Is the West history?

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I am enjoying Niall Ferguson’s new Channel 4 documentary, Civilization: Is the West History? which identifies and explores the ‘six killer apps’ of Western civilization. These qualities, which have set the West apart from the rest of the world, are competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic, Ferguson says. Sunday night’s programme focused on the second app: science.

Ferguson’s thesis was that the West had quickly overtaken the Ottoman Empire (from a position of parity) because it embraced scientific advance, while the Arab world rejected it. He made a compelling case, contrasting the intellectual and technological advancement that came with the European enlightenment and scientific revolution, with the domination of the Arab world by the church, which deemed science unholy and even rejected printing (and thus the spread of knowledge) on the grounds that calligraphy was sacred.

The only place I thought the programme fell down was in its conclusion, where Ferguson suggested that Western dominance was threatened by the embrace of science by countries like Iran and China, and their own technological advance. That zero sum view strikes me as spurious. It surely matters little to us (outside the realm of national defence) if the East starts to invent things, so long as we ourselves retain the values that made us successful in the first place – chiefly the rational, critical and open discussion of ideas, and the desire for scientific advancement.

That, really, was the conclusion I wanted Ferguson to draw. Are we, in the West, abandoning those values? Has the void left by the decline of organized religion been filled by a new kind of superstition, which regards anything ‘unnatural’ as likely to turn the world into grey goo? Has open, critical debate been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness? Indeed, are we losing that ‘pioneer spirit’ which seeks and yearns for development, and instead accepting gentle, parasitic decline?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, but I wish someone like Ferguson would ask them. If the ‘West’ really is history, it will be the result of our own actions and our shifting cultural values, and not the consequence of new, rising world powers.

Civilization: Is the West History? is currently showing on Channel 4, every Sunday at 8pm. The book that accompanies the series can be purchased here.

A local problem for local people?

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The news that the BBC may be planning to radically shrink the output of its local radio stations, merging them into the output of Radio Five Live, should not surprise us.

The ASI has been saying for some years that the BBC – as a free-to-air tax-funded institution – is fatally flawed. Our view has also been that it will die of a thousand cuts like this week's news, as it fails to cope with multiple global media organisations that can price their services for customers.

Crucially, those competitors learn from those customers and can innovate to capture new revenues. If it were priced, some local BBC stations might well find their feet as a voice for a subscribing local community audience. They would use low powered cheap transmitters, small studios with modern small scale equipment and a lot of volunteer staff. Of all electronic media radio it might be the one to survive like this, although my bet is that it would be on the internet more than the airwaves.

Instead, BBC local radio carries all the overheads of cushioned personnel, over-sized buildings, globally capable equipment, and the electronic networking capabilities of the worldwide BBC News agency, acting as a journalistic "stringer" to the very expensive core news operation.

The BBC cannot go on like this. It has to face the real world, grow into new challenges and compete with new media. It does not need to retain its local arms at high cost to the taxpayer. Shrinking their airtime to become a small element buried inside Radio Five Live which is the present proposal is a good start. My guess is that this is the beginning of the end for the network of local stations.

Contracting out libraries

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The Sunday Times (£) contained an interesting article concerning the ongoing debate about library closures. Library Systems & Services (LSSI), America’s fifth-largest operator of public libraries, says they can take over British libraries and cut costs by 35 percent, while also improving the service they provide. Here’s why:

Analysis by The Sunday Times of every library authority in England, Wales and Scotland shows widespread waste and variations in how public money is spent. On average, a third of the money councils say they spend on library services actually goes on administration. Some use more than half their allocated funds for head-office costs.

The article also notes, “LSSI spends up to 25% of its budget on books, compared with the 2.7% of Somerset county council.”

So, is anyone surprised that profit-making private sector companies cost less and produce more than bloated public sector bureaucracies? You have to wonder sometimes why the government is still attempting to run anything itself.

Rewriting the book on libraries

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The Radio Four classes are up in arms about library closures. The authors among them naturally worry about a loss to their trade. As for the others – well, I wonder how much of it is nostalgia for how libraries used to be. But none of that justifies taking money from already-stretched taxpayers to pay for middle-class entertainment. Most books borrowed – look at the authors' lending right figures – are popular fiction. It costs the library service about £3 to lend a book. Hey, for 50p you can buy secondhand books at a charity store, and help a good cause in the process.

Public libraries are a recent phenomenon. They grew fast in the 1920s and 1930s when an expanding state thought it should get involved. Before that, though, the public had plenty of access to books - either through philanthropic foundations like the Carnegie Libraries, or through subscription libraries (of which the London Library in St James's Square, London, was an early pioneer. Indeed, until well after the Second World War, private shops like Boots would lend books out to the public for a few pence.

As for that other staple of public libraries, reference, the technology is making their job redundant. 30m Britons access the internet every day. Some 73% of households have internet access - most of those who don't say it's not because they can't afford it but because they don't need it. And many more of us can access the internet at work. Who needs to go to the library to look something up any more?

Public libraries could be taken over by community and voluntary groups, who might actually run them more appropriately for local needs. And they might bring in some fresh ideas. See how bookshops have changed over the years, with their coffee bars and easy chairs? But public libraries look positively antique. Most of them belong in a museum. Their huge footprint simply crowds out private and voluntary alternatives. Private shops rent out CDs and DVDs - why do we need a state-funded body to do their job? And if public libraries weren't in the way, how many agencies might spring up to lend out books too?

Those who criticize the public library service are of course branded as mean-spirited philistines. But it's easy to be generous if you do it on someone else's money. I don't see why poor taxpayers should be forced, by threat of imprisonment, to pay for the entertainment of the middle classes. Let's get some balance into the morality of this debate.

On the twelfth day of Christmas...

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My true love sent to me: twelve drummers drumming. In the original, religious-allegory song it may refer to the twelve points of doctrine in the Apostle's Creed. Well, that is as good a guess as any.

Everyone has heard of Twelfth Night, but there is plenty of confusion about when it is. Interestingly, it is only in modern times that we consider 25 December as the First Day of Christmas, and Twelfth Night the evening of 6 January. In earlier times, the 24-hour cycle that we call a 'day' was considered to start at sundown, with a period of darkness, followed by the associated period of light. Christmas – or Christmas Eve – would therefore start as the evening of 24 December began. The First Day of Christmas would start, in turn, at sundown on 25 December, and continue until sundown on 26 December. Follow it through and you find that Twelfth Day is actually what we would call 6 January, and Twelfth Night the evening before.

Or so they tell me. Whatever the realities, Twelfth Night traditionally marks the end of the midwinter festivities and the return to normality. Hence William Shakespeare's play with its exuberant and riotous characters. Today, normality is resumed. The trouble is that these days, political normality is just as bizarre as any Shakespearian revels. It can be hard to know where public policy ends and insanity begins. Perhaps that is because there is so much overlap. Enjoy your return to reality, such as it is.

Read the rest of Eamonn's twelve days of Christmas series:

First; second; third; fourth; fifth; sixth; seventh; eighth; ninth; tenth; eleventh; and twelfth.

On the sixth day of Christmas...

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My true love sent to me: six geese a-laying. In the song, this seems to refer to the six days of creation.

Six, traditionally the number of years it took to deliver a five-year Soviet economic plan, was also the number of the character played by Patrick McGoohan in the stylish 1967-8 TV series The Prisoner. The 'prison' set was the resort village of Portmeirion in Wales, but this strange place, with its bizarre customs, and people referred to by numbers rather than names, is really just an allegory for Britain and the wider world.

In each episode, Number Six insists "I am not a number. I am a free man," but in fact he cannot escape and cannot fit in. "You have no values," one of the residents rebukes him. "Different values," is his terse reply. He wants to live his own life in his own way, rather than be part of some regimented, impersonal and illiberal culture. Many people in the 1960s could not understand what The Prisoner was all about, for this too was a time when the prevailing culture, in Britain at least, was of conformity and deference, though it was at last starting to be challenged by individualists like Number Six.

Today, when diversity is more celebrated, the message is perhaps clearer; and it is explained more fully in Chris Tame's thoughtful commentary, Different Values. Beyond doubt, The Prisoner is a libertarian classic, a portrayal of how oppressive a culture can be, without any of us realising it. Except, perhaps, for the true individualist.

Properganda

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Jackart at the A Very British Dude blog makes an important point today about the problems that free marketeers face in communicating their ideas concisely online. When arguing on Twitter, for example, you have to keep your points within 140 characters – how can we use that to communicate relatively difficult ideas? Jackart uses the dispersed costs, concentrated benefits problem as an example:

And every policy cut, every social service no longer provided has two constituencies loudly shouting "I No LONGER HAVE A JOB" and "I NO LONGER GET MY SERVICE" whereas the benefit is spread amongst 40m taxpayers, some time in the future.

Politicians who would in fact do best cutting taxes, reducing red tape and getting out of the way instead get involved with trade policies, monetary policies and labour market interventions to solve the problem, because it is easier to be seen to be doing something than explaining why Government is the wrong tool for the job. All these social policies and redistribution costs in money, people's time and lost opportunity and eventually the costs mount up to overwhelm the country's economy.

Fortunately, we are not there yet. The country can go on getting ever more statist for some time yet and this will meet the support of people like UK Uncut. Eventually, however the burden of regulation and tax becomes too great. The coalition has an opportunity to to remove the burden on the hard-pressed tax-payer, and change the narrative. But the success of the policy MUST be seen within this parliament or eventually the problem of people demanding people use the powerful tool for their benefit at the highly dispersed cost to others rears its head.

The person Jackart is debating can make the easy point that policy X harms whichever group is its recipient. The free market case – that politicians should ignore special interest groups who are the beneficiaries of government interventions – requires more elaboration and, as Jackart says, we can't expect statists to read voluminous free market texts any more than we'd read Das Kapital if the statist recommended it.

We on the right need to get better at putting our message forward, especially on the internet. So Jackart poses a challenge: can anyone condense the dispersed costs, concentrated benefits argument into a single, 140 character-long tweet? Answers in the comments section of his post.

Don't believe the hype about Rupert Murdoch

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The Bishop of Manchester this week called for News Corp's £12 billion bid to take control of BSkyB to be blocked. It follows Vince Cable’s referral of the bid to Ofcom, the UK’s communications industry regulator, based on concern that the deal will threaten media plurality in the UK. There has been a growing and unfounded anti-Murdoch sentiment fomented by his media rivals based on the allegation that he has a monopoly over British media. This is mistaken.

In terms of media plurality (sustaining a diversity of views in the media), Murdoch has done a great deal to encourage plurality and innovation through his investment in the UK media scene. Like all profit-driven ventures, success in media comes directly from satisfying people’s wants: Sky News wouldn’t exist without Murdoch’s money and we would probably still be watching three or four TV channels without his support for satellite TV.

James Murdoch also made a strong point when he highlighted how much News Corporation have invested in UK media. Their investment has led to the creation of over 30,000 jobs in the UK over the last 40 years and News Corp’s commitment to innovation, particularly in digital journalism, has changed the face of news provision. Meanwhile in print journalism, Murdoch runs the Times at loss. Without his passion for print media and his deep pockets facilitating long-term recovery, it would most likely collapse. It’s also worth noting that only Murdoch’s support has allowed the Times to experiment with charging for online content – an innovation that may secure the future of other independent newspapers if successful. It’s rather ironic seeing Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, calling for Ofcom action against BSkyB when Thompson is the man running the market-dominating, government-funded media monopoly.

As Stephen Foster has argued, the media world is kicking up a fuss about Rupert Murdoch not because of concerns about media plurality, but because they are afraid of the competition. The vilification of Rupert Murdoch as a ‘media tyrant’ gives cover to his rivals to run to the regulators to protect them, rather than trying to compete by offering better services.

Bringing the BBC Downton earth

The BBC has long justified its existence by pointing to the fact that it airs programmes that appeal to a range of audiences – providing “public value” with didactic, highbrow broadcasting that would not arise naturally on the market. Once again, this claim can be shown to be unsubstantiated by the facts. This autumn, TV critics and audiences alike have focused around ITV, with the channel moving away from its traditional image of gritty soap operas and cheap entertainment.

Many people’s weekends now revolve around the X-Factor on Saturday and Sunday night, followed by the highly-praised period drama Downton Abbey. Though the X-Factor may not be to everyone taste, it is a huge success drawing in the audiences for the seventh year running – whatever its artistic merit, people enjoy it. However, it is the airing of Downton Abbey that underline’s the potential for ITV’s output. The Edwardian costume drama has truly challenged the BBC’s supposed monopoly on this genre. It has shown the depth and diversity that private broadcasters can achieve and makes one wonder why we need a public broadcaster.

The unique thing about the revival of ITV is that they operate on a much tighter programme budget compared to the government-funded BBC. With only £1 billion a year, which has remained static for several years, ITV have shown that well-invested and well-written dramas can compete with the BBC and all other channels out there. On the other hand, the BBC, which receives around £3.6 billion of taxpayers money through the tax known as the ‘licence fee’, has brought little new to the schedule that has truly captured the viewing public.

This highlights the question of whether public funding is justifiable at all. If private television companies are producing some of the best and most-watched television whilst competing with a government-protected monopoly, how much more could be produced in a genuinely free market without government anti-competition subsidies?

It is time the BBC was disbanded or privatized so it has to compete on a level playing field, not only with ITV but with all the other corporate channels that are now made available to us following the digital switchover. No longer crowded out by the BBC, private channels would soon produce higher rated and higher quality programmes: Downton Abbey is only the tip of the iceberg.

A sound night's viewing

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Tonight, the ASI's Director Eamonn Butler will be appearing on both Channel 4 and Sky News. At 7pm he will be discussing Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms on Sky News' Jeff Randall Live, and then at 9pm Eamonn will be appearing in Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story on Channel 4.

Channel 4's film explains the full extent of the financial mess this country is in – with an estimated £4.8 trillion of national debt and counting. It argues that the recent spending review hasn’t gone far enough, and to put Britain back on track we need to radically rethink the role of the state, stop politicians spending money in our name, and drastically lower taxes to make Britain’s economy grow again.

So, a very sound night’s viewing lies ahead…