The list of what we can't do in public spaces is outpacing what we can do. In light of this the collaboration between Blueprint magazine and the Manifesto Club is welcome as it attempts to answer Mayor Johnson's 'Great Spaces' initiative. Blueprint Magazine would like to see all the 'rules and regulations' removed and the Manifesto Club would like a removal of bans on alcohol (part of their ongoing 'Booze Campaign').
The New Statesman article covering the above's 48 hour test of public spaces shows why there needs to be a thorough review of how public space is regulated. The example of the police officers, happily accepting lager drunk from a tea cup rather than a can – otherwise they would confiscate it – makes a mockery of the inane regulations. It also points to a policy of self-regulation being the correct way that the public should govern the public spaces they enter. The control of the public realm needs to be wrested back from the politicians who are using it as a vote-winning policy fairground, appeasing this or that section of society to gain popularity.
Common sense, both from the public and the police, is the attitude that used to be pervasive in society. Unfortunately the politicians have sought to absolve us of relying on our own intelligence. For many this now means we are treated like children, assumed to be likely to act in a fashion similar to the very transgressors that regulations and rules are promoted to deal with. It's time to fight back, emancipating public space and ourselves at the same time.
The revelation that BBC executives are claiming outlandish expenses is not all-together shocking. This second expenses scandal seems to have a different air than the exposure of MPs; the BBC officials are not elected and are not there to represent us. People feel less betrayed, though more ripped-off. This latest revelation simply illustrates the problem of public waste and a culture totally disassociated from the taxpayer.
There is no place for a state broadcaster in an age of such technological advancement and variety. Entertainment and information is now at most people’s fingertips via the internet, the state does not need to provide it. This change in technology has decreased the barriers to entry in the broadcasting markets, as blogs and YouTube video sharing have shown. The BBC is a public industry operating within a free market, they are chasing the same staff and resources as ITV and Sky but with none of the profit incentives, which makes them much more inefficient.
Currently, the BBC is wasting vast sums of public money producing substandard broadcasting. As long as the government continues to pump funding into the BBC they will continue to act as a monopsony power, stifling this market.
A council cleaner in Buxton earning £14,000 a year - officially below the poverty line - pays her income tax and then gets an extra bill from the BBC for a licence tax. She pays that to a wealthy TV executive driving into London who claims on his expenses for a congestion tax paid to a government quango.
The taxes are used to fund a taxpayer maintained MP's flat-screen television so that the MP, eating food paid for by the taxpayer can watch the Prime Minister on television talk about a "fair and equal" society and how he is determined to make the economy grow.
That's mad as hell, and so are we, and we are NOT going to take it any more.
The dispersed interest of taxpayers is gradually being allowed transparency of the grand corporate culture that emerges when big institutions get grand ideas.
Those cultures have to change. Three hundred pound hotel rooms, expensive meals after an "extended working day of 12 hours" do not go down well with the small businessman tucked in his Travelodge bed with the late evening hamburger half-eaten at the bedside after 16 hours on the road trying to avoid trading losses. They go down worse with the cleaner from Buxton hearing about six hundred pound restaurant meetings for Controllers when she's stuck in a janitorial cupboard being told by her supervisor that her supplementary hours are being cut due to shortage of cash.
It's time the BBC executives "got it" as well as MP's.
Sunday Telegraph editor Ian Macgregor (left) was our guest at a power lunch in Westminster this week. His topic was "The importance of journalism in modern society".
And of course, that's a topic that Telegraph have earned a right to talk about in the last couple of months, with their brilliantly handled investigation into MPs expenses. There's no question the story has been good for the Telegraph's business, winning them many thousands of new readers. But I also think they have performed a genuine public service, by making people realize that you just can't trust politicians to be responsible with taxpayers' money.
Moreover, this precisely is the sort of thing that newspapers should be doing. My own view is that the media has been far too supine over the past decade, much too content to simply act as a broadcasting service for the government. The Telegraph's expenses splash is a welcome step in the right direction.
That said, I don't know whether it's going to mark a lasting change in the all-too-cosy relationship between politicians and journalists. It's one of the big problems with the way Westminster operates today – ministers leak stories to favoured journalists before making announcements to Parliament, journalists build their careers on these political connections, and then if they step out of line their supply of insider information gets cut off.
New House of Commons speaker John Bercow is making the right noises, saying he'll take a tough line on ministers who speak to the media before Parliament, but that alone won't be enough to change the spin culture. The real hope has to be that the media will see the success the Telegraph has had with its expenses revelations, and realize that the public wants to read proper, value-added journalism, and not just recycled press releases.
Ultimately, if they want to survive the competition from online news sources, I can't help thinking that's the way the press need to do it.
The government has announced "plans to help secure Britain's place at the head of a new media age". We should be cautious whenever we see governments combining future visions with the word "plan".
Not surprisingly, the headline measures involve the use of force to construct a "transformation" - in Gordon Browns words - of the distribution of digital broadband, comparing it with what he calls "essential services such as electricity, gas and water".
This is an upside-down policy approach. Technology, delivery methods and service product innovations are changing rapidly under private initiative, individual traders are juggling for profitable commercial position and the industry is moving on fast. Now leviathan wants in on the act to re-invent a commanding height in the economy that they control. That's mad.
If ever there was the case for getting out of the way, this is it. The dangers of larger players getting into bed with government using new legislation as an excuse are huge. Producers and service providers are bound to follow market incentives and the government appears about to create incentives to cartelise the industry in the name of equality for old ladies and slow-witted shopkeepers who do not have broadband, and an unknown method of curtailing individuals engaging in file-sharing.
We should not forget that it is possible to get your granny on the internet for essentially zero cost if she can cope with a computer, and as the part owner of a specialist jazz download site I happen to know that it is within the scope of even small companies to develop fullproof watermarking of music. These innovations will strengthen through market incentives through time.
The tangle web the government is weaving is made complicated by their interest in what happens in digitalised television, now under threat from broadband internet. But the threat is a chimera, created by the ossified structures of a quasi-nationalised television industry. We are likely to see a carve up of bandwidth use rights decided on by government which guarantees various incumbent players a secure channel to broadcast audiences. But this horsetrading negates what the market actually does; i.e. fine tune audience preferences through the creative innovation which the internet makes happen. It is time that some old things failed so that new things can take their place. For example, why should local news always be delivered on television? Would it not do local internet services some good it it migrated to the internet? Hey, they could even compete with the tax subsidised BBC online service.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to have a feast of purported details about the "plan" to develop "digital Britain". Listen, but keep looking at the wider picture, these are dinosaurs stumbling around in Jurassic Park, digitally focussed mammals have been through the fence and out in the new world for a long time and are creating new ways of doing things that governments haven't even thought about yet.
There's a proposal in the air to take about £130m out of the TV Licence Fee and use it for promoting broadband access in Britain. From the flurry of interviews and debates on the BBC's radio and TV channels, you would think this is the end of civilization as we know it. But it's just £130m out of a licence fee revenue that is twenty times that. So why the fuss?
The answer is that the BBC knows this is the thin edge of a fatal wedge. Already, money from the TV Licence Fee has been used to help the general conversion to digital television. Now here's another proposal which will also take some of it for other means of communication. If the BBC can't hold the pass now, it's slaughtered. Once the principle is broken, that the Licence Fee exists to fund the BBC, it will be open season on it. Scores of broadcasters will be pointing out that they too provide 'public service' broadcasting, so why should the BBC alone get a free ride.
And they're right. TV and radio channels should support themselves, through advertising or subscriptions, without imposing a regressive communication poll tax on the public. If you really believe that we need 'public service' broadcasting funded out of taxation, then fair enough – but it should go to the providers of that broadcasting on the basis of cost and quality, and should not be doled out exclusively to just one, particularly one that is so large and powerful, a real monopolist on the communications scene.
To be honest, I think that 'public service' broadcasting is mostly just a chance for politicians to preen themselves in public, so I wouldn't give it a penny. But if we're going to have it, let's buy it in from a range of suppliers and at least get the benefit of competition.
I think it's probably fair to say that Ben Goldacre is currently the best writer about science in the British newspapers. This piece of his about what is purported to be the cost of illegal downloads is a good example. It would appear that the debate over what the law should be is being driven by an conspicuous absence of rigorously sourced facts. The headline number employed is:
An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release.
You'd hope that they would be able to do better than that really.
However (and Ben does say that he's not an economist so we can forgive him not stating this) there's a much larger problem with all of these estimates of the costs of downloading, of pirate production, of couterfeiting.
Reports always, but always, take the form of x illegal pieces or downloads and the value of a legal sale is y thus to total cost is xy. Which betrays a rather alarming lack of understanding of the most basic building block of economics. That as prices change so does demand.
It might be that demand doesn't change very much with prices, it might be that it changes a lot, but we're absolutely certain that the demand for a music album at £10 each is different from the demand for the same album at £0. Thus we cannot assume that all of those who get a counterfeit or illegal download of music would in fact have purchased one at the full price: indeed, we're pretty much certain (unless we think there are Giffen Goods hidden in here) that the number of purchasers at £10 will be lower than the number at £0.
So whenever you see the costs of these actions being calculated in that xy manner simply snigger and ignore the argument. They're either ignorant or, what is worse, propagandists.
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.
Of course, we should all be happy in these gender egalitarian times that women no longer lord it over men in terms of their subjective happiness. As we all know, proper equality insists that we are all as miserable as each other rather than allowing any one group to be better off in any manner.
However, there shouldn't really be any surprise at this finding, not amongst those who have absorbed the second thing everyone needs to know about economics: that there are always opportunity costs.
It's true that women were restricted in the life choices that they could make only a few decades ago. A serious career was incompatible with marriage not all that long ago, a generation or two, and while that did get milder, it's only recently that the wider society has believed that children and a career were both possible. That all such choices, career or no, children or no, are seen as socially acceptable (even if the combinations might not be all that easy to carry off) this is an advance in the choices open to women and thus their liberty.
Hurrah! More liberty is good.
However, no one has ever said that such will make us happier. For with more choices comes a problem: there are more things that we cannot do. One cannot be both a childless career woman and a stay at home mother. One cannot be a career woman with children and simultaneously be a career woman without. As the number of possible paths increases so must the number of paths not taken. And as we all know, the true cost of something is what you give up to get it.
So, taking any one path means forsaking all those other paths, those number of paths which have in recent decades been rising in numbers. Thus the paradox of choice, that more such can make us subjectively less happy. But if you ask people whether having fewer choices would make them happier, no one ever actually says that yes, it would.
Just as an example, does anyone seriously think that insisting that women either pursued careers or had children, with no blurring of the roles allowed, would be an acceptable limitation of liberty in a free society: even if it did make those women happier?
No, I thought not maybe subjective happiness isn't the goal that society should be pursuing then?
Teenagers will be teenagers, and during that period of their lives their hormones are rampant and the opportunity to explore takes on attractive new levels. Throughout this time there are many dangers and one of which seems to have taken hold of the media's imagination is the apparent craze of 'sexting'. This is the new mode of communicating juvenile lust, whereby the sender of a text attaches anything from, titillating to pornographic pictures of themselves and then presses send. The recipient usually being the latest crush. In the United States there have recently been some high profile cases of teens being arrested and charged with child pornography and shackled with the tag of being sex offenders.
But as highlighted by this article there are two very different approaches to dealing with teens just being teens. In the first the district attorney in Pennsylvania offers the offenders the chance to attend a six month educational course that would help them understand their actions better. The second is the legislative approach taken by Vermont that reduces the crime to a misdemeanor when done between two consenting 13-18 year olds.
Both of these are rationale approaches (even if parents of three of the teens in the first example don't seem to think so) and should be considered if this problem be broached by politicians here. The teens are acting in a consensual way, there is little harm being done (but to themselves should the pictures spread further than the intended recipient) and their natural behaviour, in conjunction with modern times, should not land them with a criminal record.
It was brought up in PMQs this week that British youths are the unhappiest in Europe. 1 in 3 eleven year olds are illiterate and record numbers are turning to drink and anti-depressants. Also, it is this generation who are now going to be forced to pay off the colossal government debt. The story is very negative, but politicians are making it worse, intent on blaming the youth for the state’s failings. Instead, the youth need to be encouraged and made productive rather than demonized and disincentivized.
The welfare state is failing the youth as this story shows. It focuses on a seventeen year old who drinks a litre of vodka a day, spending her £47 per week benefits on alcohol (that must be cheap and nasty vodka!). This is clear evidence that a benefit culture has reached an excessive level in the UK. The 17 year old in the article does not work or attend school – but then why bother when the state will give you free money to spend on whatever you like, illegal or not.
It is immoral that the government can tax hard working individuals in order to encourage the illegal drinking of others. This sends out signals to younger citizens that it is acceptable to expect the right to be bailed out by the state if they don’t fancy working. This is clearly counterproductive towards society; if there is no incentive for young people to work or go into further education, that demographic of the economy will stagnate – making the process of paying off Gordon Browns debt gloomier than ever.
Younger generations are the lifeline of our future economy. Currently the government seems to underestimate their importance, seeing them as scapegoats for their failings in education and burdens on the labour market; set them free and see the benefits they can bring to society.
The list of what we can't do in public spaces is outpacing what we can do. In light of this the collaboration between 
The revelation that BBC executives are claiming outlandish expenses is not all-together shocking. This second expenses scandal seems to have a different air than the exposure of MPs; the BBC officials are not elected and are not there to represent us. People feel less betrayed, though more ripped-off. This latest revelation simply illustrates the problem of public waste and a culture totally disassociated from the taxpayer.
Sunday Telegraph editor Ian Macgregor (left) was our guest at a power lunch in Westminster this week. His topic was "The importance of journalism in modern society".
The government has announced "plans to help secure Britain's place at the head of a new media age". We should be cautious whenever we see governments combining future visions with the word "plan".
There's a proposal in the air to take about £130m out of the TV Licence Fee and use it for promoting broadband access in Britain. From the flurry of interviews and debates on the BBC's radio and TV channels, you would think this is the end of civilization as we know it. But it's just £130m out of a licence fee revenue that is twenty times that. So why the fuss?
It was brought up in PMQs this week that British youths are the unhappiest in Europe. 1 in 3 eleven year olds are illiterate and record numbers are turning to drink and anti-depressants. Also, it is this generation who are now going to be forced to pay off the colossal government debt. The story is very negative, but politicians are making it worse, intent on blaming the youth for the state’s failings. Instead, the youth need to be encouraged and made productive rather than demonized and disincentivized.