If only Jonathan Porritt knew what a technology is
Jonathan Porritt wants us all to understand that it will be renewables, not nuclear or hydrogen, that will power our future world. Well, maybe, possibly that is the way that it will pan out. We don’t particularly mind either, our concern is that civilisation does get powered and at the least overall cost. Which may or may not coincide with the exclusive use of renewables.
However, buried within the argument is a horrible piece of ignorance:
Rather than being the solution we have been waiting for, this nuclear/hydrogen development would actually be a disastrous techno-fix.
There’s nothing wrong with a techno-fix, indeed there’s everything right with one. For a technology is simply a way of doing something. Capitalism is a technology, it’s a way of doing the ownership and financing of productive assets. Socialism is a technology, a useful way of making sure there are too few productive assets to be owned and or financed. Nuclear is a technology, hydrogen is a technology, windmills, solar cells, dams, they’re all technologies, as is doing without anything other than animal and human muscle power a technology.
That is, every approach to doing anything is a techno-fix. All that Porritt is offering is a different techno-fix and one that we should evaluate on that basis alone. Does this technology fix the problem better than that other one?
We strongly suspect not which is why the scary words he’s offering about the alternatives but the base point still remains. Methods of fixing problems are, by definition, technologies, thus everything is indeed a techno-fix.
It's not that we just randomly oppose everything Harriet Harman suggests
There is often enough thought and reason put into the opposition:
Harman proposed the creation of a British Music Export office
This would be a government office, of course it would - it is a politician recommending it after all.
Most European countries have a designated music export office. That the UK doesn’t is down to “a failure” to recognise that it is a necessity, said Harman.
“DCMS [department for culture, media and sport] needs to be flexing its muscles and recognising the power of these sectors and the importance of public policy in them,” she said.
It is true that French disco had its moment, Belgian punk a hit. We believe that there is such a thing as Austrian rap and in the possibility of Polish rock and roll. Cross-fertilisation abounds, the best Glimmer Twins production is a Russo-Finnish collaboration with an able assist from Nicky Tesco.
Consider these facts. Sweden is the largest exporter of pop music per capita in the world. In fact, regardless of population, Sweden is currently the third largest exporter of music in the world, just behind the US and the UK.
Neither the US nor UK have such an office. As for Sweden:
Running the Swedish Music Export office with a significantly smaller financial support from the government than other comparable countries
And:
Export Music Sweden is a non-profit organization founded by the music industry associations SAMI (artists and musicians) and IFPI/SOM (record companies) and STIM (composers and publishers).
We seem to have one of those examples where less government works better. Not that this greatly surprises as a theoretical result to be honest. The specific industry redoubling that we feel. After all, the major purpose of most popular beat combos is pour epater les bourgeois. Putting the paperclip sniffers of government in charge does seem to be missing the point rather.
There usually is a reason why Harriet Harman is wrong, the intrinsic assumption just being a matter of saving time.
What, exactly, is the problem here?
Something, something, mumble, mumble:
A giant American healthcare group will employ its own doctors when it opens its first hospital in Britain in a move that experts have warned could result in a rush of medics permanently moving to the private sector.
....
Experts warned that the recruitment could add to NHS workforce pressures that reached breaking point during the pandemic. If the model is a success it could mean an exodus of NHS-trained doctors moving permanently to the private sector, they say.
The government takes upon itself the job of planning for, then training, those required to deliver health care in the UK. Whether they then work for the NHS or the Cleveland Clinic wouldn’t seem to matter. They are delivering health care in the UK off the back of the training, no?
Any why would we worry about a non-profit, one that runs the finest cardiology department in the US, in fact one of the finest hospitals in that country, organising some of the health care in London? The very complaint is that it will be British people doing health care for British people in Britain. Which does seem to be a very odd thing to be worrying about.
Reasons for optimism - Ageing
While we can be optimistic that advances in medicine and healthcare could enable us to live longer, healthier lives, we eventually come up against the lifespan barrier that limits the number of years before the body’s deterioration with age finally ends its life. The indications are that many more people will live to pass the 100-year milestone, and some suggest that perhaps 120 years might supplant the traditional biblical “three score years and ten.” But some researchers are looking into ways that might delay, or even reverse, the ageing process to the extent that people might live for hundreds of years, not aged and relatively helpless years, but vigorous, youthful years.
There are several approaches that show promise, including ones that have lengthened the lifespan and apparent youthfulness of test mice in laboratory experiments. These include measures to prevent the shortening, or even lengthen, the telomeres, the same short repeated DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes. They have been compared to the plastic tips on shoelaces that prevent them fraying. Shorter telomeres correlate with ageing, and longer ones with longevity. They become shorter as the body ages and telomerase, the enzyme that repairs the telomeres, becomes depleted and degraded. But there are procedures that can delay or prevent this, and these include taking control of weight, exercise, stress, and diet, and perhaps taking supplements. Studies have shown that, on average, subjects who do this have longer telomeres than those who do not.
A further class of research is looking at senolytics, a class of small molecules that can target senescent cells, the damaged and ineffective cells that increasingly proliferate as the body ages, causing inflammation, and turning healthy cells senescent and leading to tissue damage. When senolytics are used to remove these cells in mice, the animals treated have achieved longer, healthier lifespans, and the research now has turned to repeating these successes in human subjects. Some of the scientists involved in this research have volunteered themselves as guinea pigs to monitor the effectiveness of the process.
The people working along such lines of approach are breaking new ground by attempting to deal with ageing itself, instead of attempting to treat, one by one, the diseases and conditions that come with it. Their outlook is that it is ageing, with its cell and tissue damage as the body loses the ability to repair itself, that leads to the cancers and heart diseases that degrade or terminate lives. By treating ageing itself, their hope is that the body can be kept or restored to an indefinitely youthful state. In short, instead of concentrating on treating the diseases and infirmities that come with age, they are seeking to have the body retain its ability to do that itself.
This raises the prospect of extending the human lifespan to perhaps hundreds of years, which could bring social problems in its wake. If youthful and vigorous older people remain active and in place, this could close off opportunities for advancement and promotion by younger people. And it might retard progress as people loyal to their old ideas do not leave the stage and make way for those prepared to embrace new ones. No doubt solutions to such problems will manifest themselves as people learn and adapt to new circumstances, but it helps to anticipate that developments such as these will bring about a radically different world. The prospect of lives not debilitated or depleted by age is an attractive, optimistic one, the more so if humanity prepares in advance for the changed world it will engender.
We're deeply unconvinced there are too many rich people
Matthew Syed gets a little confused about positional goods:
Turchin argues that resentment among elites is having serious political consequences. He points out that the trappings of social prestige are, by their nature, limited. After all, if everyone had membership of Annabel’s, it wouldn’t be worth having. Status goods derive their cachet from how they exclude others. But this means that as the pool of super-rich swells rapidly, expectations outpace the constraints. This can lead to corruption and, in time, a breakdown of moral order.
That’s to get positional goods the wrong way around. There is always going to be that competition for them. A generally poorer society would have just as many people desiring to bop next to an over-champagned Duchess. A richer one would have just as many with the same lack of ambition and taste.
It is precisely because they are positional goods that the general level of wealth or income makes no difference. For it exactly having that little bit of whatever is defined as unavailable to all which is the point of the exercise in the first place.
Syed uses his misunderstanding to justify this:
There are too many super rich people now, and that spells trouble
When elites grow swollen and opportunities for their children dry up, unrest is inevitable
That could be true of non-positional goods, things that are not, by their very nature, in limited supply. But then if things are not, by their very nature, limited in supply, why would we worry about an increasing number of people who can afford them?
A little linguistic note on market failure
It is entirely true that markets, markets alone and all the time markets, do not solve every problem that either we or society are prey to. The trick is to work out when they are so they can be left alone and when they are not so that some other mechanism needs to be used.
Which brings us to the phrase “market failure”. For example, the Stern Review calls climate change the world’s biggest market failure ever. This is then taken to mean that as markets have failed in this instance then we must, clearly and obviously, move to non-market methods of solving the problem.
This is not actually what “market failure” means. We can take it, if we wish, to mean that this particular construction of markets has failed, so far, to deal with this problem. But a much better translation into colloquial is that “market failure” means “we have failed to have a market in this” rather than “markets have failed with this”.
With this clarification it then becomes obvious what we should be doing - having a market in this. Which is why the Stern Review does go on to insist that the solution to the market failure of climate change is to create a market via a carbon tax. Or, if we prefer, to shoehorn the issue into our currently extant markets.
Given that this is the solution insisted upon it must therefore be true that the meaning of market failure is as we describe. The failure is not of markets, but the failure to have the relevant market.
This also applies more generally. The provision of public goods can be seen as a market failure - given that the logical definition of public goods is something that markets don’t deal well with the provision of this seems reasonable. Often enough, although not always, the answer is the creation of a market though patents, copyrights and trademarks.
So too with externalities. These are things that are external to market processes. Between sometimes and often the solution is to make them into internalities so that markets do deal with them.
We’re entirely willing to agree that markets don’t solve every problem. But we will insist that market failure does, often enough, mean a failure to have a market rather than that markets have failed.
The Polly Toynbee approach to public finance
We can’t help but think that this might not be the very finest manner of running the public finances:
But those deaths are another blow to social care providers. A substantial proportion of the people who have died so far lived in care homes, and they have left empty beds and an even deeper financial hole. Occupancy dropped from over 90% to around 70%, according to Martin Green of Care England, and families are now more reluctant to put relatives into homes. This week, the National Audit Office has warned that 94% of councils will have to cut spending, and social care is the biggest slice of their stricken budgets. On Wednesday, Care England called on the chancellor not to axe relief funds on 1 April: the fund pays (inadequately) towards testing, infection control and extra staff in an industry with an estimated 100,000 shortfall. The Health Foundation says restoring care even to the meagre levels of 2010 would cost £12.5bn.
In other words, a crisis is becoming a calamity.
The claim being made is that as a specific area of public services faces less demand therefore more money must be spent upon it. Because, as far as we can unravel this argument, the less demand requires less spending and that would never do. If public spending were to decrease then where would we all be?
It’s as if the child ageing into leaving home requires the household’s receipt of child benefit to rise.
We would also note this:
A ghoulish figure was hidden away on page 135 of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report on budget day last week. The 125,000 deaths from Covid so far will save the Treasury £1.5bn in state pensions by 2022; savings will continue to be made during all the years those people should have lived. That shocking death toll brings in more inheritance tax revenues, too.
This is a point we’ve been making for a couple of decades now. People dying younger but after retirement age is something that saves government considerable amounts of money. That is, smoking, boozing and being a fatty lardbucket is not a charge upon the public purse but a saving to it. Of course, we should continue to advise people of the limitations they impose upon their own lives by their behaviours. But the insistences upon using taxation, the law (no BOGOFs and all that) and the panoply of state action to force people out of saving the rest of us money is not justified on those costs grounds.
We have to stop using the “but your behaviour costs us money” argument on the grounds that it simply is not true.
It's even possible to agree with Neal Lawson and Compass on occasion
n that very liberal manner we have of reaching across the aisle to seek common ground it is even possible to agree, occasionally, with Neal Lawson and Compass. Who tell us that:
On the other side of the coin are the services that are essential to live a good life, which people don’t pay for directly. These are worth much more to people on low incomes, so they help to reduce inequalities.
This is indeed true. The education of a child costs perhaps £5,000 a year - that’s what government tends to pay, perhaps £6,000 for secondary school - and such a sum is a greater portion of a lower income than a higher. Therefore this being provided, free at the point of use, to all on the same terms reduces inequality. The same is true of what ever value we ascribe to the NHS, to libraries, to the existence of unemployment insurance, the state pension and on and on.
We expect to pay for some necessities ourselves. Food is an obvious example, so everyone must have enough money to afford a nutritious diet. There are other essentials that most of us couldn’t afford on our own. Think of education, healthcare, childcare and adult social care. Here, we ensure everyone has access by sharing responsibility, pooling resources and acting together. Without providing these services collectively through public institutions, we would need vast amounts of cash to meet all of our needs.
We can have the most lovely arguments about which parts of life should be paid for directly, ourselves. Further, about how, exactly - with competitive markets even if state financed for example - those collective actions should be organised. But that some of them will be collectively, even state, organised is obvious.
Which is where we do agree with Neal Lawson and Compass. We do provide a number of these things collectively, through public institutions. They do, by being so provided, reduce inequality.
The problem being that we don’t measure the manner in which they reduce inequality. For our measures of inequality - Gini numbers and so on - are of income or wealth inequality. They are not of consumption inequality, the thing which publicly delivered services reduce.
That they do reduce inequality but that we don;t measure the inequality reduction they provide means that inequality is very much less than it is currently measured as being. Even, possibly, to the point that we don’t need or desire to reduce it any further.
At the very least, given that we do have such public services, we need to measure what inequality is after their effects. Some years ago the TUC essayed an attempt. The market income difference between the top 10% and the bottom was perhaps 12 to 1. By the time we added in taxes and benefits, the effects of public services and so on, the consumption difference was about 4 to 1.
Which leads to the question, well, is that low enough? Are we done now? If not how much more is there to go?
For, of course, we can only decide upon what next in public policy by considering how far we’ve already come, can’t we?
Is the EU Implementing the Irish Protocol Unfairly?
The trouble all started when Dublin, aided and abetted by the EU, conned the UK government into accepting that Brexit might contravene the Good Friday Agreement. This was nonsense for two reasons.
The Agreement was reached in 1998, long before Brexit was even on the horizon. It has no reference to customs posts or a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic – it has nothing to contravene. It does require north and south to cooperate but it takes two to cooperate and there was no cooperation from Dublin about the mitigations proposed by London. Secondly, the UK was relaxed about goods flowing north. It was the EU that required customs posts and all the absurd documentation devised by the bureaucrats in Brussels. The customs posts would have been south of the border and any security issues would have been matters for the Republic.
The UK proposal of a customs border in the Irish Sea for goods that might travel onward to the Republic seemed to Westminster like a small price to pay. It didn't go to Belfast but by then the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had lost its critical role in Mrs May’s majority.
Rightly or wrongly, the 63 page Protocol is now a done deal and must either be honoured or renegotiated. Significantly, the EU presents the Protocol as being a wholly Irish and EU matter and makes no reference to protecting UK interests: it claims “the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland:
Avoids a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, thereby enabling the smooth functioning of the all-island economy and safeguarding the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in all its dimensions;
ensures the integrity of the EU’s Single Market for goods, along with all the guarantees it offers in terms of consumer protection, public and animal health protection, and combating fraud and trafficking.”
The Protocol is administered by a “Joint Committee” (Annex VIII) co-chaired by an EU Commissioner and a UK government Minister (or their nominated officials as alternates). There are six similarly bipartisan “Specialised Committees”.
The basic idea of the Protocol, at least as presented by the UK government, is that Northern Ireland is simultaneously in the UK and EU customs unions. So long as the goods only travel within each, no formalities or paperwork would be required. It was only for goods travelling from Great Britain to the Republic, via the Province, or vice versa, that paperwork and customs checks, equivalent to those between the UK and continental EU, would be required. Article 5 states “Before the end of the transition period, the Joint Committee shall by decision establish the criteria for considering that a good brought into Northern Ireland from outside the Union is not at risk of subsequently being moved into the Union.” Note, as is true throughout the Protocol, the absence of any reciprocal protection for Great Britain. Article 5 seems the nub of the problem.
Unremarked in the media, there seems to have been a bit of fancy word play. The Prime Minister promised there would be no “customs border” in the Irish Sea and, indeed, if goods are certain to stay in the Province, no duties are payable. However, we do have a “regulatory border”:"Agreement being reached is confirmation that there will be a regulatory border in the Irish Sea.
This proposal from Boris Johnson last year was endorsed by Arlene Foster and her DUP colleagues on October 2 2019." Lord Reg Empey December 2020. The warning was in the preamble to the Protocol: “UNDERLINING the Union's and the United Kingdom's shared aim of avoiding controls at the ports and airports of Northern Ireland, to the extent possible in accordance with applicable legislation and taking into account their respective regulatory regimes as well as the implementation thereof,” [my emphasis].
EU officials are using the Protocol’s application of innumerable EU Regulations to goods in Northern Ireland to prevent their import from Great Britain and/or require massive documentation, irrespective of whether they are travelling on to the Republic or not. Furthermore, “Union representatives” have the right to go anywhere they like in the UK and demand whatever they see fit, no matter how ridiculous: “Where the Union representative requests the authorities of the United Kingdom to carry out control measures in individual cases for duly stated reasons, the authorities of the United Kingdom shall carry out those control measures.” (Article 12(2)).
By the end of February, it was clear that the Protocol was not working. Routine goods for the Province were not getting through and supermarket shelves were emptying. The Protocol was far from bringing peace to the Province; it was bringing unrest. The EU representatives on the Joint Committee were refusing to accept the pragmatic solutions offered by the UK. We are told they were all working very hard but no agreement was reached. Secretary of State Brandon Lewis had no choice but to extend the grace period for six months during which paperwork would not be required for goods intended for the Province itself. Contrary to some questions in the House of Commons on 10th March, this deferral is perfectly legal and mirrors similar technical adjustments required by Dublin.
Of course, extending the grace period deferred, but did not solve, the problem, but it does have other advantages. It shows the international community that the UK is pursuing best endeavours in attempting to implement the protocol, but also allows a continued raising of the issues that fall under it. This in turn allows the UK members of the Joint Committee to suggest to the EU that their measures are too onerous and need changing. Examples are available from elsewhere, e.g. the EU relationship with New Zealand.
The Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, Simon Hoare, urged “the Government to desist the narrative of unilateral action and debate, to get back around the Joint Committee table and to make sure that the protocol works.” Duncan Baker asked “Does the Secretary of State agree that fresh minds should be brought to bear on the conundrum? The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, for example, could call on new help and advice from qualified business experts.” The Secretary of State recognised the need for business advice but not the need for fresh minds. After going round in circles for two months, there is little confidence that the same people will find new answers.
One problem is that the Protocol requires the proceedings of the Joint Committee to be kept confidential. The country, or even its MPs, cannot be told what has been discussed and what the obstructions are. We are told that the EU’s Vice-President Šefčovič is trying to be helpful but is being dragged back by his colleagues in Brussels. One wonders why. Senior EU officials are good, intelligent people and there must be reasons why they are behaving in a way that is clearly harmful to the people of Northern Ireland. Does the UK government understand what those reasons are? Surely a step towards resolving them. The current situation is mutually unsatisfactory to all parties.
The Protocol states “The Union and the United Kingdom shall at all times endeavour to agree on the interpretation and application of this Agreement, and shall make every attempt, through cooperation and consultations, to arrive at a mutually satisfactory resolution of any matter that might affect its operation.” (Article 167)
We need the fresh minds of business people with experience of implementing and renegotiating major international contracts, as well as more openness, to let that happen.
It was 245 years ago yesterday...
…That Adam Smith told us how the band doth play. While we’re not on favour of the determination of a legal interest rate at which borrowing may take place or not - for reasons given elsewhere in the chapter - the rest of this advice seems apposite:
The legal rate, it is to be observed, though it ought to be somewhat above, ought not to be much above the lowest market rate. If the legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, was fixed so high as eight or ten per cent, the greater part of the money which was to be lent would be lent to prodigals and projectors, who alone would be willing to give this high interest. Sober people, who will give for the use of money no more than a part of what they are likely to make by the use of it, would not venture into the competition. A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it. Where the legal rate of interest, on the contrary, is fixed but a very little above the lowest market rate, sober people are universally preferred, as borrowers, to prodigals and projectors. The person who lends money gets nearly as much interest from the former as he dares to take from the latter, and his money is much safer in the hands of the one set of people than in those of the other. A great part of the capital of the country is thus thrown into the hands in which it is most likely to be employed with advantage.
From today’s newspaper:
The answer is that without Greensill’s backing, Gupta’s sprawling industrial empire probably wouldn’t exist. Tapping enthusiastically into Greensill’s short-term supply chain financing model, his Liberty Steel outfit has taken over 12 UK plants, including in Rotherham, Newport, Hartlepool, and the Scottish Highlands.
It has also bought distressed steel businesses in Australia and Romania, amassing a £4bn debt pile along the way, £3bn of which is owed to Greensill alone, according to The Sunday Times. In the space of just a few years, Gupta went from obscure trading house to one of the biggest industrial outfits in Europe.
To condense Adam Smith’s advice down, it has never been difficult to find new ways to lend money, nor new people to lend money to. There has always been the occasional difficulty with finding people worth lending to.