An employment Huqabust?

Chris Dillow writes some really clever posts. He is one of the best UK bloggers of any type or ideological persuasion. Unfortunately, he has something of a penchant for pursuing arguments that he must know are decidedly silly. Elaborate houses of cards (like these).

Yesterday he gave us Konnie Huq's contribution to unemployment. As her pleasant appearance makes unemployment more enjoyable - "Why bother going out to work when you can stay home and look at her?" - she must have contributed to the social and economic costs attached to unemployment. This is the obviously silly bit in Chris's post. Despite her obvious charms no one is remaining unemployed in order to stay home and watch Konnie Huq.

So far, all good fun and I might sound like a bit of pedant to be writing about this at all. However, Chris argues there is a serious lesson to be learned from all this silliness:

"The point: does this seem absurd? It shouldn't. It's merely the logical consequence of the assumption that people on benefits could work if they want to. Perhaps it's this premise that's wonky."

That point doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. The reason why it seems absurd that Konnie Huq created unemployment is that it is not plausible that she made a concrete difference to the utility attached to remaining unemployed. Images of beautiful women, on a screen, are easy to come by. The absurdity of a Konnie Huq effect on the unemployment figures says nothing about the likely effects of a more credible alteration to the conditions attached to unemployment - a change in unemployment benefit rates, for example.

I don't think it is a wonky premise that some people on benefits could work if they wanted to. Particularly given the number of immigrants, even to poor areas of the country, demonstrating that it is possible to find work here. A lot of those immigrants are low skilled so are not taking jobs beyond the locals.

In the end, the premise Chris attacks as possibly wonky is just saying that the unemployed are responding to incentives like anyone else. If the benefits to entering work aren't sufficiently high relative to the benefits of staying in unemployment (and those benefits include leisure time) for some people then there is a good chance they won't try and get work. Others might not look as hard or accept less than ideal jobs. It's a very simple intuition that is also behind iniatives that I know Chris supports, like the Citizen's Basic Income.

N.B. I apologise for the title of this post. It is a reference to the term "Huckaboom" used to describe Mike Huckabee's meteoric rise in the American opinion polls a little while back.

The ongoing political saga of the three little pigs

Apparently the story of three little pigs is no longer acceptable. Having been slowly toned down over the years - the characters no longer eat each other - it has now fallen foul of some politically correct imperative to avoid any mention of pigs for fear of offending Muslims. A cartoon that attacks cowboy builders - The Three Little Cowboy Builders - was seen to "raise cultural issues", thanks to its portrayal of pigs, by Becta (the government's "educational technology agency" - whatever that is).

Bizarrely enough the story of the three little pigs has run into trouble with the PC-police before. The three little pigs were going to be recast as puppies for a school play in West Yorkshire before a councillor stepped in and restored sanity.

I'm pretty certain this is all utterly absurd. Muslims can't eat pork but there is no prohibition on pigs in the media. There is no suggestion that any Muslim has actually complained. Beyond that, Becta are clearly utter imbeciles as they assume the cartoon will offend builders - it won't. An attack on cowboy builders will be welcomed by the honest builders who lose business to the unscrupulous.

Despite the obvious silliness in this case it does illustrate a more serious issue. Attacks on free speech through the legal system, threats of violence (overt or implied) and hypersensitive protests at minor, perceived insults have a broad range of social effects. While we do need to be concerned that even the bravest - with something important to say - won't be able to speak their mind we should also be mindful of small concessions, some of them entirely irrational. Topics ruled out of bounds, self-censorship to be on the safe side. This isn't as dramatic and obviously important as the grand struggles over Salman Rushdie's book or the Danish Cartoons but it does matter.

We don't want a society where people are too cautious about what they say. A vibrant culture is built upon expression that is free in spirit. Where spontaneous creativity is not subjected to a political filter.

That kind of freedom of expression is worth defending. It makes the world a brighter, more interesting place.

Aaronovitch on Craig Murray and Internet abuse

This article is pretty good. Aaronovitch has hit upon a far more sensible response to blogosphere taunts than getting in a tantrum and calling the lawyers:

"A few weeks ago someone sent me a link to the website belonging to Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. Last year I found myself debating against him at Trinity College, Dublin, on the Middle East. Though I didn't agree with him on much and wondered why he was wearing a kilt, I found him pleasant enough, especially when, afterwards, he rather disarmingly admitted that he didn't know a lot about Israel, about which he'd just been pontificating.

So to his site, where Mr Murray was highly critical of me being allowed by the BBC to interview Tony Blair last year on the basis that I was “a leading neocon, pro-war, pro-Zionist and anti-Muslim propagandist”. But if I was slightly saddened to see Mr Murray seduced by the adjectival Pavlovianism of the anti-war movement, I was staggered by what he said about me personally, describing me as “that sleazy fat neo-con slob Aaronovitch - someone should buy that man a picture for his attic”. Of course, I am too fat; “neocon” is the new all-purpose political accusation; though scrupulously clean, I occasionally underdress - and if Mr Murray feels so obviously superior in physical aesthetics, then I am sure The Times can provide the reader with photographs of us both to enable a comparison.

[...]

Now suppose, that I were to write an article for this paper in which I began by telling readers that Craig Murray was not just wrong and oddly ill-informed, but that he was also - let's say - a chinless, adulterous, anti-Semitic clown whose vanity and incontinence had led to him damaging those very causes that he claimed to care for so much. My editors wouldn't have stood for it, and the readers would have thought less of me for it. Yet in several of the more lionised and supposedly political websites that influence some of our journalists, this is exactly the level of debate. "

Update: What Gracchi said. Murray is clearly a complete fool making the kind of argument a complete fool should be expected to make.

Judicial Aristocracy

There are a great many topics I think about a lot that don't make it onto this blog. Judicial activism is one of those issues.

This article, an interview with Antonin Scalia, contains a brief version of a profound argument that continues ad nauseum in the United States:

"I am not happy about the intrusion of politics into the judicial appointment process in my country. But frankly, I prefer it to the alternative, which is government by judicial aristocracy."

This isn't a problem confined to the United States, though, and we need to take it more seriously. Douglas Carswell, in a chapter (PDF) from Direct Democracy, via Centre Right, sets out how judicial aristocracy in the UK has broken most of its reasonable limits in recent years.

I think that the basic cause of the problem is the cognitive bias created by a lawyer's career. They deal with individual cases and that encourages them to disregard broader social effects. When so focussed on an individual case it can seem brutal to think of the bigger picture. While many lawyers will accept that deterrence can be effective they will generally be more sceptical of its efficacy than the general population.

I think they're wrong. The evidence appears to be that deterrence is very effective. However, I don't want to predicate this post on that. It is quite possible that economists have a cognitive bias in the other direction. We see everything through the prism of data and tend to lose a lot of important detail in the aggregate. Beyond that, our subject works with incentives so we are predisposed to believe in their effectiveness. Given how hard it is to increase the probability of getting caught high sentences are the often most sensible public policy if you want to control crime.

This is one of those issues that we'll struggle to resolve rationally. The difference in views is rooted in the way in which economists and lawyers understand the world. Each group will sound unconvincing to the other. The lawyers will hear unrealistic generalisation and the economists will hear mushy anecdote when listening to their opposite numbers.

Now, both lawyers and economists have a host of rational and emotional arguments to support their case. The proper way, in a democracy, to resolve the question is to put it to the public. The problem is that the legal community maintains an entirely unnaccountable power through the judiciary.

The right can win the debate over law and order but it will be frustrated by the judiciary. The judicial aristocracy's distortion of the democratic decision is then exacerbated as their resistance often has the added effect of making deterrence-boosting legislation itself appear ineffective.

I don't have any policy solutions in mind. Ending the independence of the judiciary is a big step. That's why I don't write on the subject very often. However, the problem of the judicial aristocracy is a serious one that the right should be thinking very seriously about.

McCain's TV style

If there is one thing I'd expect an American politician to be good at it is coming across well on TV. It is a pretty basic competence and their politics is supposed to be more professional. However, I can't imagine any British politician being this bad:



There are two options on TV:

1) Stare down the camera. This is generally done when you're being interviewed remotely - "from our Westminster studio" - and you must on no account ever look away. If you look away even for an instant then you look shifty.

It's difficult. The questions will often be coming to you from a speaker to the side and the temptation to look at your questioner is a powerful natural reflex you've got to completely kill.

2) Look at whoever you're speaking to. Let the camera be a fly on the wall watching you give a speech to ordinary people. Don't look down the camera or you'll break the illusion of reality.

Either option works, neither is 'right', but you can't fudge the issue. The half way house McCain occupies in this speech makes him look shifty, nervous and amateurish.

Facebook can take their Bear Balloon and shove it!

I wouldn't normally write a blog about Facebook. Having seen a book about Facebook in WH Smiths while on my way back to Letchworth for the weekend I've become convinced the whole affair is a horrible cliché. Writing about it or otherwise making it out to be somehow important or profound is silly. The Facebook industry exploits poor, deluded and normally middle-aged people who buy into the idea their social life can be improved with better IT skills. The opposite is true.

However, my Facebook-blog embargo has to be broken thanks to the social milestone that is the $1 Bear Balloon. You see, a Bear Balloon is clearly just a regular balloon with ears attached. Balloons are cheap. I'm convinced you could buy one for less than a dollar. Particularly if you were willing to bulk buy.

That means that the imitation has become more valuable than the actual product. Not only are people willing to pay for an entirely imaginary product - they're willing to pay more!

The kind of virtualised life that William Gibson imagined a few years ago has existed at the fringes for a while - Second Life and online games - now it is reaching the mainstream. Soon we'll all be buying virtual tickets to virtual plays with virtual props bought from virtual designers. It's weird. I think the Bear Balloon is a vital step on the path to such a weird future.

While I'm breaking my Facebook-blog embargo, I think you can divide the Facebook community into the old guard and Facebook-proles. Facebook-proles can be identified by their "(no network)" tag, the old guard have a university network. The Facebook-proles brought with them all of the paraphenalia that they loved on MySpace.com - weird little games, the ability to bite people as a zombie and a host of other distractions from real life. Ironically, many of the Facebook-proles are middle-aged, middle class people. They're so obviously jumping on the bandwagon. They're not cool. If you're a Facebook-prole then feel ashamed!

Some rather weak responses to the TPA report on NHS performance

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog

Here at the TaxPayers' Alliance we're used to rather unconvincing government responses to our reports. Tessa Jowell produced the memorably meaningless argument that it "is a mistake to view 2012 as a cost, rather than an investment" - as if investments don't have costs. The DFID managed to completely contradict their own press release in a response to our study on hate education in the Palestinian Territories.

Today we've had some equally lackluster responses to our study Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981.

The King's Fund, quoted in the Guardian, were good enough to acknowledge that our basic methodological approach is valid. Unfortunately, they then tried to diminish the conclusions of our study by placing them in a completely inappropriate context.

Even if the statistic that total mortality is between 750,000 and 1,000,000 is accurate that isn't the correct number to compare with our estimate of 17,000 deaths from poor NHS performance. Most deaths occur either from a condition, or at an age, that they should not be considered amenable to healthcare and therefore have a limited part to play in any discussion of the ability of the NHS to save lives.

The proper comparison is with total amenable mortality and that comparison is contained in our study. As the Times noted "mortality from [amenable] conditions is 26.9 per cent higher in the UK than the average in the four European countries, and 48.6 per cent higher than in France, the best-performing country." This is a very significant difference. We only cited the number of lives lost more prominently as we didn't want the human tragedy to be lost in a fog of more esoteric statistics.

If the King's Fund don't think that 17,000 deaths is a high number then why do we concern ourselves with deaths on the road or deaths related to alcohol? Neither are nearly as lethal as poor NHS performance.

Health Minister Ben Bradshaw responds for the Government with a quote in the Guardian. First, he said that the gap between EU peers and the UK has been narrowing. That was clearly acknowledged in our study. However, it has been narrowing at pretty much exactly the same slow pace since 1981 despite a huge cash injection since 1999. There are probably several trends underlying that pattern, technological change that erodes established advantages is probably particularly important. There is a lot of analysis of the trend in our report but, suffice it to say, Bradshaw has to explain how exactly his government has spent so much more, £34 billion, and got exactly the same results.

He follows that with a meaningless ad hominem. Hopefully Guardian readers will be open minded enough to know that calling someone "rightwing" is a poor substitute for being able to point out how they are wrong.

Finally he accuses us of admitting that our figures are "more than three years out of date". We did no such thing. The data used in our report is the very latest available mortality data. It describes deaths in 2004 for the simple reason that mortality statistics for more recent years just don't exist yet. 2004 isn't that long ago and is five years after the cash injection whose effects we wanted to study. Almost all statistical analyses have to look a certain distance into the past thanks to the time taken, by the relevant organisations, to produce the statistics that they analyse. If Ben Bradshaw isn't willing to accept any study that does so you have to wonder how he understands health policy at all.

A new TaxPayers' Alliance report - Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981

A report I have written, Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981, examining NHS performance and putting it in context with an examination of trends in Europe was released today. It has done rather well in the media and will hopefully provide a new clarity to the healthcare debate - illustrating both the huge stakes and the failure of recent strategy.

The empirical method used, mortality amenable to healthcare, was obviously inspired by Nolte & McKee's 2003 study of amenable mortality, which was cited in the Better Government position paper (PDF). However, the analysis was inspired by this graph, and others like it, from the Department of Health (PDF):



Look at the pattern for England compared to the EU-15. Premature mortality from circulatory diseases is definitely falling - and converging on the EU-15 average. But its been falling pretty steadily since the eighties. If you look at that graph its very hard to spot what has happened to massive additional spending since 1999.


Replacing this graph of one condition with no filtering for conditions amenable to healthcare with the aggregate mortality amenable to healthcare numbers in our study was an enormous empirical task. It required exporting the numbers for a given gender, in a given country, in a given year from the raw World Health Organisation database to a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet filtered for conditions amenable to healthcare and then turned those numbers into an age-standardised rate. This had to be done for each gender, each year and each country. It was a big process but it gave us an aggregate measure of healthcare progress in Britain and the European countries studied.

We could then look and find out two things. First, we could get an estimate of the human cost each year of the poor performance of the NHS. These are mortality rates and it is easy to lose sight of the fact that they represent a staggering number of lives lost. Innumerable tragedies, a significant number of which, over 17,000 by our estimate, could have been avoided if we matched the performance of European healthcare systems.

Second, we can see whether massive increases in funding post-1999 have had been effective. It appears they haven't. There is no discernable effect of the additional funding in the mortality numbers. If we want to get the kind of performance in healthcare that people in Europe expect and receive we need to learn lessons from how they organise healthcare: we need to decentralise, encourage competition and end political management.

Barry Sheerman's ironic accusations

Epolitix.com (via ConservativeHome) reports Barry Sheerman accusing David Cameron of turning the Commons into a brawling house:

"In an ePolitix.com podcast, the chairman of the education select committee said: "Can I just say, there was appalling behaviour by the leader of the Opposition today.

"He has been around in Parliament long enough to understand the rules of Parliament.

"He used the word 'you' shouting across the despatch box six times. He wasn't reprimanded by the Speaker, which I think was unfortunate.

"If someone is going to turn this place into a sort of brawling house, I am going to do anything I can as a senior member of Parliament to stop him."

Asked whether he would be seeking action on Cameron's interventions, Sheerman said: "He's got the behaviour of a hooligan in the chamber.

"As someone who wanted to get away from 'Punch and Judy', he is dragging the House of Commons down into a pit that I don't want to see it in."

What's brilliantly ironic is that this is the same Barry Sheerman who got in a drunken fight with Bob Marshall-Andrews, from the Times:

"Barry Sheerman, the senior Labour MP and chairman of the Commons Education Committee, happened upon the scene and attacked Mr Marshall-Andrews for talking to his “friends” in the Tory party. Mr Marshall-Andrews shouted back at him and suggested that Mr Sheerman might have taken drink.

At that point Jim Dowd, the pugnacious Labour MP for Lewisham West, arrived to begin haranguing Mr Marshall-Andrews, who insulted him and again implied that he was the worse for wear. It was too much for Mr Dowd, who grabbed his foe by the lapels and began pushing him across the lobby, finally pinning him against a wall.

Fortunately, the Labour whips’ office is in the opposite corner of the lobby and they were quickly alerted. Tom Watson, the genial and rotund junior whip, raced to the fracas and pulled Mr Dowd away from his adversary.

Other whips — known as the Westminster “thought police” — appeared swiftly to surround the combatants and defuse the situation,fearful that the real police might have to be called in. Mr Dowd retired from the area and Mr Marshall- Andrews went back to his Conservative “friends”.

Later, with tongue slightly in cheek, Mr Mitchell described it as an “unprovoked and unpleasant attack on a distinguished senior parliamentarian. It was mercifully defused with speed and efficiency by the government whips."

What a hooligan!

The DFID respond to the TPA study on Hate Education

Yesterday we released a report on how British taxpayers' money supports hate education in the Palestinian territories. The response from the Government is a little confused.

As I wrote on the TPA blog:

"Today our study on Hate Education in the Palestinian territories was reported in the Express. The report included a response from the Department for International Development:

"A spokesman for the Department for International Development said: “We don’t fund the Palestinian Authority directly and therefore don’t fund textbooks."

How strange, on the 11th of July last year they put out a press release titled:

"UK leads the way in resuming direct aid for Palestinian Authority"

The release continued:

"The UK has underlined its support for the Palestinian Authority with a contribution of £3 million to allow it to begin paying off its private sector debts, Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development, announced today.

A month after Hamas’ takeover of Gaza and the establishment of a new Government by President Mahmoud Abbas, today’s announcement makes the UK one of the first countries to resume direct financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority." [emphasis added]

Beyond that, the problem isn't just direct contributions, as the Express notes: "the TaxPayers’ Alliance said that, by funding worthwhile activities, Britain was freeing up funds which could be spent in more sinister areas."

Our report raises serious issues about how the UK contributes to the long-term prospects for an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict. It makes positive recommendations, modelled on longstanding practice in Northern Ireland, for how our aid money can encourage an end to radicalisation and hate education. The DFID should look at those recommendations instead of issuing nonsensical rebuttals."

"I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there."

There are some massive and flawed assumptions underlying Justin McKeating's angry post about those opposing opt-out organ donation. This section is a prime example:

"‘It strikes at our relationship with the state,’ they say. Well get this: You can’t have a relationship with the state when you’re dead. You can’t assert ownership over your own corpse. Why? Because. You. Are. Dead. What other freedoms would you like to exercise after you’ve shuffled off? I take it you’ll be putting your favourite songs on your iPod to take with you as well? It’ll be as much use to you as your liver."

You clearly can and do have a relationship with the state when you are dead. It doesn't take very long to think of some examples:

1. There is both a criminal penalty (I assume) and a massive social sanction to necrophilia.
2. People frequently refight criminal trials after the person convicted has died in order to establish their innocence.
3. A will has legal force.
4. Even under Brown's proposed reforms we will legally respect explicit opt-outs.

We clearly believe that people are entitled to maintain some kind of dignity after they have gone. This requires that we respect their wishes. Assuming that they would be okay with us removing their organs, rather than leaving them be if we don't know, is a fairly major change in how the state treats the dead. If you assume some kind of continuity between a dead person's identity and a live person's - which you should if you support the use of wills - then it most certainly does strike at our relationship with the state.

Balancing the dignity of the dead against the interests of the living is the philosophical question at the heart of any reasoned consideration of this problem. Plenty of people get very angry at the idea that their autonomy over the final fate of their bodies is being limited. Justin's rant isn't going to win them over. It isn't designed to. Those who die for lack of organs are never really used as anything but a rhetorical stick with which to beat assorted enemies.

Such a debate would look at alternatives like reforming how the health services treats grieving families. The Department of Health reckon they could increase organ donations by 50 per cent by better managing that process. That isn't enough but throw in some inventive new ways to get people to consent before death and I think you'd be fine. Beyond that, there's always commoditisation. Wat Tyler has more on the various alternatives to Brown's initiative.

I find the idea of an opt-out system for organ donation alarming for the same reason I found the idea - floated a while ago - that the HMRC should be able to take money straight out of our bank accounts alarming. It will mean that when inevitable screw-ups take place it will be far more likely that someone will wind up having their organs removed against their wishes. Bureaucratic procedure tends to err on the side of the default position; it seems almost certain that scandals thanks to overlooked opt-outs would become commonplace very quickly.

I don't actually feel outraged myself - I'm blessed with a rather moderate temperament - but I absolutely understand those who just feel very affronted at the idea anyone would presume consent to take their organs. As Justin says, even many of those who will quite happily take a donor card are angry at the presumption. Just the way plenty of people will give to charity but wouldn't like to find the RNLI lifting their wallet. Our bodies are our own, even after our death our wishes over how our corpses should be disposed of are quite rightly respected, and having them stolen grates even if it is for a good cause.

Canadian Heroics

This is the opening statement of Ezra Levant - brought up before the Albertan Human Rights Commission thought police - defending his decision, and freedom, to republish the Danish Cartoons. A real hero for our time.



There are more excellent videos on his website, from the actual interrogation, including his refusal to accept that his intentions should be a relevant matter, description of how these cases diminish journalistic expression and do more to contribute to racial animosity than the cartoons and finally how he refuses to answer to the state, rather than civil society, for his views.

You can donate, at his site, to support him in his struggle. A worthy cause.

Best of Blogpower 2007

There's an excellent set of self-nominated 'Best of 2007' blogs up at the Blogpower home. An excellent showcase of the variety the group has to offer. Go and take a look.

I nominated my post which set out, using some pretty simple statistics, why a clearly expensive survey by the British Council actually completely disproved the Tranzi line that we all need to think like 'global citizens' that they were trying to push.

The policy choices driving high oil and gas prices

Some excellent quotes highlighted by Tim Newman, from ExxonMobil President Rex Tillerson:

"High oil prices and perceptions of soaring industry profits have prompted many producing countries to give national oil companies more power to extract richer fiscal terms and greater control over resources, pushing out international players, Rex Tillerson, chief executive of US supermajor ExxonMobil, said.

Such policies will lead to tighter oil supplies as ExxonMobil and other majors stop deploying their technology, know-how and capital in some of those countries, he said.

“If there’s no room to share it then there is no role for us - it’s a simple as that,” he told business and political leaders at a meeting in Calgary, Reuters reported."

And:

"ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson, speaking in the wake of last week’s dire warnings from the International Energy Agency about unsustainable growth in energy use, sought to warn of the dangers of resource nationalism.

Talking about oil supply tightness, Tillerson told reporters during this week’s World Energy Congress in Rome that: “It’s not a resource problem. The world has plenty of oil.”

Instead, “it is an issue of whether or not the investment dollars, technology and the know-how to develop those resources in an efficient and reliable way…is going to be brought to bear on those resources”, he argued.

Tillerson talked about such nationalism as being counter-productive for the resource-rich countries where the people miss out on revenues and opportunities."

While Tillerson is talking about the really oil rich states very similar logic applies to the UK as well. Brown's response to rising oil prices was a big hike in taxation on North Sea oil. This will speed up the process of North Sea production winding down. This makes a small contribution to world supplies but makes our economy far more vulnerable to rising prices for oil and gas.

An unrelated, but fascinating, little fact in another post of Tim's:

"McDonalds is so highly thought of in Sakhalin that a few people we know there asked us to bring back a few McDonalds meals for them. At first I thought they were joking, but it turned out they genuinely wanted us to stick a load of McDonalds in the overhead locker for nine hours so they could reheat it and eat it on arrival. Madness."

Peter Hain and a house of cards

Should Peter Hain resign?

Well, it looks like he's broken the law. But, so did Wendy Alexander. If she didn't resign...

His failures can hardly be compared, in terms of the massive harm done, to the numerous failures at the Treasury. If Alistair Darling didn't resign...

There has to be a fear that if one of these people - or another Labour figure implicated in a new scandal - resigns the comparisons are going to become very uncomfortable. The house of cards will start to fall and the Government will be in an even deeper mess.

Tatchell vs. Nuclear Power

What Peter Tatchell has done in this article for Comment is Free is exploit Gordon Brown's turn of phrase. Of course, when Gordon Brown says "there is no alternative" to nuclear power that is just a lie. We could massacre nine out of every ten Britons, close off the country to immigration and our energy use would rapidly decline. We could give up on the whole idea of a modern economy and go live in the trees.


There are very few absolute, categorical musts in public policy. Although politicians and commentators prefer such statements - one example is the ludicrous and repeated statement that we just 'have' to recycle more - real life almost invariably requires balancing costs and benefits.


I'm pretty certain that what Brown really meant was that there is no alternative to nuclear power if you want to obtain serious cuts in carbon emissions without the economic costs being too high. This is a very plausible position and one that Tatchell's article does little to address. After all, it doesn't contain any numbers. None of his different measures comes with a price tag or a carbon emission saving attached.


The big difference between nuclear power and most renewable options is well summed up by this graph, via Wat Tyler:

That is why anyone serious about cutting carbon emissions - including, to his credit, the rather messianic originator of the Gaia theory James Lovelock - should think very seriously about nuclear power. It is, by a significant margin, the most economic low-carbon method for producing energy.

Nokia N95 8GB

Apologies for the lack of posts. Work has been pretty busy.

I've got a new phone. It's a Nokia N95 8GB. It's amazing.

The camera is 5MP which means huge amounts of detail and it focusses and shoots really quickly. It is good enough to handle just about any task that doesn't need an SLR.

I took this picture of Westminster Abbey while getting lunch:

The video camera's footage doesn't look like it was shot on a mobile phone. The frame rate is high (30 fps) and the detail is superb. The final footage looks like it comes from a reasonable dedicated digital camcorder.

It connects to the Internet both through its own 3G (or even 3.5G) connection and through a wireless network if there is one within range. I tried reading a few blogs and it is very usable thanks to a big, high-resolution screen.

With 8GB of memory you can store plenty of music and video. In fact, it comes preloaded with Spiderman 3. Having an entire movie on a phone is strange but could be pretty welcome on a long train journey. I think I'll fill it with South Park. It may also displace my iPod for the journey to work. The display quality is good enough to use its TV Out to watch a film or something you've recorded on the camcorder on a decent sized TV - which I did for a bit - and still have it look sharp.

It contains maps to, I think, the entire world - if not the entire world then most of the important bits - but also GPS. That allows you to give it two addresses and ask it to plot a route or one address and ask it to find you a way there. The very idea of sat nav in a phone seems insane. I tried it out and it followed me down Victoria Street pretty efficiently. It can also work out a route between my Hertfordshire and London homes with no trouble at all. I'll try more exotic journeys at some point.

It does have other features like the N-Gage gaming system but that doesn't particularly interest me. I haven't tried it out with e-mail yet but, to be honest, I'm not terribly interested in that either. I'm rarely away from my desk for too long at work so there isn't much need and it is nice to be disconnected sometimes. If you want to do a lot of e-mailing a Blackberry of some description is probably the best way forward.

The phone looks pretty good and the ability to slide the screen up and down to expose either the keypad or the media controls - and change the screen from portrait to landscape - is pretty cool. It's reasonably chunky though - you can't fit features like the ones on this phone in a RAZR.

The performance, which was apparently a problem on the earlier N95, is fine. The applications run pretty smoothly and you can flick around the various menus and applications reasonably freely without slowing it down.

A few days after getting it I'm still somewhat amazed at its features. When it effortlessly tapped into the TPA network; when it quickly found my position by satellite and when I saw the quality of the video it recorded I was stunned. Just a few short years ago carrying around five devices and a generator in a van couldn't get you these kinds of features at this kind of standard.

What a world.

Army advertising

Is accountancy fun? The Chairman of KPMG UK certainly makes it sound that way:

"I’ve been at KPMG for over 30 years and, broadly speaking, I’ve loved every, every minute of it. I think my experience, if I was to summarise it, is the sheer variety of experiences. I’ve had some wonderful clients, big clients, small clients, entrepreneurs, clients in trouble, clients doing extremely well. Every single size and shape, and in lots of different industries. I’ve had some wonderful people experiences. We’re a people organisation so there’s the sort of leadership and management challenges as you move up through the organisation, and I’ve had those challenges very early in my career and I’ve still got those challenges today."

On the other hand, this suggests it might be rather dull:



Neither account is exclusively accurate. It depends on who you are, the company or other organisation you join, when you join and innumerable other factors. You'll only really find out if it is for you after you've started - though you can get a pretty good idea before hand if you ask around. Is it some kind of unconscionable fraud that KPMG's chairman focusses on the positive? Of course not. It's staff advertising.

Yet, somehow when the Army - whose ability to recruit staff is a very public good - does the same, makes the positive case for a life in the Forces, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust decides (PDF) that is a great injustice. As Lawrence James points out, there is no shortage of voices telling a young person that life in the army will have its hard side. Movies about the horrors of war and a strong folk memory of the trenches that they are likely to have had reinforced in school, for example. There is no reason the Army should be expected to forgo advertising and suffer resulting shortages of personnel.

Being in the Forces can do wonderful things for a person. Had my grandfather not joined the Army - as a boy soldier no less - he would have been far worse off. I would probably be worse off. He had few skills having finished a misspent education at just fourteen. He could still have reached a respectable position but would probably not have had the opportunity that allowed him to progress to become an officer. Also, he would have missed out on the intangible benefits of a career that inculcated discipline and would not have had a quality, specially provided, education for his children. Without all those things it is quite possible my family would not have done nearly as well for themselves as they all have. There is nothing wrong with joining the Army and its recruiters should not feel guilty for trying to recruit the soldiers that do such an important service for their country.

It is necessarily harder to leave the Army than it is to leave many other careers after a certain point but the process is not instantaneous and a term of a few years is not forever. Of course, there are particular dangers but everyone knows that.

Some people may find that they do not enjoy the Army life, just as some people may discover that they hate accountancy. This isn't due to misleading recruitment ads but the fact that it is impossible to know what being a part of the Army is really like before you start. No matter how balanced the advertising that will always be the case.

The conclusion to Lawrence James' article sums up the study well:

"The trust’s report is as predictable as it is misjudged. An understanding of the values of the military world are absent, just as we would expect from a Quaker institution. One might as well ask a vegan to review the charcuteries of Paris."

Wars aren't short

Great article by Max Boot for the Wall Street Journal. He makes the very simple point that short and sharp wars are not the historical norm. He then sets out one interesting example of a long conflict, that between England and Scotland. Shorter wars are a creation of particularly determined European nation states more than anything.

As he says, this does recast Israel-Palestine. There is a solid argument that Americans, with a history of short wars, assume it is overdue to end. The reality could be that, regardless of whether the Palestinians have a state, this conflict will rumble on for decades yet.

This can be added to the list of myths about war that the War Nerd set out years ago: that wars involve battles, that you win by killing the enemy, that hi-tech beats lo-tech, that insurgents will quit and that everyone really wants peace. All these are myths. Understanding that brings home the real strategic challenges of the coming century.

Back

Sorry for my absence since Thursday. I've been moving myself back into London and the Internet connection here has been broken.

Jeremy Leggett strikes again

Some people accuse the Guardian of being mindlessly opposed to marketing. Well, those people are proved wrong every time Jeremy Leggett is given, for free, space in the Guardian to sell his industry. Last time, he was drawing ludicrous analogies to Spitfires. This time, he's mounting an incoherent attack on the Government's nuclear plans. It isn't worth fisking most of his article as he isn't writing very well and gets lost in inane chatter about consultations. He takes what should have been the central argument in his article, the superiority of renewable power to nuclear, as a given and I can't imagine anyone who isn't a renewable energy executive being convinced.

The article is only worth noting for this, incredible, section - which is a masterpiece of the Comment is Free genre:

"In March the EU agreed a target of 20% renewables in the energy mix; 27 leaders signed up, Blair among them. The EC costed the switch to renewables at €24bn to €31bn a year, assuming an oil price of $48 a barrel. At $78 there would be no additional cost. Before the year was out, oil almost hit $100."

Does he realise what that is saying? Those are estimates of the subsidy that will be required to make renewable energy work. If we are above the oil price at which renewable energy has 'costs' (i.e. costs more than running on oil) then there shouldn't be any need for a subsidy at all.

Leggett clearly thinks the EC estimate is credible or he wouldn't be citing it. Fantastic! Let's scrap the various subsidies to renewable power and let those fine people in the renewable power industry outcompete expensive, peaked oil.

Gracchi responds on the NHS and lifestyle choice

Gracchi has some criticisms of my post on the NHS and lifestyle freedom. I don't think any of his criticisms stand up to scrutiny. I'll take the risk of pulling some sections of his post out for brevity's sake. I'm sure he'll correct me if I've taken anything out of context or missed important arguments.

"Those who support the NHS and support drug legalisation today often overlap. Whereas those who want to privatise the NHS and support drugs being illegal often overlap as well."

This is certainly true. A prime example, that I mentioned in my post, is the Liberal Democrat party that both aspires to be liberal, in the libertine sense, and also to support the NHS. People are quite able to hold positions that make their other positions untenable in practice. They'll be frustrated if they ever try to put their policy platform into effect over the medium term but that's not a concern for a Liberal Democrat. Equally, there are plenty of reasons other than lifestyle liberalism to support NHS reform - better results for example. Gracchi misses the point I was making: not that supporting the NHS makes any given thinker less liberal with respect to lifestyles but that the existence of the NHS makes it harder to sustain lifestyle liberalism in practical politics.

His explanation for illiberalism is the 'yuck' factor. This could be important at the margin but I don't think it can really be the driving factor behind bans. If it were why would there be a new crusade against the relatively attractive behaviour of middle class drinking?

People need to rationalise their beliefs and the 'yuck' factor therefore requires rational justification. I've seen, countless times, the cost to the NHS of a particular behaviour used as justification for a prohibition on that behaviour, a ban on advertising or a new tax. Even if some people are just disgusted by the obese and using the cost to the NHS to rationalise the ability to do so is still important. Rational debate is still relevant to politics even if it is, too often, bent out of shape.

"Matt misunderstands wilfully Mill's argument and consequently misinterprets the zone of Mill's freedom. Mill's concept of freedom is very tricky to understand- but if it were as Matt suggests inclusive of all actions that affected others in any way, the area of free rights would be tiny. Afterall all our actions in some ways effect others- even actions taken in complete privacy- a choice of job afterall effects others sometimes more than a choice of lifestyle does (even in a system with an NHS)."

This seems to be an argument that I should be wrong rather than an argument that I am wrong. Gracchi's criticism is the one that makes Mill's sphere rather weak in theory. However, the harm principle, as summed up by Mill himself, is pretty much exactly how I expressed it:

"The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."

It is highly imperfect. All of our decisions do affect others in some way. If I am unhealthy and die as a result then no matter the healthcare system others will be affected as they will feel bad, if only for a short while. However, that weakness has not prevented the harm principle becoming vital to effective liberalism. Non-financial externalities that affect friends, family and other close acquaintances tend to be socially internalised in a manner described by the Coase theorem. If I live in an unhealthy fashion and it risks my health those who care for me risk an emotional loss. However, their closeness to me allows them to influence my decisions. Whose mother doesn't check that they're eating well and hassle them if they're not? The more people care the more they will socially police behaviour.

These kinds of strategies allow for the harm principle to function despite its theoretical weaknesses. As a result, an approximated version of Mill's sphere, allowing choices that have societal effects smaller than a certain magnitude, is an important popular justification for liberalism. It is the best simple guide to what the liberal position is in the first place. It is what people mean when they say "it's none of your business".

The NHS makes people's decisions over diet, smoking and drink, and a massive host of other choices, the business of everyone other Briton. The fat man in Glasgow concerns me because I will contribute to paying if he becomes unwell but there are few practical ways for me to influence the health behaviours of him and millions of others socially and without enlisting the power of the state.

We might still allow people some unhealthy choices, taking a stressful job for example, but perhaps that is just the way the societal cost/benefit analysis plays out? We don't respect people's right to take a stressful job - it is just good for us if they do.

"Genes matter as much as environmental factors- would Matt accept a system in which companies were allowed access to our genetic code and set different premiums based on that for various people, sometimes prohibitive premiums."

People don't choose their genes. That means you can't incentivise people. It makes the public policy debate completely different to the one I was addressing. Being genetically predisposed to poor health is more analagous to having a pre-existing condition or being old than to eating an unhealthy diet or smoking. There is an interesting debate to be had over whether insurance companies should be allowed to take account of things like genetic predispositions but none of the logic in my original post pertains to that debate at all.

"What about such premiums actively discouraging people for example from performing various important jobs- take for example those who volunteer to be part of the royal lifeboat association (something that involves them in great risk for a real public good and for free)- that would incur them a higher premium is that fair- the same thing might be said about special constables."

These would not be among the unhealthy behaviours that you would want to allow providers of compulsory social health insurance to attach a price to - just as it isn't one of the activities that might, under Government proposals, get people denied NHS treatment. I don't think this flaw is critical even if you want to implement a system that allows insurers to present higher premiums for any reason at all but, for the purposes of the debate we're having right now, it just isn't relevant. There is no reason why the slope, allowing certain information about health behaviours to affect insurance premiums, should be so slippery that any case for greater flexibility is a case for allowing perfect information.

The NHS cannot properly incentivise healthy behaviours and creates a very real imperative and justification for lifestyle illiberalism. A reformed healthcare system need not create those pressures for a less liberal society. I hope this post has helped to flesh out why.

If you go down to the woods today...

Cry of existential affirmation to greet the New Year or bad movie in-joke? You decide...



Went on quite a fun little trip yesterday. First, Baconsthorpe Castle which was nice but a little too small and ruined to make a full day out. Then, on the way back, traipsing around Thetford Forest causing trouble.

The NHS and lifestyle choice

Threats to deny NHS care to those who don't maintain a healthy lifestyle are a paper tiger. We're not going to see smokers, the overweight and drunkards dying in the street with Gordon Brown standing over them wagging his finger and saying "look at the NHS Constitution". Even if the politicians were hard headed enough to do it, which they aren't, they'd struggle to bring the medical profession along with them.

The only thing that might actually happen is the denial of certain forms of treatment - particularly expensive treatments. Even that probably can't be institutionalised as their are too many borderline cases. Smoking aside, most lifestyles will contribute to health risks instead of obviously causing a condition and in uncertain cases it will be hard to deny treatment. Consider the pretty common case of a man who is somewhat overweight but not morbidly obese and also has a stressful job. We wouldn't want to punish someone for having a stressful job so it would be a moral nightmare to deny that man treatment. Cases like that will be very, very common.

That means decisions over whether to deny treatment will have to be, from the point of view of the public, highly arbitrary. The threat of denying NHS treatment is too idle, too vague and too uncertain to have much of an effect on incentives. It can't get around the problem that a taxpayer funded healthcare system makes each person's lifestyle choices a public good or bad.

Now, every healthcare system that pools risk faces this problem to a certain extent. If you have a compulsory social insurance model and mandate that all insurance policies are available to everyone (as the Dutch do, for example) so that no one is going to be left without treatment and the vulnerable (thanks to age or existing conditions) are looked after you might also wind up subsidising unhealthy lifestyles. However, there is a key difference.

When individuals, rather than taxpayers, are paying for their health insurance it should be possible to allow adjustments in their premiums for healthy behaviours. As Wat Tyler describes this is already happening in the private health insurance market. It doesn't face any of the problems that I've mentioned above and prevents unhealthy behaviours imposing a cost on the health conscious.

Sin taxes are a clumsy substitute that have to make do without price signals (the level of tax is arbitrary whereas the correct level for lifestyle compensation in an insurance fund can be discovered by a market process). They are an easy way to raise revenue rather than a serious attempt to internalise the externalities associated with poor health. They will always be inferior to a solution that stops unhealthy lifestyles being an externality.

Pooling the costs of bad health and turning lifestyle into a public good is a problem for the NHS that leaks into the rest of public policy, turning it in a distinctly illiberal direction. There are few individual choices that don't have some kind of impact on a person's health. Unhealthy behaviour is controlled in an ever more draconian manner through taxes, regulation and outright bans. The Millian sphere (the set of decisions that don't affect others and should be left to individuals) is always unstable but completely dissapears with socialised healthcare. Liberalism becomes almost entirely untenable.

One quick aside: If the Liberal Democrats were an intellectually serious bunch they'd take this issue very seriously. The contradiction between healthcare socialism and lifestyle liberalism is one more example of the kind of issue that makes an attempt to marry their attachment to Britain's socialist institutions with a notional commitment to 'liberalism' a complete farce.

Liberalism isn't just undermined by the real externalities to unhealthy behaviour, created by socialised healthcare, that I have discussed so far. It is also politically expedient to exagerrate the problems associated with unhealthy lifestyles. The NHS, as it is currently organised, just can't deliver the performance that people expect and that would warrant the huge amounts of taxpayers' money that politicians have spent. That is a political nightmare for any political party that can't countenance calling for serious reform. They can dilute perceived responsibility for that institutional failure by announcing measures relating to people's lifestyle.

That is how we should understand this new threat to deny care to people living unhealthy lifestyles. It isn't even a serious but vain attempt to address the problem that the NHS makes everyone's health a public good. Instead, it is another attempt to avoid criticism for the ongoing failure to deliver quality healthcare and value for money in the NHS.

Grizzly Man

I watched Grizzly Man last night. Gracchi's review of the film is superb and there's not a lot I'd like to add to it. He gets to the core of the film with admirable clarity and perceptiveness. There's little sense repeating him except to confirm that this film is well worth watching.

All I'd add is that I found the footage of Timothy Treadwell (the Grizzly Man of the title) with the foxes more distinctive than either Gracchi or Werner Herzog (the filmmaker) did. The bears did seem totally uncaring with their only real reactions to Treadwell a hostility if he got too close and, finally, killing him when they were hungry. By contrast, I do think there was a genuine reaction from the foxes. They are animals with a social instinct that, as we do with dogs, humans can, I guess, become a part of. At times he did seem to have formed a connection with them more genuine than the one with the bears that were more central for the film and Treadwell himself.

I would guess that the foxes weren't enough because the relationship was more genuine. As Gracchi says Treadwell wasn't after an authentic, reciprocal relationship but something unreal. He found love that could not be requited safer. While the relationship with the fox was not real in the sense that human relationships are I still get the sense he preferred the complete fantasy of his relationship with the bears.

The Closing of the American Mind

I've just finished reading Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind - just twenty years after it was written. While its title and content is directed towards Americans Harry Mount is right to argue that the disease now afflicts us and all the Western nations.

Bloom's masterpiece is hard to precis. It begins discussing his students and how relativism has closed their minds; how a doctrine of 'openness' has perversely undermined serious dialogue between different opinions and cultures. It then goes on a tour of Western philosophical thought illustrating the struggles that brought us to where we are now. My understanding of his critique is that we have lapsed into nihilism without taking the condition seriously. We cannot take seriously old visions of the good life and have broken the processes and destroyed the environments in which new visions might flourish. He sees this as a broad problem for Western civilisation but sees the crucial centre of the problem in the decline of liberal education within the Universities.

This isn't a book to discuss in one post and I'm sure it will be brought up frequently on this blog in the coming months but what I thought I'd note right now is how it relates to Dalrymple. Theodore Dalrymple's social conservatism has been a frequent topic of mine over the last year and relates in a very interesting way to Bloom's work. Dalrymple discusses (most effectively in this essay - which I will keep linking to until I'm satisfied every one of this blog's readers has read it) how the relativism of the elite creates desperate social problems for the disadvantaged.

Dalrymple's work is excellent but if you only read Dalrymple and look at the problems of the poor it is as if you are studying an oceanic earthquake by measuring coastal waves and understanding the misery of those they make homeless. You need to understand the problem at its source. The source of the awful problems Dalrymple describes is in the elite and their intellectual decline. A philosophical decline in the West. Hopefully Bloom can provide a valuable first step in understanding that source of our problems.

The Economist on the changing nature of equality

This is brilliant. The whole article is worth reading but this section illustrates the point they're driving at:

"You can see this levelling at work in markets for transport and appliances. You no longer need be a Vanderbilt to own a refrigerator or a car. Refrigerators are now all but universal in America, even though refrigerator inequality continues to grow. The Sub-Zero PRO 48, which the manufacturer calls “a monument to food preservation”, costs about $11,000, compared with a paltry $350 for the IKEA Energisk B18 W. The lived difference, however, is rather smaller than that between having fresh meat and milk and having none. Similarly, more than 70% of Americans under the official poverty line own at least one car. And the distance between driving a used Hyundai Elantra and a new Jaguar XJ is well nigh undetectable compared with the difference between motoring and hiking through the muck. The vast spread of prices often distracts from a narrowing range of experience."

Combine this with the fact that the new income inequality is driven by differentials in skills, as set out brilliantly by Becker, and it should become clear that very different policies are in order. The Economist's arguments suggest that we can take a long-term approach to relieving poverty - there is not a driving need for relief right now. Becker's suggest that improving human capital can bring the poor out of poverty - there is not some other problem keeping the poor from improving their condition.

All that suggests that creating the social and institutional conditions for the poor to improve their human capital is the right way forward. Those who see benefit spending as the way to end poverty should think again.

Misplaced self-righteousness

This, via Iain Dale, is full of misplaced self-righteousness. It assumes that fixed term parliaments can only be opposed by those who are "spineless and self-important".

"The Case" on the website of the campaign for Fixed Term parliaments consists of a single deeply flawed article. Unless there is some masterly treatise elsewhere that neither Iain Dale, the campaign for fixed terms nor the Our Kingdom blog have felt fit to link to we'll have to assume they don't have a better case. If they don't then they are astonishingly arrogant to think that anyone who disagrees with them must have some moral failing. Either that or Anthony Barnett's brain is on holiday.

Sad news from Pakistan

Benazir Bhutto wasn't perfect. There are few saints in any politics as troubled as Pakistan's. However, she was a democrat and a moderate and her murder by extremists is a blow to Pakistan's better nature. Her death marks a sad end to a troubling year for Pakistan.

In the end

I always find films and books concerned with the death of a society fascinating. One of my favourite histories is Runciman's description of the fall of Constantinople. I loved Children of Men as much as any film I've ever seen - although my interpretation of it might not be what the film maker intended. I think that when such stories are handled well the characters' responses can tell us things about how we respond to external social shocks. They also beg deep questions about the direction our own society is going in.

As such, the Telegraph's review of I Am Legend is dissapointing. It sounds like the film has a great start considering questions of what someone does if their society dies, how the bee copes without the hive, but then degenerates into an unspectacular zombie film. I'll still go and see it, though, and report back.

Update: The Telegraph's review is basically right. I think it makes too much of the difference between the early stages of the film and the end though. All the content, through to the end, relating to the disaster and his survival alone is good but never quite engrossing enough to be great. There isn't anywhere near the emotional power or incredible style of Children of Men but it's interesting and worth watching. The monsters are lame but they mostly function as a nameless and unseen threat so their offensiveness is limited. All in all, I'd probably be more positive about this film than the Telegraph was and it only really suffers when you compare it to the masterpiece that was Children of Men.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!

All our potential

Fraser Nelson has a brilliant post on the CoffeeHouse which sets out the tragic number of deaths among the old each winter. Excess mortality was 23,900 in 2006-07 and Norway - despite hardly being the warmest of places - typically has just over half the rate we do. There is a political conclusion that should be taken from this: measures like the Climate Change Levy, Emissions Trading Scheme and Renewables Obligation that increase the price of energy have a hefty human cost. However, I'd like to focus on a more philosophical question.

Nelson's central point is that we just don't give the deaths of pensioners the attention we should. I don't think this is merely a matter of fashion; it isn't just that other political issues have more partisan potential.

Instead, there is a cognitive bias created by the utilitarianism of the modern discourse. In modern politics we're all thinking in terms of the greatest happiness of the greatest number and approach each policy recommendation longing to ask 'how many utils?'

When we try to assess the value of saving a life we do the same and think in terms of the number of utils lost. Years of Potential Life Lost is the translation of this concept into terms that can be applied to healthcare debates. It is usually understood as the number of years that the deceased could - had they lived - have expected to live. It is the utilitarian opportunity cost to dying - the life you might otherwise have lived.

To make calculations simpler it is usually just life expectancy minus age at death. It is then often time discounted as years of life (just like monetary sums) are more valuable when we don't have to wait as long for them. Even if years of life in the future are discounted at 3 per cent - as the Americans apparently think it should be - the deaths of old people aren't going to be judged nearly as important as those of the young.

That might not seem outrageous. To a certain extent it reflects a quite ordinary moral intuition that it is somewhat more tragic when someone dies with their life ahead of, rather than largely behind, them. I think that Atonement did a great job of portraying an opportunity costs-based understanding of the tragedy of death (I'm worried I'm the only one who took that to be the film's central emotional message). Its final scenes portrayed what could have been if the couple the story revolves around had lived and this gave a real tragedy to their unnecessary deaths. However, in my view this principle is taken too far by the modern policy debate and explains the callousness with which the old are treated.

To get your around why this concept can be so toxic imagine applying it to another group: the poor. Someone living in Calton - near the centre of Glasgow - has a life expectancy of 54. I'm not sure what the life expectancy of someone from my socio-economic group is but it could well be over eighty. At 24 that means a significant difference in our Years of Potential Life Lost if we die. The utils cost if I'm allowed to die unnecessarily is significantly higher. I'm less likely to die at a relatively young age from some other cause and so have a greater expected life in front of me. I don't think that the ONS revision of its productivity figures for healthcare to take account of rising incomes is, in principle, very far from this at all.

Many economists are under the impression that policy makers don't really 'get' opportunity costs. I think that might be wrong. Perhaps policy is predicated on opportunity costs, combined with radical utilitarianism, far more than it should be?

Montaigne described the purpose of philosophy as being to prepare us for the horror of dying - a particular terrifying moment. He described this as an alternative to the viewpoint of Cicero who saw the purpose of philosophy in preparing people for death - the finality. Montaigne's view might provide us with an alternative reason why healthcare should try to avert death.

We should try to stop people dying because of the direct human tragedy of the process of death no matter how painless. While we will all have to die at some point there is still a very real imperative to spare people when we can. What happens next is a matter for fate, chance or God (take your pick).

If we can balance our opportunity costs understanding of death with a more humanitarian concern that people should avoid the mental horror of dying then we might, as a society, attach more priority to care for the elderly.

Man of the Year

Iain is right, it should have been Patreus.




I don't think many of us really saw what has been a substantial turn around in Iraq coming. Who would have thought, before the surge began, that we could ever see a sub-headline like this one in the Guardian: "Attacks plummet as Shias join Sunnis in neighbourhood patrols to tackle militants and reunite communities".

Things aren't perfect. Political progress is elusive and there are still some very unpleasant sectarian confrontations going on. It could still go wrong but there is now a very real possibility of a decent outcome in Iraq. That's an amazing achievement.

Germany defends its carmakers

The BBC reports fury in Germany at EU proposals to restrict emissions from new cars:

"German Chancellor Angela Merkel has opposed European Union (EU) plans to cut pollution from new cars, saying it was "not economically favourable".

She said the move would burden Germany and its carmakers disproportionately."

It would be easy to get up on a high-horse about double standards and a German government unwilling to pay the price for action to meet international targets to cut emissions that they've been so active in pushing for. That would be a mistake, though.

The German government should be defending the German national interest. A democratic government should look out for the interests of its constituents. In fact, we should be asking very serious questions about why our government cares so little about our own interests.

There are two key examples here.

The first example is the Emissions Trading Scheme where countries were allowed to allocate themselves emissions allowances. This way of doing things obviously encouraged every country to set the highest allowance they could. Every country then did just that except for the UK. We set tough limits and Open Europe found (PDF) that we ended up paying £470 million in subsidy to other European states. No emissions were cut at all.

The second example is the EU Landfill Directive which was obviously going to hit disproportionately at Britain as we recycle less than other European states. Hated bin taxes are blamed on the European Union but our Government never seriously opposed the Directive that makes them necessary.

With our overly centralised politics public services monopolise the national debate and squeeze out foreign policy. As few votes are at stake politicians attend to their own foreign policy agendas rather than the priorities of the public. Being popular at international conferences makes them feel good but leaves us worse off. It would be better if our politics was a little more German in this regard, if we learnt from L'exception Francaise.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Sinclair's Musings - pissing off all the right people since 2006

Well - it appears I've rather upset the MPAC. They don't link to my original fisk and have failed to respond to my charge that they are idiots who don't even know much about Islam itself let alone the wider world. Tony Sharp is also the target for some of their incoherent ire. Tony can handle himself but suffice to say that he is entirely correct that Policy Exchange's attempt to identify an extremist infiltration of British Islam does not constitute an attack on British Islam itself.

Let's go over their charges against my fisk:

"This level of ignorance is one thing but to step from that into the blatantly paranoid hysteria of some nut called Matthew Sinclair is another. The crazed lunatic, walking the streets of a major political party right now, actually claimed we were trying to ‘murder’ the 8 sufi ‘hate preachers,’ who were caught red handed forging receipts, by simply stating we wanted to know who they were!

If the Muslims have an extremist problem its nothing to the one going on within some segments of the conservative party! Or the one going on in this nuts head – now that’s extreme! He is not just a danger to the Muslims, the good standing of the conservative party but worse to himself. Any one who can read words to the effect of ‘let’s find these dodgy Sufi’s’ on a Muslim website, have a panic attack, have to change his underwear, and then start to dial 999 screaming ‘they are out to kill the Sufi’s’ to some poor police officer, is either on drugs or so out of his mind he should be sectioned!"

Lots of invective there. Very little argument - I certainly haven't even thought about calling the police, although I'd think about doing so for protection if I was one of the researchers - except that I shouldn't read their call to "find these dodgy Sufi's" to be an incitement to violence. The problem is that MPAC don't give any other reason why they want to know "every last detail" about these people.

If this happened in isolation it might be taken as innocent curiosity. That they called their attempt to find the researchers a "hunt" would raise some questions even then. However, they are calling for a "hunt" for researchers they accuse of trying "to destroy their own community" after a series of other frightening examples of extremists attacking people they perceive as critics of Islam. Soldiers in Windsor had their property damaged and been forced to move. Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are a couple of famous examples of people who have faced threats of death and attempted assasinations. Rushdie's Japanese translator and Theo van Gogh are famous examples of that threat being acted upon. There are many more examples out there. We cannot naively give the benefit of the doubt to people like MPAC when they go hunting their enemies.

There is a savage irony to their implication that I'm a coward. If I were easily scared I'd have kept quiet, they'd have silenced someone and infringed free speech. That's the existential challenge to our values that these people pose.

Misunderstanding Northern Rock

There are two points surrounding yesterday's events at Northern Rock that really need to be cleared up.

First, the BBC's Business Editor, Robert Peston, is very enthusiastic about Bradford & Bingley's offer to help out at Northern Rock:

"In the worst case of the Rock being nationalised, it could take assets off the Treasury's hands and lessen the very substantial burden and risks for all of us as taxpayers,"

So, Bradford & Bingley are going to take a load of the rather unreliable Northern Rock debt off the taxpayers' hands?  How good of them!  Should Bradford & Bingley shareholders be up in arms about their company's directors using company funds to bail out the Treasury?

Probably not.  The truth is that Bradford & Bingley's directors wouldn't be looking at buying Northern Rock Assets if that move didn't have the potential to be a good deal for the company.  Not because they're bad people but because they have a legal and moral duty to look out for the interests of their shareholders.  So, unless we think the Treasury has somehow outwitted them - an idea so far fetched it would have to be retrieved from the moon - the proper question to ask is:  how are Bradford & Bingley going to get value from a deal for Northern Rock assets?

The answer is obvious.  They'll take some of the best assets - the most reliable mortgages - at a low price.  We'll have a smaller liability but the range of assets that Northern Rock will be left with to pay off its massive debts to the taxpayer will be more than commensurately smaller.

This is particularly worrying thanks to the other big new Northern Rock story.  We've now guaranteed to wholesale lenders that they won't lose money on Northern Rock.  There are two important things to notice here:

1)  Taxpayers are now covering almost all the downside risk.  This is so close to nationalisation that the final taking of the bank into public ownership is increasingly of totemic, rather than material, importance.

Research into privatisation (PDF) for the Competitive Enterprise Institute by Eli Lehrer and Iain Murray seeks to redefine the concept of privatisation and nationalisation in terms of who bears the downside risk as the question "who will lose money if it goes under" is often more important to incentives and real control than nominal ownership.  If we accept Lehrer and Murray's analysis then Northern Rock is already pretty much nationalised.

2)  We've effectively been booted way down the queue of creditors looking to get paid in the event of Northern Rock going under.  When its assets are sold the wholesale lenders will now need to be paid, in order to satisfy the new guarantee, before we are.  With Northern Rock's mortgage book in doubt and plenty of existing claims on its assets - even before any Bradford & Bingley stripping - we should have very little confidence it will be possible to get taxpayers all of their money back.

All in all, the last forty-eight hours have brought a lot of worrying news for taxpayers.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog

Fisking the MPAC

This article (via ConservativeHome) made me more than a little angry:

"You would have to be sitting in a darkened room repeating the name of Allah since 7/7 to be unaware that the new front against Muslims by the Government is
being led by Sufi cults."

Since 7/7? Why exactly is that the date used here as the start of the "front against Muslims"?

Are they acknowledging that violent extremism is the root cause of the problems here, rather than some "Zio-Con" (their term, obviously not mine) conspiracy? If so then I'd congratulate them on the one statement in this entire article that isn't utterly absurd.

Referring to Sufism as a cult is so utterly offensive that if a non-Muslim said it there'd be understandable cries of Islamaphobia. Here it is though coming from the "Muslim" (which apparently means all the Muslims the author likes) Public Affairs Committee.

"It’s an old Russian trick, they used Sufi sects to pacify the Mujahadeen who were fighting for their freedom from occupation. These Sufi cults taught them to forget the world and be content sitting in darkened rooms repeating the name of Allah over and over and over again. The British used it in India too, creating groups who focused on every minor ritual and repeated the words ‘no politics’ over and over and over again…anyone guess who they are?"

Wait. So the same "cults" that are "leading the new front against Muslims" are in fact distinguished by a refusal to engage in politics? Congratulations you idiots you've just completely contradicted yourselves in the space of two pretty simple paragraphs.

The idea that the British "created" Sufism is hard to sustain if the Principles of Sufism were written in the 15th century. Is Wikipedia leading me astray or do MPAC actually know nothing about the history of Islam itself?

"The Sufi Muslim council are the recognisable face of the new Government appointed cults. However there are many Sufi groups operating throughout Britain doing work to pacify the Muslim mind."

The choice of the term "pacify" as their pejorative is unfortunate here. Isn't Islam supposed to be the religion of peace? Is the MPAC's criticism that the Sufis are making Muslims more Muslim?

"Recently these individuals belonging to these undercover cults took one step too far. They teamed up with Policy Exchange a pro Israel right wing, neo conservative think tank, which has gone out of its way to dig dirt on the Muslim community.

One of its attacks led to front page news and headlines across the UK when it claimed that a quarter of all mosques sold ‘hate literature’."

This is the real moment of close to clinical brain death stupidity. Are they seriously responding to a pretty centrist think tank's claim that British Islam has a problem with extremists by ranting about undercover cults co-operating with Zio-Cons? Perhaps they were upset that Policy Exchange were getting in the way of the MPAC's goal of becoming the number one body proving that British Islam has an extremism problem.

"However as we have been reporting on this website, Newsnight uncovered that these Sufi researchers had in fact forged the receipts to prove the case."

This article for the Guardian sets out the real extent of the possible problem with Policy Exchange's work. The allegations are serious but at most they suggest that 20 per cent rather than 25 per cent of mosques have a problem with extremist literature being sold on the premises. The core political message of the report still holds true and is proved prescient daily by the MPAC and their ilk anyway.

To be honest, I wouldn't have bothered rebutting these lunatics. Evolution clearly forgot them so I think it is fair enough that I should too. However, this section changed my mind:

"These Sufi researchers then fled the country to Mauritania for what the Zio-Con think tank called ‘religious purification’!

MPAC now wants to find out exactly who these Sufis are, who are working for the Zio-Con think tank. There were 8 Sufis who worked for them, and all apparently have gone abroad to hide while the storm is raging. They worked, according to Policy Exchange for over a year on the project, so some Muslim out there must have come into contact with them.

Who are they, what are their backgrounds … MPACUK will dig deeper and expose every last detail of the Sufis who tried to destroy their own community.

If you know who they are – please write in and we will expose these men and women for all the Muslim community to see. Write in now and let us do what the incompetent idiots in the Mosque should be doing, protecting our community."

This is a direct attempt to recreate the murder of Theo van Gogh. These people are not just wrong and ignorant. They're dangerous. Their nasty work threatens brave people with death. Of course, it isn't our job to enforce the law upon them if they have broken it by inciting violence.

However, some kind of campaign of peaceful resistance is in order. They've put their e-mail address there for those who wish to lynch by proxy. I reckon we subscribe them to some innapropriate newsletters.

Losing control of the public sector

I really don't think Mike is exagerrating at all here:

"Did you follow that? Cricklade residents (aka the customers) are angry because their local police station is closed- ie if you go there you find nobody manning the front desk, and even if you shout, nobody comes. But rather than putting it right, North Wiltshire's top cop advises them to pretend the station's functioning properly as it is. Otherwise, he says, it will be perceived the residents perceive it's closed, and it will be closed. Even though in real world terms, it's closed already.

Only in Stalin's Russia is such madness possible.

And there's no doubt Stalin would have approved of the commissars' programme to streamline policing by closing stations. As he would have appreciated, manned stations open to the public are a huge distraction for the police. Far more efficient if they concentrate 100% on their core function, which is to carry out orders from above."

Alright, we're not in Stalin's Russia. But there is something deeply dystopian about the mindset at work. Our public services are now beholden to a government machine with almost no connection to the public and their priorities at all.

If you think that we'll be alright because, while we have no direct influence, at least our MPs can hold the public servants to account you'd be wrong. The Government machine is tied up in trying to excuse itself from resigning for endless public service failures that they can't control but also can't disclaim responsibility for without wrecking the vision of an omnipotent state they are so wedded to. MPs outside of this structure struggle to hold it to account. Let's hear from one of those MPs, one of the best, Douglas Carswell:

"The House of Commons is a house of charades; Ministers pretend to make the big decisions and we MPs pretend to hold them to account. Voters give up.

Parliamentary procedure is partly to blame. Debating rules favour seniority over originality, ensuring those with something fresh to say speak last, if at all. It is a tradition for the Commons Speaker to defend the rights of the Commons – when in retirement. If only Mr Speaker was as fierce when in the job. Institutionally flat-footed, Parliament lacks punch.

Fresh into the Commons, and angry about what had happened to kids in my constituency forced out of their special school, I jumped at the chance of serving on the Commons Education Select Committee. Two years, three foreign trips and half a dozen reports later, how much has made any difference? Control over education lies not with politicians promising to improve it, but with unaccountable officials."

This lack of accountability to ordinary people or even the poor substitute of accountability to an adversarial and curious Parliament means endless failures in public sector performance: thousands upon thousands of children missing out on a quality education, thousands upon thousands dead who would have lived with a better health service and our national income being drained in a vain attempt to stop the rot. That's enough to make the state of our public services right now alarming but in the long term social decline - intimately tied up with public service failure - can lead to even darker places.