Larry Elliott doesn't quite grasp central bank independence
Larry Elliott tells us that central bank independence has had its day. Monetary and fiscal policy should be co-directed by the politicians because, well, actually, because that would give much more power over the economy to politicians.
Which isn’t quite how we think of the good life. But what worries rather more is that Elliott isn’t quite getting the lessons of his own example:
Independent central banks were once all the rage. Taking decisions over interest rates and handing them to technocrats was seen as a sensible way of preventing politicians from trying to buy votes with cheap money. They couldn’t be trusted to keep inflation under control, but central banks could.
Yes, that’s the justification. Elliott then tells us:
A decade on from the 2008 crash, another financial crisis is brewing. The US central bank – the Federal Reserve – is coming under huge pressure from Donald Trump to cut interest rates and restart QE.
That’s not a refutation, that’s an example. An example of what we’re trying to prevent. Any even casual glance at the American electoral calendar shows that.
The poor state of the German economy and the threat of deflation means that on Thursday the ECB will cut the already negative interest rate for bank deposits and announce the resumption of its QE programme.
And think what the German economy would be like with both the current rather restrictive fiscal policy and also a tight money policy? Which is what would happen given the political leanings in that country.
This is not to argue about the precise state of the macroeconomy in either place. It’s rather to point out that Elliott is using examples of independent monetary policy being a good idea to argue that independent monetary policy is a bad idea.
But then, you know, The Guardian and economics….
In all this hooha about democracy, why doesn’t the DHSC listen to the public?
As everyone except the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) knows full well, NHS England is too big for its own good. If NHS Scotland, itself far bigger than the NHS in Wales or Northern Ireland, is the right size, then NHS England should be split into autonomous regions. And it should be focussed on its core role of cure and treatment rather than provide beds for those needing social care, send their staff overseas to help other countries with their health services or nanny to those engaging in activities of which the DHSC disapproves, such as eating the wrong food, drinking anything except water and failing to take an extra 10,000 steps a day. If I succeed in getting an appointment with my GP, the first half of the allocated 10 minutes is taken up with being told (again) to desist from smoking my two cigars a month. My GP does not then get a chance to diagnose my ailment, still less cure it.
On 11th September the Health Secretary gave a strategic speech on “How we make public health for for the future”. This is what should have been the nub of his talk "The Department of Health and Social Care has polled people across the country on prevention, from all age groups, from all backgrounds, so we can understand what the great British public think, and what they expect from us.
And there were 2, clear, overriding messages:
the overwhelming majority of people believe the responsibility for their health lies with them – the individual, not the state. I think this is a good thing and should underpin our approach – we must do more to empower people to look after their health
that our efforts on prevention must be focused on children
Sensible people, the British public – we should listen to them more often.”
What follows is a precise contradiction, so much for “listening”. “I do not like the phrase ‘nanny state’, like some critics say, but what I do like is an active state with active citizens. So personalised prevention means the government, both local and national, working with the NHS, to put prevention at the heart of our decision-making.” We must treat “health as a shared responsibility between an active state with active citizens. All of the constituent parts: local authorities, national government, the NHS, communities, individuals, everybody in this room, everybody who believes in the power of public health, playing their part."
Mr Hancock seems unaware of the dictum “if something should be everyone’s responsibility, then it will be nobody’s.”
Of course prevention is important, and so is social care, but that does not make either the responsibility of NHS England. In fact, the DHSC already has a unit, Public Health England, employing, in 2018, 5.283 staff and a budget of around £4bn. Public Health England is entirely separate from NHS England. Here’s an amazing idea: why doesn’t Public Health England take care of public health, adult social care look after care and let NHS England focus on cure and treatment?
Switzerland shows federalism working
Switzerland’s cantons include French, German and Italian speaking ones, as well as predominantly Catholic and Protestant ones. Following an 1847 civil war, one that was over in a month with fewer than 100 casualties, Switzerland became a federal state on September 12th, 1848, inspired by the American model. The constitution established a central authority, but left much of local self-government in the hands of the cantons.
It acted to create uniform standards, with a uniform postal service in 1849, and a single currency in 1850. Customs duties between cantons were abolished. A nationwide telegraph service was set up in 1851, and weights and measures unified in 1868. The constitution forbade Swiss from fighting in foreign wars, except for the Vatican’s Swiss Guard. A revised 1874 constitution gave the federal government the responsibility defence, trade and law. While the 1848 constitution granted only to Christians the right of free movement and freedom of religion, this was extended in 1866 to all Swiss citizens of whatever religion.
The Swiss federal system works, and has kept the country at peace, both from internal conflict and from foreign wars. Switzerland has stayed neutral, though its citizens have compulsory military training. In the Cold War it built nuclear shelters for its population in case the worst happened. It had a programme that could have given it nuclear weapons, but abandoned this when detente and arms limitation treaties eased international tensions.
Famously Switzerland has referenda to decide on contentious issues. There have been several on the EU, which Switzerland applied to join at one stage, but withdrew its application following popular opposition. It has, however, signed bilateral agreements with the EU, and was a founding member of EFTA, though it rejected membership of the EEA. A 2011 referendum saw 85% opposing a ban on assisted suicide, with 78% opposed to outlawing it for foreigners.
The other side to the peace and harmony that Swiss federalism has engendered was mischievously put by Orson Wells in “The Third Man” movie.
“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
It might have been more accurate to say 100 years rather than 500 years of brotherly love. In any case, the Swiss also make excellent watches and precision instruments, they do banking pretty well, and they produce a rather good cheese.
The myth of Cuban healthcare
On the 9th September, the ASI welcomed Cuban journalist and academic, Boris Gonzalez Arenas, speaking to us over Skype about his homeland - so often portrayed as content by socialists - where the Castro regime has for decades shut down dissent and held back development. Boris couldn’t be present in person, as the Cuban regime had blocked him from travelling to Britain.
I visited Cuba last summer, and it really is one of the most naturally beautiful countries in the world - with such a rich history. In Havana, it’s clear that something is bubbling amongst the younger generation, who are ready to challenge the status quo. But there’s something sad about visiting Cuba - it’s a country held back by a regime hellbent on appropriating the products of hard-working farmers, squashing opposition, and communism as a means to control - even though it quite blatantly, as always, is not working. Cubans are the seventh largest immigrant group in the US - remarkable for such a small country. As of 2013, more than 1.1 million Cuban immigrants resided in the United States. The current population of Cuba is 11.5million (2016.) Make of that what you will.
When Fidel Castro died, back in 2016, much was made about the notion that - despite the fact that he’d interned LGBT+ people in concentration camps, suppressed any kind of democratic opposition to his bloodthirsty ideology, and driven the Cuban economy into the ground - it’s healthcare system wasn’t too bad!
This myth of a brilliant Cuban healthcare system is just that - a myth. Regardless, the extreme Left have an unerring need to believe in it, as proof that somehow, somewhere, their ideology can work. Yet even in Cuban healthcare, which they hold up as proof - they’re wrong.
According to Hadley Heath Manning, this perception is entirely based on the international volunteerism of Cuban doctors - sent abroad by the regime to improve the ‘brand’ of Cuban healthcare. Of course, on some metrics, Cuban healthcare does seem to shape up well (it wouldn’t be so widely praised if it didn’t,) but most of these - notably low infant mortality rates - are unfair metrics to measure quality on when you consider that Cuban women with ‘risky’ pregnancies are strongly encouraged to have abortions by the State.
According to Boris - it’s really important for the Cuban government to hide the real situation in Cuban public health. He claims that there’s been a massive decrease in the number of hospitals in Cuba in the last 20 years - and that hospital staff often steal from hospitals to sell medication on to the black market.
Indeed, Cuba’s system is really a two (or even three) tier system. Dr. Jaime Suchlicki of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies explains this. The first is for foreigners who come to Cuba as medical tourists - they pay in hard currency and treated to quality medical treatment, as they would expect in Europe or North America. These facilities, which cater only to medical tourists, do expensive treatments in cosmetic surgery.
There’s also quality service for the elite in Cuba - and then there’s the ‘real’ system. Dr. Suchlicki documents a few of the vast array of testimonies on this and notes unsanitary conditions, crumbling facilities, and hospitals where patients are expected to bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, toilet paper and even light bulbs. Katherine Hirschfeld of the University of Oklahoma, notes from her 9-month research trip to Cuba that ‘a number of people complained... informally that their doctors were unhelpful, that the best clinics and hospitals only served political elites and that scarce medical supplies were often stolen from hospitals and sold on the black market.’
Cuban healthcare may outrank other services provided in Cuba, but it isn’t the global beacon for healthcare it is often lauded as. A health system which discourages pregnant women from making their own choices (and a regime that tries to make the choice for them) on their own bodies, requires patients to bring their own light bulbs, and absolutely zero choice (all hospitals are run and owned by the regime) should not be celebrated
A memorable, and correct, George Orwell quote is from the Leninist rationalisation for communism that “you have to break some eggs to make an omelette.” Orwell reportedly replied: “where is the omelette?” Cuban healthcare, despite the headlines, is not an omelette.
Well George, if you don't understand neoliberalism then of course you'll fear it
George Monbiot wants to tell us that neoliberalism is puppy dog tails and snails, as opposed to the all things nice which his as yet unexplained alternative would be. But if you fail to understand even the most basic underlying concepts of a philosophy then you’re going to come to grief in critiquing it:
Neoliberalism is the ideology developed by people such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It is not just a set of free-market ideas, but a focused discipline, deliberately applied around the world. It treats competition as humanity’s defining characteristic, sees citizens as consumers and “the market” as society’s organising principle.
That’s to fail at the first fence. Far from competition being the defining characteristic we neoliberals insist that cooperation is. We humans do cooperate with each other, always have done always will. Competition is simply the method by which we decide who to cooperate with. The market is just the mechanism of mediation and exchange.
We do, after all, insist that a market transaction is, by definition, voluntary. And what is two or more people voluntarily agreeing to do something other than cooperation? The British economy is no more - and no less - than 65 million people cooperating the hell out of each other.
If you can’t grasp even this basic building block of the logic then you’re really never going to understand the world around us.
David Ricardo, among the brightest and best - and richest
The economist David Ricardo, who died aged 51 on September 11th, 1823, of septicaemia following an ear infection, had an extraordinary career. He was the third of 17 children of a Portuguese then Dutch Sephardic Jewish family, and when he eloped with a Unitarian Christian and adopted her faith, his parents ostracized him.
He went into a banking house and made a fortune, perhaps over £1 million sterling, speculating on the outcome of the battle of Waterloo. That would be equivalent to hundreds of millions of pounds today. He immediately retired to spend the rest of his life in economics and politics. He bought a seat in Parliament for £4,000 in 1818, as one could do in those days, and remained an MP until his death. He campaigned against slavery, and was in general on the side of reform.
He’d first made a name as an economic thinker in 1809 when he wrote that the inflation then in evidence was caused by the Bank of England issuing too many banknotes. Today we call this monetarism, the quantity theory of money.
His 1815 essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock expressed what today is called the law of diminishing marginal returns. It pointed out that if extra resources are mixed with something (such as land) in fixed supply, the increases in output will be less than they were. He opposed the Corn Laws which kept up the price of corn by limiting imports, pointing out that they benefitted the landlords rather than their tenant farmers. This still holds, in that agricultural price supports have been shown to enrich the owners of farmland rather than those who work it. He also suggested that because landowners spend wealth on luxuries instead of investing it, that the Corn Laws were leading to economic stagnation.
He made some errors, supposing the worth of something to be the product of the labour that went to produce it. But Smith made the same mistake, as did Marx. It was only later that people realized that value arises from demand, not supply. If nobody wants it, it’s worthless, no matter how much labour it took to produce it. He was also wrong about technology, believing that machines would act against the interests of working people, not foreseeing that the increased productivity they brought would increase wealth generally, most of all for the less well-off.
Following Adam Smith, he rejected the idea that nations became rich by accumulating gold and silver through a trade surplus. Instead he argued in favour of specialization and free trade. Famously he suggested that even some industries that were profitable and competitive should be abandoned in favour of those that were even more competitive. Thus, even if a nation was better at producing everything, it should still buy from other countries to replace the things it did less competitively, in order to commit its resources to those that were its most competitive. This is the famous notion of comparative advantage. When the economist Paul Samuelson was asked to name an economic proposition that is true but not obvious, the only one he named was the theory of comparative advantage.
To modern economists, Ricardo seems unique in arriving, via plain language and logical thought, at concepts they need complex mathematical tools to arrive at. David Friedman put it succinctly, “The modern economist reading Ricardo’s Principles feels rather as a member of one of the Mount Everest expeditions would feel if, arriving at the top of the mountain, he encountered a hiker clad in T-shirt and tennis shoes.”
Ricardo is reckoned to be second only to Adam Smith in the field of economics and, like Smith, he did it in ways that are accessible to non-professionals. For that, among his other contributions, the word owes him a huge favour.
Jonathan Franzen is, of course, correct here
Rather a large number of people are shouting at Jonathan Franzen over his recent piece on climate change:
Many climate scientists, however, feel that despite the number of scenarios it has run – 10,000! – the Franzen Brain Model could do with a bit of tinkering. “Franzen’s modeling isn’t scientific modeling at all. It’s DAYDREAMING,” wrote volcanologist Jess Phoenix on Twitter.
“Dear @NewYorker,” added water conservation specialist and MacArthur fellow Peter Gleick. “The fact that pretty much every single person who actually understands & writes about #climatechange for a living is dunking hard on the new piece by Franzen is an indication that you shouldn’t just publish a piece because it’s written by Franzen.”
Dr Genevieve Guenther, founder and director of EndClimateSilence.org, says that “Franzen doesn’t understand how climate science works”. His essay, she adds, “distorts the science”, is “completely apolitical”, and “contradicts itself: is the apocalypse coming or should we all start local farmers markets?”. “I get it, I guess, climate science is hard. But if you’re going to write about climate science for the New Yorker, you should really get it right,” she says.
The thing is, his central contention is absolutely correct:
Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.
Not so much the two degrees but the human nature part.
The basic truth over history of attempts to make new people to suit the mores of the day being that the New People never do turn up. It didn’t happen for New Soviet Man, Pol Pot didn’t create a happily peasant society and the desired class communalism of mid-20th century Britain created I’m All Right Jack.
The art of this governance thing is to recognise the fractious, sometimes greedy, often lazy and above all human people being governed. Insistences that better people must turn up to match the plan don’t work.
Which is why the radical transformation of human society to beat climate change isn’t going to work. We humans have’t agreed to live that way any time in the last 10,000 years and we’re not going to start now either. Sure, it’s possible, over time, to deal with the fossil fuel emissions themselves through advancing technology. But the call that we all make ourselves deliberately poorer to pleasure Gaia just isn’t going to work.
Simply because human nature doesn’t work that way and isn’t going to change to do so.
The larger point being that whatever your desires and or plans they’re only going to work if they go with the grain of those being planned for, us humans. Our evidence is the litter in history of attempts to deny this.
For example, markets and trade, these are simply things humans do. They’ve done them everywhere and everywhen to whatever extent law and available technology allow - and in defiance at least of the law as well. Any plan to solve anything therefore has to accept, at least, their existence and for any level of useful effectiveness harness them rather than ignore or ban them. Otherwise there’s not going to be a place for humans nor their activity in your plan, is there?
Don’t be alarmed by America’s latest vaping scare
America is currently in the midst of moral panic. A cluster of people have developed severe and sudden lung injuries after vaping and at least 5 deaths have now been linked to e-cigarette use. It’s important to state from the outset that this should not worry UK vapers or indeed the overwhelming majority of people around the world who use e-cigarettes as a reduced-risk smoking cessation aid.
Following these reports, the U.S Centre for Disease Control quickly stoked fears by recommending that the public “consider not using e-cigarette products.” This message is being enthusiastically spread by UK media outlets.
However, the risks for UK vapers are—unsurprisingly to those familiar with often woeful media reporting on e-cigarettes—extremely low. While these unfortunate deaths and lung injuries cannot yet be traced to one underlying cause, all indications point towards unregulated e-liquids containing THC (the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis). No such cases have ever been reported in the UK, perhaps down to the competence of our regulator (the MHRA). These deaths are clearly unrelated to vaping in general. Even if they were related, they would be comprehensively outweighed on a public health level by the millions of people in the US and UK using e-cigarettes as an especially effective way of quitting smoking. But don’t just take my word for it; various public health experts in the UK have weighed in on the controversy.
Prof Paul Aveyard, Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Oxford, said:
People who vape will be asking themselves if it’s safe to vape. They can be reassured by other data we have. The best data on the effectiveness, tolerability, and safety of e-cigarettes comes from randomised trials and the largest of these was published recently, also in the New England Journal of Medicine. This trial enrolled 886 people and half tried to stop smoking by vaping and half by using nicotine replacement treatment. Most of those who stopped smoking by vaping continued using the e-cigarette for the whole year, but most of those using nicotine replacement stopped using it. At the end of that year the scientists found that people who were vaping had less cough, and produced less phlegm than those who were not vaping, while there was no difference in wheeze or breathlessness. This study added to other good quality studies that show no evidence that vaping causes short-term serious harms.
We must also remember that for nearly every person who vapes, the alternative to vaping is smoking. While vaping does produce some toxins, those are at significantly lower levels than seen in cigarette smoke. If vaping typically caused severe lung damage, we’d have seen many more cases in people who smoke, which we have not. These cases are worrying and need investigating, but advice from all official bodies in the UK is that it is always preferable to vape than to smoke.
Dr Sarah Jackson, Senior Research Fellow, UCL Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group, University College London (UCL), said:
The recent cluster of vapers developing lung problems follows a decade of widespread e-cigarette use without reports of similar adverse effects. The majority of cases appear to have been vaping illicit e-liquids containing THC. E-cigarettes are the most popular quitting aid used by smokers – and among the most effective. Advice to discourage people from vaping legal, regulated e-liquids appears to be unwarranted and risks pushing people back to smoking.
Prof Peter Hajek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), said:
The mystery seems to have been resolved now, with cases being traced to a contaminated marijuana extract. Although the scare is being used to put smokers off switching from cigarettes to much less risky vaping, it has nothing to do with e-cigarettes as they are normally used in this country.
E-cigarettes have been around for over a decade now and are used by millions of people, with no such cases occurring. The outbreak is similar to methanol poisonings that kill people every now and then when contaminated alcohol is sold.
Aside from overzealous American regulators, the UK’s groundbreaking success in embracing tobacco harm reduction is likely to come under further pressure from the World Health Organization. Leaked documents have revealed plans for a renewed international offensive against adult smokers switching to products that are less likely to kill them. While an absolute ban on reduced-risk nicotine products appears to be their end goal, the WHO expects vaping to be treated at least as harshly as smoking in regulatory terms.
It is vital that the UK resists such pressure and fights back on the international stage. There’s reason for optimism: Public Health England’s media response to the American vaping scare has been exemplary. I’m currently planning an ASI research paper on the ways we can continue to be a world-leader in tobacco harm reduction, for example by creating a list of generic approved health statements that can be used in the marketing of regulated e-cigarette products (something Health Canada is currently in the latter stages of devising). But above all, we must not bow to ill-informed scaremongering about innovative ways to help smokers quit if they want to.
Gibraltar's great day
Gibraltarians celebrate their National Day on September 10th. It dates from a poll in 1967 that took place on that day. Spain was then still a dictatorship under General Franco's rule, but the United Nations had requested that the UK enter negotiations with Spain concerning Gibraltar's sovereignty. The UK's response was to consult the people of Gibraltar, at their request, in a sovereignty referendum. The UN criticized the UK for holding such a vote, presumably thinking that the Gibraltarians should have no say in their future.
The referendum went ahead on September 10th, achieving a huge turnout of eligible voters. The result was that 12.138 voted to reject Spanish sovereignty, and 44 voted to accept it, representing a 99.64 percent majority. The UN seems to regard Gibraltar as a colony, but its status is in fact a self-governing British Overseas Territory. It is tiny, a mere 2.6 square miles, on the Mediterranean just to the South of Spain. It currently has about 30,000 inhabitants in a densely populated town at the foot of its famous rock.
Its importance lies in its strategic position at the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, a gap of only 8.9 miles of waterway that separates Europe from Africa. In the War of the Spanish Succession, an Anglo-Dutch force captured it on behalf of the Habsburg claimants, and it was ceded to Great Britain forever in the 1713 Treat of Utrecht. Britain has retained it ever since as an important naval base, in which capacity it was exceptionally valuable during World War II.
Today its economy depends upon its use as a base for refuelling cargo freighters and on tourism, and on its "offshore" status for financial services and online gambling. When I have won political bets, the winnings have been paid to me in cheques drawn on a Gibraltar bank. Half of the world's entire seaborne trade passes through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Spain has long sought to incorporate Gibraltar into its territory, regarding it as an anomalous legacy of a colonial past. Curiously enough, they do not seem to regard their continued holding of territories in Africa, including two autonomous Spanish enclaves and the Canary Islands, in the same light. The UK view is that any change in its status can only take place with the consent of Gibraltar's inhabitants. They rejected Spanish sovereignty in that 1967 referendum, and in a 2002 referendum, they rejected the Labour government's suggestion of shared sovereignty. The Spanish government's response to the 1967 vote was to close the border in 1969 and restrict movement. This lasted until 1985, prior to Spain's entry into the EU in 1986.
On the 25th anniversary of the first vote, Gibraltar's government held a National Day on 10th September 1992, and have done so on that date very year since then. When the people of Gibraltar voted overwhelmingly to Remain in the Brexit referendum, Spain renewed calls for joint sovereignty, but has made it clear that it will not use the issue to veto any Brexit deal that might be reached between the UK and the EU.
The Gibraltarians are proud of the British Status and fly the flag. Their students pursue higher education at UK universities, and UK television programmes by the BBC and Sky are widely watched. It seems inevitable that their status and sovereignty will not be changed unless and until they want it to. In the meantime, we wish them a happy National Day.
This is not a strong condemnation of vaping
It’s possible to take this as a slam dunk finding against vaping:
E-cigarettes may damage the heart, scientists have concluded, and have called for Public Health England (PHE) to stop recommending vaping.
Researchers looked at 38 studies into the cardiovascular impact of vaping and found worrying signs of damage in nearly three quarters of tests.
When they discounted trials which had been funded by the tobacco industry - or where the scientists involved had conflicts of interest - the number of studies showing harm rose to 90 per cent.
Asked whether PHE should now change its advice, Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who co-authored the new analysis said: “The simple answer is yes.”
Human studies in the new analysis showed vaping led to an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, arterial stiffness and platelets which cause clotting. It also increased free radicals and reduced anti-oxidants, raising the risk of plaque build up in the artery walls, which can lead to a heart attack.
The question is not whether vaping causes harm, or is dangerous. Getting out of bed in the morning is dangerous, can cause harm. Vaping allows the consumption of nicotine. Nicotine is dangerous, can cause harm:
Nicotine is well known to have serious systemic side effects in addition to being highly addictive. It adversely affects the heart, reproductive system, lung, kidney etc. Many studies have consistently demonstrated its carcinogenic potential.
The thing is some substantial minority of people desire and like to consume nicotine. The question is not whether they may be allowed to or not - they’re consenting adults and they’re their hearts. The question is whether a less damaging method is recommended instead of a more damaging one - vaping or smoking?
We’re entirely certain that there are ill health effects of vaping. We’re also entirely certain that PHE should be recommending it on those simple grounds that the effects are vastly less than of smoking direct.