Einstein, and the importance of testing

On May 29th, 1919, exactly 100 years ago, an historic experiment took place. Einstein had published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, and an opportunity arose during the solar eclipse of May 29th in 1919 to test his hypothesis. If light were indeed bent by gravity, then a couple of stars in the constellation of Taurus would be visible during the eclipse, not in the position that Newtonian physics suggested, but displaced by gravity. Two expeditions set out to test this, one by Dyson and Eddington to Principe island, the other by Crommelin and Davidson to Brazil. Both found the stars were indeed observed where Einstein’s theory predicted.

The young Karl Popper, aged 17 at the time, was powerfully influenced by this. His Vienna was abuzz with the radical ideas of Marx, Adler and Einstein. Adler had introduced the notion of inferiority complexes in childhood. Popper came across a case that didn’t seem to fit, and took it to Adler. He reported that Adler had no difficulty in explaining it in terms of his theory, even though he knew nothing about the person in question.

“How can you be so sure?” he asked Adler. The great man replied, “I know it from my thousand-fold experience.” To which young Popper replied, “And now I suppose it’s a thousand and one,” suddenly realizing that if all cases could be fitted into the theory, none could ever test it. It was the same with Marx’s theories - they could explain everything that happened, no matter what outcome prevailed. Einstein was different. His theory lived dangerously. If the two stars had not appeared in their predicted positions, his theory would have had to be discarded. Popper realized then that theories had to be capable of being tested, and rejected if observations went against them.

It was an insight that led to his “Logic of Scientific Discovery,” rejecting induction in favour of what he called “conjecture and refutation,” meaning that creative proposals had to be tested against the world of our observation. It lies at the core of neoliberalism. Marxism and socialism interpret the world, but neoliberalism seeks to change it by applying techniques that work in practice. Its record has far surpassed that of its rivals. It has created the wealth that has lifted men and women out of degrading subsistence toil and given them opportunities for advancement undreamed of by previous generations. It has lowered death rates, increased lifespan, conquered diseases, and generally improved the condition of humankind.

The importance is testing. If observed reality goes against a practice, it has to be modified or rejected. Socialism, by contrast, rejects the evidence if observation shows that it fails to achieve its objectives. If it does not bring the promised equality and prosperity, its advocates claim that “it wasn’t really socialism.” Thus socialism can never be disproved, and cannot, therefore, contain any insights of value about the real world, the one that we live in.

On that day 100 years ago, we learned something important, that theories have to be tested against the observed world. Depending on how they perform, they have to be modified or rejected, and only the useful ones are retained. This is why neoliberalism has improved the world, and why socialism has not.

The problem with communal ownership - community flowers in Brixton

That private property is theft is a mantra well known to us all. That there has to be a management system for property is even more obvious. That private property, even if we accept the first contention, is the best solution to the requirement is something all too many don’t wish to acknowledge. Yet it is true, as this about community flowers in Brixton tells us:

A flower row has erupted on the streets of Brixton after a community grower accused their neighbours of stealing blooms planted by a community group.

The problem? There’s no enforcement of property rights going on.

The original note poster responded, explaining that the lupins and geraniums were planted as part of a local scheme called Our Streets, in which members of the local community in south London "adopt" a tree to water and plant flowers under.

They added that the flowers have now been dug up and "moved elsewhere".

The neighbour who first replied seemed intent on having the last word, and penned: "Helpful to know that the flowers were part of a community project. However, if that was the case, it was very misleading to refer to them as 'my' flowers.

One amusement is that this is being done with Post-It notes rather than on Twitter. However, the underlying problem is a common one. For we’re in Tragedy of the Commons territory here.

There has to be some management system. Can be private ownership, a capitalist solution. Can be regulatory, a socialist one. As Hardin pointed out, which will work best depends upon the specifics of the item and situation. Elinor Ostrom took us further in our understanding, community self-regulation can indeed work. But the emphasis there is upon “can”.

Ostrom started from the sensible observation that there are commons which do survive without regulatory or private solutions. So, how do they work then? The obvious corollary to which is that those that don’t so work have already disappeared. Thus we cannot take Ostrom’s work as an insistence that community self-regulation will always work - only that sometimes it does.

As, sometimes it doesn’t. Ostrom’s own finding being that when we start to talk of groups bigger than a few thousand, perhaps 3,000 people at the top end, then the community bonds aren’t going to be strong enough for them to be binding on behaviour. The ability to free ride without significant cost from that community will be too great.

How many walk the garden streets of Brixton? There is our problem, isn’t it?

We’re entirely pragmatists around here. We’ve no great ideological attachment to specific forms of property management. We agree that at times the regulatory, governmental, solution is the one that’s going to work. So also that the vast majority of the time it’s going to be private ownership. Which is dependent upon the details. We even agree that this communal and undefined system will indeed work. But, from observation, only in a community small enough for it to do so. Which isn’t, sadly for the romantics about human nature, a useful description of most communities in the modern world.

Who was wearing the trousers

On May 28th, 1923, the US Attorney General declared that it was legal for women to wear trousers anywhere. This was by no means the end of the matter, though it was a significant landmark. The prohibition of trousers for women was enforced in most European countries and US states not only by social custom, but by laws that punished transgressors.

Several women defied this ban, not only for freedom of movement, but for disguise, especially for runaway slave women, and in some cases to earn much more than women could earn. Several prominent women activists were arrested and sentenced for wearing clothing that was deemed appropriate only for men. Amelia Bloomer popularized the loose-fitting garment that bears her name, and bloomers caught on as women took up cycling, tennis and horse-riding. Demure ladies might ride horseback side-saddle in skirts, but most found riding-breeches more practical.

Two world wars that saw women doing men’s jobs while men were away in combat helped speed along more relaxed attitudes to modes of dress, and female pilots often preferred trousers. Many states still passed and enforced laws against cross dressing in the 20th Century, however, despite the 1923 declaration by the Attorney General. Female senators were banned from wearing trousers on the senate floor until 1993, and it was only in 2013 that a Paris by-law that required women to seek city permission before wearing trousers was revoked - it had previously allowed them only for cycling or horse-riding.

Remaining restrictions in modern developed countries are now more or less confined to institutions imposing rules, rather than legal bans. Some schools insist on a “skirts only” code for girls, and some businesses such as airlines have required them for female flight attendants. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police dropped its opposition in 2012, British Airways did so in 2016, and Virgin Atlantic began permitting trousers for its female staff earlier this year.

Some religious orders ban women from wearing men’s clothing or otherwise dressing “immodestly.” It was long banned by Christian churches, which quoted Deuteronomy 22:5 saying, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.”  And by coincidence it was on May 28th, 1431, that Joan of Arc was charged with “relapsing into heresy” by donning male clothing (i.e. military attire) again. She was convicted and burned at the stake.

Trousers on women have been symbolic of the slow transition from ancient to modern, from patriarchy to a more gender-equal society. The march into liberty took longer for women than it did for men, but the changes in social attitudes that permitted greater choice about deportment and lifestyle have been a liberating influence for both.

We like Roger Bootle, we do, but we think he's being unduly optimistic here

The thought that perhaps the next Prime Minister might have a sound knowledge of economics is a comforting one. But we fear that this isn’t in fact the problem. Rather, it’s not the knowledge, it’s the incentives:

Now that the search for a new Prime Minister is under way, after the disasters of the last couple of years it is worth reflecting on how important it is that Mrs May’s replacement has a sound grasp of economics.

History gives a mixed message. Mrs May herself was not burdened with an understanding of economics, nor much interest in it.

The thought that someone who knows their economics will be better is that comforting one. But then Karl Marx knew his economics - he lifted an awful lot from Adam Smith after all - and other than John McDonnell few think he’d have made a good Prime Minister.

The problem, we fear, being not the knowledge of the subject but the incentives faced by an elected politician. In order to keep the job it is necessary to win the next election. That means that the useful time horizon is never more than 4 and a bit years, on average is around two. Given that either fiscal or monetary policy take a couple of years to make a difference this is problematic. It’s obviously worse when we move to microeconomic matters where misrule might take a decade or two to turn up.

It’s easy enough to gain electoral favour by announcing some measure of spending here or there. The effects of the collection to fund the spending turning up only after that period of time.

That is, a system whereby our money is spent by those who must regularly appeal to the mob produces the wrong incentives for those rulers.

No, this is not to say that democracy has thus failed - an undemocratic regime faces exactly the same problems of panem et circences as we can observe around the world. The answer is to structure the system so that we move from St Milton’s fourth method - spending other peoples’ money on other people - to the first, we spend our own money on ourselves. That’s actually useful knowledge of the heart of economics and we might indeed hope that the next PM grasps that point.

Habeas corpus and the protection of liberties

340 years ago on this day, May 27th, 1679, the Habeas Corpus Act passed and became part of the laws of England. Designed to safeguard against illegal detention, it requires a detained person to be produced before court in order to ascertain if the detention is lawful. Witnesses will be required to establish this before the detention can be continued. Meaning “you have the body,” it names a person and requires the authorities to bring them before a court, thereby ruling out their ability to continue to imprison them in secrecy.

Along with Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus is regarded as one of the landmarks along the road that led to the establishment of English liberties and the limits of untrammelled state power against them. These were rights that limited the power of the power of the state, then expressed in the hands of the monarch, to encroach arbitrarily on the liberties of the subject. These rights were not granted graciously by authority, nor were they natural rights deduced from something inherent in people’s nature, nor even were they derived from some ancient social contract alleged to have been made in primitive times. Instead they had evolved from the traditional ways in which tribes and societies had recognized that leaders had obligations to their fellows and followers, as well as authority over them.

Spiderman’s uncle famously said, “With great power comes great responsibility,” implying that those with power have a moral obligation to exercise its use with discretion and restraint. This is not the English tradition. It relies not on moral restraint, but on limits set by laws. Those in power are restrained, not because they are virtuous, but because they come under laws that protect every one of those subject to that power from its arbitrary use.

In Robert Bolt’s “A Man for all Seasons,” Thomas More is asked if he would give the devil himself the protection of English laws, and replies that he would.

“This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

It expresses the view that it is laws and institutions that protect our liberties, not because we choose wise and virtuous leaders, like Plato’s philosopher kings, but because we restrain them. These rights have been codified over time in acts like Habeas Corpus, but they were not established by those acts, just confirmed by them. When the Founding Fathers in America objected to arbitrary acts imposed from a distant colonial ruler, they wanted to preserve their established rights, not to seek new ones. One of their number, George Mason, stated that "We claim nothing but the liberty and privileges of Englishmen in the same degree, as if we had continued among our brethren in Great Britain.”

Habeas Corpus was an important landmark in the honourable tradition of confirming established liberties in law, and in bringing authorities under legal obligation to respect them.

If only Will Hutton understood what he's talking about

The Will Hutton solution to British Steel is obvious of course. Remain, government subsidy, sunlit uplands. This being the Will Hutton solution to everything.

However, such Olympian solutions always do suffer from those little technical problems, don’t they? That being why government subsidy directed by newspaper columnists is a less than wondrous solution. Here Hutton tells us that British Steel will be -= or could be, should be - saved by decarbonised steel:

What’s more, the company’s vital reinvention – around making decarbonised steel, say – and a general revived manufacturing industry requires a purposed industrial strategy on a much larger scale than what we have.

What’s being missed there is that we know how to make decarbonised steel. It’s easy. And we do a lot of it:

Blast furnaces such as the one at Scunthorpe make steel from scratch and, once shut down, are more or less impossible to replace. Greener, less energy-intensive electric arc furnaces, of which the UK has four, can make steel by recycling scrap.

Run your arc furnace off renewables created electricity and you’ve decarbonised steel production. It’s also nice and cheap to do so. Which is why we do do so. Decarbonising a blast furnace isn’t really an option for we’re looking for the chemical reaction between the carbon in the coal and the iron ore as well as the energy produced by the combustion.

Which is precisely British Steel’s problem. It runs a blast furnace. The old technology we need very much less of these days. Precisely because the hippies have won, we recycle much more. And, pace Will Hutton’s plans, we do produce decarbonised steel. It’s just that to do so we don’t need a blast furnace.

The entire problem over Scunthorpe is that we’ve already done what Hutton demands. Which is probably all we need to know about the wisdom and perspicacity of Willy Hutton’s demands, isn’t it?

Venezuela Campaign: Cartel of the Suns

When a criminal cartel takes hold of a state like Venezuela, it poses a difficult challenge for the international community.

The main focus of Maduro’s regime is personal enrichment for its leading members – mainly through crime. Outright drug smuggling is a huge source of revenue for the regime. The cabal of ministers and generals who control it are known as the ‘Cartel of the Suns’, and there is much evidence pointing to top regime leaders’ involvement in the narcotics trade.

Diosdado Cabello, head of the puppet legislature known as the National Constituent Assembly and Tareck El-Aissami, the Minister of Industries, have been sanctioned for their drug trafficking activities. This has been confirmed in leaked Venezuelan intelligence files. Members of Maduro’s own family are currently in prison in the US for cocaine smuggling.

Venezuela is the main source of drugs smuggled into the US and Europe. The quantity of drug flights from Venezuela has been expanding rapidly in recent years, growing from around one flight a week in 2017 to daily flights in 2018, mainly using around 50 runways in the north-western state of Zulia. The value of the cocaine that reaches American streets from Venezuela is around $39 billion. The Maduro regime receives billions for its part in these operations

Another way the regime is siphoning off money into its own pockets is through misuse of a subsidized food programme, known by its Spanish initials ‘CLAP’. CLAP is run by the Venezuelan military through a network of companies owned or controlled by Alex Saab. Saab was appointed to this role by Maduro himself. The US has just announced that it is preparing sanctions and criminal charges against those involved in the programme. Saab himself was indicted this month in Colombia on money-laundering and fraud charges. Prosecutors now say he is also being investigated for laundering money for Colombian drug cartels.

How has this programme been used for corruption? Venezuelan officials sign overpriced, no-bid contracts with suppliers abroad, who send low quality food to Venezuela. Some of it is diverted to the black market. The regime then pays suppliers through a state-owned bank, with overpayments distributed to various bank accounts and into other investments controlled by the conspirators, who have amassed vast quantities of real estate, yachts and airplanes.

Illegal mining in co-operation with Colombian guerrilla groups is another critical means for regime members to cash in. Causing huge environmental destruction, gold is illegally extracted from the Amazonian basin by armed groups colluding with the Venezuelan military. Much of this is laundered through Suriname, a small country ruled by Desi Bouterse, a convicted cocaine trafficker who gained office with financial support from Chavez. The illegal gold is badged as coming from a facility in Suriname called KSMH, a fictional site whose entire purpose is to act as a cover for Venezuela’s strip-mined gold.

Although the Venezuelan oil industry has largely been destroyed by Chavista policies, stealing from the state oil company PDVSA through kickbacks, currency manipulation and other means still continues. Just last year in the US, 12 individuals were convicted of stealing $1.2 billion from PDVSA. Chavistas often cooperate with ‘ideological allies’ in other states in order to facilitate such corruption. One of the original cross-border theft schemes was that of falsified oil sales, started in Chavez’s time. For example, PDVSA owns 60 percent of Alba Petroleos in El Salvador. This subsidiary received virtually no oil from PDVSA between 2010 and 2017 but recorded an income of $1.2 billion over that period. The 51% owned Nicaraguan subsidiary Albanisa did get some oil from PDVSA, but still received funds far in excess of their value, constituting a theft of $4-6 billion.

Both subsidiaries, in cahoots with local Chavista-aligned politicians, then set up and lent money to dozens of front companies – from food production to airlines – which didn’t actually produce anything. Their entire operation consisted of moving money to various havens in Belize, the Cayman Islands and Russia. The debt was then declared unrecoverable.

Recognising that the Maduro regime is actually a criminal cartel has serious policy consequences. Firstly, coming to an agreement with their leaders in which they go scot-free is unlikely to be fruitful, since they will always fear being tracked down and arrested.  Better to convince their underlings to switch sides. Secondly, a robust approach to dealing with the criminals makes more sense. For example, the closure of Venezuelan airspace to stop drug flights is an approach that would cut off another source of regime funds. When it is recognised that we are dealing with a criminal regime, what needs to be done should become clearer.

Jeremy Corbyn at 70

Jeremy Corbyn is 70 years old today. He was born on May 26th, 1949, and has spent his life in politics, rather than in employment in business, industry, services or the professions. His education culminated in two E-grade passes as A-level, and although he began a course in Trade Union Studies at North London Polytechnic, he left after a year without gaining a degree. He worked as a Trade Union organizer before being elected as MP for Islington North in 1983.

Always on the far left, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1966 aged 16, and became its vice-president. He opposed Britain's liberation of the Falkland Islands in 1982, describing it as a "Tory plot." Also in 1982, he opposed the Labour Party's expulsion of the Trotskyist and entryist group, Militant Tendency. He favours the UK leaving NATO, and "would prefer Britain to be a republic" rather than a monarchy. He supports a "united Ireland" and has appeared alongside IRA terrorists, one of whom he invited into Parliament just weeks after the Brighton bombing.

He is a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Group, and has shared platforms with those who call for Israel and its population to be eliminated. He was at a ceremony to commemorate the Palestinian murderers of Israeli athletes at Munich, reportedly laying a wreath. He hosted a meeting at which Israel's actions in Gaza were likened to the Nazi holocaust. He contributed a forward to a book that claimed Jewish control of finance enabled them to influence world events, and has himself called for an investigation into "Israeli" influence in UK politics. He describes the terrorist organizations Hezbollah and Hamas as "his friends."

He now supports renationalization of leading industries, including energy, and advocates raising the youth minimum wage to the adult level. He has vast spending plans, including the abolition of student fees and student debt, to be financed by raising taxes, increasing National Insurance, and by inflationary increases in the money supply. He lauds what has been achieved in Venezuela.

His career and his attitudes have given rise to a popular joke:

A Communist, a terrorist supporter, and an anti-Semite walked into a bar. The bartender said, "Hi, Jeremy. What can I get you?”

He himself may be a joke, but one in very questionable taste, and he is by no means popular.

Why we shouldn't believe a word of Philip Alston's UN report on poverty in the UK

Philip Alston is the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty. He’s done a report on poverty in the UK. A report that we simply shouldn’t believe a word of. Including any use of then words “and “, “or” and the like. For it actually is pretty terrible. Not that the headlines discussing it point this out but you know, any stick to beat with.

The report is here.

The bottom line is that much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos. A booming economy, high employment and a budget surplus have not reversed austerity, a policy pursued more as an ideological than an economic agenda.

A budget surplus? ONS doesn’t think so. Even The Guardian doesn’t think so. Nor does Spreadsheet Phil:

As a share of economic output, the deficit fell to 1.2 percent, its lowest since the 12 months to March 2002 and down from nearly 10 percent during the depths of the global banking crisis a decade ago, the Office for National Statistics said.

Following publication of the figures, Hammond said the government looked on track to meet its goal of reducing overall government debt levels as a percentage of the economy by 2021 and keeping the core budget deficit below 2 percent.

A deficit of 2% of GDP is not a surplus. And this is the level of accuracy throughout the report. You know, not accurate at all.

The United Kingdom, the world’s fifth largest economy, is a leading centre of global finance, boasts a “fundamentally strong” economy and currently enjoys record low levels of unemployment. But despite such prosperity, one fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty. Four million of those are more than 50 per cent below the poverty line3

Footnote 3 is this:

Social Metrics Commission, A New Measure of Poverty for the UK, September 2018, p. 97

Which leads to this. Which is an entirely new method of measuring poverty, one entirely made up by a self-appointed group of possibly worthies. You know, maybe not a useful method of measuring poverty and most certainly not an official one.

and 1.5 million experienced destitution in 2017, unable to afford basic essentials.4

Destitution, eh? Footnote 4 is this

Suzanne Fitzpatrick and others, Destitution in the UK 2018, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, pp. 2–3.

Which leads here.

Which describes destitution as being:

Definition of destitution People are destitute if: a) They have lacked two or more of these six essentials over the past month, because they cannot afford them:  shelter (have slept rough for one or more nights)  food (have had fewer than two meals a day for two or more days)  heating their home (have been unable to do this for five or more days)  lighting their home (have been unable to do this for five or more days)  clothing and footwear (appropriate for weather)  basic toiletries (soap, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrush). 3 To check that the reason for going without these essential items was that they could not afford them we: asked respondents if this was the reason; checked that their income was below the standard relative poverty line (ie 60% of median income 'after housing costs' for the relevant household size); and checked that they had no or negligible savings. OR b. Their income is so extremely low that they are unable to purchase these essentials for themselves. We set the relevant weekly 'extremely low' income thresholds by averaging: the actual spend on these essentials of the poorest 10% of the population; 80% of the JRF 'Minimum Income Standard' costs for equivalent items; and the amount that the general public thought was required for a relevant sized household to avoid destitution. The resulting (after housing costs) weekly amounts were £70 for a single adult living alone, £90 for a lone parent with one child, £100 for a couple, and £140 for a couple with two children. We also checked that households had insufficient savings to make up for the income shortfall.

The problem here is that they’re measuring incomes according to something higher than that normal relative poverty measure of 60% of median household income. Instead, they’re using their own higher estimate, the one that leads to the living wage numbers. Apologies, we got bored checking footnotes at this stage, the point being we think well made.

And yes, it gets worse than that. If we plug that £70 a week number into the global income distribution then we find that this apparently abject destitution is in the top 25% of all such global incomes. Note that this is the post housing paid for income, while that global number is a pre-housing one. Adding in a modest £100 a week for housing costs puts that destitution level up into the top 16 or 17% of global incomes. And that’s before we even consider the free at the point of use health care, education and so on that the British state provides.

Britain is a place where some have more than others, most certainly. That’s known as inequality. Britain doesn’t actually have any - at all - of what we globally call poverty and it most certainly doesn’t have any destitution. As actually checking the footnotes of Philip Alston’s report shows. Which is why we shouldn’t believe anything the report says.

A good date for space travel

By coincidence, May 25th has been a significant year for space travel in several years. On that date in 1945, Arthur C Clarke (later Sir Arthur) began circulating to his friends a proposal he later published in Practical Wireless. It suggested that TV signals could be beamed down to Earth from satellites in geostationary orbits, 26,000 miles high, so they would match the rotation of the Earth and appear to remain at a fixed point in the sky. The idea later became the basis for Intelsat and its successors.

It was the date on which President Kennedy announced in 1961 America’s goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before this decade is out.” NASA achieved that goal five months ahead of the target date. It was a remarkable and ambitious target to set, since Alan Shephard had flown his suborbital flight as America’s first man in space only 20 days previously.

It was on May 25th, 1977, that cinema goers had their minds blown by the premiere of "Star Wars." The movie quickened the pulse and inculcated a new eagerness for space among young and not-so-young people worldwide. It started the franchise that became a cult, filling the screens with adventures of space travel.

And it was also on May 25th, in 2012, that Elon Musk’s SpaceX docked its Dragon capsule with the International Space Station. It was the first private sector vehicle to achieve such an accomplishment, and opened up a new era of private participation in space exploration. Indeed, of the four space anniversaries that took place on May 25th, only President Kennedy’s announcement concerned a public sector event.

Space Travel is far from the "utter bilge" it was characterized as by the Astronomer Royal, Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley, just before Sputnik I was launched. It has proved its importance economically, militarily, scientifically and psychologically since then. The new element recently has been the incorporation of private sector initiatives into developing and testing new techniques, into experimenting with novel and cheaper ways of achieving space goals.

While much public money is spent on space exploration, the increasing commercial use of space means that entrepreneurs will invest resources and effort into gaining increased value from it, value that customers on Earth will happily pay for if it adds value to their businesses and enables them to provide better services to their customers.