The Politics of the Bridge

Posted by Martin Cohen

Bridges are the stuff of superlatives and parlour games. Which is the longest bridge in the world? The tallest? The most expensive? And then there's also a prize which few seem to compete for - the prize for being the most political. The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s. surprise proposal in September for a feasibility study for a bridge to Ireland threatens to scoop the pot.

But then, what is it about bridges and Mr. Johnson? Fresh from the disaster, at least in public relations terms, of his ‘Garden bridge’ (pictured above) over the river Thames, the one that Joanna Lumley said would be a “floating paradise”, the “tiara on the head of our fabulous city” and was forecast to cost £200 million before the plug was pulled on it (leaving Londoners with bills of £48 million for nothing), he announces a new bridge - this time connecting Northern Ireland across seas a thousand feet deep to Stranraer in Scotland. This one would cost a bit too - albeit Johnson suggests it would be value for money at no more than £15 billion.

If Londoners choked on a minuscule fraction of that for their new bridge, it is hard to see how exactly this new one could have been afforded. Particularly as costs of large-scale public works don't exactly have a good reputation in terms of coming in within budget.

• The 55-kilometre bridge–tunnel system of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge that opened last year was constructed only after delays, corruption and accidents had put its cost up to 48 billion Yuan (about £5.4 billion).

• When wear and tear to the eastern span of the iconic San Francisco Bay bridge became too bad to keep patching, an entirely new bridge was built to replace it, at a final price tag of $6.5 billion (about £5.2 billion), a remarkable sum in its own right but all more indigestible because it represented a 2,500% cost overrun from the original estimate of $250 million.

Grand public works are always political. For a start, there is the money to be made on the contract, but there is also the money to be made from interest on the loans obtained. Money borrowed at a low rate from governments, can be relent at a higher rate. Even when they are run scrupulously, bridges are, like so many large construction projects, moneygorounds.

And yet, bridges have a good image, certainly compared to walls. They are said to unite, where barriers divide. "Praise the bridge that carried you safe over" says Lady Duberly at breakfast, in George Colman's play The Heir at Law. But surface appearances can be deceptive. Bridges, as recent history has shown, have a special power to divide.

That Hong Kong bridge is also a way of projecting mainland Chinese power onto its fractious new family member. President Putin's $3.7 billion Kerch Strait Bridge joining Crimea to Russia was hardly likely, as he put it, to bring “all of us closer together”. Ukrainians and the wider international community considered Russia's the bridge to be reinforcing Russian annexation of the peninsula. And if bridges are often favourably contrasted with walls, this one, it soon emerged, functioned as both: no sooner was the bridge completed than shipping trying to sail under it began to be obstructed. No wonder that Ukraine believes that there was an entirely negative and carefully secret political rationale for the bridge: to impose an economic stranglehold over Ukraine and cripple its commercial shipping industry in the Azov Sea.

In this sense, a bridge to Northern Ireland seems anything but a friendly gesture by the British, rather it smacks of old-style colonialism.

But perhaps the saddest bridge of them all was the sixteenth century Old Bridge at Mostar, commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1557 and connecting the two sides of the old city. Upon its completion it was the widest man-made arch in the world, towering forty meters (130 feet) over the river. Yet it was constructed and bound not with cement but with egg whites. No wonder, according to legend, the builder, Mimar Hayruddin, whose conditions of employment apparently included his being hanged if the bridge collapsed, carefully prepared for his own funeral on the day the scaffolding was finally removed from the completed structure.

In fact, the bridge was a fantastic piece of engineering and stood proud - until that is, in 1993 when Croatian nationalists, intent on dividing the communities either side of the river, collapsed it in a barrage of artillery shells. Thus the bridge once compared with a ‘rainbow rising up to the Milky Way’ became instead a tragic monument to hatred.

Extinction Crisis? The solution may be privatisation

Endangered species can often be protected with comparatively tiny amounts 

of resources. Pictured, the critically endangered Black-flanked rock wallaby whose 
protection needs are measured in thousands of dollars - Image via WWF Australia

Posted by Martin Cohen

Looking around the world, there are so many problems that seem so intractable and the solutions so far off, that it can seem as if it is better to, well not look around the world. 'Climate change', for example, where it has been estimated by Danish statistician and reformed ‘skeptic’, Bjorn Lomborg, that the cost of reducing the world's temperature by the end of the century by a ‘grand total of three tenths of one degree’ is ... $100 trillion. That's not small beans. In terms of charitable donations, you'd need to find 100 million people ready to chip in a million each..

For any number of reasons, that cash ain't gonna be raised and those abatement measures - however worthy - are not going to be made.

Yet in fact there are a whole range of environmental problems which do have relatively straightforwards solutions - and require only tiny investments. These small but vital programmes are often starved of resources.

Take extinctions in Australia, for example, a topic I asked Friends of the Earth (UK) to campaign on back in the 1990s  mainly to highlight UK business links to forest clearance. To run a campaign might have costs a few thousand pounds but after discussions with the then Head of FoE and meeting the senior staff including the Biodiversities campaigner for a roundtable on the issues, I was told there were no resources for it. They offered to run a Press Release campaign if I wrote it instead. And then reneged on that too.

The point is not that I don't like Friends of the Earth much, in fact I think they do a lot of good work, (they helped me lead a campaign that saved the Yorkshire Moors from a four-lane motorway, probably the only time the organisation actually reversed a road scheme that had been formally approved) but that relying on environmentalists to save the world is a mistake. The economics points at a problem and a paradox: environmental pressure groups exist and make money out of environmental horror stories - they have no financial interest in saving anything. A campaign like Climate Change in which a bottomless pit of money must be raised suits certain people very well, even though it can never achieve its ends.

Meanwhile time is running out! Talk about an ‘extinction crisis’ ... It is there all right. But the solutions don't require grandiose schemes to control the world’s climate - they require small concrete actions to preserve habitat.

Half of all the species lost in modern time have been in Australia. In the last 150 years, one in eight of Australia's mammal species - which live(d) nowhere else on earth, have been driven out of existence, as the Australians literally bulldozed their forests into desert, in pursuit of grazing for sheep and cows. At the same time, the land value stolen from the defenceless animals and plundered form Australia's native people is actually tiny.

The Bramble Cay Melomys that lived only on a tiny island in the Torres Strait could have been saved if the island had but been bought and made into a sanctuary. Instead the fate of the little rodent was determined by red tape and political indifference.

Land clearing, invasive farming, extermination programs, lack of monitoring - all these are essentially money-driven failings with economic responses possible. To save the Spotted Tailed Quoll, for example, needs only to preserve a chunk of land from the insatiable thirst of Australia's farmers for land clearance. Likewise, the Black-flanked Rock-wallaby needs a small reserve declaring to cover it's now much diminished range. Such things essentially can be investments - yet the world's billionaire philanthropists - I'm looking at you Mr Gates, Mr Buffett! - have so far directed their wealthy and otherwise worthy Foundations only to talk about human needs - medicine, education, governance even. yet biodiversity and species preservation is surely just as much a vital part of our shred human shared inheritance as any other aspect of human life.

At the moment, attention is rightly focussed on the land clearance in the Amazon rainforest, land clearance often financed directly or indirectly by Western banks and institutions. Yet here's an idea for those with resources: buy up sections of the Amazon and hold them on behalf of their indigenous peoples as ecological parks, scientific resources and sustainably farmed forests. Such privately owned 'ecofarms' would be able to resist predation by those set on both genocide and ecocide. They only need investors!

It has already been done successfully for example in the conservation-driven Kruger Private Reserves in Africa. There, the connecting of habitats alone serves to improve the survival chances of many species in the region.

Lessons of the “Prisoner's Dilemma” for Real Life

Posted by Keith Tidman

The ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ is a classic example of game theory and a tool for decision-making, where two rational, independent players must choose between cooperation and conflict to arrive at what’s perceived as the best outcome. Central to the interactive nature of the game is that the payoff (optimal or otherwise) for any single player deliberating his or her decisions and the consequences of those decisions hinges on the strategies that the other player chooses to implement according to assumptions and rules.

The prisoner’s dilemma was the product of modeling work performed in 1950; however, it was the mathematician Albert Tucker who ultimately structured and named the thought experiment as we know it today. The standard description of the prisoner’s dilemma runs along these lines:

Two prisoners are being interrogated apart from one another for crimes they are believed to have committed jointly. Although officials have enough evidence to convict both suspects on the lesser of the two charges, they have insufficient evidence for a conviction on the more severe crime they’re suspected of. The prosecutor, therefore, simultaneously but separately offers each prisoner a plea deal. The deal offered is either to provide information adequate to convict the other suspect in an act of betrayal, or to remain silent and refuse to testify, this being in effect a form of continued cooperation with their fellow prisoner.

There are three ways the preceding situation may play out:

• If both prisoners refuse to talk about their involvement in the main crime — that is, they cooperate with each other — they will both serve only one year (for the lesser crime). 

• If one prisoner refuses to talk, but his partner chooses to betray (implicate) the other regarding the main crime, the silent prisoner will be sentenced to three years while the testifying prisoner will be set free. 

• If, instead, both suspects implicate each other, both will fetch a sentence of two years.

The thought experiment is supposed to illustrate that neither prisoner has faith that his accomplice will stay tight-lipped, so both prisoners cannot resist testifying, with the tantalising hope of going free. These supposedly rational prisoners therefore pursue their self-interest, implicating each other. But the result is that both prisoners end up serving two years instead of one year if both had remained mum.

The lessons of the prisoner’s dilemma have been applied to many real-life, non-zero-sum situations. In such situations, cooperation results in better outcomes for all parties than if each party single-mindedly chases his or her own interests (rather than mutual interest) in order misguidedly to gain advantage over the other. So, for example, individually self-interested decisions can lead to injurious consequences for all. There are many everyday instances of the dilemma playing out, cutting across diverse behavioural arenas, such as economics, politics, biology, psychology, sports, academia, business, commerce, the workplace, and more. I'll briefly describe one particular instance.

In international strategic positioning, one theory assumes that all states ultimately compete rather than cooperate, their decisions reflecting rational self-interest to acquire advantage. For example, during the seventy-year Cold War, the phalanxes of NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced three options:

• Both sides endlessly scramble to deploy ever-more-advanced nuclear and conventional weapons to protect themselves and menace others, this being a policy with enormous, hard-to-sustain economic cost;

• One side greatly expands and enhances its forces while the other side doesn’t, the latter fearing betrayal and placing itself in peril while, on the upside, conserving its economic resources;

• Or both sides agree to disarm, thus reducing the probability of war while both avoid the massive expense of highly robust militaries.

It seems that the last of these choices, cooperation, would have led to the most desirable shared outcome; however, the delusion of ‘rational self-interest’ — doggedly pursuing individual reward — led both alliances to arm to the teeth, escalating the chance of conflict while hugely taxing both economies. Eventual arms-control agreements, though shaky and often tested, attempted to showcase cooperation, albeit fed by acute wariness: to keep a first-strike advantage out of the opposition’s hands.

The fragility of such agreements has been evident recently, in the fraught pursuit of arms control between the West and North Korea (with an already-existing nuclear arsenal) and the West and Iran (with an incipient capability, along with a presumably quick breakout to deployed nuclear weapons). In prisoner’s dilemma fashion, the resultant policies have reflected rational self-interest more so than cooperation, goaded by various motivators: 

• Distrust over intent and betrayal, such as ‘regime change’; 

• Anxiety over cheating and existential threats;

• Incendiary rhetoric threatening obliteration; 

• The honest-to-goodness objectives that skulk below the public pronouncements;

• Risk of later repudiation of agreements; 

• Bristling at the opposition’s negotiation tactics, where cultural differences intrude. 

Thus far, outcomes, such as they are, have mirrored these dynamics of distrust and antagonism, stemming from what is sometimes referred to as the Hobbesian trap, where parties default to tit-for-tat parrying over non-cooperative prisoner’s dilemma strategies.

Few circumstances, however, quite rise to the level of conforming to the idealism captured by John Rawls’s assertion that:

‘The hazards of the generalized prisoner’s dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good.’

Yet, the prisoner’s dilemma thought experiment does bear upon many real-life situations that decision-makers around the world tackle daily. Scenarios that reflect how the push–pull between cooperation and conflict, as well as outcomes and payoffs, become complex — the more so with multiple parties in play, as in the example of strategic defence just described.

Another case involves the environment and global measures to mitigate serious threats emanating from climate change, as well as from the dilated timeline for halting or slowing the trajectory of that change. The key goal being to yield benefits shared across national borders. The self-serving interests so often associated with prisoner’s dilemma thinking — and the assumption that other countries will shoulder the burden of changing policies that harm the environment — might result in even developed nations keeping performance targets easy. 

The purpose would be to protect themselves from social and economic disruption, as well as not to be taken advantage of in, say, lowering pollutants. Meanwhile, yet other countries may silently breach the Paris climate accord and the agreements reached recently in Katowice, Poland — neither of which arguably provides adequate confidence in the ‘fair play’ of others, provides sufficient metrics and accountability, proves demonstrably enforceable, or meaningfully disincentivises cheating.

Despite, therefore, the apparent win–win payoff that can stem from cooperation, from focus on mutual interests, and from trust-building, the strategic application of the prisoner’s dilemma in seeking maximum payoffs may still lead to parties succumbing to the myopic illusion of advantaged self-interest, and the delusion of being able to avoid incurring costs as a consequence.