The unemployed and migration

Chris Dillow posts at Liberal Conspiracy lamenting the Left's unwillingness to challenge the tendency of right-wingers like me to "blame the victim" of unemployment.

This was a response to the comments on an earlier post of his where I argued that the important skills shortages aren't in occupational skills, the need for which is hard to predict, but basic social and intellectual skills. Chris responds that most unemployed people don't fit into that category at all. That I'm blaming the "genuine losers from the creative destruction that is inevitable in a market economy" for their hard luck.

I think he's missed the point. He is right to note that most unemployed, or economically inactive, people do not have the social problems I'm discussing but they aren't are victims either. From the Liberal Conspiracy post:

"3. Unemployment is not a “pool” but rather the difference between two quite fast-flowing rivers. In any one month, almost a quarter of the claimant count measure of unemployed leave or join the count (table 10). If they’re so idle, how come so many of the unemployed leave the register so quickly?"

I had a period like this after I left university (I didn't claim unemployment benefit but that's not particularly crucial to this debate). My skills would have been more than sufficient to secure a quite respectable job immediately but instead I was not employed for a bit and found a job I really wanted. I'm quite pleased with the way things have turned out. This is quite normal and the source of most unemployment (most of the unemployed could find "a job").

I wasn't a victim. Neither are most of the short-term unemployed. Short-term unemployment only becomes a real problem when a mess of a benefits system undermines the incentives that encourage people to be a bit flexible about the kind of job they will accept. That turns short-term joblessness into long term unemployment.

I still think I was focussed on the right problem in my original comment. Shortages of basic skills (those you can easily predict an ongoing need for) don't just create unemployment, after all:

1) They are spread out across the unemployed, those on incapacity benefit, those economically inactive and - more than anything - those in low value and patchy employment.

2) They have particularly pernicious effects. Young people have the potential to stay in long-term unemployment for longer, are more likely to have dependent children and are more likely to spend their free time making other people's lives a misery. I'm not saying unemployment among the over fifties doesn't matter. It does and we clearly need to do some serious thinking about how we improve opportunities for older people. However, long-term youth unemployment creates more problems for more people.

3) Long-term youth unemployment is the most relevant to demand for migrants. A failure to consider which shortages migrants can effectively fill is, I think, the big flaw with Chris's original post.

Most vacancies are just as temporary as most unemployment. How many of the vacancies that Chris used to justify an economic need for immigration would be filled within days, weeks or months?

Imagine what would happen if migration were used to fill short-term vacancies in a dynamic labour market:

Day One: Large number of vacancies. Immigrants respond to the demand and enter the UK labour market.

Day Two: Whole new load of vacancies. New immigrants enter the labour market. Immigrants from Day One and earlier run a similar risk of becoming unemployed to the indigenous population.

This process continues ad infinitum. If the labour market needed immigrants to fill short-term vacancies it would need immigration on an unimaginable scale. I doubt you could even get the immigrants here in time to significantly shorten the length of the vacancy.

Migration only really makes sense if it is responding to a medium to long-term demand for labour. Young people are the ones who really compete with long-term immigrants. It is their lack of basic skills that makes them unable to fill junior positions and creates a demand for mass-immigration. As such, if British young people were more employable there would be less demand for migrant labour. Some of the demand that migrants fill could be filled with domestic workers if they could be provided with skills that we can predict a need for.

None of this is particularly important to my own thinking on immigration. I'll set that out another time. However, I do think it is important to understand the trends driving economic demand for migrants and I'm not sure Chris's focus on shortages of occupational skills can facilitate such an understanding.

Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart's story is incredible. There's a good account from the National Geographic here. This is one of many fascinating sections:

"On a deeper level, however, his friend Martin is right. The people from whom Stewart draws inspiration spring from the dusty shelves of history, men such as Alexander, Babur, Lord Byron, and T.E. Lawrence. These figures not only achieved monumental things, but they did so according to a moral code Stewart finds irresistible, one that includes generosity, bravery, honor, greatness of soul, and magnificence in gesture.

Stewart has written quite a bit about heroes, and he maintains that past societies not only tolerated the vanity, violence, and godlike yearning of these men, but they viewed those qualities as necessary for heroism itself. For 2,500 years the notion of the superhuman hero shaped art, literature, and rhetoric and provided a model of how to live. But by the mid-20th century the social context had changed. Western society, with its industrialization, democracy, and new attitudes toward masculinity, stopped forgiving the ambition of would-be heroes. Today, Stewart argues, we are left with primarily one kind of hero, the "victim hero," an individual judged not on his accomplishments but on what happens to him, like the 9/11 firemen or like Pat Tillman, the football star turned Army Ranger who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. Stewart, in a 2005 article he wrote for Prospect magazine, remains decidedly ambivalent about this evolution:

Nostalgia for dead tyrants and the longing for heroes are unhealthy and they can result in the deification of a Saddam as easily as a Havel or Mandela. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we have lost nothing. The drive to be godlike and do the impossible is gone and we will see this loss in music, in novels, in painting, in architecture and the way we shape our lives. September 11th has produced only miniature heroes because our culture has freed itself from many of the old, dangerous, elitist fantasies of heroism …. But in so doing we have not only tamed and diminished heroes. We have risked taming and diminishing ourselves."

I think there is a very, very profound thought behind this. It connects to the broad case set out in Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. The idea that we have lost contact with heroism itself - along with evil, the sublime and any other concept too deep to fit into an Oasis album.

Mark Steyn wrote a brilliant article recently on music, another side of the Bloom case. Our new, unshakeable, faith in relativism made it impossible for us to see that Shostakovich was more valuable than in Supergrass. Supergrass are easier, quicker and less effort; Shostakovich couldn't compete on artificial terms of equivalence; people stopped listening to classical music. We lost the vital inspiration and meaning that high culture used to provide.

Public service oddities: Scottish wolfman edition

As Tim reports on the TaxPayers' Alliance blog some councils spend far too much on formatting and printing their accounts:

"At a cost of £4 per copy, 1500 copies were produced, resulting in a bill to the taxpayer of £6000. As you can see above, it's clearly an expensive, hefty report. My source was sent 3 of these by post, at a cost of roughly £8 postage – odd seeing as the Trust could easily have emailed the report to our activist.

Seeing as the Trust didn’t send any by email, this resulted in a total postage bill for all posted reports of £21.20. That doesn’t sound that bad, but factor in that the Trust only posted 40 sets of accounts."

Others spend too little. These (PDF) were clearly scanned by a monkey with a soldering iron and are a year out of date. Then again, perhaps training a monkey to scan documents with a soldering iron is expensive? It is almost certainly time consuming.

Of course, neither expensive accounts nor monkey-embossed accounts are as frightening as the wolfman discovered by NHS Lothian!

(You've got to look at it right)

Finally, the Crofter's Commission website confuses me. I had no idea what Crofting was. Seeking an explanation I found this:

"What is crofting?

The Commission considers the meaning of ‘crofting’ to encompass the close and interlinked relationships between the land and the economy, agriculture, environment, heritage, culture and distinctive lifetyles of crofting communities."

What?

Wikipedia is more helpful.

Inayat Bunglawala is a fraud

Gracchi has a brilliant post up on Inayat Bunglawala's rather inconsistent attitude to free speech. Turns out he's all for defending people's "fundamental right to say that I want to bomb you, [their] fundamental right to download materials from the internet about bombing and to write poems about how nice your brains would look if only they were blown from your skull" but not so keen on allowing any criticism of Islam.

Combine that with Perry de Havilland's excellent fisk of Dr. Abdul Bari's interview with the Telegraph and you have a pretty decent primer on the MCB's contribution to the national debate.

For an examination of their more 'practical' contributions to extremism you'd need to watch the excellent Panorama on the subject (this is an online version but I think it is similar enough to the original broadcast). The programme doesn't follow its lines of inquiry through to their conclusion but it should be pretty obvious how deeply unsatisfactory Sir Iqbal Sacranie's answers are.

Public service oddities: local government edition

First, I love some of the front-covers that councils put on their accounts. Now, I've got family from Leicester and have quite an attachment to the place but this (PDF) seems a little... optimistic:


Lichfield's (PDF) is a masterpiece of political correctness. Look children, all the peas of different colours are in the same pod!
Next, Limavady have a web tool I've seen on a few council sites. Basically it reads whatever you mouseover. Who is that catering for? If you're a blind person surely you aren't able to mouseover things so that they are read to you. The only people I can think of who could use such a tool are the extremely dyslexic and illiterate. If anyone knows I'd love to know who it is targetted at.

In the meantime all manner of fun can be had pushing the button in the bottom left of the page and then mousing over various items (although it doesn't appear to work on this computer - consider it a kind of lottery). They're all quite upbeat apart from "Payments" which sounds a little bored.

Finally, Maidstone County Council have a web game that allows you to alter items in the budget to see if you can avoid having to raise council tax. Unfortunately they haven't included "Chief Executive's salary" or "the budget that was tapped to pay for this bloody game" which would, I believe, be most people's preferred targets for reductions.

One final thought: You see these budget games a lot. Sky had one recently where Adam Boulton delivered a news report summarising your achievements, one enterprising soul or another will usually set them up around the time of the Budget and I even remember being given such a game to play with at school. Don't they serve to indoctrinate people with a static view of the economy?

We need a supply-side game where you play new rounds set in five and ten years time and have pots more money to spend if you've put the right tax cutting package in place.

Lions for Lambs - a risk worth taking?

Gracchi thinks that Lions for Lambs is flawed but that it's central story (the Streep-Cruise showdown) is compelling. Normally I'd take his advice but these reviews are so utterly damning that I'm not sure. The Onion A.V. Club:

"Lambs' central chatterboxes function as bloodless abstractions—empty, unconvincing conduits for clashing ideologies. These aren't human beings; they're sentient position papers."

Dana Stevens:

"Meryl Streep tries to bring her "A" game to the scenes with Cruise, throwing in speech tics and bits of business to give her character some heft. But both politician and journalist are such cutouts (he spouts about the axis of evil, she sighs disapprovingly and scribbles on her pad) that they might as well be debating on Meet the Press. Cruise gets one juicy moment that recalls Jack Nicholson's iconic "You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall" speech in A Few Good Men. But he throws away the chance to embody the passion of the true believer; he never lets us forget that he's only pretending to be Republican."

John Podhoretz basically just describes the plot but, as Ross Douthat notes, that is pretty effective in establishing its ridiculous quality:

"After Cruise gets a phone call informing him that the new strategy is already a failure because Redford's two students are bleeding on the mountain, he turns to her and speaks the truth. He is tired of America being humiliated, he says. She leaves his office, begins to hyperventilate, and tells her boss that Cruise is going to become the next president and use nuclear weapons on unsuspecting Muslims. Her boss tells her to write up the news without mentioning the whole nuclear-weapons thing. She says she will not be a vehicle for warmongering propaganda the way the entire news media were the last time. He says she'd better, or Streep's sick mother will no longer be able to receive 24-hour care."

I'm half tempted to watch the thing just to find out if Gracchi has really got it so uncharacteristically wrong.

Being globally aware is bad for your health, wealth and freedom

Another day, another depressing headline. Yet another international league that Britain is at the bottom of:

"UK children aged 11 to 16 have the lowest international awareness among their age group in 10 countries, a British Council survey says."

The British Council receives £195,352,000 per year in government funding supposedly needed to "build mutually beneficial relationships between people in the UK and other countries and to increase appreciation of the UK’s creative ideas and achievements."

In order to do this they've come up with a study that shows us falling behind in our awareness of the world around us:

"British Council chief executive Martin Davidson said: "Our school children cannot afford to fall behind the rest of the world.

"For the UK to compete in a global economy, it is vital that we encourage our young people to have an interest in and engagement with the world around them."

Doees the evidence he has produced at all back that statement up?

Take a quick look at the ranking they've produced:

1. Nigeria 5.15



2. India 4.86



3. Brazil 4.53



4. Saudi Arabia 3.74



5. Spain 3.29



6. Germany 3.24



7. China 2.97



8. Czech Republic 2.51



9. USA 2.22



10. UK 2.19

To compete we apparently need to become more like Nigeria or India and less like the USA, Germany or China. Let's compare the British Council's index to a few key development indicators (click to expand any of these graphs, data is from the Economist World in Figures 2005):

So, more globally aware countries are poorer.

They're also less, economically, free. The economic freedom index gives more free economies a lower score.

Finally, they perform worse on the broad measure of the Human Development Index.

How can this be? Well, one of the questions asked gives a flavour of what the study was really getting at:

"Asked whether they saw themselves as citizens of the world or their own country, most saw themselves as global citizens - except in the UK, USA and the Czech Republic."

A genuine measure of international awareness would include measures like number of foreign holidays or ask questions about foreign customs, faiths and politics. On that measure the UK might do a lot better. However, this study isn't looking for that. The closest it comes is a question about whether people think they keep themselves aware of current events. Instead, it is looking for countries whose people do not consider themselves a distinct nation - it is looking for transnationalism.

Successful nations are built on a strong sense of national identity among their people. Thankfully - and despite the efforts of people like the British Council - we still have that in the UK. That national identity encourages co-operation, compromise and trust . Those describing themselves as international citizens probably don't feel any more attached to the people of the world than we do. They just don't feel a special attachment to each other. In Nigeria inter-ethnic wars show the horrible extremes such a process can reach when an absent national identity is replaced by other group loyalities such as tribe and religion.

Let's hope that unnaccountable quangocrats like those at the British Council don't succeed in convincing Britons that patriotism is some kind of sin.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog

Chavez and the King

The contrast between moderate decency and fanatical dehumanization could not be more acute than in this story:

"Mr Chavez called Mr Aznar, a close ally of US President George W Bush, a fascist, adding "fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Chavez has clearly passed all the intellectual barriers to genocide. I suspect only the lack of an 'other' close to hand - too many of his enemies are foreign - has prevented him taking that final, unconscionable step. He is lucky that history has not afforded him the opportunity to join the ranks of the true dictatorial monsters. His regime is pathetic, illiberal and wasteful instead of genocidal and history's judgement will therefore be less emphatic. More on the Left's fringe might even be tempted to apologise for him as too many do for Mao.

Zapatero's response was - to his eternal credit as it must have been tempting to allow the slight to his old political rival to stand - just right:

"Mr Zapatero said: "[Former Prime Minister] Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people."

The King put the same message in less delicate terms:

"Mr Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, despite his microphone being turned off. The king leaned forward and said: "Why don't you shut up?"

Quite.

Why don't workers own and control the companies they work for?

The statist left, the left as most understand it, believe that government can make things better. That organisation by the state can outperform the chaos of the market. However, Chris Dillow is right to argue that this is not necessarily the logical conclusion of the Marxist call for workers to seize ownership from capitalists. He argues that for workers to own the firms they work for - within the market system - would be more just and for them to run those firms - from the bottom up - would be more efficient.

My father worked for a mutual and it seemed to work quite well. Largely as a result of that experience I'm quite open to forms of corporate ownership other than the public limited company. However, that is still the way most sizeable firms are organised (small companies often are owned by their workers - the corner shop is a classic example). Firms like John Lewis are very much the exception.

Why do we not have a John Lewis economy?

First, I will put a couple of reasons why workers rarely own the companies they work in. From there I will build the case as to why a hierarchy is necessary within most firms. Why do workers not own the firms they work in?

1. It is not in the workers' interest

According to Chris the managers are successfully rent-seeking at the moment so it seems unlikely that they would benefit from his new system. However, I also doubt the workers would stand to benefit from it either.

First, bear in mind that workers do own huge swathes of the corporate world. Pension funds are largely composed of their savings and have huge financial muscle. The question isn't "should workers own companies" but "should workers own the company they work for".

The next thing you must remember is that most people have the bulk of their wealth in the form of future income from labour. Their financial wealth generally has a much smaller present value, at least until they near retirement. Their expected future earnings are often tied up with the fortunes of their employer and their industry. It makes sense to use their financial wealth to diversify away so that if their employer or industry should suffer their fortunes will not be entirely ruined. To own the company they work for exposes them to greater risk and is not in their interests. That is why employees usually need to be bribed to take stock options.

What do they get in return? They get control of their workplace. Not much control though. In any firm of more than 100 employees they will, personally, have less than 1 per cent of the votes. Only if they think of themselves as part of the monolith 'workers' would 'they' really be in control. I'm not sure they do. I think the lack of class feeling among the workers has long been the downfall of Marxist analyses and undermines the idea of workers controlling their workplace as well.

Workers increase their financial risk and gain little but a symbolic power over their workplace.

2. It would stifle the economy's ability to respond to changing conditions

It is important that most large firms are owned by investors concerned, more than anything, with maximising their return. That interest means that they direct their capital where it is most valued. By contrast, workers cannot move freely between employers and industries. If workers owned the firms they work in they would not reallocate their capital if an opportunity for greater profit arose. New industries could be neglected as they are unable to build a critical mass of workers invested in them. In this way firms owned by workers would create the same sclerosis that many historians argue affected British corporate performance when it was dominated by family firms.

Only firms that exist will have workers attached to them. To quote Milton Friedman: "the interest-group whose self-interest is most aligned with the free market, isn't big business or small business, it's the businesses that don't yet exist". An economy dominated by worker co-operatives would make it hard for new industries, even if they were far more profitable, to attract capital and expand with new businesses and investment.

Making the economy less adaptable and hurting the financial security of the workers themselves seems, to me, to deal a serious blow to any case for workers owning their places of work.

Why firms usually operate as hierarchies

Chris argues that Hayekians, who are sceptical of government planning, should also be sceptical of planning by management within a firm. I don't think that really constitutes a case for worker control, bottom-up management. There is still planning whether that planning is done by one or a thousand people. Hayek saw the best system of organisation not as a democracy but a market. While more people making a decision might allow for more dispersed information to be used in decision-making the amount gathered in a corporate democracy would still be vanishingly small compared to the volume of information marshalled by the price system.

For firms - a space in which planning takes the place of the price system - to exist at all is a sacrifice of Hayekian principle. How they are organised is a trivial detail by comparison. However, Coase did a fine job of explaining why firms exist so that sacrifice in purist anti-planning principle should not be too galling.

Having external shareholders drives the need for a hierarchy. Shareholders need to be able to appoint someone who will manage their company for them. They then need to be able to hold that person accountable for delivering results. That really needs to be one person, to whom other employees are - in turn - responsible. Without the clear lines of accountability provided by a hierarchy there is too much opportunity for people to either avoid being held to account or be held to account for things outside their control. The skill of the manager is in ensuring those he manages know what they are responsible for, are only responsible for what they can control and are held properly accountable when they fail.

Therefore, Chris is right that corporate hierarchies are about power. However, that power is the legitimate power of a company's owners over all those who work for it.

P.S. I've only linked to the oldest incarnation I could find of Chris making this argument but have drawn on several arguments that he has made since. This has been such a theme at his blog that it would be more of an effort than I can manage right now to link to all his relevant posts on this subject.

Automated HTML-synesthesia

This is Sinclair's Musings in visual form. Thanks to Tom Paine for the pointer to this Java applet. Watching the graphic unfold is actually strangely engrossing and I like the end result.

The problem with Rawls

I think it is hard to overestimate just how influential Rawls is on the modern Left. He both provides a systematic intellectual justification for their long held inclination that their opponents are essentially selfish and gave them a way to answer intuitive outrage at things like this.

For all that I think there are huge weaknesses in Rawls' theory. Essentially, his method is based upon taking two methodological assumptions and stretching them far beyond breaking point. His theory also doesn't answer the question of how we should help the poor and doesn't answer Nietzsche's great challenge to any theory of justice.

Assumption 1: Determinism

Just as science has roled back the number of everyday phenomena that religion is called upon to explain it has also rolled back the domain of free-will. If people make their choices because of their upbriningings, genes, vitamin deficiencies or brain chemistry what right do we have to punish them for their bad luck? Murderers tend to have similar differences in their brain chemistry. Why would we punish them for having a malfunctioning brain?

The problem is that there are huge gaps in our understanding of how the mind, and the physical world, works. Much that appears to be causing certain behaviours could actually be a response to it, or correlated with it but not a cause. There is plenty of room for free will yet. Once free will comes back into the picture Rawls' thought starts to seriously weaken. If someone chooses a less moral path they can deserve less favourable treatment.

Of course, that isn't true of many of the poor. Many of them did have an awful start and little chance to prove their quality. However, allowing some roll for free will both implies a more nuanced and discriminating policy than blanket redistribution and makes the proper question for any policy aimed at helping the worst off "how can we give people the chance to show their moral quality?"

Assumption 2: Risk aversion

People will usually, ceteris paribus, prefer to take less risk. I can believe that if, in an original position, they were offered a choice where most would be poor but a few would escape to relative riches they'd choose to make the poor better off at the rich's expense. However, your actual chances in society today aren't like that. Most people will be middle class and, while hardly raking it in, basically pretty alright. There is a core of 1/6 to 1/4 of the population who are in a pretty wretched state. There is then a small but significant portion of the population who do very well for themselves.

If faced by that choice I'm not convinced that most people would really want to pay that much to insure themselves against the possibility of poverty. They'd want to ensure that they are kept alive and in reasonable comfort against the elements but wouldn't want to hurt their fortunes if they drew the most likely result (somewhere in the broad swathe of the middle class). I'm not quite sure why I think this but it seems intuitively sensible to me and, here's the real beef, I know just as much about how people would feel in the hypothetical world of the original position as John Rawls or anyone else does.

How should you help

While I disagree with Rawls that doesn't mean that I don't see helping the poor as a broadly good thing. However, that doesn't necessarily imply a case for redistribution. The Citizens Basic Income can't do a lot of redistribution without becoming cripplingly expensive. It is more plausible as a safety net. Other forms of redistribution can hurt people's incentives to leave the unpleasant situation that is welfare dependency. In that way it can make them worse off.

Chris Dillow argues that the difficulty of using improved educational standards to create opportunity for unfortunate children shows that we should give up on educational opportunity. I'd argue that even if this is true (and I think that reform can make a significant difference) it doesn't imply that we should discard attempts to give people an opportunity to better themselves. Instead, it implies that other measures besides improving the education system have to be tried as a part of any coherent attempt to give people real opportunity. That's where the work of thinkers like Theodore Dalrymple and labrador conservatism comes in.

Nietzsche

Art is cruelty. The quest for excellence and beauty for its own sake and in an attempt to understand the nature of humanity and the good life is expensive and impossible to justify under the Rawlsian system of justice. A Rawlsian may justify high culture on the grounds that it does some nebulous good for the economy or on some other spurious rationale but they are not being true to their principles. While a liberal Rawlsian might tolerate art they cannot really value it without admitting the bankruptcy of Rawls' ideology.

Nietzsche saw that art meant cruelty but chose art nonetheless. Any culture that is to be truly worthwhile has to make this choice, at least occassionally. Otherwise it denies what is best and most praiseworthy in humanity.

"Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself."

The real online home of the liberal Left

With all the excitement about Liberal Conspiracy and its continuing attempts to replace the English meaning of the word "liberal" with the liberal = leftie Americanism we shouldn't forget just how good the older left-liberal home on the net is. Spiked manages to combine a genuine liberalism with a left-wing outlook on life.

Right now take a read of some articles on how citizenship lessons are a pretty sinister and ineffective way of engaging people with democracy and society, your lifestyle isn't really very likely to give you cancer and an excellent philosophical critique of environmentalist morality. Endless good value.

Education is about more than economics

Gracchi writes that education should be about more than economics. He is absolutely right.

I went to a comprehensive school. I'm not going to tell you a sob story. It was in a nice town in Hertfordshire and I was never stabbed, no one tried to sell me drugs and I emerged with no serious personality defects I'm aware of. My school wasn't remarkably good or remarkably bad. It was pretty average. I'm middle class enough that I was never in any real danger of dropping out anyway.

However, in my time at LSE and since I've met people, Gracchi one of them, who went to the very best public schools. Some of the best in the country. They are much better educated than I am. I can see the truth in what Gracchi is saying in what I miss, the benefits that I might have taken from a better education and really wish I could enjoy.

I don't miss the exam results. I did pretty well, well enough to get into the LSE. While I could certainly have done better it seems an increasingly minor issue now I've entered work and am proving my ability more directly.

I don't miss the skills. When I arrived at LSE I had, despite having done no end of supposedly high-quality coursework, no real idea how to write and structure an essay. In other ways I definitely had a lot to learn of the basic skills required to be a successful student. That meant a lot of catching up in my first year. However, it doesn't seem likely to prove important in the long-term.

What I really miss is the broader education that those from a really good private school have enjoyed. I am absolutely certain I spent too much time being taught to the test. Not because my teachers were lazy or inept. I think they were generally very good and a few I have very fond memories of. Some of them had little else to offer but I think most taught to the test because the system created an imperative for them to prioritise the narrow understanding required to reach an adequate standard for exams instead of taking the longer, but ultimately far more rewarding, route that treats exams as important but not the central "point" of a really good education.

As a result I just haven't had the same broad exposure and introduction to subjects beyond the exam, to the broader current of human knowledge, that many public school students have. I labour at remedying this but I'm starting from quite a distance behind.

Now, it might seem that my support for a broad education which puts non-economic priorities at its heart contradicts my support for school choice, extending a market in education. After all, aren't markets supposed to kill or corrupt our higher instincts, isn't the vulgarity of the market supposed to diminish everything outside of the "cash nexus"?

Clearly not. Private schools, that need to attract fee-paying students to survive, are the ones that offer that broad education. When parents are given the choice right now over how their children are educated they choose the broad education with non-economic benefits that they do value. While some might say that this is only due to the character of the particular group of parents who are choosing right now I think it speaks to something deeper in most parents' aspirations for their children.

The real challenge of cutting emissions

In late September President Bush hosted a meeting of the world's largest 16 greenhouse gas emitting countries in late September. The CEI, for their Cooler Heads Digest (sign up on the left-hand bar), obtained the slides from a Power Point presentation that the White House Council on Environment Quality (CEQ) Chairman Jim Connaughton gave at that meeting. Apparently the Chinese and other developing country delegates were shocked - they were right to be. This data shows, in simple terms, just how painful the emissions curbs, Kyoto-plus, agenda would have to be for both developed and developing world.

Essentially, emissions under the Business As Usual scenario that so many global warming policies are hell-bent on preventing goes something like this:

Emissions nearly quadruple by 2095 with nearly all the growth in developing countries. Bear in mind that business as usual expects that the kind of efficiency gains we've been making so far continue - that's why the developed world is already forecast to stall emissions growth despite continuing economic growth.

That sets up a massive challenge for global warming policy that wants to cut emissions to 50 per cent of their levels now. In order to reach that 50 per cent target we would need to make a 15 gigatons of carbon per year cut to get the 2050 levels back down to the level we're at now. We would then need to make another 11 gigaton cut to reach the 50 per cent target. If you're after 60 per cent, as the British Government is, 80 per cent, as the Quality of Life policy group is, or the even stronger target the Lib Dems are aiming at things only get worse.

Cutting a gigaton of waste off what will already be vastly more efficient economies takes some doing. To get an idea of just what cutting a gigaton of carbon means see this table:



Once again, that's on top of expected "business as usual" efficiency gains. Doing any of these 26 times is utterly impractical without incomes taking a serious hit.

Perhaps you think that the developed world should be shouldering most of the work. You're prepared to see our income taking a kicking but don't want to deny the opportunity to develop to poor countries.

Even if you were to miraculously cut developed world emissions to zero, complete de-carbonisation, the developing countries would still need to cut their emissions by 9.5 gigatones, 46 per cent. Growth in poor countries will mean that the rich world just can't do all the work in cutting emissions. If your cut in developed world emissions is more realistic, two-thirds for example, then the developed countries would need to make a 74 per cent cut.

Without some kind of miracle technology you can only reduce emissions sufficiently by radically slashing incomes. There is just no way that the Chinese, or any other other big emitters, will possibly accept this. Cutting their long-term expected income in half, or more, is just not an option at all.

What does this mean for Britain? We already knew that our emissions weren't particularly important to global emissions growth. The UK just doesn't emit that much. Instead of actually changing anything by our actions we were supposed to be "leading". Showing others how it is done. That's pretty irrelevant now. Even if you were to, as some would like to, have the EU put massive trade sanctions on any country that doesn't sign up to our green agenda they're still not going to pay half of their long-term income for the right to trade with us. They certainly won't be shamed into it by Britain's selfless willingness to decimate its manufacturing sector.

Our response to the threat of climate change has to be based on the three sets of measures those of us on the free-market right have been advocating for some time now:

1) Technology - cutting emissions to the level Al Gore, Zac Goldsmith or even Chris Huhne would like isn't impossible. It just requires a miracle. Fortunately science has a history of providing what, to previous generations, would have seemed miracles. There are economical steps we can take that don't screw over our economy and might make such a miracle, or just an incremental technology that reduces our emissions a bit, more likely. Prizes for technological discovery, an alternative to patents that was very successful in encouraging important developments during the Industrial Revolution, are a good candidate that Jim Manzi proposed in a recent National Review article.

2) Adaptation - we can make sure our flood defences are in order, our crops will respond well to the new seasons and take other steps to prepare for the challenges of a warmer world. We can help poor countries do the same. This needn't be particularly expensive and we should avoid doing too much while we don't know precisely what we'll be adapting to but adaptation is clearly a central response to climate change under any sensible programme.

3) Resilience - Manzi put it well: "Wealth and technology are raw materials for options". The most important thing to do in order to be able to withstand an ecological crisis is make sure you're rich to start off with. Rich countries are so much better able to withstand the harms of global warming. If we screw up our economy in a vain attempt to avert climate change future generations will not thanks us.

Liberaltarian conspiracy

A lot of right-wingers are very curious about Liberal Conspiracy. All our favourite lefties and many of our favourite ideological curiosities are there.

I think the contradiction that will make it difficult to maintain is that some (I'm thinking Chris Dillow and Gracchi in particular) think "left-liberal" means a libertarian who isn't particularly content with some of the right-libertarian movement's underlying philosophy. Others clearly mean it to be more like an American liberaltarian: Basically a classic statist left-winger with a particular concern for civil liberties. Neither position is illegitimate but they lead to very different practical politics. The ultra-Hayekian viewpoint Dillow advocates, for example, would imply a very small state which is a project a liberaltarian will, at best, spend their time poking holes in.

Now, while I have to write up a long Coasean post and finally tangle with Chris on the economic efficiency of firms (and write more about Rawls) the only real policy difference I can see between him and the very right-wing is immigration. Even there you'll find plenty of pro-immigration libertarians - far more than anti-statist lefties I think. Over at Liberal Conspiracy, by contrast, writers are already writing that "why social and environmental justice are worth spending a lot of society’s money on" is self-evident which suggests statism is likely to rear its head sooner rather than later.

There are important reasons why libertarians and conservatives tend to find themselves in alliance. I detailed them in an article for TCS that I'm still very proud of.

Still, disagreement and controversy on a group blog isn't necessarily a problem. That's generally what drives the Corner's most interesting moments.

I'm not sure what interaction Liberal Conspiracy wants with right-wingers. At first I thought it must want to be a showcase for the best talent the left-wing blogosphere has to offer. Sort of like Comment is Free was originally intended to be. That intention is suggested by the ConservativeHome-like online magazine format and the fact that it has clearly been "marketed" pretty widely. If that is the intention then it could become a great place to go and find all my favourite left-wing bloggers to debate with. The site would want to attract right-wing comment so that the new ideas it purports to promote can be battle-hardened before heading out into the real world.

Unfortunately, one of its very first posts manages a combination of superficiality and self-righteousness that has utterly put me off the whole project. Apparently what Zohra really wants is to escape the real world with all those unpleasant and self-evidently wrong people who disagree - who she never discusses in any tone but utter disdainful incomprehension. She might get what she wants. Ideas and arguments there aren't going to get scrutiny from the Right if we have to wade through such empty-headed sanctimony to get to them.

I've nothing against a forum to discuss ideas among the like-minded. Sometimes you do want to get off arguments about principles. I doubt you'll get that from Liberal Conspiracy though. The Hayekian left is too different to the politics of "social and environmental justice". Also, I'd suggest that if you look at the output of Demos, the IPPR and the other left-wing think tanks and compare it to an organisation like the TaxPayers' Alliance the left needs to do less talking to itself not more - the editor of Prospect expressed the same opinion at their Think Tank Awards this year. Of course that will require Zohra to get over his/herself.

Update: So far the two substantive posts are why we should force students to stay at school longer and why we should ban smoking in public places. It appears the site is less a liberal conspiracy and more a conspiracy to steal the word liberal from its rightful owners.

Jonathan Evans' brilliant speech on MI5 and the terrorist threat

This (via Ben Brogan) is an absolutely superb speech. Well worth reading in full as the press have, very understandably, focussed on the number of potential terrorists and the news that 15 year olds are being enlisted by the terrorist movement. While those are the most sensational and novel claims in the speech this is the most analytically section important in my opinion:

"But before we look at the violent manifestation of that threat in the UK, we need to remember where this comes from. The violence directed against us is the product of a much wider extremist ideology, whose basic tenets are inimical to the tolerance and liberty which form the basis of our democracy. So although the most visible manifestations of this problem are the attacks and attempted attacks we have suffered in recent years, the root of the problem is ideological.

Why? Because the ideology underlying Al Qaida and other violent groups is extreme. It does not accept the legitimacy of other viewpoints. It is intolerant, and it believes in a form of government which is explicitly anti-democratic. And the more that this ideology spreads in our communities, the harder it will be to maintain the kind of society that the vast majority of us wish to live in."

As he describes there is little reason to view 9/11 or any subsequent event at the beginning of this challenge to our way of life and its end is not in sight. It is an attack on our values by those who hate them.

Dershowitz gets censored

This essay is absolutely shocking. Both the account of what's going on in the Oxford Union and the fact that it has been censored. I find the idea that a Harvard Professor of Law's original articles was really beyond the journalistic pale a little far-fetched.

Hutton is not the King

Will Hutton is such a shoddy thinker. His latest piece is little more than blanket assertion about what the best thing to do "obviously" is:

"What should have happened, of course, is that when the Bank of England found that it could not find a secret buyer for Northern Rock in the summer, it should have done what it did in the 1974 secondary banking crisis. It should have taken Northern Rock into the Bank of England's ownership."

He then does nothing to establish quite why this is so obvious. Having the Bank of England take control of a bank and then sell it is a bloody big deal with plenty of transaction costs and a huge signal to the market of weaknesses in the system. He discusses none of the potential problems with his little scheme.

He also doesn't even mention Mervyn King's (someone not only more expert on this matter but also more influential - there's no excuse) alternate explanation of why intervention was so costly. Mike Denham gives some details of King's account and a more conventional view of what went wrong with Northern Rock. For Hutton to write his article without even mentioning this is the height of rhetorical laziness.

The Left's narrative on globalisation

There is a deep perversity to the Left's criticism of global multi-national capitalism that is terribly frustrating.

First, they hold companies operating in the Third World to an unrealistically high standard.

If anything happens in a developed country, from Colombia to Chad, that would look out of place in Crawley they cry foul. I once spoke against a motion at the LSE Student's Union that was going to condemn the entire Coca Cola company because some of its staff in Colombia had murdered trade unionists. While I'm no fan of murdering trade unionists I had to point out that with the sky-high murder rate in Colombia and the sheer scale and breadth of Coca-Cola's global operation this event didn't necessarily signify a systemic problem.

What the lefties miss is what it means to ensure, in the developing world, that factories are as safe, company's dealings are as above board and working conditions are as pleasant as in the West:

It is more difficult, as local staff will be used to the working standards of their own country - often corrupt or unsafe, that's a major reason why the country is poor in the first place. Local staff are essential in most industries and it is utterly unrealistic to expect multi-nationals to maintain perfect control over them. Multi-nationals can change that over time but it can't happen all at once.

It is also fundamentally less sensible. There's no reason why workers in these factories should not accept working conditions worse than those in the West (but still usually better than work outside the multi-nationals) in return for an ability to compete with more productive workers.

I'm not saying that firms should do as they wish and never face criticism for shabby behaviour in poor countries. We should ensure they do what they can. The problem is that more often than not the criticism completely loses perspective and makes investing in poor countries a fools game. If firms take a PR hammering every time anything goes wrong in a Third World factory or if they are forced to provide standards of pay and working conditions that the poor country's productivity cannot afford then they will simply invest elsewhere. While wages in poor countries are low with weak protection of property rights they are often a risky place to invest anyway. The anti-globalisation movement can succeed in stopping multi-nationals investing in poor countries.

When they do that three things happen.

1) Without the capital, technology and exposure to Western business methods that the multi-nationals bring the poor countries stay poorer, longer. With the divide in international incomes closing more slowly the Left complains ever more fiercely about exploitation and inequality.

2) Poor countries have to work still harder to attract international capital that will invest far less in the developing world once the Left has made investing there almost a guarantee of a PR disaster. Working harder to attract that capital means both making investment a better deal and more reliable by going further than rich countries to establish their capital-friendly credentials. This looks, to the Left, like an unfair inequality so they write fierce denunciations of the unfairness of making poor countries adopt more radical pro-capital policies than ourselves. Actually that is just the only way poor and unstable countries can now attract vital capital whether they decide to do it themselves or are forced to by international institutions charged with not wasting donor countries' money.

3) Western capitalism gets criticised for not engaging with Africa. As if they'd get any credit if they did.

It's deeply ridiculous.

More on the morality of capitalism

Both Ian at Imagined Community and Gracchi have offered up interesting responses to my morality of capitalism post. Here are my attempts at a response, first to Ian:

"Gracchi points us to a well-made argument from our newest colleague in Blogpower Matt Sinclair suggesting that capitalism actually promotes less selfishness than other ways of organising society, but I wonder if it is too abstract. He argues, for example, that "In a capitalist system my well being depends upon anticipating and satisfying the needs of others." Could it be the case that much actual commercial activity is devoted to persuading people they have needs they were previously unaware of that, just coincidentally, Acme corporation can meet with their new product."

This critique of capitalism, that it manufactures demand through advertising, has a lot of intuitive force to it. Marketing told me I had a drastic need for an iPod whose lack I never rued before. However, I think it oversimplifies the process of advertising somewhat.

I'll use the example of the Phillips Wake-up Light that I recently purchased as an example. I saw the advert on the tube before buying it. Before that I had no inclination to buy a wake-up light as a substitute for my alarm clock. I did have trouble getting up. However, I had accepted the unpleasantness of my mornings as a constant and gave it little thought. It was a part of life. Therefore, I was unaware of the need for an alarm clock with the wake-up light's particular method.

What the advertising did was suggest that things could be different and I bought that message. It was less about manufacturing a need and more about making me aware of a need by showing that the need was not simply one more cross I would have to bear. I suspect that this is often the function of advertising. The advertising tells us that we have a need because it convinces us that a part of our life we had given up on as unimprovable is actually highly malleable.

This works for other, more status oriented products as well. We long to improve our status but give up on the idea that clothes can do it for us. We are convinced otherwise. This perception isn't false, people are shallow and clothes can improve your social standing. The shallowness is in ourselves and not our advertising. Some of the earliest human tools found by archaeologists were vastly oversized axes that were clearly unusable but functioned as status symbols.

I'm a little unsure about Ian's next two paragraphs.

"Also, does it risk under-estimating the complexity and potential incompatibility of the recipient's needs?"

Sometimes peoples needs are complex. That's why capitalism's rewards are so much better at encouraging people to take care of each other than the social rewards of gifts and charity that they often develop out of. The price system provides information about which products are really valued and which are valued most.

Ian then talks about the potential of firms to abuse the contracting process. I'm not sure of the particular relevance to this discussion but I'd suggest two common responses:

1) When contracting is particularly difficult a common response is to internalise that work within the corporation. A classic example is research and development. It is hard to specify price and requirement for research and development contracts thanks to the uncertainty that is inherent to research work. That is why research and development has so often been done within the firm or bought in after the fact by purchasing small and innovative firms.

2) Reputation does matter. Even if there are only a couple of firms in the market a duopoly can still be highly competitive. Monopolies are rarer than people think. They tend to exist in either geographical or very small product niches. Even then the monopoly is only pernicious if others cannot enter the market. If others can enter the market an inefficient company will need to stay on top of their game to avoid new competition. True, unshakeable, monopolies are particularly rare without some form of state intervention.

"In fact, surely the tendency to remove restrictions on managed capitalism in the name of the free market has had a significant impact on social breakdown - traditional industries have collapsed, whilst only mcjobs have replaced them."

With so much welfare dependency so often set alongside a need for immigrants to fill jobs I don't think the problem is a decline in economic opportunity. Some communities have suffered with economic change, that will happen under any system as tastes and technologies move. However, the decline has gone too far in too many places where economic opportunity is abundant for economic pressures to explain social decline. I think Dalrymple's peerless essay "The Frivolity of Evil" captures the true cause of social decline far better.

Gracchi's contribution is more esoteric. I think this is the crucial paragraph:

"This is a fascinating film- and there is much more to it than just what I have written- as ever there are interesting things to think about here which I haven't touched on from sex to alcoholism and the nature of addiction. But central to it all I think is this perception of the corrosive influence of capitalism upon our habits, that living in an other regarding society can turn us all into fraudsters and destroy our closest relationships as we seek that popularity known as profit. The point is extreme and in its extremity wrong- not all employment is geekdom. But the point that capitalism undermines true sympathy is an accurate one- and the issue that that points to in morality is a central problem that we live with constantly. This is neither a Randian individualistic manifesto (we are looking for real sympathy and not to abolish sympathy) nor is it a particularly positive manifesto (these problems may be endemic). What it does though is offer a corrective to the too easy view that if an action is other regarding, it is sympathetic. Gresham and the director and actors suggest it isn't."

Gracchi's argument is a funny one as he isn't really arguing for anything. He doesn't claim a moral superiority for any other doctrine (I claim some credit for the proviso he inserts that he isn't really a Randian). In fact, I'm almost concerned that Gracchi has come to conflate any human flaw with some deformity of capitalism. In any political state of affairs our very best instincts can be turned to evil: Love can turn to jealousy. The ambition that drove the most sublime of art also brings us the evil of Macbeth.

Does the desire to be of value to others, engendered by a capitalist system that makes our fortunes contingent upon the fortunes of others, lose its quality because in some it becomes a desire to fool people? Capitalism offers no particular favours to the trickster and will often punish them brutally (losing a reputation for honesty is usually very expensive) if they are found out. I'm not naive enough to think this will always be sufficient but neither am I expecting utopia.

This is clearly a domain for private morality that must be sustained by values and traditions. While I would still disagree with it Gracchi's film may be a better case for the necessity of combining Christian morality with capitalism than for an inherent immorality in the capitalist system.

Pakistan in trouble

I've been saying for a while that Pakistan is among the most important foreign countries to Britain's interests. With a large Pakistani population here as immigrants and our troops in Afghanistan in danger from militants crossing the Pakistani border we are uniquely exposed to that country's problems. For that reason the dramatic news today that the government has declared a state of emergency, the chief justice has been dismissed, the head of their Supreme Court Bar Association arrested, Benazir Bhutto's return from a personal visit to Dubai cancelled and the media placed firmly under military control should be concerning us all.

I'll post more later today or tomorrow morning if I have any particular thoughts about how this might turn out or what it means in the medium to long term. At the moment it seems very uncertain how it will all play out.

Thoughtful blogging: how and why?

Sunny at Pickled Politics laments that the "elites" in academic, think tank, corporate research (I think that's what he means by analysts) and NGO circles don't get involved in blogging. As my day job is as a policy analyst for a pressure group and I blog both at the TaxPayers' Alliance website and here on more esoteric subjects I'm pretty well qualified to write on this subject.

I first have to take issue with his factual premise. On the right alone there are the Adam Smith Institute (probably the best developed), Civitas, the TaxPayers' Alliance and the Social Affairs Unit blogs. Others don't but, all in all, I'd say that over half of right-wing think tanks have blogs. My impression is that the left blogs somewhat less but there are still plenty of left-wing think tank blogs. That all these organisations are so keen to get involved in blogging suggests to me that the problem isn't, as Sunny suggests, some fear that bloggers will find them out. By putting their research out into the mainstream media they place it in the bloggers' firing line anyway.

So, most of these organisations do blog. What they don't do is interact with the blogosphere much. They can certainly work harder to make their blogs more involving with richer and more varied content. However, I suspect that the real difficulty has something to do with the rapid reaction/gossip focus in the blogosphere that Gracchi discusses. There are relatively few blogs demonstrating the depth of thought of, for an example you might not have heard of, The American Scene in the States. Our blogs are dominated by people expressing their immediate reaction to something they saw in the news. This doesn't take a lot of research, thinking or specialist knowledge to do well so the policy sphere loses its comparative advantage and becomes one more, often rather tame thanks to the need to avoid embarassing the institution, voice in the crowd.

This is not really something I'm inclined to get too worked up about. Blogs are written in people's spare time and the time and attention required for analytical work is a scarce resource. Getting too dissapointed that the product of amateurs writing with very limited time and largely for their own amusement isn't producing Dostoyevsky just seems unrealistic. In the States there is an interesting debate going on about whether Greg Mankiw, an economist with a serious academic reputation who does blog, can sustain that effort and whether he should.

First Dani Rodrik suggested that the best writers are the ones with the highest opportunity costs to their time blogging:

"So if economists with high opportunity costs of time start to get out, shall we have a lemons problem on our hands? Will eventually the only prolific bloggers remain the ones that are not worth reading?"

Blogging has very low entry costs but relatively low rewards relative to other ways someone with novel and interesting perspectives to share can express themselves. Iain Dale advised that the blogs further down his rankings needed to work on increasing their readership. If I write a report that gets covered in the Sun or makes the front-page of the Metro I reckon it will, in number of readers, achieve more than even the biggest blog can in months if not years. Look at the media coverage that the capital projects report got, if I'm interested in readership why should I bother blogging?

Perhaps we blog for irrational reasons, Nicholas Carr suggests some:

"But what's left out of all these economic equations is the ego-gratification that comes from being a popular blogger. Because blogging is such a personal pursuit, with strong and immediate ego-rewards, it can be irrationally seductive, particularly to highly competitive overachievers. The hazard - and this applies as well to disciplines beyond economics - is that extraordinarily talented individuals may end up, like lab mice drinking sugar water, spending more time blogging than they should, even though their comparative advantage is smaller in blogging than it is elsewhere. Distorted by noneconomic but nonetheless powerful rewards, the idea market would become less efficient than it should be, and we'd all suffer as a result. The real danger, in other words, may not be that the "lemons" - the "tolerable bloggers" - will take over as the mainstays of the blogosphere but that they won't."

Seth Finkelstein suggests some more reasons why people will over-blog in the comments:

"1) The lottery-like nature of the success argument.

Lotteries have negative expected value. This is very obvious. But people don't make good expected-value calculations overall (the ones that do, don't play lotteries!). This is apparent in the common evangelism marketing represented by the part about "actively demonstrating one's skillset for an interested public". There are very few winners in that game. But an unlimited number of aspirants can be induced to buy a (losing) blog-ticket in hopes of becoming one of the lucky few.

2) The objects-in-mirror-are-smaller-than-they-appear

It's really easy to think that your blog is far more influential that it is. A niche celebrity will attract enough of an audience to seem impressive, even though objectively, it's likely not. But still, you can readily get the impression it's more effective than rationally justified.

3) Random reinforcement

The occasional high-attention hit is great for misleading the blogger that they matter."

I only mention all this to illustrate how uncertain it is that analytical thinkers should get actively involved in the blogosphere. Perhaps those who do so now are essentially acting irrationally. Neither Gracchi nor Sunny ask the simple question, why should someone with interesting and novel things to say use the blogosphere as a medium? What is in it for them?

I'd suggest a few answers:

1) Anonymity - some people can only write on a broad range of topics with the cloak of anonymity or risk endangering their careers.

2) A place for ideas that are interesting but not worth the greater effort of preparing them for publication in another medium with greater rewards but higher standards. The blogosphere provides a small but significant reward for the presentation of ideas that aren't yet ready, are of interest to too small a niche or are not sufficiently novel for the big time.

3) A testing ground for incomplete ideas and arguments. If you have ideas that you are unsure of then dicussion in the blogosphere can either confirm that they are interesting and stand up to scrutiny or can reveal where more thinking/research is needed.

1) is significant but pretty constant. I think 2) is the reason most think tanks blog now. 3) probably has the most potential to encourage intellectually significant blogging. What is interesting about 3) is that it relies very heavily on a network. Blogs are most valuable when you are interacting with other bloggers who can challenge you and provide social rewards for your most interesting efforts in exactly the same way that a phone is most valuable when there are plenty of other people to call.

That might explain why it is difficult to get an analytical blogosphere going. I reckon lots of smart people start blogging and don't find it rewarding because they don't get into a community whose praise and criticism can make it worthwhile. That community is what those of us who want to see a more thoughtful blogosphere should all try to build.

Blogpower

I have now been approved and am a member of Blogpower (check out the links on the right). I like the group and only certain practical considerations have prevented me joining sooner. There are two things I think it does better than any other online community I've seen:

1) It creates a space for a reasoned dialogue between people who disagree. Too many bloggers are terribly concerned for rules and netiquette but miss the more important need to be respectful and friendly; to build a sense of community that makes everyone confident to venture their opinions and good-natured when they disagree.

2) It exemplifies the incredible connections that can form on the Internet. The sheer diversity of Blogpower, the range of backgrounds and experiences brought together, is amazing. You never know where you're going to find your audience and normally our social circle is so restricted. The Internet can offer us a way out of those narrow bounds and I see so many examples of Blogpower doing so. Wonderful.

Libertarians and Monarchy

Devil's Kitchen and Peter Risdon are having a debate about the monarchy. First, can and should a libertarian be a monarchist? Second, should we adopt DK's particular plan for giving the monarchy 'hard' power within our constitution again?

I should qualify that I am not a libertarian so am writing about a doctrine not my own. While I still have relatively liberal views on many touchstone social issues, and always come up as a strict libertarian on the silly ideological tests, I am philosophically conservative. However, I still have a feel for libertarian thinking from my student days, I should be okay.

I find myself forced to write in abstention on this idea. Libertarians should be fundamentally unimpressed by the very question of how we choose our leaders.

Peter's notion that democracy is preferable because rights flow from the people is less than libertarian. People are the only ones who have rights in libertarian thinking but they have no rights over other people, whether they are alone or part of a group of a million. Libertarianism is at root sceptical of democracy and libertarians have often been at the front of opposition to its excesses. While I am not going to pretend that Ron Paul has the power to pronounce what libertarians should believe it is not a coincidence that he has been so hawkish on the constitution, itself a compromise with democracy. While, historically, limiting the power of the monarch has been essential to liberty that does not mean that, right now, monarchs contribute to the progress of illiberalism.

In the end, I don't see a libertarian answer to how we should be governed except "less". I think a Hayekian would prefer a decentralised democracy as it best brings in dispersed knowledge but Hayekians and libertarians are not, despite there being plenty of overlap, the same group.

So, I don't think there is a more or less libertarian form of government. Is DK's idea a good one anyway?

My own understanding of what makes the British monarchy so great is that it provides a figurehead for our law and tradition who is above politics. The only guard to real, crushing tyranny in Britain, or any country with or without a constitution, is that British people would find it morally and aesthetically repulsive. Constitutional 'rules' only help if people rally around them. Otherwise a majority or a disproportionately powerful minority will just break the rules.

Unfortunately a liberty-loving population is hard to maintain. A host of things from state dependency to terrorism to foreign attack to economic stagnation threaten it. You need the population of your liberal state to be both capable of living without state support and want to. You need to be able to provide credible security. Producing a decent society where people respect each other's freedoms, person and property is about as hard a policy challenge as they come. Getting it right is really rare and the system is under huge strain in the UK for a host of reasons. The monarchy is a powerful symbol of tradition and law that people rally round and that is not contaminated by distrust of politics. In troubled times getting rid of that would be quite a risk.

That's why I dislike the Devil's proposal to have the monarch veto bills that threaten a constitution and be dethroned if the people, through a referendum, decide that they have failed in that duty. By making the monarch one more wielder of temporal power he also makes them part of the political process. There's no way someone whose decisions we will debate over and can dethrone if we don't like their constitutional judgement can remain above politics. We will lose our monarchy and gain a sort of deformed supreme court. That is not an idea I could support.

Public service oddities

Following on from my discussions of some curiosities I found in the NHS here are some more tales of public sector eccentricity.

NHS Trusts like to get creative


South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has an online art gallery on its website. I'm not quite sure why. This is the most subversive picture I've found so far. I'm not sure whether this is your tax pound at work or whether it is funded in some other way.

If you'd like another example of NHS Trusts getting artsy look to the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust. They have a flash intro to their website. Inspired.

The Tote used to be owned by noone

The Tote has a statutory monopoly on pool betting on horses races since it was created by a 1928 Act of Parliament. When Labour went to privatise it they found that they had to nationalise it first. Until that happened, with royal assent in 2004, it had no owner.

The Tote was a living and breathing company with employees and profits but wasn't owned by the state, society, any individual or other organisation. It gave its profits to horse racing related charities but was really its own creature.

I see the light

This is the first time I'm working through winter having left the irregular student schedule behind. I finally get just how strange it is to be leaving work when it is already dark. Stepping out at six to seven in the evening and finding that it is night time is very strange and a little disconcerting.

I'm fortunate enough to work in a bright office with plenty of windows and it is still light when I walk in to work at eight. As such, I haven't had the experience, that I've heard some people describe, of going the entire day without seeing natural light.

I'm fortunate in another way. I'm not much of a mornings person but at the end of last week I bought this:


It's brilliant. Slowly lights up over half an hour and then wakes you up with a gentle sound at the end.

I bought it on Friday and it has now been 'road'-tested. First, how good is it at waking you up?

So far I've used it for three work days. For one I was very tired and it got me out of bed quickly and into work without too much grouchiness. Today I was a bit tired but basically fine and I got up easily. Yesterday I was very rested and I almost bounded to work. It really does make getting up in the morning much easier.

Second, are you sharper on waking up?

I had the alarm wake me up on Saturday morning to do an interview at 8am on slopping out in Scottish prisons with Talk 107. A relatively challenging radio interview if you want to do it well without sounding simple or unpleasant and risky when you've just woken up. It went really well. I didn't have any morning grogginess and was on top form.

It's pretty expensive but this is an unflashy but genuinely useful gadget. I'd highly recommend it.

"... and scientists predict that by 2050 there will be 32.9 scare stories for every person in Britain"

This, by Johann Hari, is unpleasant tripe:

"Back in 2001, I wondered out loud – and in print – if it would take "an environmental 9/11" to finally break the corporate brake that is holding up all action on global warming in America. Since then, New Orleans has drowned, the South-east has dried up so severely the city of Atlanta is nearly out of water, and the skies over California have been turned red by the worst wildfires since records began.

More than a thousand people have died, and more than $70bn worth of property has been destroyed. Seeing Americans huddled together in refugee camps is something that no longer shocks us on the nightly news. Yet still the political debate in the US remains stuck far short of the drastic cuts in carbon emissions we need now if we are to stop this Weather of Mass Destruction.

The science is clear: these apocalyptic weather-events are unlikely to be freak one-offs. While it's hard to link any single hurricane or vast fire to global warming, Katrina and California's wildfires fit into the wider warming pattern of increasingly freaky weather predicted by climatologists as the world gets warmer."

DK points out that patterns of both rainfall and hurricanes have been pretty good over the last few years. Rainfall was poor last year but that was an exception rather than fitting some rule while hurricanes are actually at a historic low.

All this is highly persuasive and clearly Hari is playing at The Day After Tomorrow inspired doom-mongering in the Al Gore style rather than actually attempting to tell an honest story about American political discourse. However, the sheer strength of the data supporting DK's position worries me. It is setting up a very low base.

So far the pattern of hurricanes has been this:

If the frequency of hurricanes has nothing to do with climate change then, as far as I and other lay observers are concerned, it is a pretty random pattern. God may not play dice but as we don't know the factors driving hurricanes let us assume they're random. It isn't an assumption I'd recommend doing anything serious with but it will work for the purposes of this post. That makes it entirely possible that over the next few years the pattern will be:

The number of hurricanes could go up more, it could go up less, it could continue to fall. However, looking at the graph like that it is pretty clear that there is no reason to blame global warming. It would still look like a pretty random process.

However, I don't think that will stop some people claiming it as evidence for global warming. I think they'll present the pattern (not necessarily graphically) as:

They'll probably do this by saying something like: "the number of hurricanes has doubled in the last three years". Worse, someone - probably Dr. Someone - will do this:

The light-grey line is a projection and it pretty quickly leaves the historical range. An economist will be found to turn this into a prediction that the associated costs will be some astronomical portion of world product. A new scare story will have been born. Some lonely voices will point out that the trend described is misleading but they won't be able to make much of a difference.

Maybe I'm being too cynical but when a man can get a Nobel Prize for his documentary the same weak it is judged, in court, to have fatal flaws something has probably gone very wrong with the debate itself. What particularly angers me is that it might well be Johann Hari himself deploying the new 'increase in the number of hurricanes' as part of his rhetorical case. If he can get away with falsehoods now what is to stop him getting away with mere misleading statements in future?

What is even more infuriating is that I can see this coming but there's nothing that can be done about it. All we can do is hope that there are still bloggers around to point out the deceit and that someone is listening to them.

Bullets

It's been frustrating me for ages that with my template bullets weren't showing up. It just looked like I was quoting someone else. Fortunately, Blogger's Help function absolutely rocks and it answered my question in no time at all. Now I have bullets and only feel slightly foolish for leaving it this long. Huzzah!

The NHS keeping busy

I've wondered a few times whether it would be a serious service to the British political debate if someone were to plot out the different NHS institutions and how they interact with each other. It's a real jungle out there.

Take a look at the institution for five minutes and you quickly realise how utterly absurd it is to hope that such an unwieldy and byzantine structure, both centralised and out of control, can deliver a modern healthcare system. The politicians in charge don't have a clue and, for all the excellent people in the health service, the professionals get ground down by the system. All we can do is advocate real reform and, until that happens, enjoy the sheer strangeness of it all. Here are some things about the NHS that have been amusing me recently.

The Chief Executive of Christie Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has a podcast

Inspiring. I haven't watched through the archive yet. I'm not sure whether I should be pleased that they're trying new things or horrified that they're spending their time producing these little promo videos which I'm almost sure no one will be watching.

Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust are using Mr. Eugenides as a model for their promotional material

He looks scared.

This may not seem notable but all the other pictures in hospital accounts are so posed its nice to see this one so poorly composed. A document that looks professional generally reflects well on the organisation producing it. Unfortunately, many public bodies take that principle a little far and have clearly put more time and money into their annual reports than is sensible. The Public Accounts Committee is, naturally, the role model they should be looking to emulate.

Quango titles are special

Here are some favourites of mine, all from the Department of Health, which is only surpassed by the Home Office for number of quangos:

• United Kingdom Xenotransplantation Interim Regulatory Authority. Despite its title suggesting it is a stop-gap solution this body has been in place since at least 1998.
• National Radiological Protection Board. Lead-lined presumably. This was phased out in 2005 so either its been merged with some other organisation with much moving of desks or we're all in serious radiological danger.
• Advisory Committee on Borderline Substances. This sounds too silly for words.
• Advisory Committee on Hepatitis. Filling the role that used to be filled by the sober best friend before society went to the dogs.
• Advisory Committee on Clinical Excellence Awards. Hard to parody.

Big numbers

Some numbers are so stupidly large it's hard to get your head around them. I don't mean obvious ones like how large the universe is. I mean everyday, politically important facts. An interesting challenge is how you make the figures meaningful. A classic example is to put an amount of spending, waste or taxation in £ per household.

Sometimes you can be more adventurous. As of the 30th of September 2006 our little nation employed 554,000 civil servants. That's a staggering number. How can you make it meaningful?

All you can do is look for the right comparison. That means that there is nearly a civil servant for every hundred people in the UK. That our army of civil servants is now larger than the army that Napoleon used to invade Russia (at that point the largest army ever assembled in European history). Herodotus estimated that the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza required 100,000 workers for 20 years. Blair could have had civil servants build him two in his years as Prime Minister with plenty of time to spare. When you put it like that you start to realise how ludicrously large the bureaucracy is.

"Sure it's hard work, but the pension's still great."

When this doesn't work statistics can be quite hard to absorb. Mike Denham has looked into evidence recently submitted to parliament on immigration trends. The numbers are incredible. Talk of a need for integration might even be missing the point. If these predictions come to pass what we're going to have to do would seem more analogous to the building of a new nation, similar to the process the United States went through.

I'm still not entirely sure I've got my head around the numbers. That shows how useful the little mental tricks like the ones I've demonstrated above are.