21st Century Schizoid Boy

Is knowing that you know nothing still a pretence of knowledge?

In 2006, a group of researchers at Duke University announced in a research article a major breakthrough [in chemotherapy]. This was followed by several articles in the same vein; all were published in leading journals and had citation counts that any academic would envy. One paper, in the New England Journal of Medicine, was cited 290 times.

By 2009, three trials based on the research results were under way, with 109 cancer patients eventually enrolled. But the efforts never came to fruition – in fact, the trials were halted early, for the promise had been a hollow one. The research was riddled with major errors. This sad story has lessons for our universities, individual researchers and academic journals.

When the first Duke papers on therapeutic regimes came to the attention of clinicians at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, they were keen to try the techniques. Two of their biostatisticians, Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes, were asked to investigate. They discovered major problems with the statistics and the validity of the data, and pointed this out to the Duke researchers. Although some small errors were rectified, the researchers were adamant that the core work was valid.

So why had the Duke University review given the all-clear? The reason was that the external reviewers tasked with validating the research were working with corrupted databases. In the diplomatic words of the university’s post-mortem report to the Institute of Medicine inquiry, the databases had “incorrect labelling … the samples also appeared to be non-random and yielded robust predictions of drug response, while predictions with correct clinical annotation did not give accurate predictions”.

The medical journals and the Duke researchers and senior managers should reflect on the damage caused. The events have blotted one of the most promising areas in medical research, harmed the reputation of medical researchers in general, blighted the careers of junior staff whose names are attached to the withdrawn papers, diverted other researchers into work that was wasted and harmed the reputation of Duke University.

What lessons should be learned from the scandal? The first concerns the journals. They were not incompetent. Their embarrassing lapses stemmed from two tenets shared by many journals that are now out of date in the age of the internet. The first is that a research paper is the prime indicant of research. That used to be the case when science was comparatively simple, but now masses of data and complex programs are used to establish results. The distinguished geophysicist Jon Claerbout has expressed this succinctly: “An article about computational science in a scientific publication isn’t the scholarship itself, it’s merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instructions used to generate the figures.”

The second tenet is that letters and discussions about defects in a published paper announcing new research have low status. Journals must acknowledge that falsifiability lies at the heart of the scientific endeavour. Science philosopher Karl Popper said that a theory has authority only as long as no one has provided evidence that shows it to be deficient. It is not good enough for a journal to reject a paper simply because it believes it to be too negative.

The third lesson is for scientists. When research involves data and computer software to process that data, it is usually a good idea to have a statistician on the team. At the “expense” of adding an extra name to a publication, statisticians provide a degree of validation not normally available from the most conscientious external referee. Indeed, the statistics used might merit an extra publication in an applied statistics journal. Statisticians are harsh numerical critics – that’s their job – but their involvement gives the researcher huge confidence in the results. Currently the scientific literature, as evidenced by the major research journals, does not boast any great involvement by statisticians.

In its official account to the Institute of Medicine inquiry – in effect a chronicle, a detailed description of the errors that were committed and a future agenda – Duke University implicitly acknowledges the mistakes. It states that “quantitative expertise is needed for complex analyses”, “sustained statistical collaboration is critical to assure proper management of these complex datasets for translation to clinical utility” and “the implementation and utilization of systems that provide the ability to track and record each step in these types of complex projects is critical”.

Systems failure, The Times Higher Education, May 5, 2011, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416000&c=2.

Most published research findings are false. This was the startling conclusion of a paper by John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, who has since become the poster boy for an uncomfortable fact: human fallibility undermines the pursuit of truth in research.

While science is still popularly seen as an unfaltering march towards truth, Professor Ioannidis demonstrated in his now-famous 2005 paper, “Why most published research findings are false”, that scientists have a bad habit of getting in the way. They play around with their data until they spot something they want to see, engaging in what Professor Ioannidis called statistical “significance chasing”. They find clever ways to confirm hypotheses, cherry-picking results and burying bad news in inaccessible, complex databases.

Of course, researchers are not lone actors. Another group of all-too-fallible humans, journal editors, can muddy the waters further. Journals like to report eye-catching positive research findings, but they often pay less attention if a theory is later shot down. When editors are also reluctant to print retractions when things are simply wrong, the scientific literature can become messy and murky.

What seemed to be a significant scientific breakthrough was leaped upon by several top journals, while subsequent evidence of major problems with the data and statistical analysis struggled to gain anything like the same public prominence. There was reluctance by some journals to set the record straight and suggestions that the issue was one of statistical interpretation, with no right or wrong answer.

In the end, it was clear that the case was built on flawed data. But if it had not been for two dogged biostatisticians who spotted the problems and would not let the matter go, much more than just money and time could have been at stake – clinical trials based on the flawed findings were under way.

Leader: To get to the truth, open up, Phil Baty, May 5, 2011, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416017&c=2.

Figure 36.1 shows that the workplace fatality rate began its downward trend well before the creation of OSHA [, the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration, created in 1970]. The trend was fueled not by OSHA but in large part by improvements in safety technology and changes in the occupational distribution of labor, for example, away from more dangerous assembly line work to white collar service jobs… the vast majority of studies has found no statistically significant reduction in the rate of workplace fatalities or injuries due to OSHA.

In 1993 firms paid more than $55 billion for workers’ compensation insurance and an estimated $200 billion in wage premiums to workers for accepting some job hazards. OSHA, both federal and state, assessed fines of only $160 million in 1993. At a ratio of 1,594 to 1, the economic incentives to improve safety by reducing compensating wage differentials and workers’ compensation insurance expenses far surpass the safety-enhancing incentives of the relatively small fines imposed by OSHA for violating its standards.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Thomas J. Kniesner and John D. Leeth, http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-36.html.

The right of self-ownership, as I understand it, is the right to use and dispose of oneself as one pleases, without coercive interference, so long as one refrains from coercive interference with the like self-ownership of others. It follows that the use of force is never justified except in response to an invasion of someone’s self-ownership. But since rights are, by definition, legitimately enforceable claims, it further follows that there can be no rights in addition to self-ownership. For if there were such additional rights, then there would be claims other than self-ownership that could be legitimately enforced, which would mean that refraining from invading the self-ownership of others would no longer be sufficient to exempt one from liability to coercive interference. But self-ownership, as defined above, just is exemption from liability to coercive interference so long as one respects the like self-ownership of others; hence the right of self-ownership is inconsistent with the recognition of any additional rights.

It follows that whatever property rights there are cannot be rights in addition to self-ownership, but must instead be specific applications of the self-ownership right itself. Now the homesteading principle, as Carson seems willing to admit, can be justified as an application of self-ownership. The essence of human personality is not the mass of material which composes our bodies—a bundle of stuff that in any case changes over time like Heracleitus’ river, through accretion of new particles and discharge of old ones—but our activities and projects; indeed a human being’s body itself is simply one of its owner’s ongoing projects. By transforming external objects so as to incorporate them into my ongoing projects, I make them an extension of myself, in a manner analogous to the way that food becomes part of my body through digestion. What we transform in this way becomes so related to us that no one can subject it to her purposes without thereby subjecting us to her purposes and so violating our right of self-ownership; we make something into our property by causing it to have the same relation to ourselves that the matter composing our bodies has to ourselves.

While, contra Carson, a public cannot acquire property rights just by existing, it is possible—as I and others have argued elsewhere—for a public to acquire property rights via homesteading: Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it’s hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time the way is cleared and a path forms—not through any centrally coordinated efforts, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking by that way day after day.

The cleared path is the product of labor—not any individual’s labor, but of all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.

Once a public has in such manner gained title to some piece of land, it becomes their common patrimony, and that public’s preferences then become decisive as to the conditions under which it can then pass into private hands, and likewise decisive as to what residual limitations, if any, will then apply (i.e., as restrictive covenants). Such a public could with perfect legitimacy decide on Mutualist, Georgist, or Lockean rules of transfer.

As we have seen, only No-Proviso Lockeanism is defensible on libertarian grounds; however, a version of No-Proviso Lockeanism that allows for the possibility of a community’s acquiring title to land, not by merely existing but by collectively homesteading the land (or for that matter by receiving it as a gift from some philanthropist), provides a basis for No-Proviso Lockeans to recognize as legitimate the property arrangements of Mutualist, Georgist, and Proviso-Lockean communities, and so to “acquiesce to the system favored by majority consensus in each particular area”—so long as that means a majority consensus of the owners—without any compromise of, or loss of confidence in, their own No-Proviso Lockean principles.

Land-locked: A Critique of Carson on Property Rights, Roderick T. Long, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Winter 2006, http://mises.org/journals/jls/20_1/20_1_6.pdf.

As an idea, anarchism is the conviction that people can and should cooperate peacefully and voluntarily. As a political program, it’s the project of doing without the state. Because governments are rooted in the use of force, anarchists maintain that no actual government is legitimate and that, in any case, we would be better off without the state. Anarchists reject any kind of authority acquired or maintained through aggressive violence or fraud.

People can and should organize their interactions on their own terms. We can defend ourselves against aggression; we don’t need the state to force us not to kill each other. And we don’t need the state’s help to coordinate our interactions. Working together, we can craft meaningful lives and livable communities.

Sometimes, people wear the anarchist label, or hoist anarchist black flags, when their primary goal is just to spread a little chaos. Even people who know better may sometimes act as if “anarchy” were just another word for disorder. But anarchism as I understand it is about the best kind of order imaginable: the kind that emerges voluntarily, spontaneously, as people work creatively together to shape their lives and plan their futures. Anarchy is what happens when social order flows, not from the state’s gun barrels, but from the free choices of fearless people.

States persist because of the self-interest of the powerful people who manage or manipulate them and because ordinary people haven’t realized their own power to imagine and implement alternatives… people who make and implement state decisions are pursuing their own agendas, often in conflict with our own… and we have no reason to treat them with reverence, to view them as anything other than ordinary people with rights just like ours.

I’m an anarchist for several reasons.

I’m an anarchist because I believe there’s no natural right to rule. I believe that people are equal in dignity and worth, which means, in turn, that they have equal moral standing.

I’m an an anarchist because I believe the state lacks legitimacy. Some people argue that rulers deserve to have more rights than those they rule because their subjects have consented and continue to consent to their authority. But I believe they haven’t.

I’m an anarchist because I believe the state is unnecessary. Statists often maintain that having a state is the only way to have a peaceful society. I disagree, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. I believe non-state institutions can provide the services the state provides- but more efficiently and flexibly; and there’s good evidence that they’re capable of doing so. In addition, I am convinced that if the state has the power to do good things, even very good, very useful, very important things, it will almost unavoidably use that power in authoritarian ways; it will use the power it has to regulate people’s lives– and acquire more power.

I’m an anarchist because the state tips the scales in favour of privileged elites and against ordinary people. The state tends to promote inefficiencies through subsidies, monopolies, patents, tariffs, and other mechanisms that allow elites to avoid paying the actual costs of what they do. It forces ordinary people to bear the costs of elite decisions and to adjust their preferences and behaviours to suit conformist majorities. I believe a stateless society would be more likely than ours to foster efficiency and productivity and to avoid varieties of hierarchy and exclusion states tend to promote and protect.

I’m an anarchist because the state tends to be destructive. It engages in war and plunder, and seems persistently to be involved in ratcheting up the level of violence and injustice across borders… I believe a stateless society would feature much less large-scale violence than ours.

I’m an anarchist because the state restricts personal freedom- as a way of maintaining order, benefiting the privileged, preserving its own power, or subsidizing some people’s moralizing preferences.

I’m an anarchist because I want a society marked by diversity, exploration, and experimentation, because I believe states impose conformity and resist creativity, and because I believe a stateless society would provide opportunities for people to explore diverse ways of living fulfilled, flourishing lives and to put the results of their explorations on display.

…

Pre-National Labor Relations Act unions, not legislators, won the first big battles in the struggle for the eight-hour day, for instance. The current labor law framework has had the practical effect of limiting workers’ options and opportunities.

In the Jim Crow South and in apartheid-era South Africa, the state played a key role in preventing white people from paying for work by and providing services to black people on the same basis as white people.

The state limits access to work. It limits access to housing. It tries to force people into a middle-class cookie-cutter mold… It gets in the way of people’s ability to protect themselves by organizing. By doing so, it creates and exacerbates poverty.

The state can’t effectively provide macro-level management of the economy. And when it gets involved in the operation of industries and firms and the economic behaviour of people and families it predictably shores up the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful… As long as there is a state, it will be vulnerable to lobbying and manipulation, and the wealthy will be the best equipped to lobby and manipulate… The problem, I emphasize, is not, per se, with particular people. The problem is with the vast power the state exercises, its power to cartelize and regulate and subsidize and demand tribute and compel compliance through fear.

Because the state has so much power, even well-intentioned errors can have awful consequences. And mischief coordinated among the elites who direct the course of the state– mischief like war– can be devastating for entire societies. The state is dangerous.

Anarchists often spend a lot of time imagining what life might be like without the state. I confess that I don’t know. I don’t have a plan, and, if I did, I wouldn’t want to impose it on everyone else… That’s why I favour what is sometimes called “panarchy” or “anarchy without adjectives.”… Decent voluntary communities and networks will help people resolve disputes, protect people– especially vulnerable people– and animals against violence and injustice, insure people against risk, and help to safeguard them from the effects of economic insecurity… Indeed, that’s one reason I find anarchism appealing. Without a little cognitive humility, it’s easy to assume that I’ve got a model, a plan, that’s just right for everyone, that all I need is the right sort of benevolent philosopher-queen to implement it. But of course it’s that kind of naive idealism about the capacities of states and the motivations of state actors that’s gotten us into the mess we’re in now, the mess in which the state tyrannizes us– supposedly for our own good.

That doesn’t mean that all options are equally OK, or that the notion that we can make sound judgements about what’s right and wrong, good and bad, just goes out the window. Being an anarchist doesn’t commit you to being a relativist or a nihilist. But there are all sorts of ways of being flourishingly human.

It’s tough to free other people when you’re not free yourself. It’s too easy to get caught up in unloading your own emotional baggage or to become a humourless, self-righteous crusader– the mirror image of the statist authority figure you’d like to leave in the dust… Anarchism is about living a good life, and friendship is a marvellous aspect of human welfare; it’s a good thing whether your friends agree with you about anything at all, and you pervert it if you turn it into an opportunity for proselytizing… The most important way to get people excited about the possibility of liberation is to connect with them personally… Ultimately, people are more loyal to their friends than they are to movements or ideas.

Authoritarianism begins at home… Parents who treat their children in demeaning ways or who use physical force against them when they’d never do so against adults send the message that people in authority answer to different rules than others do and that aggressive or punitive violence is an acceptable way to solve problems.

The Conscience of an Anarchist, Gary Chartier, 2011, http://www.fr33minds.com/product_info.php?products_id=467.

One of the favorite self-affirming pastimes of establishment Democratic and Republican pundits is to mock anyone and everyone outside of the two-party mainstream as crazy, sick lunatics. That serves to bolster the two political parties as the sole arbiters of what is acceptable: anyone who meaningfully deviates from their orthodoxies are, by definition, fringe, crazy losers.

This behavior is partially driven by the adolescent/high-school version of authoritarianism (anyone who deviates from the popular cliques — standard Democrats and Republicans — is a fringe loser who must be castigated by all those who wish to be perceived as normal), and is partially driven by the desire to preserve the power of the two political parties to monopolize all political debates and define the exclusive venues for Sanity and Mainstream Acceptability. But regardless of what drives this behavior, it’s irrational and nonsensical in the extreme.

I’ve been writing for several years about this destructive dynamic: whereby people who embrace clearly crazy ideas and crazy politicians anoint themselves the Arbiters of Sanity simply because they’re good mainstream Democrats and Republicans and because the objects of their scorn are not. For me, the issue has… everything to do with how the “crazy” smear is defined and applied as a weapon in our political culture. Perhaps the clearest and most harmful example was the way in which the anti-war view was marginalized, even suppressed, in the run-up to the attack on Iraq because the leadership of both parties supported the war, and the anti-war position was thus inherently the province of the Crazies. That’s what happens to any views not endorsed by either of the two parties.

The reason this is so significant — the reason I’m writing about it again — is because forced adherence to the two parties’ orthodoxies, forced allegiance to the two parties’ establishments, is the most potent weapon in status quo preservation. That’s how our political debates remain suffocatingly narrow, the permanent power factions in Washington remain firmly in control, the central political orthodoxies remain largely unchallenged. Neither party nor its loyalists are really willing to undermine the prevailing political system because that’s the source of their power. And neither parties’ loyalists are really willing to oppose serious expansions or abuses of government power when their side is in control, and no serious challenge is therefore ever mounted; the only ones who are willing to do so are the Crazies.

If one wants to argue that Ron Paul and others like him hold specific views that are crazy, that’s certainly reasonable. But those who make that claim virtually always hold views at least as crazy, and devote themselves to one of the two political parties that has, over and over, embraced insane, destructive and warped policies of their own. The reason the U.S. is in the shape it’s in isn’t because Ron Paul and the rest of the so-called “crazies” have been in charge; they haven’t been, at all. The policies that have prevailed are the ones which the two parties have endorsed. So where does the real craziness lie?

Who are the real “crazies” in our political culture?, Glenn Greenwald, May 28, 2010, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/28/crazy.

“I always use the word extreme,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

A minute or two into the talking-points tutorial, though, someone apparently figured out that reporters were listening, and silence fell.

On a Senate Call, a Glimpse of Marching Orders, The New York Times blog, March 29, 2011, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/on-a-senate-call-a-glimpse-of-marching-orders/.

The passion for dealing with social questions is one of the marks of our time. Every man and woman gets some experience of, and makes some observations on social affairs. Except matters of health, probably none have such general interest as matters of society. Except matters of health, none are so much afflicted by dogmatism and crude speculation as those which appertain to society. The amateurs in social science always ask: What shall we do? What shall we do with Neighbor A? What shall we do for Neighbor B? What shall we make Neighbor A do for Neighbor B? It is a fine thing to be planning and discussing broad and general theories of wide application. The amateurs always plan to use the individual for some constructive and inferential social purpose, or to use the society for some constructive and inferential individual purpose. For A to sit down and think, What shall I do? is commonplace; but to think what B ought to do is interesting, romantic, moral, self-flattering, and public-spirited all at once. It satisfies a great number of human weaknesses at once. To go on and plan what a whole class of people ought to do is to feel one’s self a power on earth, to win a public position, to clothe one’s self in dignity. Hence we have an unlimited supply of reformers, philanthropists, humanitarians, and would-be managers-in-general of society.

The amateur social doctors are like the amateur physicians—they always begin with the question of remedies, and they go at this without any diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of society. They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies. They never take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious injunction to the quacks is, to mind their own business.

The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They are able to see what other men ought to do when the other men do not see it. An examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people. We have a great many social difficulties and hardships to contend with. Poverty, pain, disease, and misfortune surround our existence. We fight against them all the time. The individual is a centre of hopes, affections, desires, and sufferings. When he dies, life changes its form, but does not cease. That means that the person—the centre of all the hopes, affections, etc.—after struggling as long as he can, is sure to succumb at last. We would, therefore, as far as the hardships of the human lot are concerned, go on struggling to the best of our ability against them but for the social doctors, and we would endure what we could not cure. But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science.

Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way. Some people have decided to spend Sunday in a certain way, and they want laws passed to make other people spend Sunday in the same way. Some people have resolved to be teetotalers, and they want a law passed to make everybody else a teetotaler. Some people have resolved to eschew luxury, and they want taxes laid to make others eschew luxury. The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer’s finger always itches.

Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty. For, fortunately, the matter stands so that the duty of making the best of one’s self individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one’s place in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished when the
former is done. The common notion, however, seems to be that one has a duty to society, as a special and separate thing, and that this duty consists in considering and deciding what other people ought to do… The danger of minding other people’s business is twofold. First, there is the danger that a man may leave his own business unattended to; and, second, there is the danger of an impertinent interference with another’s affairs. The “friends of humanity” almost always run into both dangers. I am one of humanity, and I do not want any volunteer friends. I regard friendship as mutual, and I want to have my say about it.

The greatest reforms which could now be accomplished would consist in undoing the work of statesmen in the past, and the greatest difficulty in the way of reform is to find out how to undo their work without injury to what is natural and sound. All this mischief has been done by men who sat down to consider the problem (as I heard an apprentice of theirs once express it), What kind of a society do we want to make? When they had settled this question a priori to their satisfaction, they set to work to make their ideal society, and today we suffer the consequences. Human society tries hard to adapt itself to any conditions in which it finds itself, and we have been warped and distorted until we have got used to it, as the foot adapts itself to an ill-made boot. Next, we have come to think that that is the right way for things to be; and it is true that a change to a sound and normal condition would for a time hurt us, as a man whose foot has been distorted would suffer if he tried to wear a well-shaped boot. Finally, we have produced a lot of economists and social philosophers who have invented sophisms for fitting our thinking to the distorted facts.

Society, therefore, does not need any care or supervision. If we can acquire a science of society, based on observation of phenomena and study of forces, we may hope to gain some ground slowly toward the elimination of old errors and the re-establishment of a sound and natural social order. Whatever we gain that way will be by growth, never in the world by any reconstruction of society on the plan of some enthusiastic social architect. The latter is only repeating the old error over again, and postponing all our chances of real improvement. Society needs first of all to be freed from these meddlers—that is, to be let alone. Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine—Laissez faire. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way. If his sphere of action and interest impinges on that of any other man, there will have to be compromise and adjustment. Wait for the occasion. Do not attempt to generalize those interferences or to plan for them a priori. We have a body of laws and institutions which have grown up as occasion has occurred for adjusting rights. Let the same process go on. Practise the utmost reserve possible in your interferences even of this kind, and by no means seize occasion for interfering with natural adjustments. Try first long and patiently whether the natural adjustment will not come about through the play of interests and the voluntary concessions of the parties.

It no doubt wounds the vanity of a philosopher who is just ready with a new solution of the universe to be told to mind his own business. So he goes on to tell us that if we think that we shall, by being let alone, attain a perfect happiness on earth, we are mistaken. The halfway men—the professional socialists—join him. They solemnly shake their heads, and tell us that he is right—that letting us alone will never secure us perfect happiness. Under all this lies the familiar logical fallacy, never expressed, but really the point of the whole, that we shall get perfect happiness if we put ourselves in the hands of the world-reformer. We never supposed that laissez faire would give us perfect
happiness. We have left perfect happiness entirely out of our account. If the social doctors will mind their own business, we shall have no troubles but what belong to Nature. Those we will endure or combat as we can. What we desire is, that the friends of humanity should cease to add to them. Our disposition toward the ills which our fellow-man inflicts on us through malice or meddling is quite different from our disposition toward the ills which are inherent in the conditions of human life.

What Social Classes Owe To Each Other, William Graham Sumner, 1883, https://mises.org/books/socialclasses-web.pdf.

New research most likely cements Mao Zedong’s place as history’s most brutal dictator (Mao > Stalin > Hitler). The Great Leap Forward killed approximately 45 million Chinese, but that was only 5 years of his brutal rule.

This book is based on well over a thousand archival documents, collected over several years in dozens of party archives… The material includes secret reports from the Public Security Bureau, detailed minutes of top party meetings, unexpurgated versions of important leadership speeches, surveys of working conditions in the countryside, investigations into cases of mass murder, confessions of leaders responsible for the deaths of millions of people, inquiries compiled by special teams sent in to discover the extent of the catastrophe in the last stages of the Great Leap Forward, general reports on peasant resistance during the collectivization campaign, secret opinion surveys, letters of complaint written by ordinary people and much more.

What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier transforms our understanding of the Great Leap Forward. When it comes to the overall death toll, for instance, researchers so far have had to extrapolate from official population statistics, including the census figures of 1953, 1964 and 1982. Their estimates range from 15 million to 32 million excess deaths. But the public security reports compiled at the time, as well as the voluminous secret reports collated by party committees in the last months of the Great Leap Forward, show how inadequate these calculations are, pointing instead to a catastrophe of a much greater magnitude: this book shows that at least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962.

In May 1957 Khrushchev had crowed that within the next few years the Soviet Union would catch up with the United States in per-capita production of meat, milk, and butter, and “the calculations of our planners show that, within the next fifteen years, the Soviet Union will be able not only to catch up with but also surpass the present volume of output of important products in the USA”… Mao wasted no time, saying, “… Comrade Khrushchev tells us that the Soviet Union will overtake the United States in fifteen years. I can tell you that in fifteen years we may well catch up with or overtake Britain.” The Great Leap Forward had begun.

Mass killings are not usually associated with Mao and the Great Leap Forward… But as the fresh evidence presented in this book demonstrates, coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward. Thanks to the often meticulous reports compiled by the party itself, we can infer that between 1958 and 1962 by a rough approximation 6 to 8 percent of the victims were tortured to death or summarily killed — amounting to at least 2.5 million people.

As everyone cut corners in the relentless pursuit of higher output, factories spewed out inferior goods that accumulated uncollected by railway sidings. Goods worth hundreds of millions of yuan accumulated in canteens, dormitories, and even on the streets, a lot of the stock simply rotting or rusting away. It would have been difficult to design a more wasteful system, one in which grain was left uncollected by dusty roads in the countryside as people foraged for roots or ate mud.

Up to 40 percent of all housing was turned into rubble, as homes were pulled down to create fertilizer, to build canteens, to relocate villagers, to straighten roads, to make room for a better future or simply to punish their occupants… the greatest demolition of property in human history… outstripping any of the Second World War bombing campaigns.

After the famine came to an end, new factional alignments appeared that were strongly opposed to the Chairman: to stay in power he had to turn the country upside down with the Cultural Revolution.

We know that Mao was the key architect of the Great Leap Forward, and thus bears the main responsibility for the catastrophe that followed.

So destructive was radical collectivization that at every level the population tried to circumvent, undermine or exploit the master plan… As famine spread, the very survival of an ordinary person came increasingly to depend on the ability to lie, charm, hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, trick, manipulate or otherwise outwit the state… Survival depended on disobedience… It may be tempting to glorify what appears at first sight to be a morally appealing culture of resistance by ordinary people, but when food was finite, one individual’s gain was all too often another’s loss.

In some Guangdong villages women were forced to shave their heads to contribute fertilizer or face a ban from the canteen.

Explained party secretary Zhang Xianli in Macheng: ‘Now that we have communes, with the exception of a chamber pot, everything is collective, even human beings.’ As Li Jingquan, the leader of Sichuan, put it: ‘Even shit has to be collectivized!’ This was understood by a poor farmer in Lin Shengqi to mean: ‘You do whatever you are told to do by a cadre.’ As Zhang Aihua, who lived through the famine in Anhui, later explained: ‘You did as you were told, otherwise the boss gave you no food: his hand held the ladle.’ Tan Zhenlin was blunt, addressing some of the leaders of South China in October 1958: ‘You need to fight against the peasants… There is something ideologically wrong with you if you are afraid of coercion.’

Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, Frank Dikötter, 2010, http://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastrophe/dp/0802777686.