This seems perfectly acceptable to us too
This is about American practices but still:
When my kids started pre-kindergarten in New York last year, the school issued parents with a long list of items to buy and bring in. This was not, as in state school in Britain, a list of uniform and PE kit requirements but rather necessities including paper towels, glue sticks, a year’s supply of paper plates and plastic cutlery, cups, napkins, board markers, crayons and packing tape. Classroom supplies, in other words.
These donations were discretionary; no one was going to yell at you if you didn’t bring them in. And in the sheer volume of stuff being asked of each parent – for two kids in separate classes, it was way too much to be carried in on a single trip – the tacit understanding was that those who could afford it were providing for those who could not.
This seemed to me right and reasonable at the time. The New York education system is as cash-strapped as any and, at least in the small scale, asking affluent parents to help out makes sense.
Think of what the alternative is. A higher education budget. Which will be financed by the progressive system of taxation in use. Which would mean those who can afford it providing for those who cannot. Unless it’s all more moral if the money is collected a gunpoint - the ultimate force behind any system of taxation rather than donation - we don’t see a particular difference.
Except, of course, that this way the educational bureaucracy doesn’t get a slice of the budget. Perhaps it’s that which makes the direct donation something to abhor?
Thomas Jefferson and liberty
Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 on April 13th, a date that also saw the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial in 1943, 200 years later. He was the chief author of America’s Declaration of Independence, and served as his country’s third President. As President, he doubled the size of America by the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, which added over 825,000 square miles at a cost of $15 million.
Jefferson was a remarkable and versatile man, a planter, a lawyer and a statesman. He was also an architect, an archeologist and an inventor. Monticello, his home, has many of his inventions, including the swivel chair he invented, a revolving bookstand, and a great clock with heavy cannon balls as pulleys.
His philosophy was based on liberty, which he took to mean a God-given right to do what you wanted provided it did not stop others doing likewise. He wrote, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” He was proud of the law for religious freedom that he drafted as a Virginia legislator.
Paradoxically, while writing that “all men are created equal,” he was a slave-owner. He inherited about 175 saves, but owned about 600 over the course of his life, most born on his plantations. He is reckoned to have treated them benignly, and he did campaign unsuccessfully for the abolition of slavery. As President, he signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807. But he thought that to push too hard for abolition might break up the Union. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he called slavery a moral evil, and later wrote, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
More controversy surrounds the fact that after his wife died, he fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemmings. Although his supporters have denied this, in recent times DNA tests on their descendants have established an unmistakable link to him. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation accepted Jefferson's paternity in a 2000 report, and his black descendants are now welcomed at family gatherings at Monticello.
Despite these inconsistencies, common in his day, he is rightly regarded as one of the great architects of liberty, and is honoured on Mount Rushmore, as well as in his memorial in DC.
The effects of Big Tech on competition
As we can observe - and it’s not just Elizabeth Warren making stuff up over in the US to give her an election campaign issue - there’s an awful lot of concern about the monopolistic effects of Big Tech out there. Regulate, break up, above all proffer more power to the bureaucracy than to those private market actors.
At which point we can try to consider the actual effects of Big Tech on the only human economic unit of any importance, the household. Has the irruption of online into the marketplace increased or reduced competition? For, sure, we can observe large companies out there and assume we’ve greater market concentration. But does that hold at that household level?
One cute possibility is to look at the UK supermarket industry. Over the years we’ve had several investigations into whether the big supermarkets had carved up the country between them. There was certainly some evidence of oligopoly - British supermarket margins were globally regarded as immense at some 6 and 7%. From one of those reports:
In rural areas, 71 per cent of the population has access to at least one grocery store larger than 1,400 sq metres within a 15-minute drive-time (see Figure 3.10), and 13 per cent of the population has a choice of at least four stores of different fascia larger than 1,400 sq metres within a 15-minute drive-time.
This indicates that a large proportion of the urban and rural population in the UK is able to choose between at least two larger grocery stores within a reasonable drivetime. Nevertheless, these national-level figures will mask substantial regional variations. In Section 6, we assess the extent to which local markets for grocery retailing are highly concentrated. We also take the extent of store choice into account when assessing the overall effectiveness of competition in grocery retailing in Section 10.
That report is from 2008. Something a little more recent, 2016:
With the introduction of online grocery shopping, home delivery and click and collect in the nineties, the market was initially made up of the four major players on the British grocery scene: Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons and Tesco. Since then, online grocery sales have skyrocketed, with the United Kingdom forecasted to become the second largest online grocery market worldwide after China by 2020. With the introduction of new players, such as purely online retailers Ocado and AmazonFresh, the online grocery market share has changed with Tesco, Asda and Ocado the leading online grocery retailers in terms of edible grocery sales.
Quite how many full service supermarkets are now available will be variable. One of those doing those deliveries might well be the same organisation which owns the locally accessible bricks and mortar store. But a reasonable rule of thumb would be that every household in the country, down to and including the most isolated rural hamlet, now has at least four supermarkets literally on the doorstep via those delivery vans.
Four being an important number as it was the number the Competition Commission used to indicate that obviously, clearly, there’s no competition problem here if that many choices exist.
We can also look at other indicators - anyone pondering supermarket share prices will know that retail margins have collapsed in the past couple of decades.
Again, sure, Amazon’s a big company. But it’s not obvious that it has led to increased concentration, less competition, in the retail market now, is it? So, our justification in trying to regulate it is what? Other than just that taste to find a justification for more regulation and plum jobs as regulators?
As to the larger picture, just another proof of the contention that every monopoly or oligopoly eventually - eventually being a variable amount of time - will be destroyed by advancing and changing technology. It’ll happen to all those we currently worry about, as it has happened to all those we used to.
Man in space
It was on April 12th, 1961, that Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth. Sergei Korolev designed and built the Vostok spacecraft that launched Gagarin on his single-orbit mission. Only 58 years had passed since Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the first powered heavier than air flight over a distance that is shorter than the wingspan of a 747. A mere 66 years after that first flight, men put their footprints on the moon, this time in a Saturn V rocket designed by Wernher von Braun.
It provides a telling illustration of the rapidly-accelerating pace of change. Since the Renaissance we have been climbing the rapidly-rising curve of a hockey stick graph. Before that time, men and women lived pretty much as their grandparents had lived, in a world that stayed familiar. Since then this has not been true. We have lived in a world in which constant change has been the norm, the world of Heraclitus in which it is a new river into which we step for the second time.
We cannot predict the future with any accuracy because, as Popper pointed out, the future state of society depends on the knowledge available to it. We cannot predict future knowledge without knowing it now, and thus cannot predict society’s future. We do know, however, that it will depend on the technology that we and our successors develop.
We are witnessing a series of revolutions, each of which will have transformational effects. Three significant ones are being developed simultaneously. Autonomous vehicles, genetic modification and artificial intelligence are all game-changers, and they are arriving together.
The economic consequence of this accelerating pace of progress are immense, in medicine, agriculture, transport, communication and computing. We do not know what jobs there will be for the next generation, but we know they will be different ones. Gagarin’s flight was a breakthrough, but breakthroughs now happen almost daily. He and Korolev died within a couple of years of each other, and the houses they lived in, side by side at Baikonur, are now preserved as museum pieces. I saw them when I witnessed a couple of Soyuz launches close up. We can be reasonably sure that what we regard as today’s marvels will themselves be museum pieces in a much shorter time.
The correct question in the modern world is "Are we being cynical enough?"
Paranoia definitely exists and so too is it true that sometimes they really are out to get you.
Of course, why shouldn’t the State have a duty to ensure that all children are educated? But there’s also that possibility that those doing the educating will have more than just the 3 Rs in mind when they define what is an education. Possibly - and we mention this only as a bat’s squeak of a maybe - there is a thought that propagandising to the young will force them into growing up with certain viewpoints. Say, that the radical transformation of society is necessary to stop climate change. Or that absolutely everything must be recycled in violation of any commonsense rules.
Thus there would be an insistence that certain parts of said education must be enforced, so as to make sure the entire rising generation was exposed to such indoctrination:
Children taught at home will be placed on a register and monitored for the first time amid fears that thousands are being educated at illegal schools, Damian Hinds has announced.
The Education Secretary has warned that while many home-schooled children benefit from parental supervision, others are being exposed to “dangerous influences” at unregistered centres or not “getting an education at all”.
Define “dangerous influence”. Which disagreement with the ruling educational orthodoxy would qualify? Harming Gaia? Religious extremism? Rote learning of the times table?
The Education Secretary has said that parents cannot veto children taking part in LGBT lessons, as he warns that “myths” are being spread about the content of the classes.
If you were to want to use the education system to create New British Man then this is how you would do it. Insist that no one should be outside that approved, regulated and mandated system. And refuse to allow any opting out from any particular part of that approved, regulated and mandated system.
Of course, that’s to be excessively cynical, there’s just no way that we British would ever move to such a system. Except, well, there is that basic rule of modern life, are we being cynical enough when contemplating the actions of our rulers?
Free speech is more than just a laughing matter
Free speech is under attack in Britain. The police are knocking on doors to tell people off for ‘offensive’ tweets. The Government is proposing a new regulator of online speech. Universities are no-platforming speakers that don’t chime with student unions’ narratives. Places of work are forcing employees to sign contracts that ban certain phrases and words.
This culture of censorship has even reached the industry designed to push the limits of acceptability: comedy. At a comedy night you may be picked out of the crowd and receive a joke at your expense, or you might be offended by one that touches a personal weak spot. But in the end, it’s all in the name of having a good laugh. Comedy is supposed to be judged based on whether it is funny, not based on who it is offending.
This principle, however, is under dire threat from a new movement of ‘woke’ comedy. Woke comedians want to purge all potentially offensive material from comedians’ content. Boundaries cannot be pushed. And why would they? What comedian would risk the collapse of their entire career as a result of one offensive joke?
In February, the ASI hosted comedian and social commentator Andrew Doyle, who spoke out against this new culture. As a comedian, you learn quickly if a joke has gone too far. You will deliver the joke you have been practising and rehearsing in your set and if it doesn’t go down well, no one will laugh, people will look uncomfortable and you will learn not to say it again. Comedians are there to make people laugh. If that isn’t happening, they’re going to change their material. As such, material is designed to please the audience.
Andrew spoke about Comedy Unleashed - London’s Free-thinking Standup Comedy Club, explaining the ethos that:
“If something is funny, it’s funny. We shouldn’t be afraid of exploring prejudices, contrarian views and hidden thoughts. If someone is gratuitous or nasty, people won’t be amused. The audience is the ultimate judge.”
This resonated with me and the other young politicos in the room. Comedy is becoming predictable and stale. The same jokes are made over and over about what happened on a flight to Malia. Andrew spoke of something new, something fresh. Something that was so compelling, I left and immediately purchased a ticket for the next show.
I did not know what to expect when I travelled to the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green. I had been so brainwashed at university into thinking free speech was dangerous and something you needed to be protected from, that I was anxious at the thought of sitting there for hours of being offended. I went to the bar, bought a pint, took my seat in the second row, and waited for the show to start.
All of my worries disappeared within a few minutes of the host taking the stage. I have never laughed so much in my life.
Was some of the material controversial? Yes. Was it funny? Absolutely.
Afterwards I talked to Andy Shaw, a founder of Comedy Unleashed to find out more about what drove them to create a ‘safe space’ for comedians. Andy grew up with rebellious free-thinking comedians like Spike Milligan, Monty Python, Dawn French, and now he’s watching comedy start to die.
It started with a gig on the eve of the general election which brought together politicos from across the political spectrum. People who were intellectually curious, who didn’t see comedy as a vehicle for moral education. From speaking to Andy, one point that really stuck with me was that comedy is about exploring ideas, creating characterisations and thinking freely. It can be absurd and childish, as there is something naturally liberating about comedy.
Comedy had started to be seen as a negative experience, which is why Andy Shaw and Andrew Doyle decided to set up a club based on free thinking, expression and free speech. There is no need for self-censorship at Comedy Unleashed.
I asked Andy if he had one take home message to give to people who’ve never been to one of the events, but were considering it, he said: “If it’s funny, it’s funny. Every night is unpredictable, I don’t even know what’s going to happen anymore, and I organise it. It’s free expression, and that’s why we love it.”
“The growing culture of censorship is a danger to a free and liberal society. In recent weeks we’ve seen the cancellation of a free speech society event at Bristol University and Jordan Peterson’s fellowship at Cambridge University cancelled,” the ASI’s Matthew Lesh explains. “Freedom of speech is core to our humanity, to our capacity to think what we want and hear what we want. It’s through the process of debate, hearing a wide diversity of ideas, that we are able to separate good ideas from bad ones in the eternal human mission towards progress.”
Comedy Unleashed offers a new opportunity to spark debate, to question people on the material they say, and in this intense political PC climate, it gives people a chance to speak, without the fear of being locked up simply for a retweet.
World Parkinson's Day
James Parkinson, the English doctor who identified the condition is his 1817 paper, "An Essay on the Shaking Palsy," was born on April 11th, 1755. His birthday has been chosen to mark World Parkinson's Day, when efforts are made to publicize the disease, and to raise support for research into its treatment and eventual cure. A red tulip symbolizes the awareness and the efforts
Parkinson's is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. Its early symptoms include shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty with walking. It leads to dementia in its advanced stages. The disease involves the death of cells in the substantia nigra part of the brain, with an insufficiency of dopamine.
It affects about 145,000 in the UK (1 in 350 adults), and 6.2m worldwide, with 117,400 deaths globally. While there is no cure yet, it can be treated with levodopa (L-dopa) in its early stages. Research is investigating gene therapy, possible vaccines to prime the immune system against it, and cell-based therapies using stem cells.
Celebrity sufferers include the actor, Michael J Fox, and have included Muhammad Ali, the boxer, and Jeremy Thorpe, the politician. They have helped to publicize the condition and the work being done on it. It will undoubtedly be cured some day, given the effort and resources going into it. Humanity's ancient enemy, smallpox, was killed. Polio is on the point of extinction, and we have the means to conquer tuberculosis. Malaria, too, will be wiped out.
All of these successes and impending successes illustrate the dictum that if humanity wants something badly enough and are prepared to commit the resources to it, they will get it. This is not blind optimism, but simply reality. It is what happens. Whether it is to put men on the moon or to eradicate smallpox, it is that combination of determination plus resources that achieves the result. It will be true of Parkinson's and other forms of dementia, and of other diseases that blight and stunt human lives.
The doomsayers who trade on predicting bleak and destructive futures for humankind, and who sell millions of books to an avid public, miss out on the determination, resourcefulness and creativity that humans bring to bear on their problems. We solve our problems, and Parkinson's is one of them.
Asthmatics, use that inhaler whenever - those climate change emissions are trivial
The latest alarm over climate change is that inhalers used by asthmatics - you know, to stop them dying? - produce the sort of emissions which contribute to that climate change. And sure enough they do, as do near all the other things we do to stay alive.
The important question here is always, well, how much? And what is the cost of those emissions and what the benefit?
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has issued new guidance urging sufferers, where possible, to avoid using the most popular type of inhaler, known as a metered dose inhaler (MDI).
Making up around 70 per cent of inhaler prescriptions - approximately 26 million a year - MDIs contain propellants known as hydrofluorocarbons, which are powerful greenhouse gasses.
The first time Nice has assessed the carbon footprint of a recommended device, the body calculated that five doses from a MDI have the same carbon emissions as a nine-mile trip in a typical car.
Fortunately we’re given the numbers here to be able to work out what that cost is. Using the numbers the Stern Review gave us, the social cost of emissions is $80 per tonne Co2-e. And yes, that’s using Stern’s “I’m going to assume worse than the IPCC does” and also his heterodox ideas about discount rates.
One source tells us that the average (new) car does 52 mpg which we’ll take as that average. 9 miles is thus roughly one sixth (17%) of a gallon. A gallon produces some 9 kg of CO2. We’ve thus $80 x 1/6 x 0.009 which is about 12 cents or perhaps 10 pence. We do hope we’ve got the right number of zeroes there etc.
The benefit is that someone doesn’t choke to death on their own airways, or suffer the experience of thinking they’re about to. Yes, that’s worth 10 pence of damage to the planet in some century or so hence, tough luck Flipper. Go ahead and use your inhalers as you wish therefore. Maybe not pop them off just for fun and the lulz but otherwise don’t even worry about it.
Of course, if we had the only climate change policy that makes sense - assuming that we need one at all - that carbon tax then this would already be incorporated into everyone’s incentives as to what actions they take. We wouldn’t need boards of worthies to tell us about this, we’d already know.
Titanic sets sail
On April 10th, 1912, the RMS Titanic set sail on her ill-fated and only voyage. She struck an iceberg near Newfoundland and sank with the loss of 1,523 of her 2,200 passengers and crew. The Titanic is widely hailed as an example of hubris, with many relating (incorrectly) that she was deemed “unsinkable.” The story of her voyage has made the ship something of a totem for human tragedy, and has earned her a place in legend. Since the wreck was finally located in 1985, many exploratory visits have been made to explore it and salvage items scattered beside it. I myself booked a place on such a descent, but had it cancelled when the Russians withdrew the submersible for work in the Baltic ten days before my trip down was scheduled.
In 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sailed, a writer named Morgan Robertson published a novella about the world’s biggest liner sailing the Atlantic and hitting an iceberg off Newfoundland on its maiden voyage with great loss of life. His ship was roughly the same size and displacement of the Titanic, and like her, had not enough lifeboats to take all of the passengers. There were other similarities, such as its speed and propulsion, and in the fictional version the ship was called “Titan.”
At first blush it looks uncanny, but the reality is less remarkable. People were building bigger and bigger ships, and the largest would obviously have to ply the lucrative Atlantic route. Robertson needed an accident to make his story, and had a choice of three realistic ones. It could have been a collision with another ship in the fog and dark, a catastrophic boiler explosion, perhaps, or maybe an iceberg. He chose the last of these.
The biggest ship has to have a name reflecting its size. It could have been Atlas, maybe, or Hercules, but he chose Titan. When America built its biggest missiles, it called one Atlas and the other Titan. What looked like precognition of events that were to happen fourteen years later is seen to be just intelligent anticipation. Robertson himself said that the similarities were explained by his extensive knowledge of shipbuilding and maritime trends.
The future is impossible to predict accurately; it wouldn’t be the future if it were. But it is possible to project trends forward. I find the best method is to look at what people want to do, and work out ways in which resources and human ingenuity can achieve those goals. The results are often surprising, but then so is human progress. The doom-mongers, from Malthus to Erlich and today’s environmental alarmists, are confounded by human determination and creativity. We see a problem and we solve it. That’s what people do.
The French appear to be rediscovering Colbert
France might have discovered an interesting truth here. That it is possible for taxation as a whole to be too high for the society to willingly carry.
France must slash taxes, fast.
That, according to the French prime minister, is the main message from an unprecedented three-month “great debate” in the wake of anti-government “yellow vest” protests.
Unveiling the findings from two million online contributions and 10,000 hours of town hall debates around the country, Edouard Philippe said on Monday that “huge exasperation” over the level of taxation was a prime concern.
"The debate clearly shows us in which direction we need to go: we need to lower taxes and lower them faster," Mr Philippe said in a speech in the Grand Palace in Paris.
Well, yes, when you’ve some hundreds of thousands repeatedly shouting in the streets over the level of taxation perhaps that’s true.
Mr Philippe said the findings suggested the Macron government had made the right diagnosis but had not been fast or “clear” enough in hacking at the taxation rate, which at 46.2 per cent of GDP is the highest in the world, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
As the OECD notes. Sweden taxes 44% of GDP, Iceland 38%, Switzerland 28%. It’s difficult to argue that any one of those three is worse run than France, suffers from a lack of government worse than France. They all are paying a smaller portion of everything for that government that they don’t lack.
Perhaps that great truth has been uncovered therefore. That taxation can be too high? The location of that discovery being interesting as it’s from the same source as the observation that sometimes the geese do indeed hiss about being plucked.