Shouldn't we welcome a decline in prosecutions?
This rather puzzles us:
The number of drivers fined for using mobile phones has fallen to a record low, amid fears there are not enough police patrols to catch offenders.
Some 38,600 fixed penalty notices were issued by police to offenders in 2018 compared with 53,000 during the previous 12 months, according to Home Office data.
This is the lowest amount since current records began in 2011.
Fewer people being fined could be because the same level of offences is happening yet fewer are being caught at it. Or, of course, it could be that the incidence of the offence is lower:
AA President Edmund King suggested more offenders would be deterred from using their phones and caught if there were more police patrols.
Well, yes, but we still need to know whether the decline is because of not catching or not doing.
The Home Office data also shows that the number of fines issued for not wearing a seat belt rose by 17 per cent last year, while there was a 5 per cent increase in speeding tickets.
Careless driving fines excluding mobile use were up 20 per cent.
We seem to be catching other people committing other offences in greater numbers. It seems unlikely that it’s a lack of catching going on therefore.
Fines for using mobile phones at wheel at record low amid concerns there are not enough police to catch drivers
If the incidence of the offence is falling then what’s the complaint again?
Missing the last bus
The last horse-drawn bus operated by the London General Omnibus Company in central London ran on October 25th, 1911, between London Bridge and Moorgate Street. In August 1914, the last horse-drawn bus that ran anywhere in London ceased operation, and many of the horses were subsequently used for war service.
It had been a distinguished story, with the first regular horse-bus service started by George Shillibeer in 1829. The first ones could take 16-18 passengers in a single-deck vehicle pulled by three horses. He ran four or five services a day between Paddington Green and the Bank, charging a fare of one shilling (5p).
The services proliferated, and by 1888/89 the two Underground companies, the Metropolitan and District lines, provided horse buses as feeder services for their stations, selling through tickets that covered the bus and the tube trip. They ran for about 15 hours a day, usually with passengers facing each other on long bench-like seats that ran parallel to the direction of travel. The driver sat on a forward-facing bench. Side windows enabled the lower deck passengers to see out, but the upper deck travellers were exposed to the elements.
They were mainly patronized by the middle classes, because from the 1870s the working classes used the horse tramways with their cheaper fares. Typically, the horse buses were drawn by two horses, had smaller front wheels than rear ones, and were boarded by steps at the back. A third horse would normally be added on hilly routes.
Those who like to hark back to the days before London became polluted with motor vehicle exhausts might reflect on the pollution caused by horses. In 1900 London had several thousand horse-drawn buses, each needing 12 horses a day. To these were added 11,000 horse-drawn hansom cabs making a total of 50,000 horses.
Since each horse produced about 15 - 35 lb of manure a day, this meant that about 600 tons of manure was being deposited each day on London’s streets. It attracted flies that spread typhoid and other diseases. Small children would ply street corners, and for a small coin would sweep the road ahead of gentlemen and ladies so their clothes would not be soiled. Each horse also produced about 2 pints of urine a day, and when their working life was over - usually after about 3 years, their bodies had to be disposed of. Sometimes they were left to rot on the streets.
There was a Great Manure Crisis of 1894, when the scale of the problem drew concerned attention. The Times newspaper predicted that “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” But the solution was not far off. In September, 1901, the same paper announced the introduction of “a service of motor-cars…to carry passengers, at omnibus fares, between Piccadilly Circus and Putney.” The new motorized transport was cheaper and more efficient, since the engines only had to be fed when working. Within a few years it displaced the horse for passenger transport in the metropolis. With the horses went the excrement, the urine, and the carcasses.
Technology solved the problem of horse pollution without people needing to change their bahaviour or limit their travel. It replaced horse pollution with exhaust fume pollution, but that, too is being solved by the technological innovation of the electric car. Had there been Extinction Rebellion protesters in 1900, they would doubtless have campaigned to ban horses and their manure from the streets, and to have people travel less. Such a campaign was not needed because innovative modes of transport made it unnecessary. As always, humans are quite good at solving problems.
We're sorry but we don't actually believe this
A new explanation for what actually happened before and during the Industrial Revolution. Wages were rising all along, it being annual incomes that increased as a result of longer work years.
Economists Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf have uncovered new evidence to show that modern economic growth started in the late 16th Century – 200 years earlier than previously thought. They also argue that Britain’s early economic growth was driven by having longer work years.
In research published in the October 2019 issue of The Economic Journal, the authors challenge the widely held view, based on wage rates paid to British day labourers, that western societies began to grow rich as late as the 19th Century.
They re-estimate the starting point of modern economic growth by collecting wage data for historical British workers who worked for an annual stipend rather than the daily wages used by previous researchers.
The paper itself is here.
The reason we don’t believe it? The division is into paid labour and leisure. This is the same mistake that modern commentators make about the average workweek today. We’re all still working 40 hour weeks, what happened to Keynes’ promise of 15 hours?
The bit that’s missing is that we all work very much fewer hours - sufficient reduction to meet Keynes’ prediction in fact - in unpaid household labour.
We do not insist that the early modern explanation is the same but we’d want to see at least consideration of the point. Early medieval farming life was based upon a large measure of household production for consumption within the household. One way of looking at the post-Black Death wage economy - combined with enclosure and so on - is the replacement of that household labour with market labour.
Missing this gives odd results. This paper - and many before it - tries to say that the villein was working perhaps 150 days a year. Commentators like Greg Clark and Juliet Schur indicate that peasants had 70 holidays a year, confusing holiday with Holy Day. This misses that said villeins did some market work and some household. They might farm their own 30 acres (say) and also have to do work on the Lord’s land by way of rent payment. Counting only that work done for cash and rent misses all of that household production, both in terms of the work year and also consumption.
One obvious point is that animal owning peasants who only work 150 days a year rapidly become non-animal owning peasants. The initial claim about the work year doesn’t make logical sense that is.
What does make sense is if we divide the year, correctly, into the current four divisions. Personal time, household production, market labour, leisure. What this paper, as so many others, is measuring is the substitution of market labour time for that household production. Yes, this will lead to greater incomes but as a derivative, from the greater efficiency of market over household production, not from an increase in labour hours themselves.
Another way to make much the same point. What was that first major advance in that Industrial Revolution? Spinning. Whose labour was replaced by that Jenny? The household labour of most of the women of the country. For that’s where spinning was done, it was a major labour occupation but it is never recorded as being market labour when done inside the household.
As when we measure working hours today we must include both household and market labour so too must we when looking at history. Without doing so the past just doesn’t make sense.
The usual estimation is that the average working year rose to 3,000 hours or so when the machines arrived. It’s only possible to assume the rise if we ignore all the work the peasants had been doing in their own fields, their own houses. It being that household labour that declined - exactly the same as the story of this past century.
Can’t afford the opera? Your GP will prescribe a visit.
Matt Hancock took time out on Wednesday to announce a new National Academy. It turns out that this has nothing to do with conventional academia. “Social prescribing” is having the NHS pay for our leisure pursuits – as if it did not cost us enough already. Our Health Secretary was “setting out his ambition for every patient in the country to have access to social prescribing schemes on the NHS as readily as they do medical care.
Social prescribing involves helping patients to improve their health, wellbeing and social welfare by connecting them to community services. This can include activities such as art and singing classes.”
Social prescribing, in a small way, has been around since the 1990s. More than 100 schemes exist in the UK, 25% or so in London. The General practice forward view (2016) proposed that the NHS appointed a national champion for social prescribing and said (p.28): “we will also work with CCGs to ensure they institute plans to address patient flows in their area using tried and tested ideas such as access hubs, social prescribing and evidence based minor ailment schemes.”
The Kings Fund is more sceptical: “robust and systematic evidence on the effectiveness of social prescribing is very limited. Many studies are small scale, do not have a control group, focus on progress rather than outcomes, or relate to individual interventions rather than the social prescribing model. Much of the evidence available is qualitative, and relies on self-reported outcomes. Researchers have also highlighted the challenges of measuring the outcomes of complex interventions, or making meaningful comparisons between very different schemes.” The claimed a 38% (in some areas) reduction in the use of hospital A&E units for example, which makes one wonder why those people were attending A&E in the first place if all they wanted was a little socialising.
There has been no serious quantification of the costs versus the benefits, something one might have expected a cash-strapped NHS to undertake before rolling a National Academy out across the country. Nor has there been any comparative study of which types of social prescribing are most effective for which conditions. There is just a generic claim that social prescribing is good for patients. Guinness is probably better. How much faith would one put in a GP who said “medicine would help your condition but I have no idea which one”?
The announcement of the National Academy had no evidence to support it, and no expected financial benefits. “The indepedent [sic] academy will receive £5 million of government funding”, presumably per annum, but that ignores the boosting of social prescribing from 60% to 100% of the NHS. Inter alia, “The National Academy for Social Prescribing will work to increase awareness of the benefits of social prescribing by building and promoting the evidence base.” How one-sided is that?
If the objective of the new academy was to reduce the costs of the NHS, and/or increase the benefits at the same cost, we should take it seriously. But it is not. The objective is solely “to help more people benefit from arts, sport and leisure activities across the country.” Matt Hancock is jumping on a fashionable bandwagon with no evidential support and throwing away taxpayer money in the process.
To boldly go into an optimistic future
Gene Roddenberry, who left us on October 24th, 1991, had several successes as a freelance TV scriptwriter. He was involved in several hit series, including Highway Patrol, which I used to watch as a teenager, Have Gun Will Travel, which I saw as a university student and, of course, for the series that will forever be associated with his name, Star Trek, and the later series, Star Trek, the Next Generation.
The show was not a brilliant success, and NBC planned to close it after its second season, but a determined campaign by devoted ‘trekkies’ led them to air a third season. It was hailed as TV’s first ‘adult’ (meaning non-childish) science fiction series, and the surprise was that its hero, William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, was overshadowed by Leonard Nimoy’s emotion-free Vulcan, Mr Spock. Indeed, Roddenberry wrote to SF author Isaac Asimov to seek advice on how to counter this. Asimov suggested having Kirk and Spock work together as a team "to get people to think of Kirk when they think of Spock."
The optimism of the Star Trek universe was part of its appeal. Humanity was headed out to the stars not to conquer and exploit, but to explore and to make friends. Its introduction became famous.
“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!”
Fans forgave the polystyrene rocks and the obviously-humans-in-costume that represented aliens, and loved Star Trek’s technology. They loved phasers (set to stun), tricorders and transporters. This was ever more true for the sequel series, The Next Generation, that featured holodecks and replicators.
In Star Trek, the Next Generation, the replicators satisfied material needs, so the series could concentrate on the character development of the main players. Humankind had apparently broken free of superstition (including, apparently, religion, which was remarkable for a show written principally for a US audience). Racism and nationalism had been superseded by an affinity with all life-forms. Conflicts, potential and actual, were resolved for the most part by peaceful diplomacy, though there was the occasional steel behind the apple pie - “Let’s speak to them in a language everybody understands. Arm photon torpedoes!”
The series pictured a better future that people yearned for, one in which people would no longer strive for material gain, but for honour, and one characterized by constant outward reaching to learn new things. The final frontier calls to mind Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 Frontier in American History thesis. In Star Trek it is the space frontier that shapes humanity’s values.
There have been big-budget motion pictures, spin-off series that still continue, and annual conventions at which trekkies pay homage to their heroes. Overwhelmingly, though, it is the optimism that lingers. The vision of a better, calmer, but still challenging future draws us today as it did then, inspiring in many people the idea that if we want badly enough to have it happen, we can make it happen, make it so.
How not to deal with climate change
The British Government currently mutters that all new cars must be electric in 2040. The Labour Party is making noises that this should be brought forward to 2030. This is not the way to deal with climate change:
Toyota is developing a hydrogen-powered car which could be fuelled for a year by the manure of a single cow, bosses have claimed.
Chief technology officer Shigeki Terashi said a cow's droppings can be converted to produce enough hydrogen to run its next-generation Mirai saloon for 12 months.
The concept car uses a “fuel stack” to transform liquefied hydrogen into electricity with water as the only byproduct, making the technology zero emission.
It’s a fuel cell, not a stack, even though cells come in stacks.
But the point is there are myriad technologies which could be used to meet whatever emissions target we might have. Choosing one of them, now, when the varied possibilities are not mature, is the incorrect decision.
We would point out that one of us has actually worked on fuel cells and they’re lovely things - even if they may or may not be the correct replacement for the internal combustion engine.
A bureaucratic - or political - decision to choose the one technology now is that wrong decision. The correct method is to set the performance target, whatever it is, then leave markets to tell us which meets that target best. The problem being not the choosing of the one technology, but the ruling out of all the others, some of which may well be better.
This stuff is complicated, meaning we’ve got to turn to that only complex calculating engine we’ve got, the economy as a whole and its price system.
Two decisive battles
By coincidence the date of October 23rd marked two decisive battles of World War II. On that date in 1942 Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery launched his 8th army into an attack on the German and Italian positions near the railway halt of El Alamein. Montgomery had chosen his field carefully, with quicksands to his South barring Rommel's favoured flank attack. He had overwhelming superiority in equipment, largely because Rommel's extended supply lines had to run the gauntlet of Allied attack in the Mediterranean, and then faced air attack on their way to reach Rommel's position in Egypt.
The battle lasted 10 days and resulted in a total Allied victory. It heralded the beginning of the end of the Western Desert Campaign, eliminating the Axis threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern and Persian oil fields. The battle revived the morale of the Allies, being the first big success against the Axis. Winston Churchill said, "Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat." He ordered church bells to be rung cross the country in celebration.
On the same date two years later, October 23rd 1944, began the largest naval battle of World War II, possibly the largest in history, with over 200,000 personnel involved. It took place at Leyte Gulf off the Philippines. It could easily have gone Japan’s way, since US Admiral Halsey took the bait of pursuing the Japanese Northern carrier force, not realizing it was a decoy fleet that could only muster 100 planes with inexperienced pilots. He left the US landing force undefended as Japanese battleships and cruisers attacked, but the Japanese were unnerved by the aggression of the outgunned US defending forces, and withdrew in disorder.
It was a total Allied victory, like El Alamein, with the American losing 7 warships to the 26 lost by the Japanese, including carriers, battleships and heavy cruisers. It signalled the effective end of Japan’s navy. It remaining ships lacked oil because of the US submarine blockade, and lacked air cover.
Both battles saw the Allies up against countries gripped by poisonous ideologies whose troops revered their leaders as gods or near godlike figures. Both countries were brainwashed into a belief in their racial superiority, and both committed unspeakable atrocities. In Japan’s case, Leyte Gulf saw the first use of Kamikaze suicide attacks, evidence of a fanaticism that led America to atom bomb them into surrender.
El Alamein and Leyte Gulf were won by superior forces backed by high morale and determination. The sudden, unprovoked attacks by the Axis powers, Blitzkrieg, Barbarossa and Pearl Harbour, gained early victories, but provoked outrage and stiffened Allied resolve. Then the remorseless build-up of Allied strength eventually took its toll. US factories switched from making cars to making tanks and planes, and even prefabricated ships.
The lessons were not lost during the Cold War. NATO resisted Soviet aggression with resolve and resources, using technology to close the gap caused by brute Soviet strength. Eventually the USSR could not match the sophistication of their opponents, not browbeat them into submission, nor subvert them by employing their “useful idiots” in the Western media, and left the field in disarray, just as their predecessors had done at El Alamein and Leyte Gulf. Their ideology, as destructive as that of the Japanese and the Nazis, and just as corrosive of human rights and human values, went into history’s trash-can, just as the others had done.
Apparently building housing doesn't provide housing
A marked inability to understand how markets work here:
On either side of the leafy park, which undulates over the graves of 40,000 Victorian paupers, the bulky concrete frames of new apartment blocks are beginning to rise. They will ultimately become 17- and 22-storey slabs that will in turn be dwarfed by a 41-storey tower, all surrounding the park with a glacial wall of “ultra-sleek urban homes”. And not a single one affordable.
The complaint is that building lots of housing in Manchester does not provide places for poor people to live in Manchester. Which is, of course, ridiculous. If we’ve added housing for 35,000 more people to the area - one estimate being used - then we’ve added housing for 35,000 more people to the area.
The part that’s being missed is that here in England almost all of us - as it ever has been - live in second hand housing. It may well be true that the new builds are going to the rich and the rich only. But as they move into those new builds then they leave their former housing and so on up and down the housing ladder. Adding 35,000 new dwelling spaces at the top then frees up 35,000 dwelling spaces at the bottom as well.
Yes, of course, there’s also migration to consider. But the general point still stands. Adding housing adds housing. Even if none of the new build is “affordable” it still makes other housing more so as those laws of supply and demand still work.
Adding more housing reduces the cost of housing. How could it be otherwise?
The end is nigh (again)
The Millerites were the followers of the teachings of William Miller, who in 1833 first shared publicly his belief that the Second Advent of Jesus Christ would occur in roughly the year 1843–1844. This was later pinned down by biblical scholarship to happen on October 22nd, 1844.
That October day, 175 years ago, the day Jesus was expected to return, ended without it happening. Millerite leaders and followers were left generally bewildered and disillusioned. The next day was called "The Great Disappointment." A similar event occurred in 2012 when the world's end, allegedly predicted in the Mayan Calendar, failed to show up.
There have been many predictions of doom and disaster over the centuries, but there seem to be more in recent years because there is now big money in it. It sells books. It also provides new way to attack business and capitalism for those who yearn for the good old days of Soviet central planning.
Paul Erlich has made a fortune out of it. In 1967 he said it was already too late to avert worldwide famines in 1975. In 1970 he told us the oceans would be dead by 1980. James Hansen, a NASA scientist, is also a repeat offender. In 1988 he predicted regional droughts in the 1990s, and that the oceans would rise by 6 feet, putting parts of New York under water. In 2008 he told us that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2018, reversing an earlier trend of people predicting an imminent ice age.
In 1971 Dr S I Rasool predicted a new ice age by 2020. The Guardian in 1974 told us it was coming fast, and in 1976 Stephen Schneider forecast an ice age and famines "soon." As late as 2004, the Guardian reported that Britain would be like Siberia by 2020. However, in more recent years the 'melters,' led by Al Gore, have greatly outnumbered the 'freezers.'
Several people have compiled lists of doom prophecies that failed to materialize. Here is a selection of them (sources are readily googleable).
1966: Oil will run out in ten years
1967: Famines by 1975
1968: Worldwide overpopulation
1970: World's natural resources run out
1970: Ice Age by 2000
1970: Water rationing in US by 1974, food rationing by 1980
1971: New ice age by 2020 or 2030
1974: Satellites show new ice age near
1976: Scientific consensus that Earth is cooling.
1978: 30-year cooling trend continues
1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes
1980: Peak oil in 2000
1988: Regional droughts by 1990s
1988: Maldives underwater by 2018
1989: Nations will be wiped out if nothing done by 2000
2000: Children won’t know what snow Is
2002: Peak Oil in 2010
2002: Famine in 10 years unless we stop eating fish, meat, and dairy products
2004: Britain will be Siberia by 2020
2008: Arctic will be ice free by 2018
2008: Al Gore predicts ice-free Arctic by 2013
2009: Prince Charles says we have 96 months to save the world
2009: Gordon Brown says we have 50 days to "save the planet from catastrophe"
2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015
2014: Only 500 days before ‘climate chaos’
Some of these came from reputable scientists, and some from headline-hungry popularizers. The fact that none of it happened does not stop others making similar forecasts of imminent disaster, but it does give it some kind of perspective. We are now told of an extinction crisis. It is unlikely that we will go extinct, being resourceful enough to stop it, but it is likely that when the date passes without it happening, alarmed voices will be telling us that doom is coming soon.
It's not always about climate change
The problem with the evil du jour is that everything, rightly or wrongly, gets ascribed to the evil du jour. As here, where we have new speculations about the deaths and injuries caused by air pollution:
The boss of the NHS has declared an air pollution "emergency" as a major study today shows it causes hundreds of heart attacks and strokes every year.
Simon Stevens says we must act now to avoid so many "avoidable deaths" after figures reveal days of high air pollution trigger an extra 124 cardiac arrests, 231 stroke admissions and 193 hospitalisations for asthma across nine major UK cities each year.
Certainly something we should investigate, yes. The first part of that being to work out the societal cost of these injuries and the societal cost of reducing air pollution enough to eliminate these same injuries. But sadly that custodian our of health care monies doesn’t suggest anything so sensible:
In response to the findings Mr Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said: “As these new figures show, air pollution is now causing thousands of strokes, cardiac arrests and asthma attacks, so it’s clear that the climate emergency is in fact also a health emergency.
“Since these avoidable deaths are happening now - not in 2025 or 2050 - together we need to act now. For the NHS that is going to mean further comprehensive action building on the reduction of our carbon footprint of one fifth in the past decade.
“So our NHS energy use, supply chain, building adaptations and our transport will all need to change substantially.”
The heart attacks and strokes are not caused by CO2 emissions. Nor by methane, or CFCs and so on. Thus taking action on carbon footprints isn’t the point at all.
In fact, a goodly part of the problem is from earlier attempts to reduce carbon footprints. The encouragement of diesel with it’s higher NOx and particulate emissions was because it reduces carbon dioxide such. The rise in wood stoves and burners was precisely because it was seen as carbon neutral over the cycle - they are significant sources of particularates. And these strokes and heart attacks are being caused by the NOx and particularates…..
It’s unfair but accurate to insist that some part at least of these excess injuries are the result of earlier attempts to reduce carbon footprints. Which does make redoubling our efforts to increase the cause of the problem look an odd way to reduce it.
It is also both fair and accurate to point out that if the answer is always the same whatever the question then we are not dealing with science but religion. “Reduce carbon footprints” may often be the correct answer, even mostly the right answer, but the moment it becomes the only answer it is as with “toss another virgin into the volcano”. It’s superstition, not science.