Privatise your Personality?
You may be reading this on your way to lunch at the Ritz, on the way to school or even in your parent’s basement like the true libertarian you are (and secretly wished everyone else was too). Whichever caricature you empathise with, there are some curiosities which unite us all. If you have ever wondered why vegans always look like vegans and why it’s always people on the centre-right that like double breasted jackets this blog post is for you.
Only kidding; I am not quite yet qualified to answer these great enigmas. Nonetheless, this blog post aims to explore why such manifestations of personality are so crucial and how they became possible. There are debts we owe to the free market for the idiosyncrasies and interests which culminate in ‘personality’ as we understand it today. Your ‘usual’ at Costa, cheeky Netflix binges and new sick obsession with the Adam Smith Institute’s Twitter page are dispositions impossible without the material wealth and choices available to us at present.
Perhaps there exists a universe where - like ants - humans are content with intrinsic values, goals and biological imperatives governing their lives. Apparently some would even like for this to be the case today, but humans in the real world live their lives in a system of trial and error which goes hand in hand with economic and personal freedom. Whilst it is often claimed that it is the Humanities and Arts, rather than the Sciences, which make the human condition their sole purpose of study, human action often operates through experiment in an intriguingly scientific way. The difference being that unlike ‘hard sciences’ such as physics we are both the subject of study and the executors of the experiment.
Just as how a good scientist would test as many independent variables as possible to examine how different factors affect the dependent variable, most people live best when they have as many choices as possible; this is the point of the system of trial and error which leads to progress. It results in choices being made either for us or us making choices we don’t fully endorse because there is little to choose from. Whilst there is not objective truth regarding human action as there is with any hard science, the element of choice allows for an almost scientific method of hypothesising, testing, and concluding; The end result is learning how to better oneself and our decisions each time. Thus it is only through increasing choices - freedom - can man fully express his personality how he wishes.
The freedom to make such choices, develop interests, and adopt attitudes stems from the abundant and (hopefully) ever-increasing time and resources available today. Nobody can become an art history enthusiast in a primitive society where much of everyone's time is spent harvesting (not even running through) fields of wheat. Specialisation allows us to develop interests and the free time to rolick aimlessly around Christmas markets without worrying that the next harvest leaves us with no orange for the yule log. What’s more, being able to pick up the ‘Vikings’ box set at less than a day’s work at minimum wage (despite how nauseating the historical inaccuracies are) is testament to how well economic and social development correspond with each other.
Personalities are often shaped by relationships to the people around us, not just interests and material possessions. Capitalism’s ‘great enrichment’ was the catalyst to urbanisation, leading to communities in which individuals may have greater choice in their company rather than the all-too-familiar primary school situation where you realise your friends were only friends out of proximity. The theory of Dunbar’s number may still apply to cities with populations outnumbering countries, such as London. Nonetheless, a greater pool of people means it is more likely that one would find those that make them tick, those they love, and - if they’re really lucky - those they loathe. Though in a city, of course, you can get away from those you loathe: it is much harder to do so in a primitive society where you are bound by mundane endless tasks just to maintain yourself.
In Scandinavia, countries lauded for their levels of equality and wealth, individuals are better able to make choices they want, and the outcomes are often surprising. This has been dubbed the ‘Nordic paradox’ whereby countries such as Albania and Algeria have a greater percentage of women amongst their STEM graduates than more egalitarian societies such as Finland, Norway and Sweden. When individuals are not constrained by the need to choose a relatively high-paid STEM career, they are able to study and develop interests in fields they genuinely find more attractive.
This is merely a microcosm of the way wealth creation has created a developed society in which man is able to flourish through specialisation, and most importantly choice.
Finally, probably the best answer (fit for civilised discourse) you will get on why vegans always look like vegans and why it’s always people on the centre-right that like double breasted jackets is this: because they choose to.
The establishment will have its slice of economic activity
Facebook is to “invest” $300 million in local journalism. There are a number of possible ways of looking at this. One might be to applaud a rich corporation’s investment in such necessary infrastructure of a good society. Another might be - and rather closer to our own opinion - that this is the feasance that is being extracted by the current establishment. There’s lots of economic activity there after all, so why shouldn’t they have some of it?
Facebook is investing $300m (£233m) in local journalism projects amid mounting criticism over fake news on its platform and its role in the demise of regional newspapers.
The company said it would be investing in local reporters and newsrooms as well as helping media organisations to create sustainable business models.
It said the three-year project would be part of its efforts to "fight fake news, misinformation, and low quality news on Facebook", and said there was an "opportunity and a responsibility, to help local news organisations grow and thrive".
News of the investment comes just days after Facebook unveiled a new fact-checking service in the UK to deal with disinformation on its site, as it struggles to cope with the onslaught of accounts posting such content. The announcement is among the first initiatives since Sir Nick Clegg, Britain's former deputy prime minister, joined Facebook as head of global affairs and communications tasked with repairing the company's reputation.
One could imagine - and of course this is just an imagining - that political process looking at the irruption onto the stage of this new technology, social media, and there being a certain amount of muttering of nice business you’ve got there, shame if something happened to it. And thus a rent is extracted from that activity to be spent upon what that political process thinks should be spent upon.
The actual merit of the activity is an irrelevance here. Politics is, after all, the scramble to be able to command the resources and efforts of others without consideration of that pesky merit.
Yes, of course, this is all much too cynical. Couldn’t possibly be true that a company threatened with regulation by all sides hires an ex-politician to devise the pay off. Just unthinkable, the very idea. Such a pity that there are some so debased as to think ill of all concerned here.
Isn't the taxpayer doing well out of Capita's Army contract
We’re told that Capita’s contract with the Army to provide recruitment services will never make the company a profit. They were chasing revenue, not that profit, so they underbid. This, although few to none will care to note this, means that the taxpayer is doing very well out of the arrangement.
Note what we’re not saying, that Capita is performing well, or that all is ticketty boo. Our point is a much simpler and more basic one. If Capita is being paid less than it costs to provide the service - those costs obviously including the cost of capital - then that’s a transfer from the company to taxpayers. For us taxpayers are getting those services at less than they cost to produce:
Capita will never make money on the troubled £495m contract it signed to recruit soldiers for the British Army, MPs have been told.
The boss of the outsourcing company admitted Capita was “chasing revenue” when it took on the programme in 2012, and which has failed to provide enough soldiers, leaving the Army dangerously under strength.
Again, we’re not saying that it’s a good contract being performed well. We’re only on about that one financial aspect. If the private sector is so competitive that profits are competed away then that’s a benefit to taxpayers, not a problem for us all. For any loss, any price less than covering full economic costs, is a transfer from the capitalist owners of the providers to said taxpayers. That’s a bargain.
Coca-Cola: A symbol of capitalism
There are several significant dates on the early history of Coca-Cola, but a generally accepted one is January 15th 1889, 130 years ago, which was when the franchised distribution system that became its hallmark was introduced. Today the company is reckoned to have the third most popular brand name, recognized by 94 percent of the world's population, and the company's $35.1 billion in revenue makes it the 84th largest economy in the world, just ahead of Costa Rica. It has 500 brands sold in more than 200 countries.
Coca-Cola has become a symbol of entrepreneurial capitalism. Originally Colonel Pemberton was looking for a way to wean himself off the morphine addiction he'd picked up after the American Civil War. He developed a medication containing carbonated water, coca leaves (a source of cocaine), and kola nuts (a source of caffeine). It was sold in soda fountains, but it was the business model of providing syrup to franchised bottlers that provided the basis of its success.
Its status as a symbol of capitalism, and indeed of America, is helped by the fact that it has made mistakes along the way and corrected them. To counter the popularity of its sweeter tasting rival, Pepsi, the company introduced New Coke in 1985. It was a PR disaster that yielded a huge backlash. The company quickly responded with Coke Classic to recapture its popularity. It succeeded, and it quietly dropped the Classic tag in 2011.
It has responded to criticism, adding sugar-free versions such as Diet Coke and Coke Zero alongside its original product (from which the cocaine was removed long ago).
What does Coke do? It provides a product that millions of people all over the world willingly pay to consume every day. Coke spends more on advertising than Apple and Microsoft combined, recognizing that people drink it to be part of a culture as well as having their thirst quenched. Their 1971 ad featured teenage children of embassy staff on a hillside in Rome singing "I'd like to teach the world to sing," promoting Coke as a symbol of internationalism and harmony between different peoples. The song became a chart topper, albeit with the specific pitch for Coke removed.
Today Coke ranks among the world's top ten private employers with over 600,000 employees. It is a huge success, and a testament to what entrepreneurial capitalism can achieve with good ideas, determination and drive. Happy birthday, Coca-Cola.
We did in fact warn about this - time to be a free society again
It wasn’t just us that warned about it either, Feargal Sharkey did:
It is a sad indictment of society when something as innocent as singing sea shanties in a pub is banned. Yet when James Purefoy and fellow actors were relaxing in a London tavern after a hard day’s filming some months ago, they were asked to stop singing traditional folk-songs because the pub was not authorised to have live music. The landlord risked losing his alcohol licence.
The irony is that those actors had been making a film based on the true story of the Fisherman’s Friends, Cornish fishermen and their friends, who received a million-pound record deal and chart-topping success after a holidaying executive heard them singing songs of the sea in their village pub.
That warning? From 2007:
The singer Feargal Sharkey asked of the Licensing Act 2003 that regulates live music: is it really necessary that old men should be stopped from singing folk songs to each other in a room above a pub? Stopped unless they apply for permission to do so?
The essential guiding principle of anything even approximating to a liberal society is that consenting adults can be left to working out and organising such things themselves. Permission from the State is not necessary nor a system which insists upon it desired.
Perhaps we should return to that idea then, be liberal as England used to be?
An NHS result - but what's the cause of it?
A fascinating finding from the National Health Service here. That old people in hospital do better if they’re fed more. Specifically, those going in for hip problems fare very much better if they’re fed an extra meal a day. The question is here, well, what’s the cause of this improvement?
Giving elderly patients an extra meal a day halves their chances of dying in hospital, an NHS pilot scheme is showing.
Death rates among those admitted with hip fractures have plummeted since the scheme was introduced two years ago, prompting medical chiefs to consider recommending it nationally, The Telegraph can reveal.
Experts behind the programme say older patients are typically failing to consume enough nutrients while convalescing on geriatric wards.
They believe this contributes to the toll of more than 4,000 elderly people who die within a month of being admitted for a hip fracture each year.
What we do now is obvious enough - we feed old people in hospital more.
But we’d still like to know why this is so, why is there this improvement?
As a first estimate we’d not think that a national and government managed health care system was providing insufficient calories in the general diet. All those experts, all that attention paid to hospital food, it simply cannot be that we are starving our elderly. Not by plan at least.
So, what is it? Our suspicion - and it’s very much a suspicion, nothing else - would be that the process of an experiment like this is what has caused the benefit. To do an experiment one must measure exactly how much people are eating. Monitor matters. Make sure they are ingesting the food provided. It could possibly be - and we mention this as only the vaguest of possibilities - that without the experiment not enough attention is paid to how much of the food provided is actually being eaten.
Perhaps, whisper it, not enough nursing attention is given to people finishing up their plate?
Fortunately this is easy enough to test. Run two wards on equal experiments, equal in their measurement and monitoring methods at least. Provide that extra meal on one, not on the other. That way we’ll find out whether it’s the extra food being provided - that is, our current meal plans just don’t contain enough calories - or the extra attention to the food provided being eaten - that we’ve an inadequacy in nursing attention.
It’ll be fascinating to see the results, won’t it?
Venezuela Campaign: no-one's on the buses in Maduro's Venezuela
The streets of Caracas are unnaturally quiet. But this is no blissful moment of peace. Public transport in Venezuela, in common with the rest of the country, is ceasing to operate altogether - yet another symptom of a collapsing state.
In order to get to work many Venezuelans now have to walk or buy a bicycle, although there is a shortage of those too. Commuters often have to walk 7 kilometres (over an hour) to reach their place of work. Driving is not an option either. Most cars and motorbikes are off the road because their owners cannot get spare parts to repair them. People are being murdered just to cannibalise their bikes for parts.
Caracas’ main bus company, Colectivos del Norte, used to operate a fleet of 80 buses. Now it can only keep two running due to this lack of spare parts. Taking a taxi isn’t much of an option either, as one ride often costs several times the average monthly salary.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the collapse of Venezuela’s transport systems has been directly caused by the economic policies of the Chavista regime. The government held down ticket prices below the costs of operation, without providing subsidies or any other sources of income. This forced operators to take their buses off the road, as they could no longer afford to buy spare parts or carry out basic maintenance. As of mid-2018 only 10% of the country’s public transport fleet was still operating, according to Jose Luis Trocel, the head of the main transport workers union.
The Chavista government had sought to address this growing crisis by constructing a new state-owned bus plant - supposedly the biggest bus assembly plant in Latin America - in partnership with the Chinese company Yutong. However, the scheme has been a dismal failure. An inquiry by the National Assembly found that the factory was largely inoperative and that massive corruption had occurred. The regime overpaid some $92,852 per bus. An estimated 939 million dollars was stolen by regime members. In June this year an opposition activist published on Twitter aerial images of “Yutong bus cemeteries” where hundreds of non-functioning Yutong buses lie abandoned.
In a half-hearted effort to help people get to work, municipal authorities have started using lorries and garbage trucks as buses. Known as ‘dog-carts’, these trucks are standing room only – mainly for poor Venezuelans – and are both unreliable and dangerous. People are dying as a consequence. In Merida earlier this year a truck overturned, killing eleven passengers. Nine of them were children.
When one can find a bus or truck, it is often beyond the means of most Venezuelans, as drivers are forced to ignore price controls and increase prices weekly. This is largely because hyperinflation is relentlessly pushing up the cost of essentials such as oil and tires. But this means when Venezuelans are offered new jobs – a rare phenomenon – they often have to decline because the cost of getting to and from the job exceeds the pay.
Functioning public transport is something that is taken for granted in most countries. It is only when it disappears as in Venezuela that one understands the essential role that it plays. Most importantly, in a country where most of the country lives in poverty, failing to provide public transport hurts the poorest most.
More information on the Venezuela Campaign can be found on their website.
Creating money out of nowhere
On this day in 1404, 615 years ago, Parliament passed the "Act Against Multipliers," making it illegal to turn base metals into gold by alchemy. Alchemists could not at that time actually do this, and cannot now, but English lawmakers wanted to cover themselves against the possibility for fear that if it did happen, it would ruin the country. It is not recorded if they had discovered, centuries before Milton Friedman, that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon," but they had an inkling that too much gold and silver coming suddenly into circulation would be a bad thing.
They were wise before their time, in that the during the following century the Spaniards discovered abundant gold and silver in the Americas and brought it back to Europe, where it did cause significant inflation, which Spain exported to the rest of Europe by spending it there. It made Spain rich for a time until the inflation kicked in, but the easy wealth meant the country had little incentive to stimulate its own production since it could easily buy from others.
England never received vast quantities of specie. Sir Francis Drake pirated a little from Spanish ships, and Queen Elizabeth I wisely used it to pay off the national debt. England's alchemists never discovered how to make precious metals out of base ones, but later governments found how to turn base paper into money, and have often caused inflation by printing too much of it.
Present-day alchemists think there is a magic money tree, and that government can print as much as it likes to finance increased social welfare payments with it, use it to buy up industries into state hands, and create employment by financing huge infrastructure projects with it. They might do well to study a little history.
Paying for a TV licence would put some oldsters into poverty, would it?
A useful example of how we get our poverty and inequality statistics entirely wrong here. Yes, this is specific to the UK in details but it is indeed an illustration of a larger problem which affects all such calculations everywhere.
The claim is that if the oldies among us have to pay for a TV licence then this will push some of them into poverty. This isn’t actually true given the measure being used anyway:
Scrapping the free TV licence for over-75s could push 50,000 older people into relative poverty, according to research by the charity Age UK, which is urging the government to pick up the bill of providing BBC services to elderly people.
The broadcaster opened a consultation last year on whether to start charging older people the £150.50-a-year fee, but the charity said such a move could distress many older people, “potentially forcing them to cut back on other essentials such as heating and food in order to remain informed, entertained, stimulated and connected to the world beyond their doorstep”.
Age UK calculated that forcing over-75s to start paying for BBC services could hit disposable incomes and leave tens of thousands of households facing a choice between being able to watch television or being pushed into relative poverty, which is defined as households with less 60% of median household income.
Relative poverty is defined by income, not expenditure.
But that larger problem. Let us accept disposable income as our measure. The TV licence is indeed a tax, so, OK. We’ve the claim that people having to pay it will drive some into that relative poverty. OK. So, where in our measurements of poverty and or inequality is the value of those services which they currently do not have to pay for?
We all gain access to the same medical services at the same price through the National Health Service. This reduces both poverty and inequality substantially. So too free education for all to the age of 18. Even equal access to the road network is an economic leveler. Yet none of these appear in any of our poverty nor inequality statistics.
Which means two things. Firstly, it’s a bit off to claim increased poverty or inequality as a result of withdrawing such things if we’re not equally claiming reduced such by their existence. Secondly, it makes a mockery of the claim that either are up to historical levels, Victorian say. Simply because those equally available services and public goodies mean that we’re not anything like those times at all.
If not repairing things were more expensive then we'd repair things, wouldn't we?
There’s a current mania - sadly prevalent within government as well as elsewhere - to insist that we should be repairing things instead of just recycling the components when they break down. For example, white goods like fridges, dishwashers and the like.
We can think of two models here. One is that we’ve that steel box with bits in it and we build it so that each component can be replaced, repaired, so that the box staggers on as a whole for decades. Or, we could build so that the box as an integrated whole of bits. When one or more break we then reuse - recycle perhaps - by passing the steel box through a furnace and build a new one out of the melted metal. These are not entirely or of course, there’s a spectrum here. We’d probably not want to melt the entire box because of a grommet on the feet meaning it sits wonky on the floor. We’d probably not want to repair if a falling i-beam had flattened it all. We’re thus talking about which tendency we’d prefer, a little bit more to the repair end, a little more to the junk and recycle.
The current contention is that we must move to the more repair end of our spectrum. But why?
But if you’ve ever had a sense that things are falling apart faster than they used to, invariably just after the warranty runs out, then you may have a point. A 2015 study showed that between 2004 and 2012, the proportion of household appliances that died within five years of purchase had doubled. This speeded-up cycle of stuff breaking down, being chucked away and having to be replaced isn’t just expensive,…
But is it expensive? Not obviously so, no:
In 1981, the 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above from a 1981 Wards Christmas catalog sold for $359.88. The average hourly manufacturing wage then was $7.42, meaning that it would have taken 48.5 hours of work at the average hourly wage for a typical factory worker to earn enough income 32 years ago to purchase the dishwasher above.
The new Kenmore 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above is currently listed on the Sears website for sale at $539.99. At the current average hourly wage of $20.26 for production workers, the average factory worker today would only have to work 26.7 hours to earn enough pre-tax income to buy today’s energy-efficient dishwasher, which is only a little more than one-half of the 48.5 hour time-cost for the 1981 model.
White goods are becoming cheaper by the only measure that actually matters, the labour we must perform to be able to gain access to them. And they’re becoming cheaper in that other measure of real prices, post-inflation adjustment - US CPI rose 176% between 1981 and 2018. It’s not just that our incomes are rising relative to prices, it’s that real prices are falling too.
Falling prices do indeed indicate that we’re using fewer resources to make these things over time. It’s also a flat rejection of the idea that this is all becoming more expensive in at least this one sense.
But there’s another thing we should look at too. What is the cost of the labour to repair something? Our average cost of labour has risen from that $7-ish an hour to $20-ish without the inflation adjustment - nominal prices have moved more than inflation note, meaning that labour has really become more expensive. This changes the repair to recycle costs, no? 10 hours of labour to repair has gone from $70 on a $360 machine to $200 on a $540 one. At some point in this process we will be using fewer resources to melt and do over our steel box rather than attempt to repair it.
Now run the same process over the repair or recycle decision for a computer. A 1981 model against a 2018 one. The decision is more obvious there.
At which point we need a decision making process. How are we to calculate through these numbers to decide upon which? Obviously enough the price system, it’s the only one we’ve got which can do it for us. But when we do look at this we find that we’re already doing so. People do resole £500 pairs of handmade shoes and don’t £10 trainers. People do repair £2,000 ovens and don’t £30 microwaves. On the grounds that some things are not cheaper to repair, others are.
Oh, and we’ve also proven that the statement that not repairing is more expensive isn’t true - for a reasonable subset of all goods that is. Thus an insistence that we must repair more in order to save isn’t true, is it?