Mirabile dictu - Polly Toynbee at least asks the right question

Polly Toynbee does manage to ask the correct question here. Although as is her wont she manages not to grasp the underlying point. Concerning Universal Credit and the taper rate - that combination of national insurance, income tax, benefits withdrawals - that affect welfare recipients as their incomes rise:

For every extra pound they earn, 63p is deducted: what if the rich paid 63% in income tax?

If we tried to charge the rich that then we’d gain less in tax revenue. For that is well over the Laffer Curve peak, as is well known. But what is less well known is that we’ve no evidence whatsoever to tell us that this peak applies only to the rich. We can hypothesise that the confluence of the income and substitution effects will have a different shape to the curve for the poor but we’ve no real empirical evidence that there is anything different.

That is, yes, that taper rate is too high. We’d all very much prefer it to be lower. Which can be done in a number of ways, all of them politically difficult. We can lower the tax rate upon those working poor. Our own favoured policy of a significantly higher - one that has more than doubled as a result of our suggestions already - personal allowance would help. So would a significant raise, as we’ve suggested, in the national insurance threshold. Benefits could be lower, more measly. Or they could be paid ever further up the income scale, thus reducing the rate they are withdrawn as incomes rise.

We, obviously, prefer the idea of just taking less tax off the poor in the first place. Others will prefer other solutions. But we do agree that that 63% rate is too high, making it lower is a good idea and something we should do.

So, yes, good question Polly. But then to fail the larger question. What was the rate under the old system? We know because Budget speeches used to contain a specific litany on this point. We would be told the number of benefits claimants who faced such taper rates - benefits withdrawal and tax impositions - of over 60%, over 80% and over 100%. Roughly, and from memory, the numbers would be several millions, several hundreds of thousands and several tens of thousands.

That is, Universal Credit may well not be perfect. Little that government ever does is going to be. But it is better than the system that went before. And it is so by design. One of the very points of the new system is to have that just the one calculation with a lower taper rate so that we reduce the disincentives to work to gain higher income.

Sure, 63% is too high. But it’s better than over 100%, isn’t it. As with Maggie’s first budget with Howe - 60% is too high as a top income tax rate but it’s better than 83%.

The man who saved billions

On May 17th 1749, the man called “the father of immunology” was born. Edward Jenner’s work is reckoned by some to have saved more lives than the work of anyone else. He served a 7-year apprenticeship from 14 to 21 with a Gloucester surgeon, before going into medicine himself. He gained a degree from St Andrews University, one of my own almae matres.

Smallpox was the big killer in his day, killing about 10 percent of the population, with the number as high as 20 percent in towns and cities where people were concentrated and infection could spread more easily. People had experimented with variolation, rubbing material from infected people into small cuts, and even with injecting small quantities of smallpox itself, but each of these methods risked spreading the infection or risking the life of the patient.

Jenner’s innovation was to use cowpox, similar to smallpox. Noting that milkmaids rarely contracted smallpox, but did acquire mild sores from the far less virulent cowpox, Jenner used some of the material from these sores to inject into human patients. When later exposed to smallpox, they did not contract it, showing they had acquired immunity to it through cowpox.

Jenner’s procedure spread rapidly. Napoleon had all his troops vaccinated, and although at war with Britain, awarded Jenner a medal and granted the release of two British prisoners at his request. He called Jenner “one of the greatest benefactors of mankind."

The fight against man’s ancient enemy proceeded apace, until in 1979 the World Health Organization was able to declare that smallpox was now extinct, save for a handful of samples kept in laboratories under total security. A recent UK poll saw Jenner included among the 100 greatest Britons of all time.

His methods were extended to other diseases, including the first polio vaccine developed in the 1950s by Jonas Salk. Poliomyelitis is on the edge of extinction, and would have been globally eradicated by 2018 were it not for Islamists telling villagers in Pakistan and Afghanistan that vaccination is a plot by Westerners to poison them. Concerted efforts will kill it soon, though.

Attention has focussed on malaria, a disease that has killed more people than have died in all of the wars in history. This is more difficult because the disease also resides in a non-human host. While long-lasting bed-nets impregnated with insecticide are greatly reducing its incidence, we may have to eradicate the anopheles mosquito to eliminate the plasmodium it carries.

After that will come tuberculosis, another disease that has killed billions through the ages, including George Orwell. Already there are effective vaccines to protect young infants, but after polio and malaria, it will probably be the next to come under concerted attack to prevent it infecting adults. 

I have often used the following dictum to predict the future: “If humanity wants something badly enough, and if they are prepared to commit the necessary resources, they will get it, whatever it is.” Humans will not be overwhelmed and destroyed by their problems; they will solve their problems. Jenner led the way in the conquest of diseases, spending his life in the pursuit of a worthwhile aim. When we do conquer the other diseases, it will be because he pointed the way.

A Scholarly Scandal

The ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia, for academics, is too futile, for economists, too dry and for politicians, too prudish. Nonetheless, it reveals a rot at the heart of academia that sullies the knowledge foundation on which future studies, indeed, societies are built.

It has long been criticised, increasingly so, with the rise of the popstar intellectual Jordan Peterson and 'grievance studies’ Kween Helen Pluckrose on their objections to the ideological bias of university Humanities and Arts faculties.

Annually, 2 million new papers are published, however, this isn’t indicative of increased readership. Dishearteningly, half of the published research papers are never read, 90% never cited and of those that are peer reviews; half do not stand up to replication. While ‘scandal’ is a bit of a stretch (it’s more, a strain on wonk morale) such consequences have far-reaching impacts on the integrity of academic research.

The most obvious argument against this is that when academics are pressured to publish when they have nothing to say, there is a tendency for the literature to become bloated with subpar research and outright false or unscientific claims.

This was terrifically demonstrated (similar to the 1996 Sokal Affair) by the Grievance Studies Affair where three authors created bogus academic papers on topics about anything from dog rape to feminist Mein Kampf to expose the problem. The results were hilarious:

“ [The] papers claim that dog parks are rape-condoning spaces and that by observing the reactions of dog-owners to “unwanted humping” among dogs, we can determine that a human rape culture is deeply ingrained in men who could benefit from being trained like dogs. They [the papers] ponder why heterosexual men rarely self-penetrate their anuses with sex-toys and advocate doing so in order to become less transphobic and more feminist.”

Seven were accepted, and a further seven were in various stages of the submission process when the hoax project was discovered. *Wonk morale dies a little more*

Another problem is the publishing industry itself. The impact factor of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. While frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, the popularity of a paper does not necessarily correlate with intellectual rigour. Increasingly, top universities are giving their academics ‘productivity targets’, which prescribe the number of publications and the impact level of the journal they must publish them in.

A prolific publishing culture means academics have little control over the publishing process. Publishers are the gatekeepers, they control when pieces are read, reviewed and published. Despite this lack of control, publishing has a direct impact on an academic's chances at promotions, grants, scholarships, and funding.

Replication has been referred to as "the cornerstone of science". A recent consequence of this issue and evidence for the decrease in quality of research is also the replication crisis, described by some at the ‘Tragedy of the Academic Commons’. Thus, as well as an absence of a structural incentive to peer review papers, when it does occur, half of the publications’ results are not replicable, even in disciplines such as Psychology, where it is easier to control variables, rather than Political Science, for example.

Another symptom is that it has resulted in less time for peer-review, further decreasing the quality of academic literature. Economists in top-ranked departments now publish very few papers in top field journals. There is a marked decline in such publications between the early 1990s and early 2000s. The share of papers authored by chaperoned senior authors grew from 16% to 22% between 1990 and 2012, while new senior authors dropped from 39% to 31%.

Although, this is not the result of the tragedy of pure rentier capitalism as some who object to paying for anything would have you believe. It is a problem of high impact journals having the power to make “chaperoned” scientists learn to frame their results in a way that is attractive to high-impact journals, to navigate the review process, and to work with the editor to give them the paper they are looking for.

This results in a plethora of problems. Among these, plagiarism, salami slicing (where the same research is split into many fragments and published) and newbies simply not having this knowledge or clout even if their research merits more credit than the established names.

Nonetheless, this does not convince everyone. The best argument in favour is perhaps that it keeps the nerds on their toes; constant pressure to publish means they don’t get ‘lazy’. However, the idea that the decline of a Darwinistic ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia would decrease both the amount and quality of research is ludicrous. These aren’t just any nerds, these are nerds on steroids who are fiercely passionate and proficient in their specialisms.

Research-oriented universities may attempt to manage the unhealthy aspects of the publish or perish practices, but their administrators often argue that some pressure to produce cutting-edge research is necessary to motivate scholars early in their careers to focus on research and balance this with the other responsibilities. This is, again not a fair case. Rewards for exceptional teaching rarely match rewards for exceptional research thus the pressure to publish detracts from the time and effort professors can devote to teaching undergraduates. Stringing together words when one has nothing to say results in spouts of utter drivel. Just take a look at the recent PMQs.

This issue has been published about extensively; see here, here and here, for example. One would have thought the problem would have perished by now, or at least lessened, but I’m not entirely sure this is the case. The solutions are two-fold: reduce the threat of perishing and change how we publish.

While the former solution is easier to articulate, it is more difficult to implement— requiring a change in attitudes. But one could start with getting rid of university ‘productivity targets’ and replacing them with targets consisting of peer review (to weed out ‘the charlatans, the misguided, and the fools’ (as astutely articulate in Gad-el-Hak, 2004, p. 61) and relating to the quality of their work which would naturally involve further peer review.

The latter could involve anonymous publishing, also helping to change attitudes to facts that don’t align with everyone’s feelings while allowing for genuinely critical peer reviews. Additionally, though the tendencies of academics to highly value ‘Science and Nature’ papers may still exist, the introduction of impact-neutral journals that evaluate science based only on rigour, rather than perceived "impact" would help.

Some question the validity of this perspective on the current state of academic research and argue that the new ‘get visible or vanish’ culture has heralded the end of the publish or perish dogma. But the Kim Kardashian Index which measures the discrepancy between a scientist's social media profile and publication record is telling; an academic that is ’visible’ is not always the author of the highest quality work.

In 2013, teacher’s pet Peter Higgs, the namesake of the Higgs boson, said "it's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964 … I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough." While the maintenance of academic integrity isn’t the most seductive of topics, it is one that affects the information we use to make decisions on a daily basis. The hopeful thing is, however - it can be solved (as with most things) with grassroots change. Let’s start by cutting academics more slack on the number of papers produced so they aren’t all about dog rape and feminist Mein Kampf.

Who will factcheck the factcheckers?

This isn’t, contrary to appearances, a complaint about the European Union. It is, rather, an exemplar of the basic problem with any system which attempts to have an official declaration of what is the truth:

“The whole fake news as a concept started spreading at the time of the US presidential election and we thought, well, now is the time.”

It is set to be a busy few weeks. Hedin’s team of three full-time reporters and five student researchers has been bolstered in numbers ahead of the European parliament elections on 26 May and the Danish parliament elections on 5 June.

Denmark’s intelligence services have warned it is “very likely” Russia will seek to manipulate the former, infecting the latter, through a wave of eurosceptic, anti-immigrant content.

The European commission has summoned up visions of an enemy exploiting a “weapon of mass disinformation – a WMD for the modern age” in a clash between populist nationalism out to destroy the EU and defenders of liberal democracy.

Brussels announced in April 2018 that it would support “an independent European network of factcheckers” who would “establish common working methods, exchange best practices, and work to achieve the broadest possible coverage of factual corrections across the EU”.

Participants, the commission said, would be selected from EU members of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), an offshoot of the US Poynter Institute, a centre for media studies based in Florida.

A year on – and after an EU investment of €1m (£867,000) – eight factchecking organisations in six EU countries have been approved as members of this Brussels-backed collaborative platform, known as the Social Observatory for Disinformation and Social Media Analysis (Soma). Two are IFCN signatories. The network is incomplete, and still not up and running with days to go before Europeans have their vote.

Hand up everyone who thinks that this network of factcheckers will examine press releases, official announcements from, briefing papers put out by, the European Union, European Parliament or European Commission for their veracity?

To take just the one example, a claim that the European Union has caused peace in Europe since the last major unpleasantness. A not unusual claim now, is it? Despite the first shooting war in Europe - in Yugoslavia - since that major unpleasantness being coincident with the creation of the European Union in 1992.

Do note that this really isn’t a point about the EU itself. It’s about the very idea of there being an official definition, enforcement even - as the public sphere is being told, it is being vociferously insisted even that they must, to banish fake news from public discussions - of what is the truth. For that truth will become whatever it is that the people defining it desire, the system will be limited to examining whatever points and subjects those paying for it desire to be examined.

This is going to be true whether it’s D notices to protect national security, the European network to preserve European values or the Soviets making sure none hear about the riches of capitalism.

For who will factcheck the facktcheckers as they dance to the tune of the piper paying them?

Mao’s Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, later abbreviated to just “The Cultural Revolution,” was launched by Mao Zedong with a letter issued on May 16th, 1966. It launched a ruthless drive against what were alleged to be remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. Mao claimed that some of his rivals within the Communist Party were bourgeois revisionists who must be removed through violent class struggle.

Young Chinese Communists formed militant Red Guard groups across China to bully and intimidate the alleged capitalist infiltrators, and were joined by the army, workers, and party leaders. Intellectuals such as teachers were forced into the countryside to become farm workers and re-educate themselves into a proletarian mentality. China fell victim to a mass hysteria, bordering on a religion, with angry mobs waving Mao’s “little red book” into the faces of anyone remotely educated or middle class.

It will never be known how many died in the ensuing chaos. The authors of “Mao, the Unknown Story” put it as 3 million, whereas the Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates the death toll as between 5 and 10 million. It certainly set China back economically, socially and politically. After it was all over, perhaps ten years later after Mao’s death in 1976, the Party declared in 1981 that the Cultural Revolution was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic".

Deng Xiaoping was among the victims. He was forced to lie prostrate with his arms over his head and to confess to his “crimes” of “unorthodox thinking.” His son, Deng Pufang, was thrown out of an upstairs window by Red Guards and crippled for life. After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping outmanoeuvred the late chairman's chosen successor Hua Guofeng and the Gang of Four led by Mao’s widow, and became Paramount Leader. He never became head of state, head of government or General Secretary, but he became undisputed ruler of China. He turned China capitalist, combining socialist words with free enterprise practice under the banner "socialism with Chinese characteristics".

China since then has prospered, as have its peoples. The abandonment of collective farming and the replacement of socialist economics with free enterprise and free markets has led to spectacular and continued growth, lifting more than a billion people from subsistence and starvation. Deng will be remembered as one of the positive figures of the 20th Century, long after Mao is simply remembered along with Stalin and Hitler as a power-crazed mass murderer. The Cultural Revolution was, like the Great Leap Forward, a disaster for China, as ideology was imposed at the expense of all sense and reason. But Deng Xiaoping, the great pragmatist, had the last laugh, and it is his imprint rather than that of Mao, that is stamped upon modern China.

Details are important - what's the difference between a Postcode Area, District, Sector and Unit Postcode?

Age UK wants to inform us all that there are care deserts out there. Areas of the country in which the elderly and frail are - presumably - left to wander the streets, or fester uncared for in their crumbling homes, as a result of there not being any dedicated facilities to take care of those elderly. This could be true although we’d probably expect to have greater visibility of such a problem if it really is wandering the streets.

Which is where detail becomes important:

A study commissioned by Age UK found that large swathes of the country were “care deserts” lacking residential care or nursing homes.

Caroline Abrahams, the charity’s director, said the research showed how “chaotic and broken” the market for care had become after years of underfunding. “If the awful situation set out in this report does not persuade our government to finally get a grip and take action, I don’t know what will,” Abrahams said.

The study, conducted by Incisive Health, an independent health consultancy firm, found that more than one in four postcode areas in England – 2,200 out of around 7,500 – had no residential care provision. Two-thirds (5,300) had no nursing homes, for people with more acute problems.

That could be distinctly worrying. A postcode area is a pretty big area. It’s a term of art - jargon if you prefer - and there are only 124 of them for the entire UK. Population isn’t equally distributed between them but assume they are, that’s a unit of half a million people.

A quarter of the half million population units have no old age care homes? Serious stuff indeed. Except we’re given some numbers there.

Please do note that we here are ignoring the difference between England and the UK. It does matter but doesn’t change our conclusion.

The BBC gives us the same story.

To given an idea of the scale of this, the research looked at how many local areas did not have any residential care or nursing home beds.

It found out of the 7,500 postcode districts in England, about 2,200 had no residential care beds and 4,600 had no nursing ones with the north-east, south-west and east of England particularly badly hit.

Postcode District? Ah, that’s a different thing. There are 3,000 and a bit of those for the UK. A unit of perhaps 20,000 people. Less worrying but we might think that still a problem.

Except, of course, we’ve been given that 7,500 number. Which means that they must be talking about Postcode Sectors. There are 12,000 odd for the UK, 7,500 for England sounds about right. This is a unit of about 5,000 people. The claim actually is that 25% of population areas containing 5,000 people or so don’t have a dedicated care home in that area. Is this a problem?

Hmm. Well. The population is 18% 65 years or older. So, we’re talking about 25% of areas that have a possible population in need of 1,000 people.

We can also examine another way. There are perhaps 500,000 people in care homes in the UK. A bit over the top to allow for those who perhaps should be but can’t because they live in one of these deserts and are thus wandering lonely. That’s 0.8% of the population. Tie that into our average population of a postcode sector and we’ve an actual likely population of 40 people requiring a care home in any one postcode sector.

Now we can actually evaluate this complaint. Which is that we’ve not got an equal geographic spread of something we provide to 40 people in our measurement unit of population. Or, even, given there are 22,000 care homes for the UK, they’re not equally spread over all of the 12,000 geographic units we’re using.

Is this actually a problem? No, obviously, it’s not, is it? It’s whingeing. Why, in urban areas Granny might actually end up living hundreds of yards away!

It’s not even true that every postcode sector in the country has a butcher or baker whose benevolence provides us with our dinner, nor even that most essential of civilisation, a pub. Quite why such a small unit of geography just must have an old age care home is unknown to anyone other than Age UK.

Two iconic firsts

Two American icons saw their first appearance on May 15th. The first of these was in 1928, when Mickey Mouse made his first appearance in the silent movie “Plane Crazy,” inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s epic transatlantic solo flight made a year earlier. On the same date 12 years later, in 1940, the world’s first McDonald’s restaurant opened in San Bernardino, California.

Mickey came almost by chance. Walt Disney’s animator suggested other animals, but Walt remembered his childhood pet mouse. He was going to call him Mortimer, but his wife thought Mickey sounded more fun and youthful. Walt wanted to portray “a little fellow trying to do the best he could.” Psychologists tell us that because Mickey is drawn with all circles, it makes him appeal to us subconsciously as comfortable, with no sharp edges or angles. He is regarded as a symbol of American optimism and fun, constantly going down, but always getting up again.

His name is used derogatively to mean amateurish and unprofessional. Margaret Thatcher called the European Parliament a "Mickey Mouse parliament,” but it totally lacks Mickey’s sense of optimism and fun.

Twelve years after Mickey’s debut, Dick and Mac McDonald, having failed in the movie business, went into operating drive-in restaurants. They subsequently streamlined their operations by introducing their “Speedee Service System featuring” 15 cent hamburgers. When Ray Kroc became their franchise agent, the modern McDonalds was born. Today, the company has over 36,000 restaurants in over 100 nations.

Although sometimes criticized as junk food, a McDonald’s burger packs some of the most nutritious, low cost food ever available. Stephen Dubner, co-author of “Freakonomics,” described it as providing sustaining food at low prices, a real boon for those eating on a budget. Their double cheeseburger provides 390 calories, 23 grams of protein – half a daily serving – seven per cent of daily fibre, 19 grams of fat and 20 per cent of daily calcium, all for between 65p and £1.30, depending on which country you buy it in. Indeed, The Economist uses it as an international comparison of living costs in different countries.

Both the friendly round-eared mouse and the golden arches are brand images recognized worldwide. Both are successful and enduring international corporations, but in remaining so, both are bucking a trend which sees churn and change in the roster of market leaders. Paul Ormerod points out in “Why Most Things Fail” that most companies do not last. A look at the top 100 today shows many names unknown a generation ago, and the absence of the big names that once dominated. Sears, Kodak, J C Penney and K-Mart have been replaced in the roster by the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

This is as it should be. Although some critics suggest that big firms hold their position by manipulating captive consumers, the reality is that they either adapt to what those consumers want and need, or they die. Congratulations are due to Disney and McDonalds for successfully meeting those customer wants. And congratulations, too, to Morgan Schondelmeier of the ASI, who happens to share their May 15th birthday.

We don't have much hope for this IFS Deaton Inequality Review to be honest

That Angus Deaton has the Nobel and we don’t - we wouldn’t gain one in aggregate let alone individually - is true. It is still true that the mouse may look at the King, that even Blind Homer nods and all that. We’re thus not entirely sure that this new IFS Deaton review on inequality is going to be of much use, In fact we think it will end up being entirely misleading.

Any such report will depend upon the numbers that go into it. Has inequality increased? If so which kind? What are the exact numbers being used, where did they come from, how were they composed? And if they start from this sort of point then the report is indeed going to be wildly misleading:

And there is much evidence to support their belief. For example, not only have median wages been stagnating in the US for the last 50 years,…

Well, no, they haven’t. Nominal wages have obviously risen. To get to real wages we must subtract inflation. Here we generally use the consumer price index. We know that the CPI for the US has been overstated over the decades. By exactly how much is still argued but anywhere from 0.5 to 2% per annum is considered within the reasonable range. That makes real wages from 128% to 269% of what they were 50 years ago. We might describe only a 28% rise as stagnation over that time but a near threefold rise isn’t.

Wages not being the number we should be using anyway. Compensation - what’s the total amount gained by going off to work? That has risen strongly - as it must have done for productivity has and the labour share hasn’t fallen until very recently. The is ably described by Paul Krugman, here.

Rising inequality - or falling, whatever - isn’t even well described by wages or compensation anyway. It’s the post tax, post benefits situation that matters. The American welfare state - yes, we know the claim that it doesn’t exist but they do spend some $trillion a year on it - has indeed grown over this time.

And then even that’s not the important number. We want, if we want to know anything about inequality that matters, to look at inequality of consumption, not income. Consumption being determined not by cash income alone, we have to add the consumer surplus to get that. That explosion of free stuff from Big Tech in recent decades hugely, vastly, changing that relationship between GDP and the consumer surplus.

After all, if we’re studying inequality we should note that access to the Google search engine is estimated - realistically too - to have a value of $18,000 a year, email some $8,000, Facebook some $1,000 and you, me, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates - well, not Gates as he has to use Bing - and the homeless guy using the library computer all have equal access at exactly the same price, $nothing.

If our starting point, our input into our analysis, is that US median wages have been static this past five decades then we’re simply not going to end up with an accurate portrayal of current inequality. After all, garbage in, garbage out isn’t restricted to computing.

We’re willing to be pleasantly surprised by the IFS Deaton examination of inequality. But we don’t think we will be. We expect the inputs to their musings to be the incorrect yet currently fashionable and that’s really not a good way to be doing science.

People marched for beer

The momentous day was May 14th, 1932. New York Mayor, Jimmy Walker, organized a march through his city by people who wanted beer. Originally planned as a “Beer for Taxation” march, it soon transformed itself into a “We Want Beer” parade, with over 100,000 taking part, and with banners bearing that slogan.

The point was that New Yorkers were as fed up with Prohibition as was most of the rest of the US. Without revenues from alcohol duty, New York had been forced by lack of funding to cut back its police and fire department budgets. Gangsters had taken over the production, import, distribution and sale of alcohol. There were estimated to be over 400 bootlegging-related murders in New York every year, and corruption was rife among the police and judiciary.

There was also rampant unemployment as the Great Depression gripped America. The Mayor’s case was straightforward. If Prohibition were ended, it would cut crime, raise revenue in taxes, and create tens of thousands of jobs. It was compelling. He might have added that it would stop ordinary Americans who wanted a drink becoming criminals at odds with the police and the law.

The marchers chanted “Beer for Prosperity,” but they also chanted the question, “Who wants beer?” and shouted in response, “We Do!” It had an effect on events because it took place shortly before the Democratic and Republican Conventions for the upcoming Presidential election. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, running for the Democrats, took due note, and let it be understood that he would not oppose the repeal of Prohibition. This was brave because the “drys” still commanded huge voting strength across the country.

Roosevelt took office the following year, and December saw ratification of the 21st Constitutional Amendment, repealing the 18th that had banned alcohol. Prohibition was ended, and the marchers celebrated with the beer they had demanded. The demonstration saw a successful outcome because it didn’t inconvenience people and because it was supported by authority. Ordinary Americans were fed up with gangster violence, graft and prosecutions, and preferred instead the combination of jobs, better public services, and of course beer. The authorities listened because they wanted it, too.

Tesco boss - tax them over there to benefit me and mine

It’s necessary to call this out for what it is. This isn’t a careful and considered attempt to work through the problems that assail us. It’s a naked insistence that them over there must be taxed to benefit me and mine:

Online retailers should pay new sales tax to support struggling British high street shops, Tesco CEO says

We might even think this an admission that Tesco’s online adventures aren’t going well given the demand to inflict extra taxation upon the sector.

Internet giants such as Amazon should pay a new sales tax to support shops on the struggling British high street, the boss of Tesco has said.

Dave Lewis, who has been the CEO of Tesco since 2014, warned that the current business rates system is “unsustainable” as many shops are facing crippling bills on their properties while battling competition from online rivals who pay much less.

Mr Lewis called for these high street stores to get a 20 per cent reduction on their business rates, to be paid for with a 2 per cent levy on online retail sales.

There is that technical problem with this. Business rates are incident upon landlords, a sales tax upon online would be incident upon consumers. A reasonable assumption therefore would be that the boss of Tesco is looking at how his business is a substantial landlord and not a substantial consumer.

Pfft. Treat the suggestion with the contempt it deserves therefore.

However, there’s a bigger problem underneath this. Why should we help out struggling high streets?

Sure, at one stage of technological development that was the best manner of gaining the retail services we desire access to. But technology changes - as does fashion - and the optimal answer to one generation isn’t so for another. All this internet stuff now means that the high street is no longer optimal. Or at least isn’t for that 18% or so of retail sales which now take place online.

We’ve today also an example of how fashion changes:

You can barely throw a stick without hitting a man sporting an immaculately groomed beard.

The trend for male facial hair has seen barbers become the fastest growing shops on the British high street, bucking the downturn that has seen fashion stores close at a rate of knots.

Barber shops were the fastest growing retail category in 2018, with 813 units opening.

It was a similar story the previous year, when 624 opened and analysts say that numbers are already outstripping growth again this year.

If the high street was still full of those electronics retailers who have fallen victim to internet sales we’d not have the room to cater to this change in human desires, would we?

The basic truth about economies being that what it is possible to do changes as technology does, what we want done changes too as fashion does. The trick is to enable the move from the old to the new to happen with the least friction possible so as to continue to gain that additional value creation. You know, that more GDP which is economic growth.

This obviously meaning don’t tax the new in order to subsidise the old thereby preventing that change and that growth. Dave Lewis’ demand for an online sales tax is both grossly self-interested and also wrong. So better if we don’t do it, eh?