Tim Worstall Tim Worstall

Taking George Monbiot's advice to heart

George tells us that:

The lesson, to my mind, is obvious: if we fail to hold organisations to account for their mistakes and obfuscations, they’ll keep repeating them. Climate crimes have perpetrators. They also have facilitators.

This seems entirely reasonable to us. From the same edition of The Guardian we get this:

More than 8 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever by 2080 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unabated, a new study says.

Malaria and dengue fever will spread to reach billions of people, according to new projections.

Researchers predict that up to 4.7 billion more people could be threatened by the world’s two most prominent mosquito-borne diseases, compared with 1970-99 figures.

The figures are based on projections of a population growth of about 4.5 billion over the same period, and a temperature rise of about 3.7C by 2100.

This comes from a paper in a part of The Lancet network:

…across four RCPs (arranged from the most conservative to business-as-usual: RCP2·6, RCP4·5, RCP6·0, and RCP8·5)

Now that’s a mistake, or obfuscation, that needs to be held to account. As one of us has pointed out in significant detail that RCP 8.5 is not business as usual. It never was anything other than an unlikely edge case just to show extremes. The actions that have already been taken concerning climate change make it - without extreme and significant retrogression - unachievable as even a possible case now.

What might happen if we all party with coal like it’s 1899 is a possibly interesting rumination. But to call that a likely, even possible - let alone business as usual - future is somewhere between that mistake or obfuscation that we must hold people to account for.

Well George, what say you?

Read More
Madsen Pirie Madsen Pirie

Green capitalism

Although many environmentalists say that socialism must be introduced to solve environmental problems, the environmental record of socialist counties has been very poor indeed. Other environmentalists blame capitalism for degrading the environment and call for it to be replaced without specifying what is to replace it.

Green capitalists, on the other hand, say that where capitalism has degraded the environment it is because natural resources such as the atmosphere and the oceans have not been costed. It is the tragedy of the commons that people are motivated to overuse resources that add value but cost nothing. They further say that if externalities are properly costed, people will have an incentive to use them efficiently and sparingly. They support the notion of internalizing these externalities, with many of them calling for carbon taxes and carbon trading so that the pollution costs enter the prices of products, leading people to turn to less polluting alternatives. Green capitalists argue that firms that use fewer resources such as energy, raw materials or water, find this is good for profits as well as the planet.

They further point out that if society through its governments sets targets, capitalist entrepreneurs will come up with cost effective ways of achieving them. But it’s not just governments that are doing this. Surveys report that consumers show more brand loyalty and willingness to pay higher prices for products perceived to be sustainable. This is especially true among Millennials and Generation Z, who currently make up 48% of the global marketplace and have not yet hit their peak spending levels. Firms that want to capture a chunk of that market have a financial interest in producing sustainably.

Entrepreneurs in search of profits are already making renewable energy sources more efficient, and are bringing its costs down. Renewables are technologies, not fuels, and technologies develop and improve, whereas fossil fuels remain as constants. And given the ability to produce more and more electricity from renewables, the development and spread of electric vehicles is offering a green revolution in transport. People need not travel less, but just to travel clean.

Environmentalists assume that if animal husbandry is bad for the environment, people must learn to eat less meat, but the green capitalist’s answer is to produce meat from non-animal sources such as cultured (lab-grown) meats. Capitalists are also applying GM and CRISPR technologies to enable more food to be produced on less land, leaving land free for reforestation, and thereby increasing the world’s tree cover.

The capitalist’s answer to the overfishing of the world’s seas is to insert the discipline of markets into what has been a common resource. Iceland and New Zealand now assign tradable quotas to fishing boats so that they have a commercial interest in sustaining stocks. If a boat hauls in more than its quota of designated fish, they buy quotas from other boats instead of dumping the catch, EU-style, to avoid fines.

When supermarkets, seeking profits, buy cheaper tomatoes from warmer countries rather than pay for expensive ones that need energy inputs to grow them, this has been castigated as “food miles,” but the reality is that they are effectively importing renewable sunshine from abroad rather than requiring energy resources to be expended at home.

The effect of all of this capitalist and entrepreneurial activity is to make a convincing case that protecting the environment does not require the overthrow of capitalism and markets, as many environmentalists demand. Instead it requires the application of them.

Read More
Tim Ambler Tim Ambler

The Merchant of Brussels

We all know the plot of the Merchant of Venice. Antonio needs money in a hurry to finance his global trading ambitions and signs a contract under which Shylock can have a pound of his flesh of his choosing if he fails to repay the loan on the due date. Come the date, his ships are not back. He cannot repay the loan and the contractual text allowed Shylock to select Antonio’s heart. The sub-plot is that Shylock hates Antonio who went to the Venetian equivalents of Eton and Oxford and sees this as an opportunity to wreak vengeance. When Antonio’s friends offer to pay off the loan at many times its value, Shylock refuses. He insists that the contract was freely signed by Antonio and must be implemented to the exact letter.

Clearly it would be ridiculous to suggest that Shakespeare anticipated the Irish Protocol negotiations by 416 years, or that our Prime Minister resembles Antonio in any way, or that the EU are seeking to penalise the UK for leaving the club. Nevertheless, the parallels are there and it is interesting to recall how Shakespeare resolved the irresolvable.

The Irish Protocol was devised to avoid customs posts on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. It may be a small island but the border is longer than that between France and Germany and more difficult to police, although customs border posts worked perfectly well for 70 years from 1923. The idea that reinstating them would infringe the Belfast Agreement is a myth invented by Dublin; nothing in that Agreement envisages Brexit.

So, a Protocol which would allow free trade between the north and south of the island is clearly a good idea especially as the master trade agreement stipulates tariff free trade between the EU and UK. Free trade within the UK, i.e. between Britain and Northern Ireland, was so obvious that it hardly needed stating so the PM affirmed there would be no border in the Irish Sea. Unfortunately Shylock’s clerks could not grasp how Northern Ireland could be part of the EU customs union, observing all its rules and regulations, at the same time as being part of the UK customs union with rules and regulations which were expected to diverge from the EU’s. Tariffs are not the issue; non-tariff barriers are.

Furthermore, the drafting clerks had a tenuous grasp of UK geography. They seem to have confused the Isle of Man, which is not part of the UK, with Northern Ireland, which is. When the PM read the draft Protocol, if he read it at all, the absence of the obvious would not have worried him any more than it worried Antonio.

Given the total commitment of the Merchant of Brussels to the signed text of the Protocol, it is no surprise that suggestions of “flexibility” and “pragmatism” fall on deaf ears. Brussels views rather trivial extensions of detailed matters, such as sausages, as hugely magnanimous and the British negotiators take credit for any crumbs they can get. That approach will not solve the fundamental problem and it was not a route that Portia, an intelligent woman, chose to take. She played Shylock at his own game: he insisted on the letter of the contract, that, no more and no less. So be it: he could take a pound of flesh but not a drop of blood.

So where, in the 63 pages of the Protocol, is there the equivalent of the drop of blood? If that can be found and cause the Protocol to collapse, another could be drawn up to meet the requirements of both the EU and the UK. The negotiators spent weeks looking for that and probably missed it because it is so obvious. We can come to that later.

The drop of blood equivalent arises from the Protocol’s uncertainty about whether Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, or merely involved in a shared customs union. This is a key point because the Protocol sees Northern Ireland as becoming part of the EU customs union but does not claim it is part of the EU.

Some Protocol clauses imply that Northern Ireland is indeed merely linked to, but not an integral part of, the United Kingdom. For example, one of the introductory clauses:

“RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom and will benefit from participation in the United Kingdom's independent trade policy,”

And Article 4 of the Protocol:

“Article 4: Customs territory of the United Kingdom:

Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom. 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. In particular, nothing in this Protocol shall prevent the United Kingdom from concluding agreements with a third country that grant goods produced in Northern Ireland preferential access to that country’s market on the same terms as goods produced in other parts of the United Kingdom. Nothing in this Protocol shall prevent the United Kingdom from including Northern Ireland in the territorial scope of its Schedules of Concessions annexed to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994.”

This confusion about Northern Ireland being fully part of the UK seems to be widespread amongst continental politicians. If one was to take a “pragmatic” view of implementing the Protocol then these matters would be swept away but if one takes the Shylock enforcing the literal approach, as the EU does, then the confusion undermines the very essence of the contract. The Protocol is a contract between two legal entities, the UK and the EU. If Northern Ireland is not an integral part of the UK, it is a separate country and not bound by the Protocol. Note that no Northern Ireland politicians were involved in the original Protocol negotiations, nor the renegotiations since. When I queried this with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland on May 21st, he said it was nothing to do with them; it was purely a matter for London and Brussels.

Whether or not a judge would agree that this issue is enough to void the contract, is debatable. The case is certainly not strong and it may be regarded as academic because the need for a better Protocol is far more important. The relationship these days between Dublin and Belfast is pretty good and it is far more likely that they could not only find a solution but believe they own it. How much loyalty did London imagine Ulster politicians would give whatever Protocol London negotiated if the Ulster politicians were excluded?

At present the DUP focuses on the removal of the present Protocol when its replacement by a workable Protocol of some sort, one that meets the needs of the two parties in Ireland as well as the UK and the EU, is of far greater importance. Northern Ireland being in the two competing customs unions at the same time would be feasible if the UK regulations apply to goods supplied from Britain for consumption in Northern Ireland, whereas EU regulations apply to goods created in Northern Ireland for consumption in Northern Ireland or the EU. The contentious issue has been goods supplied from Britain to Northern Ireland intended for the Republic, or at risk of being consumed there. As it happens, the Republic makes plenty of its own sausages, similar to UK ones but of a different shape. There is minimal, if any, demand for UK sausages in the EU.

This problem could be solved by shipping all goods intended for the Republic, directly to the Republic, and labelling goods intended for Northern Ireland in a way that would make them unsaleable in the Republic, e.g. priced in sterling not euros or marked “For sale in Northern Ireland only”. It should be a matter for EU trading officers to deal with offenders within the EU, not a matter for UK officials.

No doubt Portia could make a better job of unravelling this matter than I have. What should be obvious to the negotiators, but seems not to be, is that the Protocol is fundamentally unfair and will cause serious trouble unless they stop tinkering and replace it with something sensible. By the way, Antonio’s ships did eventually return and he lived happily ever after.

Read More
Tim Worstall Tim Worstall

The good old days are right now - and don't forget it

The Guardian offers a reader question - “Were people happier in the good old days? And when was that?”

To which the correct answer comes in two parts. The first being the good old days - that’s right now. This moment, this instant. We’re unsure of what the future is going to be although we can assume, with pretty good odds, that it will continue to improve. As long as we don’t elect those who will offer us Venezuela, or Zimbabwe, as a societal pathway. Compared to the past though it is now which is good.

We’re richer, live longer lives, have more choices, are, in general, just the generation of our species living highest upon the hog. At levels quite literally beyond the dreams or imagination of those significantly before us.

Just the one example, given the stories about those Canadian First Nations schools in the current news. The claim is of a 3% or so death rate among the pupils. Dependent upon how we count - infant deaths or all youth or just school age - that’s around the current global rate, the UK rate in the year of this specific author’s birth or possibly well under one tenth of the global historical rate.

It is precisely because things have got so much better that those historical numbers currently shock.

The good old days are now.

However, happier is more complex, one correspondent grasping this point:

People had lower expectations and were less bombarded with images of all the other lives they could be aspiring to.

The nub here is that second important lesson of economics, there are always opportunity costs. The true price of something is what is given up to get it. If we have more choices then the price of gaining any one of them is giving up many more of those alternatives.

This is why all those surveys showing that female - self-reported - happiness has been declining to standard male levels over recent decades. That wholly righteous economic and social liberation of women has led to greater choice and thus higher opportunity costs. As women gain those same choices as men therefore happiness rates converge.

There are those who take this to mean that society should regress, to where those opportunity costs are lower and therefore we would be happier. The correct answer to which is that 50% child mortality rates did not in fact make people happier.

We’ll take the vague unease of having so many choices over parents having to bury half their children, thank you very much, we really do think we’re all truly happier this way around.

Read More
Madsen Pirie Madsen Pirie

The latterday Malthusians

Robert Malthus (1766-1834) is very much alive and well and living among us. His 1798 book, “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” made the point that starvation must come because population multiplies geometrically and food supply does so arithmetically. When a nation’s food supply increases, so does its population, until it reaches back again to subsistence and famine. In the future, said Malthus, there would not be enough food to sustain the whole of humanity, so people would starve.

By a coincidence, it ceased to be true the moment he published it because the world was on the cusp of a shift to the mechanized mass-production that characterized the Industrial Revolution’s bridge to the modern world. Those innovations extended to agriculture and expanded food production.

The modern Malthusians have included Paul R Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, published in 1968. It said that the battle to feed the world had been lost, and that in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation. Ehrlich has published many revisions of the book, always maintaining his thesis, but pushing the catastrophe dates forward.

By another coincidence, Ehrlich’s thesis ceased to be true even as he was publishing it. Norman Borlaug was at the time developing the Green Revolution, using high-yielding grains, expanded irrigation, modern management techniques, hybridized seeds, and the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Borlaug was reckoned to have saved over one billion lives, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, two years after Ehrlich’s book came out.

More Malthusians came along in 1972 when the Club of Rome commissioned “The Limits to Growth,” predicting that the future would bring "sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity" (i.e. starvation and poverty). They looked at five variables: “population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources,” and assumed that all of them would grow exponentially, whereas the ability of technology to increase resources would grow only linearly. Critics immediately decried is as “simplistic,” underrating the role of technological progress in solving the problems of resource depletion, pollution, and food production.

The rise of obesity as a major problem has rather put starvation onto the back burner, but latterday Malthusians now stress other reasons why unchecked population increases will bring disaster. These include resource depletion, pollution, greenhouse gases, and even that there will not be enough space for everyone. All of these help to reinforce a Project Fear designed to force people to change their ways.

But along come renewable and clean energy production, electric and hydrogen powered vehicles, lab-grown meats, genetic engineering, CRISPR gene editing and Artificial Intelligence, among others that show the pace of technological advance is accelerating rather than increasing linearly. Modern projections predict the world population to peak at 10 billion, then decline. This is a manageable figure. And it looks as though the modern Malthusians will be confounded in their gloom by the one unlimited resource of human ingenuity and creativity. It will prove them as wrong as their predecessor was.

Read More
Dr Rainer Zitelmann Dr Rainer Zitelmann

Violence is History's Great Leveller

The authors of the classical utopian novels were obsessed with the notion of equality. In almost every design of a utopian system, private ownership of the means of production (and sometimes even all private property) is abolished, as is any distinction between rich and poor. In philosopher Tommaso Campanella’s 1602 novel The City in the Sun, almost all of the city’s inhabitants, whether male or female, wear the same clothes. And in Johann Valentin Andreae’s utopian Description of the Republic of Christianopolis there are only two types of clothing. Even the architecture of the houses is entirely uniform in many utopian novels. Hardly anyone who bemoans “social inequality” would today dream of advocating such radical egalitarianism. Almost everyone accepts that there should be differences in income, but – many add – these differences should not be “too big.” But what is “too big” and what is okay?

The price of equality

Another question that is all too rarely asked is: What would be the price of eliminating inequality? In 2017, the renowned Stanford historian and scholar of ancient history Walter Scheidel presented an impressive historical analysis of this question: The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. He concludes that societies that have been spared mass violence and catastrophes have never experienced substantial reductions in inequality.

Substantial reductions in inequality have only ever been achieved as the result of violent shocks, primarily consisting of:

  • War,

  • Revolution,

  • State failure and systems collapse, and

  • Plague.

According to Scheidel, the greatest levellers of the twentieth century did not include peaceful social reforms, they were the two World Wars and the communist revolutions. More than 100 million people died in each of the two World Wars and in the communist social experiments.

Total war as a great leveller

World War II serves as Scheidel’s strongest example of “total war” levelling. Take Japan: In 1938, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population received 19.9 percent of all reported income before taxes and transfers. Within the next seven years, their share dropped by two-thirds, all the way down to 6.4 percent. More than half of this loss was incurred by the richest tenth of that top bracket: their income share collapsed from 9.2 percent to 1.9 percent in the same period, a decline by almost four-fifths. The declared real value of the income of the largest 1 percent of estates in Japan’s population fell by 90 percent between 1936 and 1945 and by almost 97 percent between 1936 to 1949. The top 0.1 percent of all estates lost even more during this period, 93 and 98 percent, respectively. During this period, the Japanese economic system was transformed as state intervention gradually created a planned economy that preserved only a facade of free market capitalism. Executive bonuses were capped, rental income was fixed by the authorities, and between 1935 and 1943 the top income tax rate in Japan doubled.

Significant levelling also took place in other countries during wartime. According to Scheidel’s analysis, the two World Wars were among the greatest levellers in history. The average percentage drop of top income shares in countries that actively fought in World War II as frontline states was 31 percent of the pre-war level. This is a robust finding because the sample consists of a dozen countries. The only two countries in which inequality increased during this period were also those farthest from the major theatres of war (Argentina and South Africa).

Low savings rates and depressed asset prices, physical destruction and the loss of foreign assets, inflation and progressive taxation, rent and price controls, and nationalisation all contributed in varying degrees to equalisation. The wealth of the rich was dramatically reduced in the two World Wars, whether countries lost or won, suffered occupation during or after the war, were democracies or run by autocratic regimes.

The economic consequences of the two World Wars were therefore devastating for the rich – a fact that stands in direct opposition to the thesis that it was capitalists that instigated the wars in pursuit of their own economic interests. Contrary to the popular perception that the lower classes suffered most in the wars, in economic terms it was the capitalists who were the biggest losers.

Incidentally, the left-wing economist Thomas Piketty comes to a similar conclusion. In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he argues that progressive taxation in the twentieth century was primarily a product of the two World Wars and not of democracy.

Poverty is eliminated peacefully

The price of reducing inequality has thus usually involved violent shocks and catastrophes, whose victims have been not only the rich, but millions and millions of people. Neither nonviolent land reforms nor economic crises nor democratisation has had as great a levelling effect throughout recorded history as these violent upheavals. If the goal is to distribute income and wealth more equally, says historian Scheidel, then we simply cannot close our eyes to the violent ruptures that have so often proved necessary to achieve that goal. We must ask ourselves whether humanity has ever succeeded in equalising the distribution of wealth without considerable violence. Analysing thousands of years of human history, Scheidel’s answer is no. This may be a depressing finding for many adherents of egalitarian ideas.

However, if we shift perspective, and ask not “How do we reduce inequality?” but "How do we reduce poverty?" then we can provide an optimistic answer: not violent ruptures of the kind that led to reductions of inequality, but very peaceful mechanisms, namely innovations and growth, brought about by the forces of capitalism, have led to the greatest declines in poverty. Or, to put it another way: the greatest “levellers” in history have been violent events such as wars, revolutions, state and systems collapses, and pandemics, but the greatest poverty reducer in history has been capitalism. Before capitalism came into being, most of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty – in 1820, the rate stood at 90 percent. Today, it’s down to less then 10 percent. And the most remarkable aspect of all this progress is that, in the recent decades since the end of communism in China and other countries, the decline in poverty has accelerated to a pace unmatched in any previous period of human history. In 1981, the rate was still 42.7 percent; by 2000, it had fallen to 27.8 percent, and in 2021 it was only 9.3 percent.

Rainer Zitelmann is the author of The Power of Capitalism https://the-power-of-capitalism.com/

Read More
Tim Worstall Tim Worstall

We're struggling to understand The Guardian's logic here

We agree entirely that the move to working from home is going to require a change in the planning system for housing. Building the smallest new housing in Europe doesn’t make sense when people are to be working and living in the same place. Further, we can imagine that even the most determined Nimby or Banana (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) could be persuaded that a switch in the built environment from workspaces to living ones is OK.

However:

Proof of widening housing and wealth inequality caused by the pandemic already exists. Price inflation over the past year was driven by owners using savings to get hold of more space, as well as the chancellor’s decision to give buyers a stamp duty holiday (£180bn is estimated to have been added to household savings, with home workers in better paid and professional jobs the least likely to have been laid off or furloughed). Prices of detached homes rose 10% – twice as much as flats – with rural areas seeing the highest rises.

Just for the sake of argument accept that point. The gap between those who own and those who rent is growing and it’s a bad idea. The logical struggle comes here:

More secure and longer tenancies, and a huge increase in the supply of social housing, were desperately needed before; the signs are that ever greater numbers working from home will only intensify that need.

If the thing to be worried about is the divide between owners and renters then why is the solution an expansion of the rental sector?

The correct solution would seem to be freeing the housing market so that houses people wish to live in are built where they wish to live. We can then leave the market to sort out tenancies and size. You know, blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors.

Read More
Madsen Pirie Madsen Pirie

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.

Read More
Tim Worstall Tim Worstall

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?

Read More
Madsen Pirie Madsen Pirie

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?

Read More
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Your subscription has been successful.

Blogs by email