The law of unintended consequences: Brexit and touring musicians

 Boyle's law.  The laws of thermodynamics.  The physical sciences are replete with principles elevated to the status of "law" by a group of people who are both precise and cautious to a fault, if such a thing can ever be said.  In all intended circular irony.  In political science, we refrain from bestowing the title of "law" upon anything that is neither statutory nor constitutional nor "common" in its non-colloquial sense.  Mostly.*  Occasionally, one of us stumbles, half-blind upon an empirical observation that the discipline gleefully rushes to call a "law" in the mad hope that we, too, can look like we have something more deterministic than a p-value for a regression coefficient in a multinomial logit with clustered standard errors because we were too fucking lazy to do hierarchical models, so fuck you very much Dr. Reviewer Sir, and trust me, that was very funny to like, three people, but it's Sunday morning, and I'm not talking math this morning.  Let's do something else.

Anyway, we mostly don't have laws in political science.  And don't do that bullshit thing where you put sarcasm quotes around "science" in the name of my discipline.  Science is a method, not a subject.  The reason we don't have a lot of laws is that people are complicated and messy.  Also, stupid, irrational and inconsistent.  That last part is the kicker.  Global population is closing in on 8 billion, and the population of the U.S. is just over 330 mil, so when you put together either 330 million, 8 billion, or some other just fucking large number of complicated, messy, stupid, irrational and inconsistent critters, the resultant pattern of collective behavior will be probabilistic rather than deterministic, so finding a way to label that resultant pattern of collective behavior a "law" will generally be either a rhetorical gimmick, a sleight of hand, or just plain bullshit.  Yeah, there are things we call, "laws" in political science, but Boyle would laugh at us and our gassiness.  For example, Duverger's law.  Yeah, I teach this.  When you have an electoral system built around a plurality rule, you have a strong tendency towards two parties.  Proportional representation rules give you more than two parties.  Very strong tendencies.  We call this a law.  Why?  Because if we didn't, we would have any laws, and then where would you be?  Anarchy!  That's where!  But you know what?  Technically, we have a bunch of minor parties, and occasionally, something weird happens and Jesse "The Body" Ventura wins the Minnesota Governor's race, or some fuckin' weird thing, and the South was a one-party system for a long time, but that one party was kind of a third party because the Southern Democrats were totally different from Northern Democrats for a long-ass time, and I could go on, and the fact that I could go on is kind of a problem, isn't it?  I mean, yeah, I teach Duverger's law, and so does every political science professor who teaches about parties, cares about empiricism, and isn't a fucking moron, but should we actually call it a law?  No.  Duverger's observation?  Principle?  Rule of thumb?  Somethin' like that?  Yeah.  But as a stickler for terminology, if I'm totally honest, this does kind of bug me.  Yet, if you were to go read my shit-- my real shit, as opposed to this shitty blog-- you'll see me write about good, ole' Maurice and his "law!"  Why?  Well, I needed to publish, and that's what it's fuckin' called.  We suck.  We all suck.

Wow.  That was a particularly long-winded wind-up.  Anyway, we do actually have a law that deserves to be called a law.  The law of unintended consequences.  Do X, and whatever you intend, it will have consequences beyond your intentions.  Yeah, this one's a fuckin' law.  Ain't no way around it.  It is also a sort of left-right divide, or at least, a left-right-classical conservative divide, now that the modern right is reckless and batshit crazy, completely detached from the principles of classical conservatism.  The core principle of classical conservatism is caution because whatever you intend, it may backfire, and you cannot foresee all of the unintended consequences.

Which brings us today to Brexit.  OK, so free trade is one of these known things.  It's good.  Trade, for lack of a better word, is good.  Trade is right.  Trade works.  Trade clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit, blah, blah, fuck off, commies and mercantilists, stop wasting my economically-educated time.

Protectionism, on the other hand, does not work.  The math is pretty clear on this, the empirical data are clear on this, and really.  Enough.  Still, what catches my attention this week is the ongoing mess that this causes in something that truly matters.

Art.  Yeah, blah blah, trade and the economy, but fuck that.  I care about art and music.  One of the interesting issues bubbling beneath the surface as the Brexit mess has played out has been the visa issue for touring musicians.  Remember how part of the point of the EU was freeing up travel?  Well, Brexit made it just a wee more complicated for Brits to travel within the Schengen zone.  If some merry, British couple just wants to take a vacation to, well, obviously they won't go to France, but, um, Italy?, well, it's still not a huge deal, but it used to be relatively simple for British touring musicians to schlep themselves and their shit all over the fuckin' continent.

Yeah, not so much anymore.  Remember that border-closing thing?  It kind of works both ways.  It's now a hassle if musicians want to go to more than a few countries or do a longer tour.  In the early days of COVID, that obviously didn't matter.  It's becoming a bigger deal now, so the pressure is building.  Negotiations between the British government and the EU have failed to solve this.  OK, yeah, fuck Politico, but here's the latest from them, just following the threads.  My favorite, from Charles Hay:  "We fear that this not only risks substantial damage to an important sector of the UK economy, but may also undermine the government's vision of a global Britain using its soft power to advance its interests internationally in the post-Brexit era."

Well... yeah!  What the fuck did anyone think?!  I mean, that's kind of the point, right?  Nobody intended this, nobody thought it through, but if they had asked the question, the answer would have been obvious.  If you begin reimposing borders, that works both ways.  What are the implications?  There are sectors of the economy, like touring musicians, impacted by that.  D'uh!  The point is, nobody thought about that in advance, because nobody thought about those kinds of questions.  At all.  Then you get that great line about Britain's "soft power."  I just fucking love that, particularly in the context of all this "anti-colonial" shit that has taken over modern dialog.  Britain, of course, being Britain.

Yes, American culture is all over the world, for better and worse.  British culture has influenced American culture, and been influenced by, and it's all a big, tangled ball of somethin'.  Hairball, maybe.  Don't step in it.  The idea of soft power-- the idea that a country can have influence, not by running around the world with guns pointed at other governments, but through economics, and this amorphous thing called "culture"-- this all depends on, yes, trade!  I occasionally reference Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant books (read The Traitor Baru Cormorant, skip its sequel, The Monster Baru Cormorant), and the first book really does have fascinating insight into the notion of "soft power."  Exporting ideas, "culture" and economic webs of influence.  How the fuck do you think this works?  And how the fuck did Britain think this worked?  I mean, seriously.  Do they not recognize the soft power of people all over the world speaking English?

So we bring this around to the arts.  To music.  To what matters.  Who are the popular British musicians?  I could not possibly give less of a shit.  I do not know, and I do not care.  There is some amazing British jazz right now, and the first name that comes to mind is Nubya Garcia.  Holy shit, is she a genius.  She is managing to tour, and it must be mentioned that Garcia is the toast of the town, in the jazz world.  She'll be fine, but there's a scene around her, and my concern, particularly through COVID, has been the under-the-radar musicians.  The ones who struggle to make a living through touring.

The historically brief period during which some musicians made a living through the sale of recorded music was an historical anomaly.  Prior to the technological/marketing arrangement by which profits were found and allocated to some musicians through this system, being a musician just meant touring.  Then, file-sharing became a thing, and the ones who could make a living through live performance were sort of back where it all started.  Touring.  COVID took that largely off the table, which hurt them badly, but as the world reopens, that's back.

Except... if British musicians can't tour the continent, what does that mean?  It has economic implications for them, and then we consider the cultural implications.  One should not necessarily read too much, broadly, into diminished touring.  It would be a stretch to construct a story by which some British bands fail to tour the continent, therefore a British good doesn't sell in Europe, or a British proposal at the UN gets shot down, or something like that.  The point, though, is that this isn't necessarily the story.  That's not the story Hay wanted to construct.

When your artists can't tour, and you are having trouble exporting... you have chosen to limit your own soft power.

We can ask, how much cultural power do the arts have?  How much does it matter that every movie theater, everywhere in the world, is playing our movies?  Everyone, everywhere, listens to American music?  Yeah, I'll bash this stuff, 'cuz it sucks, but are there consequences?  How do we measure those consequences, in a scientifically rigorous way?  That's really hard.

But if you think those consequences exist, and you want in on that action... then this was a) fucking stupid, b) totally unintended, but c) foreseeable if anyone had bothered to think it through first.

Yet the point is, they didn't.  And now here they are.  Metaphorically.  You know where they aren't?  The European continent.

Anyway, how's about some Nubya Garcia?  She's awesome.  Check out Source.  Great album.

*But sometimes, we're fine with double-negatives.