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Californication

"A golden dream by the sea" is how Arnold Schwarzenegger described California, when he was inaugurated as the state's governor six years ago. Cruise down highway 280 from San Francisco, then up over the wooded Santa Cruz mountains to the Pacific coast, with red-tailed hawks soaring across a perfect blue sky, and it still looks like a dream. But underneath, there is this nightmare.

The state that once boasted the best public schools, colleges and highways in America now has some of the worst. Its healthcare is ranked lowest of all the 50 states by the Commonwealth Fund, a respected thinktank; its prisons are overflowing; the energy-guzzling way it meets its water needs takes a staggering 19% of the state's now expensive electricity; it has six of the 10 worst cities in the US for air pollution; its public finances are a disaster. Year after year, its legislature has failed to agree a budget. Its deficits make Italy look like a paragon of fiscal prudence. And this summer, it generated incredulous headlines around the world when the state started issuing IOUs. The government of one of the most richly endowed territories on earth, home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, a crucible of innovation and the eighth largest economy in the world, was broke.

Why has California got into such a mess? Some analysts say: "Too much democracy!" In California's eccentric version of direct democracy, all kinds of extravagant public spending are mandated by so-called initiatives, proposed by anyone who can gather enough signatures, and passed by a simple majority of those who bother to vote on them, while the state's revenue-gathering possibilities are curbed by the same method. The most famous example was Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which drastically capped property taxes while making California the only state in the union that requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature not just to pass a budget but also to increase taxes.

So extensive is this "ballot-box budgeting " that legislators estimate they control only some 7% to 17% of the state's spending. Troy Senik, author of a new book on the woes of the golden state, says Californians have been living with the delusion that they could be taxed like libertarians and subsidised like socialists.

Yet it's not fair to blame all this on government of the people by the people. Rather, California shows how such experiments in direct democracy can be perverted – and how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For this framework of initiatives and referendums was established by self-styled progressives in the early 20th century to curb the power of the railway bosses and bring power to the people. A hundred years later, it is today's more diverse special-interest groups – not just billionaires and businesses but also powerful public service unions, especially those representing teachers and prison guards – who play the system to feather their own nests or further their own fads. They hire hands to collect signatures on their chosen initiative, and use advertising muscle to whip in the votes.

The supposedly representative side of California's democracy doesn't work well, either. Electoral districts have been so shamelessly gerrymandered that most voters, most of the time, have no choice. In 2004, for example, 153 state or federal seats were up for election: not one went to another party. As a result, the real political competition occurs in Democrat and Republican primaries, producing politicians whose future depends on pandering to the ideological extremes of their own parties. No wonder it proves impossible to get the bipartisan two-thirds majority needed to pass a budget.

The initiatives have also added to and changed California's constitution, which is now said to be the third longest in the world – outdone only by India and Alabama. If the American constitutional tradition is distinguished by checks and balances, California has a tangle of checks and balances worthy of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It has also created a bureaucratic nightmare of multiple, overlapping and conflicting agencies and competencies. California has been the state where no agency ever dies, and truly a golden dream for special-interest groups. Until, that is, the gold ran out.

Perhaps California's deepest problem is that it has been so superabundantly endowed with both natural and human resources, so blessed by the huge contracts that the second world war and the cold war brought to its industries, so fortunate in the inflow of brilliant innovators, dynamic entrepreneurs and industrious workers from Hitler's Germany, rainy Britain, Vietnam, India, China, Mexico and everywhere else, who have moved here, wooed by its matchless charms and opportunities. A poorer place could not have sustained such an idiotic system for so long.

Imagine a bicycle with brakes permanently biting, gears that make it more difficult, rather than easier, to go uphill and the front wheel permanently askew – and it gets worse every time you take it to the repair shop. Only a giant could keep such a bicycle moving forwards. For more than 30 years, California has done just that. Now even this most dynamic of human societies can't keep the crazy bike on the road. So they need to do a proper repair – or, better still, make a new bike.

That is what Californians are now mobilising to do. A group called California Forward proposes piecemeal repairs; another, though called Repair California, aims to build a whole new bike. In the next fortnight, Repair California is due to announce the proposed wording of two initiatives: one to change the state's constitution to allow the people to call a constitutional convention, the other to have the people actually call that convention. According to its own polling, 71% of Californians support the idea. Once the attorney general has formally agreed the wording, it will have until next April to get 1.6 million signatures – which it aims to do by Obama-style volunteer organising.

If all went according to plan, these proposals would be endorsed by the people at the same time as the next gubernatorial election, in November 2010, the convention would be held in 2011, and the people of California could approve a gleaming new mountain bike of a constitution in November 2012 – which, in case you hadn't noticed, is when president Barack Obama will be bidding for his second term.

And there's the larger story. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin liked to quote the saying "The Jews are just like everyone else – only more so." Well, Californians are just like other Americans – only more so. Of course, some of California's specific difficulties are unique, and most states are better run. But in many ways the golden state's sickness is an extreme, hypertrophied version of the politico-economic problems of the whole United States in the early 21st century. The deeper structure is the same: an accumulation over many decades of systemic burdens – in healthcare, for example – which the country could once carry by a combination of economic dynamism and the advantages of its preeminent place in the international system, but no longer can; a multiplication of checks and balances that makes it extremely difficult to reform. The odds may be against the reformers, but everyone who believes the world needs an open, dynamic America must hope they will succeed.

by Timothy Garton Ash

Patrick Swayze (RIP)

Roberto Bolaño

A (late but) Deserved Apology

Gordon Brown has said he is sorry for the "appalling" way World War II code-breaker Alan Turing was treated for being gay.

A petition on the No 10 website had called for a posthumous government apology to the computer pioneer.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency after admitting a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

The campaign was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming.

He was seeking an apology for the way the mathematician was treated after his conviction. He also wrote to the Queen to ask for Turing to be awarded a posthumous knighthood.

The campaign was backed by author Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. The petition posted on the Downing Street website attracted thousands of signatures.

Mr Brown, writing in the Telegraph newspaper, said: "While Mr Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him."

National legacy

He said Mr Turing deserved recognition for his contribution to humankind.

In the statement he said: "So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better."

A niece of Mr Turing, Inagh Payne, said that at the time she had no idea about his contribution to the war effort because he kept his work "hush-hush".

She was also unaware of his sexuality and his prosecution as the family "kept mum about that sort of thing". She said she was "very grateful" for the apology. "We realise now that he was gay and we think he was treated abominably," she said.

Welcoming Mr Brown's move, Peter Tatchell of gay rights group Outrage! said a similar apology was also due to the estimated 100,000 British men who suffered similar treatment.

"Singling out Turing just because he is famous is wrong," he said.

Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment" and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue to work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

He is most famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines.

However, he also made significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing.

In 1936 he established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the rise of computers in a seminal paper called On Computable Numbers and in 1950 he devised a test to measure the intelligence of a machine. Today it is known as the Turing Test.

After the war he worked at many institutions including the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester Mark 1, one of the first recognisable modern computers.

There is a memorial statue of him in Manchester's Sackville Gardens which was unveiled in 2001.

Say the "K" word please!

A Turkish university will for the first time teach the Kurdish language, which was banned throughout the country until 1991, Turkish officials say.

Postgraduate studies in Kurdish will begin at Artuklu University, in the southeastern province of Mardin (Kurdistan, FYI).

The language will be offered alongside Farsi, Arabic and Syriac, at a new "Living Languages in Turkey" institute.

Expanding Kurdish language rights is part of a government drive to end years of conflict with armed Kurdish rebels.

In January, Turkey's public broadcaster launched a 24-hour Kurdish-language television channel.

As many as one in five people in Turkey are ethnically Kurdish, most of them living in the country's south-east (BBC means Kurdistan but they don´t mention it in order not to upset Turkey).

The head of Turkey's higher education board, Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, announced the new language course on Thursday, saying the goal would be to train academics to teach the minority languages.

The EU has urged Turkey to do more to improve Kurdish cultural rights, among a package of reforms demanded by the EU as conditions for joining the 27-nation bloc.

Turkey's EU accession talks opened in October 2005, but progress has been slow.

(from the BBC website)

Juan Almeida Bosque (RIP)

An Impressive Reading

Title: Fidel Castro, My Life. With Ignacio Ramonet.
Original Title: Fidel Castro, Biografia A Dos Voces.
Translated By: Andrew Hurley.
Published By: Penguin.
Number of pages: 724.

Summer Holidays

4 Sep: A Chicken Song Is Due Today...

When The Mouse Ate The Spider

The Murdochs v BBC

Credit where it's due: the free-market right is nothing if not brave. Fainter-hearted souls would have spotted the imminent first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman brothers that started the global financial crisis and decided that now was not the moment to trumpet the case for unfettered private enterprise, free of meddling regulation. But the evangelists for turbo-charged capitalism are made of sterner stuff. With the American conservative assault on Britain's "Nazi" and "Orwellian" National Health Service still fresh in the memory, a leading US free marketeer has trained his sights on another British institution: the BBC.

He is James Murdoch whose weekend MacTaggart lecture was a 39-minute plea for comprehensive deregulation, warning of the dangers of state interference in the "natural diversity" of the media industry. Of the recent history of deregulation, with its catastrophic consequences for the world's economy, there was not a mention.

Nor did he detain his audience at the Edinburgh television festival, sponsored by the Guardian, with a declaration of his own interest in the subject. He spoke as if he were a mere policy wonk, rather than the heir to a broadcasting empire that would make billions if he had his way and the BBC were cut down to size. This was like a fox arguing that the henhouse doors be thrown wide open – not for his own sake, you understand, but for the good of society.

So Murdoch showed some brass neck. But he made some sharp points, too. He is probably right that Ofcom is bloated, poking its nose too often into areas where it's not needed. Right, too, to note that the old distinction between the press (where no rules on impartiality apply) and the broadcasters (obliged to be neutral) makes less sense when the two are rapidly converging, forming "an all-media market" where, say, the Guardian and the BBC both run websites that include text, audio and video. These days, we're a bit like a broadcaster and they're a bit like a newspaper, and the rules probably ought to reflect that. (Though if that means dropping the impartiality obligation on the TV networks there are two words to give us pause: Fox News.)

Of course, a Murdoch attacking the BBC is not news. But these are perilous times for the organisation. Buffeted by a series of scandals and set to face a Conservative government headed by a man whose sole job outside politics was as PR man for a private TV company, the BBC should feel vulnerable. David Cameron has warned that we're entering a new age of austerity, and that will surely include the BBC and its licence fee. James Murdoch, bent on continuing the war Rupert started, might succeed where his father failed. Which is why his argument has to be tackled head on.

First, his case is undermined by the fact that, while everyone has their pet grumbles, most Britons feel a strong attachment to the BBC. Those Republican attacks on the NHS ran into a solid wall of British affection for the service, and a similar fate awaits any attempt to argue that the great malaise in our national life is the BBC. Most Britons continue to use it and trust it: one survey last year put the BBC at the top of a list of trusted institutions, ahead of the NHS, the church and the military.

Or take the view from abroad. The BBC is one of the few British exports to be universally recognised as world class. That's why BBC programmes from The Blue Planet to the Dickens adaptations are snapped up around the globe. They may not be watching Bleak House in Burma or Iran, but they are relying on BBC News for an independent, truthful view of the world. Spend a day absorbing public television and radio in the US. They do their best, but the begging bowl of fundraising appeals intrudes regularly. You have to listen to National Public Radio's Morning Edition to realise quite what we have in the Today programme. It's not just slicker and better resourced. It actually does a civic job, invigilating those who hold elected power, following an agenda set not by a profit-seeking corporation but by the journalists themselves. Speech radio of the kind served up 24 hours a day on the BBC barely exists as a form outside Britain. (Full disclosure: I present The Long View, an occasional series on BBC Radio 4.) It adds up to an output not achieved anywhere else, by any other funding model. To get rid of it, even to shrink it into the "far, far smaller" BBC James Murdoch yearns for, would be an act of cultural vandalism. We'd only appreciate what we had once it was gone.

For the very thing that so appals Murdoch is what makes the BBC precious. As with the NHS, it ensures that part of our national life is organised according to principles other than profit and loss. We are not customers of the NHS, nor of the BBC. Our relationship with it is measured in a less tangible, but ultimately more valuable, currency than pounds and pence. Murdoch cannot understand that. The final sentence of his speech declared: "The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."

These are perennial arguments for the BBC, but that does not mean nothing should change. Murdoch was heard respectfully in Edinburgh partly because the BBC has allowed its critics too many grounds for opposition and partly because other media companies, threatened with extinction by declining advertising revenues, eye jealously a BBC beast which only seems to get bigger, forever insulated from those pressures.

So the BBC should not wait for a Cameron administration to act. It should move first, blunting its critics' strongest lines of attack. The bosses could reduce costs instantly, and visibly, by paying themselves far less. There is no reason why the director general, Mark Thompson, should be paid £816,000, as he was last year. He can't claim that that is the market rate, since the BBC does not operate like any other company in the market. His salary should be pegged to the rest of the public sector. If Gordon Brown can get by on £185,000, so should Thompson.

Next, the BBC can rein in its ceaseless expansion. It had every right to move online, but it surely cannot justify buying up the Lonely Planet travel guides. Again, its unique privilege is that it does not have to operate according to market logic. Which means it does not have to behave like a rapacious media giant.

Then it could do something really bold, fulfilling its public service remit by providing something the market is failing to provide. Local newspapers are dying or dead. Yet towns and cities across Britain need to know what is happening in their councils, town halls and police forces. The BBC has an army of reporters and offices across the land, unmatched by any other news organisation. Why doesn't it set aside a few millions to cover those unreported communities – then put the results into the public realm, "open source" style. Commercial radio stations could pick up audio of the council leader; a local paper could run a BBC-originated report from the court. If people are worried about state-run media let the BBC share the money with, say, the Press Association.

The BBC ought to do this, before even its friends come to resent its gargantuan size and scale. But this cannot be a matter solely for media folk. This is a cultural jewel, one we dare not take for granted.

by Jonathan Freedland

1 Sep 39: Germany invades Poland

An American in Edinburgh

Twenty years after his father lectured the British media on their failings, James Murdoch flew into Edinburgh at the weekend to do the same. One was Australian at the time, the other is American: both relish their outsider status. Both chafe at what they see as an over-regulated industry indefensibly dominated by a public-service broadcaster. To James Murdoch, the British media is like the Addams family – unhappy in every way.

The unrelenting Murdoch attack on the BBC has echoes of the recent attacks by the American right on the NHS. Both are institutions which, when push comes to shove, the British people use, treasure and trust. They may moan about them and complain about their shortcomings, but in the end they feel grateful to have them and regard them as pretty good value for money. This may seem inexplicable to some on the American right, who regard both organisations with barely concealed contempt, but that's the way it is.

In James Murdoch's analysis, creativity, investment and innovation are being choked off in the UK by the twin evils of the BBC and the media regulator, Ofcom. He would like British TV to be more like the press – opinionated, lightly regulated (if at all) and totally independent. In other words, he would like Britain to be more like America. The problem is that the American newspaper sector – untroubled by either the BBC or very much regulation – is on its knees. The free market can no longer support the work of keeping communities informed. The same is true in the UK, where the job of systematically reporting public authorities and courts is increasingly beyond the ability of desperately struggling local newspapers. Yes, the Times has a Baghdad reporter. But the paper is currently losing tens of millions of pounds a year and is able to do its fine journalism only by virtue of enlightened Murdoch cross-subsidy. Good for the Murdochs, who have, over the years, invested admirably in journalism, but don't pretend this is an example of the free market at work. And remember it was the Murdochs – now arguing for plurality and the customer paying a fair price for quality journalism – who cut the price of the Times to 10p in the predatory hope that weaker papers would go to the wall, an act that affected newspaper pricing in the UK for 15 years.

Sky has done extraordinarily well in Britain, thanks to the Murdochs' vision, tenacity and willingness to take risks – and, in part, to a regulatory regime that has not been unhelpful to their ambitions. It is not obvious that the company has been held back by the presence of the BBC. Any fair analysis of the woes of the media industry in America and Europe today would have questioned the growth and alarming dominance of Google. It is a shame that Mr Murdoch allowed these twin obsessions to distort a speech that made some good points. There are aspects of the BBC's size and purpose that should be scrutinised. Regulation should change with the times. He was right to highlight the way convergence is producing "an all-media market". He is right to talk about the need to trust consumers, even if the underlying purpose of his speech will be seen as one of self-interest.

All countries' media ecosystems are different. The American way is no more desirable in the UK than the Italian way – in which a very powerful media magnate has ended up with a dangerously large slice of the cake. What works rather well in the UK is a mixed economy of private and public. Newspapers are lightly regulated, fiercely opinionated and proudly independent. Public-service broadcasters are more heavily regulated in return for their subsidy. It's not a perfect mix, but its part of the texture of life in the country. The idea of decimating it in order to allow a sort of Fox News UK to flourish is a prospect that should truly chill our souls.

The File

The File

Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash lived in East Berlin in the late 1970s and early 1980s, conducting academic research on the German resistance to Nazism. As a foreigner he inevitably came under the scrutiny of the Stasi. Returning to Berlin in 1992 after the demise of the DDR he gained access to the file that had been kept on him, and on reading through it, discovered a network of informants, divided loyalties and betrayals that forced him to re-examine his memories of the time. During the momentous events of 1989 Garton Ash became one of the leading Western commentators on the unravelling of state communism in Eastern Europe, an experience he describes as ‘like being lashed to the saddlestraps of a racehorse at full gallop: very exciting, but you don’t get the best view of the race.’ The File, first published in 1997 and now reissued to mark the 20th anniversary of die Wende, benefits from years of self-reflection, and is a masterful limning of the moral complexities of life under a totalitarian regime. ‘A chilling portrait of treachery and compromise’, thought John Le Carré, ‘an invaluable document for our time, bravely and beautifully written.’

Japan In Numbers

Japan loves counting things. The precise length of the noodles in rival brands of instant ramen; the average skirt lengths of high-school girls from the north or south; the number of words for “obsessive” — Japan doesn’t wonder, it tallies.

So when general elections come around, and official campaigning for the August 30 vote began yesterday, the armchair Japanologist is immediately squashed by statistics. You want a snapshot, but end up with the whole album. Each data point seems so exact and so significant: the fertility rate, the suicide rate, number of patents filed annually, the number of people over 65, the unemployment rate, the rate of GDP growth and a thousand more beautifully calibrated gauges.

The world’s second-richest nation is on the brink of its most spectacular political upheaval in 54 years but the excitement is lost in a sludge of numeracy. But the reality — the unspeakable truth that would bring down the Japanese statistics industry — is that the whole picture can be painted in just six numbers.

21,066 is the number of companies still operating in Japan founded more than a century ago. This tells you more or less all you need to know about Japanese corporate culture, management style and appetite for change. It tells you what the Japanese think about longevity and why they are less worried about being the fastest ageing society on Earth than everyone else is on their behalf.

When Western companies talk glibly of their “corporate DNA”, it is a management consultant’s metaphor. When Japanese do it, they are talking about actual chromosomes. Broken down further, the figure is even more astounding — it includes an Osaka-based construction company founded when London was still run by the Middle Saxons, and seven others established a century before the invention of the quill pen. Hundreds of the companies were doing business before the United States was founded. There is a reason Japan doesn’t like listening to patronising “how-to” lectures on capitalism and corporate governance, and it opened its doors to customers in AD578.

1 is the number of gifted civil engineering students who died this week in an Osaka river while testing a concrete canoe. Japanese technology has lost some of its lustre over the years, but never let it be said that its best and brightest have lost that mischievous spark of brilliance that makes them such formidable inventors.

49 is the age of Yo Onaga, arrested last week on the sun-kissed southern island of Okinawa after beating his 76-year old mother to death. He turned himself in and explained that he “just snapped” after she hid the TV remote control. It is the sort of vileness that feels almost comically out of place in Japan, where street crime is so low, people are polite and lost property offices receive a constant stream of valuables returned unransacked from train seats and café tables. These are not illusions, but they conceal a simmering anger that any new government will soon have to address. It is a fury that finds its expression in domestic violence, school bullying and a range of social pathologies that Japan is extremely reluctant to diagnose, let alone cure.

15 is the number of police officers of the Hachioji constabulary that it took to issue me with a 20,000 yen speeding fine at the weekend. Four manned the radar trap, two strolled into traffic and waved me to the side of the road. Another two guided me to a coned-off area where I was to park while four women officers processed my driving licence and two hefty bruisers glared menacingly from their Toyota Black Maria. At the end, a senior officer thanked me for my patience and warned me not to do it again. Yukio Hatoyama, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan has declared the civil service bloated and vowed to fight waste. I’ve no idea what he means.

1,200 is the number of new cars that, on average, hit the roads of Beijing every day — if only to sit for hours in their maiden traffic jam. The number is inspiring, terrifying and thick with messages about the vigour and ambition of the next great Asian economy. Don’t think for a moment Japan hasn’t picked up on all that.

24 is the number of times that a cotton shibori flannel — the sort that is soaked in water, heated up, sealed in plastic and offered to restaurant diners before they start eating — can be machine-washed before it dies in a heap of tatters and lint. It is a figure that defines both the meticulousness of Japan’s service industry and the consumers it serves. Diners want clean hands, but rather than simply showing them to the sink, Japan contrives a fabulously finicky, enormously wasteful system to make it minutely more convenient.

It is a retail and design attitude that has evolved over decades and is tilted in favour of the customer rather than the purveyor. It is certainly expensive, probably barmy and horribly vulnerable as Japan’s economy declines. When 24 washes seem like economic folly and the shibori goes, sensibility will have finally lost its glorious Japanese war with sense.

Black Swan

Taleb says rich should not pay more tax to help the poor

A US academic billed as David Cameron's new intellectual guru takes a Darwinian approach to economics and says it is wrong for the rich to pay higher taxes to help the less well-off.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of risk engineering at New York University, attacked Barack Obama for increasing his tax bill as part of a series of anti-recessionary measures.

The remarks by Taleb, the conservative author of the book Black Swan, were made during an appearance with Cameron at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) on Tuesday.

Labour attacked Cameron, who says Taleb's work confirms his own prejudices, because the "eccentric" academic says economic crashes are a good thing.

In some of his most provocative remarks at his appearance with Cameron, the Lebanese-American academic criticised Obama for increasing his taxes as he harked back to Darwin's theory of evolution.

"I happen to do OK. I am paying more taxes," Taleb said. "How can you have evolution if those who do the right thing have to finance those who did the wrong thing? If you are making money in 2009 – that means you have a robust business in the cycle – you are paying more taxes. If you are losing money in 2009 you get a bigger tax break. It is the opposite of everything I believe in."

Taleb has become a conservative folk hero following the success of his book, which examines the phenomena of "Black Swans" or "low-probability, high-impact events" that can have a major impact on the world.

Cameron praised Taleb and said his book had confirmed his own prejudices. "I very much enjoyed Black Swan. I am trying to come to terms with Black Swan thinking and what it might mean for politics … The danger with reading somebody's book is that it just confirms some of your prejudices and that is why you like it," the Tory leader said.

But Taleb has beliefs which are outside the political mainstream in Britain. These include:

• Economic crashes are a good thing. "I like crashes. I just like the world to be robust with them. The world is not robust. In 2000 Silicon Valley was very robust."

• Debt is nearly always dangerous. "Christianity early on did not like debt. Islam banned debt. It is not without reason. The Romans had problems with debt. A lot of wars were caused by debt. So debt was not necessarily a good thing. You say in moderation. But we don't know what moderation is."

• Climate change may not be man-made. "I'm a hyper-conservative ecologically. I don't want to mess with Mother Nature, OK. Even I don't believe that carbon thing is necessarily anthropogenic [man made], right. I just don't want to mess with Mother Nature. I don't understand Mother Nature. It is much more intelligent than us. It has been around for longer than anything else." Cameron made clear he disagrees with Taleb on this.

Taleb yesterday criticised the British press for the reporting of his remarks, saying they may have become "lost in translation". His views on economic crashes had been distorted, he said. "I said that free markets generate fads, crashes, massive movements. Attempts to control the cycle proved futile – what we need is citizens to become robust to them, to be immune to their impact. My point is that we cannot predict Black Swans, but we know their impact and can be prepared for them. Again taken backwards: 'Taleb loves crashes'. This is incompetent journalism in its most insidious form."

Climate experts and bank risk managers have both failed us

I'm not a denier. We just do not know the consequences of our actions

I am honoured to see my conversation with David Cameron at the RSA covered in your paper (Cameron's guru says rich should not pay more tax to help the poor, 20 August). However, your reporting was in complete reverse to my positions on three subjects.

First, you say I believe that "Climate change may not be man-made"; and Lucy Mangan describes me as a "climate-change denier" (This week, 22 August). In fact, ecologically I am hyper-conservative (meaning super-Green), and I am one of the authors of the King of Sweden's recent Bönhamn declaration on attitudes to climate change. My position on the climate is to avoid releasing pollutants into the atmosphere, regardless of current expert opinion. Climate experts, like banking risk managers, have failed us in the past in foreseeing long-term damage. This is an extension of my general belief: "Do not disturb a complex system." We do not know the consequences of our actions (this idea also makes me anti-war), and I have explicitly stated the need to leave the planet the way we got it.

Second, I was portrayed as someone who "loves crashes". By coincidence I spoke at the same venue, the RSA, two and a half years earlier – well before the current crash – as part of my crusade against the risk of financial collapse. I find it depressing that the British public could have saved a trillion pounds and hundreds of thousands of jobs had these hidden systemic risks been addressed.

My position is that a robust system needs to produce frequent crashes, with citizens immune to them, rather than infrequent total collapses which we cannot cope with. By constraining cycles and assuming "no more boom and bust" (as your current government did) you end up with a very large bust – and I am sure that I do not need more events like the recent crisis to prove the point.

Thirdly, I was quoted as saying "How can you have evolution if those who do the right thing have to finance those who did the wrong thing?" But this is not the same as saying "[the] rich should not pay more tax to help the poor", as your headline stated. I spent 13 years fighting bankers' bonuses (when no one else did) and am currently crusading for past payments to be clawed back. I have also shown how regular taxpayers have been financing millionaire bankers' bonuses: "socialism for the losses, capitalism for the profits". We are still financing those who got us here, with tax hikes on those who do the right thing, and larger tax breaks for those who blew us up. Companies who made mistakes and weakened the system are being subsidised by the countercyclical ones who make it more robust.

Nowhere do your articles discuss my central idea, that the risks that were in the system two years ago are still with us now, and that unless we lower debt to "definancialise" the economy (instead of increasing deficits through stimulus) we face more risks of blow-ups. With the same distortion of views one could easily make Karl Marx an apologist of capitalism and Adam Smith a promoter of communism.