If you force people to do it, you've given the game away
Leave aside the innate stupidity of the plan for a moment and consider instead the ordering of it.
OK, actually, consider the stupidity of the plan first:
“Draconian” plans to divide Oxford residents into six climate zones have led to council chiefs calling in the police over "extreme abuse".
In a UK first, the city will be carved into six districts from 2024 and car drivers must apply for a permit to travel between them for a maximum of 100 days a year.
The “traffic filters” come as Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council hope to become a “15-minute city”, with GPs, schools and shops in local clusters.
The entire point of cities is “agglomeration”. More folk packed into an area creates more interactions between folk. Interactions also have another name, the foundation of innovation and economic growth. We simply get richer when people move to the Big City and swarm all over each other in the Big City. Having the Big City without the interaction - the serendipity of the interaction - is insane.
We also have economies and diseconomies of scale. To entirely invent some numbers - entirely invent you understand, just for the example - we desire one GP per thousand people, one Alzheimer’s ward per 10,000 and one heart surgeon per 100k. We certainly don’t need one heart surgeon per 1,000 and one GP per 100k would only be slightly more efficient than the current NHS.
Where that sweet spot is between economies and diseconomies changes near daily as technology changes. So there’s no possibility of anyone planning to provide those varied things correctly, to scale. As, of course, the current NHS shows us and that’s government merely limiting itself to health care instead of the entire urban economy.
Divvying up a city in this manner cannot be planned and runs against the entire incentive to have a city in the first place. Which is stupid enough.
But now consider the order in which this is being attempted. The movement between sectors is to be limited first, hoping that the new ordering of services will then arrive. This is like building that socialist economy then hoping that New Soviet Man will turn up to make it work. This is also the wrong way around, as that earlier experiment was.
If the 15 minute city is so desirable - desired that is, by the only people who matter, the populace - then if the 15 minute city is created by allocating the services according to the plan then the movement restrictions are not needed. Everyone will be so ecstatically fulfilled by the new plan that they’ll all, entirely voluntarily - possibly even with Hosannahs of praise to the councillors - live within their little 15 minute neighbourhoods.
There are only two possible justifications for the movement restrictions. The first is that the councils will not manage to plan those services so that the 15 minute city exists. The second is that the populace will decide they don’t like the 15 minute city and so won’t stay within it. Neither of those are good enough justifications for those limitations - indeed, they positively argue against them.
As we’ve been known to point out before, if you’ve this grand new idea then great. Try it out. If people like it then they’ll voluntarily adopt it and you’ve succeeded in the only important economic task, providing more of what people want. You know, the way free markets work. The moment you’ve got to force people to do it you’ve given the game away - even you don’t think people will do it by choice.
Yes, yes, we do need to have politics and that does mean that some people will end up with political power. It’s just that we don’t actually want anyone to exercise it now, do we?
An interesting proof perfect of the gender pay gap
One of the reasons that men and women get paid different amounts - on average and across the range of all jobs - is because women are more sensible than men. There’s more to life than grinding away for gelt and pilf and women tend to balance their pursuit of such with those other interests in a different manner from many men. More of those other things that the gilt and pelf that is.
Given that employers are there to profit from labour, not the balanced life - it’s difficult for an employer to make money from such activities outside the workplace after all - this leads to men preferentially, and as always on average and in general, gaining access to those higher paid jobs where more dedication to the gelt and pilf is desired by said employers.
Which brings us to this:
Two women have sued Twitter for sex descrimination during sweeping layoffs of thousands of staff orchestrated by billionaire owner Elon Musk.
The former female staff members have brought an unfair dismissal claim against the tech company, arguing more women were laid off than men by Mr Musk.
In a court filing, the former staff claimed Mr Musk had unfairly demanded staff commit to “extremely hardcore” working hours, despite knowing this would force mothers and female caregivers to quit.
Lawyers for the claimants said: “Elon Musk would certainly have known that these policy changes and expectations would have a disproportionate impact on women, who are more often caregivers for children and other family members, and thus not able to comply with such demands.”
Leave aside all of the oughts and shoulds. This is exactly the same story as that gender pay gap one. Because women are more sensible they’ll not devote their lives to mere gilt and pelf and therefore demands that a workforce do so are gender discriminatory.
We can add back in those oughts and should bes if we wish but we do need to also conduct that analysis of the is. Some part of the gender pay gap - across the population and on average - is because of these different gender preoccupations - on average and across the population - with amassing gilt and pelf rather than the more interesting things in life.
Shrug.
Our preference is that nothing whatsoever be done about this. On the basis that we’re liberals. The aim of this whole let’s have a civilisation game is that more folk get to have more of what folk want. So, the correct outcome is whatever the interactions of those tens of millions for a country, or billions for us all, lead to as long as that basic aim is met - more folk getting to gain more of what folk want.
Men and women - on average and across the population - have slightly different work habits and desires about work. Men and women - across the population and on average - gain different amounts of cash from their work.
And?
Trafigura - The glory of workers' cooperatives
What a glory of a mixed and free market economy this is:
The commodities trading firm Trafigura is to hand more than $1.7bn (£1.4bn) to its top traders and shareholders after the energy crisis, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, led to a surge in profits.
Trafigura, one of the world’s largest specialist commodity traders, posted a record $7bn net profit in its last financial year, more than the previous four years combined after making gains from the market volatility caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Its chief financial officer, Christophe Salmon, hailed an “exceptionally strong year”, as profits more than doubled and revenues grew to $318.5bn in the year to 30 September, up from $231.3bn a year earlier.
The $1.71bn payout to its 1,100 shareholders, including top employees, equates to about $1.56m a head if shared equally. That’s an increase of about 35% compared with 2021’s dividend of $1.12bn to around 1,000 top traders and investors.
Trafigura is, of course, a worker owned cooperative.
Trafigura is an independent, employee-owned physical trading and logistics business.
There are other companies in that space - Cargill comes to mind - which are family-owned and capitalist. Trafigura is, by any reasonable definition, a socialist organisation. Those who work there gain the full value of the sweat of their brow.
Isn’t this excellent? Folk get to structure their organisations as they wish, that free part of free market means that we do have different structures, some sating some ethical desires, some others, which then compete for the custom of the populace.
Given that Trafigura has the same ownership structure as John Lewis - or Richer Sounds, now that sale has gone through - no doubt those who praise worker coops and employee owned firms will be vocal in their support of this success.
They will won’t they, be logically consistent?
Cumbrian coal - What's this got to do with you, Matey?
In all the shouting about the go ahead for the Cumbrian coal mine this is the comment that grates the most:
Tony Bosworth, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth…..”and this mine risks becoming an expensive stranded asset.”
The money being used seems to flow through West Cumbria Mining, itself backed by EMR Capital, that seems to be a conduit for varied sources of private equity. That is, the money being used is not that of Mr. Bosworth nor of Friends of the Earth. Meaning that the correct response to this claim of Mr. Bosworth’s - or of FoE - is what’s that got to do with you, Matey?
Because this is how a market economy works. People are free to waste their money on whatever moonbeams into sunshine cucumber machine they desire. Rather than be subject to the insistences of some prodnose with a grievance.
Sadly, the major newspaper commentators seem not much better:
Besides, steelmakers have dramatically reduced Russian imports since the invasion of Ukraine, and the industry is moving rapidly to low-carbon alternatives to coking coal such as hydrogen anyway, so the project risks quickly becoming an expensive white elephant.
That’s not even the right question, let alone the right answer.
As background, yes, we need coking coal if we’re to continue running blast furnaces. “We” here being humanity in general. Yes, DRI with hydrogen looks like it might well become the technology of choice in time. Electric arc furnaces have been making inroads into the market for 60 years now and show no signs of stopping. But that 60 years is an important number. For that recycling of scrap in arc furnaces - led in a market sense by Nucor over in the US - has taken that 60 years to penetrate the market. For blast furnaces are vast capital investments and once one has been built the financial incentive is to keep using it until it falls over. This is the Nordhaus point about climate change. The least cost method of reducing emissions is to keep using all our old kit until it does fall over, but make absolutely certain that new stuff we build is non-emittive.
They did give Nordhaus the Nobel for this point so it’s worth including it in our calculations.
But to step back from the decision making about whether we, ourselves, think that it’s a good investment or not. And consider what is being said by these varied people now. Which is that those not involved in the investment decision, those with no money at risk, do in fact know whether it is going to be a profitable investment or not. Which is fine - you think it’ll lose money then don’t invest in it. But they’re going that unallowable one step further. They’re saying that because they, themselves, think it will be unprofitable then other people cannot be allowed to invest in it.
No, that’s not how a free market system works. Other people get to do as they wish with their money. That’s rather what private property means and it’s very much what the free part of free markets means.
Yes, yes, we grasp all the points about public policy and emissions and so on. Given that we are talking about planning permission of course there’s an element of planning in this as well. But those aren’t the points - nor even the desirability of coking coal or steel making - that we insist upon highlighting here.
The claim is that West Cumbria Mining should not be allowed to do that because they’ll lose money. The answer to that being what’s that to do with you, Matey? Because the essence of, the driving force of, free market capitalism is that the capitalists are free to spray their money up against any wall they wish. Yes, we know all too many don’t believe this but the experience of the last 250 years is that we get, on balance, more correct decisions this way than through any other investment decision process anyone has ever tried.
West Cumbria Mining will lose money? Let ‘em lose it then. Shrug.
Our Coxless NHS
In June 2021, NHS England numbered 1.2 million staff. When Amanda Pritchard was appointed in August, was that number reporting to her? Wrong. In April 2022, it was just 9,794. Of course GPs are independent contractors and more than a million people work in the 240 acute, ambulance, community and mental health trusts and foundation trusts which are, nominally, independent.
The current Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, has 55% more NHS England staff (15,171) reporting to him than the CEO does. And all these 24,966 staff work for non-governmental public bodies which are, supposedly, independent of government and therefore reporting to neither the Health Secretary nor the CEO.
The present government is different because the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, was Health Secretary from 2012 to 2018 and thereafter Chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee. He is under the impression he knows more about steering NHS England than Pritchard or Barclay. Be that as it may, he has now appointed Patricia Hewitt, Labour Health Secretary from 2005 to 2007, to conduct an independent review of integrated care systems.
Does NHS England now have four coxes or none?
Her terms of reference came out on 6th December, and she should recommend, this month,
“how to empower local leaders to focus on improving outcomes for their populations, giving them greater control while making them more accountable for performance and spending
the scope and options for a significantly smaller number of national targets for which NHS ICBs [integrated care boards] should be both held accountable for and supported to improve by NHS England and other national bodies, alongside local priorities reflecting the particular needs of communities
show the role of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) can be enhanced in system oversight”
Behind this lies, in essence, the bureaucrats long demand that the NHS should take over social care from local authorities. To muddy the water, the terms of reference lay down that local bureaucrats should have more control whilst simultaneously being more accountable and having to report “with a particular focus on real time data shared digitally with the Department of Health and Social Care.” It is not at all surprising that this job should have been given to a Labour ex-politician.
NHS England is already far too big and merging it with social services will help neither. Of course, they need to liaise but the way to do it is to have the NHS focus on treatment and cure leaving care to local authorities. Of the £1.2 million NHS England staff in June 2021, the people patients actually want to see, namely doctors and nurses, make up less than 40% of the headcount. Technicians and (some) managers are needed too but focus on its original role, rather than expanding it, would enhance value for money.
The experiments thus far with integrated care have not been analysed. The only good thing that has emerged so far from integrated care systems (ICS) is alignment of local authority/NHS local borders. That must help liaison. Shifting authority from the centre and middle management to the front line would also help, as it did with Covid. Pharmacies should be allowed licence on prescribing to relieve GP practices. These terms of reference are otherwise bound to increase costs and bureaucracy and, worse, distract over-worked GPs from treating their patients. GPs need less bureaucracy, form-filling and interference from NHS management and the DHSC, not more.
Instead, with no clue as to whether ICS improves matters, this NHS coxless four are steering straight for the rocks of worse service, greater costs, more deaths and longer waiting lists.
Brexit hasn't increased food prices
The problem here is not Brexit, it’s the reaction to, the policies that follow, Brexit:
Brexit has fuelled surge in UK food prices, says Bank of England policymaker
Not really, no. There is a sense in which it has, the pound fell in foreign value, so imports become more expensive. But that’s not the manner in which we’re being told that prices have been forced up:
Researchers at the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance warned last week that Brexit had added almost £6bn to UK food bills in the two years to the end of 2021, with border delays, red tape and other costs increasing the price of food by about 3% a year.
Dhingra said three-quarters of UK imports were from the EU, which meant “naturally, if non-tariff barriers start to kick in there, we are going to see that – not fully but manifest to some degree – in food prices.”
We agree that all of those are bad things, will have pushed food prices up. But they’re not the result of Brexit. They’re the result of policies adopted after Brexit. One of the major points about Brexit being that we’re able to make our own policies for ourselves of course.
So, if we find the costs of these non-tariff barriers to be too high to bear then let’s stop having these non-tariff barriers. On the grounds that we find them too high to bear.
Perhaps the benefits of those barriers are higher than £6 billion. We think it doubtful but then we’re free traders after all. But if no one can point to any result from them which is worth the £6 billion costs to us then let’s do away with them.
After all, the aim and point of Brexit was that we can have local policies for local people. So, let’s do that, have local policies that benefit local people.
Galton's Ox and free speech
Apparently the new bill isn’t going to be very good:
It has changed from its initial intention – to focus on online abuse and harassment – into a clarion call for “free speech”, thanks to the work of Kemi Badenoch, an excuse that is often used by those who spew hatred as a shield for their online abuse.
Free speech has its moral and ethical value of course. But it’s also an intensely pragmatic issue. As Galton’s Ox illustrates. Galton observed that the crowd, estimating the weight of the ox, did, on average, get very close to the real number. That is, the average of all guesses was close. As the full Wisdom of the Crowds argument goes on, it’s necessary to have the uninformed and even wildly wrong guesses included for this to be true. As soon as we limit the sampling to the in crowd, or the cognoscenti, then we get both groupthink and a decline in the accuracy of that averaged set of guesses.
That is, if we’re to worry about hate speech - say - in free speech then we need the free speech, in all its glory and vileness both, so that we can work out what actually is hate speech. Just as we need the free speech in that larger sense to be able to make sense of the world around us. It’s precisely that all can have their say which provides the accuracy.
Fortunately this also speaks to this idea:
We are, in a sense, getting the bill we deserve from the politicians we deserve: not a very good one, from not a very good lot. It’s a shining beacon of mediocrity; of people too stupid to understand the nuance of one of the most nuanced-filled areas of our modern lives, over-promoted into positions of power and thinking they know better than researchers who have spent their lives looking at these issues.
Well, yes, we share the suspicion that the sausage making machine doesn’t lead to good things being enacted by the clever people. But then if that is true then that’s an argument for not allowing politics into those areas of life where we’ve got any better possible solution. Use politics only where we absolutely have to and leave everything else - speech say - to be free. Oh, and researchers who have spent their lives etc. will merely be that groupthink we need to avoid.
Which does leave the solution here rather simple. Retain those two common law ideas - however encoded into legislation - of libel and incitement to immediate violence and leave everything else well alone. Or, you know, the speech problem is solved by leaving speech to be free.
The problem with that detailed governmental management
The particular problem being that government isn’t very good at it. Nesrine Malik, in the usual Guardianista complaint about it all being racism and money, does make one good point:
…. a limited number of university places to study medicine
Well, yes. It’s been obvious for some decades now that medicine - especially GP services - is becoming (sorry, has become) a majority female occupation. Nothing wrong with that, the flowering of individual talent is to be welcomed in fact. Except there are obvious changes that also have to be made. Given maternity leaves, choices about part time working while children are young and so on, it’s necessary to train more doctors in order to have the same number of hours and days of doctoring being done.
Nothing wrong with those choices either - it’s just that whoever it is that plans the training system for doctoring needs to adapt that system for the changes. Government does that planning and government didn’t. So much for the efficiency of government planning then.
It’s also possible to note bad planning the other way:
Plans to overhaul NHS pension rules have been set out by the government in an attempt to retain more senior doctors in the health service.
The problem is the limitation on the size of lifetime pension pots. Save enough from a working life to breach this limit and pay for additional work can be taxed at vast rates, 80% easily and for some unfortunates over 100%. This particularly bites on doctors for three reasons - generous pensions, high rates of pay while working and the third, well the third is that we actually notice a shortage of doctors in a manner we don’t some and many other professions who might be in the same situations.
That root problem is the lifetime limit on pensions pot sizes. But government management is, as evidenced here, to fiddle around with the rules for doctors only. Instead of the obvious solution, to lift the limits on lifetime pensions pots. For there are other professions and working lives which are affected, in exactly the same way, by those same rules. So, planning would be to change the rules causing the problem, not fiddling at the edges with special rules for the one manner of earning a living.
As we can all note, that’s not what is being done. The root problem is not being addressed.
So, the problem with govenment planning? That government planning isn’t very good both in what it doesn’t take into account in its plans and also in what it does do when it does plan.
Not exactly grand recommendations for a system there. Perhaps we should stop using it?
Dominic Lawson misses a little trick here
It’s entirely true that public sector wages, properly measured, are higher than private sector:
It is true that the pay of public sector workers has been squeezed, relative to the private sector, since the Conservatives came to power in 2010. But at that point what the Office for National Statistics calls the “modelled average public sector earnings premium” (compared with the equivalent job in the private sector) had risen to 10 per cent. Given the typically superior job security, holiday allowances and, above all, pensions in the public sector, that was clearly unsustainable.
That is after all those necessary adjustments for age, jobs done, educational levels and so on. They, being paid by us, are living better than we do.
However, there is still that trick being missed:
One thing these disparate groups have in common is a form of pension that has now all but disappeared outside the public sector: the TOCs’ employees are highly unusual in this respect. I mean the defined-benefit variety, whose beneficiaries are guaranteed a pension linked to their earnings and indexed to inflation.
Yes, entirely so. But isn’t that included in the ONS calculation? It does say including pensions, doesn’t it? Well, no:
Employer and employee pension contributions
For ONS is measuring what is paid for those pensions, not the value of what is received in those pensions. The point being that - as a result of taxpayer subsidy, of course - each £ of public sector pension contribution buys more value in pension paid than the equivalent £ paid in the private sector does. Because defined benefit pensions are more valuable than defined contribution ones.
The truth is that - on average and across the sector - public sector workers are vastly better paid than private sector. Over and above that measured premium and as a result of the greater value of pensions paid, rather than pensions paid for. At which point, of course, it’s possible to ponder whether that earnings gulf is something we’d like to continue.
Possibly, when the economy is less than stellar, we should be asking the public sector to share our pain? Or at least, force them to tell us, in detail, why they shouldn’t?
How wondrously glorious that farmers make such small profits
We do think this is an absurd thing to complain about but then the modern left, you know:
UK farmers making tiny profits as supermarkets boast record takings
As the report itself, from Sustain, goes on:
For a 480g pack of mild cheddar purchased in a supermarket the dairy farmer has high production costs of £1.48 yet receives in profit 0.02% (much less than a penny) of the selling price of £2.50.
For a 350g four-pack of beefburgers….receives in profit 0.03% (far less than a penny)
For a loaf of bread, the cereal farmer has costs of 9.03p yet receives an almost negligible profit
For 1kg of apples purchased in a supermarket (about 6 apples), the apple grower has costs of 76p, yet receives in profit just 1% (3 pence)
Isn’t this glorious? For it’s the proof of the free market creed. It’s entirely true - as Steve Keen keeps pointing out - that there’s no truly free market anywhere. As we don’t have an infinite number of producers of anything with zero costs of market entry then we don’t have anything that truly and wholly meets those theoretical strictures of what is a truly free and entirely competitive market.
On the other hand, with farming we do have some billions of farmers globally which is probably enough to at least asymptotically approach such an infinite count of suppliers. Entry costs at the small scale are really very low - most local councils will rent you a starter farm for £100 a year or some such even if we do normally call them allotments.
So, we’re really very close, with farming, to that model of a truly free and competitive market. The end result of which is that the producers make from near no to no profit. Well, there we go then, our proof of the desirability of a free and competitive market. In one the capitalists, the producers, make near no profit. Job done, extraction and exploitation - expropriation of the worker’s sweat of hand and brow even - destroyed.
Given that we’ve now got our proof all else that is necessary is to insist upon having free and competitive markets in every other area of life. At which point the cruel rapine of capitalism is destroyed. Super - job done.
Next question?