Some economic findings are simply obvious

Or at least, some economic findings are obvious if one takes a mere moment to think about them. Take this for example:

Wealth gaps are bigger. Black home-ownership rates are under half those of white. Bangladeshi adults have a quarter of the wealth held by white adults on average. With evidence of such inequalities, it’s beyond me how anyone thinks it’s job done.

Wealth inequality is greater than income inequality. Well, that’s not just a common finding it’s one that holds for everywhere, everywhen. But with respect to ethnic disparities in the Britain of today we can and should go further.

Some 35% of household wealth, the thing being measured, is property equity. That people on lower incomes have less of this is not greatly a surprise. The further being, well, we subsidise rents to the tune of some £23 billion a year through housing benefit. Using the Saez and Zucman capitalisation technique this is some £400 billion or so of wealth. That’s £400 billion of wealth largely transferred from richer to poorer - something we don’t include in our calculation of the wealth distribution.

We can and should go further than this too. A lifetime tenancy - often enough an inheritable one, therefore lasting for more than just the one generation - at below market rent as with council, social or affordable housing is also wealth. Except we don’t count it as such when measuring the wealth distribution.

Again, to go further. It’s not just that we are not measuring wealth properly - by including the things we already do to make that distribution more equal - we are also deliberately subsidising people into =not having wealth by our usual standards of measurement. One reason that the poorer among us don’t have housing equity is because we specifically and deliberately subsidise rents so that they don’t attempt to gain any housing equity. This is going to affect the ethnic wealth distribution because, as we’ve already noted, the ethnic income distribution is skewed.

No, we don’t recommend the absence of housing subsidies for the poor. As should be well known we recommend making housing cheaper for everyone. But we would insist that the effect is most definitely there. One reason why the wealth distribution is so skewed is that we subsidise people not to amass wealth by the measurement yardstick we use.

The greatest portion of household wealth is of course pensions and there the situation is similar - we don’t include the effects of the state old age pension. Exactly the thing which by existing reduces the incentive for the income poor to create their own pension wealth.

Why is wealth inequality in Britain so great? Because we have a welfare state which reduces wealth inequality but we don’t count the effects of this. Why is the ethnic wealth distribution so skewed? Because the income distribution is - that welfare state specifically and deliberately reducing the incentives of the income poor to amass wealth in the forms we measure.

That camel that's a horse designed by a committee

This is about a monument to slavery in France:

Setting aside the obvious practical difficulties that a memorial containing such a vast roll-call would pose, this is also a perfect example of how art cannot be devised by administrative bodies. A memorial should be entrusted to the vision of one artist, not determined by bureaucrats. The problem with steering committees and orientation committees is that they’re all too willing to impose their political or ideological agendas onto an artist’s design – which is a threat to the creative freedom that powerful work requires.

It has rather wider application. Change the words specific to art - memorial, art, design - and it’s a useful description of getting anything done. Particularly anything new in either business or product design.

We can even, just for the sake or argument, accept Ms. Mazzucato’s idea that Steve Jobs didn’t really create the iPhone. All the component parts existed, often government funded, all he did was just put them together. Well, yes, quite, Jobs was the one, the driving, tyrannical, force that did put them together. No government nor committee did so nor has done in the 15 years since.

You know, as with the artists and the memorial. Stone exists and has done for some time, so too drafting tables, paper, pencils all the required components. Yet without the individual driving the project there is no memorial, no art.

Which does rather give us our answer to Ms. Mazzucato’s insistence. By definition an entrepreneur is someone who takes extant economic resources to do something not being done by others. Someone who invents a new thing is an inventor, someone who owns an asset that is used is a capitalist, someone who works on the project is a worker supplying labour. The entrepreneur is the vision, the tyrant, that combines them to make it happen.

As with the creation of great art, to be an entrepreneur is a rare skill which is why it is highly rewarded. Whoever and whatever created the assets which are employed in the scheme.

Prince Philip and the power of personal choice

The world marked the passing of The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh yesterday at the grand old age of 99. It truly was the world too, born a Prince of Greece and Denmark he died a Prince of sixteen realms over which quite literally the sun never sets. 

The Prince’s life was an extraordinary one. So much of which was buffeted by world events not of his choice and defined by others. In that respect his titles belie a sense of control that was not his, and is not ours in many cases. But it is his choices that shine out, a reminder that what matters is not what you are given or where you are from, but what you choose to do when you are asked or the time demands that you rise to the occasion.

Born in Corfu as a minor royal of the Greek ruling family to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Philip would see in his lifetime his family’s exile, estrangement, the rise of Nazism, his mother’s incarceration in a mental asylum, her joining a nunnery, her sheltering of Jewish refugees, his sister’s marriage to a Nazi official and her early death in an aircraft accident. His wider family would be forced from office, suffer communist oppression and purges across the continent, fascism again in Spain, and even restoration (as King Felipe and his wife Queen Letizia’s letter to “Dear Aunt Lilibet” attests).

Philip’s formal education began in Germany but left when the German Jewish educator Kurt Hahn (who founded the Schule Schloss Salem at which Philip studied) was forced out of the country and came to the UK — setting up Gordonstoun School with the belief that freedom and discipline were "not enemies."

The education he received was one of practical bulwark against the ‘societal ills’ that Hahn identified as the lack of physical fitness and the declines of: initiative and enterprise, imagination, craftsmanship, self-discipline, and compassion. The Prince’s move to Scotland was by free choice, a brave choice to follow the ideas of the man and an active one to reject the rise of identitarian and national socialist politics driving Germany at the time. 

Britain gained an exceptional man. He came top of the class in officer training for the Navy and saw service throughout the world. Many of the tributes yesterday by Commonwealth leaders began by remarking his first arrival in their countries aboard numerous of His Majesty’s Ships. He saw active service in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific — and was present in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered. 

His service to our Crown and Country, and to a world free from fascism, was by free choice. It reminds me of the exchange between Milton Friedman and General William Westmoreland over whether the US draft should be replaced by volunteerism:

“In the course of his [General Westmoreland’s] testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I [Milton Friedman] stopped him and said, ‘General, would you rather command an army of slaves?’ He drew himself up and said, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.’ I replied, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.’ But I went on to say, ‘If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.’ That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries.”

The Battenbergs were one of Europe’s great mercenary Houses, with many of their number adorned by the crowns of many separate states over the centuries. Prince Philip chose Britain and with it a new name: Mountbatten. This came from his uncle, the Earl Mountbatten, own decision to choose Britain too — service for which Philip’s uncle was rewarded with both the Supreme Allied Command of SouthEast Asia during the war, the last Viceroyship of India after it, and death by the IRA. 

Philip’s choice of Britain multiplied after the war. His correspondence with the young Princess Elizabeth that had begun before the war, survived the many months at sea and at port, became marriage and a lifetime of dedicated service to both the woman and the Crown. His role was to be ever in the spotlight but to ensure he never stole the show. 

A man’s man and a lady’s man the Duke has had his fair share of enjoying the finer things in life. The front page of the Times today carries a picture of the Duke playing polo on a bike at Windsor Great Park catching a woman in a short skirt and a camera in hand off guard gleefully in 1964. The obituary carries a wonderful quote from his cousin Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia of his bachelor days: “Blondes, brunettes and red-headed charmers, Philip gallantly, and I think impartially, squired them all.”

Yet for seven decades the Palace and the Queen have been his paramount choice. Decades were spent standing in her service in driving rain, in snow and sand and at sea, honouring the war dead, patronising charities and famously offering a range of witty (and sometimes condescending) remarks. Little by choice but all by choice at the same time. Family first, family at the heart of every decision. Offered the choice to meet President Trump or to attend the Christening of a godchild, it is telling he chose the Christening. 

Freedom of religion is a practical as well as academic matter in the Duke’s life. Two of his aunts are martyrs of the Orthodox Church, murdered by Bolsheviks. His mother as a nun of that Church is venerated at Yad Vashem in Israel as “righteous among the nations.” He himself converted to Anglicanism in order to reflect his loyalty to his wife as Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

But while choice over belief in the otherworldly is important, the everyday here and now takes precedence in his deeds. It was his choice to use his office and his role to launch the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme that best reflects that he is aware that his title confers the ability to offer advantage to others as much as it did give reward and responsibilities to himself. 

144 countries now operate the scheme started in 1956, six million people in the UK and eight million across the world have a personal link to the Duke via awards — whose focuses on skill acquisition, independent expedition, physicality and volunteerism have clear foundations in the educational thought of Hahn and the wartime experience of the Duke.

The message here is an important one. Pass on and expand opportunities, help others to expand their own horizons, and use what advantage you have to give advantage to others. Doing so is in your own interests, the free exchange of opportunities engenders obligations that provide surety to your own position. Loyalty begotten by kinship. It is a remarkable application of the principle of the monarchical appeal that I think mirrors Smith’s explanation of what we need to deliver prosperity. 

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Constitutional monarchies have a habit of achieving that stability and limiting the excesses of political overreach that enables the tolerable administration and thus the promotion of prosperity. Mauro Guillen of the University of Pennsylvania found that over the 110 years between 1900 and 2010, monarchies had a better record than republics in protecting property rights of businesses and individuals.  

While most of the Royal Family’s politics are kept unknown we do know something of the late Duke’s. In 1984 he told Thames Television what he thought of communitarian ideologies:

“the individual shouldn’t be lost in the bureaucracy of state”

and that

“the consequences of dictatorships… that individuals are there for the sake of the state, and I think that seems to be wrong to me, the state should be there for the sake of the individual.”

He spoke of Sacred Cows, things that you cannot speak about, and he named explicitly the NHS as something that is elevated beyond its status and to the detriment of those that have no choice other than its provision. 

In 1977 the Duke warned in a speech to Radio Clyde that unless a sea change would occur in Britain the declinism that dominated at the time would mean a:

“gradual reduction in the freedom of choice and individual responsibility, particularly in such things as housing, the education of children, healthcare, the ability to acquire or inherit personal property, to hand on commercial enterprises, and the ability to provide for old age through personal savings, and, perhaps most important of all, the freedom of the individual to exploit his skills or talents as suits him best.”

He went on to echo the words of Adam Smith in saying that we should

“trust individuals to pursue their own interests to the benefit of their fellow citizens and the state as a whole.”

The country got a reprieve from statism under Thatcher but it feels like a timely warning today. For decades we’ve lost growing amounts of our incomes to rents thanks to a democratised housing market that favours incumbents over new entrants and which rewards landlordism. My generation is locked out of home ownership, we cannot save for old age, and we’re storing up inequalities of inheritance that’ll be tied to race issues within a decade. This year we saw the Conservatives choose to bow to public pressure to say that taxpayers and not parents should pay for the lunch of kids even when not in school. The NHS, quite literally in the middle of rationing care that left a great many of our countrymen dead, was clapped ahead of the actual nurses and doctors doing all they could to save as many as possible being let down by a system that couldn’t cope. We have higher taxes apparently incoming from a Tory government, and we’ve had Conservatives define what skills and jobs are deemed essential or otherwise.

Perhaps then you can start to understand the Prince through both his actions and his words as a materialist and instinctive conservative. A man for whom institutions are designed to provide stability and loyalty in a virtuous circle but require reform if they’re enforcing the opposite. For whom practical things are done for purpose and (as he wrote in a letter to the IEA) which should be judged against facts and not fashions. And for whom above all else, and from whom is demanded most, is kith and kin. 

It marries well the 1792 cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson (the Duke was a renowned lover of political cartoons, owning several works by the Express cartoonist Carl Giles and opened the capital’s Cartoon Museum) that satirised French and English liberties and emphasised the importance of judging outcomes over intentions.

The individual took a back seat in the final year of his life as we collectively worked to defeat a viral threat, but politicians that are keen to take the credit for the victories while ignoring the losses should be reminded that it was individuals and private businesses that delivered both the literal goods to millions of us and the development of vaccines — and not the state monopolies or rationing services. 

It was our politicians’ jobs to ensure that we had sufficient credit and cash available to us that would enable us freely to avoid interactions with others while those interactions led to deaths. To enable the economy to actively not adapt to a non-normal situation and survive until now when we can have it adapt to changed circumstances. Too much has been lost of the individual choice, right and responsibility, and I worry that a balance has been tipped in the wrong direction with the absurdity of bans on the ability to leave the country without giving due reason. It is upon us all to ensure that as the viral threat recedes, so too wholesale the restrictions on our lives — perhaps even to make the case that a deficit of freedom requires an expansion of our rights beyond what we had before.

Prince Philip’s was an extraordinary life, made up of extraordinary choices but it is all the more remarkable for the fact that he used those choices and circumstances to expand the choices and opportunities of those with fewer and less than himself. With your support we try and do just that too, whether it’s our books and research (the latest of which is very applicable!), our podcasts and webinars, or Freedom Week (applications open on April 12th!). We thank you for that, it changes the next generation’s lives and that means the world. 

My condolences to the Queen, to the whole of the Royal Family, and to the realms’ peoples. We have lost a man who really did get it.

This is the way economic recoveries happen

Covid lockdowns have caused more than a few businesses to crumble - airlines among them. So, what will happen after covid with airlines? This:

MESA, AZ — Avelo Airlines, which launched Thursday at Hollywood Burbank Airport, offers $19 flights to and from Mesa Gateway Airport.

Avelo’s only flight option from Mesa Gateway as of now is Burbank, but the price tag of only $19 after taxes and fees is pretty enticing.

Not that we’re backing, in any manner, this particular adventure into the soaring skies. Rather, that it’s an excellent example of how economic recovery happens.

People who desire to fly still exist. ‘Planes and airports still exist. People capable of flying ‘planes still exist. What might have failed in the recent hard times are particular organisations which employ the people to fly the planes which people desire to travel upon. So, the solution is that new organisations arise to employ the extant people to fly the existing ‘planes to services that revived desire.

That is, the Austrian view of recessions and the recovery from them is at least partially true. Assets don’t disappear, it’s the form of their ownership that might change. Once the hard times are past then entrepreneurs will and do pick up the assets and use them, again, to satiate consumer demand.

And, of course, if no one can work out how to usefully utilise such assets then clearly they’re not in fact assets anyway.

The point being of rather wider application than just short haul jollies of course. Take, just as an example, a business built of the scrag ends of the steel and aluminium industry worldwide which now finds itself desperately short of working capital. No names, no pack drill you understand.

That the organisation itself goes bust will be painful to those who currently own it. Other than that, well, not much. The assets that are worth reemploying will be reemployed. Those that aren’t then we shouldn’t be trying to save them anyway.

Liquidationism as a reaction to recession has a bad name, mostly because people don’t seem to understand that what is liquidated is the current structure of ownership, not the underlying valuable assets.

Here's the difficulty with investing our way out of debt

The IMF tells us how to get out of this problem of there both being a massive debt mountain and also slack in the economy:

The IMF tries to square the policy circle by advocating investment in infrastructure projects with a fiscal multiplier of 1.0 to 2.0, meaning that they pay for themselves through higher GDP growth, and ultimately lower the debt ratio over time.

Well, yes, but does anyone know of a manner of ensuring an actually existing political system makes such investments?

We have a certain logical problem which is that if past governments had been investing only in such a manner then we wouldn’t have a national debt whizzing through 100% of GDP in the first place. For the growth from those past investments would have arrived and paid off the debt.

We’ve also little to suggest that current plans pass such a test. HS2 appears to cost £100 billion by now and that doesn’t even pass its own internal cost benefit analysis let alone anything more general. Or perhaps it should be more directly about greenery, one idea being the mass installation of heat pumps. This would seem to involve “investing” £450 billion for a £3 billion a year reduction in emissions costs. That’s not a set of numbers to pay off the national debt now, is it?

It is conceptually obvious that it is possible to spend now to reap more in the future - that’s how all investment works after all. It is conceptually possible that government can spend money that performs this trick. It is not obvious, to say the least, that politics - that thing which defines what government does - leads to this result in practice.

The answer here - such as there is one other than abandoning the whole idea as unworkable - would be to insist that any such government “investment” pass a rigorous cost benefit analysis. A proper financial one, not just vague hand waving about intangible benefits at some point. For the aim here is to pay off the national debt, something determinedly financial. The problem with this as a solution is that some to many of the things already being spent upon would fail such a test.

That is, we could only know that the government is being serious about investing to cut debt levels when they cancel HS2. Which isn’t, as we know, going to happen. Therefore the idea itself doesn’t work, does it?

In short, politics cannot invest its way out of a wet paper bag - therefore government investment isn’t going to pay off the national debt.

It's so immensely annoying when George Monbiot almost gets there

Monbiot tells us that:

The central premise of neoliberalism is that the locus of decision-making can be shifted from democratic government to the individual, working through “the market”. Rather than using politics to change the world for the better, we can do it through our purchases. If neoliberals even half-believed this nonsense, you’d expect them to ensure we were as knowledgable as possible, so that we could exercise effective decision-making in their great consumer democracy. Instead, the media keeps us in a state of almost total ignorance about the impacts of our consumption.

Given that we are neoliberals we do indeed put our hands up to that prejudice. We’d shade it a bit of course. Even among those who insist that fewer pints must be sunk, less soda pop consumed, everyone does agree that precisely which flavour be consumed by which person is to be left to individual choice, not democratic government. So we all agree, at one end of the possible range, in the liberal ideal.

We neoliberals just disagree about the other end of that range, where is it that individual choice and markets stop working so well and government becomes the solution? We think it extends much further than Monbiot does.

We even run this site and write books and make speeches and run conferences and produce position papers pointing out to the public at large how far that spectrum of market efficiency reaches - to then blame us for how the BBC doesn’t pick up the story is just that little tad unfair perhaps. It’s not us limiting the knowledge available to the public that is.

This has its importance with the specific that George wants to talk about:

Many “marine reserves” are a total farce, as industrial fishing is still allowed inside them. In the EU, the intensity of trawling in so-called protected areas is greater than in unprotected places. “Sustainable seafood” is often nothing of the kind. Commercial fishing is the greatest cause of the death and decline of marine animals. It can also be extremely cruel to humans: slavery and other gross exploitations of labour are rampant.

Only 6.2% of the world’s marine fish populations, according to the latest assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, are neither “fully fished” nor “overfished”, and they continue to decline. “Fully fished” means that fish are being caught at their “maximum sustainable yield”: the most that can be taken without crashing the stock.

This is a central aim of fisheries management. But from the ecologist’s perspective, it often means grossly overexploited.

From the neoliberal’s point of view such stocks are grossly overexploited. Blaming us for the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy moves well beyond unkind to a calumny. We have been, for many years now, pointing out the foolishness of the policy.

Backed by considerable evidence too. The base problem is that described by Garrett Hardin, the commons problem. Revised by Elinor Ostrom who gained the Nobel for her work. What actually is the management system that should be imposed upon a commons that actually needs a management system? As Hardin pointed out - Ostrom’s revision being that in smaller groups of humans communal management also works - it needs to be either government regulation or private property ownership with markets. Which depends - depends upon the specifics of the resource under discussion.

Coase, another Nobel Laureate, pointed out that mining spoils can be privately dealt with - can be, not must be. Widespread air pollution is going to need at least some regulatory interference, a result that conforms to Ostrom.

So, what is it that works with fisheries? Yes to marine reserves, then private ownership of the stocks outside them. We’ve seen this work in situations as diverse as salmon netting off Scottish rivers, orange roughy off New Zealand, the Alaskan halibut fisheries. The Icelandic and Norwegian fisheries are near entirely built upon individual transferable quotas, ITQs, a best approximation to such a system.

The reason these work is because profit is maximised where the fish stock is well - and it is well - above sustainable levels. It being easier to catch fish if there are more of them to catch.

That is, this is not a knee-jerk reaction, this idea that individual choice and action within markets works better than politics, government and democracy. It’s a result of direct observation of the world around us. The CFP is vile and governmental, more market and private property based fishing systems work better.

That is, the only neoliberal knee-jerk that exists is a propensity to believe that “the market” works better than the alternatives. A propensity that we’re entirely willing to see disproven as it is in the case of, say, nuclear weapons, the price regulation of a natural monopoly - it was us who insisted that the national grid and the like needed price regulation - and public goods.

That is, the neoliberal reaction to a proposal that government solve a problem is not to run from the room shrieking in horror, it is to insist upon “Prove it, Sunshine”. Something that doesn’t in fact work with fishing, as Monbiot complains. Which is why we support more market based solutions to the agreed problems of fishing.

A Formula of Diplomatic Etiquette

When my great-grandfather was deputy head of the Royal Irish Constabulary during the troubles at the dawn of the 20th century, he considered Whitehall to be the main obstacle. Were he alive today, his views would probably not have changed. The Northern Ireland Protocol is an example.  It all started from a good idea. The Irish land border is 499 km long, about 10% longer than that between France and Germany. Nearly 300 public roads cross it.  Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, border posts and customs checks existed along it, albeit not very effectively, for the 70 years up to the UK and Ireland joining the Single Market in 1993. Brexit meant that there had to be a border with customs checks between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. As the land border was not really enforceable, moving one in the Irish Sea would be more practical. 

The UK was not too bothered about goods moving south to north but the EU was very exercised about goods moving from the UK into the Republic. So far, so good but, at this point, Whitehall lost the plot. What should have happened was that goods coming into Northern Ireland were demarcated “north” or “south” with the former needing no paperwork or customs formalities and only the latter receiving the customary checks by EU officials.  The problem was that the EU were only prepared to give a free pass to goods originating in Northern Ireland if it remained, in effect, in the EU with all its rules and regulations.  They ignored the reality that Mrs May’s government had already adopted all the EU’s rules and regulations to smooth the transition.  

The EU therefore insisted that shipments from Britain to Northern Ireland would, after all, be required to meet the full bureaucracy.  In effect the EU would annex Northern Ireland and, contrary to Boris Johnson’s “over my dead body” claims, there would be a full not-quite-so-Great Britain/EU border in the Irish Sea. 

The EU’s interpretation of this was enshrined in the Protocol which, in order to get the main deal through, the UK government signed and Parliament endorsed. The EU Parliament has yet to do so which may prove helpful.  “Protocol” is a French word meaning a “formula of diplomatic etiquette”. In other words, it specifies polite behaviour.  Its wording is indeed polite with much emphasis on the need to cooperate, but the substance is all take by the EU and give by the UK.  For example: “Accordingly, nothing in this Protocol shall prevent the United Kingdom from including Northern Ireland in the territorial scope of any agreements it may conclude with third countries, provided that those agreements do not prejudice the application of this Protocol.” (Article 4).  In other words, the Protocol takes precedence over any international deals the UK might do. Some doubt that Mr Johnson, never a man for detail, has ever read it cover to cover. 

VAT is a minefield.  So far as VAT on goods is concerned: “Northern Ireland is treated as if it were a Member State.” (p.5) I am not clear whether this means that the part of the VAT take known as the “VAT-based own resources" is handed over to Brussels as it is by other member states.  On the other hand, Northern Ireland is treated as part of the UK for VAT on services. 

So, having got into this mess, how should the UK now proceed? 

The three alternatives are firstly to tear it up and face the consequences. Secondly, having unilaterally postponed the worst of the paperwork until September, the government could keep doing that until the Belfast government can legally reject the Protocol in 2024. Finally, it could be renegotiated. The first of these would be unlikely to bring the whole Brexit treaty crashing down and it would have the advantage of dumping the hard border problem on the EU. The Good Friday agreement, finalised long before Brexit was envisaged, has nothing to do with the border issues. 

The main problem with the first two is that the UK is developing a reputation for reneging on EU agreements and they would make that worse.  This damages the UK’s international new dealings and ability to pressure others into conformity.  The Protocol allows for independent arbitration but unilateral UK action makes that less likely to be favourable. 

The reality is that the priority for all three options is to restore the UK’s reputation for compliance and create a climate where the UK is seen as the victim, not the transgressor.  The EU has blocked any attempt to make the Protocol workable but this intransigence is not widely appreciated. As it stands, the Protocol is costly for the UK without any financial benefit for the EU.  This lies behind the intransigence: streamlining it has no financial benefit for the EU either. 

There are wider reasons why genuine cooperation would benefit the EU and the Republic of Ireland in particular.  They need to be formulated and marketed but this has not happened. 

Since the current postponement of much of the paperwork was announced in March, the UK government has been entirely silent on the matter.  Discussions may be going on behind the scenes and a secret plan may be evolving but, if so, they are symptomatic of the lack of openness that has persisted since the Protocol was first mooted.  The House of Commons Select Committee has done its best to help but all the evidence to date, bar one, has been about the problems caused by the Protocol, not potential solutions.  

The Protocol requires that the minutes of the meetings of the joint committees remain confidential but that does not prevent the UK publicising the problems, sensible solutions and the obstinance and intransigence of the EU which is failing to cooperate.  This publicity campaign is needed in the USA, the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the EU in particular.

We're always insisting that things must be properly measured

There is Hayek’s point, that the central planner never can quite measure the world accurately enough to be able to plan things properly. We then go on to insist that even if we’re going to ignore that - because some things really do require management even if it cannot be done perfectly accurately - then we do have to devote a certain effort to trying to measure matters as well as we can.

For example, we insist that all measures of the wealth distribution are wrong because they, quite deliberately and openly, ignore the effect upon that wealth distribution of all the things government currently does to change it. We continually point to the manner in which estimates of climate change damage are vastly too high as they entirely ignore what has already been done to avoid those worst future projections.

We seem to have another example here with the Body Mass Index:

Growing numbers of women and men in England with eating disorders are being denied support because they are not considered to be thin enough to warrant it, a leading psychiatrist and other experts have warned in a briefing shared with ministers.

Against the backdrop of a fourfold rise in people admitted to hospital with eating disorders during the Covid pandemic, doctors said body mass index (BMI) was too often used as a blunt measure to decide whether someone should get treatment.

In some cases, women have not received an eating disorder diagnosis despite their periods stopping due to overexercising or restrictive eating.

BMI uses height and weight to calculate a healthy weight score. A normal body weight is considered to be between 18.5 and 24.9, and some doctors consider anything below this a signifier of an eating disorder.

The point here being that at least some people considered “normal” by that BMI are quite clearly too thin to be healthy.

It’s also possible to point out that those considered “overweight” and shading into “obese” - but not “morbidly obese” - by that very same BMI measure have better health outcomes. More years of life, more years of pain and sickness free life.

It would appear that we’ve pegged the definition of normal too low - or perhaps the definition of desirable.

All of which does play to our own insistence on counting things right. Once we do so solutions to the perceived problems become much easier. A more equal wealth distribution is achieved by counting what we already do to gain such. Climate change is at least in part beaten by how we’ve already made wind and solar power so much cheaper than they were. Britain’s obesity crisis can be lifted simply by shifting our definitions.

The current definition of “normal” weight is unhelpfully, often enough dangerously so, thin. So, rebase to normal being what is currently considered overweight, that BMI which is, in fact, healthier. At wihch point, largely enough, we’re done. No need to eviscerate commercial freedoms and civil liberties by banning foodstuffs, or advertisements for them, or supermarket placings. Unless, of course, the power to do those things is the point of the scares about BMI and obesity in the first place.

Reasons for optimism - Space

In 1956 the then Astronomer Royal, Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley, was widely quoted saying, “Space travel is utter bilge.” When the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched a year later, he was asked if he stood by his remarks and replied, “It depends what you mean by utter bilge.” I forgave Sir Richard when he taught me to play croquet three years later, but I’m not sure the space industry ever did.

The conquest of space has enabled us to do things that were impossible or at least very difficult to do on Earth. Communication satellites that beamed television from fixed geostationary orbits were among the first big money-spinners. Although still classified to some degree, military reconnaissance satellites have given each side detailed information about the other, and have probably made the world a safer place. No more dangerous and provocative spy plane flights over hostile territory were needed, since the information could be safely gleaned from orbit.

Satellites have enabled us to gain information about the Earth below them and the universe beyond them. They have enabled us to map pollution and rainforest depletion, to measure icecap shrinkage and expansion, to track illegal shipping activity, and to monitor the progress by rogue states to develop nuclear weapons and missile capability.

The Hubble space telescope has given us more insights into the working of the universe and its early origins than Sir Richard could even have dreamed about when he made his comment 65 years ago. When the James Webb Space Telescope, planned to be launched in October, is operational, it will far exceed the capabilities of the Hubble telescope it will replace. 

Space offers the chance to step up communications by making high speed internet available in most of the world via hundreds of small low orbit satellites. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has already put more than 1,300 of his Starlink satellites into orbit, and plans rapid expansion of his 10,000 existing users. It is particularly useful in remote areas that would otherwise lack connectivity.

Intriguingly, space tourism looks set to become a significant source of revenue as costs and prices come down. The only non-government space travellers so far have been seven multi-millionaires sent by Space Adventures aboard Soyuz launch vehicles to the International Space Station at a cost exceeding $20m per trip. The SpaceX Crew Dragon and the Boeing Starliner have been approved to take private astronauts into orbit and to the International Space Station at much less cost, and even cheaper sub-orbital flights by firms such as Virgin Galactic are planned to give passengers the space experience for about $250,000.

Companies have been formed somewhat prematurely “to exploit the mineral resources of the asteroid belt.” While some asteroids are known to contain large deposits of valuable minerals, the costs of extracting and transporting them is currently far beyond any value that could be gained from such operations. More plausible, perhaps might be the future harvesting of ice asteroids to provide water for future space activities.

We can be optimistic that some means of reaching outer space by means other than rocket power might be developed to achieve dramatic cost reductions. There are proposals to site rail guns up mountain slopes to achieve the requited velocities using ground-based power. The ultimate prize would be the space elevator, with its cars ascending to the geostationary point 22,500 miles high. The materials with the necessary strength have yet to be developed, but they might soon be. It looks as though space will be an important part of human achievement and activity for decades, if not centuries, to come, and will continue to bring us new knowledge and new excitement.

Just how much should those other people be allowed to make?

It’s a standard joke - or observation of human behaviour - that those rich people over there who must be taxed much more are defined as being those earning 10% more than the person making the demand. Perhaps we should expand this to business matters too:

Channel 4 has urged the competition watchdog to broaden its crackdown on Google and Facebook to prevent broadcasters ceding millions of pounds in advertising income.

The Gogglebox broadcaster has called on the Competition & Markets Authority to rein in distribution deals offered by the tech platforms that demand a 45pc slice of the advertising revenue.

Is 45% too much? Channel 4 itself:

£985m total revenues in 2019

£660m total content spend

£492m spend on originated content

If we consider total content spend then Channel 4 charges, to feed its own costs, about a 33% - instead of the 45% of Google or Facebook - margin. If we consider the spend on originated then Channel 4 charges those who make their programmes more like a 50% margin to feed their own cost base. Or, if we wish to be naughty with numbers here, a 100% markup.

Which is too much? Well, actually, our faith in human nature is confirmed whichever the correct number ought to be. For the complaint is coming, as ever, from those making a little less than those they’re complaining about. So, that’s all right then, humans are still humans.