Evidence versus interpretation
A story Karl Popper told in his “Conjectures and Refutations” tells of the intellectual excitement that gripped Vienna in the wake of the post WWI collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Theories, ideas and revolutionary slogans clashed with each other in a stimulating torrent of intellect. Four theories were among those holding prominence; they were Einstein’s theory of relativity, Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler’s so-called ‘individual psychology.’
The young teenaged Popper (born in July 1902) had friends impressed by the apparent explanatory power of the theories of Marx, Freud and Adler. Popper wrote that to his friends “these theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred.”
Popper relates a personal experience when he had barely turned 17, yet confronted the great Alfred Adler with a case that didn’t seem to fit. Popper reports that nonetheless,
“He found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. ‘Because of my thousand-fold experience,’ he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: ‘And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.’”
Popper spotted that Adler’s theory, like those of Marx and Freud could explain everything because it expressed nothing more than a determination to interpret events in a preconceived way. Because of this there was nothing that could disprove these theories. Everything that happened could be accommodated within them as further ‘proof’ of their universality.
He realized that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was different. It had predicted that during the total eclipse of 1919, two stars near the sun would not be in their expected positions because, if he were right, their light would have been bent by gravity. A team was sent out to observe, and found that the stars were where Einstein had predicted. But he could have been wrong. Einstein’s theory lived dangerously by predicting observations that could have gone otherwise, but the theories of Marx, Freud and Adler did not.
The observed world we experience can lead us to retain, modify, or discard theories according to their abilities to predict what will be observed. This is how scientific progress is made. It might comfort some people to hold to theories that interpret events along preconceived lines, but these theories are by no means scientific, even though their protagonists might talk about the “sciences” of history, society and behaviour. They belong in a separate compartment to that of science.
Into that non-scientific compartment goes Critical Race Theory, along with the other theories that tell us more about the person holding them than they do about the world beyond them.
Well, that didn't take long then
It was three days ago that the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders was insisting that there must be large government subsidy to the building of battery gigafactories. Otherwise, woe is us, this will be the death knell of the British car industry:
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Trades (SMMT) has launched a new Go Fund Me campaign. Except, of course, they’re demanding rather than asking politely for our money as they insist that government pick up many of the costs of their business.
We must all pay for gigafactories and fuel cell plants and rewiring the entire country for battery chargers and on. The correct answer to which is do it with your own money mateys.
We now learn that:
Nissan has confirmed plans to build a “gigafactory” to make batteries for electric cars as well as a new electric car as part of a £1 billion expansion of its Sunderland factory that will create thousands of jobs.
The investment by the Japanese carmaker, its Chinese partner Envision AESC and the government will create 6,200 jobs at the Sunderland plant and its supply chains.
Vast sums of our money, cash from us taxpayers out here, are not required. The capitalists are entirely happy - well, at least some of them are - to spend their own.
We can thus deposit the demand for our wealth into the round under-desk filing cabinet as we always should have done anyway.
Well, that didn’t take long then, did it?
The mythic world versus the real world
Because the real world of actual existence fails to correspond with their world view, many on the Left construct a mythic world in which the things that didn’t happen did, and where the things that did happen didn’t. Joseph Goebbels famously described the ‘Big Lie’ technique he used himself: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’ said, “What I tell you three times is true.” More prosaically, logicians have described it as the ‘argumentum ad nauseam,’ the supposition that simply repeating something somehow adds to its truth content. It doesn’t. But what does happen is that many Left-wingers themselves come to believe the myths.
They believe that UK manufacturing was destroyed under the 1980s Tory governments, whereas manufacturing actually rose by 7.5%. The service sector grew much more, so the proportion of the total economy taken by manufacturing declined. But it grew, not shrank.
The tax cuts of the 1980s were not paid for by the sale of state assets and the squandering of North Sea oil revenues, as the myth has it, they were in fact paid for by the tax cuts themselves. More money was raised for the Treasury from the lower rates than had been collected when they were higher. And the top 10% of earners who had been paying 35% of total income tax saw that rise to 48% of the total. In the real world, as opposed to the mythic one, the rich paid more of their “fair” share, not less.
The UK coal industry had been in decline for decades as North Sea gas replaced coal gas and oil, gas and nuclear emerged as cleaner alternatives to coal’s use in industry. And UK coal had difficulty competing with cheaper foreign coal. In the myth world Margaret Thatcher ravaged the coal industry, but in the real world Labour’s Harold Wilson presided over the closure of more pits than she did. Far from Tory governments “slashing the public services” over the course of the 1980s, spending on them rose by 17.6%. There were cuts to proposed increases, but core services were expanded, not “slashed.”
Precious public assets were not sold off into private monopolies. That’s the mythic world. The real one saw mostly loss-making state industries that needed subsidies turned into successful private companies that paid taxes into the Exchequer, and huge numbers of the general public bought into them when they were floated. In nearly all cases competition was introduced into industries that had never had it before. What Harold Macmillan called “selling the precious family silver to pay the butler’s wages” was in the real world mostly offloading the costly state junk.
Today’s myths are made no less wrong by repetition. It’s simply not true that poor people can only become richer by having wealth taken from rich people. What is true is that both can become richer together if the right policies generate economic growth. Nor is it true that reducing overseas aid harms the economies of poorer countries. It’s reducing trade with them that does that.
The myth of Brexit so prevalent in Islington and BBC circles is that it was the basic xenophobic racism of the foreign-hating British that reared its ugly head, whereas surveys indicate that the Brits are not like that, but made a rational decision to withdraw from what was clearly on its way to becoming a political union they wanted to be no part of.
Ah well, why bother with the real world if you can seek comfort and consolation from the mythic one? As the biographer of Wyatt Earp was told, “Print the legend.”
One of those gaspingly untrue statements
There are indeed problems in this imperfect world, this vale of tears. The price of food in rich countries not really being one of them.
Nor is there anything new about people treating the obesity epidemic as if it is a simple matter of individual willpower rather than complex systemic change. In the rich world, obesity is an economic issue: the less money you have, the less access to healthy food you often have.
As long as we leave aside the spurious claims made by the organic and biodynamic movements (burying dung in a cow’s horn by the full moonlight to improve the quality of the fruit is a religious observance, not a scientific one) this simply is not true.
As ONS points out the average household food bill is around 10% of weekly income. Yes, this varies with household income but it is not true, simply is not, that healthy food is priced out of the range of the poorer while unhealthy food is not. Not unless we’re to take the excessively elitist view that by definition what the upper middle class eat is healthy, the diets of the proletarians are unhealthy.
It may well be true that there is an income gradient to health. Even that diet will have something to do with this. But this is what George Orwell was talking about. It is not the price of food - which is the lowest it ever has been in the entire history of our species - which explains the variance in the healthfuness of diets between the richer and poorer among us.
That is, it may well be a a complex systemic problem but it’s not an economic one.
Growth and happiness
The connection between economic growth and happiness has been called into question many times. Surveys have been conducted that purport to show that people in the UK, and perhaps other rich nations, are no happier now than when GDP was half the level it now stands at. The argument goes that if we are no happier with economic growth, why should we be putting in the effort, risk using up resources, and perhaps polluting the planet, all to no good effect?
There are several caveats to this analysis. The first is that there are no objective measures of a person’s happiness. We cannot hold a hedometer to someone’s forehead and read off their measured happiness in hedons. We have to rely on subjective measures, and typically these are established through questionnaires. A person might be asked which of five categories of happiness they would consider themselves to be in, ranging from miserable as sin to ecstatic with delight.
We cannot judge what their standards are when they complete these surveys. To some extent, perhaps to a considerable extent, it depends on character as well as circumstances. Things that might make one person happy might make another miserable. Secondly, and importantly, the people who fill in the questionnaires now are not the same people who filled them in decades ago. Standards might have changed over time. People might have learned to expect more out of life than did their predecessors, or maybe less. The spread of 24-hour news coverage, mostly concentrating as it does on crimes, follies and misfortunes, might have engendered an air of gloom and foreboding that makes people unhappier than they were without it.
It is also true that many of the causes of unhappiness have changed. People who a century or more ago might have been unhappy because their grandparents starved to death in winter, or because their child died of diphtheria, are less likely to do so today because of the advances that growth has made possible. But these sources of unhappiness might have been replaced by others that concern personal appearance or relationships. Perhaps people will always find reasons to be unhappy, but growth has enabled us to eliminate many of the unnecessary causes of it by helping us to fund the advance of science and medicine.
Other surveys, also subjective, suggest that the level of happiness is less important to people than the direction of it. Adam Smith spoke of “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition,” and Thomas Jefferson wrote of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” not its attainment, but its pursuit. These surveys suggest that people are happier if they are progressing in life than they are if they live in a static society, even if it is a richer one. It seems to be the game that matters, not the quarry.
One thing growth does is to enable opportunity. It brings new prospects for advance and for progress. It not only enables us to remove more of the unnecessary sources of unhappiness, it also makes it more likely that people can hope to better their condition and happily set about improving their lot in life.
Let’s not be beastly to the Brits
Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, joined enthusiastically by the French President Emmanuel Macron, wants to stop individual EU members deciding who can or cannot enter their countries and instead have EU-wide border controls. In particular, the Brits, with the nasty variant they have imported from India, shouldn’t be welcome anywhere without lengthy and expensive quarantines.
At one level, it’s the big countries again insisting that The Project goes on. The EU cannot let member states all do their own thing. This is a political as well as an economic union, and it is darn well going to decide political issues, like immigration policies, centrally. That’s a bit harsh, though, if you are a tourist country like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy or Malta — the latter being the most-vaccinated country in Europe and far beyond. Not surprisingly, they are objecting to the Chancellor’s idea. They want to control their own borders with the non-EU world, and apart from a few places like the Balearics, British tourists are welcome because those countries rely so much on tourist cash.
And there’s the rub. The two biggest travelling countries in Europe are — or were, before all the travel bans started — and the UK and Germany. There are no border controls in the Schengen that covers much of continental Europe, so (legally or not), there is nothing to stop a German travelling to the Riviera or a Belgian taking a holiday in Tuscany. That kind of internal control is difficult or impossible, which means that once the virus enters Italy, France, Spain or elsewhere, it can be spread round the rest quite easily. Lacking that internal control, Merkel and Macron want to conceal their powerlessness by creating outside controls. It’s a policy of doing something, however pointless, to show that you are doing something.
The single border policy plan is bad business to Europe’s tourist destinations. It’s not even good economics for Germany, which before the pandemic employed two million people in travel and tourism, accounting for nearly 4% of its economy. And after more than a year of lockdowns and restrictions, the travel industry needs all the help it can get. So, what’s the idea of keeping out the Brits? To hope that continental carriers prosper at the expense of British ones, just like the hope that Frankfurt will prosper if the EU’s nasty to the City of London? If so, that’s just wrong, and the worst kind of grudge politics.
Of course, being beastly to the Brits plays well in Russia and China, and Angela Merkel thinks she needs Putin’s Nord Stream 2 gas and China’s billion customers. Both are hostages to fortune. She would have a much better friend in Britain.
Sure, our case rates are rising, driven mostly by the Delta variant. But then we’re testing so many people, particularly kids in school. So it is not surprising that we will find more cases than many other countries, including EU ones, who test far less assiduously. And those cases are leading, it seems (though these are lagging indicators), to less hospitalisation and deaths than before — perhaps again because so many of them are schoolchildren. Let’s see what happens when the schools close for the summer.
More than that, nearly 50% of Brits are fully vaccinated. In Germany, the next highest by a long way in Europe, it’s only 37%. And the vaccines are effective — more Brits are dying of Pneumonia and Flu than Covid-19.
Lastly, in the UK there must be a sneaking suspicion that this is the big EU heavyweights just being beastly to the Brexit Brits. A case of “Let’s show them, and EU member countries, that there are penalties for leaving the club. It will discourage anyone from daring to follow. Oh, and there are elections coming up before too long. The economy’s tanked, so a nice bit of foreigner-bashing will go down well.” It’s bad diplomacy, dismal economics, and nasty politics.
Incoherent demands about climate change
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Trades (SMMT) has launched a new Go Fund Me campaign. Except, of course, they’re demanding rather than asking politely for our money as they insist that government pick up many of the costs of their business.
We must all pay for gigafactories and fuel cell plants and rewiring the entire country for battery chargers and on. The correct answer to which is do it with your own money mateys. The original ICE plants and the associated petrol stations were not government planned nor funded and nor should this transition.
More than that there’s an intellectual incoherence here. The demand is that both those battery factories and also those producing the fuel cells must be built. But they’re competing technologies. At a certain level of abstraction the hydrogen for the fuel cells is the lithium battery - they’re both ways of storing electricity and being able to apply it to the motor driving the wheels.
Fuel cells only make sense if green hydrogen becomes a reality - if renewable electricity becomes cheap enough that large scale production of hydrogen from electrolysis is sensible. So, if green hydrogen never does make it - we think it will be that’s an opinion, nothing more - then fuel cells aren’t the answer. But if green hydrogen does make it then we need the fueling network across the country. If we have that we also don’t need the batteries and the electric charging points because we’re using the hydrogen technological alternative.
It’s also true that if we have cheap green hydrogen then the manufacturing of artificial complex hydrocarbons becomes cheap - possibly cheap enough that it is overall cheaper to have a net zero system by making methanol, or petrol even, and running it through the extant network of petrol stations and continuing to use the internal combustion engine.
Another way to put this is that we simply do not know enough about how technology is going to pan out for us to be able to build for that winner as yet. Something which does make it rather hard to plan matters.
But perhaps more importantly here by insisting that we all pay for both technologies, both batteries and fuel cells, then we’re absolutely guaranteeing that government is picking a loser for one or other of the technologies will be superseded by the other. You know, as opposed to the more normal situation where government is only highly likely to pick a loser.
It is exactly when we face such technological uncertainty that we shouldn’t be using government to make the decision. This is a market matter. What will replace the ICE? Even, what will replace fossil fuels as the power for an ICE? We don’t know as yet - so we need to stand back and see, not direct.
Bifurcation - in black and white
In logic the fallacy of bifurcation is committed if an either/or situation is presented when in reality there is a range of options. The mistake is made by the denial of those extra choices. Unlike many fallacies which introduce irrelevant material, this one omits relevant material.
It has been committed in strength by the opponents of Winston Marshall, the banjo player of the group Mumford and Sons. He has resigned from the band because of a Twitter storm by woke leftist agitprop people. He favourably commented on a book that exposed Antifa, an extremist hard left group that advocates violence. They called him a fascist and a Nazi, among other abuse. It was too much for him, since 13 of his relatives were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. He’s quit the band in order to protect his band-mates from abuse, and to be free to express his views without causing difficulties for them.
His abusers were committing the fallacy of bifurcation, sometimes called the fallacy of black and white. It mistakenly supposes there to be only two alternatives when in fact there are several. They said that because he supported an exposé of the extreme left, he must therefore be of the extreme right. Nonsense. He might be a moderate who opposes extremism and violence in general. But there you are. The Woken SS takes anyone who disagrees with them to be a right-wing racist extremist.
The standard line of fanatics is “He that is not with us is against us!” The intent of the fallacy is to force people into being either in favour of their agenda or to admit to being against it. In reality, outside of that black-and-white world, people might support some of their agenda while opposing other parts of it. They might support many of the aims in general, while opposing the hate and fanaticism used to advance them. They might even, who knows, show no interest in it at all, preferring to fill their minds and their time with things more relevant to their own lives.
In 1930s Germany, people faced intimidation and violence if they refrained from giving the straight-arm salute. In modern day USA, people have been bullied, screamed at by mobs, and threatened with violence for declining to give the clenched-fist salute associated with Communism and left-wing fanaticism.
Most bullies regard acquiescence in their bullying as a cue for them to do more of it. When authority figures such as University Vice-Chancellors and Directors of National Institutions surrender to bullying, it encourages the bullies to seek other targets on whom they can enforce their will. A more valid response to the whipped-up hysteria would be to point out that there are vast swathes of life outside the scope of the black-and-white world of the fanatics, and that most of us prefer to live in the complex and colourful world that is, rather than in the narrow and bifurcated world they want it to become.
A Picture of Health
39 Victoria Street
“Secretary of State, I cannot fully express our pleasure in welcoming you.”
“It’s good to meet you too, Humphrey.”
“Your predecessor proved a little difficult to dislodge but we managed it eventually.”
“So I understand, Humphrey. I hope you won’t have to resort to such measures in my case.”
“No, certainly not. Mrs Johnson has assured us you are a thoroughly good egg, if you will permit such a vulgar expression.”
“It’s probably best if we start by taking you through the in-tray. It looks a little full.”
“It certainly is, Minister. I probably should not say this but your predecessor was exceedingly fond of press releases and rather less concerned with reality. We did wonder if he fell on his head while he was training to be a jockey at Newmarket.”
“Yes, I noticed that too. Only last week, you banned the advertising of certain foods on TV even though the scientists told you it would only make a microscopic difference, if any, to childhood obesity.”
“Yes, I know, Minister, but we had to be seen to be doing something.”
“Am I right that the biggest outstanding item is adult social care and that you have had a ready-to-go plan for that for two years?”
“You are correct indeed.”
“May I see the plan?”
“Ah well, I am not sure that would be wise. The PM and the Chancellor have taken it over and we do not know how it now looks. Furthermore, because the plan has to be robust enough to survive future changes in government, the PM wants to discuss it with Her Majesty’s Opposition.”
“I think you are telling me the Chancellor says we cannot afford it.”
“You may have put your finger on the nub. Minister.”
“That’s ridiculous. We’ve been throwing money at everything else, £39 billion on an entirely useless Test and Trace system, for example. And the Scots have introduced their caring for the elderly solution to applause all round. Why don’t we in England just copy theirs?”
“We could not afford it.”
“If the Scots can, why can’t we?”
“That’s because the English pay for what the Scots want. The Scots have 30% more per capita resources than the English to spend on public services because we give them the extra money.”
“Yes, I know about all that. Don’t forget I was Chancellor until Dominic Cummings decided I wasn’t. Joel Barnett, Finance Secretary and also a qualified accountant, devised the formula back in 1978. We’ve had no qualified accountants in the Cabinet since, so no one has been able to work out how to change it.”
“Very interesting, Minister, but it is funded by Robert Jenrick at the Ministry of Housing and neither of you can do anything about it either. You might be able to do something about the NHS, though.”
“Don’t tell me that is beyond help too.”
“Far from it. It is the best nourished part of the state: the NHS percent of GDP has shot up since 2000 and that is before the pandemic. However, you are not responsible for NHS England either because it is a non-departmental public body.”
“So I’m the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care but I’m responsible for neither health nor social care.”
“Yes. I regret to say that is correct. There is, however, one thing I might suggest: you might persuade Sir Simon Stevens to rescind his resignation. It may be too late but now that Hapless, I mean Mr Hancock, has gone, he may change his mind. Lady Harding has been lobbying for the job and that is scaring everyone. Mr Hancock is her greatest admirer, maybe because they both trained as jockeys.”
“I agree that Simon is excellent and we will miss him. So, that apart, there’s not much I can do? My predecessor was always going on about working night and day.”
“That may be because we have one of the greatest numbers, 29, of arm’s length bodies of any government department and yet Mr Hancock added two to their number. Three of the 29 do come under your authority; they mostly deal with public health. We need to talk about that later. 11 are non-departmental public bodies which are not really accountable to anyone although Mr Hancock thought they answered to him – except when he needed someone to blame, of course.”
“Humphrey, you are being unkind. Matt would never have stooped so low.”
“If you say so, Minister. To continue - seven are advisory. They do no harm as nobody bothers about what they have to say. Then there are eight others which we cannot categorise. One of those is the Morecambe Bay Investigation which finished its work four years ago but we have not had a chance to close it down. Another is NHS Improvement which we also need to discuss later.”
“Everyone knows the pandemic showed Public Health England to be absolutely useless. We cheered when, last August, Matt announced he was closing it down. Then it transpired it would transmogrify into the National Institute for Health Protection, Office for Health Promotion and Health Security Agency. Now that Chris Whitty, who has charge of the first two, and Jenny Harries, in charge of the third, are TV stars, Matt had to give them some public presence, I suppose, but might it be that you’ve replaced one disaster by three?”
“Minister, Chris Whitty got to the heart of it when he said ‘Preventing ill health and supporting our communities to live healthy lives is very important.’ Nobel prize stuff that. Meanwhile, Dr Harries explained ‘her ambition to boost public recognition for the vast amount of work that goes into protecting people’s health.’”
“Did I hear that right, Humphrey? She doesn’t want to improve our health, just get us to think they are working hard? All this reminds me of when George Osborne became Chancellor of the Exchequer and announced that the Financial Services Authority was useless (correct) and would therefore be closed. He then panicked and replaced it with the Financial Conduct Authority (equally useless) and the Prudential Regulatory Board which returned the Bank of England to doing what it did in the first place.”
“You have to give the civil service marks for consistency, Minister.”
“You were going to tell me about NHS Improvement?”
“NHS Improvement is another non-departmental public body, responsible for NHS England's independent trusts and the providers of NHS-funded care.”
“Humphrey, you are pulling my leg. If the NHS can’t do that because trusts and providers are independent, how can NHS Improvement do it? And why do we need it anyway?”
“Well, NHS Improvement is now both part of NHS England and not part of it. They each have a Board. Lord Prior and Lady Harding, who else, chair NHS England and NHS Improvement respectively. And Amanda Pritchard, the deputy CEO of NHS England is CEO of NHS Improvement.”
“No wonder Simon Stevens is pushing off. This is a madhouse. I will just announce I am concentrating on ending the pandemic. No one can argue with that. One last thing, Humphrey. Please tell everyone to stop using my private email address.”
“Certainly, Minister. Good luck!”
Homelessness isn't really about housing
As we’ve noted over the years we’re generally not told the entire and whole truth about homelessness. The usual numbers we see - say, claims that 130,000 families were made homeless in a year - are in fact the numbers of people rehoused. That is, the number of people not-homeless as a result of the existence of the welfare state.
This can be viewed either way of course, how terrible that so many need such saving, or phew, isn’t it good that they were so saved? What it isn’t though is a proof that homelessness isn’t being addressed.
Then there’s the other part of the problem:
Ela Sozeri felt hopeful when she was sent to a privately owned hostel in Birmingham, where support staff promised to help get her life back on track. She dreams of one day setting up her own craft business but has been held back by mental health problems and spells of homelessness. Yet her stay soon turned into a terrifying ordeal, which left her and her boyfriend cowering in their rooms in fear.
“When they showed us around, they told us we would get daily contact and support. But we actually didn’t get any [proper support],” she said. “We’ve only had problems here because the other tenants were heroin and crack users. We’re here because of emotional difficulties and having nowhere to live – not for drugs or anything like that.”
Sozeri and her boyfriend were targeted by another couple after they made complaints about prostitution and drug taking in the hostel,
That’s all a problem, entirely so. It’s also not a problem about housing. It’s a problem about drugs, or booze, or mental health.
Which is largely where we are overall about homelessness. There are those sleeping rough, 4,000 to 5,000 on any one night, perhaps 8,000 over the course of a year. There are those at risk, the 130,000, who do get rehoused. But the problem of that rough sleeping, of that last edge of the larger problem, isn’t in fact a problem about housing at all. The existence of more houses wouldn’t solve it - it’s not therefore a problem about houses.
Unlike the US the UK’s remnant homelessness problem is one about addictions and mental health problems, not things solved by buildings.