The man who saved a billion lives
One of the most influential figures of the 20th Century was born on March 25th, 1914. His name hardly resonates with the man in the street, but Norman Borlaug, so-called "Father of the Green Revolution," was the agronomist whose work developing more resistant and high-yielding crop strains, combined with the use of new technology and techniques, virtually disproved the pessimistic thesis of Malthus single-handedly. In doing so, he also made the best-selling doomsayer Paul Erlich look even more ridiculously wrong than he already was.
As a child and teenager, he worked the family farm, and was taught in a one-room one-teacher school in rural Iowa. He went on to gain degrees in forestry, plant pathology and genetics. In Mexico he bred a series of high-yield, disease-resistant, semi-dwarf wheat, and took the best plants of each crop to develop properties that would make them more resistant to the plant pathogen, rust, and other parasites. By breeding dwarf crops, he made them waste less energy in growing long stalks, and less prone to fall over in the wind and rain. He was able to grow varieties that had larger heads with more cereal, and increase production per acre.
Under his team Mexico went rapidly from being an importer of wheat to being an exporter. He did this by introducing a double season for wheat, and by developing multiline varieties to grow together in the same field, to increase pest resistance through genetic variation.
Borlaug went on to Southeast Asia, introducing his strains and techniques to India and Pakistan and hugely boosting their crop yields. In his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," Erlich had said that humanity was doomed to mass starvation. He said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971," and "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." It was, it did.
His team went on to develop high yield, semi-dwarf rice for use in China, boosting productivity per acre there as well, and developed and popularized the new crop varieties in South America and he Middle East. Food production was increasing, pace Malthus, faster than population was. The "Borlaug Hypothesis" suggested that increasing food production on current agricultural land made it less necessary to cut down forests in order to grow more food.
He criticized some Western environmentalists who favoured "traditional" (i.e. subsistence) agriculture, suggesting that if they were to spend a month on a poor country farm, watching the people there struggle each day to grow enough food to survive, maybe they would be more favourable to the use of modern farming methods.
Borlaug thought that genetic modification was the key to the next agricultural revolution, pointing out that humans have been modifying crop strains for millennia. He said that GM crops would enable the world to feed a population of 10bn, the level at which it is expected to stabilize.
Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and subsequently the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He demonstrated, by the techniques he pioneered, that the people of the world can survive and prosper if they move on from the traditional ways to embrace the challenges of change. He is reckoned to have saved a billion people from starvation by his initiatives and his life's work. This is ten times the number that were killed by socialist regimes. As epitaphs go, that's one worth writing.
Well of course HS2 should be cancelled, it's a ghastly waste of money
The argument in favour of national, democratic and political, control of parts of the economy is that decisions can and will be made on more than purely private profit grounds. Things such as the public interest can and will be considered too. The argument against national, democratic and political, control of parts of the economy is that decisions can and will be made on more than purely private profit grounds.
Which is how we get HS2:
The Treasury chief who initially signed off on funding for High Speed 2 has called for the £56 billion project to be scrapped, saying that it would fail a "rigorous cost-benefit analysis".
It fails even a reasonable one. The sums depend upon the value of time saved by the faster train set. Which is calculated by assuming that people on a train can do nothing other than be on the train waiting to arrive. The mobile phone, mobile internet, means that this is an incorrect assumption. The cost benefit test is failed purely on this point.
Lord Macpherson of Earl's Court, who was permanent secretary at the Treasury until 2016, said the rail scheme "always had a low economic return compared to other transport projects" and was based on technology that was likely to look obsolete by the time it is finished in the 2030s.
Quite so, it’s a 19th century technology about to be entirely overcome by the 21 st century one of the driverless car. Other than the baying mob chasing the contracts to do so there really is no good reason to build it.
So, obviously enough, we should stop doing so.
Venezuela Campaign: Trading oil for repression
The Venezuelan and Cuban totalitarian regimes have built a symbiotic relationship based on oil, in which Venezuelan oil keeps Cuba’s centrally planned economy afloat, and Cuban military, intelligence, and political services allow Maduro’s regime to counter and suppress political dissent.
Every day more disturbing facts about the relationship between Cuba and Venezuela emerge. The New York Times has just published an exposé about how Cuban doctors in Venezuela are instructed to use the provision of medical treatment as a means of political control. This ranges from handing out medicine in return for sign-ups to the ruling socialist party, to outright denial of treatment to opposition supporters with life-threatening ailments.
Sixteen Cuban doctors have come forward to discuss these practices. According to one, “It became a form of blackmail: ‘You’re not going to have medicine. You’re not going to have free health care. You’re not going to have prenatal care if you’re a pregnant woman.” The doctors revealed that the Maduro regime established “electoral command centres” inside or next to clinics, with Socialist Party operatives dispatching doctors to pressure residents to vote for the ruling party. Another doctor, Yansnier Arias, told of how a 65-year-old opposition-supporting patient with heart failure entered his clinic urgently needing oxygen. “I argued with my colleagues over and over,” he said. “Yes, of course there was oxygen, but they didn’t let me use it.”
Despite the collapse of much of the Barrio Adentro health programme under which they were employed, there are still thousands of Cuban doctors in Venezuela, because their other main function is to make money for the Cuban regime. The doctors themselves are paid next to nothing, and even some of that is held back in Cuba pending their safe return. It is estimated that of every $100 Venezuela pays for their services, the Cuban state keeps $96. Billions of dollars have been paid to Cuba for these services.
Cuba is also paid for the 15,000 Cuban military and intelligence officers stationed in Venezuela. They play a vital role in maintaining the regime, and the details become ever more apparent. Ronald Dugarte, a Venezuelan navy lieutenant assigned to the feared counter-intelligence body DGCIM, took concealed video footage of torture being carried out on prisoners. He confirmed that Cubans control all the intelligence directorates and give orders to Venezuelan officials. “Cuban intelligence performs mixed operations between the Venezuelan and Cuban military. Their job is to monitor all the military units. The moment the Cuban intelligence militia enters, they give orders of how to perform the intelligence work”, he said.
And of course, the Venezuelan regime funds this brutal and horrific repression with oil. Highly subsidised oil shipments to Cuba previously exceeded 100,000 barrels per day. Recently the collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry has reduced this to some 55,000 barrels per day, which still accounts for some 40% of Cuba’s total oil consumption. Cuba has also received ‘investments’ from Venezuela, such as the billions of dollars paid to rehabilitate Cuba’s Cienfuegos refinery so it could refine up to 65,000 barrels per day of heavy Venezuelan crude for both export and domestic use. In 2017 Cuba simply confiscated Venezuela’s 49% stake in this refinery, apparently in compensation for Venezuela’s failure to deliver as much subsidised oil as anticipated.
The collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry is depriving the regime of its black gold. Without the means to fund brutal crack-downs on dissidents, it is surely an inevitability that the regime will collapse. Without access to subsidised oil, the Cuban regime may well follow. We must hope that the seeds for new democratic regimes in the Caribbean have been sown, and that successor regimes learn from the mistakes of their predecessors.
More information on the Venezuela Campaign can be found on their website.
An unlikely clockmaker cracked longitude
John Harrison died on March 24th, 1776. He had been born near Wakefield in 1693, and was by trade a carpenter, one that became the clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer. Following the loss of four warships that went off course in 1707 and were wrecked on the rocks of the Silly Isles with great loss of life, Parliament offered £20,000 to whomever could solve the problem of measuring longitude at sea.
It was widely supposed by the day's scientists that the answer would lie in measurements of the stars or the moon, but Harrison thought it might be done with a clock, if one could be constructed with an accuracy that could cope with the variations in temperature, pressure, and humidity aboard a ship that tossed and rolled on the seas, and that could be resistant to the salt spray of sea voyages. Knowing the time in Greenwich from the clock, and calculating the difference between that and local time, longitude could be calculated.
Harrison had built his first clock, entirely of wood, aged 20. Now he set about devising and refining a clock that would meet Parliament's requirements. After years of work on several models, he finally cracked the problem. His H4 chronometer looked like a large pocket watch, and used a fast-beating balance wheel controlled by a temperature-compensated spiral spring. In ocean voyage tests it met the accuracy level required.
Unfortunately one of his rivals, Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, tried to prevent him being awarded the prize, and it took the intervention of King George III to secure justice for Harrison by having Parliament finally vote to reward him.
Parliament's approach to the problem of longitude was sound. They offered the prize for however the problem could be solved, allowing free rein for several approaches to be tested. They wanted the result, regardless of the process that produced it.
Too often regulators specify the approach and the technology that must be used, rather than allowing creativity to test different approaches. When the US wanted to control auto emissions, they specified catalytic converters, requiring them by law to be fitted to all autos. They were widely unpopular because they increased fuel consumption and cut performance. A better approach would have been to set maximum emissions levels, leaving it to engineers and inventors to find ways of achieving them. Regulation should specify the result required, rather than the process to attain it. EU regulators are notoriously inclined to require process-driven, rather than result-driven regulation.
The Parliament that passed the Longitude Act was also right not to pay people to produce the result, but to offer a prize to anyone who could. That way they had several people working on solutions, but only had to pay the successful one. The Ansari X-Prize for the first private enterprise space flight used the same principle. The success of both serves to vindicate the offering of prizes to teams that can come up with technically viable solutions to the word's problems.
This might be harsh but perhaps there shouldn't be a funding stream for this
We wouldn’t say that this is an entirely and fully baked suggestion. Rather that this is something that does need to be thought about. If we create a dedicated fund, funding stream, to compensate for a certain form of criminal activity, aren’t we then reducing the pressure to reduce this form of criminal activity?
Banks are lobbying to introduce charges on the vast majority of money transfers to fund payouts for fraud victims, Telegraph Money understands.
The industry has agreed that victims of bank transfer fraud who did nothing to put themselves at risk should get their money back. It is now under pressure to agree where this money will come from.
This week it emerged that the number of reported cases of bank transfer fraud, where someone is tricked into authorising a payment to criminals, has almost doubled in a year, from 43,875 to 84,624, according to the banking trade body, UK Finance. In total £354m was stolen but banks returned only £83m to victims.
If the banks must compensate from shareholder funds then that will put a certain pressure on the bank and management systems to reduce this form of crime. If there’s a funding scheme, that flow of funds from each and every transfer, then that pressure will be reduced. The banks won’t have skin in the game in reducing the instances of the fraud. Their profits are unaffected by the scale of crime.
Is that what we really want? Those best able to limit the thieving having no economic pressure to reduce it? It’s not entirely obvious that it is, is it?
What the Strategic Defence Initiative achieved
On March 23rd, 1983, just 36 years ago to the day, President Ronald Reagan announced from the White House that he had initiated a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). The proposed system was designed to protect the United States from intercontinental and submarine-launched missiles. Its significance was its move away from deterrence to a defensive capability. The prevailing policy, called "Mutual assured destruction" (MAD), was designed to convince a would-be attacker that they, too, would be destroyed by a retaliatory strike from their opponents.
SDI was something new. It would use a dazzling array of new technologies to detect and destroy incoming missiles. The advanced weaponry that would have to be developed included lasers, x-ray lasers, particle-beam weapons, and space-based missiles to supplement ground-launched ones. President Reagan suggested that it could remove the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation from the lives of Americans.
The revolutionary concept was widely attacked, chiefly because of the instability it brought to a world that had learned to live with the nuclear stalemate. It was derided as "fantasy by some." They dubbed it "Star Wars," claiming that the technology to implement it could never be gained. Other people, and often the same people, warned of its dangers, claiming that it could be a first strike weapon, tempting an invincible America to attack without fear of retaliation. This was like listing a shield as a first strike weapon because it could allow its bearer to throw spears with impunity.
Despite the orchestrated chorus of derision from the left-leaning media of the time, Reagan pressed ahead, funding the research and development of many of the systems the SDI would need to incorporate. The Soviet Union made it a top priority to prevent such a system from being deployed. The 1986 summit in Reykjavik between Reagan and Gorbachev ended without agreement because abandoning SDI was top of the Soviet priorities, and it was the one thing Reagan would not give up. Thus agreement failed because of what many insisted was a "fantasy."
In fact Reagan's advisers had been briefed, pre-summit, by Oleg Gordievsky, who had been KGB Bureau Chief in London while secretly working for the British. He had been party to top Soviet thinking, and told the American team to hold fast on SDI because it would ultimately break a Soviet Union unable to compete economically and technologically with such a project. Even without SDI, the huge proportion of the Soviet budget allocated to the military had deprived its civilian sector of funds for investment. Its economy could not cope with a space arms race.
Within a few years Gordievsky's prediction was confirmed. The Communist empire collapsed in 1989. The Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union was dissolved shortly afterwards. If it was, indeed, "a fantasy," and "never more than a graphic," the Strategic Defence initiative became the graphic that changed history.
Yes, lovely theory, now how about reality?
We’re told that the privatisation of water was a big mistake, we really must take it all back into public hands. Because:
Our water supply belongs to all of us. Having our water industry run by public servants who are elected and are accountable to voters means that we can reinvest money in technologies, maintenance and systems that will ensure our water supply’s viability – instead of giving huge payouts to shareholders. Nationalising the UK water industry is what works best for consumers and what will ensure the conservation of our water supply for the next 25 years – and beyond.
It’s a great theory. Society’s impartial technocrats will optimally allocate resources to all our benefit if only they were freed to do so. Like all theories this has to be tested against reality. So, what did happen when that did happen?
Investment under nationalisation was lower than after privatisation. In fact, the privatising was in part caused by that need for investment which the public couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, deliver. That is, the problem with the theory is that reality just doesn’t work out that way.
The State has many things to spend money upon. It also faces budget constraints. What does get spent upon within those constraints often turns out to be a great deal less than is socially optimal. That technocratic allocation simply doesn’t work as assumed above.
This is thus the big question that would be nationalisers have to answer. If nationalisation would raise investment why is it that privatisation raised investment?
Freedom's Fighters with David Davis
Earlier this month the Adam Smith Institute hosted the Rt Hon. David Davis MP for the latest in our series of Freedom’s Fighters. A serial champion for civil liberties and liberal policy, the interview with ASI President Madsen Pirie looks back on his business and political careers. You can watch the full interview below.
March 22nd is World Water Day
The UN designates March 22nd as World Water Day, to draw attention to the world supplies and uses of fresh water. It supports the management of fresh water supplies in a sustainable way, covering such issues as its scarcity, pollution, and access to it.
The UN will doubtless use the day to pass resolutions asserting everyone's 'right' to clean, fresh water, and demanding access to it for women, minorities, children and disabled people. It will issue school packs to make children aware of the importance of water, and organize competitions to have children draw pictures that illustrate it.
None of this will actually produce any more fresh water, but fortunately there are other people out there already doing just that. This is important. The pumping, treating and transporting of water uses about 8% of all energy generated. Sometimes its conservation can be achieved using natural means such as restoring or developing wetlands, or managing floodplains. The reintroduction of beavers into the UK is helping with that conservation.
Ultimately, however, and given the increasing demand for fresh water, the solution lies with developing new sources and new technology. Voluntary groups are assisting villagers to dig deep wells. Others are demonstrating how plastic bottles and sunlight can purify contaminated water. For an adequate supply of drinkable quality water, though, the future will have to involve the large-scale desalination of seawater.
A key problem is that the two main types of desalination, thermal and osmotic, are both energy intensive and expensive. But breakthroughs promise to reduce the costs. Israel has just upped the output of its Sorek plant, the world's largest reverse osmosis desalination plant. Built by Israel Desalination Enterprises, it produces enough fresh water to cover 20% of the country's households. Additional desalination plants are ramping up to produce 50% of the country's water needs. Its secret is good engineering. Is uses 16-inch pressure tubes instead of the usual 8-inch ones, meaning it needs only a quarter of the piping. It also uses highly efficient pumps and has energy recovery mechanisms, giving it the cheapest desalinated seawater in the world.
Another breakthrough has come in grapheme-oxide membranes. A University of Manchester group has announced in the journal Nature Nanotechnology that it can now prevent the membranes becoming swollen in water, and can precisely control their pore size, enabling unwanted salts to be sieved out at speed, leaving clean, drinkable water. They aim to scale this up into large-scale and cost effective plants.
By all means let us celebrate World Water Day. But let us remember as we do so that it is voluntary workers who are currently helping remote communities gain access to clean water, and it is engineers and entrepreneurs who are applying the work of researchers to give the world all the clean water it will need in the future. The doomsayers are wrong yet again. There will be no "water wars," largely because we are unlikely to run out of seawater or, indeed, of the human ingenuity that can process it.
Opposing nuclear because of the land it uses looks very odd indeed to us
That varied people oppose nuclear power is both fine and a fact of life. That, in our opinion, near all do through not understanding the issue might be more about us than them. But to oppose nuclear because of a blot on the landscape seems absurd even then:
A coalition of actors, broadcasters and entrepreneurs is warning that building work to replace Sizewell nuclear power station will “lay waste” to swathes of Suffolk’s most idyllic landscape.
Bill Turnbull, the broadcaster; actors Bill Nighy and Diana Quick; the novelist Esther Freud and renowned sculptor Maggi Hambling are among those voicing their opposition to the movement of tons of construction materials and waste to and from the site.
They say the plans could mean 1,500 lorries a day thundering through the quiet Suffolk countryside, with construction work disrupting the lives of residents and carving up farms and communities for years to come.
We don’t doubt in the slightest that there will be some disruption and noise and lorries and so on. But to ask Thomas Sowell’s question, compared to what?
Note that Sizewell C will be pretty much where A and B already are. No one’s going to be using that land for much else given the general and unjustified queasiness about reusing nuclear occupied land. But compared to what?
Say that we tried to gain 1,600 MW of power from solar panels? One estimate would give us 6,400 acres. Or 10 square miles. Or 0.7% of the entire county of Suffolk. This would be more or less disruptive of that landscape? And if we use windmills instead? 150 foot birdchoppers invoke the Hay Wain in what manner?
Sure, complain about nuclear all you’d like but to moan about the footprint of it is to be absurd. For the one thing that nuclear is really conservative in is its use of is land.