This is rather the point, competition benefits the consumer, even at universities
An interesting little example of producers complaining that we're all being blue meanies by insisting that they compete with each other:
The Russell Group has complained that leading universities are “forced to compete” with eachother to recruit from a “small pool” of bright but disadvantaged students.
In a submission to the Office for Students (OFS), the group criticised the regulator’s approach to boosting diversity, arguing that universities should not have to report back to the regulator annually on their plans.
Setting targets that “demand a consistent increase in the intake of students from disadvantaged backgrounds” risk discouraging leading universities from working together, the Russell Group said.
Instead, it means that the country’s top universities are “forced to compete for a small pool of suitably qualified applicants from these groups”.
Under the current fees system, any English university wishing to charge tuition fees of over around £6,000 must have an “access agreement” approved by the new higher education regulator.
We can't say that we're entirely in favour of everything about the current university dispensation. The insistence that 50% of the age cohort are suitable for, will even benefit from, an academic education looks more than a tad suspect to us. However, we're all in favour of the useful and bracing effects of competition.
Note who benefits here - those disadvantaged. The more those better universities have to compete for their custom the better the offers will be to those disadvantaged. Which is precisely what we're after of course. Well, maybe we should be and maybe we shouldn't but we are.
Note what the universities themselves are arguing. They should be allowed to cooperate - form a cartel - so that they don't have to so compete and thus don't have to so benefit the consumer.
Aye up, as ever, competition benefits the consumer and the producer group would very much prefer it didn't. All of which is why markets do indeed work, isn't it?
This is quite wondrous from Owen Jones
The underlying subject is the slowdown in the rate of increase in lifespans. The answer, obviously enough from Jones, is Tory Austerity. Then he makes this statement:
Given the government is refusing a national inquiry into the great standstill in life expectancy, experts are left without a credible explanation other than austerity.
One of the experts named is Danny Dorling and we are unsurprised that he doesn't know what to think unless the government tells him.
For that's what the claim is by Jones. Experts don't know unless government, through the medium of a national inquiry, tells them. It's all rather Promparty, isn't it? The engineers must be told by Stalin how to do their jobs and any who insist upon actual physics or chemistry are wreckers who must be rooted out. Instead of how we think the system should work which is that experts advise the government.
As, you know, would actually happen in a national inquiry. Experts in such things as lifespans would get together and advise government on what is happening and what should be done. Which, if said experts haven't a clue, are all at scoobie, isn't really something that's going to work very well, is it?
But enough of logic and good scientific practice. Just savour the claim being made. Experts are left floundering for an explanation until and unless government tells them.
Well, yes, we think the modern university system probably does have a few disciplines that work that way, not that we find it reassuring that Jones is at least half right in some sense.
Solving the Uber Congestion Problem
On Wednesday, New York City Council voted to impose a cap on Uber and Lyft licenses. No new private for-hire vehicle licenses will be issued for the next twelve months while the City Council studies the effect of ridesharing on congestion.
The news from New York comes a month after TfL announced that they plan to extend the Congestion Charge to private hire vehicles (including Uber).
There’s a growing concern that Uber (and its competitors) are leading to people taking fewer trips on public transport and more trips in cars causing congestion. While some research suggests that Uber actually reduces the total number of car journeys (and frees up parking spaces), it might be the case that in cities where public transport use is high, Uber adds to the total number of car journeys if it’s competing more with buses, trams and trains rather than other cars. This is very much an open question.
New York’s approach seems strictly worse than London’s approach. While in London, TfL are effectively removing an advantage Uber has over existing private cars and using a(n imperfect) price mechanism, New York are imposing a strict quota and favouring privately-owned cars over rideshares.
But London’s approach isn’t perfect. There’s a glaring admission. Black Cabs remain exempt. TfL justifies the exemption on two grounds.
“A taxi driver, unlike a PHV driver, would be compelled to enter the Congestion Charging zone if required to do so when hailed or booked”
“Taxis are a part of the accessible public transport network in central London. We believe that it is right, therefore, that taxis continue to be exempt from paying the Congestion Charge. PHVs which are designated wheelchair accessible will retain an exemption to the Congestion Charge.”
The first reason is weak. Black Cabs may have less ability to avoid central london, but they still impose the cost of congestion upon others. Also, Uber requires its drivers to take the fastest possible route as well, and while they could in theory, allow a lower cost Congestion Charge zone free route, in practice it seems unlikely they would offer it.
The second reason is more compelling, but exempting Black Cabs still isn’t the answer.
Rather than favour one mode of transport (at a relatively high price point) over another, we could instead give London’s wheelchair users more choice, while tackling the congestion caused by 22,500 Black Cabs.
It is important to remember that most Black Cabs journeys aren’t taken by wheelchair users, so exempting them altogether is a poorly targeted approach.
A better approach would include the 22,500 Black Cabs (as well as wheelchair-accessible private hire vehicles) and use the additional revenue (£58.5m per year assuming that each cabbie drives into the congestion zone 5 days a week) to pay London’s wheelchair users directly.
Roughly 1.8% of the British public uses a wheelchair. Assuming the proportion for London is the same then it implies there are 146,448 wheelchair users living in London today. They could all receive a £400 annual transport voucher (to be used how they please).
The policy has two major advantages over TfL’s current plan.
First, it substantially cuts the cost of travelling for wheelchair users. Not only are wheelchair users directly subsidised, they also can spend their voucher on alternative services such as Uber’s cheaper, but sometimes longer wait-time Access service.
Second, it ensures that we can tackle congestion without giving Black Cabs an unfair advantage over private hire vehicles.
In truth, extending the congestion charge to taxis and minicabs won’t be enough to seriously reduce congestion. To do that we need a real system of road pricing. Instead of a flat-rate, we should charge road users based on when, where and how long they drive for.
We have more than a little sympathy for Victorian laws
Not all laws of the 19 th century, of course not, but certain aspects of life did appear to be properly dealt with back then. Thus this complaint about Theresa Mays attitude towards Brexit doesn't really ring true with us:
An EU diplomat savaged Theresa May's Brexit stance - accusing her of coming up with a plan that is stuck in the Victorian age.
The official said the PM is so indecisive that it is easier to negotiate with Donald Trump.
In a brutal attack on Mrs May's Chequers plan, the ambassador of an EU country said the Prime Minister has come up with a plan which is 'very nostalgic'.
The unnamed diplomat told The Sun said the Brussels bloc has found it incredibly difficult to negotiate with Mrs May because she is 'irrational'.
The blistering put-down comes amid growing fears that Britain will crash out of the bloc without a deal.
After that blessed repeal of the Corn Laws Britain's trade position for negotiations was largely :
1) There will be no tariffs or quotas on imports into the United Kingdom - although there will be certain excise taxes.
2) Imports will be regulated the same as domestic products
3) You can do what you like.
3) Did get violated at times, demands for trade preference being enforced by gunboats - not something we would recommend in this age. But the three basic principles, those sound just fine to us. And it is Brexit, leaving the EU's Customs Union and Single Market as we do so, which would allow us to have that correct deal upon trade once again.
After all, why not do the very thing which we know makes us rich?
Loosening planning permission makes us richer
An interesting paper from an offshoot of the LSE. Looser planning permission makes a city richer. Of course, the paper looks a little odd at first sight but they do the work correctly.
The Blitz, in which the Luftwaffe dropped more than 18,000 bombs on London over eight months during the Second World War, was utterly devastating for the capital.
More than two million homes were destroyed, 60,000 civilians killed and 87,000 wounded between September 1940 and May 1941.
Yet a new study from the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), at the London School of Economics (LSE), suggests that the capital is £4.5 billion a year better off because of the raids.
Note what they do not do which is make the cod-Keynesian mistake of only measuring the economic activity of rebuilding while ignoring the losses from the bombing. Rather, they've:
This paper exploits locally exogenous variation in the location of bombs dropped during the Blitz to quantify the effect of density restrictions on agglomeration economies in London: an elite global city. Employing microgeographic data on office rents and employment, this analysis points to effects for London several multiples larger than the existing literature which primarily derives its results from secondary cities. In particular, doubling employment density raises rents by 25%. Consequently if the Blitz had not taken place, the resulting loss in agglomeration economies to present day London would cause total annual office rent revenues to fall by $4:5 billion { equivalent to 1:2% of London's annual GDP. These results illuminate the substantial impact of land-use regulations in one of the world's largest and most productive cities.
Roughly speaking, you understand, bomb sites had planning permission by definition. Not-bomb sites had to go through the post-war planning process. Those places where people could build without according to the planners' desires built bigger and quite possibly better. To such an extent that the London economy is now larger than if all had been according to plan.
The lesson from which is pretty obvious really - abolish the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors and we'll all be richer. Which would be a nice result from just getting government to do less, wouldn't it?
That small government, free market - liberal - argument for Brexit
For at least one of us here the argument in favour of leaving the European Union is that the EU prevents the creation of the sort of governance we would prefer. We find now that those arguing in favour of Remain are making the very same argument, an interesting confirmation of our basic contention.
John Harris in The Guardian:
The likes of Liam Fox seek a Britain that would be disastrous for many leave voters. These ultra-free-marketeers must be stopped....If we take that as a given, anyone involved in progressive politics ought to focus on one imperative above all others: the defeat of the zealots who saw the dismay and disaffection of so many potential leave voters, opportunistically seized on it – and now want to pilot the country into a post-Brexit future that is completely inimical to their future. We all know who they are: in the Conservative party, their strength is built on a bedrock of true believers in a weird kind of anarcho-Thatcherism: Jacob Rees-Mogg, Fox, an array of MPs too obscure to mention.......these politicians are blazing a trail for a rightwing politics that has decisively left behind any semblance of moderation, and fully embraced the reckless mindset of the revolutionary. There is a reason why the hard Brexiteers cannot coherently explain their vision of Brexit: their chief aim is to break as many things as possible, in the belief that from the rubble might arise a kind of flag-waving, small-state, free-market utopia that even the blessed Margaret might have found unpalatable.
As regular readers will know our views on the role of the state in the economy are rather more subtle than that propagandistic description. And yet there is a truth underlying the point.
That sort of small state, interventionist only when absolutely necessary and reliant largely upon free markets, society is what produces the wealth and living standards of Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland and, in fact, all the places richer than us which aren't just living off resource rents.
We'd like Britons to be richer than they are, as rich as the current state of knowledge enables us all to be and we're really pretty sure that our fellow countrymen would also like that. Which is why we advocate what we do. Including to point out that the European Union's basic governmental ethos isn't amenable to that plan.
The contention here from Harris is that we must leave the EU in order to have that plan. Sure, he's exaggerating, but his point is that the EU saves the progressives' desired system. Leaving would enable to deconstruction of that bureaucratic social democracy if that's what Britons want to do, therefore we must stay in to preserve that bureaucratic and regulatory social democracy.
Which is rather our point, isn't it? Note the difference between Harris' accusation and our own position. Harris insists that this small state solution will be imposed by Brexiteers red in tooth and claw. We are only insisting that the standard classically liberal order can only happen if we're outside the EU. Whether it does happen will still be in the hands of the people of Britain. That being rather our point, being in the EU means Britons cannot have what they might want, being out gives the choice.
Sure, we argue that people will prefer, possibly even should prefer, that classically liberal order. But what we're insistent upon is that people should have the choice. We are, after all, a democracy, are we not?
Why politics and planning just aren't good ways to run things
That there will be politics is obvious enough, that there will be some modicum of planning equally. There really are problems which need to be chewed over publicly, it really is true that all markets all the time markets does not address every single problem we face. It's also obviously true that democracy is valuable in that deciding upon what the goals are is important.
However, it's also important to note that the politics part introduces gross inefficiencies into the system. This is above and beyond Hayek's point about the centre never having the information to plan, this is about the purblind refusal to accept what we do in fact know. Take the subject of consent for organ donations:
A new system of presumed consent for organ donation will save up to 700 lives a year, ministers have said.
The Government today confirmed its intention to change the rules in spring 2020, introducing an “opt-out” model after decades of debate.
It's not just that we have no evidence of this contention, it's that all the evidence we do have show us that this contention is wrong:
The best estimates of presumed consent suggested that switching to presumed consent might increase organ donor rates by 25%. 25% isn’t bad! But we don’t have many examples of countries that have switched from one system to another so that estimate should be taken with a grain of salt.
The latest evidence comes form Wales which switched to presumed-consent in 2013. Unfortunately, there has been no increase in donation rates.
We're the people who actually conducted the experiment. We're the people who produced the evidence. No lives are saved by the nationalisation of corpses because nationalising corpses doesn't raise the transplant rate.
We have pointed out, many a time, that paying donors for organs - as in Iran, where there is no waiting list for kidneys - works, no other method we've tried does in the sense of producing enough organs for the desired number of transplants. But that isn't our point here.
This is our point:
The legislation, which was introduced in Parliament last July, is expected to return to the House of Commons in the autumn, having won widespread political backing so far.
Planning doesn't work for Hayekian reasons. But also because politics will determine what is planned and how. And politics doesn't produce the right answer nor the best plan. It produces what many people agree upon, a very different matter.
As here, enough agree that presumed consent will increase transplant rates therefore that's going to be the political action. The real world tells us - in an experiment conducted by our very selves just yesterday - that presumed consent won't work. But it's still going to happen because politics isn't a good way of determining how we do things.
All of which is Churchill on democracy of course. The lesson of which is that sometimes we must use this not very good system. But let's limit our use of the not good system to when we must shall we? Rather than using this inefficient, often entirely wrong, political planning in every nook and cranny of our lives and economy.
After all, if political decision making is to ignore the evidence staring them in the face over organ donation what's to make us think they'll be different over where houses should be built, the rents that should be charged, the righteous level of wages, what are the industries of the future that should be invested in, which factories should be making what?
When did this happen - and who did it?
A case, of White Van Man being cruelly oppressed by the authorities or a righteous protection of the environment?
A council is refusing to back down and cancel a roofer's £300 fine- which he claims was for keeping empty crisp packets in his work van without a rubbish licence.
Stewart Gosling, 43, kept the stash of empty crisp packets and water bottles in a plastic commercial waste bag in the back of his white van.
But when he was pulled over by council workers carrying out spot checks, they told him he was breaking the law for carrying the rubbish without permission.
It is, of course, that delight the European Union and law derived from it that leads to such. We tend to think that £300 for a crisp packet or two is a bit too much as a fine. But that's not the important point here, not at all:
A Waltham Forest Council spokesman said: 'The waste in this case was being transported in commercial refuse bag in the trader’s vehicle.
'Regardless of what the items are, if waste is being stored in a commercial refuse bag in a trader’s van it is necessary that they have a valid waste carriers’ license (sic).
'It is widely recognised as best practice for tradesmen to be licensed to avoid legal repercussions, in the event they are required to transport even small quantities of waste.'
That the anal retentive prodnoses appear to be in charge of society is also not something we favour but that's not the important point here either.
The Americans are rather ahead of us on this, given their constitutional prohibition upon unreasonable search and seizure. Yet we also insist that the police are not allowed to just randomly stop anyone and test them for drunk driving. There must be some cause, some reason to think that the offence might be being committed. Erratic driving for example.
Equally it's an important part of the British dispensation that we do not carry ID, that we do not have to prove ourselves to any passing official or policeman. The inquiry "And who are you, what are you doing here?" can be and is righteously answered by "Going about my lawful business, Constable."
Then, under the guise of this environmental law, we've granted every local council in the country the right to stop any vehicle and inspect it for empty crisp packets. An authoritarian breach of basic civil liberties is an authoritarian breach of basic civil liberties whatever the justification.
And that actually is the point here. Sure, the justification is the maintenance of our green and pleasant land but we've still just ceded much too much power to the State. That it's the local councils, not the police or the immigration authorities, insisting "Your papers please" as of right is not an improvement.
It is not that we the people are some problem to be managed by them, we appoint them simply to do society's scut work for us. The problem here is that they've taken unto themselves powers that State never should have in the first place, to be able to demand we prove our innocence at their pleasure.
Not that we expect such self-knowledge from The Guardian but still...
The Guardian gives us a long read on denialism. The part that so interests is what is not being said:
Denialism is more than just another manifestation of the humdrum intricacies of our deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a whole new way of seeing the world and – most important – a collective accomplishment. Denial is furtive and routine; denialism is combative and extraordinary. Denial hides from the truth, denialism builds a new and better truth.
OK. That's what we're being told it all is.
In recent years, the term has been used to describe a number of fields of “scholarship”, whose scholars engage in audacious projects to hold back, against seemingly insurmountable odds, the findings of an avalanche of research. They argue that the Holocaust (and other genocides) never happened, that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a myth, that Aids either does not exist or is unrelated to HIV, that evolution is a scientific impossibility, and that all manner of other scientific and historical orthodoxies must be rejected.
We have checked and nowhere is the denialism with the greatest impact upon humans mentioned, not even once. That delusion that planned economies work. We did test this idea to destruction in that controlled experiment we call the 20th century. The market economies wildly outperformed the planned ones in that basic aim of having an economy in the first place, making human lives better. But not a mention of this at all.
There are multiple kinds of denialists: from those who are sceptical of all established knowledge, to those who challenge one type of knowledge; from those who actively contribute to the creation of denialist scholarship, to those who quietly consume it; from those who burn with certainty, to those who are privately sceptical about their scepticism. What they all have in common, I would argue, is a particular type of desire. This desire – for something not to be true – is the driver of denialism.
Quite so, that desire to insist that if only the right people were directing affairs then all would be copacetic. The right people always, but always, being defined as those doing the insisting.
If we are to be properly informed concerning what we humans really do know then it is of a certain importance that all accept the idea that market economies work, non-market economies do not. As above, we have tested this and we know it to be true.
But then we don't really expect that level of self-knowledge from The Guardian. It would certainly have a lot of blank space between the adverts if it took the principle seriously.
The student loan obligation that lives on after death
No, the British student loan system doesn't operate this way and we're not even sure that the American one should. However:
Deceased and still in debt: the student loans that don't get forgiven
Student loans not expunged upon death? Now there's a thing, eh?
In 2005, Sean Bennett took out a student loan with Sallie Mae, in 2010 he graduated from college and in 2011, when Sean was 23 years old, he died in a car accident.
At first, Sallie Mae sent out a letter of condolence to Sean’s parents explaining that they had a policy of forgiving debt if the recipient dies before they have repaid (they could afford to forgive – in the first quarter of this year alone, Sallie Mae made $333m in interest repayments from student loans).
Their policy of debt forgiveness is available on their website but it’s also in a file which Sean’s parents have meticulously maintained. It contains Sean’s loan application, his death certificate and the letters they received from Sean’s lenders when they decided to chase the debt after all.
Sallie Mae did not, of course, "make" $333 million in interest payments. It received them. And also paid out substantial sums to the people who had lent it the money in the first place. But then The Guardian an accounting, economics or numbers.
However, let's think of the alternative system to student loans - taxpayer funding of both students and academe. We're really pretty sure that tax bills are not expunged at death, the estate must still settle them. In fact, it's worse than that, death itself is a taxable event, the government will, upon issuance of that death certificate, start asking for up to 40% or so of everything.
We cannot see why that's a better system than a student loan similarly living on after death. Especially since the complaint here is that dead people shouldn't have to pay.