Time to get rid of the idea of cultural appropriation and other Marxist identity claptrap

When the pandemic is over, it’s possible that a few things that once seemed important to some people might leave with it. This could include some of the more arcane elements of what constituted the “Woke” culture. For example, some people used to fret about what they called “cultural appropriation,” castigating people from Western white cultures who adopted practices from other cultures. Justin Bieber was slated for wearing his hair in blond dreadlocks, and university students were derided for holding costume parties themed on countries such as Mexico or Japan. 

It’s nonsense, or course. When we take on board things done by other cultures, more often than not it’s cultural appreciation rather than appropriation. The walls of my house feature paintings done by a Western artist in the Chinese style, but this is a tribute to Chinese culture rather than the theft of it. I love Chinese cuisine, and I don’t mind in the slightest if some of it is prepared by non-Chinese chefs. Indeed, I sometimes cook in that style myself, as I do in the style of many countries. When I dress, as I often do, in clothes that echo the fashions of Eastern countries, it is because I admire that style.

At the heart of this absurd idea lies the notion that we should all live in boxes with labels on them. Western Europeans are supposed to live like stereotypical Europeans, without enriching their culture with outside influences. It would be a duller and poorer world if we did this. We’ve always taken outside ideas and influences, usually because we admire them. When the Pope and his predecessor wore sombreros on visiting Mexico, they were honouring Mexican culture, not mocking it.

It is identity politics gone mad to define us and limit us to one narrow culture. People are too complex, too diverse, and too multi-faceted to be confined like this. We express our own independent ideas, rather than simply giving expression to what someone else thinks is our class interest. We need to be treated as individuals, not dealt with merely as members of the groups that others want to define us by. 

There are people who prefer to dismiss our ideas as the mere expression of our group interest and identity. It saves them from having to listen to those ideas, or to consider them, or to argue with them. They claim that people in one box have nothing to say about those in other boxes, and no value to draw from them into their own lives. Fortunately, people are bigger than this, and the idea that they should be limited in this way will almost certainly have a short shelf life when the current pandemic is over.

Thanks very much, but we’ve had quite enough confinement of late, and when it’s ended, we’re not about to let a few obsessives continue to confine us culturally or intellectually.

What is this rise in child poverty being claimed?

We are being told that the recession is going to cause a significant rise in child poverty. By the method that this is normally measured we can’t see it ourselves:

Coronavirus will cause child poverty to soar. So what can we do about it?

We agree that this recession - and it’s a proper doozy of a recession too - is going to lead to a decrease in the economic resources available to many to most of the population. We’re entirely happy with calling that an increase in poverty. But that’s not actually how poverty is measured these days. Instead we use a relative definition, poverty is having less than others not less in toto.

That is, the current measure of child poverty - living in a household with less than 60% of median income - is a measure of inequality, not poverty. And here’s the thing about recessions, inequality falls in them. At first blush this should mean a reduction in child poverty. And, in fact, given that relative measure, that’s what does happen in a recession.

We can go into slightly more detail. Median income is clearly going to fall when GDP does by 25 or 30%. But the incomes of the poor are somewhat to largely to completely made up of welfare and benefits, none of which are going to fall in these difficult times. We’re going to see a compression of incomes at the low end that is. Top end incomes will fall, largely based upon profits as they are, middling incomes and the median will fall, bottom end incomes will be static. Because inequality falls then so does poverty given the way we measure that poverty.

We entirely agree that we shouldn’t be measuring this way - falling incomes will indeed cause more poverty sensibly defined. But that also means that in more normal times we shouldn’t be measuring poverty this way either.

We can go a step further. In the good times inequality expands because that’s just what happens. At which point the call is for more taxation and more redistribution to curb the rise in child poverty. In these bad times our commentators are insisting that the same cure must be applied - more taxes, more benefits, to curb the increase in child poverty. But if both good and bad times increase that child poverty then there’s something wrong with the measure of the poverty we’re using, isn’t there? And something very definitely wrong with the proposed cure if that remains the same whatever else is happening.

We’re as with medieval doctors and leeches. An entirely sensible cure for a limited set of problems but their application to every problem is closer to religion than sensible disease management. So too with this treatment of child poverty. If the answer is always the leech then we’re asking the wrong question.

Critical supply chains and the lesson of I Pencil

Given the interruptions to international trade as a result of the coronavirus there’s a series of calls that we must bring closer to home, somehow control, supply chains of what might be called “critical” items.

As Don Boudreaux points out there’s a certain difficulty with that:

Instead of a collection of distinct supply chains, our modern economy is a single globe-spanning web of interconnectedness. Within this web every output is the product of countless inputs and each kind of input typically is used to produce countless different kinds of outputs. This web of interconnectedness – the complexity of which is beyond human comprehension – is indispensable for our modern mass prosperity. Yet its existence – its ‘everything-is-connected-in-some-way-to-everything-else’ reality – means that there are no objective and clear lines separating “critical supplies” from “uncritical” ones.

We can reach the same conclusion by re-reading I Pencil. No one does actually know how to make a pencil because the supply chain to do so is that entire global economy. Therefore we can’t in fact build supply chains that are transparent to our concerns about a pandemic.

But the lesson goes further than that. We also can’t build supply chains that are transparent to any other concern that we might have. Those insistences on fair wages say, or certain environmental practices, or blood minerals, whatever will be next in the list of fashionable concerns. The full supply chain for anything at all is the entire global economy. As it’s not possible to track all of that then it’s not possible to track the absence of those agreed and admitted evils from a specific supply chain. The adventure is simply impossible from the start.

It’s not even possible for us to know the supply chain let alone manage it.

Genetically Modified Organisms take the fight to the coronavirus

Some things will change after the pandemic, and one of the likely ones is that opposition to genetically modified organisms will be much diminished. We’ve been using genetic modification since our ancestors first domesticated grains and farm animals about 12,000 years ago, but in the slow way, by cross-breeding and selection. 

When we found how to do it faster by inserting useful traits from one organism into another, some environmental lobby groups discovered they could attract funding by running scare campaigns against it. They coined terms like “Frankenfoods” to imply that GMOs were laboratory monsters that would run amok. 

Since the technology was developed, none of their dire predictions has come about. Americans have been eating GM foods for most of this century with no ill effects at all, and several useful organisms have been developed to help solve some of our problems. A modified enzyme has been developed to eat up waste plastic, and another organism has been tweaked to gobble up oil spills. 

Most of the teams racing to develop vaccines that protect against Covid-19 are using genetically modified organisms to produce effective ones, and the world will be thankful when they succeed. There’s a Canadian company genetically modifying tobacco plants to grow proteins for use in a potential vaccine that would normally be done in eggs, taking longer and at higher cost.

The argument about GMOs is that they should be banned until they are “proven safe.” This is absurd, because nothing can be “proven safe.” It’s more valid to ask if they present a greater or less risk than their traditional, non-modified, rivals. This can, and has been, established in trials. But the anti-GMO lobby opposes even trails, and has systematically tried to sabotage them by destroying crops. No evidence has emerged that GMOs pose greater risk. On the contrary, many of them offer huge benefits.

One of the greatest benefits is offered by golden rice, modified to incorporate vitamin A, whose absence in the diet of poorer countries leads to malnutrition, blindness and death, especially among children. The NGO campaigns against it have prevented its use, and a Johns Hopkins study published late last year puts the death toll caused by their actions at several million lives. The variety has been made open source and non-profit to farmers in needy countries, but has been opposed as a “Trojan horse” that threatens to break a blanket ban.

It does, it should, and it will, and more countries are now beginning to approve its use. After the pandemic has been defeated, helped by organisms genetically modified to fight it, countries will look more objectively at the benefits GMOs offer, and those who accept those benefits will prosper more than those who continue to resist them. 

A very Protestant view of the world

Perhaps not Protestant but Calvinist. That it is work which is the thing that must be done. We must work, that is, for the good of our souls:

Unleash us from the “tyranny” of work and we are likely to feel the tyranny of inactivity more heavily. When the coal-mining and fishing industries collapsed the loss went far beyond financial pain; whole communities were denuded of identity and purpose. As Musk has admitted of technological unemployment and the limitations of UBI, “If there’s no need for your labour, what’s your meaning? Do you feel useless? That’s a much harder problem to deal with.”

Can you feel it? That burn as the absence of wage slavery diminishes our sense of self worth? It’s being put forward as the reason why we shouldn’t have a universal basic income. About which there are a couple of possible comments.

The first and most obvious being that it’s an idea being put forward, often enough, by those who do not need to work by hand or brow to put the calories on the dinner table. Who have, themselves, found something to occupy their time even as the essential basics are paid for in other ways. That is, those who do not have to work for a basic income are postulating that if other people didn’t have to then, well, they’d not be like those who currently don’t have to. Oi, the polloi won’t do like what we do sort of thing.

The second and rather more important being that we’ve already got a basic income guarantee in this country. It’s called the welfare state. Whether you bother to work or not there will be education for the kids, health care for everyone, a roof over the head (absent those mental health and addiction problems that so plague the rough sleepers at least) and so on. There will even be some modest amount of cash to aid in moving life along. It might not be all that much but it is there.

If you like, we’ve already sold the pass that there is that basic income. Now we’re only arguing about the form of it. The current system is conditional which has its inefficiencies, not least the immense tax and benefit withdrawal rate faced by those just climbing up out of poverty. The universal basic income rather neatly solves that. It is more efficient that is.

We like economic efficiency around here because it means that, by definition, we’re richer in aggregate by doing things that efficient way. This over and above our refusal to believe that work is what defines us. To insist so is, clearly, most illiberal for it implies that the dunnykin diver is of less moral worth than the nurse, or the newspaper columnist, which isn’t part of our vision of the good society at all.

Let’s plan before we need the plan

Even Baldrick knew that you actually had to have a cunning plan before you could action it. 

On 10th April, Matt Hancock announced his distribution plan for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). It involved guidance on what and how much to use, a website to order it and fulfilment. Nothing wrong with the plan — apart from it being several weeks too late.

It is too soon to know when the lockdown exit strategy should be triggered but we have reached the point where we all need to know what it might be so that we can prepare for when it is actioned. If the form so far is anything to go by, the exit strategy will only be announced after it should have been implemented. And neither that, nor alternative strategies, will have been exposed to the sunlight of debate and improvement.

The lack of planning

Here are some more examples of this not-in-time Covid-19 planning. The government announced the emergency on 30th January but it was not until mid-March that briefings began. We were told there would be stages of restriction in order to spread the load on the NHS, but there was no plan for the specifics; it would be “steered by the science” coming mainly from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). But SAGE provides only scenarios and opinions, not actual science nor proposals for government action. Being “guided by science” looks like a smokescreen to conceal the lack of in-time planning.

To be fair, government has well planned the provision of additional hospital beds and intensive care. The arithmetic was suspect but the 50, 000 extra beds (15K from ejecting bed-blockers, 15K from the private sector and 20K from Nightingales) looks, so far at least, enough. But the plan to increase bed capacity should have led immediately to plans for manufacturing and distribution of PPE, ventilators, oxygen and relevant medicines. 

The lack of timely planning is most conspicuous in the case of antigen test kits. Prompt action (and results) in South Korea in February indicated their critical importance. On 2nd April, in response to criticism that UK testing was too little and too slow, Matt Hancock announced a goal of 100,000 tests a day by month end, up from 10,000 a day at that time. Since then, reporters have pressed him for the plans for reaching that ambitious target, but none have been forthcoming. 

The need for a future plan

For the future, the government needs public acceptance of whatever the lockdown exit programme turns out to be. Only two trends matter: hospitalisations and deaths, which will peak at different times, and sooner in some regions than others. The number of Covid-19 infections not requiring hospitalisation should not affect the exit programme or the trigger date for starting it: they do not drain NHS resources.

We also know that the lockdown exit programme can begin sometime (hopefully soon) after those peaks are apparent. For that, the public needs to see decent tracking curves, nationally and by region, for Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths. Figures need to be accurately allocated to the right days; it is not apparent that they are now. 

The programme will almost certainly proceed by stages, e.g. age groups, regions of the country and types of congregation and commercial activity. For example, it seems likely that schools should open first followed by wage-earners with seniors last. We need to know what other countries have done and what those experiences appear to be. Denmark, for example, has opened its golf courses, but not clubhouses, to two-ball games. Germany has kept DIY stores open. 

Whatever solution is adopted, there is an urgent need for transparency and debate so that the public can support whatever is decided and help carry it out. 

Helicopter money has dropped into the discourse once again

Helicopter money is in the news again. The original concept was from Milton Friedman. In a 1969 paper he asked what might happen if banknotes were dropped from helicopters, and people knew it was a one-off event. In his case it was a thought experiment, but it has been put forward since as a serious policy proposal. 

The thinking is that if the economy has taken a hit, as happened with the corona virus, then a stimulus will be needed to help it restart and move into growth territory. The idea is that a consumer boost might be stimulated by giving people free money, as if dropped from helicopters. If it produces extra spending, businesses will take up the economic slack, and production will be increased, with a positive effect on jobs and wages. 

This might be fine in theory, but does it work? There have been tests of a kind, done under George W Bush in response to the 2008 financial crisis, and later under Obama. The evidence is open to interpretation, but there are indications that if people receive one-off cash sums, they don’t tend to spend it, and therefore don’t create the desired stimulus. They save it instead, with richer people adding it to investments, and those lower down using it to reduce debt, such as paying down credit card balances to reduce monthly repayments. 

The supposition is that if people think it is a once-only, not to be repeated, they don’t want it to go without trace. They behave differently, though, if the extra money comes not as a lump sum from the government, but as an increase in the size of their wage packet. If their tax rate and social security taxes are reduced, they see more in their wage packet, and they tend to spend it instead of saving it.

The reasoning is based on psychology. If they think this is now a regular increase, to be repeated every month, they are more inclined to spend it, knowing there’s more coming along. They save the one-off, thinking that’s all there is, but they spend the extra funds if they think there’ll be more where that came from.

The lesson seems to be that helicopter money can work to kick-start an economy fallen on hard times, but not if it’s dropped all at once in a single lump sum. Instead of that, if those helicopters drop regular sums into monthly pay packets by way of lower income tax and National Insurance rates, people will be readier to spend their new-found wealth, giving businesses the sales boost that can lead them to increase production and take on staff. 

So yes. After the epidemic we might get those helicopters flying, not dropping one-off lump sums to everyone, but dropping them extra spending power by leaving them more in their pay packets. Milton Friedman didn’t suggest helicopter money as policy, but he’d certainly have approved of lowering taxes.

Well, yes and no really, yes and no

Should women be involved in politics, should the political decisions about pandemics be made at least partially, or even equally, across genders? Sure, those who hold up half the sky should be part of what to do when the heavens open and tribulations fall like rain. However.

The however being not about the concept itself but the evidence being used to support the contention here:

That male drivers are much more dangerous to other road users than female ones is a proposition still considered extraordinary enough for an academic study confirming this widely observed phenomenon to have made headlines last week.

Discussing the difference, the authors note, in the journal Injury Prevention, the major gender imbalance in driving jobs and advise policymakers that “reduced risk to others could be a co-benefit from increasing gender equity”.

Possibly, but:

He took special exception to the idea, debated after the 2008 banking collapse, that such catastrophes might be less likely under the Lehman Sisters. Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, for example, said that, were it up to him, “I would take steps to have 50% of women in risk positions in banks.” Christine Lagarde, the former head of the IMF, has likewise argued for increased female representation: “This very diversity also leads to more prudence and less of the reckless decision-making that provoked the crisis.”But guided, as ever, by the science, Raab dismissed such arguments as “playing on stereotypes that paint men as innately gung-ho and women as more risk-averse”.

All men are not more risk loving than all women, the original statement is that on average men are less risk averse - or, if you prefer, more risk loving - than women are on average. In a sexually dimorphic species with such extremely different investments in child production this won’t come as a surprise either.

However, it’s vital to understand the interplay between gender and risk attitudes. An all male environment is, generally and on average, more risk loving, less risk averse, than an all female one.

But mixed gender environments are more risk loving than either.

It is true that Lehman Sisters would have been likely to be less risky than Lehman Brothers. But the actual Lehman we had was a mixed gender environment which turned out to be really rather risky, didn’t it?

Again, this is not to even comment upon our having mixed gender groups in politics or decision making about pandemics or anything else. It is only to point at how the actual findings of science about risk are being missed. If the mitigation of risk taking is our aim then we need single gender groups. We ourselves say that the each half of the sky argument outweighs any extra risks that might be taken. But risk reduction cannot be used as an argument in favour of that gender equality in the decision making simply because it’s not the actual outcome of having the gender equal groupings. Quite the opposite in fact.

Let's not fall for the Nirvana Fallacy

In my logic book I classify it as “Unobtainable Perfection,” but it’s often nicknamed the “Nirvana” or the “Utopia” fallacy. It’s when you criticize something because it’s not perfect, like criticizing the present because it doesn’t reach the perfection of some imagined future world.

People on the Left often compare the present world with a hypothetical future one.  “ Wouldn’t it be nice if all our wants were satisfied, and people behaved better towards each other.” Yes, it might indeed be nice, but it’s not what’s on offer. What’s on offer is this world that might be made better. Not perfect, but certainly better.

People on the centre right usually compare the present, not with the future, but with the past. They don’t ask “Could it be perfect,” they ask “Is it better than it was.” They usually say that it is. It’s better than billions fewer die of starvation and disease, that a tiny fraction of mothers now die in childbirth, or children in infancy. And they tend to favour doing more of what we know works in practice, rather than putting all our eggs in a restructured basket that probably won’t work. 

They try to improve the human condition, but cautiously, and alert for unintended consequences. Popper called this process “piecemeal social engineering,” and compared it favourably with utopian grand designs that have never worked in practice. 

A popular saying is that “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” meaning that if we reject initiatives that might improve things because they fall short of perfect, we risk not making any improvements at all. We do what we can with the limited knowledge we have, and we see if it works in practice. If it does, we do more of it. This real-world approach has achieved more for humanity than any of the grand conceptions of a perfect world, and certainly better than any of the catastrophic failures that resulted when people have attempted to bring one about. 

Most of us have encountered people who want to compare what capitalism, with all its flaws, has achieved in practice, with what some idealized concept of what a perfect socialist society might be like. No. We compare practice with practice or theory with theory. We don’t compare the apples of the real world with the pears of some fanciful world of the imagination.

Perfection might be for the next world, but for this one the target should be improvement.

Well, if you start with an incorrect assumption....

Starting with an incorrect assumption does rather mean that the conclusion reached is going to have problems in being correct. So it is with this from Simon Wren Lewis. Leave aside all his claims about austerity and so on and concentrate just upon this:

…a healthy NHS needs to grow faster than GDP to cope with an ageing population, technological change and other well known factors.

Note what happens according to this, over time the NHS becomes an ever larger part of the economy and, eventually, the economy becomes nothing but the NHS.

Now it’s true that health care is a luxury good, something that we tend to spend more of our incomes upon as our incomes rise but that’s not the claim being made here. Rather, the insistence is that even with static incomes our health care spending should and must rise.

The incorrect part of this being the idea that technological change means an increase in costs. Of course it doesn’t, the impact is the other way around. The only reason to ever adopt new tech is that it’s more efficient than the old way of doing things - that is, for a particular outturn, it’s cheaper.

Another way to make the same point is that new tech increases productivity. Or at least should and if it isn’t there’s something very wrong with the institution trying to apply it.

That is, it could be true that the NHS should gain ever more money because that’s how we want to spend our money. But it’s not true, entirely the opposite is in fact true, that advancing technology means the NHS requires ever more rivers of cash. For the only reason to adopt a new technology is because, for the same outcome, it’s cheaper.