Just a little note on that boy child thing

We note that there’s a complaint about how male focused health care is. Women are simply ignored:

Finally the UK has noticed its rampant sexism in healthcare. What now?

Analysis: acknowledging the shocking female health gap is only a first step – ministers must put money into reversing it

The 50% of men who die with prostate cancer (note, with, not of) might observe the funding concerning breast cancer and emit a little hollow laugh at that.

In many countries men face greater health risks, but not in the UK. A study from Manual, a wellbeing platform for men, has found the UK has the largest female health gap among G20 countries and the 12th largest globally.

Now that is an interesting finding given that the largest gaps against females are found in those places with the greatest equality - the Scandis and Holland. It’s even possible that what is being measured isn’t what they think is being measured.

We’d also suggest that there’s a pretty simple explanation for this:

The inequalities start well before women make it to their doctor’s surgery. Women are routinely underrepresented in clinical trials,

Before the routine use of chemical contraceptives no one really did want to do medical experiments on a woman who was, or might be, pregnant. Which was any woman of fertile age in a sexual relationship. Thalidomide showed the dangers of that. Today the answer might be considered more sexist but still true for all that. “Scientists, would you like to try your new medicaments on a population with wild hormonal swings?” And we think we know the answer “Umm, thanks, we’ll do it on the others first, get to that later. Please.”

It’s even true that drug trials are conducted on volunteers and we’re aware that young men tend to be happy with taking more risk than any other group of the species.

But really irks our bile is that argument about the production of children itself - apposite given the day. Historically women lived shorter (peacetime at least) lives than men simply because of the risks of childbirth. Survive those and as now, lifespans for women were longer but that survival was a risky bet. Death in childbirth is now a rounding error in the mortality statistics - even if they did put Semmelweis in a lunatic asylum for pointing out how to make it so.

And, finally, we get to that point that women do indeed live longer lives than men.

But gender inequality in healthcare runs deep. Recognising, as the government has today, that system-wide changes are needed to tackle “decades of gender health inequality” is a vital first step yet, as Criado-Perez has said, women have been considered less important in healthcare as far back as Ancient Greece.

At which point, sorry, but we disagree with the entire premise here. But then what’s that got to do with the validity of a political campaign, eh?

Bless, Owen Jones has only just noticed

We’re not quite sure whether to applaud here - Owen Jones has noted reality - or hiss given how long it’s taken him.

Public support for lockdown measures is disintegrating - a new approach is needed

Owen Jones

Well, yes. This is, of course, the basis of the Swedish approach. Us folks out here will only put up with restrictions on how we wish to live our lives for so long. So, limit such restrictions to when they are absolutely and wholly necessary. For use of them on the precautionary principle, just in case, will exhaust that willingness and we might in fact really, really, need it at some point.

This must be why so few examinations of how Sweden has done through all of this are performed.

But the point is rather larger and we do wonder whether Jones will be able to recognise the logical connection. It is possible to get the Stakhanovites to storm the workfront - when there is a real emergency. What doesn’t work is that constant exhortation for the greater good at personal cost over time. Effort slacks off. That’s just the way humans work.

Therefore economic systems, entire societies, have to be based for the long term on personal incentives, not that more ephemeral gain to the general good. Again, this is just how humans work, we’ll all put our backs into it for no personal gain when we can see and feel the emergency. In more normal times we’ll all worry more about our own thumbs than the lives of a million Chinese - as the man, approximately, said.

Days, weeks, of constant effort to shore up the dyke, rescue the children from the earthquake rubble? Sure - a decades long struggle to build socialism? Doesn’t work.

Because we’re optimists we’ll hope that Owen Jones is able to make the connection - but it does require that significant optimism.

Costs don't go away you know

The collapse of Bulb Energy - largely through not disposing of wholesale price risk to the speculators in The City - is leading to government carrying some rather large costs:

The cost to the taxpayer of running Bulb, the failed energy supplier, could spiral by £1 billion or more as gas prices hit fresh record highs, according to industry estimates.

The point we want to insist upon being that those costs don’t go away simply because someone else - in this case government - owns it. The idiot price cap means that the gap between wholesale and retail prices is there. Someone, somewhere, has to carry those costs.

This principle is of wider application too. George Monbiot was earlier this week wittering about free health care. The NHS isn’t free, it surged through a cost of £150 billion a year some time ago. UK health care is free at the point of use but someone is still carrying that cost.

The Resolution Foundation is today complaining about how social rents are going to rise with inflation. OK, someone, somewhere, is going to carry the costs of housing 5.5 million people. That we might be talking more of opportunity costs - the rent that could be collected rather than the direct cost of housing provision - doesn’t change matters. If we’re not including opportunity costs then whatever it is we might be talking about it’s not economics. Someone, somewhere, is carrying that cost of providing that housing.

We do not solve cost problems by changing the ownership of something. Dumping something on government does not change those costs. We can - and sometimes most certainly should - change whose wallet lightens to cover certain costs but that switch doesn’t change the amount of those costs.

It’s an important point and given current conversations worth recalling. Costs are costs and changing who pays them is not the same thing, at all, as changing the costs themselves. That second is rather more difficult in fact and isn’t something that - unless we desire to increase them often enough - is achieved by nationalising something. As Bulb is showing. That price mismatch between unhedged wholesale and capped retail costs is still there whoever owns or runs the organisation.

This sounds like an excellent idea to us

The usual suspects are complaining and yet:

In a joint letter to the foreign secretary, the group criticises the rebranding of the UK’s development investment arm, which will see the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) become British International Investment (BII) next year.

“This new strategy and name change appears to repurpose BII as an institution that focuses solely on private-sector investment and profit-making, rather than development goals and poverty reduction,” write the 12 organisations, including Global Justice Now, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod) and Unison.

The last 40 years has seen the greatest reduction in human poverty in the entire history of our species. The cause has been the spread of capitalism and markets across the economies of the globe. Globalised neoliberalism that is. So, we wish to attack poverty - which we do - then we should have more of that. Up with this sort of thing say we.

We would agree with some of the critiques of that system, refute others and disagree with yet more. But we do insist that the one thing the system does, provably, is reduce human poverty. In a manner and with a level of effectiveness that no other system of socioeconomic organisation does achieve.

It’s possible to shorten the argument, Global Justice Now is against it so we’re for it.

Private-sector investment, the pursuit of profit, these are poverty reduction. Not just poverty reducing, they are the very process itself. More please.

Ideological blindness is a terrible thing

Sonia Sodha, in The Observer, wants us all to know that the NHS really isn’t the national religion, that’s just a cheap jibe from Nigel Lawson. We may puff our chests in pride about it, fail to think rationally, but it’s not a religion, oh no.

She also tells us this:

The real story is this. Until 2010, the NHS had historically been given real-terms funding increases of 4% a year on average: not a sign of inefficiency, but of the fact that countries spend more on healthcare as they get richer, cutting-edge health technologies become more expensive over time, and ageing societies have more people who need more healthcare. However, over the past decade, the NHS has received the tightest funding settlement in its history, way below this average.

Health care is indeed a luxury good - meaning that richer folks spend more of their income on it, not that it’s a luxury only for the rich - but rational, rather than religious, observation also brings us to Baumol. Services become more expensive relative to manufactures as a society becomes richer. Because it’s much more difficult to increase labour productivity in services as labour becomes more expensive - labour becoming more expensive being a synonym for a place becoming richer.

This is true but the important thing is what do we do about it? Well, the way to improve productivity is more markets and more competition. This is a known economic result, it’s not some mystique being sprinkled across the debate by neoliberals or anything. Competition raises productivity over time. So, if we’re finding it hard to raise productivity in health care - we are - then we need more competition in the provision of health care. This is not less so because Baumol, or luxury goods, but more so.

But the NHS is indeed that religion, not something to be discussed rationally. A useful proof of that contention being this from Ms. Sodha:

Long-term data show just how efficient the NHS is. We spend significantly less per person than comparable countries such as Germany, France, Switzerland and Sweden. We have far fewer hospital beds a head, way below Germany, France and Austria, and fewer doctors and nurses a head than the OECD average.

Her own link to the evidence takes us to this:

Health and long-term care spending are above average, though hospital beds and the number of doctors and nurses are slightly below the OECD average

Spending more and getting less is known as inefficiency, non-efficiency, not as is claimed, efficiency.

But then that’s a mark of religious belief, isn’t it? Facts and reality have to be ignored, or at least twisted, to fit the extant belief system rather than theories adjusted to fit the universe.

These claims of NHS efficiency are as those American Bible parks where Adam and Eve pet dinosaurs. After all, we know absolutely the Earth was created on Oct 23, 4004 BC. Reality has to fit around that, obviously. To argue with Holy Writ is to be a heretic.

Imagine a world where the climate models are better than the covid ones

As we all know economists only make predictions to prove they’ve got a sense of humour. There is though one thing that economists do in fact get right about their models - probability.

Fraser Nelson over at the Spectator finds that the covid modellers at Sage haven’t grasped this. Those Sage models and results are not adjusted for the probability of outcome, they are instead simply the results from extreme ends of the spectrum of possible outcomes.

We do see exactly the same thing in much of the hyperventilating about climate change. Results from the RCP 8.5 model (A1 FI in the earlier SRES) are what drive all those tales of imminent droughts, London underwater (at the same time too) and the immediate turning of the Earth into Venus. They’re also wrong, in that we know that RCP 8.5 isn’t going to happen and never really was either.

However, we also see folks getting this right even in climate change. Back some years James Hansen decided to model what the carbon tax should be and came up with $1,000 a tonne CO2-e. Immediately folks pointed out that this was not true. His calculation was that if everything went wrong, economic growth was slow, globalisation retreated, we didn’t frack and so turned back to coal as our prime energy source, there were significant positive feedbacks we don’t know about, then maybe and possibly the correct carbon tax could be as much as $1,000 a tonne. The if and the could being very important qualifiers there.

When we include probability - what is the probability of each of the socioeconomic scenarios which drive emissions estimates - then we come back to our more usual range of what that carbon tax should be. As with all other such investigations, ranging from a negative tax - a subsidy to the glories of fossil fuels which make us richer - through to that extreme at the other end, the $1,000. Multiply each outcome by the probability, average out and we get the range we actually use for decision making, somewhere in the $30 to $100 range. As shown by the economists, Nordhaus and Stern.

The estimate must be the averaging of the outcome times the probability. This economists know. This at least some of the discussion about climate change acknowledges. This Sage and covid are entirely ignoring.

Which is why covid modelling is doing such a sterling job in making even economic and climate change estimates look good.

Something of a pity that this basic truth about modelling and prediction is being ignored in the one of the three that requires immediate and significant decision making, isn‘t it?

This could indeed be substantial state aid from the SNP to Gupta

A useful little reminder that just because cash doesn’t change hands doesn’t mean that there isn’t something of economic import going on:

Nicola Sturgeon's government may have broken state aid rules in a deal to sell a steelworks to Sanjeev Gupta

We’re not attempting to judge this particular case, we want instead to use it as an example:

The SNP government bought the site for £1 from Tata Steel, then immediately sold it to Mr Gupta's business Liberty Steel as part of a deal they claim was intended to protect jobs. Ministers agreed to protect Tata from any future clean-up costs for environmental damage to the site.

Ah:

….it is considered that the clause providing the indemnity to Tata Steel may represent State aid, even though no money has, or may ever, change hands."

Well, yes, it could be. For the costs of closing down a site after decades - possibly centuries - of heavy industrial use can be extremely high. That’s why it is often so much more expensive to build on brown- rather than green- field sites. An indemnity against any possible clean-up costs is a significant subsidy. Whether that actually breaches state aid rules we’ll leave to the courts.

The larger point here though being we agree, no cash has changed hands. Yet clearly something of economic import has happened. Which is something we need to consider about government involvement overall.

It may be true that the UK government only - “only” - takes 35% of everything in tax to spend as it, not we, wishes. But the government also imposes burdens through regulation, bans, indemnities and even flat out stupidities. These may not lead to cash changing hands but they weigh upon the performance of the economy just as badly. The true cost of government is thus much larger than the mere cash that is sucked from our wallets.

One estimation over in the US, by the Cato Institute, suggests that the true cost of government is about twice that cashflow. That would be 70% of GDP, of everything, for us and that wouldn’t surprise us as an accurate measure.

Which leads to a suggestion. Why don’t we lift some of that burden off our shoulders by limiting, even reducing, the regulation and non-cash interventions into the economy? Actually have that long promised bonfire of the red tape?

Capitalism doesn't cause death by tornados

There’s an interesting attempt out there to insist that those deaths in the tornados were caused by capitalism. You see, folks were at work, work is capitalism, so, without capitalism they wouldn’t be at work and therefore wouldn’t have died. We’ve seen the idea floated in several places so we might think that it’s an attempt to create a meme - something wildly untrue, a lie even, but which is popular.

Here’s The Guardian version:

They were forced to stay at work as a tornado bore down. Would a union have saved them?

Those who died in an Amazon warehouse in Illinois and a Kentucky candle factory were sacrificed to the altar of profit

Profit, d’ye see? Capitalism.

Because none of them had a union to protect them.

Fight the power etc.

Some 100 people, around and about, died in those tornados. Something like 10% of those were at work. Meaning that 90% were not and having a union or not would have made no difference at all. Nor would capitalism in fact. So, at this level of detail we can reject the idea already. Even if it were all about capitalism, unions, the pursuit of profit and work then it’s only trivially so.

Except, of course, it isn’t about any of those things at all. Work is not something unique to a capitalist system of production. Indeed, given that capitalism and markets are what make modern society so rich - and richer people work fewer hours because leisure has value - we can actually say that given capitalism fewer were at work when the tornados struck than would have been under any other system. After all, the workloads under socialism of feudalism weren’t lighter, were they?

So, no, it’s not true. Capitalism didn’t kill here. Unions wouldn’t have saved. It’s an attempt to create one of those memes. Something lightly and generally believed but which on examination has no truth to it at all.

But then, you know, The Guardian.

Joe Stiglitz appears remarkably unobservant for a Nobel Laureate

Joe Stigltiz tells us that this is vitally important:

Only when they all agree to the WTO waiver will they have done what is necessary. But there will still be more to do, including incentivising the transfer of technology. Only then can vaccine production be adequately ramped up around the world. And only then will we really be able to effectively counter the spread of the virus.

Well, no. It’s not true that vaccine production needs to be ramped up around the world. It is true that vaccine production should be ramped up for the world though. Which is a rather different thing.

To illustrate, there’s no point at all in Cabo Verde, with half a million people, producing its own vaccines. That’s as sensible as suggesting Bristol does and that’s not including Clifton. But that seems to be what is being suggested:

What is needed is for Germany to agree to a temporary exemption from the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property rules. These currently stifle the worldwide production of Covid-19 vaccines and antiviral treatments. If this barrier were removed, more vaccine doses could be produced in, and for, developing countries. That is exactly what the world needs, as the emergence of the Omicron variant is proving, all over again.

What is needed is that vaccines are produced, not where they are produced. And it’s only if the patent on a vaccine is the scarce resource that freeing that patent will increase vaccine production.

From those who actually know their onions in this field patents are not, in fact, the constraint. Anyone who has the ability and capacity to manufacture extant vaccines can gain access to the right to do so. What is lacking is industrial capacity, not access to the patents that is. So, the patent waiver would not solve the problem then, would it?

It’s also interesting the specificity about Germany. That’s where BioNTech is based of course. That Pfizer manufactured and distributed vaccine, part of that programme where Pfizer spent its own money, thinking that taking government cash, with bureaucratic oversight, would slow things down.

So, the actual proposal is that the private property of those folks should be taken in order to produce nothing of value to the vaccine rollout. Except, of course, to the great disincentive of anyone in the future agreeing to spend their own money trying to solve a global problem.

It might be possible to disagree more strongly with this suggestion but at the very least we’d say that this, coming from a Nobel Laureate in economics, is remarkably unobservant as a suggestion.

In Memoriam: Linda Whetstone (1942 - 2021)

We are saddened by the death of Linda Whetstone (1942-2021), a good friend of the Adam Smith Institute and a tireless campaigner and organiser for the cause of a free society and free economy.

In that, Linda took up the work of her father, Battle of Britain pilot Antony Fisher, who in the 1950s, set up the highly influential Institute of Economic Affairs — following advice from the great liberal thinker F A Hayek that liberty is won through ideas, not politics. Knighted under Margaret Thatcher’s government for his work in advancing the ideas of liberty, Sir Antony went on to create the Atlas Network, an institution dedicated to establishing and assisting free-market think-tanks around the globe.The Network has by now grown to around 500 partner think-tanks in 100 countries.

Linda became a board member of the Institute of Economic Affairs and of the Atlas Network, rising to become its chair before going on to become President of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association of liberal-minded scholars and practitioners first created by Hayek in 1947. She still held this office when she died, suddenly, at an Atlas Network forum in Miami on December 15th.

Linda was also a farmer who gave advice to Margaret Thatcher on agricultural policy reform and wrote reports and spoke at events for the Adam Smith Institute criticising the agricultural subsidies system. She bred horses and became Chair of British Dressage, where she was instrumental in the development of the National Championships and Area Festivals.

However, she will be best remembered for her tireless initiatives and effort in helping spread liberal ideas and working with young liberal activists in many countries, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. She developed a CD with key extracts from the work of important liberal thinkers such as Hayek and Milton Friedman, successfully negotiating with publishers to release their copyright for the purpose of public education through this medium. Over 150,000 copies were distributed to over 60 countries. Having access to these ideas — so rarely taught in schools in rich and poor countries alike — brought countless young people their first experience of liberal thought and the arguments to support it. Many of them went on to form their own liberal student societies and think-tanks.

It was Linda who urged me to write, for the Institute of Economic Affairs, Foundations of a Free Society, a short introduction to the liberal mind, which she helped get translated into over twenty different languages including Arabic, Swahili, French, Farsi, Dari and many others. So successful was this enterprise that she commissioned another author to write Islamic Foundations of a Free Society, which again she helped get translated and distributed across the Middle East and North Africa.

Those who knew her will remember her as a no-nonsense person who railed without tiring against the inbuilt conservatism of governments and organisations, particularly those that were supposedly committed to advancing freedom. She was happiest in the company of young people who were driven by ideas and saw no limits on what could be achieved with application and effort.

She leaves in the liberal movement a gap that is impossible for any other individual to fill. And yet, the countless hundreds of new, young ambassadors for freedom that she inspired and developed will carry on her work in different ways but with no less vigour, commitment, kindness and humility.