Space disco, Kate Bush, and more: the ASI's best of 2014
Ben:
Song: #####.1 by #####Album: It's Album Time by Todd Terje
Musician: The Pizza Underground
Movie: Grand Budapest Hotel, but I'm ashamed to say I only saw five
Book: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Restaurant: Rex and Mariano, Soho (runner up The Manor, Clapham)
Favourite article: I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, by Scott Alexander
Favourite moment: #Gamergate
Favourite person: Scottish highlander on BBC Question Time
Kate:
Song: Wild Child by Kenny Chesney, with Grace Potter
Album: 1989 by Taylor Swift
Musician: Jason Aldean (for continuing his tradition of writing songs about trucks)
Movie: Magic in the Moonlight
Book: Goodbye, Mr Chips by James Hilton (1939)
Article: Bring Back the Girls - Quietly by Peggy Noonan (WSJ)
Political moment: #Bridgegate
Person: Senator-elect Cory Gardner, CO (I have now forgiven Colorado for their nightmare decision in 2012. Ohio, on the other hand, I am still not speaking to)
Charlotte:
Song: minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix] by Aphex Twin (because it only took 13 years to come out proper)
Album: Rivers of the Red Planet by Max Graef (jazz/hip-hop/house, good background music)
Musician: Kate Bush (the year I got round to listening to her albums)
Movie: Under the Skin (amazingly shot)
Book: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind (one of the few I actually read)
Restaurant: Bone Daddies, Soho (who can't love a huge bowl of pig fat & garlic)
Article: The Socialist Origins of Big Data - The New Yorker (on Chile's project Cybersyn)
Political Moment: The world thinking Kim Jung Il's public absence was because he broke both his ankles because he ate so much Emmenthal (because obviously)
Person: Shia LaBeouf (for everything he's given us)
Sophie:
Single: Shake It Off by Taylor Swift (I do not enjoy this song but LOVE watching Charity, one of my best friends and Swift’s greatest fan, singing it)
Album: Artpop by Lady Gaga (the pop genius’s works are not only the epitome of freedom of expression and individualism but Gaga demonstrates the natural force with which the world sucks up anything walking into a gaping hole in the market)
Musician: Kate Bush (my eyes opened to her brilliance and creations this year by Sam, her sounds and voice open creative avenues in my mind)
Movie: La Grand Bellezza (released 2013 but watched this year, you MUST see this, it’s an indulgent party for the senses to devour)
Book: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (only read this year though it was released in 2010)
Restaurant: Le Relais de Venise, Mansion House (holds fond memories of both an amazing steak and my first time dining with the ASI team)
Political moment: remaining a United Kingdom (were endless obscure and hilarious ones in 2014, though building up to the referendum for two years and the elation experienced at the result makes this undoubtably number 1)
Person: Malala Yousafzai (the 17-year-old global role model is courageous, ambitious and hard-working, existing to fight for others’ education—I was reduced to tears of inspiration when she spoke at my university)
Nick:
Song: Fancy by Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX (albeit for entirely non-I-G-G-Y related reasons)
Album: Kenny Dennis III by Serengeti (see No Beginner, Off/On)
Musician: Jonwayne (partly for being the neckbeardiest rapper/producer going - see Andrew, Be Honest)
Movie: Locke (of the four or so I watched)
Book: Time's Arrow by Martin Amis (1991) or The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) by Matthew Young (honourable mentions to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921) and Girl, 20 by Kingsley Amis (1971))
Restaurant: Jam Jar, Jesmond, Newcastle, if only for their Cow vs. Pig burger
Article: ‘Tories should turn their backs on Clacton’ and ‘Voters, not the politicians, are out of touch’ by Matthew Parris, King of trolls (Times)
Political moment: The UKIP defections and the resulting betting, which netted me a sum of no less than £10
Person: For me, 2014 was the year of the unimullet (s/o r/YoutubeHaiku)
Sam:
Song: Attachment by Hannah Diamond (My top 50 singles of the year are here, Youtube playlist link here)
Album: It's Album Time by Todd Terje (Thanks Ben for introducing me. I also enjoyed FKA Twigs's album LP1 and got into Susanne Sundfor in a big way this year)
Musician: AG Cook / the PC Music grouping in general
Movie: Interstellar (but I only saw about 5 films all year)
Book: Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies (Worth it for the chapter on the Kingdom of Dumbarton Rock alone. Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, on the evolutionary biology of sex, was a close runner-up)
Restaurant: Santana Grill (a burrito stand on Strutton Ground near the office—just delicious; I also ate at KFC at lot)
Article: An open letter to open-minded progressives, by Mencius Moldbug (I disagree with much of Moldbug's work, but I can't think of a more interesting contemporary political thinker)
Podcast: Serial
Political moment: Shinzo Abe storming to victory in Japan (also for his amazingly awkward handshake with Xi Jinping)
Person: Richard Dawkins (boring as an atheist, brilliant as Social Justice Warrior-bait)
Philip:
Song: Turn Down for What by DJ Snake and Lil Jon
Album: Syro by Aphex Twin
Musician: Matador
Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy
Book: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett
Restaurant: Gymkhana, Mayfair
Article / blogpost: How Farming Almost Destroyed Ancient Human Civilization by Annalee Newitz
Political moment: The landing of the Rosetta spacecraft's Philae probe on Comet 67P
Person: David Sinclair (for his work on lifespan extension)
Professor Dennis O'Keeffe
We are sad to announce that Prof Dennis O'Keeffe has died. He was a very distinguished educationist who did original and influential research on subjects that included truancy and teacher training. He was Professor of Social Science at the University of Buckingham. He attracted national attention with his report on "School Attendance and Truancy (1995)," taking the view that truancy was an almost inevitable result of poor courses that failed to entice the attention of students. With the Adam Smith Institute he published "The Wayward Elite" in 1990, a major critique of British teacher-education, and sat on the ASI's Scholars' Board. He was a keen supporter of several of the Free Market think tanks in addition to the ASI, including the IEA, the CPS, and Civitas, and participated in many of their activities. His attendance was always appreciated at our lectures and lunches, as much for his goodwill and charm as well as for his considerable intellect.
Prof. John Hibbs: an influential life
We are sad to learn of the death of Prof John Hibbs in his 89th year. Dr Hibbs was a celebrated transport economist who chose to publish many of his scholarly studies with the Adam Smith Institute. He was hugely influential in the denationalization and deregulation of the UK's bus industry. He wrote Bus Deregulation: the Next Step (1982), The Debate on Bus Regulation (1985), Deregulated Decade (1997, with Matthew Bradley), Tomorrow's Way (1992, with Gabriel Roth) and Trouble with the Authorities (1998).
Dr Hibbs was an active supporter of the ASI, as a member of our Scholars' Board and as a frequent presence at our lunches and lectures. He was full of courtesy and charm, and always found time to talk to our young members. A full obituary can be found here.
Welcome Sophie and Nick!
Sophie Sandor and Nick Partington are joining the ASI as gap-year employees for six months. We asked them to write this post to introduce themselves to our readers.
Sophie:
As I almost enter my third week with the Adam Smith Institute, I welcome myself as one of two new gap year students evolving in a world-leading think tank. And how thrilling it is to be here; immersed in the works of my favourite thinkers and a family of ambitious, intelligent minds. It really is the dream.
Crafting ideas that have changed our world before and will change it again. And if you love a challenge - even greater is the fun for the views we advocate are not the most popular or acceptable. Like our relationship with what we consume: we are not always attracted to the healthiest options. We are a consistent rebellion against common thought.
In my time so far I've witnessed eager 6th form students gather for our annual Independent Seminar on the Open Society, celebrated the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall with former European leaders and met and worked with a plethora of inspiring, hard-working individuals. I could not be more excited for my imminent future here and look forward to writing more about my educational and economy ideas.
Nick:
Having finished my A Levels in History, Politics, and Economics, not excited by the prospect of ‘finding myself’ while pretending to help build an orphanage in Mongolia, I decided to eschew ‘gap yah’ clichés and apply for the Adam Smith Institute’s gap year internship programme. Few places are as keen to engage with pre-undergraduate students as the ASI, and I am delighted to have been selected.
Being sceptical of what Jeremy Bentham called the “rhetorical nonsense” of natural rights theory, I admire places like the ASI which provide compelling justifications for a wide-ranging liberal programme quite apart from the vague philosophical assertions so often invoked by others. More than anything, I admire the ASI for so often saying the unpopular thing and holding the counterintuitive line against public opinion on so many issues. There are few institutions with the status of the ASI which approach consensus with such irreverence.
At the same time, the ASI makes prominent what I see as another powerful justification for free markets and the minimal state. For me, that classically liberal social and economic policy benefits those worst off in society is extremely important, and too rarely emphasised in circles on the liberal right (with one notable exception being Matt Zwolinski and the other Bleeding Heart Libertarians). Framed in this way, proposals such as freedom of movement across borders, sometimes dismissed by those otherwise passionate about reducing the coercion of the state, become powerful tools for ameliorating suffering in the most deprived areas of the world.
Working with and learning from the ASI's employees, all of whom do fascinating work on policy, is a rare opportunity. Added to that are the various things which come about from working in Westminster and being able to live in London for the duration of the position. I am looking forward to taking advantage of these while I am here because, perhaps unsurprisingly, there aren’t many Institute for Economic Affairs events on the flat tax in rural Northumberland.
Also, during my time at the ASI, I am hoping to write further about how and when ideas of meritocracy, debates in libertarian political philosophy, and utilitarianism can (and should) affect politics and policy research.
The new population estimates are already being misunderstood
New estimates of future population size have only been out a day and already they're being misunderstood. Firstly they're being misunderstood by the people who actually made them:
Rising population could exacerbate world problems such as climate change, infectious disease and poverty, he said. Studies show that the two things that decrease fertility rates are more access to contraceptives and education of girls and women, Raftery said. Africa, he said, could benefit greatly by acting now to lower its fertility rate.
Piffle, stuff and nonsense. It's a well known finding that access to contraception drives, at most, 10% of changes in fertility. It's the desire to limit fertility which, unsurprisingly, drives changes in fertility. And the education of girls and women, while highly desirable, is a correlate, not a cause, of declining fertility. Economies that are getting richer can afford to educate women: economies that are getting richer also have declining fertility. It's the getting richer that drives both.
But that's not enough misunderstanding. We've also got The Guardian displaying a remarkable ignorance on the subject:
Many widely-accepted analyses of global problems, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment of global warming, assume a population peak by 2050.
That's not just piffle that's howlingly wrong. The IPCC assessments do not assume any such damn thing. For example, the A2 family, which is the family that the entirety of the Stern Review is based upon (and yes, it's one of the four families used by the IPCC) assumes a 15 billion global population in 2100. That is, it assumes a significantly larger population at that date than even these new estimates do. But you can see how this is going to play out, can't you? Population's going to be larger therefore we must do more about climate change: when in fact these new estimates show that population is going to be smaller than the work on climate change already assumes.
As we might have said here before a time or two we don't mind people being misguided in their opinions and thus disagreeing with us. We pity them for their mistakes of course, but that's as nothing to the fury engendered by people actually being ignorant of the subjects they decide to opine upon.
When your results should give you pause for thought
It's entirely possible to construct methods of measurement that will prove anything you want them to. But when you do so it's always worth just checking your results to see if they make some sort of sense. As with that delightful survey from nef a few years ago, where they tried to list the best places in the world to live coming up with Vanuatu as the answer. That they arrived at a place where a penis sheath is the major fashion accoutrement and they worship the Duke of Edinburgh as a Living God (which he is of course) leads to a certain questioning of the metrics they used to decide upon "best place to live". So it is with this report about how the children in England are horribly downtrodden, depressed and unhappy:
Children in England are less happy and satisfied with their lives than those in the majority of other European countries and North America, with only South Korean and Ugandan children worse off, a study by The Children's Society has found.
Although 90% of English children in the study rated themselves as having relatively good wellbeing levels, England still ranked ninth out of a sample of 11 countries around the world in the study, which involved 50,000 children – behind countries such as Romania, Spain, and Algeria and ahead of only South Korea and Uganda.
When we look at the details of the report we find that three of the four happiest places (in the larger sample) to be a child are Greenland (60,000 people stuck on an ice floe), Armenia (per capita GDP around $6,000) and Macedonia (per capita GDP $10,000 or so, under a third of the UK). Among the smaller sample of 9 countries the very best place to be a child is apparently Romania: and aren't we still sending teddy bears to the appalling orphanages there?
Perhaps being a child in England can be made better but it's not entirely obvious that this report is using the correct ways of measuring that "best place". Or even methods that are even remotely sensible.
John Blundell, 1952—2014
The Institute has lost a talented and much valued friend, and those who work to spread economic and personal liberty have lost a staunch and effective campaigner. From the ASI's foundation in 1977, we worked with John, who was then Press & Parliamentary Officer for Federation of Small Businesses. During his spell in that post from 1977 - 1982, he was also a Lambeth Councillor, and combined knowledge of what worked for business with deep insights into the workings of local government. He was a leading figure among the very small band who worked to restore free markets and opportunities to a nation worn down by years of centralism and state planning. He engineered a joint publication between the ASI and the Federation of Small Businesses in 1979. Called "An Inspector at the Door," it detailed the various powers of officials to enter premises and seize materials. It was a media sensation, with numerous articles about Britain's "Society of Snoopers." Margaret Thatcher expressed her concern in Parliament, and set up a commission to review and curtail some of those powers.
It was an early example of John's effectiveness and his skills as an organizer and a communicator. Those skills saw him in good stead when he went to the US, where he became President of the Institute for Humane Studies, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Charles G Koch Foundation, and the Claude R Lambe Foundation.
His appointment in 1993 as Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs was an inspired one. He rapidly reinvigorated the IEA and restored it to its former glory and influence. Assiduously he built up its network of supporters and its range of influential publications. John's own temperament, outgoing and enthusiastic, helped turn the IEA's meetings into ones not to be missed. John's benign presence not only left its stamp on the IEA, but on the numerous outside bodies that he generously helped to build up and support. Internationally he helped to establish other institutes, and was a stalwart of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by F A Hayek to propagate liberal, free-market ideas.
John had many publications to his credit, including "Waging the War of Ideas" (2003), together with some important works he co-authored or edited. Under his leadership the IEA supported and publicized works by outside bodies, often hosting launches in the IEA's premises. Those premises were transformed during John's tenure, giving the IEA the space it needed for its extended tasks.
He was a good friend and a loyal one. We shall miss his huge personality and his wry humour. He made a major contribution to making the world into a better place, and will deservedly be remembered for that.
Inside the Adam Smith Institute
Now that the new Adam Smith website is up, with an exciting plethora of activities and reports scheduled, new readers might like to take stock of what the ASI does, and what motivates us. If labels are used, they might be "free market" and "libertarian," but these are big tents under which disparate people are grouped. The crucial thing is that our free market libertarianism is both consequentialist and empiricist, combining an essentially Hayekian economic outlook with a deep optimism about the world.
In our view actions that enable individuals to advance their happiness by pursuing their own goals are worthy of support, and those that restrict their ability to do that should be opposed. We are more concerned with what results from actions than with the intentions or attitudes of those who initiate those actions. And we are more concerned with changing the world for the better than with promoting theories about it.
As empiricists we make conjectures about the world and its future, and we test their value against experience of real world outcomes. Where the two conflict, it is the conjecture that has to be rejected or modified. We take the view that "an ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory."
While economics and public policy are complex fields that make experiment and testing difficult to perform, we do attempt to test proposals by their results. Several times we have proposed small-scale trials of larger ideas in order to validate the ideas and ascertain any unforeseen drawbacks before they are rolled out more widely.
We recognize, of course, that poor people do not have access to the choices and chances accessible to the rich, and this is why many of our policy initiatives are directed to improving the lot of poorer people in society. We have advocated for many years that the income tax and national insurance thresholds should be set at the level of the minimum wage and indexed to it, so we would not be taxing people on the bottom income level.
Some of our research studies and policy suggestions derive from our recognition that poor people are hurt most by things such as restrictions on international trade and migration, planning controls that prevent cheap housing from being built, education policies that condemn poor children to bad schools and regulatory policies that protect established market players from new entrants.
We propose and back policies that give all parents choice over where their children go to school and which introduce competition into the school system, whether these be by education vouchers, or by allowing the allocation of state funds to schools be determined by the choices parents make. We tend to back the view that welfare is not just about providing the services the state thinks poor people should have, but about equipping people with the means to make their own choices about the mix of services they prefer. Ideas such as a negative income tax could remove the perverse incentives present in the current welfare system.
We recognize that states can cause a great deal of harm when they attempt to direct and micromanage the economy. Many regulations have damaging effects that were not anticipated, and this includes financial regulations that can make financial systems more unstable than they would be without them.
More broadly, we think that the ‘unknown unknowns’ of regulation should lead society to prefer decentralized trial and error to the risk of one big mistake that affects everyone in the same way.
We have argued that the central bank should follow the ‘Hayek rule’ – the stabilization of the level of nominal spending in times of booms and busts along a predictable path. Scott Sumner recently delivered our annual Adam Smith Lecture and explained how the failure of the world’s central banks to do this led to the Great Recession.
In the Adam Smith Institute we have always been very optimistic about technology and society. We see the world becoming increasingly open and tolerant in most (though not all) areas, with technology and entrepreneurship helping to drive that. To us, companies like Uber, Google and Airbnb deserve to be celebrated when they break down barriers to competition and disrupt the existing way of doing things in ways that give consumers a better product for a lower cost. It is this kind of innovative entrepreneurship that moves the world forward and allows today’s luxuries of the very rich to be tomorrow’s household commonplaces.
There is a dark side when new technologies are used by governments to spy on their citizens and control them. If technologies like Bitcoin and other blockchain-based innovations represent a long-term way of evading the worst excesses of government intrusion, they should be defended from government now while they are still in their infancy.
Of course the Institute is not a monolith. It consists of people who sometimes differ, but all of whom are brought together by a desire to give more power and liberty to individuals, so that their regard to their own interest can make them and us richer, freer and happier.
The new Adam Smith Institute website
If you're a regular reader of the Adam Smith Institute, you'll have noticed that we have a new website. I'm a big fan of the design – that and the rest of the site has been done by freelancer Rob Bell (who I strongly recommend for quality, value and ease-of-doing-business if you're thinking of getting a site designed yourself).
But the changes have been a little more than cosmetic: moving to Wordpress from Drupal means that we can manage the site at the back end more cheaply and easily than ever before, and if/when we want to redesign the site in the future it should be relatively simple.
Most importantly, the site is now fully responsive to mobile and table screen sizes, so reading on your phone should be a very pleasant experience from now on.
Naturally, there have been a few hiccups – we've imported all our old research and blogposts and maintained most URLs, but some old images have been lost and some posts with special characters in their URL may not be working. Thanks in part to Google's caching of old pages and the Wayback Machine, all of these things can be fixed manually. If you spot anything amiss, just let us know in the comments here.
There are some other minor niggles that need to be sorted out – we have pages about (for instance) Adam Smith that were almost never visited on the old site and we haven't found a good way to link to on the new site just yet. As is often the case, the balance is between style and function, and it will take a while to get everything working properly.
We'll be experimenting with some other changes, like keeping the Research section for ASI reports only and putting longer think pieces (clearly labeled as such) on the blog. We're also using tags for posts to make it easier to find what you want from our archives.
If you have any comments or suggestions, do please let us know!
Disqus or Wordpress for comments? Let us know
We're going to be moving over to a new, Wordpress-based site shortly. One of the things we're trying to decide is whether to keep Disqus for comments, or to use a native Wordpress-based comments system.
As I see it, the issues are this:
- Wordpress is simpler, requiring no login or registration. Disqus does allow guest comments but it can be quite fiddly.
- Disqus allows users to upvote their favourite comments and downvote others.
- All our current comments are kept on Disqus, though I'm not sure if we'll be able to bring these over in any case.
- Some users find Disqus to be extremely annoying to use; whether this is a specific Disqus problem or a more general problem I don't know.
Since ASI writers very seldom comment on the site, preferring to allow readers to discus among themselves (maybe that should change?), I thought the best thing to do would be to open it up to you — do you like Disqus? Hate it? Which would make you happier — the status quo, or a Wordpress-powered comment system? Let us know in the comments. Of course, the fact that those comments are currently powered by Disqus may skew the results...