). But it's not a simple question.

'Your money or your life?' isn't a question that, in ordinary circumstances, anyone would want to be asked. But it's actually a much easier question to answer than the one many countries are faced with now.