Time limits on landbanking aren't going to work

Making some move against the idea of landbanking may or may not be good politics. A fairly damning criticism is that it’s not going to work. For a producer of something is going to want to have a stock of whatever it is to last however long it takes to gain new stock of that something.

If it takes 6 months to get steel to make cars from then a car manufacturer is going to want to have a 6 month stock of steel. Or, at the very least, a continual and reliable series of orders at least 6 months long. The more variability - risk - there is to an order not arriving then the closer to the 6 month’s stock, rather than just the order stream, they will decide upon. We’re seeing this calculation right now as car manufacturers do find out more about the time lags and variability of chip supplies. And yes, they are saying that they’ll probably have to hold higher stocks given the increased unreliability of supply.

How long does it take to gain planning permission to build a new development? Yes, sure, the time count from the final and completed application to pass through the system is measured in weeks. But the actual time from the decision to try to build here to gaining that permission to build here is on average some years - 5 years by several estimations.

Therefore builders seek to have a 5 year stock of planning permissions. Given the unreliability of the system in definitely delivering any specific application.

The way to reduce the number of approved but as yet unbuilt houses is to increase the certainty of the system delivering on any specific application and to reduce the total time taken to do so. Builders will then, entirely naturally, reduce the stock they desire to hold.

Another way of putting this is that builders are not trying to manipulate the market by landbanking, they are manipulated into landbanking by the planning bureaucracy. The solution thus lies in the bureaucracy, not the builders.

To reform the world it aids to know the world

Anyone planning to alter how the world works runs into that Hayekian problem of understanding how it does work before those reforms. This being, as his Nobel Lecture points out, something that is difficult for that world is a complex place.

Which brings us to this exhortation in The Guardian from an American professor of design:

….and cobalt will be processed from broken flatscreen TVs, not acid-rinsed from a million tons of rubble.

Well, cobalt tends to be acid rinsed from material already being processed for nickel or copper so we’re not entirely sure what the complaint is. It’s already in the vat, why not extract the second material? But of rather more interest we fear that trying to extract from flatscreen TVs would be an isometric exercise. A great deal of effort to get nowhere.

We don’t claim to know everything about mineral usage, just a great deal. We’re entirely unaware of the use of cobalt in flatscreens and we can’t even think of what it might be used for in them. In batteries, yes, but flatscreens? We’ve even tried checking this and the detailed breakdowns we can find don’t mention it. There is something called Cobalt TV but that’s something entirely different and cannot, possibly, be the mistake being made. It could be us making the mistake of course an if so we welcome any correction - the world is that complex place after all.

If you’re going to plan the world then these sorts of details do matter.

This before we get to the larger errors in the plan. The insistence is that we must have repairable tech and also that we must have a circular economy. No more new mining, recycle everything. But if we are to recycle everything - turn old electronics into the ore from which we make the new - then having repairable tech makes no difference. So, the old part can be extracted and replaced, or the whole machine extracted and replaced. Those broken bits are still going to go into the same crushing, grinding and creation of ore process whether they’re parts or the whole thing. It’s entirely unnecessary to do both in order to reduce that mining of virgin material. Whether to repair or recycle becomes simply a fiscal decision, either and both gain the desired end. Which we use should be decided by which is cheaper for this part or that machine.

The biggest of those larger errors being, of course, that we already have a vast global industry which does exactly this - recycles old equipment for their metals values. One of us even made their living in this field for a number of years. If the value of recycling some old kit is higher than the cost of doing so then it gets recycled. If it isn’t profitable - if value isn’t being added by the process - then it doesn’t. And how else would anyone want such a system to work? Doing what is worth doing and not doing what is not?

After all, none of us are likely to think that scrap metal merchants are going to leave $100 bills on the ground, are we? Or even, even if we agree that the problems detailed exist we still already have our solution - a capitalist and market driven economy already recycles what is worth recycling and doesn’t what isn’t. Most especially in the metals world, the industry with the highest recycling rate of any other, anywhen. Other than that which weathers off the occasional onion dome all the gold ever mined is still being recycled……

Declaring class war

An extraordinary document has appeared from a group at the London School of Economics calling itself “LSE Class War.” It puts forward a series of “demands” which reveal a totally misguided view of what the world is actually like.

Number one on their list is the installation of a David Graeber lecture series to honour the memory of a left-wing and anarchist activist who died last September aged 59. He seems to have been more of a political activist than an academic, helping to establish the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, and enthusiastically supporting Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 election, despite being a US, rather than a UK citizen.

This gesture to honour him is coupled with a demand to cease honouring the ex-LSE Nobel Laureate economist and philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. They want the LSE Hayek Society dissolved “because it promotes free market fundamentalist views which outwardly call for the oppression of working class people.” This is, of course, a total travesty. Hayek’s views have done more to elevate the condition of working classes throughout the world than virtually anyone else’s. Global free markets have lifted billions of people out of poverty, subsistence and starvation.

Oblivious to this, LSE Class Wars wants discussion of his ideas silenced, together with the dissolution of other societies that promote similar views. Presumably this would include the Economics Society and the Conservative Association amongst others. It does not want their ideas simply opposed; it wants them silenced, together with any discussion of them.

They also want the LSE “decolonized,” calling for BAME quotas for the hiring of academics. Lecturers and professors are not to be appointed on academic merit or scholarship, but on skin colour and ethnic background. It’s doubtful whether their idol, David Graeber, would have been appointed under this policy, since it’s unlikely that they include Jews as an oppressed minority.

Their other “demands” include banning people who attended private schools from studying at the LSE. This would certainly alter the ethnic balance there, since most foreign, non-white students were privately educated. It would also alter the LSE’s finance sheet, since without their fees it would probably go bankrupt in short order.

They oppose social mobility, and want the words deleted from the title of the student union’s “working class and social mobility officer.” They say that social mobility means that “only a few of the working class can transcend their class position,” and instead want “all working-class people to rise together.” It seems to have escaped their notice that by attending universities such as the LSE, most people from working-class backgrounds can gain access to middle-class employment. In the real world they would concentrate on removing barriers to social mobility so that more could rise, but in their fantasy class-struggle world they want to prevent that until, in the words of Lewis Carroll’s dodo, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

It would be easy to dismiss them as a tiny, deranged group of fanatics. But the Bolsheviks and the Nazis started as similar groups and went on to stamp out freedom and slaughter millions. The LSE Class War group deserve attention because the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Their document is well worth reading. It is a fascinating study in psychopathology.

Our Health in Safe Hands

39 Victoria Street 

“Humphrey.” 

“Yes, Minister?” 

“I want to develop a reputation for having a safe pair of hands.” 

“That would indeed be a welcome change.  Appointing Amanda Pritchard to succeed Sir Simon as Chief Executive of NHS England is an excellent start.” 

“Thank you.  I believe Lady Harding is now in the running to take charge of all our gas and electricity supplies in the run up to Zero Carbon 2050. Goodbye National Grid.” 

“I understand that there will be the politically appointed overall controller, but I could not possibly speculate as to who that might be, who will ‘help steer the country towards its climate targets, at the lowest cost to energy bill payers, by providing impartial data and advice after an overhaul of the rules governing the energy system to make it “fit for the future”.’ What could possibly go wrong?” 

“Quite right, Humphrey.  Nothing at all. Saving our NHS is far more important than protecting our energy supply.” 

“Indeed, Minister. Amanda Pritchard has worked in the NHS since she left Oxford nearly 25 years ago and her father was the Bishop of Oxford.  Thus our two national religions entwine as one.” 

“And you tell me that, apart from doling out the money once a year, she doesn’t really have anything to do.” 

“Correct. We have taken all the requisite steps to ensure that the Chief Executive is not over-burdened.  The hospitals are now mostly independent foundation trusts with their own governance, GPs have always been independent contractors and we are turning over the rest of the front line to Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) which, as you know Minister, are the 40 something independent partnerships linked to local authorities and dealing also with social care.” 

“Yes, that’s all in my predecessor’s Health and Care Bill which I seem to have been lumbered with.  A right old dog’s breakfast. Amanda has always been a manager in the NHS so excluding any responsibility for medical and care practices is not so daft.  Presumably she has charge of all the administration?” 

“We have been over this before, Minister, but legal, IT and business services are all outsourced to arm’s length bodies and we ourselves make the decisions on pay and staffing.” 

“That is also daft, Humphrey.  Now we are going to have all these local ICSs, why don’t they just pay the market rates in their own areas to get the staff they need?” 

“We have a National Health Service, Minister, and the unions would not like that at all. It would be a pay code lottery. We deal with the nation’s health, not with individuals.” 

“I expect you will tell me that our management of adult social care is not so much ‘safe hands’ as ‘hands off’.” 

“Yes, indeed, Minister.  We have a strict policy of non-interference.  We have been under pressure for some years to come up with a policy for adult social care, or a green paper, or something like that but, as Macbeth put it so neatly. ‘anticipation is better than realisation.’”  

“Yes, Macbeth was good on social care and I gather my predecessor had similar views. When the Treasury insisted, at the outset of the pandemic, that he reduced the pressure on hospital beds and the cost of social care, he solved both at a stroke by shipping all the bed-blockers, infected by Covid in the hospitals, out to care homes which speedily freed up beds there too.  Brilliant.” 

“Possibly, Minister, but it did incur a degree of odium.  Our policy of non-interference is far safer.  The local authorities have to deal with social care and receive financial support from the Ministry of Housing. The more affluent citizens pay for themselves.  We are not even contaminated by a single arm’s length body though we do provide a junior minister to express concern and sympathy on the Today programme when called upon to do so.” 

“Well, I’ll tell you where it does not cut the mustard, Humphrey, and that’s jabs, the pingdemic and travel quarantine. None of those make any sense to me.” 

“It is possible that our briefing has been inadequate, Minister. If something is self-evidently stupid, like insisting on self-isolation when the person pinged has had both jabs, we either say we are following the science, or provide an utterly irrelevant response, such giving our world-leading vaccination programme time to complete or proof that the test and trace system finally works or mentioning the ladies BMX gold medal.” 

“I took a lot of incoming last week, Humphrey, about making the French quarantine because of a few, and declining, Covid cases in La Réunion. At least, that’s what Dominic Raab said on the Today programme.  I’m all for sticking it to the Frogs but that does seem to be taking it too far.” 

“We are only following the science, Minister. The UK Biocentre advised it because France has a higher level than us of the Beta variant. They need time to study it and its resistance to vaccines.” 

“That’s piffle, Humphrey.  They’ve been studying the Beta variant since it emerged in South Africa last October so they must know all they need to know by now.  Furthermore, its prevalence in Metropolitan France is very low and a lot lower than Spain.” 

“I fear you are correct, Minister.  The truth is that we were put under pressure to do this by the Home Office.” 

“The Home Office?  What on earth does it have to do with them?”  

“It’s the migrants.  The Home Office is very embarrassed by all these migrants crossing the Channel in rubber boats.  They’d like to sink the boats and make them swim for it but they have to show compassion, pick them up and take care of them until some time in the next decade when they can be arsed, sorry Minister, find the resources to consider their asylum applications.” 

“I know all that but I don’t see the connection with Covid testing.” 

“The Home Office gave the French £114M to curb these crossings in the five years to 2020 and we’ve now promised them another £55M.  All that’s happened is that the numbers crossing have escalated and the French rubber boat business is soaring. I believe the manufacture of rubber boats, with our help, is the only growth sector in the French economy. No doubt the French coastguards have to push them off the beaches to make room for more.” 

“That’s a shocking thing to say, Minister, I am sure the French government is fully cooperating in their usual manner.” 

“The whole thing is a nonsense because asylum seekers are supposed to remain in the first safe country they reach and France is certainly safe.  Come to think of it, the whole population of La Réunion is under 900,000 and as that’s part of France they could send them there.” 

“Yes, I suggested that but my opposite number at the Home Office said it would be considered divisive.  We need another means of annoying them and especially drawing attention to their vaccination incompetence.  It would be safer, legally speaking, to play the health card.” 

“I take it that’s the joker?  Very droll, Humphrey, and the French are unlikely to see the humour.” 

“Indeed, indeed.  A safe pair of hands never drops the ball and the safest way of doing that is never trying to catch it in the first place.” 

In praise of price gouging

Of course there should be a look at what is happening in the shipping sector.

Shipping costs from Asia have surged in recent months, with the price of a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Rotterdam rising to over $13,000 from about $2,000 last November. There have been ever larger rises in the cost of getting goods into the UK, eroding businesses’ margins on imported products and leading to price rises.

The surge has been driven in part by pandemic-related bottlenecks at ports, but several businesses told The Telegraph they believe some shipping companies are effectively price gouging.

Price gouging is desirable.

“The shipping companies are profiteering from the Covid pandemic,” he added. “The UK government along with the other larger global economies must act together to insist these costs are controlled to a manageable level.”

So is profiteering desirable.

The Competition and Markets Authority is considering the complaints heard by The Telegraph ahead of a decision on whether to launch a full investigation. A spokesman said: “We are aware of increases in the cost of international shipping and have received reports of market issues and allegations of collusion and price fixing – all of which we are taking seriously. As such, we welcome additional information and evidence of any alleged breach of competition law.

Collusion and price fixing - or to be accurate, collusion in price fixing - is not desirable.

The investigation, the look at, should therefore be attempting to distinguish between the two.

This applies to the price system in general, not just shipping but let us use this current example. The general economic shutdown and subsequent boom during reopening has led to shipping costing a different amount than it did before. Prices of shipping should thus change. This is how a market system allocates that scarce resource - here, shipping capacity - across the alternative possible uses of that scarce resource.

This is not just how the system does work it is also how it should work. It now costs more to get something from China. That then changes the calculation of what should be got from China. As opposed to somewhere else, or produced domestically, or done without altogether. This is not an error, it’s the very point of the price system itself.

Price gouging is thus to be welcomed as it’s that vital part of the fine tuning of our world. Who produces what, where? That some accustomed to the current set up don;t like these changes is unfortunate but also the point. Those changes in prices are the message that they should be doing something else. Reality has changed so, therefore, so too should their actions.

If some use these fluctuations to collude and therefore by cartel force up prices and their profits this is not desired. Those found to be doing so should be both uncovered and punished. If any are of course.

Which brings us back to the original point. Yes, fine, investigate. If there is evidence of price gouging then this is evidence of how the system is supposed to work and nothing need be done. Nothing should be done either as this is how said system is supposed to work. That balance of supply and demand has changed therefore prices should. If there is evidence of collusion then punishment should righteously be meted out.

The purpose of the investigation is therefore to ascertain which is happening - not, not at all, to return prices to their previous levels.

Meddling in our lives

There is a mindset within the Department of Health and Social Care that should not be there. A group of people there, perhaps most of them, seem to think that it is their job to make people live as the Department’s personnel think they should live, rather than as people might choose to live. They use both punishments and incentives to bring this about.

The punishments they advocate, and sometimes secure, are things such as taxes on sugar and fizzy drinks and minimum pricing on alcohol. They want people made to feel bad about exercising their own eating and drinking preferences by requiring calorie counts on foods and in restaurants and pubs. The idea is to make people sufficiently guilty that they will no longer enjoy themselves when they do what they want to do instead of doing what the Department wants.

They seek bans on the advertising of what they call “junk” foods, ones that contain more fats and sugars than they would have people eat. In particular, they seek to stop advertising that might be seen by young people, so they try to secure laws that limit the times at which it can be shown. They sought, and still seek a blanket ban on the promotion of what they regard as unhealthy foods, and used a definition that would ban advertising the traditional foods that counties and localities take pride in, food such as Cumberland and Lincolnshire sausages, Cornish pasties, or Melton Mowbray pork pies.

There is scant evidence that advertising bans would be effective in changing behaviour. Estimates suggest that the ban on advertising the so-called “junk” foods to children might make a caloric difference equivalent to about one doughnut every three months.

The incentives, as opposed to punishments, they propose include discounts on clothes for those who can show they meet healthy eating targets, though it remains unclear how such records could be kept without intrusive surveillance into people’s lives. It is also unclear whether ten percent off T-shirts would lead people to avoid putting on weight more than the known drawbacks of obesity already do.

Obesity is indeed a problem, but these are not the ways to address it. The claim that curbs on freedom are justified because of the costs that would otherwise fall on the taxpayer is specious. If the aim were to save taxpayer funds, shorter lifespans would achieve far more savings on state pension payouts. It is not and never has been about money; it is about power. It is about using the power of the law to control what other people do and how they might live.

It is not an attitude that belongs in government, and it should be removed. Government may well advise us and publish information that enables us to make our choices with greater knowledge, but when it makes those choices for us, it steps over a line that should not be crossed in a free society.

Perhaps we should do this, yes

A demand so shameless in its self interest:

Eurostar chief demands airline tax to help save rail link to France

Sorry, what?

Damas does not support the idea of a similar ban on airlines flying to destinations served by Eurostar. “If you do not want to ban, but give an incentive, it is very easy,” he says “If you just work with the taxation system. If you take just £1. Take £1 more in taxing fuel for aircraft, and take that £1 as a reduction in access charges on the railway.”

That is, you must tax my competition in order to subsidise me.

It is not because this is a French company that the correct answer is that Anglo Saxon Wave. It’s because this is a demand that is entirely shameless in the effrontery of its naked self interest.

Sadly international business relationships rarely do use that two word phrase that so commonly follows the “Yer what?” question.

At which point perhaps we should in fact give in. That £1 tax on all flights between Folkestone and Calais. And much good may it do them.

A significant error in Ed Miliband's demands about climate change

Leave aside the more general background concerning climate change and consider just this point from Ed Miliband:

This is not simply failing to protect us from the biggest long-term threat we face; it’s economically illiterate too.

The case for investing now is not just clear as a question of intergenerational equity, it’s also the only conclusion to draw from a hard-headed fiscal analysis of the costs and benefits. The Office for Budget Responsibility tells us that the costs of acting early are surprisingly small relative to our national income – in the central scenario, an average annual investment in net terms of just 0.4% of GDP between now and 2050.

Meanwhile, we know that inaction is entirely unaffordable, leaving massive costs of climate damage racked up and left for future generations.

This assertion is wrong because it’s economically illiterate.

It’s assuming static technology and the truth is that we live in a world where technology - and the prices for the different variations of it - changes.

Again, stay within the logical structure Miliband is using. There are costs in the future to climate change. There are costs today to avoiding that future. If technology - and therefore those avoidance costs - is static then yes, it could be true that action now is desired. But if technology is changing then this equation changes. It is possible - possible only - that the reduction in costs of the avoidance by delaying a year is greater than the damages from the delay as the price of the necessary technologies declines in that year.

For example, it is said that the costs of solar power decline by 20% a year. Alternatively that they have declined by 80% in this past decade. Well, OK, so imagine that we’d carpeted the country with solar panels a decade ago or waited until now to do so. The cost of the move to solar power would be 80% lower through that decade of delay. The costs of the damages in the future through that delay would be?

We do in fact know, or at least can estimate, those climate damage costs of delay. A decade back solar power was not price competitive even adding the social cost of carbon to the fossil fuel alternatives. This is why those amazingly high feed in tariffs. Therefore the gain from the delay caused price reductions is greater than the costs from said delay.

The point here is the logical one, that doing everything now is necessary - or even desirable - just is not true. The prices of those fossil fuel alternatives are changing. Therefore the optimal amount of them is changing too. We’ve even a very large report explaining all of this in detail, the Stern Review. The very place that Mr. Miliband oft claims to gain his proof for the necessity of action from. We suggest he goes read it again with perhaps more attention to detail this time.

Does the spread of mobile phones indicate a rising need for personal communications?

To ask that question is to betray a certain Forrest Gump-like innocence. For clearly that’s not what has happened. Instead we’ve found - or developed - a new technology to meet an extant human desire or need. That is, the spread of an activity, or manner of achieving something, can be because of one of those technological developments rather than any change in human desires. Therefore proof of the spread cannot be taken as an increase in the need:

A decade ago, the emergence of mass food banks in the UK could genuinely be described as shocking. The image of families queueing in their local church for a box filled with pasta and beans has not only since been normalised, it has spread.

This does not simply mean the number of food banks has grown in recent years – there are now more than 1,300 such places in the Trussell Trust’s network, compared to fewer than 100 in 2010, as well as hundreds more independent ones – but also that these have opened the door for other types of donation centres, each set up by community groups and charities in response to growing need.

Food banks are a technology, for all methods of organising something are a technology. They arrived in Britain after the turn of the century. It is not logically sound to assume, or as above insist, that the spread is due to increasing need. It could be, note could be, that we are now able to meet an extant need or desire.

Which is what we think it is. One advantage of that increasing speed toward the grave is that memories and experience are long enough to recall what it used to be like. The British welfare system always did have holes in it. Payments sometimes did get delayed - we directly and specifically recall an 8 week wait for unemployment benefits that happened to one acquaintance.

That is, food banks are a solution to the efficiencies of the state run welfare state. At which point the insistence that they must be nationalised seems more than a little odd. Why would we want to put the solution into the hands of those who caused the original problem?

So, just what is ethical fashion then?

The Guardian tells us that cheap, or fast, fashion is unethical. The reason being that those working in the factories are making less than some think they should be making. This strikes us as being remarkably obtuse about ethics.

We bow to no one in our insistence that of course the consumer should express their preferences. If a label claiming “sustainability” or “ethical” adds to utility maximisation then not only go for it if you wish to, you should go for it. And yet:

In 1970, for example, the average British household spent 7% of its annual income on clothing. This had fallen to 5.9% by 2020. Even though we are spending less proportionally, we tend to own more clothes. According to the UN, the average consumer buys 60% more pieces of clothing – with half the lifespan – than they did 15 years ago. Meanwhile, fashion is getting cheaper

Clearly this process is making us, us here, richer. We are gaining more - much more - for a smaller portion of our income. Clothing poverty was, after all, a real thing. “Sunday best” is now just a phrase and one that we expect to drop out of the language as the actual experience - of having just the two sets of clothes, workaday and that Sunday set - rolls on to being a century and more old.

We’d also essay a supposition. Those collarless shirts that have been so popular these past few years. An older phrase for them is “grandad shirts” when shirts were made with detachable collars. So that one could wear the same shirt for several days but with a clean collar each one. A generation before that there were also detachable cuffs. Both shirts and the washing of them were expensive. Or read old novels, the phrase “fresh shirt” and the putting on of it. No one writing now would emphasise that for it’s assumed rather than the event it used to be.

So, our experience is better. What about those factory workers?

Their research suggested that the textile factory in Izmir received just €1.53 for cutting the material, sewing, packing and attaching the labels, with €1.10 of that being paid to the garment workers for the 30-minute job of putting the hoodie together. The report concluded that workers could not have received anything like a living wage, which the Clean Clothes Campaign defined, at the time the report was released, as a gross hourly wage of €6.19.

The Clean Clothes Campaign has some very odd ideas about what a living wage is. In Turkey they seem to think that it’s 120% or so of the average national wage. Well, OK, maybe that is the income required to gain the lifestyle that the campaign thinks all should live at. It rather becomes an ethical question as to how to get there, doesn’t it?

At which point, Paul Krugman:

.... the wages earned in one industry are largely determined by the wages similar workers are earning in other industries....(...)...Second, the link between productivity and wages is thoroughly misunderstood. Non-economists typically think that wages should reflect productivity at the level of the individual company. So if Xerox manages to increase its productivity 20 percent, it should raise the wages it pays by the same amount; if overall manufacturing productivity has risen 30 percent, the real wages of manufacturing workers should have risen 30 percent, even if service productivity has been stagnant; if this doesn't happen, it is a sign that something has gone wrong...(...)...It is a fact that some Bangladeshi apparel factories manage to achieve labor productivity close to half those of comparable installations in the United States, although overall Bangladeshi manufacturing productivity is probably only about 5 percent of the US level. Non-economists find it extremely disturbing and puzzling that wages in those productive factories are only 10 percent of US standards.

Those numbers are a little old but the points still stand. Wage rates are set across an economy, not by individual factory. Krugman again:

But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

Those textile factory jobs are better than a life staring at the south end of a north moving water buffalo. Which is why people voluntarily take them. This biggest advertisement for the process being Bangladesh, the country most reliant upon the schmutter trade. Yes, wage rates are low by our standards. They’re also double what they were a decade back and quadruple those of the turn of the century. As one of us put it in somewhat salty fashion, this does actually work as a method of reducing poverty.

Those Third Worlders are becoming less mired in destitution. We benefit too. Perhaps that second shouldn’t matter ethically but it is the vital ingredient that makes the process self-supporting. That we gain is the feedback that keeps the development cycle going.

Which gives us two very different possible ethical approaches. To purchase less but more expensively, thereby paying those living wages to whatever small number of people is required to produce that restricted consumption. Or, when passing that shop of £1 t-shirts, looking at that screen of 50 pence bikinis, buying the second and the third selection because why not aid the poor?

We insist that the ethical choice here is the hyperconsumption of fast fashion. As we’ve been known to remark, ethics require that we buy those things made by poor people in poor countries. For who wouldn’t - or perhaps who shouldn’t - prefer to make entire countries rich?