How to smear a writer

Does Sunny think David Landes is a racist?

"Portuguese intellectual shortcomings soon became a byword: thus Diogo do Couto, referring in 1603 to "the meanness and lack of curiosity of this our Portuguese nation"; and Francis Parry, the English envoy at Lisbon in 1670, observing that "the people are so little curious that no man knows more than what is merely necessary for him"; and the eighteenth-century English visitor Mary Brearley who remarked that "the bulk of the people were disinclined to independence of thought and, in all but a few instances, too much averse from intellectual activity to question what they had learned.

[...]

Portugal had become a backward, weak country" (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, p. 135-136)

His attack on Martin Amis suggests he probably does.

He quotes Amis as saying "the impulse towards rational inquiry, is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male” quote. That's a generalisation but I don't think it is a racist one. It could be true or untrue but requires no particular hostility to Muslims. It is very similar to innumerable quotes that could be pulled from Landes' book. For example, "Portuguese intellectual shortcomings soon became a byword".

Sunny says that Amis' most offensive utterings were the following:

"The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

Sunny never links to the original interview from which these comments spring so I've had to do a bit of searching to get it. As a commenter on his Liberal Conspiracy post points out the actual quote starts with:

"There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say,"

These aren't Amis' recommendations, they're a guilty admission of thoughts that he regards as unacceptable. He is describing dark thoughts that civilised people control but that are not indicative of racism or any other quality worthy of condemnation. It is those who do not see them as problematic that we have to worry about.

Amis' crime, if he has committed one, is to be a literary figure without the depth of self-control expected of someone engaged in an intensely political debate. Sunny's only response to the commenter who pointed out the distortion was, essentially 'but Imams get taken out of context too'. That Sunny can be so brazen about his character assassination is disgusting.

Perhaps Imams also suffer Amis' fate sometimes, although often when Imams claim to have been taken out of context that turns out not to be the case, but I don't know of anyone who has actually defended the practice of taking people out of context.

The statement about demographics is also taken out of context. Sunny presents it as an appeal to nativist fears of being 'overrun'. Again, here's the introduction Bennett and Sunny miss out - from the same interview linked above:

"He and The Hitch were in Las Vegas the previous week, and shared their grim premonition that this could be the beginning of the end for Israel."

His concern about Muslim demographics isn't a generalised concern about "them" and "us" but a specific concern about the Western world's ability to defend Israel. He's concerned that demographic change will make that impossible. The preceding paragraph further sets that in context as part of a broader worry that the British set Israel up in an impossible position. Deep fears that the Muslim world are out to 'get' Israel can be attacked as unjustified but are not racist.

Racist is an unfortunate description to throw around. Just like anti-semitic and insane it is one that sticks to people and defies rebuttal. After all, it is an attack not on someone's arguments or even their interests. It is an attack on the inner workings of their mind, it alleges that their very soul is defective. There is no real way to open yourself up, to prove yourself a non-racist. The best anyone can really do is the "well, I've got lots of friends of other races" but that isn't allowed to stand. Friendly personal conduct, apparently, is no barrier to being deeply unpleasant in some larger way.

Accusing people of racism is a bankrupt and small-minded style of argument. It is a witch-hunting discourse that will favour those who don't express themselves, who shut up and then manoevre into positions of power after a career of quiet blandness. It is, in the deepest sense, anti-intellectual. It closes our minds.

Oil peak and trough hysteria

The rhetoric on Peak Oil is so desperately disingenuous it is hard to know where to start. First, the possibility of the oil price breaking the $100 barrier is taken to indicate that the arrival of Peak Oil is imminent. Given that there is currently a cartel among the major oil producing countries the oil price doesn't tell you anything significant about possible production. The oil price is the result of demand interacting with the cartel's chosen supply, which bears no resemblance to total possible supply.

Once OPEC is consigned to irrelevance by depleting supplies and rising demand all that will mean is that oil is one more scarce resource. Peak oil is no more threatening than that. As supply dwindles and the price rises a genuine incentive to use oil efficiently and look for substitutes will be created. If you're worried that this process will be challenging, which it might be, the last thing you would want to do is intervene to try and make us confront this challenge now. Keep the price as low as you can, as long as you can. Don't put green taxes in place. That way we will face the greatest challenges from declining oil stocks when we have more technological substitutes in place and, as a result, using less oil is less expensive. In fact, the best policy for Britain would be to take advantage of an expected high price and slash rates now on North Sea oil so that more is discovered there and we have a larger domestic supply going foward.

What's really ironic, though, is that the faster we expect oil stocks to diminish, the more credibility we attach to those expecting Peak Oil to arrive sooner rather than later, the less seriously we should take global warming. After all, if oil stocks are going to diminish faster than we expect then the world will have to stop using fossil fuels sooner rather than later. There will be an economic imperative, that the market will reflect without any government intervention at all, to cut fossil fuel use. There's no need to accept a massive expansion of state power if the job of increasing the price of using oil-derivative powered plains, trains and automobiles will be done by declining oil reserves anyway. We can avoid the waste and incompetence that has so far been associated with attempts to use the power of the state to control fossil fuel use.

$100 oil isn't really anything to do with Peak Oil or any other natural shortage of supply but the result of faster than expected demand growth, thanks to a strong world economy, that OPEC is unwilling to balance out. Oil stocks will decline but this will just make oil one more scarce resource. Markets are very good at making efficient use of scarce resources and human ingenuity, when put to good use by a free-market economy, is great at finding substitutes. We'll be fine.

Lawyers and deterrence

I've long been opposed to the death penalty and I haven't changed my mind yet. However, this is incredible, from the New York Times:

"According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented."

I've heard it stated as fact by so many lawyer-debaters that the death penalty doesn't work as a deterrent I'd assumed that was actually what the evidence showed. Instead it appears to be just a lawyers' urban myth.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that lawyers just don't like the idea of deterrence. It doesn't fit with the highly individualistic understanding of justice that their profession encourages them to think in terms of. Their job is to deal with cases in isolation. The importance of the broader impacts of sentencing to create a deterrent just isn't apparent when you're looking through that prism. Given that they're a group given massive power and unnaccountable to the world around them such a systematic cognitive bias among the legal community is pretty bloody important.

Illness

I'm afraid I'm still ill. Just a messy, undignified cold. Which is no fun. I've got a host of things I want to do and write about but my brain is working at an absolute snails' pace.

On the plus side, I think I now 'get' Mutley's blog. This is genius.

A day's a long time in politics

When Dave wrote it (two days ago - I apologise for the title of this post - poetic license) this was a reasonable, if overly generous, account of what had gone wrong at HMRC. Now it looks like pretty much every argument in Darling's defence is completely invalid. At the same time it is becoming very apparent that this mistake will prove expensive for customers, banks and, when someone claims for compensation, the taxpayer. He might get away with it if the discs are found within the next few days and could hang on regardless but Darling should resign:

1) It wasn't just a random mistake

• It was a decision that senior staff were aware of.
• It wasn't the only such incident. 2,111 data protection breaches in the last year.
• Junior staff shouldn't have the ability to do this sort of thing.

2) The Government bear a large measure of responsibility for organisational failure at the HMRC

• There's nothing wrong with trying to slim the staff at a government department, operations can often be simplified and the need for massive bureaucracy reduced. However, combining staff cuts in the same department with a messy merger, the massive complexities of new IT systems and the ongoing debacle of an overly complicated tax credit system is a recipe for disaster.
• The Government was warned that there were serious problems with data protection within Government departments. They ignored those warnings.

3) Darling's defence for the delay in letting everyone know the data was gone appears desperately weak

He said it was to give the banks time to prepare but why was there a delay before he told the police and then a further delay before he hold the banks? Why do the banks deny that they asked for time to prepare?

On Jeff Randall Live

I'm afraid I've been very busy and am now feeling very ill. Hopefully I'll recover by the morning. In lieu of anything more substantial here is a transcript of the Shadow Chancellor, Peter Hahn - former director at Citigroup and now academic at the Cass business school and myself discussing Northern Rock on Jeff Randall Live, Sky News. A couple of extracts:

"JEFF RANDALL:
Matthew, let me bring you in, nationalisation, we don’t exactly have a great record with that do we? Looking back to all those car companies in the 70s and indeed the Dome more recently wasn’t exactly a great success.

MATTHEW SINCLAIR:
Well indeed and talking about confidence, if you are going to make this issue entirely one of, make all of the control of Northern Rock the government’s, if we are going to make it entirely a government concern, then we need to have confidence in the government. How much confidence do we have in them, how much confidence would we have in their management, in their ability to take Northern Rock forward if this becomes entirely a matter of the government handling a huge amount of risk once it nationalises and takes over all of the risk connected to Northern Rock?

[...]

JEFF RANDALL:
Matthew, Taxpayers Alliance, you sit there and watch the government’s every move, you count the pennies, what mistakes have been made here?

MATTHEW SINCLAIR:
I think the problem we had here was not necessarily that the government went in and lent but it went in without a proper exit strategy and without a proper idea of how it would limit its commitment. This is analogous to the Iraq War, your problem isn’t the decision of whether you go in or not, your problem is what you do next and I don't think they ever had a very clear picture of what that was going to be."

Update: Thanks to Edmund for pointing out that the link went to an interview with Chris Langham. It now points to the right place.

Immigration and society

I have never been convinced that there is a particularly acute case for or against immigration on economic grounds. I would expect that the labour market's gain and the congestion problems would largely offset one another. This appears to be supported by the statistical work on the subject. Mike Denham links to a National Institute of Economic and Social Research study that found that immigration increased GDP by 3 per cent, it increased population by 3.8 per cent - GDP per capita fell a little. I don't think either side can honestly claim that the issue of immigration can be comprehensively settled by an appeal to economic logic alone.

My concerns over immigration are, instead, philosophically conservative. My premise is that a decent, peaceful and liberal society is a rarity whose defence is constantly in doubt. The libertarian approach to the pursuit of liberty - of trying to define and create the most pure liberal society possible - I sympathise with but regard as fundamentally mistaken. It leads them to prioritise transient victories, laws and constitutions.

Instead, I see the most important challenge as creating a nation able and willing to sustain and defend a liberal society. This project is always difficult due to a number of necessary structural weaknesses in liberal democracy. The logic of collective action demonstrates how minorities can capture the state thanks to the difficulty of mobilising a majority. Liberal values can be limiting when facing enemies facing no such constraints.

The challenge of defending Western values is currently particularly difficult thanks to relativism. Dalrymple sets out why the challenge of confronting threats to Western values is particularly acute:

"When faced by people who, quite mistakenly and with a combination of staggering ignorance and arrogance, believe themselves to be in possession of a truth that justifies almost any atrocity committed, if not by them, exactly, then by those whom they have indoctrinated, modern Western Europeans do not know how to react. They have either forgotten what it is to believe in anything, to such an extent that they cannot really believe that anyone else believes in anything, either; or their memories of belief are of belief in something so horrible—Communism, for example, or Nazism—that they no longer believe that they have the right to pass judgment on anything. This is not a strong position from which to fight people who, by their own admission, hate you and are bent upon your destruction, brought about preferably at your own expense. First, you can't take them seriously; second, you suspect they might in any case be right."

Our weakness is immediately apparent if you look at the craven response by our media and political establishment to the Danish Cartoons Crisis. Massive and threatening protests across Europe and the Islamic world attacked freedom of speech and pronounced themselves grievously offended by cartoons published in a small newspaper in a small European country. Not a single British newspaper printed the cartoons and Jack Straw praised their cowardice as 'sensitivity'. Our most important values were coming under attack by those who hoped to use the threat of violence to intimidate others, to destroy free speech without a law in sight. Our supposedly fearless media was not willing to join Jyllands-Posten and a handful of other European newspapers in the trenches and make such a simple statement of collective defiance of the Islamist threats.

We need to be concerned about our ability to defend our values. I am often worried by the way integration is usually described: as a policy intended to ensure "community cohesion". That misses the point. You could theoretically create a very cohesive society, at least in the short term, by clamping down upon freedom of speech and just having everyone shut up about their differences. I don't think this would work in the long-term as a society lacking the catharsis of free speech would develop greater lingering resentments. More importantly, it implies sacrificing one of the West's most important values. Defending those values is more important than pursuing community cohesion for its own sake.

Importing huge numbers of people every year who often do not share those values is a very risky thing to do. 4.6 per cent of the British population have arrived here in the last ten years. A great many of those have arrived with values incompatible with the Western tradition that Britain is a part of. Unlike Iranian immigrants to America British immigrants from Pakistan, for example, are not drawn particularly disproportionately from a Westernised elite. Compare immigration to Britain now with previous waves of immigration that were smaller (the Huguenots were about one per cent of the British population) and didn't have the same clash of values and it is hard to see a parallel for the kind of challenge we already face. Further immigration at the same rate might make it utterly impossible to defend liberal values whose defence is already looking fragile.

An undermining of common values walks hand in hand with an undermining of national identity and the willingness to compromise. Compromise has to be based upon a certain measure of trust that your moderation will not be taken advantage of. Building trust is more difficult in a society where people cannot call upon shared experience and history. Integrating immigrants into that shared experience is harder when there are so many of them that they are unlikely to see an existing community of which they can form a part. Politics will become uglier and commerce more bureaucratic if people do not trust each other. A fractious politics could create differences of values even if they don't already exist.

Even leaving aside differences of values creating a nation where people trust each other enough to work and live together happily is a real challenge. I have no idea how we might go about creating such a spirit in a nation with so many new entrants. Anyone who supports immigration on the scale of the last ten years without a really good idea of how they'll turn the new population into a nation seems, to me, to be engaged in an exercise of utter irresponsibility.

So, to conclude, my problem with immigration is not economic. My biggest concern is not that immigrants will take jobs from indigenous Britons (although we should be very concerned about the impact on the lower paid) but that it will lead to the slow death of the values that define what is best in our society. That we will become more divided and untrusting.

I must, finally, comment briefly on whether we can limit immigration. I think we can. I've seen two suggestions of reasons why that might not be possible and both seem deeply spurious. First, Chris Dillow posits that we can't because our coatline is so much longer than the US-Mexico border that they're proposing to build a fence across. This rather misses the point that we already have a bloody great moat. As an island nation it is almost uniquely easy for us to defend our borders. Second, others suggest that international obligations prevent us controlling immigration. This just doesn't fit the numbers as those granted asylum and EU migrants combined are under 40 per cent of the last decade's inflow. Intra-EU migration is also less important with respect to the values clash as immigrants from European countries are more likely to share Western values like free speech.

As such, I think we can and should limit immigration in order to defend the fragile social order - already under severe strain - that has made Britain so successful, so worth migrating to.

Libertarian idealism in practice

I think sometimes the Austrian distaste for empirics has left libertarians too eager to construct theoretical expansions of the private sector instead of appealing to real world examples of private services in action. Here are a couple of examples that I think libertarians should use a lot more:

1) Turnpike trusts

The construction of the railways with private capital is the classic example of infrastructure being constructed, at an incredible pace, by the private sector. The private sector railways only fell into disrepair and then the clutches of government when they were wrecked by wartime use and poor maintenance.

However, the railways aren't the only example of the private sector managing basic transport infrastructure. Calls for the roads to be privatised may seem radical now but it wouldn't be without precedent.

In the seventeenth century the roads were the responsibility of parishes and in a poor state. With volumes of trade increasing they were being used more and more heavily and needed investment and proper maintenance. The solution was a libertarian's dream. Significant numbers of the most important roads were handed over to Turnpike Trusts that looked after the roads and charged a toll for their use. They produced a much improved trunk road network and played an important role in moving goods from canal and railheads in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.

2) The lifeboats

An emergency service run successfully for hundreds of years on a charitable basis, in the libertarians' dreams surely?

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution runs an emergency service that saves 22 lives a day. Running a lifeboat service is obviously a massively capital intensive activity and one that needs to be on service permanently. Despite that it has been a private service funded philanthropically since its founding in 1824. While the Admiralty could not be persuaded to take an interest private society set the service up and legacies and other donations still provide it with the funds it needs to operate each year.

Bloggertarians

The bloggertarian debate has gotten a little heated. It's made me think. First, about this question:

But - in passing - none of the Bloggertarians ever address the question of how you can have a CBI without ID cards?

Well, it's just one more benefit like the dozens paid right now to countless people without ID cards. It doesn't have any special quality that makes an identity card necessary. How can you have free museum entrance without ID cards?

Beyond that, it forced me to confront just how rare I am in being a non-libertarian blogger. There are left-liberals and dozens of libertarians but I reckon you could count the conservatives in the UK blogosphere on one hand. That isn't at all the case in the US blogosphere or in the broader movement here. The only other environment in which I've seen libertarians enjoy such an ascendancy among the Right was in the students' union.

I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

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."