The treason of the intellectuals

The phrase “La Trahison des Clercs” was the title of a 1927 book by the French Philosopher Julien Benda (1867-1956). It was published in translation in the US as “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” and in the UK as “The Great Betrayal.” Its theme was that the European Intellectuals of the 19th and 20th Century had abandoned their duty to judge political and military events from afar, bringing the light of reason and understanding to interpret the developments of their day, and had instead chosen to take sides with the less desirable and less humane ideas of their times. Instead of exposing and opposing populism, nationalism, crude racism and the military adventurism that swept across various countries of Europe, they had, in effect, chosen to endorse such developments and become their apologists.

He called it treason because he believed that intellectuals had a duty to uphold civilized values against the tides of unreason that raged across the Continent. Just as we speak of “noblesse oblige,” meaning that those in privileged positions have a moral duty to engage in honourable, generous and responsible behaviour, Benda’s view could be described as supporting the idea of “sagesse oblige,” requiring that those endowed with wisdom, learning and understanding have a similar moral imperative to comment on events in a dispassionate and intellectually honest way, rather than being swept along by the tides of passion that moves those less well endowed with intellect and insight.

We see today a similar abandonment of duty by those in our university seats of authority, and in those appointed to preserve and protect our national institutions and to extend their value and their heritage to the general citizenry of the country as widely as possible.

University vice-chancellors, and indeed their lecturers and professors, have an implicit and understood duty to preserve the status of a university as what Disraeli described as “a place of light, of liberty and of leaning.” They are places where ideas should be expounded and challenged, where values should be subject to scrutiny, and where views, even outlandish views, should be free to strut upon the stage and receive the support or rejection of the audience. They should be a ferment of intellectual challenge and conflict, rather than places where people can feel comfortable and secure listening to the unchallenged echoes of their existing prejudices.

Institutions such as the National Trust, the British Museum and others, have a duty to make widely accessible the heritage that inheres in them, and let people learn from the past and what it has bequeathed to the present. It is not their purpose to judge all of the past by the standards of the present, and to discard or diminish its achievements because it derives from societies that had different values to those we hold today. Humans advance in moral resources as well as in physical ones, and should not denigrate or despise all of the past because it failed to live by today’s higher standards. Past thinkers and statesmen lived by the standards of their day, just as we do.

We expect students to challenge authority; it’s what they do and have always done. It’s how ideas are formed. What we do not expect and should not accept is the treason of the intellectuals who should be upholding and defending their right to do so, but are instead falling supinely before the demands of a few outspoken voices to curb freedom of expression and open debate. As Edmund Burke said, ““Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink…do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

It may be time for those who commit Benda’s “treason of the intellectuals” to be removed and replaced by others who do not.

Illogic and the perils of groupthink in the producer interest

There’s a certain illogic here:

Second, women’s healthcare is under-researched and under-evidenced.

It is possible that is true but we’d insist that it rather conflicts with this piece of evidence:

It is a miracle of modern medicine that the joy of getting pregnant no longer has to be tempered with the very real prospect that you or your baby may not survive the birth. A true marker of human progress is the fact that maternal and infant mortality have dropped dramatically in the UK even as births have become more complicated, with babies getting bigger and women having children later.

As Sonia Sadha goes on to point out the historical figures for au naturelle birth were maternal death rates of perhaps one in 25. Per vivparity that was, not per lifetime. A reasonable guess at today’s number for the UK is 0.012% or so, not that 4%.

We’d not claim that as a result of something being under-researched.

However, on the second point:

Until just a few years ago, this was widely embraced by the establishment: a working group including the National Childbirth Trust, the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, advocated for “normal birth” without medical interventions such as an epidural or caesarian section.

This has certainly been a factor in women and babies being denied life-saving care: at Morecambe Bay, midwives pursued non-medical births “at any cost”, bullying those doctors who tried to intervene. At Shrewsbury and Telford, there was a multi-professional focus on “normal birth” at “pretty much any cost”.

Entirely so. A certain groupthin, a coalescing, among the producer interest, around a specific ideology and set of practices. And damn the consumer interest, this is what we shall impose whether the customers - sorry, patients - like it or not.

Which is the argument against having a monopoly upon the supply of anything, isn’t it?

Is the flying car commercially viable?

A car that can fly has been a dream for over a century. Every few years a prototype is tested, but none ever go into production. One was flown by Christopher Lee in the Bond movie, “The Man with the Golden Gun.” Last week a new prototype was flown on a 35-minute flight between two international airports. It was the Aircar, made by Klein Vision, that uses regular petrol-pump fuel to power a BMW engine, and can carry 2 people at a cruising speed of 106 miles an hour.

Apparently it takes two minutes and 15 seconds to transform it from a car into an aircraft, and can fly 600 miles at a height of 8,200 feet. The company behind it says the prototype has taken about two years to develop and cost "less than 2m euros" (£1.7m) in investment.

It’s great that people in a market-driven capitalist economy will put up money like this to back new concepts in the hope of capturing a lucrative share of the market. The customers out there will separate out those who get it right, by providing them with what they want, from those who fail to do so.

It’s certainly a cool-looking vehicle, but as a commercial prospect I doubt it will fly (so to speak). To fly it you will need a pilot’s licence with all the training that goes into obtaining one. You need an airport and a runway to take off from. The company seems to think the Aircar’s competitors are other light aircraft, but the likelihood instead is that they will be passenger-carrying drones flown and controlled by Artificial Intelligence. People will not need pilot’s licences to travel in them, and they will be able to take off vertically from buildings or parks rather than from distant airports. They will use electricity rather than fossil fuels, and will probably be much quieter. Several prototypes of such vehicles have already been flown or are under development. When they are operating they will reduce road congestion and journey times, and take some of the strain off transport infrastructure.

All credit, however, to the inventors and designers who have produced what seems to be a valid, workable version of the long-dreamed-of flying car. It might work, perhaps cornering a small niche of the light aircraft market. But to play a significant role in mass transit, it might have arrived on the scene too late, drawing on a technology that is about to be replaced by a newer one. As with other market innovations, it will have to face the test of the consumers. Will they buy it?

The glory of those self-solving problems

Time was when the British supermarkets were renowned for the fatness of their margins, the richness of their profits. So much so that the 1990s saw an investigation into what should be done.

BRITAIN'S pounds 60bn supermarket industry is facing another lengthy investigation into alleged profiteering after the Office of Fair Trading yesterday referred the sector to the Competition Commission.

The commission has been given 12 months to report on whether a monopoly exists amongst the supermarkets and whether they exploit that power against the public interest.

Note that was at least the second - memory dims as we go further back than that. No one did very much about it other than study the problem of course. Which meant it was all repeated near a decade later:

CONSUMER watchdog the Office of Fair Trading is to refer the role of supermarkets in the UK grocery market to the Competition Commission for an inquiry.

No one did very much about it other than study the problem of course. Good jobs with fat paycheques in studying.

And today?

Most seriously of all, the deep discounters Aldi and Lidl moved aggressively into the UK market, with a limited range, low cost formula that the big chains struggled to match. The result? Not much growth, and not much in the way of profits.

The fatness of those margins, the richness of those profits, attracted the greed - sorry, enlightened self-interest - of other capitalists. This competed away the richness of those profits, the fatness of those margins.

Which is how capitalist and market economies work.

We do indeed face problems in this vale of tears and yet by getting the basic system right we find that many of them are self-solving. Isn’t that lovely?

There might be a reason George Eustice is at environment

This appears to be coming from George Eustice at whatever the environment agency is called these days. At least, it’s going out over his name which makes him the Minister responsible:

The decision means that companies exporting brands such as Evian, Volvic, Perrier and St Pellegrino will face additional red tape. Last year, about €114m (£98m) worth of mineral water was imported to the UK from the EU, according to the Eurostat agency. Currently any water recognised as “natural mineral water” by an authority in an EU member state is automatically recognised in the UK. From Jan 7, suppliers will have to have their water recognised by Food Standards Scotland, Defra or the Food Standards Agency, or be banned from Britain. British mineral waters have had to apply for recognition in an EU member state before exporting to the bloc since Brexit took effect on Dec 31.

As everyone who has ever bothered to crack open an economics book knows the purpose of trade is to get our hand - or gullets - upon those lovely things made by Johnny Foreigner. Putting bureaucratic barriers in the way of our doing so is therefore not a good trade policy.

Note that no claim is being made that those foreign regulations are no good, inadequate or lacking in some manner. The actual claim being made is that the governments of the remnant European Union are making their citizenry poorer therefore the British government must make Britons poorer in retaliation.

This doesn’t really work as logic now, does it? It being just yet another proof that the correct tit for tat response to repeated iterations of the Prisoners’ Dilemma does not work for trade issues. The actual correct trade policy, even in the face of provocations by those damn’d foreigners, is unilateral free trade. You do whatever you want and we’ll do what is best for our folks here at home.

That best being that the British government should not be putting artificial barriers in the way of Britons enjoying whatever mineral water it pleases Britons to enjoy. Or, to put it the other way around, what in heck is a British minister doing deliberately plotting to make Britons poorer. Doesn’t he work for us?

Still, in that desperate search for a silver lining in absolutely anything at least he’s only at environment, not trade.

Gell Mann Amnesia, Hayek and rare earths for electric vehicle batteries

Gell Mann Amnesia is where you read a newspaper article on your own subject of expertise and note that they’ve managed to entirely cock up the sophistications and subtleties of the area to the point of being wildly misleading to completely wrong. You then turn the page to a piece outside your own area of direct knowledge and believe everything they say.

This always does happen.

Hayek’s point about trying to plan the world is that knowledge is local, no one ever does, or can, gain the necessary information to be able to plan everything in any detail.

Colin Brazier on GBNews gives us an example. This is not to attack this specific outlet, these mistakes are more general that that, this is an exemplar.

The subject is rare earths to make the batteries for electric vehicles. The claim is made that neodymium is used to do so. It isn’t. Nd is used in magnets, electromagnetism means that you use Nd to turn movement into electricity - in a turbine say - or electricity into movement - in an engine. You do not use it in a battery. You might well use lanthanum but that’s a different element, even if it is still a rare earth. The other metals mentioned, cobalt, lithium and so on, aren’t even rare earths.

Yes, this does matter because the supply problem with rare earths - a different one from many other metals - is not going mining for them. This is between relatively and entirely trivial as an exercise. There are plenty of sources, for example, in the waste streams of other mineral activities. We - we meaning any combination of the UK, US, EU and so on, whether separately or in combination - can gain access to mixed rare earths at the drop of a hat.

The problem is that “mixed” bit. The difficulty is in separating the 15 lanthanides out into their individual elements. This requires a plant that costs some $1 billion using the current technology. There is a proposal for a mini-plant to be built upon Teesside which would cost £200 million - and do about a quarter of the job, extracting only a few of them from the mixed source.

If, and we do insist upon that if, there is to be some intervention from the centre into this industry then good logic would suggest it should be in solving that separation problem, not the mining one. Good logic because the mining part isn’t a problem while the separation is.

It is even true that there is a potentially - potentially! - viable alternative technology, vacuum distillation of metal halides, which would solve that separation problem. As it happens the UK is one of only two - and of the two the better one - global centres of excellence in the basics of this technology.

Guess what isn’t being discussed as a potential British solution to this rare earths problem? Which is where that Hayek part comes in. Because the British government does think it would like to solve this problem. It’s willing to spend considerable sums on doing so too. But it doesn’t have the knowledge to have identified what the actual problem is therefore isn’t trying to solve the actual problem.

The Gell Mann part is how - we all do get our information outside our own areas of technical expertise from the media - the general conversation gets things wrong. The Hayek part is how government does. Even when there is a problem to be solved government does the wrong thing.

Which is just another reason why we’re not in favour of that government involvement in the economy, in that idea that planning will be the solution to our economic woes. Observation of that reality outside the window tells us that the information to identify problems is lacking thus solutions never are funded.

Of course, there’s always the opportunity for the government to prove us wrong here but we’ll not be holding our breath……

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.