Osmotic desalination just took a big step

When I wrote "Britain and the World in 2050" I forecast that despite UN talk of water shortages and some alarmist predictions of "Water Wars" by mid-century, the most likely outcome would be that access to very cheap energy would enable osmotic desalination to solve the problem.

The problem with current membranes used to turn seawater into drinkable quality water is that it is very energy intensive and requires high maintenance to clean the salt sludge from the membranes. The first of these will be solved by the abundance of low cost gas from fracking, and a continuing steep decline in the cost of photovoltaic energy.

Now a major breakthrough in membrane technology has been announced. Graphene-oxide membranes have had the problem that because they swell slightly in water, smaller salts flow through them with the water, even though they block the larger molecules. A University of Manchester group has just revealed in the journal Nature Nanotechnology that it has developed a way to avoid the membrane becoming swollen in water, and to precisely control the its pore size. This enables the unwanted salts to be sieved out at speed, leaving clean, drinkable water.

The drive now is to scale up the technology so it is capable of large-scale, cost-effective production. In addition it is hoped that smaller-scale versions can be developed for countries lacking the finance to fund large-scale plants. As with so many anticipated problems, human creativity and resourcefulness seem capable of stepping up to the plate with technological solutions to them.

Why are they wasting this money upon the High Street?

The High Street is changing use, that much is obvious. The rise of the internet, of online shopping, means that we’ve a certain surplus of retail space in the country. It’s not a coincidence that, as we’ve pointed out before, some 15% or so of consumer spending is now online, some 15% of retail space in the country is empty.

Such change is rarely pretty nor enjoyable close up but change is indeed a defining feature of a well functioning economy. For we do, as technology changes and enriches us, change our behaviour to partake of those new riches. That doesn’t justify spending our wealth upon the doomed, as is being suggested here:

Britain’s high streets will receive a £675 million cash injection under Government plans to turn empty shops into tea rooms, community centres and new homes.

As of today, local authorities will be able to apply for grants from the Future High Streets Fund, with £55 million set aside for the restoration of historic buildings at risk of falling into disrepair.

The fund is the latest in a series of policy announcements announced by ministers recent months to reverse the decline of the country’s high streets, which have been decimated by the rise of online retailers and ecommerce.

With thousands of retail units falling vacant this year, calls for Government intervention have grown as major retailers including Debenhams and House of Fraser announced plans to shut dozen of stores due to dwindling profits and footfall.

This is the Planner’s Fallacy written out for us again. Those who would design our lives and urban spaces didn’t see that online shopping coming. They were entirely blind to the possibility and the effects. We just went ahead and did it through our voluntary interactions. They’re equally blind and ignorant as to what what we’d like to use those urban centres for in the future. The reason being that we’ve not a scoobie either and we’ll be the people doing the using through our voluntary interactions.

For what should be done with town centres? Dunno. We dunno, you dunno and the planners are in an entirely dunno clueless state. So, how can any planning be done? Money allocation to what we don’t know what to do about is wasted, entirely so.

There is a system we can use, of course there is - the market. Free up all the rules and regulations about what may be done. Change of use, all that sort of stuff, planning regs, requirements to show public benefit and so on. Just allow our own voluntary interactions again to work through the problem. As Hayek pointed out, it’s the only system we’ve got that actually works.

For the Great Truth is that what happens to High Streets and urban centres is emergent from what we decide we’’d like to do with them in the absence of quite so many shops. So, better let us get on with it so we can find out what we would like to use them for.

And, err, stop spending money we don’t have on what we dunno about.

The upcoming space industry

The mid-December flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo has sparked interest in the commercial exploitation of space. The craft was Burt Rutan’s rocket plane, following on from his winning of the X-Prize in October 2004 with his SpaceShipOne, funded by Paul Allen.  It was then that Sir Richard Branson stepped in to fund its successor, promising space tourism “within a couple of years.”  Important though the recent flight was, it reached only 82km, which Branson has redefined as “space.” The accepted international boundary is the Karman Line at 100km, which Rutan had to reach twice to win the X-Prize.

The phrase “a couple of years” resonates because it reveals the difficulties of achieving safe sub-orbital flight for paying passengers. I was the first person in Britain to sign up and pay a deposit for such a flight late last century. I was told then that it would probably be in “a couple of years.” Since then it has always been two years away. However, the recent flight indicates that we might be nearing the elusive goal. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are in competition with Virgin Galactic to carry the first fare-paying passengers into space. Both of the competitors have achieved many uncrewed flights into space.

After years of lacklustre interest in space, the UK has finally moved to enter what is expected to be a multi-billion pound industry by designating several areas as spaceports. Vertically launched rockets and satellites will initially lift off from the A ‘Mhoine peninsula in Sutherland, at a site between Tongue and Durness, and a £2m development fund will go towards spaceports for horizontal launches from Prestwick, Newquay, Campbeltown and Llanbedr.

What is needed now is for government to speed up the regulatory environment under which these launches will take place, and to refrain from a heavy-handed approach that might use the precautionary principle to hold back development. The aim should be to give the UK an important niche in a fast developing industry.

Piketty's World Inequality Report is less than it might seem

Whether inequality is increasing or not very much depends upon what it is that we’re trying to measure. Inequalities of lifestyle? Consumption? Income or wealth?

How these are measured also matter rather a lot. And it would appear that the latest attempt, the World Inequality Report and associated work from Thomas Piketty et al is rather less accurate than many seem to assume.

We defer to James Galbraith on this subject - someone we’ve discussed the larger issue with at times. It’s entirely true that our world views don’t entirely coincide but we do agree that facts is facts and that’s where we’ve got to start from. For if we don’t accurately analyse whether there’s a problem at all, nor the causes of it, then we’re just never going to find a solution.

Galbraith’s new paper:

A more interesting claim lies in the focus on national institutions and policies, which is justified by the comment about ‘different speeds’. Differences in the behaviour of inequality over time are indeed evidence that national institutions matter. But if it should appear instead that movements of inequality are correlated across countries, that inequalities move in the same way in neighbouring countries or even across continental distances — that would lead toward a very different view. Namely, it would suggest that global forces tend to drive the movement of inequalities across countries, even if they do not work everywhere with the same force or at the same rate. We shall return to this issue, as work with different data strongly indicates that powerful global macroeconomic currents affect the movement of inequalities, especially in smaller countries and the developing world.

Quite so, international happenings are likely to have international causes. Our own insistence would be - note ours, not Professor Galbraith’s - that integrating billions of excruciatingly poor labour into the global economy would, we would predict, increase inequality by increasing the pressures on low skill labour everywhere. The benefit of this cost being that those excruciatingly poor become less so as economic growth happens. As has been happening these past few decades.

We’d also insist that this is a benefit that is worth the cost of greater inequality.

It’s also, eventually, self-solving as catch up growth reduces that competitive pressure. But the important point to take from this being that if it’s not domestic political decisions causing the rise in inequality then it’s most unlikely to be domestic political action which will reduce it.

The lesson of this paper though is that the evidence base being used to make the wilder claims of inequality growth is, well, that evidence isn’t very good.

Christmas message

In this Christmas season, the ASI team wish to thank our loyal readers for their interest and attention. We send good wishes to those spending time with family and friends, and hope that they, like us, will give thought to those not able to do so. We wish safe journeys to those travelling, and we all wish you a happy festive season and a very merry Christmas.

The High Street dies - This is what happens to old technologies

We’re glad we’re able to be the Grinch shouting Bah Humbug - to mix stories - this joyful season. For there is much public wailing about how the High Street is dying, concern over how a couple of centuries’ worth of retail technology is being superseded. Yes, excellent, isn’t it, this is how old technologies die:

Britain’s crisis-wracked retailers have seen almost £20bn wiped off their value in a devastating year as markets brace for a tough Christmas that could cause more high street casualties in the new year.

Fears of another torrid festive period for the sector have mounted in recent weeks after gloomy warnings from high street stalwarts and Asos, the ­online fashion giant. The total market capitalisation of UK retailers has plunged 29pc to £49bn in 2018 with Debenhams, Asos and Carpetright ­enduring the heaviest losses.

The joy here being not this decline of the old, rather what it means. Which is that we’ve now got some better technology, obviously enough the online one, to produce those retail services we desire. As we flock to that new and more desirable the old fades away.

The true joy being that this is all self-regulating. It doesn’t require a planner to manage it, directives and instructions from the omniscient aren’t needed. As the new technology proves itself then capital is directed toward the money that can be made in that manner. And the old system sees first those capital values declining, then the willingness of anyone to put more or new capital into that method. We thus gain exactly what is desired, a redirection of capital to the new manner and away from the old, simply through the combination of human greed and the price system.

This general structure being what produces for us in the rich countries, this general idea of free markets and capitalism, the groaning tables piled high with food that Tiny Tim thought such a wonder just the one day of the year. Which is a cheering thought isn’t it? We’ve lucked into a system which achieves Roy Wood’s desire, that it really is Christmas everyday.

If we could only get Noddy off the sound systems and radio the Grinch really would be defeated.

Rewilding Britain

There is much to disagree with what George Monbiot writes and thinks, but he deserves some sympathy and support for his views on "rewilding" – allowing some agricultural land to revert to a non-managed or "wild" state.

We have some form on this. In 1994 we published "20-20 Vision: Targets For Britain's Future," and included a proposal to reintroduce beavers and wolves in remote parts of the UK, and even bears on some Scottish islands. There is evidence for the positive environmental effects, with beavers already aiding flood management in Britain, and grey wolves in Yellowstone National Park aiding tree growth by controlling deer populations, and creating habitats in which other wild creatures can flourish.

Monbiot called for us to give up meat and dairy products, so that agricultural land could be rewilded. Without going that far, Tim Worstall of this parish suggested that more efficient, industrialized farming could use less land and thus allow some farmland to grow wild again. He cited an example of the success of this:

New England. A century and a half back the area was a quiltwork of small farms. The forests we go to gawp at in autumn didn't exist, they'd been clear cut. What we do go to see these days is almost entirely new growth. Rewilding that has occurred as a result of mechanical farming and the railroads opening up the mid-West.

In summer we took this a stage further. A paper co-authored by Jamie Hollywood and myself looked at the prospects for cultured ("lab grown") meats, and concluded that this promised a new agricultural revolution. Cultured meats will probably soon be less costly than traditional meats from animals, and are rapidly improving in both taste and texture. This raises the possibility of using a tiny fraction of the land used in animal husbandry – less than 1 percent. This, in turn, would release land that could be rewilded. The UK's tree cover, estimated today at 13 percent, could be dramatically increased, creating huge new habitats for animals, insects and birds.

Some who oppose modern technology in agriculture because they prefer the traditional methods will not like this, but those who look to the advantageous outcomes it can produce will endorse it wholeheartedly.

For those advocating a public solution to Britain's housing woes

We’re all well aware that there’re a number of people proposing a solution to whatever it is that ails Britain’s housing provision - government should do it. This is to make a basic logical error. That a pure and unadorned free market might not solve every problem is entirely true. There are even such things as market failures. But this does not mean that government is the correct solution to that same problem. For, a truth not universally acknowledged, it is also true that there is such a thing as government failure:

Outgoing Public Advocate Letitia James took a parting shot at the de Blasio administration on Wednesday by dubbing the city’s Housing Authority the worst landlord of the year.

James, who becomes the state attorney general next month, placed NYCHA at the top of her annual Worst Landlords Watchlist, which is typically reserved for private landlords.

In our own system the council, the local housing authority, perhaps the housing association, they will most certainly be different from private sector landlords but there’s not a great deal out there to insist that they’ll be better.

The correct logic to be using here is which will fail least or least badly, government or markets. And it just isn’t always either although obviously we’re of the view that it’s government more often and failing worse.

Still, there’s a certain justice to it being the de Blasio Administration having this pointed out to them:

It was de Blasio who created the Worst Landlord list back when he served as public advocate.

Biter bit, what a nice seasonal present.

Northern Rail guards strike - safety or union featherbedding?

We’ve yet another strike on Northern Rail over the issue of driver only operated trains. The question being, well, is this just unions sticking their oar in to save the jobs of their members or is it really something to do with the safety of passengers as is claimed? Lynsey Hanley gets rolled out at The Guardian to make the safety case:

Without guards, train passengers like me would be unsafe. I back their strike

Lynsey Hanley

This is not true. “Unsafe” is an absolute, the correct phrase here is, possibly at least, less safe. There is nothing in this universe of the occasional falling asteroid which is safe. Things can only be more or less so. We thus need an idea of how many resources we’re going to use to make something how safe? Which we do have on the railways, we think that if it costs £2 million or less - we’ll not trouble to look up that specific number - to save a life then make it that safe, more and don’t. Sure, we can argue about the number but not the concept for to abandon the idea would mean that we’ve not got trains at all. No one at all being able to travel anywhere is not worth saving only the one life, is it?

As it happens not having guards isn’t less safe:

In 2017, George Bearfield, the RSSB’s director of system safety, stated that there was no discernible risk on DOO trains.

“Our conclusions from the latest analysis are that there is no discernible difference in the risk associated with driver-only dispatch vs driver and guard dispatch.

“There is no such thing as absolute safety, you cannot remove all risk. We take a rational, evidence-based view, to ensure progress in safety.”

Which is why guardless trains are operated by Abelio, Great Western, Chiltern, Govia and a number of other rail lines and franchises. With no obvious or known diminution in the safety of passengers.

Which leaves us with just this:

Dispensing of train guards could result in thousands of jobs being axed around the country, however.

Our aim and intention is always to destroy jobs, to be able to achieve our goal with the use of less human labour. For that’s how we free up labour to produce other things for us all to enjoy.

Yes, this is union featherbedding and no more.

Dame Sally Davies is sadly ignorant about obesity

We rather reject the idea that the technocrats should be running society for us - on the grounds that we think we should be doing as we wish in our own society without being told to do as we must. Not a rigid rule but a general observation.

This all gets rather worse when those technocrats who would tell us what to do are hopelessly ignorant of the reality they’re trying to organise. This is sadly true of Dame Sally Davies:

Chocolate and crisps must be taxed and the money used to subsidise the cost of vegetables, the country’s top doctor has insisted, declaring herself the nation’s “chief nanny”.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said that food companies’ voluntary efforts to cut sugar and salt were not sufficient. She called for laws to force them to make healthier products.

“The food industry is not doing enough,” Dame Sally said at the launch of her annual report. “We have a situation at the moment where people are benefiting from selling unhealthy food and they are not paying for the harm that is doing to people as individuals, to us as a society and the costs to the NHS.”

There are no costs to the NHS from obesity therefore there should be no tax to cover them and the prodnoses can leave our food alone to boot. We’ve been pointing this out for at least a decade now which is enough time for anyone to get the message. And we’d really hope that one who would manage the impact of food upon NHS costs would grasp the simplicity of the point:

Having us all slim, svelte, sober and pure of lung into our 90s would cost the NHS very much more money than the current level of topers, smokers and lardbuckets does.

There might well be very good reasons to advise people that the private costs of their behaviour, the years of life they will lose through their habits, might well not be worth it. But the public costs of their actions are the other way around from what is being assumed here.

And:

The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.

On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.

Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.

The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.

It simply isn’t true that obesity has net costs to the NHS and therefore there’s absolutely no valid argument at all that taxes should be levied as if it does, or that some grand effort is needed to change our diets to alleviate those non-existent costs.

And really, Dame Sally should know this and it’s a wonder that she doesn’t.