Folk don't value things that don't have a value to them
A little bit of basic human nature here. We - or perhaps the greener type of environmentalists - can squeak all we like that the rainforests are unpriceable, beyond mere monetary value, priceless in fact. That it’s not in fact us either living in them, chopping them down or not doing so means that our evaluations of their worth are meaningless.
It’s whatever value is ascribed to them by those interacting with them that matters. And if, just as an example, you are trying to live on $600 a year’s worth of consumption - about right for much of central Africa - then clearing that next acre of forest for a few crops of maize looks worth doing, whatever the effects upon water levels in New York harbour next century.
To stop the clearance, to preserve that priceless forest, it’s necessary for that acre to be worth more as forest than maize. And worth it to the individual standing there about to make that decision to slash and burn or not. On the entirely logical grounds that the slash and burn decision is being made by that individual thus it’s the incentives faced by that individual that determine which way the decision goes.
The president passed tough pro-environment legislation, jailed ivory smugglers, kicked out illegal loggers but, crucially, also allowed businesses land for sustainable activities, including palm oil production and legal logging as long as processing was done in the country. This attracted criticism from the purists who want no interference with nature.
“To save the forest, you have to be able to exploit the forest,” White, now 57, said. “We have to encourage the private sector, only by giving the forest value will people then ‘value’ it. It is all about management.”
Yes, obviously.
This idea that we need to value, in monetary terms, the environment around us is not some excresence of late stage capitalism nor an irruption of neoliberalism. It’s a simple observation of human nature. The money is just the method of counting, the underlying point is that people will do what benefits them, in their view. So, to preserve that environment it needs to be worth more to those there, at that time and place, than not.
Forests will be preserved where they’re worth more to the local peasantry than a few years of runty corn. Which means that late stage capitalism, all that irrupting neoliberalism, of course. For that’s the way that forests to gawp at are worth more - because everyone’s off doing indoor work, no heavy lifting - than a subsistence diet for a family.
It’s not because capitalism that we put a money value on the environment, it’s that putting that value upon it provides the justification for the economic development which capitalism - uniquely - brings about.
The UK already doesn't subsidise fossil fuels
We will, as sure as eggs is eggs, have someone popping up to shriek that Britain must stop subsidising fossil fuel consumption:
Global fossil fuel subsidies almost doubled in 2021, analysis finds
Support amid huge industry profits is a ‘roadblock’ to tackling climate crisis, says International Energy Agency
It is, quite obviously, an odd thing to do, subsidise fossil fuel usage if you’re trying to reduce fossil fuel usage. So, we shouldn’t be doing that, equally obviously.
Global public subsidies for fossil fuels almost doubled to $700bn in 2021, analysis has shown, representing a “roadblock” to tackling the climate crisis.
Despite the huge profits of fossil fuel companies, the subsidies soared as governments sought to shield citizens from surging energy prices as the global economy rebounded from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Most of the subsidies were used to reduce the price paid by consumers.
It’s that last sentence which is important here.
We’ve had, as a major theme here for many years, an insistence that how you count what you count matters. Further, to understand what is being counted you’ve got to delve into the details - otherwise you’ll be making all sorts of idiot errors.
There are two - both arguable in themselves, but very different - ways of counting fossil fuel subsidies. One is the one that gives us that $6 trillion number sometimes bandied about. That is totted up by deciding what should be the correct level of taxation to start with. So, the externalities of fossil fuel use - CO2 emissions, particularate emissions, congestion, accidents, the kitchen sink - and claim as a subsidy any price that doesn’t include all of those. Britain, amazingly, does charge near exactly the right amount for all of those on regular petrol and diesel. Further, if there’s a VAT then energy must pay the full whack of VAT. This makes the 5% domestic energy rate a subsidy in this sense.
Well, OK, it’s arguable but that’s what the measure is.
Then there’s this method of counting here, which gives us this $700 billion. That’s direct subsidies to consumption. Not variances from some theoretically pure system of taxation but actual cash handed out to make energy cheaper for consumers (whether domestic or industrial). Britain does not do any of that.
We can track that from the press release, the website, the database and then the country report.
So, we’re going to have the usual talking heads popping up to insist that this $700 billion number proves that Britain must stop subsidising fossil fuels. By their comments ye shall know them - those saying such will be ignorant. Because by this measure, this $700 billion, Britain already does not subsidise fossil fuels. We’ve already stopped doing it.
Should'a gone fracking
We tend to disagree with Michael Marmot, even in his uses of the words “and” and “the”. He has a new report out today which needs to be addressed though:
Both “cold” and “poor” will contribute to worse health and greater health inequalities. It is a humanitarian crisis. One that will not be solved by tax cuts or removing levies that favour green energy, as seems to be the “solution” proposed by our likely next prime minister. We need to act on the immediate crisis, but we also need to ask how we got here, and what to do to solve the problem of fuel poverty, and its effects on health inequalities, in the longer term.
Well, yes, that seems to be something that could be addressed by having cheap energy.
Economists from Paul Krugman to Paul Johnson to Torsten Bell have solutions, going beyond conventional economics, of what we need to do to fix this winter’s looming crisis. Now, though, is also the time to deal with the longer-term problems that led us here in the first place.
That also seems a reasonable enough goal. Just what is to be done?
Households in Britain will see their spending power cut by an average £3,000 by the end of next year unless the new government acts to counter the biggest drop in living standards in at least a century, research has indicated.
Adding to pressure on Boris Johnson’s successor as prime minister to tackle a worsening cost of living crisis, the Resolution Foundation thinktank said soaring energy bills would cut household incomes by 10% and push an extra 3 million people into poverty.
Household spending power isn’t to be cut by such numbers at all. Rather, it’s to be diverted, to pay for fuel not other things. But the same solution suggests itself - if energy were cheap then we’d not have this problem.
So, where is energy cheap and they don’t have this problem? That would be the United States of course. And what’s the big difference in energy policy between the US and the pair of the UK and continental Europe? The existence or not of fracking, equally of course.
So, we solve the problem of the poor and huddled masses by doing as the US - or, as we’ve been saying these years, Should’a Gone Fracking.
Prices work, no, honestly, they do
Energy is higher in price now than it was last year - people are changing their behaviour:
The owner of Kleenex and Andrex is to power its lavatory paper factories using “green” hydrogen as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushes natural gas prices to record levels.
Kimberly-Clark will buy green hydrogen made from wind and solar power as part of a deal with renewables company Carlton Power for its factory in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, which it claims will reduce its reliance on natural gas by 30pc.
Whether that’s entirely the way to go we’ll leave to Kimberley-Clark to work out. But it does show that changing prices changes peoples’ behaviour.
Equally, there are now those predictions that some vast majority of the population will be in fuel poverty this winter - spending more than 10% of household income on heating. They won’t be of course. For behaviour will change. Heating will be turned down - perhaps as far as was commonplace half a century ago when central heating was still a novelty - because prices change peoples’ behaviour. Don’t forget, that definition of fuel poverty is not what people do spend, it’s what they would spend to reach a certain level of heating.
The aim this past couple of decades has been to try to change peoples’ energy consumption - in both type and volume. We’ve been told that this all hasn’t been happening fast enough, that there must be more plans, more intervention, to make it all go faster. Now here we are having changed prices and we’re getting a tumbling rush to change type and volume of energy consumption.
As we’ve been saying all this time it might well have been simpler to use prices - for as we can see they work - all along. Rather than the planning which has led to this emergency surge we could have had a gentle and far less disruptive change over time. Not that this is just us, it’s the same thing the Stern Review said, it’s what Bill Nordhuas got his Nobel for pointing out.
If you want to change what everyone does then change the thing that everyone faces - prices.
The only mystery left is why everyone in power entirely ignored the science on this subject.
Sumptuary laws and the asparagus firing cannon
There’s a little tale - which we admit we can’t quite nail down right now - about the plethora of cutlery that sits upon an aristocratic dinner table. It doesn’t actually matter in the slightest which knife, which fork, is used to do what - nor even that they fire their asparagus at each other from cannons. What does matter is that they know and you don’t. That makes them inside the group, you outside it and that’s the purpose of the enterprise.
Still, nothing that can’t be solved by Madame Guillotine or by good manners (we are reminded of Prince Phillip eating with his fingers so that Lady Tebbitt did not feel awkward) but then those latter are rare enough.
But - the point is the definition of the ingroup and the outgroup.
At which point modern fashion:
But this is changing. With circularity now a cornerstone of mainstream strategies toward sustainability, consumers and brands are looking at clothes through a new lens. Circularity is focusing attention on the longevity of a garment’s appeal and its value in the future resale market. This is a radical departure for the value system of an industry that has historically hero-worshipped brand new clothes – preferably with tags on, and tissue-wrapped – and has tended to dismiss as irrelevant to the fashion conversation any clothes that have already been worn.
The history of capitalism can, in fact, be seen in clothing. As has been remarked we know that QE I had a pair of stockings, the day she received them is in her diary. It was capitalism that allowed the mill girl to also have a pair or two.
Fast forward to today and pretty much anyone can have a new outfit - of a type, to be sure - for an hour or two of work. New clothes simply do not work as a marker of distinction, of being part of the ingroup. It really is only very recently indeed that the wearing of the same outfit to a “do” or two was regarded as the most unfortunate gauchery. A new outfit for each was a minimum requirement of being fashionable. We even recall - and it really was only in recent years - breathless articles about how Kate or the like had “recycled” an outfit by wearing it more than once.
If everyone including the proles can have new clothing whenever then fashion isn’t performing its duty - of marking that ingroup and that outgroup. So, the definition of what is fashionable must change in order to preserve that function. Which is exactly what is happening.
One group arrowing in from one side wants to ban “fast fashion” in a modern version of sumptuary laws. Stop the proles from having access to cheap new clothes so as to preserve the distinction. From the other direction comes this insistence upon sustainability - change what fashion means away from having new clothes. For no other reason than that the proles can have new clothes so the marker of distinction has disappeared.
They’re firing asparagus at each other from cannons for no reason other than to mark that distinction between ingroup and outgroup. The rest of us should probably just leave them to it, pay them no mind. We can get on with enjoying what capitalism hath wrought, a world in which copious clean and new clothes are available to the entire population. It has, after all, taken us many millennia to get here.
This is not how competition works, no, really, it isn't
Certain examples of childcare cost vast fortunes:
More than 20 councils in England and Wales have paid the equivalent of £1m a year or more to place a single child in a private children’s home as the cost of specialised care soars, data released to the Guardian shows.
The reason?
The most costly placements were to look after some of society’s most vulnerable children, often at very short notice. Some were as young as 12 and needed four staff watching them 24 hours a day. Many had issues of serious self-harm and of hurting their carers, and in some cases a judge had authorised for them to be locked up in a secure home.
These children, deemed a risk to themselves and others, qualify for places in secure children’s homes, all run by the state or voluntary sector. But there are now only 14 of these specialist therapeutic institutions in England and Wales, not nearly enough to match the need. On any given day, approximately 50 children are waiting for a place, according to Ofsted, the inspectorate.
Children who cannot find a place in a secure children’s home are usually detained elsewhere, often in flats or other accommodation with large teams of agency staff.
Vast resources of labour and time are dedicated to caring for these very children. That’s why it all costs so much. But what is being blamed for these costs?
However, profiteering is a growing concern for us
Well, no, that’s something that needs to be proven, not something that is to be assumed. Show that having state owned, state run - perhaps council owned, council run - facilities at the margin are cheaper. At the margin because this is the margin. These costs are paid for those who could or possibly should be in those voluntary or state run homes but are not given a lack of capacity. When capacity becomes available they are moved into them.
This is all about the edge cases - the margin.
All of which being exactly the sort of information we don’t think we’re going to get. For on this same subject The Guardian has another piece in which we are told:
“But I think part of the competition in this market has meant that basically a provider can charge what they want and it may or may not relate to the cost of caring for the child.”
No, really, that’s not how competition works. That’s the effect of not enough competition. not of the existence of it. And if the people totting up the costs are going to get things so badly wrong then what weight would we put on anything else they say about costs or institutional structures?
What we need to know is what is going to be the cost of expanding those not-for profit homes some capacity of which - this is talking about the margin, recall - will go unused at times? Is this more expensive, to have fully staffed and funded capacity sometimes to often unused, than paying hiring fees on the outside market sometimes?
For if we don’t ask the right question we’ll never get the right answer, will we?
At least it's in the open now
In 2012, he introduced a strict regulation that means companies have to halt work if they trigger tremors over 0.5 magnitude.
Shale gas firms have said commercial fracking cannot take place under the rule. Appearing on Channel 4 in 2019, Sir Ed said the rule had “actually meant that the fracking industry has not developed in this country at all”.
“I’m very proud that you’re looking at the person who basically stopped the fracking industry in this country,” he added.
The rule was there - is there - in order to stop fracking. Not because that level of quake or tremor is actually important, but in order to stop fracking. Therefore, if we do wish to have fracking - something we think we should at least - then there’s no problem with overturning this rule. Because it’s only there to stop fracking, not for any reality-based reason.
It’s also possible to mutter about delusion:
In the same interview, he said fracking was not needed because of the “success of our renewable policy, particularly in offshore wind, means we’re not going to need anywhere near the amount of gas we did before”.
If this were true then we’d not be having the current little problems now, would we? That we are having the current little problems tells us that this statement is not true. And beliefs that fail in the light of reality are indeed known as delusions.
Sir Ed told The Telegraph he stood by what he had said in 2019, saying: “Fracking across Britain’s countryside would not mean lower heating bills as gas prices are set internationally and would not provide energy security now or in the long term.
And if that were true then the American natural gas price, driven by fracking, would not be a fraction of the UK or the varied European (there are many different European gas prices and yes indeed, they differ) ones.
So, we seem to have energy policy based upon a series of delusions. Any wonder that we have problems with energy policy?
Isn't this a problem that requires a solution?
The private schools have been taking the mickey out of the education system - so some say:
What does the dramatic fall in GCSE grades tell us? That private schools were gaming the system
We also seem to have a problem of bias - unconscious or not - in those who teach:
Unconscious bias in marking could be contributing to the underperformance of children from poorer backgrounds, researchers have suggested.
Teachers were more harsh in their grading of students from a lower socioeconomic background, a study from the University of Sussex appeared to show.
Those behind the study insisted it was not an “attack on teachers”, but rather should be used “as a mandate for educational institutions to better support teachers” with training to mitigate potential biases.
The findings, based on an experiment with 416 teachers, found a grading difference of 4.4 percentage points being awarded to those of higher and lower socioeconomic status.
None of us - well, all those other than the parents of richer but dimmer children - want the system to be this way. While many won’t go with the modern liberal insistence upon an equal outcome for everyone we do think we could find a solid majority for the old-style liberal ideal of at least all being judged by the same standards.
The dual accusation today being that this is not what is happening. Therefore we need a solution.
One does occur. Grading, that sorting into academic sheep and vocational goats, could be done by a double blind test. Something external to the organisations doing the teaching, against some known and set parcel of standards. Those doing the grading not knowing where the test comes from, those taking the test not knowing who will grade.
That would seem to solve the problems being complained of. All that’s left is to work out a name for this new system. Given that it is to examine the performance of the pupils, against some set and sacrosanct standard, we propose the portmanteau “examination”.
Who knows the system, if not the word, might catch on.
We think this is a fun thing to complain about
A little off our usual beaten track but fun all the same we think.
The GI bill has near-mythic significance in American history — generations of veterans got an education and an easy home loan, the sort of thing that pulls families up into the middle class.
That benefit has never really been available, though, to one group of Americans who serve in the military in very high numbers — Native Americans living on tribal land.
There’s a reason for this too. While there are attempts at workarounds there’s a simple and basic problem here. Land on or in tribal lands is inalienable - it cannot be sold outside the tribal members. In fact, in many to most cases, it cannot be sold at all - leased, perhaps, but not sold.
Given that a mortgage depends upon the, umm, mortgage - technically, the mortgage describes the process by which the security can be collected if the loan is not repaid - then the absence of the ability to have a mortgage on the land prevents there from being a mortgage.
Or, the other way around, inalienable land cannot be pledged as collateral therefore it’s not possible to gain a loan against inalienable land.
We’re not sure there’s any real way around this - any workarounds are always going to be less than that liquid and cheap system which is the American mortgage market. We’re also entirely aware of why that Native American land is inalienable. The results over the centuries when it hasn’t been are both obvious and distressing.
Another one of those proofs that there are no solutions, merely trade offs.
But we do still think it’s a fun thing to be complaining about. The system is deliberately set up to insist that outsiders cannot buy that land. Therefore you can’t get an outsider to finance a mortgage on that land. Well, yes?
You heard it here first - watch out for the Student Loans Company
We’ve noted before that we can be accused of cynicism although we prefer to call it mere realism. It won’t be long now before someone starts to buy votes - sorry, alleviate the terrible economic position of arts graduates - by writing off debts to the Student Loans Company.
Millions of Americans received welcome news on Wednesday when Joe Biden delivered on a campaign promise to provide $10,000 in student debt forgiveness.
Borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year will be eligible for loan forgiveness, with those whose low incomes qualified them for federal Pell Grants receiving up to $20,000 in relief. About a third of US undergraduate students receive Pell Grants.
Hundreds of millions of Americans also received the unwelcome news that they’ll be paying for this too. The debt doesn’t go away - the college courses have already been paid for after all. The burden of that debt is now taken off the shoulders of those who arguably should not have gone to college and put onto those of everyone else in the economy. That’s those who did pay off their college debts and also those who didn’t go to college at all.
This is true whatever circumlocutions are used. The Federal Government was going to collect that money at some point. Now it won’t - meaning that there’s either less to spend, or taxes must rise to maintain spending, or everyone suffer the inflation caused by money printing to fill the hole.
This is also concentrated on those arts graduates who failed, having gained a college degree, to get a median pay college degree type job. That is, those who arguably should not have gone to college in the first place.
As to why, well, we’re two months out from an election and what politician needs more than that? Produce, from the hat, a concentrated benefit with diffuse costs and thereby gain the votes of those who benefit - it’ll take a long time for the costs to become apparent. The specific sadness of this particular piece of politics being that who does actually believe that low earning arts graduates would ever vote anything other than D anyway?
The expense being dumped upon the populace doesn’t even work that is, buying what is already bought.
The policy is of such amazing cynicism - and stupidity - that of course someone will be recommending that it be applied to our own Student Loans Company in 3…2…1…you heard it here first folks.
The actual point of asking students to pay their own freight is to stop students doing degrees that aren’t worth it. Killing the debt, the price system, thereby kills the entire point of the policy.