Technology will save us
A standard environmental insistence is that we can’t use the “technology will save us” argument. There is, according to the insisters, always something, some hard limit somewhere, which will prevent us from being able to innovate our way out of whatever problem it is we face. Therefore government control, bans, rationing, must be implemented.
We, as with Julian Simon, are entirely happy to agree that there really are hard limits. But they’re so far away as to be an irrelevance for human conduct. An example today:
A device that can produce electricity from sunlight while simultaneously purifying water has been produced by researchers, an invention they say could solve two problems in one stroke.
The researchers say the device is not only a source of green energy but also offers an alternative to current technologies for purifying water. These, they add, often consume large amounts of electricity and require infrastructure beyond the reach of many communities that lack basic access to safe drinking water – a situation thought to affect more than 780 million people worldwide.
This is not, as nothing is, an entire and complete solution to everything. That “as nothing is” being why planning doesn’t solve all our problems. Because what is needed is those small and partial solutions to parts of our total problem. Nibbling away at the edges rather than trying to leap for the one true root reform.
On the top is a horizontal commercial silicon solar cell and beneath this are several tiers through which saline, brackish or contaminated surface water is run. Waste heat from the solar cell warms the saline water passing immediately beneath it – the water evaporates, passes through a membrane and condenses to yield clean water, releasing heat in the process that warms the saline water in the tier below that – the process is then repeated for the next tier. The purified water flows out of the device and is collected.
There is nothing there that is conceptually difficult. There is indeed waste heat from solar cells. Why not use to evaporate and thereby purify water? The engineering might be a little tricky - attention would need to be paid to how the wastes are discharged and whether the piping will fur up etc - but it’s not as if we’ve got to spend another 50 years getting fusion right.
Every little step forward like this does keep telling us that technology will indeed save us. For the planet’s not exactly short of either sunlight or dirty water now, is it?
The bubble and the beltway
Although people like to point to the differences between the UK and the US, there are similarities that might derive in part from a common background of sharing a vibrant democracy and a tradition of common law derived from case law and the common sense of juries.
In most of continental Europe a ten percent shift in popular opinion might result in a junior agriculture minister being replaced by someone from a different coalition party. In the UK it normally sees a removal van pulling into Downing Street next day, and in the US it results in a new President and thousands of new jobs to staff the new administration.
Another recent similarity has been the separation of much of the political class from the lives and concerns of ordinary people in both the UK and the US. In Britain we talk of the Westminster Bubble, the artificial environment centred around Parliament and government and some of the media. They parrot politically correct speech to each other and share the fashionable concerns that most of the country do not see as relevant to their lives. The world of the Guardian, the BBC, and the senior ranks of the civil service, seem to regard those who do not share their world view as ignorant yokels who simply don’t understand what it best for them. Of course they were for remaining in the European Union, unconcerned about its lack of democratic accountability because they think that bureaucrats are better fitted to govern than those answerable to uninformed and vulgar popular opinion.
In the US a similar pattern of mindset is dubbed the beltway, a ring road surrounding Washington DC that roughly corresponds to the M25 that surrounds the British capital. Within the beltway is a hothouse of concerned opinion that does not resonate with ordinary Americans and their problems. Of course it is more than DC. It is the New York Times as well as the Washington Post, and it includes the coasties of California and the Northeast as well as the mainstream media channels whose bias is so pervasive that its broadcasters don’t even think of it as bias. They regard it simply as sensible received opinion, as do their British counterparts. And in both countries it includes most of those in the hothouse of an academe that no longer even sees the real world, let alone concerning itself with its problems.
When the British people voted to leave the EU, and the Americans elected Donald Trump, both bubble and beltway went into terminal shock, unable to believe the stupidity of their respective countrymen and women. Rather than accept those democratic decisions, part of the political élites of both countries have been trying to reverse them. In the UK they have been using every trick in the book to keep Britain in the European bureaucracy it voted out of. In the US they have tried to undermine the legitimacy of the election, claiming it was Russian interference that swayed it, and seeking to unseat the President by impeachment.
Some part of this divorce of the political class from ordinary people in Britain and America is down to the echo chamber effect, in which they talk to each other and regard the fashionable view as the sensible one, and have no respect at all for alternative opinions. Some part is down to the way that social media allows those who resent the political élite and its patronizing ways to realize that there are many others who share their view, and it emboldens them to express it at the ballot box.
There is one thought that probably terrifies both bubble and beltway. It is that this might not be some brief and unpleasant blip, as the monster of popular opinion temporarily rears its ugly head. It might be that this is the way things are going to be in the future. It might be the new reality. Oh dear. That might even be worse than when the postwar consensus was overthrown.
When Yeltsin's presidency saved Russia
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the liberation by their peoples of the communist puppet states of Eastern and Central Europe, Boris Yeltsin made a political comeback with his election on July 10th, 1991, to become President of the Russian Federation. He became the first elected leader in Russia's 1,000-year history. He had previously distanced himself from Gorbachev, thinking his reforms too slow and timid. He had become a hugely popular figure in 1987, when he'd been the first person ever to resign in protest from the Communist party's Politburo.
Yeltsin was the focus for a popular revolt in August 1991, when hardline Communists in the Kremlin who had opposed Gorbachev's reforms staged a coup to restore the USSR. Gorbachev was arrested on his Crimea holiday, and the hardliners set about crushing resistance in Moscow. Yeltsin stepped out of the White House, Russia's Parliament building, and climbed up onto a tank surrounded by crowds who had gathered to protect the Parliament from the crackdown. Yeltsin declared the coup illegal, and called on troops not to accept its authority. Unable to rely on the loyalty of the military, the coup folded, and Gorbachev was released to return to Moscow.
Yeltsin dismantled the Communist Party and negotiated independence for the Soviet republics, which now became independent states. Once free to implement reforms in Russia, Yeltsin ended most price controls, privatized many state operations, legalized private property, and oversaw the establishment of a stock exchange and private banks. He allowed greater press freedom, and public criticism, and opened Russia to Western popular culture.
His rule was not regarded as successful, however, in that the country descended into chaos as the Communist system lost its authority before there were viable institutions to take its place. There was corruption, lawlessness, a failing economy, reduced industrial output and falling life expectancy. Yeltsin himself was a heavy drinker, sometimes appearing in public seemingly inebriated. He was in poor health, having a quintuple heart bypass soon after his 1996 re-election as President. Russia defaulted on its treasury bills when the rouble collapsed in 1998, and on the final day of the 20th Century, he resigned and handed over to Vladimir Putin.
His experiences illustrate that when a bad regime has to be replaced, as that of Saddam Hussein did in Iraq, those doing that transition need to keep a firm grip on power until the changeover has embedded itself. The Western powers did this successfully in postwar Germany, but failed to do so in post-invasion Iraq. Many idealistic Westerners fondly supposed that after Arab Spring had overthrown their dictatorships, the Arab countries would become benign liberal democracies. It did not happen. Both democracy and the liberalism it is there to protect need institutions such as respect for the rule of law and private property, and some history of living with them.
As for Yeltsin, that moment when he stepped up onto a tank was his defining moment, and earned forgiveness for everything he did afterwards. Those who say that history is only made by impersonal and great forces, might take stock of the occasions on which a single individual has taken a stand that has changed events.
Markets are nice, sure, but what do people really want?
A certain amount of crowing here:
Backlash against self-service checkouts bring revival for traditional markets, as report shows huge boom
Isn’t that great? Humans, as social animals, like to be social?
The latest research shows that markets are soaring in popularity all around Britain as people turn their backs on soulless High Street shops and try to connect with their community.
How excellent.
Market traders across the UK enjoyed a collective turnover of £3.1 billion last year and sales have soared £200 million on average each year since 2012, according to trade body Mission for Markets.
That’s around 6% growth in that past year then.
New data from the Office for National Statistics shows online sales rose by 15.3 per cent over the past year and now make up a record high of 18.2 per cent of all retail sales.
Oh, it appears that the even more soulsuckingly impersonal online shopping is preferred to those communal market experiences. That original contention, that we’re all crying out for more human interaction, might not be true then.
Reality being that of course some people do and many people don’t. This being a problem solved only by markets in the wider sense. Allow those retailing to experiment, see who turns up where and let them get on with it. It is only by leaving be and seeing that we can find out what it is that the consumer actually desires. Laissez faire isn’t the answer to every thing but it most certainly is to some.
Of the £50 million invested by market operators in 2017-18, £37 million came from seven local authorities investing in their traditional retail markets
Ah, sorry, we misunderstood. Rather than hoping to inform us of these exciting retail trends Mission for Markets is trying to cook up figures to justify more of our, taxpayer, money being spent on building their business infrastructure. To which the correct answer is, if there’s such a clamour for that market experience then presumably there’s the private capital willing to invest to profit from it? After all, that’s how the competition, the supermarkets and the internet, are paid for, isn’t it?
One of conservatism's founding fathers
Edmund Burke died on July 9th, 1797, having spent nearly three decades in Parliament, and laying down in his writings and speeches what became the philosophical foundations of conservatism.
Part of that philosophy emerged in his different responses to two different revolutions. When the American colonists began to rebel against what they saw as an irksome rule by a distant Britain, Burke was generally supportive of them because they were seeking to preserve the traditional rights of Englishmen against new encroachments. “They augur misgovernment at a distance,” he reported, “and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”
Burke made speeches in Parliament opposing new taxes on the colonists and urging restraint and compromise in dealing with them. The British constitution had evolved naturally over centuries, and incorporated accumulated wisdom built up over many generations. Burke thought the Americans were trying to hold on to that constitution and the rights enshrined within it. He regarded them as brothers and sisters united by blood and heritage, and hoped that if they secured their independence, they would opt to work in close union with their mother country.
When the French Revolution took place, Burke’s initial sympathy vanished within weeks into outright hostility. This was not a conservative revolution staged to retain traditional values, but an outright rejection of those values in the name of abstract ideas about what their rights ought to be. He thought the French had discarded “the yoke of law and morals.” He contrasted the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, which he described as “an adjustment” of the constitution, with the French destruction not only of their constitution, but the religion and the culture that bound them to each other as a society. They had instead descended into anarchy, he said.
His “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) was an instant best-seller, going through several editions in its first year alone. There was at the time a general optimism in England about what the French might achieve by shaking off their feudal past, and Burke alienated many of his Whig friends, including Charles James Fox, by publishing so extreme a condemnation. People in general were optimistic about France, but Burke was not, and events proved him right.
He became the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro-French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox. Burke's former friendship with Fox never recovered.
A part of Burke's case was that society stores up in its customs and traditions the accumulated wisdom of previous generations, the practices that have been found to work and to be conducive to a fulfilled life. Of course change happens, but it should take place naturally and organically, by evolution, not revolution.
Hayek echoed this in his account of the three sources of human values. Those we acquire biologically and those we think up in our minds are trivial compared to those we receive culturally from society. Burke put it succinctly:
“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.”
Rather than mocking custom and discarding it as outdated, Burke thought we should try to discern what it is about customary ways that have caused them to be retained.
“Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.”
The philosophical basis of Conservatism is not simply wanting to keep things the same. It is wanting change to be spontaneous: evolution not revolution, and based on the tried and tested, rather than on the novel. This is one reason why it has lasted.
Free trade has taken far too long to come to Africa
But while it’s taken far too long it does seem to be getting closer:
Africa has built the world’s largest free trade area with 1.3 billion customers, heralded as a chance to begin a new area of prosperity.
The agreement, signed by 54 African states and creating a bloc encompassing economies worth $2.5 trillion, took almost 20 years to negotiate. It is hoped that the African Continental Free Trade Area will give its members the benefits of economies of scale and cheaper imports, which would mean more affordable products. The countries have lacked many of these typical advantages of free trade.
There is that view out there - a particularly silly one in our opinion - that free trade is just the manner by which those of us in the rich countries continue to pillage and colonialise those in the poor. Obviously, we don’t agree. But even if you do want to maintain trade barriers between rich and poor on some spurious grounds of infant industry protection this is still an advance, this free trade area.
The entire continent of Africa is, in economic terms, about the size of the UK. Togo around and about the economic size of Swansea. Swaziland of Wolverhampton. Nigeria or South Africa perhaps equal to London.
Whatever we do about trade beyond the borders of this sceptered isle we all know that we’d be immeasurably poorer if we had trade barriers between the conurbations within it. Even if nothing else just that economies of scale argument - no one British town is large enough to support an entire supply chain of all the necessaries for an advanced industrial society. It would be absurd for Bath, Bristol, Gloucester and Swindon all to have their own steel mills, fertiliser and tyre factories. And yet that’s the sort of economy that a non-internal free trade Africa does have.
It may have taken too long to arrive and implementation is bound to be patchy for a time. But it’s still a good thing - Africans will be richer for it which is, after all, rather the point of having an African economy in the first place.
Low point of the Dow
On July 8th, 1932, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit its lowest level of the Great Depression, closing at 41.22. Share prices started to fall on September 4th of 1929, but the big drop was the stock market crash on “Black Tuesday,” October 29th 1929. It began in the US, but it spread elsewhere and lasted until the late 1930s in some places, the most severe economic downturn the industrialized world had ever known.
International trade dropped by 50 percent, and it cut personal incomes, tax receipts, prices and profits. Unemployment hit 25 percent in the US, and 33 percent in some other countries. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread downturn of the century. Many people lost their entire savings and investments. Construction and heavy industry came to a standstill in some places, while farm communities saw crop prices fall by 60 percent. Many farms ceased to be viable and were abandoned or repossessed.
The Keynesian explanation is that widespread loss of confidence cut consumption and investment. With prices falling, it paid to hold money that could buy more later. It suggests that people avoided the markets for fear of losing more. Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz took a more monetarist approach, arguing that the Great Depression was caused by the shrinking of the money supply. One third of banks went under, leading to a 35 percent monetary contraction that triggered the Great Depression. They said the Federal Reserve Bank should have lowered interest rates, increased the monetary base, and injected liquidity into the banking system. Instead, they did the opposite, turning what would have been a normal recession into the Great Depression.
One reason the Fed found it difficult to act was the presence of the gold standard. The Federal Reserve Act required 40 percent gold backing of Federal Reserve notes issued, and they had almost hit the allowable limit of credit they could back with gold. In April 1933 a Presidential Order outlawed the private ownership of gold bullion, coins and certificates, reducing the pressure of Federal Reserve gold, but by then it was too late.
Humanity does sometimes learn from its mistakes, however, and its response to the Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 was the opposite of their response to the 1929 crash. This time interest rates were slashed, Quantitative Easing flooded money into the market, and liquidity was made available to banks. There was no longer a gold standard to stop this. The result was that there was no 10-year Great Depression. World GDP dropped by about 15 percent from 1929-1932. By contrast, it dropped by less than 1 percent between 2008-2009.
Ben Bernanke, then Chair of the Federal Reserve, put it succinctly when he said:
“I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression, you're right. We did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.”
The Financial Crisis and its recession produced a period of low or briefly negative growth, but it was on nothing like the scale of the stagnation and the misery it caused in the Great Depression. At some times we learn lessons, and this was one of them.
Getting World Population Day wrong again
That there could be, at some point, too many people is a logically simple proposition. At some point between now and the surface of the planet having someone on every square metre we’d have more than enough of us. The important point being to work out what it is that means we won’t reach that point. Apart from the obvious one that we’d all have starved long before that happens.
Global population of eight billion and growing: we can’t go on like this
Well, actually, we can. Given the onward march of agricultural productivity we’ve no particular problem with feeding the extra couple of billion mouths we expect to arrive. And if we were to bring up the average of global agriculture to something even vaguely approaching current best practice we’d be bathing in food, not just eating it. It is important though to note that this is wrong:
Our growing population crisis therefore needs to be tackled there as a priority: by boosting women’s rights, by making contraception easily available and by improving education for all.
Women’s rights should of course be boosted - human rights are human rights and all humans should have them. So too should education be better for all but that’s a result of fertility rates dropping, not a cause of it. Sure, there’s a very strong correlation between female education and lower fertility. But it’s when women aren’t spending their entire adult lives either pregnant or nursing that education makes economic sense. And humans do tend to do things which make economic sense, not do those things which don’t.
So too with contraception. Of course those who wish to limit their fertility should have the ability to do so. And if circumstance means they’ve not the ability to do so we can and perhaps should help. But it’s not the availability of contraception which reduces fertility.
The usual estimation is that about 10% of any fall in the fertility rate comes from that general availability of effective contraception. The other 90% comes from the fall in desired fertility. Which seems logical enough. Fertility rates did first start falling long before the invention of cheap, modern, contraceptives. Plus, obviously enough, people must desire to have fewer children before they’ll employ a technology which produces fewer children.
What is it that reduces desired fertility? The joint effects of the intertwined increasing urbanisation and increasing richness of society. Richer people have fewer children. Urban populations have fewer than rural. As places become richer they become more urban.
So, what do we need to do in Africa to reduce future population growth? Aid Africa in becoming rich. All else is tinkering around the edges.
Think on it just for a moment. No rich society has, absent immigration and its second generation effects*, a fertility rate even approaching replacement levels. Thus if you’d like other places to have fertility rates like ours you should be striving to make them as rich as us.
*Immigrants tend to bring the fertility rates of their source culture with them, this dying out to be replaced by the rates of the host population somewhere between the second and third generation.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
The science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, was born on July 7th 1907. Together with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, he was one of the best-known SF writers who were the “big three” of the golden age of hard SF writing that featured accurate and realistic future science. They lifted SF out of its space opera phase of death rays and tentacled aliens, and into works that explored how scientific progress might shape future societies and future attitudes. He was the only one of the three I never met in person, but I am told he was as boyish and optimistic as Asimov and Clarke undoubtedly were.
Heinlein explored social and political ideas, bringing to bear his own libertarian views and his emphasis on self-reliant individuals who were competent enough to stand up to and to deal with whatever fate and circumstance might throw at them.
His libertarian masterpiece, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” (1966), deals with the rebellion of the lunar colony against the oppressive rules imposed from Earth. The freewheeling and freedom-loving lunar settlers parallel the early American colonists in their own struggle for independence. Its central thread is the close friendship between the human and a lunar computer that has had so many subsystems tacked on that it has achieved consciousness, and with that a personality of its own.
The flag the rebellious colonists adapt features a cannon, with the letters TANSTAAFL superimposed, standing for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” It was a phrase Milton Friedman later adopted. The book regularly features in lists by libertarian and neoliberal thinkers of their recommended top ten reads for would-be acolytes. It helps that it is superbly written and action-packed in and among the thoughtful insights that run through it.
Heinlein at one stage wrote a series of SF books for young adults, with teenage protagonists facing up to and overcoming the challenges of space with the resources of character and self-reliance that his adult heroes exhibited. His “Space Cadet” (1948), has teenagers training in space, and manning the monopoly of destructive weaponry that the world has entrusted to their keeping. Again, resourcefulness and confidence abound as his cadets face their fears and limitations and surmount them. A minor point of interest is that its opening chapter features mobile phones some 45 years before their actual appearance.
In a letter Heinlein described himself. "As for libertarian, I've been one all my life, a radical one. You might use the term 'philosophical anarchist' or 'autarchist' about me, but 'libertarian' is easier to define and fits well enough."
He was fairly radical in his vision of future sexual mores, with group sex, multiple partner marriages, and even incest, making appearances. It was all treated in a laid-back way as nothing remarkable. The same can be said of his imagined future political and social arrangements. He had been ‘liberal’ (i.e. left) in his youthful views, but came to hold that motivated individuals treating each other decently made for a surer societal base than collective action.
Elon Musk says a part of his own inspiration was sparked by Heinlein's books, and of the many honours awarded Heinlein both before and after his death, the one he might have liked best was that the International Astronomical Union named the Heinlein crater on Mars in his honour in 1994.
When the capitalists are trying to make a quid or two you should recognise that you've won
Pride is here and there’s the usual whining that the capitalists - the corporates - are having too much to do with it. Which is entirely the wrong way to be thinking about matters:
He also voiced concerns that the onerous costs for road closures, barricades and parking suspensions imposed on Pride had forced it to rely heavily on corporate sponsorship. There was a danger of “pinkwashing”, he said. “Some corporates seem to see Pride as a marketing opportunity to target LGBT+ customers.”
That’s what victory looks like Peter.
Everything from High Street shops, supermarkets and banks are changing their logos, adding new window displays and selling special products.
But is this "rainbow washing"? In other words - is it jumping on a bandwagon without making any meaningful change?
Some LGBT campaigners are asking what brands actually do to support their community.
Do to support? They’re trying to make money out of it. Which is indeed that victory.
It’s taken too long, certainly, it’s not entirely complete as yet. But that the capitalists, the corporates, are seeing the love that dare not speak its name as just another opportunity to make a quid or two means that it has all been normalised.
As it should be, obviously. That very insistence upon viewing as just another set of potential consumers means being viewed exactly equally to everyone else. Which is rather what the point of the entire centuries long exercise was, isn’t it?