Analysis and Facts

Gracchi's article on facts and analysis makes a simple but possibly important point. That reporting without sufficient analysis can be just as troubling as analysis without good grounds. I worry that he makes exactly the mistake, of noting a fact but not analysing what it means, that he cautions against:

"[More] Palestinians than Israelis have been killed over the last five years. [That fact doesn't] excuse but [does] help explain what has happened and why a peace process is necessary-"

The relevance of that fact isn't explained. Gracchi, a very careful and usually comprehensive thinker, has felt it appropriate to trust that fact's importance, and its contribution to the case for a peace process, is self-explanatory.

The old logic used to be that might was right. This was rationalised in all manner of ways. In the Arthurian sense, the logic that God strengthened the arm of the just. However, it seems plausible that logic was never really 'bought' by civilised peoples and it has certainly been left behind as rather subtler forms of morality have come to the fore. Now the idea that right being on one's side will make victory easier is a statement of hope for an already justified cause rather than a justification in itself.

However, an assumption in the other direction, that losing makes ones cause more just, is just as toxic. Gracchi has left behind the idea that might makes right and instead made a statement that sees weakness making right. Because the Palestinians have suffered they will need to have that hurt compensated for in some way with a compromise. He may think that being weaker makes them more worthy. They are the 'oppressed' or a plucky underdog; this is a common fallacy of the Left although not one I would expect Gracchi to hold to. Another possibility is that he simply thinks that we need to accept that, rightly or wrongly, the deaths do aggrieve the Palestinians and that will mean they need some form of 'compensation' in order to achieve peace.

There were undoubtedly more Arabs killed in their full-scale wars with Israel than Israelis. Does that mean they were in the right?

Clearly not. They lost more people because they did not fight as well. They were attempting to drive a legitimate state into abject surrender or into the sea. While those who died may have simply been following orders their nation had no right to feel aggrieved over their deaths. Any anger that the families of those who died felt should have been directed towards their leaders. The Arab states were defeated in wars in which they were the injust side.

If Gracchi were making the more practical argument that addressing a grievance is worthwhile whether that grievance is legitimate or not his logic is equally troubling:

The Germans clearly felt very aggrieved in the period before the Second World War. They clearly had suffered hugely in the First World War and with the economic instability that followed it. However, that does not mean that a compromise should have been forced on other European states. The Germans were still in the wrong when demanding territorial sacrifices from other nations. They needed to be confronted instead of being appeased. Anything else implied forcing an injustice on another European state and rewarding intransigence, such rewards usually feed rather than sate an appetite for more 'compensation'.

I do not think that Hamas, or Fatah in its extremist moments, has a legitimate cause. Israel is a state with a right to exist. Hamas are attempting to destroy them, do not wish for peace and show no desire to properly run the quasi-state that they have. Israel has honestly sought peace in the past and been utterly rebuffed by the Palestinian leadership, Arafat, simply so that he might appear credible at a meeting of Arab leaders.

Hamas gunmen may die attacking Israeli soldiers but that is the responsibility of Hamas. Hamas bear complete responsibility for innocent Israelis killed by suicide bombs targetted directly at civilians. Israel does not bear the same responsibility for innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire of strikes that do all they can to avoid civilians but cannot do so entirely when fighting an enemy that hides among the population. Palestinian militants, just like Hizbollah in the Lebanon, use civilians as a shield to protect themselves and the resulting deaths as a propaganda tool. Their strategy is based around maximising casualties in Palestine as well as Israel. Israel is under no obligation to make some penance for the self-destructive actions of the Palestinians who choose leaders like Hamas.

Casualties do not create a just cause. Unless you think, for some other reason, that their cause is just deaths within a people do not strengthen the case that people deserve better treatment. Suffering and dying thanks to their own injust policies should not be seen as cause to give them favourable treatment. What this means, in turn, is that their sense of grievance against Israel is misguided, their sufferings are the fault of their own leaders, and should be disputed instead of being indulged.

American Constitutional Law manages to get even more bizarre...

Blockquoting from a blog as popular as Instapundit seems bizarre but still. This is hilarious:

"IMPEACH CHENEY IF YOU WANT, but do bear in mind that he'll preside over his own impeachment trial.

No, really. The Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. The Vice President is the President of the Senate. He presides. The Constitution provides for only one exception in cases of impeachment: "When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside." That's because of the obvious conflict-of-interest of having the VP preside when the President is tried. But there's no similar provision for having someone else preside if the Vice President is impeached."

Americans get crazier by the day.

Being British constitutional law confuses me at the best of times. The very idea of courts telling politicians what do. I know we have that here but it is still rare enough to feel vaguely unnatural.

Man of Hats seeks new Hat

Dave Cole is a friend of mine from LSE. Very bright guy with an only slightly alarming attachment to his hat collection. There is a small but non-negligible chance he'll wind up ruling us like a king. His hats are sufficiently important to have claimed a special place in his blog's very fancy design. Each time you load unoriginalname38 (Dave's blog) you are shown a different hat in the top-right of the page.

Now Dave is looking to buy a new hat from the very fancy Lock and Company of St. James. Unfortunately he is rather spoilt for choice and, in a display of democratic spirit, calls upon the blogosphere to help him choose. Have your say, vote in the "Which Hat?" poll.

Jim Manzi on Global Warming

Jim Manzi's article for the National Review is one of the most intelligent descriptions I've seen of a plausible conservative response to global warming. The National Review isn't readily available in the United Kingdom but if you are at university or otherwise have access to LexisNexis it is available over that service. The article was in the issue of June 25 and is titled "Game Plan - What conservatives should do about global warming".

The first thing Jim Manzi does is correctly identify the stage of the argument that it is most productive for conservatives to address: what we do about global warming rather than whether it exists.

This is clearly the right position to take. There is room for doubt over global warming and the question of how much warming there will be remains deeply uncertain. However, the political debate has moved on and most non-scientists more interested in the political debate can engage far more effectively on the question of what to do about global warming, a question rooted in politics and economics, than they can in the scientific debate. There are exceptions, Tim Worstall's questions about the economic assumptions used by the IPCC spring to mind, but in general prioritising the "what next" debate over the "what's happening" debate is a good idea.

If we accept that the following proposition is probably true but there is scientific uncertainty then we can have the argument about what to do next properly: There is some warming, a significant proportion of that warming is caused by humans, there is a tiny possibility that something catastrophic will happen.

We do need to make it clear that this threat is not worth wrecking the global economy over. The chances of a catastrophic change are very low and a Precautionary Principle based approach cannot function in a world with a variety of catastrophic possibilities, from asteroids to nuclear war. We could spend every resource we have chasing our own demons. The challenge is to form policy which will enable us to respond to global warming in a cost effective and proportionate manner. Keeping wealthy isn't just a good thing in itself but also makes adapting to climate change far easier, as Manzi says "wealth and technology are raw materials for options".

He next argues for efforts to improve our ability to predict the climate. This is a rather uncontroversial idea but Manzi's notion of focussing the effort on getting more data and, in particular, some kind of system to get warning of an impending catastrophic event is distinctive. A similar idea is the proposed tsunami warning system that might have given important notice of the storm headed for South East Asia.

He argues for putting technology at the centre of any efforts to curb fossil fuel use. I worry that sometimes when people hear conservatives arguing for technological solutions they think we're trying to avoid taking climate change seriously. The reality is that at the moment there are too few good substitutes for fossil fuels. What this means is that any taxes will fail to achieve environmental objectives as the elasticities in demand for fossil fuels are, in most cases, way too low. This makes green taxes one more revenue raising tax that hurts industry and commerce. Conservatives are rightly sceptical of taxes that will do more to send emitting industries abroad than actually cut the amount of carbon dioxide emitted. Manzi's approach to creating incentives for technological development is the use of prizes. Branson's $25 million prize for the development of a 'carbon scrubber' is taken as a template. This approach has the advantage of getting the private sector involved and being remarkably cheap compared to other emissions curbing policies under consideration. The idea of keeping the prizes small enough that the incentives for interest groups to politically manipulate the system aren't too strong is a good one.

As Manzi says, "adaptation should take center stage". His recommendations for this are pretty thin. I set out a programme for an adaptive response to climate change in an article for ConservativeHome, "A Sceptics' Response to Climate Change".

The final section of the article sets out, essentially, why conservatives should have hope that they can defeat eco-socialist demands for radical changes to the economic order. He describes a bid-ask spread: $225 per month to implement Kyoto (which still doesn't come close to solving global warming) against $21 that the median US family would be willing to pay to "solve global warming".

Some time ago I set out, in a post on the politics of climate change, just why the Right has been losing the debate over climate change. We relied too much upon arguing either that there was scientific uncertainty, which could not be sustained by a scientific minority, or that the measures proposed were likely to be ineffective. As the costs of taking action to curb emissions had not yet hit home for people the response was simply that we "had to do something".

Now that people are starting to see the costs they're going to be asked to pay they are going to hold green policies to far higher standards of efficacy. The time is ripe for conservatives to be making the case against eco-socialism, particularly if we can offer alternative policies of the sort the Manzi and others are proposing.

Update: The man himself provides a link to a copy of the article. Well worth reading.

Fred Thompson at Policy Exchange

I was at Policy Exchange for this speech from Presidential candidate Fred Thompson yesterday, video via BritainandAmerica, and it was very interesting:



I thought he was extremely solid. Not the most dynamic or inspirational of speakers but he had the diamond combination I was looking for, and wasn't sure he'd display, of:

a) Recognising that in order to temper the exuberance of neo-conservativism we need a new dose of realism.

and,

b) Recognising the problems in Iraq and discussing them frankly.

while,

c) Still arguing for a muscular foreign policy.

Article on ConservativeHome

I have an article on ConservativeHome's Platform responding to Andrew Lansley's proposals for reforming the NHS. It discusses how rising demand for education and healthcare will cause the state to grow massively if conservatives cannot successfully challenge the principle of funding those services exclusively through general taxation.

Apologies for slow posting

Apologies for the lack of blogging since Sunday. Work means that I can't blog during the day like I used to and sometimes my evenings get busy. It should never be more than a couple of days between posts and I do plan on having new content up tomorrow.

The compensation, I hope, is that the quality is improving as my job exposes me to new perspectives and information and the time restriction forces me to only use my best ideas. My impression is that the frequency with which my posts get picked up and linked to by other blogs has increased since I've started work which does imply that my writing is becoming more interesting. I hope you're all happy with the quality for quantity trade-off.

Sir Salman Rushdie

Last October Salman Rushdie spoke out in the veil debate. His ongoing willingness to defy the vile threats he is under from militant Islamists is hugely impressive.

At the time I argued that for 'Sir' Iqbal Sacranie, who famously stated that death was "too good" for Rushdie during the initial furore over his book, to have a knighthood and Salman Rushdie not was a pretty ugly state of affairs. Now that wrong is to be righted. Also, it has infuriated the Iranians whose regime issued the original fatwa against Rushdie which is a welcome bonus.

Good news.

Social Standards

Chris Dillow has a post up arguing that the choice of a criminal lifestyle is not necessarily irrational; it is possible to understand someone choosing the particular spectrum of risks and rewards that comes with a life of crime.

His post reminded me of something that happened about six months ago. I was travelling back into London from my family home in Hertfordshire. In Kings Cross I ran into someone I had known at school. He had always been a somewhat strange and creepy kid and had dropped out of school after GCSEs. I had thought little about him since.

I said hello and we exchanged the obligatory "what have you been up to?"

I reported that I had just finished my Master's at the LSE and was now looking for work. His story was more extreme. While writing this post I've realised it may have been untrue but that wasn't the impression I got and isn't important to my point.

He had set up a pornographic website. This had been quite successful and he had sold it for a fair amount of money. He was now living on that money somewhere in Chelsea.

In terms of material conditions he clearly had me beat. While I was lucky enough to be emerging from university without any debt I was, at that stage, not working and living on the end of my mother's patience. I lived in the same flat I occupy now, a comfortable Westminster two-bedroom that is affordable thanks to being near the Victoria Coach Station. My employment prospects were quite reasonable and I have, of course, since found work. However, a political career is unlikely to involve retiring early in Chelsea money.

Now, why, despite the vastly better material rewards that he had obtained, probably for far less effort, did I never feel jealous?

It could be a moral decision. Certainly I do, in moral terms, think that my career is a superior choice. However, were it purely a moral decision presumably I would feel that I was making a sacrifice. I didn't, and don't, have the feeling that I'm really paying a net price for the decision to follow what I think is a morally preferable career.

The compensation I get is social standing. While I didn't nearly have the income I had far more social status. I had finished an advanced university degree at a fine university while he had hardly managed GCSEs. Education has almost entirely replaced ancestry as an indicator of class these days. Equally, while the average person connects the word politician with something like bubonic plague there is still a respectability in the job "Policy Analyst" that there isn't in "pornographer".

While criminals and pornographers do form their own communities that attempt to make up for their shunning by respectable types they will always be aware that they are somehow outside the community proper. The only way this changes is if, for example, the career of a pornographer becomes more socially acceptable. A successful community won't let this happen for a criminal lifestyle.

Now, maintaining this social standing is important to people. It is particularly important to white, middle class people. That is deeply important to our success. One of Chris Dillow's reasons why people choose a criminal lifestyle illustrates how that has broken down in troubled communities:

"4. Non-pecuniary advantages. Success in music or crime brings you some mix of fame, respect or affection. It gets you the girls. Modest professional success doesn't. Quite the opposite. Roland Fryer shows (pdf) that blacks who do well at school have fewer same-race friends. Conventional "success" therefore, gives you isolation."

That is a very clear failure to socially reward useful behaviour.

That I not only choose to accept far lower material standards of living but do so without a moment's hesitation is the power of social standards. No law or subsidy can push people towards socially useful pursuits as effectively. Breaking those social standards down, as far too many left-wing movements have, is therefore extremely dangerous. The breakdown in standards leads, rapidly, to a wider social breakdown as choosing a civilised way of life is then not the rational choice for far too large a body of people. That is why, for all the repressive effects that social mores can have, I respect their vital importance. It is this insight, more than anything, that causes me to describe myself as a conservative these days.

Dershowitz and Julius on the Boycott

This article on Times Online from Wednesday, addressing an issue I discussed on Thursday, is brilliant. It is the full-length version of a piece that appeared in the print version.

I'm not sure what else can be said in the intellectual case against the boycott. All that remains, as Daniel Finkelstein correctly points out, is to work out what we can do about it. My inclination is that some kind of protest would be a good idea. The UCU's Brittania Street headquarters looks like the right target.

Hamas and Fatah, Gaza and the West Bank

It would seem the best way to understand what's going on among the Palestinians right now is to combine Amir Taheri's piece for the Times and Con Coughlin's for the Telegraph.

First, the problem isn't that the Israeli, European and US cut in aid to Palestine has prevented Hamas properly governing the terroritories. As Coughlin notes there hasn't been a decline in donations to the Palestinians but there has been a redistribution of that income under Hamas:

"Hamas, on the other hand, sees economic deprivation as a form of political oppression. The World Bank reported that donors contributed about £375 million to the Palestinian territories in 2006, twice the amount they received in 2005. But since taking power, Hamas ensures any funds are spent on Islamic causes and its 6,000-strong militia, leaving the majority to fend for themselves."

Of course, the reason why Hamas have no interest in running the territories well is that they see them as a military base, as a staging post in the fight to destroy Israel. Few military bases are a pleasant place for a civilian to live. Taheri describes the problem:

"The constitution of Hamas, however, commits it to the creation of a single state. Gaza and the West Bank are regarded as bases from which the struggle for the liberation of the entire mandate of Palestine, that is to say the elimination of Israel, is pursued for as long as necessary."

Civilian suffering can even be an advantage if it provides helpful propaganda to assist the Hamas war machine, Coughlin:

"The bonus for Hamas is that, by forcing the majority of Palestinians to exist in dire poverty, it succeeds in attracting widespread sympathy from international do-gooders who do not understand the sadistic economic manipulation that is taking place."

Hamas is attempting to impose a Taliban-like state on areas under its control. From Taheri's article:

"Having won the general election 18 months ago, Hamas launched a drive to “Islamicise” Gaza, forcing women to wear the hijab and men to grow beards. It burnt down the last beer factory in Gaza and banned the sale of alcoholic drinks. Bands of youths calling themselves “Brigades of Enforcing the Good and Combating Evil” raid homes in search of alcohol, Western music and videos, unIslamic T-shirts and other “sinful items”. Young men and women found together in public, or even in private cars, are stopped and interrogated to make sure unmarried couples do not violate Sharia rules."

Hamas are far less interested in a struggle for a Palestinian state than they are in a general struggle for Islamist victory. This makes a stable two-state solution implausible as Hamas are unlikely to be satisfied with a Palestinian state. In fact, even if they were to achieve the destruction of Israel they are unlikely to be satisfied. Their interest is in the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation of which they are a member, dream of worldwide domination.

What the West is going to have to realise, those that haven't already, is that the suffering of the Palestinians is emphatically not a result of Israeli policy. There have been numerous opportunities, most recently at Camp David, for the Palestinians to have a state within which they could work at building a better life for themselves. These were rejected. Now the Palestinian political leadership, elected freely and fairly by ordinary Palestinians, are setting out to ruin their people's chance at a better life preferring a struggle for the destruction of Israel. The suffering of the Palestinians, cause of so much self-righteous indignation in the corridors of the United Nations and the offices of the Guardian, is a consequence of choices they have made.

Israel's policy in the face of this has to be to look to its own defences. The logic behind the wall is looking stronger and stronger. The targetted application of military force can keep its enemies on the back foot. Western policy should be to do what we can to assist Israel in this task. In the longer term some kind of unilateral settlement with the Palestinians living in the non-state they've created for themselves and the Israelis doing their best to keep its affairs and theirs' separate might be the best outcome possible.

Discounting for Adaptation

Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change has been, politically, hugely important. It is regularly cited by politicians justifying stringent steps to curb emissions thanks to its headline estimate that the harms from climate change could cost 5-20% of global GDP “now and forever”.

Stern’s report has been politically important despite, or because of, making some rather suspect methodological choices. Many of these choices have since been heavily criticised by researchers. Richard Tol was cited throughout Stern’s report but branded it “alarmist and incompetent”. An example of this alarmism is Stern’s penchant for using “this could mean up to…” statements. In discussing the numbers of people facing flooding thanks to climate change and melting glaciers he describes how up to 200 million people could face homelessness. Applying the same standard to nuclear proliferation it would be easy to justify nearly any action on the grounds that damages could be as high as 100% of GDP lost and 100% of the human population dead. This is quite a common strategy in making a rhetorical argument in politics but has little place in a supposedly rigorous study.

However, no element of Stern’s methodology has been more controversial than the decision to use a near-zero discount rate:

Stern’s call for rapid action to curb emissions is based around treating harms and benefits across generations as equally important regardless of when they occur. The “now and forever” amount is actually a sort of average of harms over hundreds of years. The majority of the harms he bases his analysis of the total cost of climate change on occur after the year 2800. This is such a long time away that with even moderate discounting the estimate of harms would fall drastically. Relying upon such long time horizons has to raise some questions about the Stern report’s reliability. Firstly, there are philosophical questions over whether we should be treating harms to the environment of different eras with very different material conditions as equally important. These have been addressed throughout the literature but particularly by Nordhaus. One example, he describes how under the Rawlsian moral logic the current generation deserves preferable treatment to subsequent generations with the good fortune to be born in what will probably be much wealthier ages. This is the same logic used to justify helping the poor within the current generation. However, there are also less high-minded, more practical reasons to question how seriously harms hundreds of years into the future should be taken.

Nordhaus briefly raises the question of changing preferences. After hundreds of years will those who we are saving from emissions necessarily want the lower levels of carbon dioxide that we have provided for them?

Nordhaus’ gives examples of possible alternate priorities: perhaps people will prefer higher productivity so that they can “develop fiendish new weapons”. There are a host of reasons why our descendants might prefer that we maximise growth instead of making efforts to cut climate change. One more prosaic example could be the possibility that, in around fifty to a hundred years time, we perfect the process of generating power through nuclear fusion. That would allow for massive cuts in carbon dioxide emissions at very little cost. A host of other technological changes could do the same job. That might cause our descendants to wish we had not taken action to curb emissions at a time when it is so expensive as we don’t have efficient alternatives to fossil fuels in place.

There are a host of other known unknowns and unknown unknowns that surround whether our descendants will value any cuts in carbon emissions we make. To illustrate the potential for surprises let’s pose a bizarre counterfactual. Suppose a Stern-like decision had been made during the Industrial Revolution. “We’re using coal at a dangerous rate and if it runs out we will lose a vital economic and strategic asset. To ensure that all generations take equal utility from limited stocks we have to impose taxes or rations on coal usage. Otherwise by the 21st century the UK will be utterly impoverished.” We would probably have a lot more coal right now but would be significantly poorer and history would not have looked kindly on those who made the decision.

Uncertainty over the value of decisions we make now to future generations is probably reason enough to be sceptical of near-zero discount rates. However, can we go beyond uncertainty and make an active case as to why our descendants are unlikely to value action now to curb climate change? I believe we can.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin laid out an important question. Why should we assume that our current level of emissions is the optimum?

“First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

It clearly depends upon the timescale one is referring to. In the long-term there probably isn’t much reason to think a little extra warmth and CO2 will be a good thing or a bad thing. Equatorial regions might suffer but it is entirely possible that this will be counterbalanced by areas like Greenland, which might become green again, and Siberia which will be better able to exploit its huge natural resources. However, in the short-term our society is built around a particular temperature. We have cities built in flood plains without proper protection, railways built in Siberia that will collapse if the permafrost melts. This is to be expected. Our society has been built with the context of a particular temperature and there will be costs if we ask it to adjust.

This balance of short and long-term harms highlights the true nature of the challenge of climate change: its transience. This has to be crucially important to any discussion of Stern’s discount rate. If we have no reason to assume that a higher temperature will be much better or much worse for humans apart from the transitional costs that come with social adaptation then the expected future harms from climate change should tend to zero over time. Working out just how long it should take before the change in climate has been adjusted to is a matter for some study but it seems unlikely it would take more than a couple of generations. Certainly the harms that Stern identifies beyond the year 2800 have to be written off as quite likely utterly irrelevant to humans who have learned to live with, or take advantage of, warmer climates.

If we make this adjustment it will make the estimate of the costs to climate change far more realistic. That realism should feed into our policy decisions. It should reinforce the impression that global warming is a change we should work to adapt to rather than a catastrophe worth ruining the world economy to avert.

600 Posts!

That last post on Professor Qvortrup was this blog's six hundredth post. I hope you've enjoyed them.

Evidence

Yesterday I went to a Policy Exchange event with Theresa May and Professor Matt Qvortrop discussing the merits of referendums, or Citizen's Initiatives as he called them, and their capacity to reengage citizens with politics.

He was arguing for, as he described it, a "supply-side democracy". This is the idea that supplies of democracy create their own demand. If involved in decision making more often people will become more engaged in the political process. This seems fairly cogent. However, Qvortrup ruined his case with the methodology behind his paper The Voting Happiness Index which we were all given a copy of before the event.

I took a flick through it before the speech started and was alarmed. The report is filled with charts illustrating a correlation between various 'goods' from happiness to green politics to voter turnout. He used this as evidence that voter turnout led to all these good things.

Now, if you're going to argue that various good things are caused by voter initiatives a correlation is of very limited use. All a correlation suggests is some kind of relationship. It seems just as plausible that high democratic involvement, caused by some factor not in the study such as historical differences, was the driving force behind not just the other good things about Citizen's Initiative states but also the existence of Citizen's Initiatives in the first place. A state with a more democratically active citizenry is, after all, far more likely to be able to justify running referenda. This same taste for civic participation could also be the cause of all the other differences between Citizen's Initiative and non-Citizen's Initiative states. High voter engagement could be caused by any number of factors not included in the study.

In short, Qvortrup's study has no way to tell which factor is cause and which effect. It can do almost nothing to establish whether an increase in the amount, supply of voting makes any difference at all to the success of a democracy.

Also, he used happiness statistics and quoted Layard on how great they are. They aren't. Happiness statistics are shoddy and unreliable.

Finally, his evidence had clearly been cherry-picked. The Citizen's Initiative states may have been greener but I'm willing to put money on them also having been less fiscally disciplined.

I asked Qvortrup about these issues and he smiled genially and said he was just making the case for his side, of course he chose data that would strengthen his case. My heart sank a little. Partly because I was deeply aware that Qvortrup wasn't really doing anything particularly wrong. He hadn't claimed his data should change the world and the methodological weaknesses of his study pale in comparison with some other, far more prestigious, works.

I emerged from the talk neither more or less convinced of the case for making referendums a regular part of our political landscape. Instead, I came away with a renewed sense of how careful you need to be when told "studies show that..."

UCU Boycott of Israel

The boycott that the UCU has endorsed is utterly disgusting. It it an attack on academic values and freedom. It has deeply unpleasant undertones of anti-semitism in singling out a state which is defending itself against gross acts of terrorism and which would not rank among the top hundred states in terms of the volume of human rights abuses but does happen to be Jewish. In this it is rather similar to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The UCU's behaviour has wider repercussions as it speaks for staff at public institutions, many of whom are not anti-semitic, and tarnishes the reputation of the United Kingdom as an honest broker in the conflict.

In this Channel 4 video you can see Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz tearing apart the Brighton University academic who proposed the motion. Attempts by our man from Brighton to retreat to the idea that all he has done is propose a debate are facile. If you want a debate you don't pass a motion to distribute campaign literature from one side.

There is a fine, if very moderate, Early Day Motion on the issue:

"That this House regrets the motion passed at the congress of the University and College Union (UCU) on 30th May, which promotes a boycott of Israeli universities and a moratorium on research and cultural collaboration with Israel; agrees with Sally Hunt, General Secretary of UCU, who has said previously that `I simply do not believe that the majority of UCU members support an academic boycott of Israel; most want us to retain dialogue with trade unionists on all sides-not just those we agree with'; supports the Government's response to the parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism which concludes that `calls to boycott contact with academics working in Israel are an assault on academic freedom and intellectual exchange'; believes that boycotting Israeli education institutions and academics is damaging to the UK's reputation worldwide and does nothing to promote a settlement in the Middle East; and urges the UCU to conduct a full ballot of its 120,000 members before adopting the terms of the resolution as policy."

Write or e-mail your MP if they haven't signed it yet. Well worth your time.

Update: As he mentions in the comments Gracchi has a very good article on this subject over at Bits of News.

Joe Trippi on 'Politics 2.0'

Britain and America's summary of the event yesterday with Joe Trippi, author of Howard Dean's incredible Internet grassroots campaign, is a good one. My impression, though, is that we are a long way from seeing the sort of bottom up politics that the speakers were talking about rising to prominence in the UK.

Trippi's explanation for why the UK was lagging was that the relatively short election campaigns that are the result of flexible election timing, by comparison with the near permanent US campaign, prevent the proper use of the Internet and social networks by politicians and groups who want to influence an election. These networks take time to build and are not given that time by organisations that expect a result within the busy few weeks before an election.

I'd suggest a different explanation. The blogs are obsessed with the parties. Even high-minded blogs will devote at least a quarter of their output to what members of parliament are saying. I think this means that the dialogue can't really stand on its own. It isn't only the blogs that display this way of thinking. Think-tanks are far too prone to judge themselves by the extent that they can influence political parties rather than the extent to which they directly affect the broader public debate. You can see it in the rationale for the UKIP, the logic that if a party doesn't represent your views they are unrepresented. We see parties as almost the be all and end all of politics rather than a particular mechanism for building a majority to govern.

This obsession with parties Daniel Finkelstein, at the event as a sort of discussant, saw emerging out of a need to effectively ration the scarce resource of the media's attention, "shelf space" as he termed it. It seems equally plausible that party loyalty emerged out of a relatively uniform set of political divisions in the post-war period, a particular ideological struggle with the rise of the social democrats clashing with the conservative-liberal tradition. Either way, that the original rationale for party obsession is fading does not necessarily mean that we will automatically turn back to a less party-focussed politics.

If we wish to build a genuine bottom-up politics we will need to see a deeper change than the technological ability to self-publish. There will need to be a change in the British understanding of how politics is conducted.

Communist Monopoly

Given that Monopoly was originally conceived of to demonstrate how rents enrich landlords and impoverish tenants, a critique of capitalism, it was always somewhat ironic that it became such a business. It has to be one of the first examples of capitalism co-opting its enemies. The early twentieth century equivalent of stores selling Ché Guevara t-shirts (although this article explains just how unpleasant hero worship of Guevara is).

Now this, deeply silly, YouTube video goes one step further and asks the question, what would Communist Monopoly look like?

Thatcher on the Falklands

A truly wonderful, inspirational, speech (click "Listen: Lady Thatcher" for the audio stream) from our greatest living Prime Minister.

Europe drifts right...

There appears to be something of a rightward drift in Western politics. The French first elected a right-wing President in an ideologically charged election and now have given the right a landslide victory in parliamentary elections. In Finland the right-wing coalition dominated the last elections. The same happened in Sweden on a more modest scale. In Belgium the right have just won a strong victory. In Britain the Conservatives have had a lead for some time although there has been no electoral test of their revival. The Germans have a right-wing government.

The obvious exceptions are Spain, Italy and the United States. Spain's result was due to an incredible miscalculation by the right-wing Prime Minister. Italy's politics always has a screw loose. In the US the Democrats are doing well but that has taken some pretty massive incompetence on the part of the Republicans. I'm not convinced that the current Democratic strength is the result of a real left-wing drift in American politics.

The trend right could just be a coincidence. Or a transient rejection of centre-left governments that swept to power in the heyday of the Third Way. I think it is something more. A rejection of the supposedly progressive values of the tranzi elite: Treating criminals like victims. Neglecting or showing disdain for the culture, history and values of the Western nations in deference to a self-hating multi-culturalism. Accepting the mass-migration of populations that Western states have proven unable to integrate as an inevitability. Submerging nation-states in unaccountable supranational bodies.

These values and objectives were never really shared by the population but became a kind of political consensus in the absence of a crisis that would remind Western peoples of what they had to lose. The combination of 9/11 and the Cartoons Crisis was a very effective wake-up call. That free-speech might be so endangered by cowardice in the face of a violent minority alarmed people used to taking such values for granted. The right is the major beneficiary because they have always been the most skeptical of the tranzi ideals. This gives right-wing parties, where they can see this trend and latch onto it, a significant advantage.

This zeitgeist will not provide the right with electoral victories on a platter. The right-wing leadership in each state will have to convince people that they can rebuild important values and cultural confidence. However, it appears to me that the opportunity is there for the taking.

Peter Singer hears about Contraction and Convergence over a decade late...

First, why on Earth did this get printed? It's just an unimaginative statement of the Contraction and Convergence policy. The Guardian could have just printed the Wikipedia entry. Isn't Peter Singer, the author, supposed to be an original thinker? Why is he just repeating an idea that has been endlessly repeated for over a decade?

It isn't even a good idea he's restating. The idea of cutting emissions in the developed world both enough to prevent global warming and to equalise emissions with the developing world or face large financial penalties. Now, while the US emits a lot of carbon per person it emits relatively little per unit of GDP. It doesn't have a lot more room to cut emissions without cutting its income. That means emissions reducing to the same level per capita of emissions as in the Chinese economy will do huge damage to US incomes.

What will happen to China's, export-driven, economy if the US economy is collapsed?

Prizes for Innovation

Prizes are a time-honoured method of rewarding inventions when industry associations, governments or other bodies want to encourage useful innovations. The practice was particularly common during the Industrial Revolution era. It works, essentially, by offering cash instead of the monopoly rights that come with a patent. In certain areas, where you know what you're looking for, it can be quite effective. The idea achieved some degree of fame recently with the success of the X-Prize for commercial spaceflight.

Some have argued that the principle should be deployed as a way of getting the private sector involved in creating innovative solutions to climate change. I'm not aware of this happening yet on a large scale but it seems only a matter of time before someone tries prizes as a response to climate change.

In a somewhat sad turn of events Microsoft is now offering a prize for studios to create a global warming video game. Instead of using prizes to address the actual issue they're going to be used to find the most innovative propaganda for eco-socialism. Ars Technica's prediction is "A platformer starring a polar bear being chased by the melting ice caps". My money is a game where you play George W. Bush using a gargantuan magnifying glass to hunt poor people or one where you play Zombé Guevara bombing Exxon plants.

Oceans 13

This film sees the series back on top form. The action takes a while to get into the swing of things as the detail is built up but is absolutely crackling once the film is at full pace. They have returned to the classic Jazz, Las Vegas and luxury themes that made the series great. They've ditched the celebrity cameos that were a somewhat self-indulgent distraction from the narrative. The scope of the scam is superb and some of the skits are inspired.

Ruthie on the constraints of parenthood

This post by Ruthie is a fine example of what makes her blog so great: an emotional openness that allows for some touching stories describing problems that face so many but are rarely articulated so clearly. In particular, this post concerns the challenges single motherhood creates for Ruthie in forming a new relationship. Unfortunately her fanbase is on the wrong side of the Atlantic but I think she'll still do fine...

Cap and Trade

It was only today that I finally really grasped just how dismal an idea the cap and trade, emissions trading, approach to carbon emissions control is. It isn't just that the particular EU scheme constitutes a subsidy of half a billion a year from British organisations to the rest of the EU; there is a more fundamental problem. It was when I saw this Excel file that I really 'got it'. That's every hydrocarbon user in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and their Annual Allocation of emissions from DEFRA under Phase I. The supposed market solution relies upon bureaucrats coming up with a quota for every plant in the country based on their emissions history and an estimate of how much they can cut.

It's reminiscent of some old Communist five year plan with government telling the private sector what it is capable of and should achieve, why is this considered the capitalist approach?

It relies upon the state being able to properly assess the technological possibilities in a host of industries, both in the present and the future. It is chronically vulnerable to manipulation by skillful or 'generous' businesses that can influence the decision over their quota. The trading system represents a huge great transaction cost for the public sector as NHS Trusts and the like who have no idea how to trade a commodity like an emissions permit make a mess of things. The skilled traders at Shell and BP, by contrast, have made a profit from the Emissions Trading Scheme.

In short: a hideous idea.

Review of Charles Koch's "The Science of Success" in The Business

I have an article in todays The Business magazine about the stunning success of Koch Industries, Inc. and the book Charles Koch has written explaining how the ideas underpinning classical liberal politics and economics made it happen.

Article on ConservativeHome

I have an article responding to Ken Clarke's Democracy Taskforce report up on ConservativeHome's YourPlatform. It sets out how the Democracy Taskforce won't succeed in restoring trust in politics so long as politicians continue to try to do too much, too centrally.

The Global Warming Debate: Over?

I tend to avoid commenting on the science of global warming. I keep as up to date with the arguments as I can and am reasonably happy that I've done what I can to understand the state of play. For now, I'm happy to take the 'consensus' view, with a few reservations, and then analyse policy on that basis.

I'm not a scientist and I honestly doubt I can add any value to the scientific debate. Fortunately the intellectual argument over policy will not be settled by scientists but, as usual, by economists. That is a debate I can be a part of. Neither myself, Sir Nicholas Stern or Richard S. J. Tol are scientists, however, the other two are as important as any IPCC physicist to the debate over our policy response to climate change. Tol's assault on Stern's review is a decent introduction to why.

DK isn't so reticent about the science of climate change, has done a lot of reading and is convinced that the mainstream opinion is entirely wrong. He is understandably frustrated that Sunny Hurndall has written the entire debate off as settled, anthropogenic global warming won apparently.

What I found odd about the opinion that Sunny, and Ben Stewart of Greenpeace who started this argument by refusing to debate Dominic Lawson on 18 Doughty Street, advance is that they seem to be calling and end to the debate so quickly.

It seems understandable that Richard Dawkins has gotten somewhat tired of rehearsing arguments for and against evolution that have been much the same since 1859 when the Origin of Species was published. After 148 years it seems quite plausible that most of the interesting arguments have already been deployed. Unless some radical new evidence or theory comes up I'd say it is fair enough to put research and argument testing the basic theory of evolution by natural selection on the back burner. That Dawkins wishes to stop debating those who still want to rehearse the same arguments after well over a century in order to satisfy their own religious imperative seems understandable.

But global warming only became an object of serious debate in the late 1970s. Why should we believe that in that relatively short period of forty years all of the relevant arguments and important studies that will shape the 'final' scientific conclusion have seen the light of day? Surely it is quite plausible that new evidence or logic that might change the debate will emerge?

It worries me a lot that those who lobby for policies to curb emissions are so keen to end the debate early. Presumably they think it strengthens the political case for taking action, perhaps it does, but intellectually it is a shabby and arrogant way to behave.

The Ghost Cabinet on IT Procurement

I'm far from sold on this piece from the Ghost Cabinet 'Technology Ghost'. A few particularly problematic paragraphs stand out:

"No-one is looking at the use of technology across the whole of government."

Utterly untrue. The National Audit Office should do some more work on examining the government's record in delivering major Information Technology programmes but there are definitely organisations looking at the government strategy for IT in the aggregate. There is the Office of Government Commerce and the Cabinet Office's Delivery and Transformation Group (formerly the e-Government Unit) both of whom are responsible, within government, for government IT implementation. Then, in Parliament, there's the Public Accounts Committee which launched a report just yesterday on the lessons from successful projects for government IT procurement. Finally, from the private sector, the consultancy Kable is focussed on public sector IT expenditure.

"This is a historical mess. At some point in the past, each government department went and did their own thing, spending loads of money implementing essentially the same solution multiple times, and now we’re looking at spending loads more either doing it yet again, or joining them all up. No-one was empowered to put their hand up and say, ‘Hang on, does anyone think that a costly, massive database of everyone’s names, addresses and other information might be useful across government?’ And if they did, no-one was made to listen."

This paragraph is the biggest flaw in the piece. The whole problem with the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is that it attempted to impose a single solution across too large an organisation. Different sections have different legacy systems all of which need to be integrated into the new project or replaced and the data moved. Everyone has different objectives which need to be accounted for and which cause massive creep in the project's scope. Pretty soon you get the over £10 billion (that's a LOT of money) overspend that has marked the NPfIT. Doing this over all of government would take a big risk of facing the problems that have plagued the NPfIT again but on a much larger scale.

A rational, problem-solving, mind will always find centralisation tempting. It is similar to the logic that a major supplier like the NHS can be more efficient than an insurance based system as it can buy in bulk and spread fixed costs across a larger health service. The problem is that the centralisation creates complexities, variety and scale too large to be managed. The impossibility of managing the lumbering behemoths that centralisation has created leads to the inefficiency that characterises today's government departments.

It seems pretty clear that, instead of the centralisation that the 'ghost' is after government IT projects need to be more decentralised, more often It is far easier to manage and control small projects that the stakeholders can be properly kept in touch with.

Energy Security and Global Warming

Quite a few people, Peter Franklin for example, have argued that China will come onboard for CO2 reductions because they don't like being dependent upon foreign oil. The problem is that the Chinese have a solution in mind already for energy security. Lots of coal power stations. Hardly a result for our green friends.

In the US a similar trend is playing out. Attempts to push energy security up the agenda as a handy bonus that comes with addressing global warming are playing into the hands of "Big Coal". Bradford Plumer for the New Republic sets out how this is creating an opportunity for the ludicrously inefficient coal-to-liquid industry. Again, strategies for energy independence are very different to the kinds of strategies imagined to fight global warming.

In Britain the most obvious way of defending energy independence in the long term is probably a move towards nuclear power or some other technology. There isn't a crisis because in the meantime we will be fine so long as the North Sea doesn't wind down too quickly. At the moment we are only narrowly net importers of fossil fuels. The absolute worst policy for energy independence would be to place a windfall tax on profits from the North Sea. Exactly what Gordon Brown has done, the swine.

Those who want to argue for curbing emissions are disingenuous to fall back on illusory peripheral benefits like energy security. Doing so is a sign of intellectual, if not political, desperation.

Benedict Rogers On Pakistan

Over the weekend Benedict Rogers, of Christian Solidarity and the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission wrote a strong piece for ConservativeHome’s Platform arguing that more needs to be done to protect Pakistan’s Christian population. They certainly face very severe abuse and as a minority religious population in an increasingly radicalised Muslim country their position is clearly a risky one. However, I disagree with Rogers on his portrayal of the political realities in wider Pakistan.

He paints the Christian community’s problems as being very much a choice made by Musharraf. In particular he approvingly quotes Zahid Hussain saying “Pakistan’s failure to curb extremism owed less to the difficulty of implementing reforms than to the administration’s own unwillingness.” If the abuse of the Christian community were the only challenge facing the military leadership this might be an accurate description. At the moment Pakistan’s leadership faces a significantly more varied and large scale set of problems.

There is a touch of unreality in covering the troubles in the border provinces purely in terms of the abuse of and threat to the Christian community. Moderate Muslims are facing serious threats of death and actual abuse in what Gideon Rachmann, Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Financial Times, termed the “Talibanisation” of Pakistan. The border regions have always been somewhat lawless and that makes cracking down on radicalisation easier said than done. This isn’t Britain, or even China; the state’s writ has a distinctly limited authority.

Equally, there are direct threats to the regime’s stability in the cities. In Karachi there has been rioting connected to the Chief Justice’s challenge to Musharraf and his nationwide tour publicising that opposition. In Islamabad there has been Islamist rioting centred around the university. For a regime that can’t take its own existence for granted this is a very alarming development.

While I would on no account want to diminish the sufferings Rogers discusses they only involve a handful of people so far, albeit with a threat to many more, and things could get far worse. The one policeman Rogers describes being sent to defend a church under threat of attack from radicals may have been an insult, how can one man defend a church?

However, on the other hand it could be that he’s fulfilling a similar role to that played by US troops in South Korea. Should radicals assault the church he might stand up to them, they might have to kill him and they might face retribution for that infringement from the state. Were Pakistan to collapse in violent revolution that credible threat of sanctions to abusing the Christian minority would disappear. Then the scale of the horrors facing that community might become radically worse.

As such, it is very much in the interests of Pakistan’s Christian community that the military leadership use their limited resources to ensure stability. Pakistan could collapse in revolution if the military gets things wrong, if troops refuse to crackdown on fellow Pakistanis in the event of renewed riots. A Pakistani I’ve spoken to reckons this is unlikely to happen as the military can try the Roman trick of sending troops from different ethnic communities to enforce their will upon the others. However, it is enough of a possibility to be worrying and if things look bad another general could panic and split the military’s support for Musharraf.

Pakistan needs stability in order to make a steady transition towards democracy. Reform through a violent change would lead to a fragile democracy or, worse, the rise of a Khomeini like figure and a radical regime. In the transition the Christian minority might face an awful fate.

Rogers is right to highlight the abuse and danger the Christian community in Pakistan is facing. Pressure should be put on the Pakistani authorities to do more if they can. However, we should understand the very real hazards the Pakistani regime faces and the costs that all would pay in the event of a collapse.

Gore or the Unabomber?

Test your ability to differentiate between the rhetoric of environmental messiah, former Vice-President Al Gore and anti-technology terrorist the Unabomber with this easy quiz.

David B Smith on Regional Fiscal Inequalities

My previous post on the politics of regional fiscal imbalances didn't do enough to explain the harms that those imbalances cause. Vino challenged me to explain what was wrong with the North, which is poorer, getting more state money. Fortunately, David B Smith's paper "Does Britain have Regional Justice, or Injustice, in its Government Spending and Taxation" (PDF) for the Economic Research Council's Spring 2007 Britain and Overseas does an excellent job of explaining both the degree of fiscal transfers between regions and the, very real, harms they create. The paper is well worth reading for yourself but I'll give a quick summary.

Even after correcting for living costs the other regions are substantially poorer than the Greater South East. After adjusting for prices London is still 42% richer than the North East.

Using regional spending figures from the Public Expenditure Spending Analyses Smith works out the degree of socialisation of each region, the share of its economy that is made up of state spending. With this analysis it emerges that the South East, if independent, would have the second lowest level of government spending in the OECD, after South Korea, at 31.3%. By contrast, in the North the level is 58%. That is uncomfortably close to the 75% of the Soviet economy that the state was thought to actually control thanks to the black market.

Smith points out the questions this raises about how we need to understand the Northern economy:

"Many academic economists spend a lot of time analysing the consequences of ‘market failure’ in the private sector. However, no more than the remnants of a market economy now survive in many parts of the British Isles. Irrespective of whether one regards this as a good or bad thing, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that ‘government failure’ could now be a more important source of the problems facing certain UK regions than any failure in the private market sector."

Smith presents three key harms that emerge from an economy dominated by the state, even if that state is paid for by someone else:

First, it encourages people to seek an income through political activism or state dependency instead of through earning a living in the marketplace. This is similar to the Bauer analysis of the harms of foreign aid to developing countries. Effort is redirected away from the productive economy.

Smith also describes this in terms reminiscent of Baumol's argument that a free-market economy is successful because it directs entrepreneurs towards productive activity. Smith describes the rise in Northern political entrepreneurship in place of market entrepreneurship since the North's industrial heyday:

There is also the interesting phenomenon that high government spending regions, such as Scotland, Wales and the North-East, seem to produce large numbers of political entrepreneurs, who live off and lobby for a large state, but few of the traditional wealth creating kind these days – compare and contrast the careers of James Watt and Gordon Brown, or George Stephenson and Alan Milburn, for example."

Smith also links this to the finding, in psychology, that welfare dependency can encourage the pursuit of instant gratification. This can explain the huge levels of drug and alcohol abuse of those on benefits. There are serious social harms to depedency on the scale seen in the North.

Second, regional income inequalities mean that other state policies such as the minimum wage do far more damage to employment in the North than the South as they translate into far higher levels of income. Benefits set on a single level throughout the UK are also a far better alternative to work in the North. This kind of affect has been seen in the poor regions of other countries with severe income inequalities such as East Germany or the Italian Mezzorgiorno.

Finally, public sector employment is an attractive alternative to work in the private sector. With the massive piles of cash provided by the Southern subsidy to play with the state can attract the best people away from cash-strapped Northern employers. This is a very direct crowding out effect.

The costs to the South of paying 8% of its GDP to the rest of the country are obvious. That money, if given back to its people, could make the South a remarkably wealthy place. The South East of England, with levels of taxation at the low end of Eastern European levels, would be a fearsomely competitive economy. To pay this opportunity cost and do serious harm to the North is pretty tragic. David B Smith's paper, by breaking down the effects of the state in different parts of the country, makes an invaluable contribution to understanding the harm that the British state does to our country as a whole.

Does Patricia Hewitt actually know anything?

The following quote is from oral evidence to the House of Commons Health Committee. The report is a huge 373 page document so I think people might have missed it. Here is the person theoretically in charge of the National Health Service, Patricia "goldfish brain" Hewitt, without basic knowledge of hospital building in recent decades:

"Q353 Mr Campbell: Just a couple of questions on PFI. You said that the greater levels of local initiatives and autonomy should be brought into the health service. How does that square with the large increase in PFI programmes when you have got the hospitals being built by these private companies who are nearly running everything, of course?

Ms Hewitt: The PFI programme, of course, was our response to the fact that there had not been a new hospital built in England for longer than any of us, I think, can remember—there simply had not been any—and large parts of the NHS were working in pre NHS hospitals, rather too many of them nineteenth century never mind twentieth century, and PFI has enabled us to make an enormous difference in terms both of refurbishing and modernising or commissioning entirely new hospitals, and we are seeing those new hospitals opening around the country—University College Hospital in London being the nearest one—but that, I think, is really helping to improve the quality of care that the NHS can give patients. Of course, those PFI projects are not imposed by the Department on local health communities. They are generally led by local hospitals who are desperate to rebuild their premises and improve their services, sometimes re-organise services maybe across several sites. They are the ones champing at the bit, if you like, for PFI. We have to make sure, as we do in every case, that there is real value for money and that the health community as a whole locally can afford what the hospital itself wants to build.

[...]

No.Q364 Anne Milton: Can I correct you on the number of hospitals that have been built. There have been some built under the previous government. Chelsea & Westminster, Princess Royal, there are about 50; it was not none.

Ms Hewitt: Right. Thank you.”

Technical Difficulties

I'm afraid my home phone line has been down for the last couple of days and will remain down till Friday. It has taken my broadband connection with it. As such, this blog is unlikely to get any posts till then. Apologies.

More Monbiot Madness

Monbiot's latest brain rot avoids any of the interesting questions in the global warming debate: to what extent is the human contribution or natural cycles the dominant cause? This determines the extent to which emission curbs policy can be effective. What will be the scale of global warming and its economic impacts? This is important to the question of the costs we should be prepared to pay to avert global warming.

Instead he continues his campaign to smear those who disagree with him.

You can tell them that almost all climate scientists believe it is taking place. But climate scientists are part of the conspiracy. You can explain that almost all peer-reviewed scientific papers on the subject accept it. But how does that help if they believe the Daily Mail is the font of all wisdom? You can point out that the effort to dissuade people that climate change is real has been sponsored by fossil fuel companies. In response - and in marvellous contradiction of their professed suspicion of scientists - they then point to the handful of climatologists who have not been sponsored by the oil industry who say that it isn't happening. You can argue that they are cherry-picking their experts and their data, but unless they have an understanding of the scientific process, they don't see what's wrong with that.

You know what he hasn't done there? Made a single non-spurious argument.

He's argued from authority and majority. I.e. we've got more professors than you. That's a recipe for writing off all minority opinions and killing science.

He's made a clumsy ad hominem. Being funded by oil companies doesn't make a person wrong. It is just as easy to attack the motives of people of Monbiot-like opinions whose careers are dependent upon the fear of global warming to justify research grants and newspaper columns.

Only one actual argument gets cited in the entire piece:

"At my talk last night, a man in the audience informed me that a belief in climate change is a religion, and that I am its Billy Graham. He pointed out that temperatures on Mars have risen: could that be because of all the people driving their SUVs there? Well full marks for originality: I haven't heard that one more than 100 times since the Martian data was published. But instead of trying to argue with him, this time I asked a question: what would it take to convince you that manmade climate change is taking place?

"Nothing", he said. "The climate has always changed. This is just another natural cycle."

"So even if every scientist of every kind and every persuasion agreed that manmade climate change is happening, you would still place your own opinion above theirs?"

"Yes."

This, I suspect, must now be the position of most of those who still deny that man-made climate change is happening: that there is nothing - no evidence, however compelling, no scientific consensus, however robust - that could persuade them of the opposite case. Could there be a better definition of religion?"

Monbiot doesn't offer any evidence as to why it isn't another natural cycle or the Martian data isn't important. He asks his questioner whether "if every scientist of every kind and every persuasion agreed that manmade climate change is happening" that would change his mind but doesn't mention whether there has been any change in the quality of the evidence for global warming. Again instead of deploying evidence Monbiot returns to telling his global warning denier he is in a minority and posing the counterfactual of his being in a smaller minority.

Monbiot doesn't seem to understand the term religion, at best he's talking about faith. However, his argumentative style, relying upon majority support and personal authority instead of evidence is reminiscent of religion at its least rational.

Frum on Mao

Frum reviews and defends Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's book on Mao. He is right to celebrate what is a massively important study. Without Chang and Halliday's painstaking research, and with so much evidence lost and those with first hand experience of Mao's crimes getting older day by day, the legends he created around his life might have been allowed to stand as history.

We might have forgotten the extent of Mao's crimes. A hideously effective, although now being slowly reversed, attack on the decency, history and people of the world's most populous nation. Many Western intellectuals, such as Nicholas Kristoff who Frum brilliantly skewers as practicing the "well Hitler did build the autobahn" approach to history, have given Mao far too easy a ride.

Praguetory on the DTI

The blogger Ghost Cabinet is a thoroughly good idea. Encouraging more policy debate in the blogosphere is a fine thing. In that spirit, here's a, hopefully constructive, response to Praguetory's piece on the DTI:

"The DTI manages government assets of £10 billion and performs sundry other tasks with 10,000 staff on a budget of £6 billion per annum. It is a department in crisis. In a classic sign of an uncertain organization the DTI recently conjured up the following statement of purpose."

That spending figure is actually a little out of date. It's the number that was bandied around a little while ago but this year the DTI spent £6,899,000,000 according to the Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses.

"“Working to create the conditions for business success and help the UK respond to the challenge of globalisation”.

Are they succeeding? Firstly, let’s measure business success by considering movements in the value of companies. Between May 1992 and 1997 the FTSE 100 index rose by 92% to 4500 when Labour took over. If Labour had managed to maintain that rate of growth the FTSE would stand at 16,532 today. It is 60% lower at around 6,600. So that’s a big black mark."

That's a little unfair. The DTI is only one government department with a very limited capacity to create a framework for business success. It has little control over regulation and none over corporate taxation. Also, FTSE performance is a pretty imprecise measure of corporate success.

"To measure how the UK is responding to the challenge of globalization we should examine the UK’s relative competitiveness. The World Competitiveness Yearbook shows that the UK has slipped from ninth place in 1997 to 21st in 2006. The World Economic Forum also compiles a global competitiveness league table. In 1997 we were 4th since which time we have dropped to 10th."

This is a better measure of the DTI's failure.

"In their latest report, an inadequately educated workforce was cited as the most problematic factor of doing business in the UK. Another major weakness is the inefficiency of the UK’s tax system. We were ranked 67th. Britain came 51st for its burden of government regulation down from 13th in 1997 and we dropped from 11th to 26th on bureaucracy. In sum, UK plc is not responding well to the “challenge of globalisation” either."

The DTI has very little power to affect most of these issues. The Department for Education and Skills is responsible for education. The Treasury controls the tax system. Regulation and bureaucracy is created by all government departments (a lot of regulation comes from the EU of course). This should highlight that the problem is less that the DTI is making poor decisions and more that it has no ability to put in place the policies that might improve the lot of business.

"It is hard to understand how bureaucracy and regulation could become so much more damaging over such a short period until we observe that Labour have brought in 15 new regulations every working day since taking office."

Doing something to curb this constant drive to regulate should be the key task for any reformed DTI that actually seeks to make government less of a hindrance to business.

"A Strong Voice For Business"

Praguetory doesn't offer any particular proposals for change. However, the best idea I've had would be to establish a new Regulatory Audit Office with a similar mandate to the, excellent if sometimes overly diplomatic, National Audit Office. While the National Audit Office attempts to highlight waste a Regulatory Audit Office might do the same for regulation that is counterproductive or harmful to business. It might highlight profitable areas of regulation to repeal or reform. Politicians would quickly become aware that new regulation faced increased scrutiny and might be more careful about the impact of its plans.

Of course, regulation emerging from the EU would be harder to tackle, we have a limited say over EU legislation. However, it would still be a fine thing to provide our government with detailed analysis of harmful regulation to present to other EU states and the Commission in negotiations.

I'm pretty sure that the National Audit Office is pretty inexpensive so a new Regulatory Audit Office would cost a tiny fraction of the amount the DTI comes to. It wouldn't tackle other business concerns like poor education or corporate taxation but I'd be wary of a generalised 'voice for business' that might just become one more PR machine. Instead, focus on the one issue that really requires both investigative resources and constant vigilance, an issue where a decent internal but independent auditor could really become influential and help government form policy more effectively. The cost of regulation. Let outside lobby groups provide a voice for business on issues like corporate taxation.

Teaching History to Boys

Fred Thompson and Ross Douthat make a sensible point I've heard before, and set as a motion for a debating competition. There isn't enough teaching of military history:

"I agree with the general point of Fred Thompson's defense of teaching military history, and the old Victor Davis Hanson column that he draws on, though I share some of the caveats expressed here. The best reason to teach military history, to my mind, isn't that the Battle of Gettysburg is necessarily more important than half a dozen other topics a student might study, but that it's more interesting, offering an exciting gateway - particularly for boys, whose progress through our educational system leaves a lot to be desired these days - into a subject that can easily become dry as dust. Plenty of people, myself included, have gone on to be interested in the Missouri Compromise, the tariff controversy, and Reconstruction because they first thrilled to accounts of heroism and cowardice, genius and incompetence, at Little Round Top and Marye's Heights and Lookout Mountain. I'm willing to bet the progression rarely happens in the opposite direction."

Education is dominated by left-libertarian academics who think that history's purpose is to 'understand people' rather than tell extravagant tales about ancient massacres. This means that even study about the Second World War becomes all about the Home Front. There's room for a lot of variety in such a varied subject and the basic skills can definitely be picked up through looking at battles, generals and the like. The focus on soft, emotion centred, subjects has turned boys off history. I read military history in my childhood and it seems highly plausible it played a substantial part in leading me to more general historical study. A serious attachment to military history is something that most young men should grow out of quite healthily but the phase is an important one.

While we're at it. The two Shakespeare plays I was introduced to most frequently in my education were Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Neither has the Henry V quality that I think might appeal more to the young male juvenile mind.

I'm not in favour of lowering standards to keep children interested. However, I don't think it is really credible to argue that teaching military history or Shakespeare's histories necessarily imply a lowering of standards.

Finally a green article that isn't hysterical

If every green article were like this one from the Scotsman the green debate would be so much less infuriating. It manages to combine a non-hysterical account of expected harms from global warming with an acknowledgement of benefits. It then moves on to a discussion of how we might go about adapting (or in this case helping species adapt) to the changes global warming will bring.

As an alternative to the apocalyptic scare story chosen from the absolute extreme end of the futures envisioned by the scientific community, completely ignoring possible benefits and making a lame case for global socialism it's a real breath of fresh air. Brilliant and far more persuasive.

Tranzi Watch: Save the children by paying all of Africa's medical bills...

This is truly spectacular, tranziism in its postnational incarnation:

"LONDON (Reuters) - Gordon Browns across Britain are calling for leaders of rich nations to help African countries abolish healthcare fees when the G8 meets in Germany next month.

In a publicity stunt, charity Save the Children has dispatched a car to travel round the country and find 840 people with the same name as the next prime minister.

Save the Children is campaigning for the G8 to pay for the abolition of healthcare fees in Africa and hopes by getting all the Gordon Browns in Britain to sign up, it might influence the Brown in government."

Brilliant, let's reinforce in African leaders minds that their budget is purely there for the purpose of enslaving or massacring their people. Replicate the dependency of poor regions in rich countries on an international scale. Create yet more corruption that ruins the chances of poor nations building decent states.

I'm not saying there's necessarily no role for international aid. Clearly at times, during disasters in particular, considerations about incentives and corruption need to go out of the window. However, institutionalising global healthcare provision is a dismal idea.

Gideon Rachman on Pakistan

The title for Gideon Rachman's piece on Pakistan "The Talibanisation of Pakistan" isn't quite right. He's actually talking about the Talibanisation of border regions at the moment. That doesn't make the evidence any less alarming.

"Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's north-west frontier province, is a depressing place to visit at the moment. Islamic militancy and violence are spilling over the border from Afghanistan. Suicide bombings used to be unknown in Peshawar. But there have been 16 since September. A bombing in January killed the local police chief, who had been cracking down on militants. Another bombing last week blew up a local hotel and killed about 24 people. This is following the pattern of Afghanistan itself. Suicide bombings did not happen there until 2005. Now they are a deadly, weekly occurrence in Afghanistan, and have spilled across the border into Pakistan.

The phrase "climate of fear" is a cliche. But it is an accurate description of the current mood in Peshawar. The American consultate - the last major western diplomatic representation in the city - is surrounded by Green-Zone style fortifications. Moderate Muslims are intimidated. Threats have been made to shops selling CDs, barbers who have the temerity to cut mens' beards and to girls' schools.

The threat of a "Talibanisation" of Pakistan is by no means confined to Peshawar. There is currently a dangerous stand-off in Islamabad, where a radical mosque - associated with suicide bombers - has kidnapped some policemen. And things are much worse in the wilder fringes of the country. Last week I met local journalists who said that it is now just too dangerous for them to travel freely in the tribal regions like Waziristan. This too is a relatively new development. The reporters who I spoke to say that as recently as last year they were prepared to risk it.

One of the sadder aspects of the whole situation is the extent to which the moderate majority are intimidated by the threat of militant violence. In Peshawar last Friday I went to a seminar on American foreign policy, at the local university. As one might have anticipated the criticism was pretty strong. But, beneath the surface, there was also clearly many students who are very frightened by their local militants. (In the audience, I would say there were about 30 female students - two were unveiled. Of the rest, about half wore a hijab - a veil covering their hair, and the other half had the niqab - a full-face covering, leaving just a space for the eyes.) After the seminar one of the students came up to me and said: "I'm a moderate. I don't have a beard. But if things go on like this in Peshawar, my family could end up being driven out or killed.""

His concludes by responding to some Pakistanis who blame the US for this process, for funding the Afghan rebels against the old Soviet Pakistan. I think he's right to note that Pakistan bears just about as much responsibility as its Inter Service Intelligence agency played a critical role in their rise to power. More than that, I don't think that the old Muhajideen that the US funded were quite as radical as the Taliban, they were predominantely the old guard that the Taliban pushed out.

I also don't think he does enough to point out that the problem of extremism in Pakistan shouldn't be solely explained as an import from Afghanistan. Pakistan has its own problems with religious extremism that emerge from a dysfunctional politics and a state founded in religious identity.

The Political Economy of Fiscal Transfers

Wat Tyler examines fiscal transfers. Using numbers for regional taxation estimated by David B Smith Tyler reckons that the South East is transferring about 8% of its GVA north each year. He then posits that this is some form of electoral bribe by the Labour party. It's a fun argument but I'm not sure that logic can hold.

If you're the Labour party facing a first past the post election system your objective isn't just to amass a massive total of votes at each election, it is to win a majority of seats. That requires some kind of dispersal of votes over a variety of seats. Given that Labour has a massive surplus of votes in many Northern seats and the major electoral battleground is the South of England Labour is either very clumsy in its bribing or it puts in place a regional subsidy for other reasons. Equally, if this was just a bribe to the electorate by the Labour party wouldn't we expect to see more of an attempt to end the subsidy during Conservative governments?

The subsidy won't have existed before the twentieth century as the North-South divide is a creation of twentieth century industrial decline. As the twentieth was a Conservative century can we really explain enduring patterns in public spending purely in terms of Labour electoral advantage?

I would think the problem is most likely a result of a poorly thought out, ad hoc, initial response to industrial decline which became entrenched through chronic path dependencies. At first politicians just couldn't face trying to sell the idea that the North needed private sector recovery and would have to accept a decline in traditional industries, migration to the south and some degree of impoverishment (which would provide the incentive to new industries and migration south) for a time.

However, the spending designed to prevent this hardship, while it masked the problems for a while, made the root cause, the moribund Northern private sector, worse. As the Northern economy fell further behind that of the South it became less and less practicable to reduce the fiscal subsidy being sent north. After all, if public spending were cut from the North now it would have extremely low incomes as private sector activity is very low indeed. A vicious circle.

Gracchi on Pakistan

Gracchi appears to have built a rather elegant house of cards in his analysis, on Bits of News, of US aid to Pakistan. He first points to the fact that much US military aid to Pakistan since 9/11 has been used to strengthen its armoury to confront India rather than to bolster its fight against our common enemy in the Taleban. This is undoubtedly true but, as Gracchi notes, is not a critical objection in itself.

With military aid to any ally there will be a certain amount of leakage to that ally's other objectives. Britain was undoubtedly a very good ally for the US during the Second World War. However, clearly we did at times direct US help towards safeguarding our remaining imperial objectives which distracted, at least a little, from the fight the US was interested in: beating Germany and Japan. That was despite Britain and the US both having rather similar interests in most respects. Winning the Second World War was a priority for both.

In a state with radically different interests that effect is bound to be magnified. Clamping down on the Taleban is something in which Pakistan has only a marginal interest. Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence agency was involved in creating the Taleban in order to stabilise their Afghan border.

I'm not implying that Pakistan is still loyal to the Taleban. I'm pretty certain the military at least see the danger in a revolutionary Islamic state next door. However, clearly in a list of Musharraf's priorities fighting the Taleban is much lower down the list than in the list of our priorities for Musharraf's attention.

As such, we're 'paying' Musharraf to do what we want. If we were to pay him entirely in the tools to do the job we want him to do why would he bother?

Gracchi's objection to this is that it alters the balance of power against a democratic state in favour of a military dictatorship. What he's missed is that this balance of power is far from delicate. No amount of US military aid is going to give Pakistan a realistic chance of winning a war with India. Even leaving aside nuclear weapons India just has too many people and too much economic power. It will always win a war with Pakistan.

Pakistan's strategy has been to create as powerful a military as it can, and develop nuclear weapons, in order to increase the costs of an Indian attack so that India cannot use a credible military response to strengthen its hand in negotiations over issues like Kashmir. The balance of power in this region isn't going to change if Pakistan is sold a few more jets or artillery pieces. At the very worst we might make Pakistan a little more intransigent over Kashmir. Given that pretty reasonable progress is being made on that issue at the moment I wouldn't worry too much.

The only real danger is Indian hurt feelings but given that Bush has signed a deal to break the Non-Proliferation Treaty in order to provide them with nuclear energy technology I wouldn't let fears of Indian resentment keep you up at night.

Sarko starts well

Mr. Eugenides sounded an important note of caution about Sarkozy when he was first elected. There is an unpleasant mercantilist strain to Sarko that the British right should be cautious of.

That caution is still appropriate but so far things have gone well. His choice for foreign minister is a socialist but a Christopher Hitchens-like hawk. His first 100 days priorities are inspired. Tax cuts including the near abolition of inheritance tax and an end to the 35 hour week. He's even planning on putting limits on transport sector strikes.

At the same time Sweden is abolishing its wealth and property taxes over the next two years. The two countries the left has used as its poster children for so long seem to want the economic dynamism of the Anglo-Saxon economies. Of course, there are things these countries do well, Swedish school choice and French healthcare (less socialist than ours and better quality). However, the people of France and Sweden have clearly understood that more economically liberal states provide a prosperity that an overactive state cannot match.

Burning our Money on Secondary Moderns

The LSE Library is, indeed, excellent. Wat Tyler has been searching through it for evidence on just why Secondary Moderns went as wrong as they did. What he has uncovered is that they were very poorly funded. If a grammar school system were to be revived today it seems unlikely that particular mistake would be repeated and that does suggest Secondary Moderns might fulfill their proper function. They might really prepare less academic students for practical careers.

I have a lot of conversations with a teacher friend in a hard, comprehensive, school. Those conversations confirm what we've read in Frank Chalk's book. That many children and parents utterly resent the education their children are expected to undertake. They resent it so much that they destroy teacher morale and the possibility of other children learning and waste vast amounts of expensive time in education.

Even those children for whom a higher education is probably not appropriate do need some academic training. They need to learn how to read and write at a basic level. They need to become somewhat numerate to function in the modern world. However, attempting to focus almost all of their attention on academic study for most of their youth is too much. Asked to study all day they become easily distracted and restless. If they were to spend most of their time acquiring practical skills they might be not only better engaged with their education in general but actually pay attention in the smaller periods they are required to study academic subjects. We would increase the productivity of their academic education by reducing the time spent on it. This effect could easily be sufficient to create a net improvement in the academic standards of the worst off at the same time as increasing their training in practical skills.

If the benefits of education become less esoteric parents might do more to help schools out. A parent from a non-academic background is unlikely to have much time for formal academic education but most have direct experience of the importance of having, or not having, skills. If this caused parents to become more supportive of education it could have a transformative effect on educational outcomes among the worst off. It also explains how secondary moderns might come to exist, with equal funding unlike in the old days, under a framework of parental choice.

Now, the case for allowing separate schools rather than streaming: It would seem that in a single school academic achievement will always push out practical skills as the main objective. Academic skills are the hallmark of the higher social strata in wider society. That means that the leadership both within a mixed ability school and the political leadership will be biased towards placing a higher value on academic achievement. It was what got them where they are. This means that schools will be judged by the criteria of whether they succeed academically. Practical skills will not be given the attention they deserve. A separate school might allow those teachers and pupils who see great benefits in a practical education to develop their own sense of pride in practical achievements and not be seen through the prism of how well they do academically.

If right-wingers want to argue successfully for giving schools the freedom to select by academic ability they need to do more than cite the benefits of grammar schools for bright children. It seems probable that you can get most of the benefits ascribed to grammar schools if you just stream every subject. It is rather counterintuitive to argue that poor educational performance somehow leaks through the walls. Arguments for grammar schools also suffer in the face of the 'worst-off test' that is applied by the current Conservative front bench. Grammars might help a small number of bright poor people escape the fate they face at the moment but Cameron's challenge for an educational policy is that it attempt to serve the interests of all students.

Instead of making the case for grammar schools yet again the right need to start making the case for secondary moderns. These schools might properly focus students time on skills that will be of use to them in later life and develop their own sense of pride in the development of hardworking and productive young people. In one of reality TV's few redeeming moments this was what was seen when underperforming students were given the chance at an old secondary modern education. Choice in education could give that chance to a vast number of young people we are currently letting down.