Be careful what you wish for on wages

Lidl is to pay that Living Wage to all its workers. This will undoubtedly lead to the insistence that if one supermarket can do it then all should. And that's the point at which people should be careful of what they wish for:

Lidl will be the first supermarket group to raise its minimum pay to the level set by the Living Wage Foundation in a boost for thousands of workers.

The German discounter said that from March it would pay all Lidl UK employees a minimum of £8.45 an hour in England, Scotland and Wales and £9.75 an hour in London. It claimed this would make them among the best-paid supermarket employees in Britain.

What Lidl wishes to do is of course entirely up to them. It's the coming insistence that if one then all which will be the problem. For there are different methods of retailing, ones that use more or less labour to perform the basic tasks. Lidl is at the low use of labour end of this spectrum - they are therefore able to, if they should so wish, to pay more for each hour of that labour. The same will not be true of other chains which use a more labour intensive retailing method.

The usual example here is in the US. Walmart famously pays quite low wages. Costco equally is famed for paying many dollars per hour more for the labour it uses. Campaigners regularly point to Costco and insist that Walmart must be able to pay those same wages, it's all retail after all, right?

The failure is in not noting that, per value of sales, Costco utilises about half the labour that Walmart does. One chain is following a labour intensive model the other a labour light one. And if the insistence is going to be that wages should equalise across the two models then the labour utilisation is going to equalise too. That is, insisting that Walmart follow the Costco model is going to lead to some half of Walmart's current labour being  offered the opportunity to contribute elsewhere in the economy. That is, to lose their current jobs.

That Lidl, running a labour light model, can pay this Living Wage does not mean that those running more labour intensive models can also do so - not while continuing to run labour intensive models that is.

To read George Monbiot's best essay of the year

George Monbiot tells us that societies get too complex - more and more effort has to be put into supporting the complexity, marginal returns fall and eventually, collapse. This is explained in his nomination for best essay of the year, which is here:

At some point, however, investment in socio-political complexity typically reaches a point of diminishing returns, meaning that the marginal beneficial returns (i.e. problems solved) of additional complexity begin to decline, leading to a lowered capacity to solve the new problems that arise and to deal with their consequences. These returns may even turn negative, at which point societies are not anymore capable of upholding the level of complexity they have reached. Typically, they then tend to break down to a lower complexity level.

Thus, inevitably, civilisation will come tumbling down as a result of our economic system becoming ever more complex.

This is all based upon the ideas of Joseph Tainter. And there's ever such a slight problem with those ideas. For he thought this was already happening just as he was explaining his ideas. In 1988.

Yes, in that 1988, just before the dual economic explosion of digital technology and globalisation. Both of which are not showing any signs whatsoever of diminishing returns, quite the opposite.

That is, we've got another of those lovely ideas - ones that might be possible, sure. We know very well that there can be diseconomies of scale for example. They could apply to political systems too - we certainly think so at times. But it's entirely non-obvious that this applies to economies. And it has most certainly been non-true since the explanation was proffered. That is, another of those lovely ideas which could possibly be true but seem not to be.

At which point to float an idea that might also fall into that class of possible but not true ones. We;re certainly willing to agree that complexity can have its problems. That the management of complexity can cause inefficiency. Perfectly happy to agree with all of that. We're pretty sure that Hayek was making the same point actually, we can't plan because we can't know enough about the complexity to do so. But then Hayek also gives us the solution here. Use the market - the market can handle complexity precisely because no one is trying to manage the complex system.

Which means that the answer to this complexity question was given several decades before it was actually asked.

Cannabis in Colorado: More than you ever wanted to know

Yesterday The Times published an op-ed response to The Tide Effect report released by VolteFace and the Adam Smith Institute on Monday by columnist Alice Thomson. The report argues that the only way to bring cannabis under control is to legally regulate it. Thomson presents the counterexample of Colorado, the US state where cannabis has been legal longer than any other, and paints a bleak picture of the place since the change.Her article plays on the understandable fears of many regarding the impact of a regulated market by sporadically drawing what seems to very credible and alarming statistics.

Thomson makes a number of serious claims about the consequences of cannabis legalisation in Colorado, including data in relation to seemingly dramatically increasing road accidents and crime rates.

This new public debate about how best to manage the demand and supply is an important one. It is vital that is conducted honestly and openly. The veracity of the evidence used by reformers and those in favour of the status quo should be unimpeachable.

Thomson’s rushed response fails in this regard. Almost all of her claims are misleading, many are products of national trends across the US and others represent a fundamental misrepresentation or misunderstanding of the available data.

This joint response by VolteFace and the Adam Smith Institute to Thomson’s article draws on the rich and varied evaluative data that has been produced from an array of creditable sources since Colorado implemented the policy of legalising and regulating cannabis sales in 2014.

"Road deaths have increased by 48 per cent in the past two years"

This figure contradicts official data from Colorado’s Department of Transport for both Denver and Colorado as a whole. In Denver, 50 people have died in road accidents in 2016 so far, and 52 died in 2015. This is up from 43 deaths in 2014 and 40 in 2013 – a much smaller percentage increase than Thomson claims.

In Colorado in general, road deaths are up, but again by nothing like 48 percent – 492 deaths in 2016 and 507 in 2015 up from 451 in 2014 and 431 in 2013. The report Thomson cites, produced by the Rocky Mountains High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (we'll get on to them later), which has slightly different figures, still only shows a 14 percent rise in road deaths, from 481 in 2013 to 547 in 2015, much smaller than Thomson claims though still significant.

But is this effect specific to Colorado, and so possibly caused by its cannabis legalisation? No. The US as a whole experienced the largest rise in traffic fatalities in 2015 for fifty years – up 8% nationwide.

This effect was not evenly distributed around the country report the National Safety Council: "Oregon (27%), Georgia (22%), Florida (18%), and South Carolina (16%) all experienced increases in fatalities.” Oregon's law legalising recreational cannabis only came into effect in October 2015, and none of the others have recreational cannabis laws, so cannabis cannot be to blame.

So what is the cause? According the the NSC: "While many factors likely contributed to the fatality increase, a stronger economy and lower unemployment rates are likely at the core of the trend.” Not legalised cannabis.

"the American Automobile Association [found] that twice as many fatal crashes now involve drivers with THC, the main psychoactive constituent of marijuana, in their system."

Actually, the report Thomson is referring to here is about Washington state, not Colorado. And if Thomson had read that report she would have seen that it explicitly states that its results "do not indicate that drivers with detectable THC in their blood at the time of the crash were necessarily impaired by THC or that they were at-fault for the crash”. Indeed of the drivers involved only one-third were not also under the influence of alcohol or other, illegal, drugs.

In Colorado, the number of fatalities in accidents with drivers testing positive for cannabis rose from 71 in 2013 to 115 in 2015, but this does not imply that the cannabis caused the crash, or that cannabis was responsible for an overall rise in fatalities.

More rigorous research looking into the impact of medical cannabis laws shows that legalisation reduces traffic fatalities by 9 percent thanks to the substitution effect – in short, people driving under the influence of cannabis instead of more-dangerous alcohol.

"Hospital visits linked to marijuana use have increased by 49 per cent"

Hospital visits linked to cannabis have indeed increased since the change in legislation, with a report by the Colorado Department of Public Safety listing hospital visits linked to cannabis between the 2010-2013 period at 1440 per 100,000 visits, while in the 2014-2015 period, this figure rose to 2413. The report urged caution in interpreting the data however, stating that it should be considered "baseline data because much of the information is available only through 2014, and data sources vary considerably in terms of what exists historically."

In fact it goes on to provide some explanation for the marked increases in figures: "Legalization may result in reports of increased use, when it may actually be a function of the decreased stigma and legal consequences regarding use rather than actual changes in use patterns. Likewise, those reporting to poison control, emergency departments, or hospitals may feel more comfortable discussing their recent use or abuse of marijuana for purposes of treatment. The impact from reduced stigma and legal consequences makes certain trends difficult to assess and will require additional time to measure post‐legalization."

Colorado doctors have also pointed out that measures defining a hopital visit as cannabis-related are also often "arbitrary", being based on medical codes that make "any mention of marijuana", and being "assigned by billers, not practitioners at the bedside".

"the murder rate has risen 15 per cent."

Once again, Thomson has arrived at this impressive-sounding figure by ignoring national effects and not looking at the numbers in absolute terms. 

Across the United States, the murder rate rose by 10.8 percent in 2015, an effect driven by large rises in murders in American cities where there was a 15% rise.

Obviously, a rise in murders in Chicago or Baltimore cannot be blamed on Colorado’s cannabis laws, and a rise in murders in Denver may also be driven by the factors affecting those cities. The Colorado Bureau of Investigations’ crime report made no mention of cannabis as a factor affecting the homicide rate there. 

But Thomson’s numbers actually seem to understate the rise – different sources suggest that Denver’s murder rate has risen by between 36% and 65%.

Why might that be? Because if we look at the absolute numbers of homicides rather than just rates of change, Denver is a very safe place overall. In 2014 there were just 31 murders in total in Denver, according to the Denver Police Department, which rose in 2015 to 42 and in 2016 to 48. So this effect was driven by an extra eleven murders – in other words, quite possibly random noise. 

Even after these rises, Denver's murder rate is now only at the level it was in 2006, and is lower than almost every year before that. The Denver Post notes that the city’s “projected 2015 murder rate was lower than average among the nation’s 30 largest cities”. The graph below shows Denver’s murder rate compared to other major US cities.

Homicide rates across major US cities (Washington Post)

"Theft and burglaries are on the increase and the number of criminal prosecutions has grown by 44 per cent."

Here again is a serious case of misrepresentation of the actual crime rates of Denver/Colorado, omitting to take into account both the population growth of the state, the second highest in the US, and the wider patterns of crime seen across the US. Thomson's 44 percent increase, taken from a report by RMHIDTA, is at odds with figures from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, which show an increase of only 3.5 percent over the same period. Corrected for population growth, neither the violent or property crime rates for Denver show any increase, as the graph below shows:

(Cato Institute - Dose of Reality)

Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson is quoted as saying “Crime is up, but I don’t know if you can relate it to marijuana.” This is the conclusion also reached by a study conducted by the Metropolitan State University of Denver.

"The number of children using dope has also spiralled"

In fact, teenage use of cannabis has fallen mildly since legalisation, according to Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment, to a level slightly below the national average. The RMHIDTA, presumably Thomson's source for this statement, suggest otherwise however.

"a third more (children) are now excluded from school"

This is an error based on a misreading of the source, or a reliance on second-hand sources. A third more students have not been excluded from school – drug-related suspensions and expulsions have risen by a third, according to the RMHIDTA. A much smaller number. 

Data from the Colorado Department of Education actually finds the reverse trend to the RMHIDTA, with the number of drug-related expulsions showing a steady decrease since legalisation, numbering 718 in the school year ending in 2012, falling to 614 in 2013, 535 in 2014, 446 in 2015 and to 337 in 2016, of which 195 were cannabis-related, the 2016 being first year where such a distinction was made.

"38 children under the age of five were hospitalised last year after accidentally consuming the drug"

This alarming figure comes yet again from the RMHIDTA, the data originating first from the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center. Unfortunately it's not true. There were 38 calls to the RMPDC that mentioned cannabis exposure in children 0-5 years old in 2015, which tallies with similar statistics reported to the Colorado Department of Public Safety. This is in itself a concerning issue, but again a partial explanation for the increase can be found in the decreased stigma that has accompanied legalisation emboldening those calling in to the RMPDC to mention cannabis.

A phone call to a poison centre involving mention of exposure to cannabis is very different - and far less extreme - than a hospitalisation. Lack of clarity in the RMHIDTA report and failure to check the original source are to blame, helped by a willingness to jump to the most dramatic explanation. Underage cannabis-related hopitalisations in Colorado have increased since legalisation, but by no means to the same extent that Thomson implies, and the extent of the increase must be kept in context - it is still minor in absolute terms.

"What’s more, the predicted fall in alcohol consumption has not materialised."

Thomson's source for this is unclear as she does not provide figures herself, but if it is the RMHIDTA report she has used elsewhere, it presents figures from the Colorado Department of Revenue for Colorado for Liquor Excise Taxes to show an increase in alcohol consumption from 2011 to 2014 of 4 percent across the state. The report itself offers these numbers as proof of the same point Thomson makes.

What it does not mention is that the population of the state rose by nearly 5 percent during the same period, according to the US Census Bureau. This indicates that during that time, alcohol consumption per Coloradan at most stayed constant, or actually decreased. Factor in the increasing rates of tourism seen during the period, which would also account for increases in alcohol consumption across the state, and it does appear that Coloradans are drinking less.

"Far from leading to a peaceful, over-the-counter trade, legalisation has triggered a 99 per cent increase in illegal distribution of the drug as gangs try to avoid paying tax."

Here again, Thomson's numbers, originating first in the same RMHIDTA report, is at odds with those of the Colorado Department of Public Safety report, quoting data from the Colorado State Judicial Branch, which notes a general reduction in distribution offences from 2011 to 2015 of 23 percent (304 to 235).

"The DA believes that police are now busier investigating marijuana-related crime “than at any time in the city’s history”."

Despite this assertion by the DA (District Attorney), cannabis-related crime in Denver has not shown a major overall increase since 2012, according to figures reported by the Colorado Deportment of Public Safety, detailed in the table below.

(Marijuana Legalization in Colorado: Early Findings - Colorado Department of Public Safety)

When normalised for the increase in the population of Denver during the period, this indicates that cannabis-related crimes have not increased per capita.

"They would want to advertise, introduce better packaging and provide more choice with cannabis shakes, smoothies and cookies, as they do in Denver. Cannabis would inevitably become easier for children as well as adults to access."

We agree with Thomson here with her first point, in fact we make it ourselves in Chapter 6 of our report. We don't, however, make the leap of faith needed for her second, as it misses out the crucial point at the heart of The Tide Effect, which is that the best protection for children comes from effective policy and regulation, rather than prohibition. Long term downward trends in underage alcohol and tobacco consumption indicate the UK is more than capable of enforcing such measures.

By now, a trend in Thomson's sources may be starting to emerge - the majority of her figures originate from a report produced by the Rocky Mountains High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (RMHIDTA). But many of their figures are found to be either in disagreement with official figures from several different Colorado state departments, including Transport, Education, Public Safety, and Public Health and Environment, or a misrepresentation of their statistics to give a negative impression of legalisation.

Whereas the Colorado state departments attempt to communicate the data without agenda and provide tentative qualification for any trends seen, the RMHIDTA do not, and have in the past been shown to doctor data to suit their agenda. This is perhaps unsurprising for an organisation that, though supposedly neutral, has the explicit purpose of reducing cannabis production and distribution. Without further investigation of the RMHIDA's sources, this would lead any reader directly to the same doom-laden conclusions about legalisation that Thomson herself arrives at.

Thomson appears not to have looked at her sources, because she makes several important errors. She cites a study about Washington state in a discussion about Colorado, which itself is explicit that it does not show that cannabis use was the cause of the crash, and she mistakes a rise in drug-caused suspensions and expulsions with a rise in total expulsions, and mistakes phone calls for hospitalisations. More broadly, by not reporting the complex factors contributing to, say, hospital visit data, putting data such as crime statistics in the context of national trends or normalising for population changes, Thomson misrepresents the data continually to produce an oversimplified and completely untrue image of the consequences of cannabis legalisation in Colorado.

Thomson’s argument that the status quo be maintained is an honest one but it is dishonestly made. There is still much we need to understand about the impact of legally regulating cannabis markets but one-eyed responses underpinned by shoddy evidence serves no one well as this debate become more mainstream.

Sam Bowman is Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute. He tweets at @s8mb.

Henry Fisher is the Policy Director at VolteFace. He tweets at @_Hydrofluoric.

How to solve South Wales - don't let government anywhere near it

It's not often that we agree with anything that Aditya Chakrabortty writes over in The Guardian. It's also not often that he writes anything conservative or free market. However:

Finally, learn one of the hardest lessons of Brexit: the reason the political geography of Britain is so divided is because its economic geography is so unequal. Treasury levers and Bank of England billions are barely any use here. Instead, what’s needed is an attentiveness to place.

In his Deep Place studies of local Welsh economies, the academic Mark Lang starts from what places like Pontypool already have, and what can be built on. He pulls together members of the community and asks them what they need. His new report on Pontypool shares a lot with the work on the foundational economy done by the Centre for Research on Economic and Social Change, which i’ve written about here before. It starts from a recognition that chasing multinationals and chain retailers pays only limited dividends in a place that’s had its purpose stripped out. It argues for focusing on what locals need: social care, good schools, broadband. This isn’t Westminster politics with its big announcements, or even Cardiff politics and its ribbon-cutters’ charter. It’s more modest, perhaps even pessimistic. To me, it rings more true.

This is conservative because it is just Burke's little platoons all over again. Central government, even regional government, doesn't have the answers. And it's free market because it's voluntary cooperation down among those little platoons that the solutions, whatever they are, will be found.

Which means that this is also the third, something we agree with Aditya about.

Who knows, we might be surprised, it could be that laddie Chakrabortty has the beginnings of a reasonable economic commentator in him.

What the ban on letting agency fees means for the marginalised

Much in need of some good publicity, Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, is set to announce a ban on letting agency fees.

These charges - often for administrative duties, such as inventory and background checks - are clearly unpopular. But in their efforts to find a political free lunch, the Conservatives should consider the threat the changes pose to the country’s most marginalised renters.

A landlord has little way of knowing whether a prospective tenant will be a delight, or a nuisance. It is this risk of the latter that means that landlords will keep rents low for long-term residents, knowing that they would prefer to keep the business of well-behaved occupants.

Letting fees, most of which are paid at the beginning of an occupancy, have served as one way to mitigate against the risk of a rotten tenant. If a new occupant is destructive, and must be evicted, the landlord is then more able to cover a loss of earnings while a new tenant is found.

Eliminating these charges could be to the detriment of tenants who landlords perceive to be more risky. Without letting fees, there is a concern that landlords could rely on crude race or class-based stereotyping in order to judge the riskiness of prospective tenants.

There is already evidence of discrimination in the British rental market, as well as in the US - a problem that a ban on letting fees could exacerbate. Yet despite this concern for at risk renters, the policy is likely to be a vote winner. 

Surveys confirm that the charges are not liked. Last year, Citizens Advice estimated that new private sector tenants were facing an average of £337 in letting fees. However, we cannot be sure that banning the fees will reduce the cost of renting. As the housing minister acknowledged just two months ago, landlords are likely to raise rents in order to recoup the lost revenues from a ban on fees.

Rather, the economic rationale for a ban on fees is likely to be that by eliminating upfront moving costs, would be tenants can more easily relocate, and rents can adjust more quickly.

This effect could plausibly be a boon to the UK’s labour market as well. Rising homeownership rates are associated with a subsequent increase in unemployment, perhaps because workers become less willing to move for work when the costs of moving home increase.

This could also ameliorate some of the concerns over tenant riskiness previously discussed.

If abolishing letting fees does increase rental sector liquidity, then kicking out an occupant is less likely to result in a property being left unoccupied - producing no rents - for a prolonged period. It is difficult to determine which effect - the lack of upfront revenues or an increase in tenant turnover - would be more significant.

However, reducing the transaction costs of moving could also play into the hands of landlords keen to evict tenants. As, again, the prospect of a property being left vacant becomes less of a concern.

US evidence suggests that such evictions tend to fall disproportionately on women and non-whites. Abandoning the letting fee model could make the position of these vulnerable tenants yet more precarious.

Liberalism must not surrender to the populist tide

It is now something of cliché, and not exactly wrong, to say liberalism and globalism are in retreat as populist nationalism is in the ascendancy. Fortunately, it is probably hyperbolic to think we’re seeing the end of liberalism or the death of Western civilisation. Still, protectionism, industrial strategy, and nativism have tragically blundered back into respectable discourse and seem set to shape policy and political culture in the immediate future.

This raises the question of how liberals should respond. Simply defending the status quo is unsatisfactory for a few reasons. Although globalisation, open markets, trade, and migration have made the world an infinitely better place over the last thirty years (and, indeed, the last three centuries), widespread dissatisfaction cannot be ignored. That is, unless you take Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign or the end of David Cameron’s career as models of success.

Secondly, liberals should not view the status quo as wholly acceptable on our own terms either. The idea of ‘neoliberal hegemony’ has always been something of a myth (or an outright lie). Regional trade agreements are, at best, a poor substitute for non-preferential multi-lateral free trade. Pernicious and nonsensical regulations have continued to restrict and distort markets, with occupational licensure and planning restrictions being obvious examples. And almost all developed countries continue to have convoluted, inefficient, arbitrary, and perverse tax regimes.

Equally liberals should not simply compromise with and capitulate to populism. If ‘protecting liberalism from itself’ means closed borders, ‘strategic’ protectionism and interventionism, disdain for the judiciary and the rule of law, the annihilation of privacy, and normalising ethno-nationalism, it’s not clear that there’s anything left that’s worth protecting.

Nevertheless, if only for pragmatic reasons, neoliberalism cannot be, and more importantly cannot be seen to be, inflexible market fundamentalism. It is arguable (though far from clear, let alone certain) that free trade does not benefit everyone, even if it clearly provides net benefits for each economy as a whole. But, rather than meekly accepting that this means that ‘reasonable’ protectionism can be acceptable, we must argue for distinctly liberal responses. For instance, providing a basic income could ease any transitional periods of structural unemployment for workers formerly employed in uncompetitive industries.

Similarly, we can recognise issues like in-work poverty without capitulating to socialist illiteracy or nationalist xenophobia. There are reasonable neoliberal responses, such as introducing a Negative Income Tax and abolishing, cutting or raising the threshold of National Insurance. Populist concerns can be recognised, without populist values or solutions being validated or respected.

At the same time, a radical and unapologetic defence of globalism, free markets, consumerism, and liberty is needed now more than ever. Just because alternatives are being advanced, it does not mean they have even a sliver of merit. And just because economic self-harm and cultural degeneration are fashionable it does not mean it is wise to accept this and follow suit. 

How to spot when a policy is not working

Imagine your city had a housing problem. Lots and lots of people wanted to buy houses there, live there. And there weren't all that many houses for them to do so in. You had some policy ideas about this and brought them into action. At which point this happens:

Housing starts in Vancouver have fallen to their lowest level in more than five years while home sales plunged 38.8% compared with October of last year.

Your problem is a shortage of supply of housing. Your actions have curtailed the supply of housing. Yep, that's a failure alright.

So, what did they actually do?

Mounting public anger and a chorus of concern emanating from the country’s banks forced a turnaround in recent months. In August, the province of British Columbia instituted a 15% tax on all home buyers in metro Vancouver who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Soon after, the federal government said it would close a tax loophole believed to be used by some speculators.

The city of Vancouver has proposed its own measures in recent months, from a 1% tax on vacant homes starting next year – after an attempt to do so last year was stymied by the provincial government – and a crackdown on short-term rentals, such as those done through Airbnb.

Those aren't the same as what has been proposed over here but there's a definite echo there, isn't there? Which gives us an inkling about how well the policies proposed here would work.

And of course the actual solution to a shortage of supply is to increase supply. Make it easier for people to build more houses - here in the UK that means blowing up the Town and Country Planning Act of course.

Prohibition created Skunk. It's basic economics

Probably the most common objection to ending the prohibition on cannabis and creating a legal, regulated market is that kids are no longer smoking your dad's pot, they're smoking super-strength skunk.  But it's that very system of prohibition that's lead to the creation of stronger, dangerous strains. 

It's all down to something called the Alchian-Allen effect. Say you've got two similar but not identical goods e.g. pricey top quality Pink Lady apples and  cheap bog-standard Cox apples. If there was an identical increase in price on every apple sold, say a pesky politician levied a 10p apple surchage, you'd see a rise in demand for Pink Lady apples and a fall in demand for Cox apples. 

Why is this? Well, while both products have seen identical absolute price increases, the high-grade Pink Lady apples have increased by much less in relative terms. Before the apple surcharge, a Pink Lady apple might have cost more than twice as much as a Cox apple. After the surchage that differential will have shrunk substantially. So in relative terms, Pink Lady apples are now much more attractive to consumers.

How does this apply to weed I hear you asking?  Think of different strains of weed just like Apples. You've got the pricier high-strength skunk and other weaker-strains on offer. If the relative price of one went up, all things being equal demand for the other would rise. 

We should think of cannabis prohibition as the equivalent of an across the board fixed increase in price. The law doesn't distinguish between different strains of weed, you're given the same sentence whether you're dealing skunk or weaker, safer varieties.  Dealers price in the cost of getting caught and going to prison, if that costs the same regardless of how strong the product is, then you'll see the price differential between skunk and weaker strains falls, making skunk the more attractive product. 

Far from being a reason to support continued prohibition, skunk is actually a reason to push for a legal, regulated market.

We reject the idea that Facebook must be told to tell the truth

There's a pernicious little idea floating about, that the Facebook news feed must be purged of all "fake" news stories. Endless groupuscules are calling for something to be done and insisting that if it isn't they'll thcweam and thcweam until they make themselves sick. Or something. 

The problem with this is that we cannot determine "the truth", we can only determine whose truth:

His statement pointed up how much Facebook struggles to find the balance between its mission to be a free-expression utopia for its 1.8 billion users and its responsibility to protect them from all that is defamatory, dangerous (like terrorist propaganda) and untrue.

But more to the point, it appeared to buy into the notion that truth is relative at a time when that notion has to finally go away. Do you really need an outside arbiter to determine whether a video suggesting — without basis — that Hillary Clinton was involved in John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal plane crash in 1999 should be allowed to stand? Really?

Yes, of course such idiocy must be allowed to stand. Because that's what the freedom in freedom of speech means. Just as it means that idiots are allowed, must be allowed, to spout other gross untruths, such as that socialism is a really great economic system, Denis MacShane is wrongly maligned and grossly undervalued and that Mom's apple pie is great, no really, it is!

Further, what we really don't want to go back to is what is being lusted after:

It’s easier said than done. The combination of attacks seeking to delegitimize serious news organizations and a drop in overall trust in the news media has made many people wary of legitimate fact-checking. And, as my colleague John Herrman noted last weekend, politicized voices can easily drown honest journalism all too easily on social media.

There is growing talk of an ambitious journalistic collaboration to beat back the tide. Industry thinkers and leaders are coming together online to brainstorm solutions, as Jeff Jarvis, the City University of New York journalism professor, and Eli Pariser, the Upworthy co-founder, have done. (Check them out online.) And I’d say it’s high time that television news — with its still-huge audiences — gets into the act with more than just token gestures at fact-checking.

Because what America used to have was exactly that, a system in which the major media very carefully rinsed their pages of everything that wasn't Good Think. It wasn't a particularly vicious thing but it was very much there. The news media leans hugely Democratic (with, according to one story, the WSJ staff doing so even more than the norm) and what was just the received opinion of what was mainstream was what was actually mainstream to the highly educated left of centre liberals running said media.

We rather saw the remains of this in the recent election, it only being the newer alternative media that had even a hope of understanding Trump and his winning coalition. 

One final point. What is a fact checked truth depends upon the beliefs of those doing the fact checking. Clearly Hillary didn't aid in killing JFK Jr, it was his own machismo which achieved that. But who thinks that pieces which argue that minimum wage rises kill jobs are going to pass through some media filter of fact checking? Because believe us when we say that if we had control of those filters then pieces which say that minimum wage rises do not kill jobs never would pass through it.

And that we would indeed do that means that no one should have this power. Simply on the entirely liberal grounds that you should never try to claim a power that you don't want your enemies to have. Pre-publication censorship -  for that is what an insistence upon only the truth being published would be - will be a power abused by whoever has it. So, don't let anyone have it.

Sajid Javid will make British cities great again by making houses soar higher

This article appeared in the Telegraph, but it was behind their Telegraph Premium paywall, so I've shared it in full here.

People living in Britain's cities, especially London, face staggering rents and mortgage payments, often for tiny properties. Families have to move miles out of the city centre to afford the space for children. At the same time there is fierce resistance to new developments that would ease some of the pressure of the housing crisis. Designs are bland at best—reruns of post-war monstrosities at worst—and locals themselves derive next to no benefits directly. Sajid Javid's latest housing idea is the first bright prospect in decades of urban policy: scrapping some height restrictions to encourage the kind of Pimlico-style development people actually like.

People call them NIMBYs, but it's easy to understand why locals oppose most developments when they're so aesthetically unappealing. Where regular, they are endlessly uniform, unchanging and blank; where varying they are contorted into seemingly-random "iconic" shapes. There is no consistent, harmonious variation within a pattern, windows are dull squares with no decoration. Blocks abound with tiny seemingly-pointless balconies and the materials fade and stain over time. Most people find them baffling—I certainly do.

But what locals usually don't know is that these are effectively deliberate decisions of the planning system. Planners are systematically biased to award more permission when developers employ "starchitects" who have won awards for iconic designs. And social enterprise Create Streets has shown how they ban the narrow streets, steep staircases, and thin properties that are necessary ingredients of widely loved Georgian terraces in Notting Hill, Islington and Greenwich. Even the balconies are down to a requirement for all flats to have a certain amount of outside space. By contrast, properties that are in traditional styles typically fetch higher prices, given similar characteristics otherwise.

After the second world war utopian city planners believed that terraces were unhealthy and antiquated, and that the future was not in urban, multi-use, cosmopolitan living, and mass transit, but the car. They forced those living in un-bombed houses out, and replaced swathes of London with tower blocks. In so doing, they actually substantially reduced the population and density of inner London, which is still far from recovered. And bits the bureaucrats didn't get to are some of the most popular in London—two-up two-down workers houses on Roupell Street in Waterloo will fetch perhaps £1.5m.

Of course, the planners were wrong: cities still had much more to offer, and successful cities like London, Oxford, Manchester, and Cambridge are sucking in people from around the country, continent, and world. Sajid Javid's scheme offers us a way to correct the bureaucrats' mistakes in a way that involves and benefits members of local communities: they can stop ugly tower blocks and develop in a way they like. But they can allow the development that brings them more shops, restaurants, businesses, jobs and money.

Javid proposes removing height restrictions, to allow people to add storeys onto their houses, and to allow whole streets to be turned into terraces, in a patchwork, voluntary fashion. His dream, like that of Prince Charles, is a London of mid-rise mansion blocks, four and five storey terraced houses, and tenements—a London more like central Barcelona and Paris and less like suburban Moscow. His method may work: the urban forms he covets fit in a lot more floor space for a given plot.

One benefit would be allowing more people to live in London and other growing cities. Many cities in the UK are thriving, but too many Brits are unable to live in them: our planning system blocks most potential developments, and local residents block many more. Javid's plan offers a way around this, by giving control back to locals, who can decide whether they want the windfall gain from extending their building up, or selling it to others to develop. The reform also offers families a chance to have a bit more space. Research, including the Redfern Review, released on Tuesday, suggests that it is rising income, rather than more people, that drives housing demand. When people get richer they are less willing to live in cramped conditions.

Britain's cities were once unimaginably grand. We cannot take back the damage the Luftwaffe and city planners have inflicted on them, but we can rebuild them anew. We have far more wealth and technological ability than the Edwardians, Georgians and Victorians ever had, and yet many of our city centres are drab, dingy, and dead. Sajid Javid's housing plan offers us a chance to restore cities to their former glories—and go beyond—at zero cost to the exchequer, and in a way that gives citizens control. Hurrah for the housing minister!