The good intentions paving company
By now we should be well on our way to the "Big Society, Small Government" that David Cameron promised us. Now the Coalition is weakening on GDP growth, the idea is to promise us happiness, or at least well-being. Apparently, the government will nudge us towards more wholesome life styles rather than enforcing it through tax and regulation. In December 2010, the Nudge Team in the Cabinet Office published how their insights could be applied to health. The topics covered were: smoking, organ donation, teenage pregnancy, alcohol, diet and weight, diabetes, food hygiene, physical activity, and social care.
So far, so good. Who could argue with improved well-being for us all and it being achieved through our own preferences and behaviour rather than government fiat?
Unfortunately, the programme has both a flaw and a problem. The flaw is the idea that GDP and happiness (i.e. satisfaction with life) are not as independent as the government would have us believe but closely correlated. Look no further than Greece to see the impact of a sharp deterioration on incomes on life satisfaction. In January the IEA published an admirable analysis (“...and the Pursuit of Happiness: Wellbeing and the Role of Government”) showed clearly that GDP led life satisfaction.
It concluded “Happiness economics, which tries to extend a deficient hedonic morality to the arrangements of an open society, must be pronounced an unworkable project.” Well that’s a bit high-flown but it boils down to the need for government to stick to its knitting, and that includes improving GDP, and desist from trying to manipulate our behaviour to match its preferences.
The problem is measurement. A whole new science of indexing happiness is developing. The OECD has a big hand in this as it wishes to measure well-being across countries. Five years ago, an introductory paper on measuring subjective well-being noted four methods for starters: multi-item scales such as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and Satisfaction With Life. More recent important measurement approaches include the Experience Sampling Method, Ecological Momentary Assessment and the Day Reconstruction Method. There have been no shortage of proposals since then but the problem has less to do with confusion than dealing with time effects.
For example, an excessive imbiber of alcohol may report high satisfaction with life until his doctor diagnoses cirrhosis. The observer may know that no good will come of his drinking but if subjective well-being is what is measured, then drinking will increase his score on party nights even if the mornings after tell a different story. It is not just a matter of short-term fluctuations but of factoring in the bad consequences from many years later. To account for those, the government statisticians have to, in effect, present value the dire future and subtract it from today’s satisfaction.
In other words, we are no longer measuring subjective well-being as promised but what that subjective well-being would be if we were rational people with perfect knowledge of the government’s forecasts for us and if those forecasts were correct. That is a lot of “ifs” to correct our illusions of our own well-being.
It does not take much manipulation of the figures to provide justification for whatever it is that the Department of Health, for example, wishes to do. It opens the door to more government interference in our lives and choices. They know how to maximise our well-being even if, and especially when, we do not.
So what started out as a benign philosophy, Big Society, Small Government, perversely turns out, and not unusually, to have unintended consequences. The issue is not the means, i.e. whether changing our behaviour is achieved by nudging (behavioural economics) or traditional tax and regulation. The issue is freedom. No one will quarrel with the need for government to tell us what the consequences of our behaviour are likely to be – assuming the science is valid – but we should be allowed to make our own choices.
National happiness cannot be divorced from GDP; if our government wants us to be happy (and vote for them), they should concentrate on GDP.. Manipulating subjective well-being statistics to justify further government interference in our lives will not deceive the electorate.
The dangers of thinking with one's stomach
Perhaps April Fool’s day has come early? In a gift for comedy writers everywhere, Eric Pickles wants us to have a 'big lunch' for community cohesion. More still – Pickles wants to introduce a ‘curry college’ to promote integration!
Joking aside, there are some serious issues here. The Secretary of State for Communities - that meaningless Blairite catch-all – wants the state to promote social integration and has introduced, inevitably, a strategy to do so. Unlike Labour, however, the Conservatives are seeking to promote integrationism rather than multiculturalism. Naturally, this has outraged leftist cultural groups. It is ironic to note that multiculturalism started life in the Netherlands as a response to post-war immigration, encouraged as a solution to labour shortages rather like the German guest worker schemes. Immigrants were to keep their culture as they were ultimately intended to return home.
The argument between multiculturalism and integrationism is a misleading one. Government cannot create or promote cultural cohesion by any mechanism and, more importantly, it is not its duty to do so. This seems to run counter to this government’s own ‘Big Society’ agenda. State-led attempts to do so invariably result in artificial, bureaucratic initiatives that have little grounding in reality and are a huge waste of taxpayer’s money. Witness the failures of the Blair and Brown governments to create social cohesion; if they had succeeded we would have no need of further initiatives. We don’t need Gordon Brown telling us what our national historical narrative ought to be – in a free society there will be an infinite number of differing and possibly contradictory ones, this is healthy. Nor do we need Eric Pickles telling us what society should look like and how it should behave.
At worst, state attempts to promote cultural and social homogeneity result in the aggressive nationalism that plagued Europe in the 20th century and beyond – witness Putin’s Russia or Serbia in the 1990s. Moreover, the state very often promotes social tensions between immigrants and ‘indigenous’ groups as it creates zero-sum games over welfare and housing and thereby conflict. This is typical of state interventionism: on the one hand it creates a problem, on the other it attempts (and fails) to solve the problem using additional spending and bureaucracy. At the same time it creates a host of client organisations who are dependent on such funding for their existence and will protest bitterly if such funding is withdrawn.
The state should not be attempting to tell people what their culture and heritage ought to be and how they ought to relate to each other; it is best left to trial and error to find out. As David Hume observed in the eighteenth century, the English were much less culturally and socially homogeneous than other European nations. Relative to the French or the Spanish, individuals were freer to expresses themselves via standards of dress and taste and a lacked a centrally dictated sense of belief and national identity:
But the English government is a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The people in authority are composed of gentry and merchants. All sects of religion are to be found among them. And the great liberty and independency, which every man enjoys, allows him to display the manners peculiar to him. Hence the English, of any people in the universe, have the least of a national character; unless this very singularity may pass for such.
As a result, society was much more coherent, stable and economically productive as interest groups were not set up in positions of exclusive privilege and antagonism.
In the contemporary context, as Mark Pennington and John Meadowcroft show, we need to ‘rescue social capital from social democracy.’ The building of ‘social capital’ is best left to free interaction and civil society. The tendency of government, as with economic capital, is to consume the existing and distort the process of formation of new social capital.
Snippets from a wacky world
“A spokesman for the Federation of Small Businesses, while hopeful that credit easing would cut the cost of lending, said that peer-to-peer forms of lending – where individuals lend directly to businesses – needed to be explored.” What’s to explore? Put a sign up in your shop window saying “Loan wanted – please form orderly queue.”
“The Institute for Fiscal Studies, the ultimate arbiter of what is and what isn't doable in the budget….” Well, that’s settled then. Close down the OBR and retrain every economist in the land for a new trade.
“The Lords had opposed the so-called "spare bedroom" tax a fortnight ago, and on Tuesday reasserted that view by saying housing benefit cuts of £14 a week should not be imposed on claimants in under-occupied homes if they are unemployed, carers, foster carers, disabled or war widows.” Former Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau once famously said “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Our ruling elite clearly disagrees. Prepare for midnight knocks on the door from the bedroom police.
“So why are Gove and his friends so keen on (for-profit schools)? Dogma is part of it. But privatisation has created interests which have driven policy in the teeth of the evidence for years.” Unlike the teachers’ unions for the past several decades.
What a regulated free press would look like
If you want to try to judge the shape of a proposed censorship regime, there are few better methods than observing the sort of people who are cheer-leading the scheme. Although of course all forms of censorship are anathema to libertarians, the exact nature of the threat is always worth divining.
The inspiration for this post was last week's Question Time, the panel of which consisted of Philip Hammond, Alastair Campbell, Shirley Williams, Steve Coogan and Ann Leslie. One of the sections was whether or not the post-Leveson press needed statutory regulation. The two champions of censorship on the panel were Coogan and Campbell, who took the view that some form of independent regulation of the press was necessary in order to restrain the worst criminal practises.
The two most vocal opponents were Shirley Williams and Ann Leslie. Ms Leslie in particular drew on her extensive experience as a foreign correspondent to warn that wherever she want, the Minister of Information is always in favour of a ‘responsible’ free press, and that a truly free press is fundamental to democracy. Her views were not really permitted to count, however, because she committed the egregious career-sin of writing for the Daily Mail. This brings me to my main point.
Both Campbell and Coogan spent a good portion of the show playing for cheap applause by lambasting the Daily Mail and that other great liberal-left Satan, News International. Scarcely a question could go by without some cheap joke at the Mail’s expense. Defending censorship, Coogan querulously queried whether or not we could have a ‘free press’ when Rupert Murdoch owned so large a share of it (the answer is yes).
As I’ve argued in the past, the Mail and especially the Murdoch papers have such a large readership not because of any great corporate conspiracy but because their papers are very popular. Murdoch only owns three national papers, no more than the Mirror Group. It is just that more people like – and buy, of their own free will – his output. This infuriates a certain species of Guardian reader (although not all of them) who genuinely believe that their tastes and preferences should carry more weight than that of the ordinary public. The fact that their newspaper of choice has to be propped up by Auto Trader and has the lowest circulation of any quality daily baffles and infuriates them.
Like fast food and cigarettes, they view right-wing journalism as a morally debilitating opiate upon which the masses have become cruelly hooked. So what’s needed is statutory regulation that will afford a narrow band of elitists the opportunity to ‘correct’ the market tendency towards journalism they dislike. It is inevitable that any censorship regime, however well-meaning, will be informed by the prejudices of its enforcers. We must not allow the political class to make the same mess of the press that they make of so much else.
George Monbiot's stupidity
George Monbiot begins his Guardian op-ed this week with this jaw-dropping assertion:
Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop.
Has Monbiot been asleep for the past 18 months of deficit-denying, Wall Street Occupying, Murdoch-pieing shenanigans? Has he heard of UK Uncut or 38 Degrees? Did he notice all the strikes and marches in London? Does he, indeed, ever read his own newspaper? His article—titled ‘The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left’—appeared on the same day as the The Guardian published such opinion pieces as ‘The NHS bill could finish the health service—and Cameron’ (Polly Toynbee) and ‘Why we need more banker bashing’ (Sunny Hundal). This is hardly unrepresentative of the organ’s output.
The issue that the left is “too polite” to mention is an academic study which Monbiot (wrongly) claims to have “revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence.” Have you heard about this well-guarded piece of secret research? Of course you have. Only two days earlier, the reticent and self-doubting Charlie Brooker covered the ‘right-wingers are stupid’ story and proved his point by quoting comments left on The Daily Mail’s website. Guess what? Some of the things people say underneath Daily Mail stories are really stupid! One hopes Brooker waived his fee for this journalistic turkey shoot.
In a classic example of confirmation bias, Monbiot declares the study’s findings to be “embarrassingly robust”. This is not the view of the statistician William M. Briggs, who calls the study “a textbook example of confused data, unrecognized bias, and ignorance of statistics”. The study’s methodology does indeed appear to have been designed with the preferred conclusion in mind and it is not difficult to guess the political persuasion of its authors. Even if the findings were sound, the study would only serve as a reminder of how useless that ridiculously broad and pejorative term “right-winger” is.
Monbiot fails to mention it, but libertarians and free-marketeers do not have a dog in this fight. The study examines homophobia and racism with a selective definition of “conservative ideology” thrown in for good measure. The researchers define right-wing ideologies as “socially conservative and authoritarian”, which rules out Monbiot’s hated libertarians and “neo-liberals” at a stroke. People who agree that “Schools should teach children to obey authority” and “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time” are, by the questionable definition of these researchers, “right-wingers” and they find correlations—though not very strong ones—between these attitudes and weaker cognitive abilities. There are similar correlations with racism and homophobia. It turns out that bigots are not always very intelligent. Who would have thought it?
But Monbiot is not prepared to leave it at that. Although the study clearly relies on a North American view of the political spectrum in which the left is socially liberal and the right is socially conservative, Monbiot cheerfully conflates it with the economic outlook of the British Left and Right. The “Conservative appeal to stupidity”, he says, manifests itself in reforming the benefits system and checking whether people on disability benefit are actually unable to work. But one wonders how many Americans on the left or the right would consider capping benefits at £26,000 ($41,000) a year to be unreasonable, let alone “stupid”.
Much as Monbiot would like to think otherwise, a study of social prejudices tells us nothing about the wisdom of his brand of Malthusian, zero-growth economics. Tax-and-spend leftists and Spirit Level suckers who still cannot grasp the broken window fallacy after 160 years should hesitate before calling people dumb. In 2010, researchers exposed the left’s economic incomprehension when they asked people whether they agreed with statements such as “Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable”, “A company with the largest market share is a monopoly” and “Free trade leads to unemployment”. They found self-defined Progressives and Liberals to be consistently more ignorant of basic economics than self-defined Libertarians and Conservatives.
The study was, however, criticised for choosing statements designed to trip up left-wingers. When the researchers conducted the experiment again last year, they added statements designed to appeal to the prejudices of the right, such as “Making abortion illegal would increase the number of black-market abortions” and “Legalizing drugs would give more wealth and power to street gangs and organized crime.” With these new statements included, the differences between political factions evened themselves out somewhat. Progressives still did worse than Libertarians overall, but it was concluded that “all groups do poorly, with each group tending to do relatively poorly on questions challenging its positions”. Regardless of political affiliation, people tend to believe what they want to believe. This is a conclusion that Monbiot should bear in mind before he allows one piece of flawed research to confirm his bias.
Why Wikipedia is doing the right thing on SOPA and PIPA
Today, with the closure of one of the internet's richest resources. the English-speaking world stands greatly impoverished. In protest against two proposed bills in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate (the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' (SOPA) and the 'Protect IP Act' (PIPA) respectively), the English-language version of Wikipedia has taken itself offline for 24 hours. [That includes the Wikipedia links in this post, lest ye take the open internet for granted — ed.]
The provisions put forward in SOPA and PIPA enable the closing down and harassment of websites (not even necessarily located in the US) on the flimsiest of pretences: government censorship masquerading as copyright protection. But what exactly makes the laws so odious? There are four key, objectionable provisions, all of which are ripe for manipulation by rent-seeking parties (summarised from this link):
1. The Anti-Circumvention Provision, allowing the US government to close sites who offer advise on merely circumventing censorship mechanisms;
2. The “Vigilante” Provision, which would grant immunity from prosecution to internet service providers who pre-emptively block potentially offending sites, leaving them inherently vulnerable to pressures from a host of interested parties;
3. The Corporate Right of Action, enabling copyright holders to obtain an unopposed court order which would cut off foreign websites from payment processors and advertisers;
4. Expanded Attorney General Powers: therein giving the Attorney General the power to block any domain name and have their results barred from search engines: they would effectively cease to exist.
You don't need to be a rabid libertarian to realise both SOPA and PIPA are anathema to a society which readily proclaims its commitment to spreading liberal democracy; an integral part of which is the freedom of expression. After all, western nations have waged war purportedly in support of 'freedom' and regularly (this time rightly) criticise those nations which continually suppress freedom of expression online.
On their own turf however, governments seem evermore reluctant to allow the internet to remain the vital bastion of freedom that it is. Away from the stifling proclamations of state broadcasters and the mass media, the internet has revolutionised Joe Bloggs's ability to think independently: little wonder it is increasingly browbeaten from governments worldwide.
Economic consequences must considered too. If a website is to avoid being picked-off by the keen-eyed legal-sharpshooters that would undoubtedly thrive with the passing of these laws, they would have to employ an army of workers to constantly micromanage their site's content: one slip-up and it's potentially 'Game Over'. Who would want to invest in company stifled in a quagmire of draconian legislation, able to be shut down with the hit of 'Enter'? The internet's position as a motor of modern innovation would be seriously jeopardised.
Despite the promising words coming from the White House that freedom of speech and expression will be upheld, scepticism about Obama's commitment to liberty is well grounded: less than three weeks ago the 'National Defense Authorization Act' was passed, enabling the indefinite detention of almost anybody the US government sees fit – an unsettling omen.
Albeit not alone, the world's most powerful nation is walking down an increasingly questionable path. The internet is one of history's most momentous inventions: its fate is far, far too important to be left for politicians to decide.
The anachronism of public service broadcasting
In last week’s Spectator, Charles Moore bemoaned the dumbing down of BBC Radio 3. In this week’s issue, several letters to the editor make the same point. Now, you may dismiss this as the snobbery of classical music afficionados. Or you might agree that Radio 3 presenters are indeed ruining the listening experience by telling you how you should feel about particular pieces of music (e.g. “blown away”) and entreating you to to email, text or tweet about what you are hearing. Frankly, I’m too much of a musical moron to have an opinion on the subject.
What this story really highlights is the futility of compulsorily funded “public service broadcasting”. The point of public service broadcasting is, one would assume, to address some failure in the broadcast market – to produce and air content which benefits the public, and which would not otherwise be produced or aired by commercial players. But if you buy this market failure argument, you have to concede that ‘public service broadcasting’ is likely to be a fairly elitist project. The intention may be to bring high culture to the masses, but in reality you will probably end up subsidising the tastes of the relatively wealthy and well educated with a tax paid largely by those who have no interest in such things. This is clearly a rather perverse outcome.
On the other hand, if you “dumb-down”, if you chase market share with populist programming, then the rationale for compulsorily funded public service broadcasting disappears. By way of illustration, let’s look at tonight’s broadcast schedule for the BBC 3 TV channel.
At 7pm, we get Pop’s Greatest Dance Crazes, “a top 50 countdown of the hippest, sexiest, quirkiest and campest dance crazes of the last 40 years.” At 8pm, it’s Don’t Tell the Bride, a reality TV show in which a man gets £12,000 to arrange his wedding, but isn’t allowed any contact with his wife-to-be while he does it: “Four weeks apart will push their relationship to the limit.” At 9pm, it’s How Sex Works, which is a documentary about twenty-somethings who get around a bit. At 10pm, it is time for Eastenders (a miserable soap opera), followed by documentary Bizarre Crimes (self-explanatory), and a series of cartoons imported from the US. If you are lucky enough to still be awake at 4.25am, you get to watch Cherry Healey look for “essential truths amongst the tales of sex and debauchery to see if losing your virginity is about more than just having sex for the first time.”
Can anyone really argue that programming like that justifies forcing television-owners, on pain of imprisonment, to pay £145.50 a year to a government agency? It’s a rhetorical question.
Public service broadcasting is caught between a rock and a hard place. If it sticks to its ‘market failure’ remit it will appear elitist and lose public support. If it chases a larger market, it will undermine any reasonable case for public funding. Ultimately, public service broadcasting and the licence fee that sustains it are an anachronism – something which might (just) have been appropriate when we had two TV channels and limited broadcasting spectrum, but no longer make sense in a world of thousand-channel satellite television and high-speed internet streaming. With almost limitless choice available at the click of a button, we don’t need government to entertain us, inform us, or filter our cultural diets for us. Curiously enough, the way that technology has democratized the media means that democracy itself no longer has any valuable role in broadcasting. It’s time the BBC and the government realized that.
Review: The Iron Lady
The Iron Lady interweaves two compelling themes. One is of a love story, romantic and endearing, played out against a backdrop of great events. The other tells of a struggle against the odds, of a woman facing the supercilious and dismissive ranks of a male establishment.
The movie is utterly dominated by the mesmeric performance of Meryl Streep. A few minutes deep into the story it becomes apparent that we are witnessing a role that will become legend. We have to remind ourselves that we are watching an actress portray a role, rather than a documentary featuring the former Prime Minister herself.
The movie, fiction though it is, will probably prompt a reappraisal of Margaret Thatcher and the part she played in changing the nation she led. Meryl Streep's strong performance wins the audience into a sympathetic evaluation of Lady Thatcher's achievements.
The movie has been criticized for its portrayal of her dementia while she is still with us. That portrayal, however, is not remotely mocking; on the contrary, it powerfully elicits our sympathy and support, and the sad fact is that the lady we knew is already no longer with us.
There is nothing in this film for the Left. Where they demonized Margaret Thatcher, the movie humanizes her. It is not about the great events of her political life; these are its backdrop. Her entry into Parliament, her leadership bid, the miners' strike, the IRA and the Falklands War all feature, but the movie is not about them. Rather is it about the strength of character with which she confronted successive challenges and crises.
Her achievements are featured, together with the confrontation it took to bring them about. She took on a prevailing political ideology and overturned it, as well as the political elite that espoused it. The nation prospered again, spreading new opportunities for advancement and home ownership. The ailing state-owned giants became successful enterprises, and the brutal ideology that had enslaved half the world was overthrown.
Her faults are depicted, too. Towards the end she became progressively more imperious and insensitive to advice or criticism. She remained committed to the view that government was there to help people to improve their lot, and was equally firm in her conviction that she knew how to do that. A little more readiness to listen and debate might have bought her a little more loyalty from her colleagues.
Overwhelmingly, though, the impression is favourable. Meryl Streep wins its audience over to identify with her struggles and to leave it more sympathetic towards the former Prime Minister than it was before. The movie will win accolades without doubt. And there will be new accolades and recognition of achievement for Lady Thatcher herself.
The ASI's best of 2011: Sam Bowman
Sam Bowman, Head of Research:
It was a pretty good year for films, both because of some excellent rereleases (Apocalypse Now, Jurassic Park, The Lion King – thankfully shown in 2D as well as 3D) and terrific independent films. The Guard was the funniest film I saw this year, about an rural Irish policeman teaming up with a black FBI agent to bust up a gang of drug smugglers, although some of the humour may be lost on a non-Irish audience. (I usually side with the drug smugglers in films like these, but they were suitably nasty in this one.)
Drive was extremely slick, and had a great soundtrack — it wasn't the most profound film ever, but it was a good watch. We Need To Talk About Kevin was well-made but deeply unpleasant to watch, and its polar opposite My Week With Marilyn wins the Most Enjoyably Frothy award from me. I should also give special mention to Attack the Block, which I haven’t seen yet but may be in one scene as a background extra. (I'm a big fan of its director, Joe Cornish, from his TV shows and radio programmes with Adam Buxton.) The most outstanding film of the year, for me, was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Mark Kermode insists that it's a film about the tense relationships between men (and not, as you might think, about spying), so the fact that every man at the ASI has chosen it as one of our films of the year might say something about us!
Most books I read this year were released before 2011. Of the 2011 crop, Detlev Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse was one of the best. Schlichter reframed the Misesian theory of the business cycle for modern times, giving a stark prediction about a Weimar-like future for the world’s fiat currencies. Of the fiction I read, the most enjoyable were the fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire books (on which the Game of Thrones TV series is based). I'm working my way through Tony Judt's history of Europe since 1945, Postwar, but it is so vast that I tend to dip in and out.
It wasn’t as good a year for music as some previous years, but there were still a few notable releases. Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow (sample song) was a languid, dreamy snowscape, and a return to form after the disappointing Director’s Cut. From Britain, the only outstanding album for me was Metronomy’s The English Riviera (sample song). St Vincent’s Strange Mercy (sample song), Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes and Bon Iver’s Bon Iver were all pretty good, but I wasn’t grabbed by many albums this year overall.
Most of my favourite TV at the moment comes from the US. Game of Thrones proved that HBO could do fantasy, fusing the epic setting of the Lord of the Rings with the characterization of The Wire or The Sopranos. I finally saw Band of Brothers, which was brilliant. But the best show I saw this year was Parks & Recreation, a hilarious successor to the US Office set in a small town local government department which also included possibly the first openly libertarian character on TV. (If you decide to try P&R, skip the weak first season.)
My favourite YouTube video was Nicholas Cage Losing His Sh*t (video may be NSFW). That's pretty much how I feel whenever I read the newspaper nowadays and see stories like this. I don't have a favourite politician of the year, but I like Gary Johnson and hope he does well on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2012. Ron Paul has an ugly past, but I like him and hope he does well in the GOP primaries.
What to hope for in 2012? I think the silent film The Artist will be great and loved the trailer. If I'm lucky, Joanna Newsom might do another album, and musicians I love like Of Montreal, Janelle Monae and Dirty Projectors are all expected to as well. And I'm hugely enjoying my advance copy of Daniel Klein’s book Knowledge and Coordination, in which he makes the case for a liberalism based on a synthesis of Adam Smith and FA Hayek, and which I will review on the blog when it is released.
