London’s burning, London’s burning

London has seen many momentous events in its chequered history, but perhaps none more so that the Great Fire that began at a baker’s on Pudding Lane on September 2nd, 1666. It spread rapidly and consumed most of the City of London (the central parts of London). In its four days it burned an estimated seven out of every eight homes in London’s central district, together with 87 parish churches and St Paul’s Cathedral.

London’s wooden homes and thatched roofs were tinder to the flames, and the riverside stores of pitch, tar, sugar, alcohol and turpentine fed their hunger. The battle to contain it was helped when the strong winds abated, and the fire-breaks created by the Tower of London garrison’s use of gunpowder stopped it spreading further East.

Recorded casualties were light, with some accounts recording 6 deaths, others 8, though many more poor people may have been burned or suffocated, with their deaths unrecorded. This is insignificant compared to the 100,000 deaths suffered a year earlier in the Great Plague of 1665, perhaps up to a fifth or even a quarter of London’s population. Some historians suggest that the fire extinguished the Bubonic Plague by destroying the unsanitary housing and killing most of the rats and fleas that spread it.

Scapegoats were needed, and when Robert Hubert, a simple-minded French watch-maker confessed to staring the fire on the instructions of the Pope, he was convicted and hanged, despite concerns that he lacked the mental competence to plead. It later emerged that he had been at sea when the fire started and hadn’t reached London until two days afterwards.

London changed in the aftermath, with new houses built upon wider, less crowded streets that gave more access. Christopher Wren built 50 new churches to replace those lost, including, most famously, St Paul’s Cathedral. Close to Pudding Lane, where the fire started, a 200-foot Doric column was erected, now called simply, “The Monument,” which gives its name to the nearby tube station.

Fires and other calamities bring death and destruction, but they bring in their wake the opportunities to rebuild and renew. The Nazi blitz destroyed much of the slum housing of Britain’s city centres, but cleared the space to replace it with something better. Coventry Cathedral was destroyed, but the new one designed by Sir Basil Spence stands resplendently in its place. Much of Notre Dame was destroyed earlier this year, but the determination is there to build it anew.

Humans learn from their misfortunes, and after the setbacks and the suffering they construct new and more durable systems to replace what was lost. We do this after physical calamities such as the Great Fire, we do it after disastrous epidemics and natural disasters, and we do it after social and economic collapses such as the Great Depression. We are resilient, and we rise up from misfortunes. We learn, we replace and we improve.

As Will Hutton says there is merit in a written constitution

Will Hutton wishes to blame everything - including, obviously, Brexit - on Britain’s lack of a written constitution. We’ll agree that there can be merits to having it all written down so that the plain man can understand it. By analogy, the Protestant view of the Bible, in the vernacular and anyone can read it, rather than the Catholic where only the elite may do so. Requiring, obviously the intervention of that priesthood to interpret it:

It is only unwritten, uncodified understandings that protect the body politic from regressing to government with minimal checks, balances and accountability. They in turn depend upon a political class that, whatever its differences, accepts common rules of the game, especially making sure that any recourse to direct democracy by referendum is firmly subordinated to rule by parliament.

Quite so Mr. Hutton, quite so. When it’s all written down in plain and simple language then we are not in some miasma of a fog of having to fight the establishment to get something done. The direct word of the people can at least be heard.

It is but one of the many constitutional earthquakes triggered by Brexit whose aftershocks will be felt for decades. Even the character of the referendum itself is testament to our lack of a constitution......What is happening is the culmination of a rightwing coup that has deployed the weakness of Britain’s constitution to drive through toxic, divisive change, the manipulated will of the people trumping representative democracy. .....The citizenry had become disillusioned with the parliamentary process, so that direct democracy seemed more democratic......Last week demonstrated that instead the constitution is fundamental. .....After last week’s events, which enraged the bravest and best in the Tory party, Corbyn has a chance to build on the emerging coalition for legislation and make his offer again, but copper-bottoming it constitutionally as an alternative to Johnson. As interim prime minister, he will exercise no prerogative power, introduce no new policies, wholly respect every constitutional protocol and commit to hold a fully-fledged constitutional convention after the election.

Well, yes, and take that as you wish. But there’s a logical failure in this argument.

EU law beats British, that’s what the European Court of Justice is for. Thus our treaty with, or perhaps creating, the EU is part of our constitution. And it contains this. Article 50. Which opens with:

Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

In so far as we’ve got bits of the constitution written down that’s part of it. Thus what Hutton is really complaining about, that the people, damn them, have decided to exercise their rights under that very written constitution he blames events upon the lack of.

Take Brexit either way you wish but Hutton’s wish for a written constitution in full is one of those things where he might not like getting what he wishes for. For writing down all the rules means that those who don’t like them have both an explanation of them and the target as to how to change them. For example, if Article 50 didn’t exist how could we have had a referendum in the first place?

We agree that plain and simple explanations of the societal rules are important. We just wish to point out that having such might not chime with the desires of those who benefit from our current lack of them.

The match of the century

Billed as “The Match of the Century,” it wasn’t cricket or football, and certainly wasn’t baseball. It was chess, playing for the World Championship in a gripping Cold War encounter that pitted a Soviet grandmaster against an American one. The final, deciding, 21st game of the contest took place on September 1st, 1972.

The match was held at Reykjavik in Iceland in the full glare of international publicity. The results of the games were covered in news bulletins around the world, with chess experts dissecting and explaining each day’s play. Chess had never received so much excited interest, and perhaps never would again. It was a clash of ideologies and personalities as well as of grandmasters.

Bobby Fischer, the American, was volatile, eccentric and unorthodox. Boris Spassky, the Russian world champion defending his title, was noted for his calm strategic play livened by a fighting spirit. To qualify in the candidates’ tournament, Fischer had demolished two grandmasters with 6-0 scores, something never seen before.

Fischer lost the first game, playing a Nimzo-Indian defence, but handling the middle game clumsily. He seemed unsettled. He didn’t show at all for Game 2, and lost by default. At 2-0 down, it seemed he must lose the match, and considered leaving, but a phone call from Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, persuaded him to stay. He came out fighting, and beat Spassky in Game 3 with a Modern Bernoni defence. After a Game 4 draw, Fischer easily won Game 5 with a Nimzo-Indian defence and Game 6 with a Queen’s Gambit Declined Tartakower defence.

At this point the Spassky team suggested that their man was being disoriented by gases planted in his chair, and demanded it be taken apart and examined. Nothing was found except a dead fly, but when one of them sarcastically suggested a post mortem on it, he was recalled to Moscow. Meanwhile Fischer stormed ahead, winning Games 8 and 10, and drawing Games 7 and 9.

Fischer was an aggressive player and never liked agreed draws. Indeed, he’d publicly accused the Soviets of rigging international chess rankings by agreeing easy draws with each other. He’d criticized the match format for awarding victory to the first player to score 12.5, but given the rules, he now played to them, drawing Games 14-20 to capitalize on his lead. After the first game, Spassky only won one more, Game 11, plus the forfeit Game 2.

When Fischer played Alekhine’s Defence and won in Game 13, it sent ripples worldwide. It was so unorthodox that virtually nobody played it. I usually did, though, revelling in its unorthodoxy as a defence against a king’s pawn opening. When Spassky resigned without resuming play in Game 21, Fischer reached 12.5 and won the match to become world champion. Spassky had 3 wins, including the forfeit, Fischer had 7, and there were 11 draws.

Fischer became a celebrity, even featuring on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Endorsement offers totalling over $5m poured in, all of which he declined. His win demoralized the Soviets. A later world champion, Gary Kasparov, was to comment:

“I think the reason you look at these matches probably was not so much the chess factor but to the political element, which was inevitable because in the Soviet Union, chess was treated by the Soviet authorities as a very important and useful ideological tool to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Soviet communist regime over the decadent West. That’s why the Spassky defeat [...] was treated by people on both sides of the Atlantic as a crushing moment in the midst of the Cold War.”

Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman called Fischer's victory "the story of a lonely hero who overcomes an entire empire".

Fischer became a recluse, and never defended his title. When he and Spassky staged a rematch in Yugoslavia in 1992, the US government pursued him for breaking sanctions and tried to have him extradited from Japan, but a grateful Iceland awarded him citizenship in gratitude for “putting Iceland on the map,” and he spent the rest of his life peacefully living there.

Fischer had mental issues, true, but he was a genius, one who gave the world an unprecedented thrill as he won a significant Cold War victory.

How Brexit will affect the health of the nation

The BMJ treats us to a warning that Brexit will leave us all victim to the scourges of infectious disease:

“The government’s claims that it is prepared for no deal are implausible and at best [its preparations] might mitigate some of the worst consequences,” they say in a paper published in the British Medical Journal.

They say no deal would be likely to increase the difficulties for people already facing poverty, poor housing options and underfunded local services.

In the event of a post-Brexit recession, they say, “likely consequences include rises in suicides, alcohol-related deaths and some communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis and HIV, especially among vulnerable groups”.

We admit that we think this unlikely a priori. Moving ultimate governance from Brussels to Westminster doesn’t sound like it would have such effects at least. So, what is it that might cause all of this?

Loss of societal norms, such as trust in government, that could pave the way for civil disorder, especially in the face of shortages of food and medicines. Related to this is the threat, recently highlighted by the police in Northern Ireland, of increased violence there as paramilitary groups exploit community tensions encouraged by Brexit.

We do think that’s something of a stretch. Some 52% of those who bothered to make their opinion known on the subject have already registered their loss of trust in the current system of governance by insisting that we leave it and turn to another manner of it.

Yes, obviously, Brexit or not Brexit is a contentious matter and not one upon which we’d insist either way as a collective. And yet certain of the arguments against it are rather straining at logic aren’t they? Even, perhaps, could be described as more than a little pathetic?

Zeppelin took flight

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patented his rigid navigable airship on August 31st, 1895. Count Zeppelin’s innovation was to have a metal framework of crosswise rings linked by longitudinal girders, the whole assembly covered by fabric and with several gasbags inside. This enabled it to be much larger than totally flexible airships that retained their shape by pressure. It was also easier for it to carry loads distributed along its elongated length.

His airship had several engine-driven propellers attached in pods on the outside to drive it forward, and to manoeuvre it for landing and mooring. The early models carried passengers in a gondola slung underneath and, while this provided spectacular views, it could be cold over the North Atlantic or Siberia because safety forbade the use of fire to provide heating. Instead the passengers wrapped up in furs and blankets.

In later models the passenger cabin was moved inside, and heated from the hot water circulated from that used to cool the engines. They were flown commercially from 1910, by the world’s first passenger airline. By 1914 they had made 1,500 flights, carrying 10,000 fare-paying passengers. The first World War interrupted their development, and the Germany military used them for reconnaissance and bombing raids that killed 500 people in Britain.

The military Zeppelins were very vulnerable to ground fire unless they flew at high altitude, and became increasingly vulnerable to attack by aircraft. Several were lost by accidents involving weather, and the overall view was that they were insufficiently reliable to be viable war weapons. After the war, Germany was restricted by the Treaty of Versailles from building big airships, but when that clause was lifted in 1926, they built the Graf Zeppelin, and then the Hindenburg, and the golden age of airships began.

The Graf Zeppelin flew 4.5 days to Lakehurst, New Jersey, setting a new record, with its crew given a ticker-tape reception in New York and an invitation to the White House. It then did an epic round-the-world voyage, and Zeppelins provided a regular transatlantic service in some style, with cabins, a restaurant (evening dress the norm) and a ballroom. The largest airship ever, the Hindenburg, was designed for helium, but had to use hydrogen instead when the US embargoed helium supplies to Nazi Germany. Its fatal fire at Lakehurst in 1937 killed 22 crew and 13 passengers of the 97 people on board, and marked the end of the Zeppelin era.

It was a technology that failed to complete with aeroplanes, despite the fact that lighter than air gas-lift did not use fuel to stay aloft. Airships have reappeared intermittently. Goodyear announced in 2011 that their blimps will be replaced by dirigible Zeppelin airships. And from 1980-1990, a series of Skyship 500 airships were used for advertising and tourist flights over major cities. I flew a Fuji one over London in the late-80s and found it a thrillingly different experience to a plane flight.

The day of the Zeppelin may yet return. They are quieter, more fuel efficient, and have less environmental impact. True, they are slower, but the continued presence of the ocean liner indicates that some people are prepared to undertake long-distance travel at a more leisurely pace. Perhaps, like the Orient Express, they will appeal to people wishing to relive the experience if a romantic past. One of the great things about free markets is that they allow niche preferences to be provided as an alternative to mainstream services. When the first of the new Zeppelins inaugurates a modern-day transatlantic service, I will be among the first to fly it - packing my dinner jacket, of course.

A useful reminder of where money comes from, what money is

The Guardian, of all newspapers, treats us to an excellent overview of what money is, where it comes from. Looking at the prison economy at Angola - no, the prison in Louisiana, not the country - tells us that:

Trades in both economies work because of the most basic law of prison economics – that a prison is a place defined by unsatisfied needs, tastes and demands. Both economies are self-built, organic and highly innovative. Both show that a currency, the provision of which can seem like the ultimate role of the state in an economy, can be established completely informally. Prisons show that the human urge to trade and exchange is impossible to repress, and that solutions to future challenges are as likely to come from informal markets as formal ones.

It’s worth noting that this entirely disproves a current contention, that fiat money gains its value from the insistence by government that one must pay taxes in it. We’re entirely happy to agree that this aids in creating the value of the pieces of paper. But non-governmental monies do exist and do retain value thus taxation isn’t the be all and end all, is it?

It’s also true that we’ve known this since the 1945 paper on the value of cigarettes as money in a WW II prison camp:

One aspect of social organization is to be found in economic activity and this,

along with other manifestations of a group existence, is to be found in any P.O.W.

camp. True, a prisoner is not dependent on his exertions for the provision of the

necessaries, or even the luxuries of life, but through his economic activity, the

exchange of goods and services, his standard of material comfort is considerably

enhanced. And this is a serious matter to the prisoner: he is not "playing at shops"

even though the small scale of the transactions and the simple expression of comfort

and wants in terms of cigarettes and jam, razor blades and writing paper, make the

urgency of those needs difficult to appreciate, even by an ex-prisoner of some three

months' standing.

Or as we might put it, that propensity to truck and barter is innate, with money being the method of tracking who owes what, who has a claim on resources.

Or even, as we might put it and as we would put it, the existence of a market economy is simply an innate part of there being a group of humans. Which is a useful lesson to have really, isn’t it? Attempts to have non-market economies aren’t going to work with humans.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Ed Conway’s recent article on orange farmers on Mallorca paints the image that the Tragedy of the Commons can be easily overcome by everyone working together to reach an agreement not to exploit common lands. While a nice idea, it is, ultimately, an impractical one. 

There are some individual cases in which a community has worked together such as the Alanya inshore fishery addressed in Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, but the common thread in each case is that these are all closed systems. The local fishermen decided who is allowed to fish and where by drawing lots. They also decided that they would all move one slot along each day (either East or West depending on the time of year) to match the migration pattern of the fish, showing how they were able to use their specialist knowledge to maximise the utility of the fishing spots. 

Likewise, with the question of ensuring their access to water, orange growers in Sóller, Mallorca, have devised their own system. They use the water for a set number of hours per day (calculated with their specialist knowledge) and then switch it off. 

Whilst locally devised systems do work for common resources which few have access to, they simply couldn’t work on a larger scale. Could the whole of Spain operate its water distribution in this manner, via a system of trust? In an ideal utopia we might wish it were so, but we live in the real world. And trust is something earned and built between people who know each other.

Social stigma or retribution, implicit or explicit in the systems that Conway and Ostrom describe, are far more influential on a small island where everyone knows each other. While a group of individuals can overcome the Tragedy of the Commons by working together, the question to ask is how often does this really occur in the wider world? Can we really use our insider knowledge of the planet and all work together to protect the earth’s atmosphere? Could all Londoners and every tourist visiting the city agree just under convention about who can use which roads and when, so as to avoid congestion? 

Spontaneous order does emerge over time and with regularity. Complexity is not an enemy, and nor do you have to know the whole for order to exist. But not knowing the rules you have to play by can be its downfall.

One strategy that works on a larger scale to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons is the certainty of private ownership. Privatisation pushes people towards ensuring best usage of common resources i.e. it pushes them to act in their own self interest. Part of the ‘tragedy’ that is the Tragedy of the Commons is that it forces individuals to neglect considerations about how they can best use the resource in the long term. Private ownership internalises the negative externalities that may arise, forcing those using the resource to look after it - or lose out.

Arrangements between those who have access to a resource and private ownership are by no means mutually exclusive. Private ownership can help to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons, as noted by Elinor Ostrom in the phenomenon of cheese makers in the Swiss alpine. Ostrom reported that farmers could only let the cows that they had fed and housed since the previous winter graze on the common field. As it is expensive to rear cows, this naturally limits the number of cows allowed to graze. This demonstrates how private ownership can be used to help rectify the Tragedy of the Commons, in this case, the over-grazed Swiss meadow.

In a world in which globalisation is ever increasing and the flow of labour changes frequently, any arbitration between small groups seems somewhat anachronistic. New entrants to the pool of common resources will have to fight for the privileges that previous occupants would have had. Associating rights to common resources with private (tradeable) property rights allows for frictionless movement. In Britain, a country which appreciates the movement of labour both from within itself and from outside, this will encourage migration and job mobility. The orange farmers in Sóller would have greater mobility if they had a tradeable right to access the water. The closed nature of the agreement makes it hard for new entrants to gain access to the same de facto rights, detering movement to the area.

Locals working together to overcome small scale instances of the Tragedy of the Common is undeniably good (and thanks to their specialist knowledge, certainly better than anything the government might impose). Yet, so many instances of the Tragedy of the Commons aren’t small scale. They are big problems that need more than just a little team effort.

Cutting housework time

On August 30th, 1901, Hubert Cecil Booth patented a dust-collection machine he called a vacuum cleaner. He'd seen an American machine demonstrated that blew away dust and dirt under pressure, and wondered if, instead of just spreading dust around, it could suck it up through a filter. He tested it by sucking with his mouth through a handkerchief and realized it would work.

Booth's machine was too large to go into a building, but was powered by a petrol engine and drawn by horses. It was called "Puffing Billy," and worked by sucking dust-laden air via long hoses through a cloth filter. He gained respectability when his machine as used to clean the carpets of Westminster Abbey ahead of the coronation of Edward VII. Booth later produced an electric version, then he and others refined the machines over several decades, adding brushes and wheels to produce the familiar household versions. He lost out to Hoover in the domestic market, but found commercial success in the industrial market for cleaning warehouses and factories.

Although Booth also designed Ferris wheels, suspension bridges and engines for Navy battleships, it is for the vacuum cleaner that he is most remembered. It was part of a process through which domestic appliances liberated women from the incessant drudgery of housework, and freed them to leave the home and enter the job market. Washing machines made a substantial contribution to that development, as did electric and gas ovens, floor polishers, central heating, and many other devices that used mechanical power to replace muscle power, and cut the time spent on domestic work to a fraction of what it had been.

Such things as the vacuum cleaner and other home appliances cut the market for domestic servants, one of the few job opportunities for women, but they freed women to take jobs outside the home, jobs that used new machines such as comptometers and typewriters that women could operate. It gave women a sense of status as valued contributors to the economy, and a degree of independence that ultimately led to them gaining the franchise and becoming full citizens.

In his essay, "Economic Prospects for our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that increasing productivity might well mean we could all be working only 15 hours a week. Critics of capitalism point to the fact that we are still working about 40 hours a week, and blame the system for keeping us on the treadmill. Advertisers, they say, inculcate false needs in us to make us work for the wages that pay for them, and they tell us we should live more simply and work fewer hours, maybe starting with a 4-day week. Capitalism, they tell us, is stealing our leisure.

They miss the point. Working hours have declined, but it is the hours spent working in the home that have been reduced to a fraction of what they were. Mechanization has increased the productivity of the household to mean fewer working hours and more leisure hours. If you add workplace hours to household hours, there has indeed been a dramatic reduction, but practically all of it has come from a drop in the latter rather than the former. We now have vastly more leisure time to spend inside or outside the home, and it is pioneering inventors and engineers such as Hubert Cecil Booth who have played an honoured role in bringing that about.

Unbelievably the North of England will run out of water

IPPR North wants us all to know that the North of England must, well, must something because it’s going to run out of water. Climate change don’tcha know.

The north accounts for 41% of all water abstracted across England, but it relies far more on surface water than elsewhere in the country. With global heating, the likelihood of drought is projected to increase while average summer river flows may decrease, reducing water availability, even as the risk of flooding is likely to increase, particularly in winter.

The logical answer is to increase supply - the supply that is captured for use over time - by building more reservoirs. This is the total discussion of this option in the report:

There are very limited opportunities to substantially increase the supply of water, for example by building new reservoirs, because of a lack of water availability, abstraction limitations, and the likely impact upon the natural environment.

If we’re to have winter floods and summer shortages we’ve not a shortage of surface water. We’ve only a shortage of places to keep it - meaning the restriction must be those impacts upon the natural environment. Mustn’t flood a few valleys so that humans can luxuriate in hot water now, must we?

Well, actually, yes we should. As was said a few years back:

Colin Green, professor of water economics at the University of Middlesex, says part of the problem with reservoirs is they are a huge investment, and it is hard to predict how things will change in the next 40 years.

"We built a lot of reservoirs in the 1960s in expectation of a lot of growth in industrial water consumption, which didn't take place.

"We don't really want to build a lot of reservoirs now and then find we just spent hundreds of millions of pounds and the water sort of just sits there looking nice and we using it for boating," he says.

Now we do know of course, the science is settled. We’ll need the reservoirs so we’d better get on with building them. That is, we can actually change that natural environment around us in order to benefit us all. What does anyone think being human is if not this?

John Locke's constitutional liberty

One of history's most influential thinkers was born on August 29th, 1632. Because of his contributions to government and constitutional theory, John Locke is widely regarded as the father of liberalism. Raised in the violence of the English Civil War, he tried to establish the basis for a constitutional government that would limit sovereign power.

He began with a 'state of nature' in which people had the right to self-preservation, to safeguard their life, health and property. Property rights are acquired when people 'mix their labour' with God's gifts, such as by catching fish or picking berries. The development of agriculture and money enabled people to accumulate surplus property, and made it possible for the surplus property of some people to be used by others. Initially acting as their own judge in disputes, people eventually form civil governments through a contract to protect their rights. This is a two-way contract in which government has the duty to protect those rights, and loses the consent of the governed if it violates them. If it does so, it becomes illegitimate, and its overthrow is justified. Locke's account thus differed dramatically from that of Thomas Hobbes, whose sovereign was not bound by the contract the people signed with each other.

Locke developed these themes in his "Two Treatises on Civil Government" (1690), and provided a justification for the Glorious Revolution of 1689, in which the autocratic King James II had been replaced by William III, Prince of Orange, and his wife, Mary, and constitutional government established.  Locke drew on his twin themes of natural rights and social contract, determined to refute any notion of a 'divine right of kings,' and to establish that government is not "merely the product of force and violence," but takes place with the consent of the governed. Locke had been developing these ideas during his self-imposed exile from England, and heavily influenced the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Locke had major influence on the American Revolutionaries, and his ideas can be seen permeating both the Declaration of Independence and the first ten amendments to the Constitution that make up the Bill of Rights. He has been described by some as the intellectual foundation of government by consent, and is thus a major theoretician behind the institution of democratic elections that can give that consent.

Such a contribution would alone have made Locke a remarkable thinker, but he influenced the modern world in another major way. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690), he sets out the empirical basis behind modern scientific method, rejecting the Cartesian notion of pre-existing concepts in favour of one in which the ideas come to us through our senses, the things we observe. We then process these ideas and they form the basis of our knowledge. Our knowledge is thus derived from our experience.

Locke thought that experience and experiment are fundamental. He wrote, "whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire." Anything that can be shown by observation and experiment to be inaccurate must be rejected.

The fact that Locke made outstanding contributions in both the theory of government and the theory of knowledge makes him one of the Enlightenment's most influential thinkers and one of its brightest stars. He helped shape the world we live in today.