Such and Such Were the Joys

Written by Jamie Monday, 04 July 2011 09:13

The way we trade today, as children or as adults, was the same as when we traded nets for fish in prehistory.  Trade, including the trading of ideas, leads to knowledge and knowledge leads to power.  Power seems to always corrupt.  Therefore, empires built on trade have arisen, shared knowledge, and were then destroyed by the priests and parasites who had sworn to defend them.

Just as trade is the same today as it was in history, so too is corruption.  Our software empires follow similar life cycles.  They start with merchants and innovators, grow, and are finally subjected to parasitism before they recover or die.  In this note, I will look at trade, how it gives rise to innovation, and how priests and parasites kill the golden goose that feeds everyone.  I will apply this to the software empires that we see around us.  It will be up to the reader to decide the corruption levels.  We will stop off in the Pacific Islands, look at the work of a Jewish immigrant, and have a quick look at the Phoenicians and Arabs.  But, as with many of my stories, we have to start at the dawn of time, when man lived a more primitive, noble life.  We have to start in 1980s Hull.

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When I was a teenager I swapped a tiny black and white television for a desk.  The tele was built into a unit the size of a ghetto blaster.  It stood on its flat side, very much like a brief case lying on a desk, and the speaker was on the top just behind the controls for the radio.  The screen faced outwards, on the thin face, and was the size of an oscilloscope that we used at school; you had to be close to see anything.  The unit was, I think, for use on ships or building sites.  I don’t know how it came into my possession.

The desk was a chipboard construction that would have cost no more than ten pounds.  It was a symbol of learning, a token of silence, a manifestation of my deepest fantasies.  This is why: The terrace house I was brought up in was a two up, two down, with myself and my two brothers in the back bedroom and my parents and younger sister in the front.  There was no space in that house, either mentally or physically, and so we suffered all the fun and frolics that many working-class Catholic families did.  The desk, therefore, was a fantasy that betrayed a more basic need: I wanted some peace and quiet, a place to reflect.  I wanted that desk.

The other boy, Travis, was as excited about his new possession as I was with mine.  I secretly thought he was mad.  I am am now convinced he thought the same of me.  This is Ricardo’s magic trick.  Matt Ridley:

‘The English have no sense,’ said a Montagnais trapper to a French missionary in seventeenth-century Canada.  ‘They give us twenty knives for this one beaver skin.’  The contempt was mutual.  When HMS Dolphin’s sailors found that a twenty penny iron nail could buy a sexual encounter on Tahiti in 1767, neither sailors or Tahitian men could believe their luck; whether the Tahitian women were as happy as their menfolk about this bargain goes unrecorded.

We trade not for fun but for gain, in my case I was a specialist in televisions and got rid of my surplus.  Travis offloaded his spare desk.  We both gained.  Neither lost.

Travis and I knew nothing of Ricardo, nor did the Tahitians or the crew of the Dolphin.  Something in us, as human beings, predates the theories of the 18th century economist.  But who was this man, and what exactly did he say?  David Ricardo was born in 1772, the seventeenth son of a Dutch Jewish immigrant.  When he was 21 he married a Quaker woman and so his father disowned him.  When he died, aged 51, from an ear infection, he was worth £725,000.  Even though he was one of the richest men in England, he was in favour of high taxation for the rich.  Ricardo knew James Mill, Jeremy Bentham (Utilitarianism) and later became friends with Thomas Malthus, who said that population would always be controlled by famine and disease.  He was wrong.  

Ricardo, famous in economics for a number of things, including formulating what would later be called the law of diminishing returns, had this to say about specialisation:

England may be so circumstanced, that to produce the cloth [to trade for Portuguese wine] may require the labour of 100 men for one year; and if she attempted to make the wine, it might require the labour of 120 men for the same time. England would therefore find it in her interest to import wine, and to purchase it by the exportation of cloth.

To produce the wine in Portugal, might require only the labour of 80 men for one year, and to produce the cloth in the same country, might require the labour of 90 men for the same time. It would therefore be advantageous for her to export wine in exchange for cloth. This exchange might even take place, notwithstanding that the commodity imported by Portugal could be produced there with less labour than in England.

Ridley observes that ‘Ricardo’s law has been called the only proposition in the whole of the social sciences that is both true and surprising’.  What Ricardo’s example means is that even though the Portuguese are better at making wine and cloth, it makes sense for them to stick to what they make best - wine - and swap it for what England makes best, cloth.  From both perspectives, they get more for less.  The real moral of the story, however, is that I am Portugal and my wine was a tele and Travis is England and his cloth was a chipboard desk.  The pattern of trade is fractal.

Once you specialise you can generate surpluses, which can be traded.  On software projects we do this all the time.  We generate surpluses of well designed code, which we swap for story points; we generate surpluses of stories, which we exchange for an iteration plan (and later features).  We generate a surplus of products (or knowledge) and exchange them for cash.  In all cases, like the highly skilled Portuguese wine makers, it benefits us to get very good at what we do, and this is the link between innovation, specialisation and productivity.

Sea Shells on the Sea Shore
Before Travis and I, before Ricardo and Malthus, and before human beings could even write, they were trading.  Our ancestors would have swapped shells for flint (each item traveling along trade routes from the central areas to the coast).  After the sexual division of labour, trade was the second wave of specialisation: if I have the raw materials and skills to make fish hooks, why would I bother going out to sea, making nets and maintaining my boat, when I can focus on getting good at making hooks and later swap five of them for a fish?  If my sister is good at making nets, then we have a nice little division of labour and we can generate a surplus and swap.  We are specialising and, if we are making tools, we are also innovating.  (Think about Martin Fowler or Kent Beck.  They invented a number of tools, including a catalogue of refactorings in Fowler’s case and the JUNit test framework in Beck’s.  In the first instance, their specialism led to their own increased productivity.  As the knowledge was captured - in code or in books and articles - those innovations made all of us more productive.)

It’s from Ricardo’s magic trick that problems start to arise.  Firstly, as we capture knowledge, either in technology or abstraction - for example, as the knowledge of continuous improvement was abstracted into the iteration - we make it easier for others to copy our work.  Secondly, trade brings people together, but once they are together they are easy to exploit and manipulate.  I.e. a successful trading post, like a successful software movement, becomes susceptible to corruption.  According to Ridley, the Phoenicians succeeded because they resisted ‘turning into thieves, priests and chiefs’.  However, the Arabs did not: ‘As they spilled out of their homeland, Arabs brought luxury and learning to an area stretching from Aden to Cordoba, before the inevitable imperial complacency and then severe priestly repression set in at home.  Once the priesthood tightened its grip, books were burned, not read.’

Innovators, merchants and craftsmen create wealth and ‘chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away’.  This was true of the Arabs, it was true of the agile software movement and it was true of Java the language and the organisation.  In the case of the agile software development movement, we started out with a bunch of radicals, like Ricardo and Malthus, who really changed the way things worked.  We captured knowledge in tools and papers and books.  I.e. we made that knowledge accessible, which meant that any fool could - and every fool did - become an expert in agile software development.  Once that happened, priests and parasites and their bureaucracy set in and we imploded our empire before we even go started.  Consider Balazs:

The reach of the Moloch-state, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, goes much further.  There are clothing regulations, a regulation of public and private construction (dimensions of houses); the colours one wears, the music one hears, the festivals - all are regulated.  There are rules for birth and rules for death; the providential State watches minutely over every step of its subjects, from cradle to grave.  It is a regime of paperwork and harassment, endless paperwork and endless harassment.

Like the Moloch-state, we have rules for birth - the project kick-off - for death - the retrospective and its Prime Directive.  We have rules for the colours we use - green for go, red for no.  For the construction of code - one public test for each public method - and for the writing of story cards.  Each rule was at first an encoding of best practice.  However, as the priests took over, the best practices became tools of coercion, each one a form of regulation, a bit of paperwork, a part of the endless harassment that still typifies software projects.  Each one stifles innovation and therefore reduces the chance of success.  Each one contributes to the myths of what makes a software project successful.

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If one knows that specialisation and innovation give rise to Ricardo’s magic, which in turn creates a fertile ground for innovation, which in turn makes the acquisition and commercialisation of knowledge easy, then one knows that parasites and priests are a natural side-effect of a technology’s and people’s success(es).  I.e. trade creates knowledge, knowledge is power, and power corrupts. We can look back in history for examples of this, but we can also look closer to home and see how the Scrum community became corrupted by the very people it beheld.  Within the knowledge of how corruption arises is the knowledge of how engineering projects work.  We need to replace bureaucracies with areas of free trade, we need to recreate Ricardo’s magic, i.e we need to enable exchange.  On a software project, that’s as simple as opening up feedback channels, getting rid of all parasites - which implies we know how to spot them - and creating divisions of labour that make sense.  This is what agile means to me.  This is what many have forgotten, or maybe what many didn’t know in the first place.

Further Reading
The follow on to this blog is here: The Agile Rules and Procedures: Just Do It.

I was inspired by Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and by the opening chapters of Gombrich’s A Little History of the World.  Diamond’s Collapse is OK but not as interesting as his Guns Germs and Steel.  Daniel Quinn’s Ismael is, in my opinion, an alternative look at Malthus’ population concerns.  Last week I had a quick look at the Atheist Manifesto by Onfray.  How priests and religions have arisen in history have an overlap with consultants, process parasites and the cults of software that blight - or maybe that constitute - a part of all our work.  ‘Such and Such Were the Joys’ was an essay by George Orwell that is collected in The Collected essays, journalism, and letters of George Orwell, Volume 4, In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950.  Canterbury’s A Brief History of Economics is where I turned to for Ricardo’s story.

Acknowledgments
Last week this note was just an idea.  Chris Matts told me to send him my thoughts.  He took some time out to go over them with me.  So, thanks to him for that feedback and the encouragement to post.