Adam Smith Institute

A nice piece detailing the new GM foods which are being developed. The first generation of such crops concentrated either on increasing yields or on decreasing inputs, thus raising the profit margins of farmers and thus the quantities grown. All good news of course but not enough to sway the near hysterical opposition to the technology.

The new generation of such foods depends rather more on increasing the nutritional quality of the crop, rather than volume or the reduction of input costs. For example:

Cassava has been packed with new genes that help the plant accumulate extra iron and zinc from the soil, and synthesise vitamins E and A.

Cassava is the basic crop for hundreds of millions (some 800 million) around the world and its nutritional failings are responsible for  the damaging of many lives through under- and mal-nutrition. The addition of those nutrients will help to reduce such problems: that vitamin A will for example stop many cases of blindness.

Sadly, there are those who would oppose even this:

Claire Hope Cummings, a former lawyer with the US Department of Agriculture and author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, published in March, said: “People do not need miracle crops offering enhanced nutrients. What they need is a good varied diet. Who wants to eat a giant bowl of cassava or golden rice each day? These ideas are just a new way of marketing GM.”

It's true that most people do not wish to eat a giant bowl of cassava or rice each day and yes, that they would prefer a varied diet. But that isn't something that's on offer just yet: we need to remind ourselves that life currently offers all too many people all too short a list of options, none of said options being all that enviable and some just plain awful. Like, perhaps, eating a giant bowl of cassava or rice each day or eating nothing each day and thus dying.

The GM cassava, like the golden rice which is also vitamin A enhanced, will allow hundreds of millions to continue living and reduce their risk of going blind while doing so (250,000 children currently blind as a result of vitamin A deficiency and a further hundred million at risk).

I realise that Ms. Cummings (and no doubt others) will disagree with me here but I take that to be 100,250,000 damn good reasons why we should get on with marketing GM.

It seems like the worst of news. Cash-strapped Americans have given up their cars andf their coffee. Car firms in Detroit say their sales are down 20% on last year, and Starbucks is closing 600 of its 7000-odd company-owned coffee bars. How bad can things get?

A lot worse, probably, because I'm not convinced these problems are completely due to an economic slowdown. The thing about hard times is that they are like a forest fire. A lot of dead old wood goes up in smoke but the tender, younger plants survive and go on to grow and bloom in a couple of years' time. The fact is that cars and other capital goods don't do at all well in a downturn – they are a purchase which people don't mind postponing for a few months or more. And, even Americans know that American cars are rubbish – lumbering, heavy, greedy, unresponsive. Detroit can only survive so long on patriotic purchases: once people are strapped for cash, if they buy at all they buy Japanese.

As for Starbucks, they used to be great but they have lost their edge. The last few times I've visited one (in the UK admittedly), my coffee has been weak and cold, the place has been littered with debris from previous customers, and the staff have roped off large areas of the seating, for their convenience rather than ours. That's bad management, and that dead wood has to get burned off.

In the UK, meanwhile, Marks & Spencer have suffered some bad figures, and that's thought particularly bad for a store that has been bouncing back so energetically. But M&S is a very upmarket store. It goes for quality in food and clothing, but that comes at a price. Again, when people are a bit short, it's the luxuries they cut back on. Everyone goes downmarket until things recover.

So sure, things are bad but I don't think we should play up these particular problems as a sign of coming catastrophe. The market is hugely diverse, and things rise and fall all the time. And as Adam Smith said, 'There's a deal of ruin in a nation.'

Eleutherophobia. e·leuth·er·o·pho·bi·a – n. 1. The fear of freedom.

Remarkable news: when petrol prices go up then sales of cars which use a lot of petrol go down. Amazing, isn't it? Perhaps someone would like to study such matters, make it the basis of a new science or something?

More motoring: while petrol prices might be high nominally, there're still highly affordable by historic standards.

Looks like we might be about to lose the biofuels mandate as well, in favour of "renewable".

This, however, does not look like a sensible substitute.

A strange thought: might it be possible to have too many property rights, or ones that are too strong?

An idea for shrinking the BBC. Perhaps as a back up if flogging the whole thing off doesn't suit?

And finally, suggestions for modern pub names. 

Greg Clark's recent book, Farewell to Alms, makes the argument that the Industrial Revolution happened because the bourgeois values necessary for it to do so were bred into the English population. It's an appealing argument to both Little Englanders and Great Britons, that there's something special about us: and indeed it's also true that since the IR did indeed start here there was indeed something different about our forefathers.

However, the perceived weakness in the argument has been over the transmission mechanism of those virtues.  Was it genetic? or cultural, memetic even? New research seems to show that it might have been a bit of both.

We find that parents who are more trusting and parents who are risk tolerant have children with similar attitudes. The correlation is strong with both mothers and fathers for risk; for trust, the mother plays a more important role than the father. Parents also tend to marry individuals with similar trust and risk attitudes. This reinforces the impact on the child; having one parent with a given attitude means that the child is likely to have a second parent with that attitude as well. We also find a role for environment, because child attitudes are similar to the prevailing attitudes in the local geographic region, even controlling for parental attitudes. Whether attitude transmission works through nurture, nature, or both is not clear, although several pieces of evidence suggest that nurture must play some role.

Trust and risk tolerance are of course cultural pre-requisites for any form of large scale trading economy. Whether it's directly genetic or more to do with nurture and education doesn't really matter for the purposes of Clark's argument. All that's necessary is that such attitudes were passed on by the part of society which was outbreeding the others, as his work on the bourgeois shows they were.

Another result of this research is that there are national differences in these levels of trust and risk tolerance, something which might aid in explaining why there are such differences in economic structure, the prevalence of entrepreneurialism and the rate of growth between nations.

Facebook is causing trouble left and right these days.

Londoner Mathew Firsht  is suing a former friend for creating a damaging false profile that revealed private details and wrongly indicated that Firsht was gay. Another woman, Kerry Harvey, has recently started receiving phone calls from strangers because they saw a fake profile that described her as a prostitute and gave out her private number.
 
Of interest to us at the Adam Smith Institute among the Facebook scandals is the recent alcohol ban in Torbay due to a "night of mayhem" beach party that is being advertised via Facebook’s event application. When officials caught wind of the event, which has over 7,000 confirmed attendees, they declared that as soon as the location is specified all pubs, bars and retailers in that area will be banned from selling alcohol.

Shutting down a region during the busy summer holiday weekends will be very damaging to business. And it's not just this constraint on trade that is worrisome. Intervention of this scope by the government is unexpected and unwarranted. While there are legitimate concerns for safety, forcing businesses to shut down a key aspect of their commerce is not the way to handle it. By all means be prepared to have extra security at hand or keep the number of people at a reasonable capacity, but imposing regulations on businesses that have every right to operate seems an unacceptable form of intervention. It sets a dangerous precedent.

More on the unveiling of that statue (what do you mean "which statue"?). And more here and photos too!

It's possible to be over-enamoured with Bob Geldof at times, then he comes up with a speech like this:

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

On the subject of liberty: looks like the War on Drugs is still failing.

The government running databases of the citizenry doesn't seem to work all that well either.

Amartya Sen got his Nobel in part for pointing this out: famines often aren't about a shortage of food, they're about a shortage of purchasing power.

Yes, we really do need to use cost benefit analysis in measuring matters environmental.

And finally, protecting the American mud hut building industry.

These figures relate to the US rather than the UK, but I think it's likely that the effects of Tesco's and China have been similar:

Inflation differentials between the rich and poor dramatically change our view of the evolution of inequality in America. Inflation of the richest 10 percent of American households has been 6 percentage points higher than that of the poorest 10 percent over the period 1994 – 2005. This means that real inequality in America, if you measure it correctly, has been roughly unchanged. And the reason is just as dramatic as the result. Why has inflation for the poor been lower than that for the rich? In large part it is because of China and Wal-Mart!

Part of the reasoning is that the richer you are the more of your income is used to purchase services rather than goods: and goods are more likely to be traded internationally and thus to have come down in price as a result of globalisation. There is also another point, Baumol's one that we would expect services to be rising in price relative to manufactures anyway, given the difference in the way that labour productivity can be increased in each.

These different inflation rates do, as mentioned, have an effect on inequality. This means that once again we should not be measuring inequality as a function of income, rather as a matter of consumption. If we do measure that inequality correctly, it's effects on the actual living standards of real people, then we find that globalisation isn't increasing it at all.

Which leads to an interesting thought about that Joseph Rowntree Foundation figure on the amount needed to be not poor in the UK. If we really let globalisation rip, if we tore down the remaining trade barriers, we might actually find that the further cheapening of goods would reduce that amount, the income necessary to reach a particular level of consumption.

Back in the old days, dentists were paid a fee for each type of treatment they provided. After a contract change, dentists started receiving their income by doing a certain amount of work, known as “units of dental activity.”

You can imagine the dentist: “I need to do 15 procedures to meet my weekly quota. I could fill all those cavities… but that takes a long time and requires numbing and filling materials. Or I could just pull the tooth out. It takes no time at all and requires no medicine or precious metals.”

The NHS did not think about all this before implementing the new contract. But a damning new report from an influential MP’s committee shows how bad the situation is.

Dentists are extracting patients’ teeth rather than carrying out more complex repair work because NHS reforms have failed… The number of tooth extractions, many of them unnecessary, experts say, has risen since the new contract was introduced. At the same time, the volume of more complex work such as crowns, bridges and dentures has fallen by more than half.

The solution is not to reform the contract again, but to eliminate it altogether. We deserve health care that gets us the best treatment for our needs, but NHS contracts distort the incentive structure in such a way that dentistry works against patients. The NHS being inefficient, working against patients, and distorting the markets? Must be a slow news day if this is news.

The development of liberties in English law is very much the story of limits being placed upon state power. One element of those liberties is that there should be limits placed on the information which the state can demand from its citizens and keep on its files. ID cards are one major infringement of that principle, and a DNA database is another. The police have been empowered to collect and hold DNA samples from people who have not been convicted of any crime. Even suspicion can be deemed sufficient, and over-zealous police forces have developed the practice of taking DNA samples for quite trivial offences.

Some police officers have said that they wish the DNA database to include as many as possible, and some forces even have DNA samples held on file for thousands of children not even accused, much less convicted, of any crime. Our DNA contains much evidence about our lives, including our vulnerability to specific diseases, and even aspects of personality that is no business of the authorities. The widespread collection and retention of such information is an abuse of state power, and should be stopped. It is part of the creeping erosion of our liberties that police feel entitled to treat citizens as potential criminals, and collect and hold information on innocent people that they have no business with.

As below, the statue was unveiled today and here's a report of the debate that preceded that last night. And another report from the unveiling.

A slightly odd (but possibly valid in a way) theory that our loss of civil liberties is all to do with gun control.

An alternative (although not mutually exclusive) explanation: that it's badly drafted legislation rushed through in a panic that is to blame.

No, it's not very good but the real question is, is it art?

Reasons not to join the Pigou Club.

People not buying SUVs isn't a problem: it's the market helping to solve the problem.

And finally, imagining Gordon Brown in alternative occupations.

Following on from Madsen's welcoming of the  Joseph Rowntree  Foundations report on the poverty level, one more thing that should be pointed out I think.

Yes, we've got a figure for a single person of £13,400 a year: below that and they don't have the minimum level of both material goods and the ability to participate fully in society. Excellent: but it does need to be noted that this is a pre-tax figure. The report looks at what is necessary in disposable income and then upgrades that by the tax that would be paid to give us this total figure.

Further, we might note that someone working full time on the minimum wage does not in fact earn this sum: so does that mean that said minimum wage should be raised? Leave aside for a moment all of the usual objections (true though they are) to such minimum wages and ponder just for a moment. What we desire to do is raise the disposable income to the level the Foundation says is needed and we can do that in one of two ways. We can increase the gross income or we can reduce the deductions made from that gross income.

On £13,400 a year the total tax and NI bill is some £2,345 a year leaving a nett income of £11,055. Someone who works 37 hours a week for 52 weeks of the year (yes, they will get holiday pay) on the current minimum wage of £5.52 an hour will earn gross £10,620 (or on the higher wage coming in in October £11,024). They will then pay £1,483 (or £1609) in tax and NI on that sum.

Now we can ask ourselves the interesting question. Why is it that those working full time on the minimum wage fall short of the amount the report states is necessary to live out of poverty? The answer that leaps out at me is that it's the tax system, stupid.

That minimum wage worker earns gross, from October, £11,024 and this is as near as dangnit the £11,055 needed to live without poverty. So why on earth are we sucking 18% of the incomes of the poor off to pay for the exigencies of the State? Surely it would be better to simply change the tax systyem so that the poor were not paying in the first place?

Strangely, I seem to remember that a think tank did suggest this, that we should raise the personal allowance to £12,000 or so. Might people start listening now?