To disagree with William Hague on something we actually know about

Hague says that Britain really should oppose deep sea mining:

Deep down beneath the waves, in nodules below the seabed, minerals such as cobalt and nickel can be found in abundance.

No, that’s “on” the seabed.

And in the “black smokers”, the deep vents on the ocean floor often associated with the earliest origins of life, copper can be found in large quantities.

No, mining the smokers is not the suggestion. The entire point of such smokers being that as the fissures in the crust expand - the smokers being the little pinholes - then what used to be the site of a smoker becomes not one. The copper suggestion is to mine where there used to be one, not where there is. As that’s where the deposits are, where they used to be.

But far more than this the assumption is being made - certainly the impression is being given by Hague - that some vast area of the seabed is to be disturbed. Which is simply nonsense. The seabed is 3.618×10*8 km2. That’s, umm, a lot. As with surface mining the idea is to mine some hundreds of square kilometres, perhaps even thousands. Which is, when we’re talking about 10*8 quantities of km2, pretty much nothing.

Even the economics, let alone the environmental point, is wrong:

An unnecessarily weak stance is not only bad for the environment but not even in our national interest. No British company has developed deep-sea mining technology.

There’s a definite absurdity in claiming that cheaper nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese will not be beneficial to Britain or the British people. Consumer benefits do in fact count, you know?

Even the environmental damages are grossly overdone:

According to the review commissioned by the government which reported two years ago, “a 20-year mining operation may discharge an estimated 100,000 tonnes of sediment”, which would settle over millions of square kilometres on the sea floor.

Umm, OK, so 100,000 tonnes over millions of km2. Say, just for the ease of the maths, 10 million km2? That’s 10kg (no, really, ten kilos) of sediment to be spread across each square kilometre of seabed.

We’ve lived in flats dustier than that and not just as a student either. In fact, that complaint is piffle. For it’s one hundredth of a gramme of sediment per square metre. Most damaging I’m sure we’ll all agree.

Mine the abyssal deeps and get on with it - whatever Billy Hague has to say about it.

We'd really suggest Nick Timothy doesn't take Michael Lind seriously

One of those little things we hope not to see in a newspaper column:

That story is recounted in Hell to Pay, a brilliant new book by Michael Lind about how the suppression of wages is driving economic, social and political crises in America. The idea that we are paid what we deserve – and that the decline in mid-skilled, mid-paid jobs simply reflects the high-tech, globalised economy in which we live – derives from free market theory. But it is, Lind argues, utter nonsense.

Lind and “brilliant” isn’t quite how we’d put it. For we always recall Paul Kurgman’s comments upon the economic commentary of Michael Lind:

One of America's new intellectual stars is a young writer named Michael Lind, whose contrarian essays on politics have given him a reputation as a brilliant enfant terrible. In 1994 Lind published an article in Harper's about international trade, which contained the following remarkable passage:

"Many advocates of free trade claim that higher productivity growth in the United States will offset pressure on wages caused by the global sweatshop economy, but the appealing theory falls victim to an unpleasant fact. Productivity has been going up, without resulting wage gains for American workers. Between 1977 and 1992, the average productivity of American workers increased by more than 30 percent, while the average real wage fell by 13 percent. The logic is inescapable. No matter how much productivity increases, wages will fall if there is an abundance of workers competing for a scarcity of jobs -- an abundance of the sort created by the globalization of the labor pool for US-based corporations." (Lind 1994: )

What is so remarkable about this passage? It is certainly a very abrupt, confident rejection of the case for free trade; it is also noticeable that the passage could almost have come out of a campaign speech by Patrick Buchanan. But the really striking thing, if you are an economist with any familiarity with this area, is that when Lind writes about how the beautiful theory of free trade is refuted by an unpleasant fact, the fact he cites is completely untrue.

More specifically: the 30 percent productivity increase he cites was achieved only in the manufacturing sector; in the business sector as a whole the increase was only 13 percent. The 13 percent decline in real wages was true only for production workers, and ignores the increase in their benefits: total compensation of the average worker actually rose 2 percent. And even that remaining gap turns out to be a statistical quirk: it is entirely due to a difference in the price indexes used to deflate business output and consumption (probably reflecting overstatement of both productivity growth and consumer price inflation). When the same price index is used, the increases in productivity and compensation have been almost exactly equal. But then how could it be otherwise? Any difference in the rates of growth of productivity and compensation would necessarily show up as a fall in labor's share of national income -- and as everyone who is even slightly familiar with the numbers knows, the share of compensation in U.S. national income has been quite stable in recent decades, and actually rose slightly over the period Lind describes.

The question here is not why Lind got these numbers wrong. It takes considerable experience to know where to look and what to worry about in economic statistics, and one should not expect someone who does not work in the field to be able to get it right without some guidance. The question is, instead, why Mr. Lind felt that it was a good idea to make sweeping pronouncements about this subject, when he clearly was unwilling to invest time and energy in actually understanding it. The short answer in this case is surely that Mr. Lind, who is always looking for ways to enhance his enfant terrible status, saw this as a perfect opportunity. Free trade is a sacred cow of economists, who are well-known to be boring, stuffy types; what could be a better way to reinforce one's credentials as a radical, innovative thinker than to skewer their most beloved doctrine? (It seems not to have occurred to him that there might be a reason other than ideological rigidity that the striking fact he thought he knew has not been noticed by economists).

Matters have not improved over the decades.

The most important point of ignorance here is though that no one really did go out and design or even build globalisation. Yes, obviously, there were spouting from politicians but when, and of what, isn’t that true? Tariffs came down a bit.

But the real drivers were cheap transport, cheap telecoms and cheap travel. Barriers to trade are not just the tariffs or quotas imposed by governments. They’re also the barriers imposed by the physical cost of trading. All of which have collapsed in these past few decades.

We saw this before in history too - after the Civil War the US raised tariffs considerably. The ocean going steamship lowered physical costs by more than the rise in tariffs - total trade costs fell and we can prove this by noting the falling differences in prices of tradeable goods between the US and Europe over this period.

Everyone loves the gravity model of trade these days and very few note that it talks about economic distance, not geographic. Those plummeting transport, travel and telecoms costs meant that economic distance also plummeted over the past 50 years. Therefore everywhere was becoming closer in that economic distance and so trade should increase. QED.

In order to stop this - if anyone wanted to be that stupid - tariffs would have to be raised, viciously and violently, to cover the reduction in those other costs.

It isn’t true that anyone went out and designed globalisation - they just didn’t stop it. And thank the Lord Above for that one, eh?

Oh, and, obviously, don’t take Michael Lind seriously on the subject of trade.

We have a suggestion for the Liz Truss Growth Commission

Of course, at times like this everyone brings out their own bugbears for a good trot around the paddock.

Liz Truss will launch a new international task force to revive flagging economic growth in the West.

The former prime minister has convened the non-partisan group, which is being called The Growth Commission, to investigate the causes of sluggish growth.

The commission, which is to be chaired by Douglas McWilliams, the leading economist, will also analyse the impact different policy decisions have on GDP per capita.

Our particular bee in the bonnet is counting. It’s vital to recall that like so many economic numbers GDP is a proxy. And reifying proxies doesn’t work - because it loses sight of the fact that it is a proxy.

Yes, we all know the standard critiques of GDP, it doesn’t count household work, includes cleaning up pollution as growth and so on. But the real biggie is that it doesn’t include the consumer surplus. A useful definition of the consumer surplus (one to horrify actual economists but one that works all the same) is the amount we are richer that doesn’t get included in GDP.

If the relationship is stable - say, the consumer surplus is equal to 100% of GDP, always - then there’s no problem. GDP still works as a proxy. If that relationship changes, which we would insist it is doing, then GDP becomes an ever worse measure of societal income and wealth.

To construct a ludicrous example. Someone invents the black box which provides power at zero cost. OK, we’re all vastly richer because power is now free (to continue with the example being ludicrous, no distribution costs etc etc - power finally too cheap to meter). But at the same time GDP has fallen - fallen by the amount we used to pay for power but now don’t. The consumer surplus has soared - hey, free power! - and GDP has fallen.

Don’t reify the proxy.

This is, of course, also Hal Varian’s point, “GDP doesn’t deal well with free”.

Now to give a non-ludicrous example. WhatsApp (at least did at one point in time) carries no advertising, makes no charge. The output associated with WhatsApp is zero in GDP. The costs, the couple of hundred engineers at Facebook that work on it, they’re still there, counted properly. So, labour costs but no output, WhatsApp appears in the GDP accounts as a fall in productivity. Yet some billion people are gaining some or all of their telecoms, for free. The consumer surplus has soared. To the extent that folk use WhatsApp instead of metered phone calls GDP falls. And the whole is measured as lower productivity, us getting poorer per hour of labour put in.

Any real examination of growth needs to deal with this problem. Much of the growth in the modern economy is digital, is free at the point of use. The consumer surplus of all of this is very large, entirely out of proportion with the usual rule of thumb that the consumer surplus and GDP about equal each other. That is, we’re getting vastly richer and not counting the fact that we are doing so.

If we’re really going to examine the counting of growth then we need to really examine the counting of growth.

There is also an obvious corollary to this. If ever more of the growth is turning up not as GDP - where we measure the distribution - but as the consumer surplus - where we don’t measure the distribution - then all claims about the inequality of society are wrong.

Think on it. You, me, Granny, Zuckerberg and that peasant on the paddy in Pakistan all have exactly the same access to WhatsApp - and therefore telecoms - at exactly the same price of nothing. And yet there are people claiming that society is becoming more unequal, are there?

Paying the staff to have more babies doesn't work

At least, paying the staff to have more babies so that there will then be more customers for the business at some future date doesn’t work:

The Chinese company behind Skyscanner and Trip.com will hand its employees £5,000 if they have more children in an effort to turn around the country’s plummeting birth rate.

James Liang, Trip.com group company’s founder and chairman, announced that staff will receive an annual cash bonus of RMB 10,000 (£1,090) for every newborn until they reach the age of five.

It’s possible to view this the same way many view Ford’s introduction of the $5 a day wage. That - incorrect - view is that the wage meant that the workers could buy the products they made. As we’ve pointed out before (and elsewhere) this doesn’t work even as a piece of basic arithmetic, let alone a business proposition.

Where this might well work is that it reduces the turnover of staff - as with Ford - or even attracts more and better staff to the company.

As long as everyone understands what’s going on here of course we think it’s fine. Not for any other reason than that markets work. Folk get to try out stuff. That which works others will copy and we’ll all get richer. That which doesn’t dies on the vine and again we all get richer by not making that mistake.

We’ve absolutely no idea whether staff bonuses for ‘avin’ a babbie is a good idea or not. We are absolutely certain that the decision making system on the subject is already in place - markets.

British Lithium - we'd just like to note, again, how lovely free market capitalism is

One of those little stories that bolsters our faith in the basic underpinning of our society - that free market capitalism. This:

French miner Imerys to help develop UK’s largest lithium deposit

Note what we’re not praising - the FT’s reporting nor understanding. Imerys owns the deposit. It is allowing someone to have a go at exploiting it. But, you know, they got the name of the metal right.

Lithium is often found in granites and the like. Granites can, sometimes, weather down into clays - kaolins, kaolinites maybe (yes, our lack of really detailed knowledge will shock geologists but this is part of the overall point here). China Clay is a form of such weathered down granite. So, it’s possible that the China clay pits of Cornwall might have lithium in them. You know, maybe?

Ah:

The granites of South-West England are a potential source of lithium which is generally found within the mica mineral, zinnwaldite. It is mainly found in the central and western end of the St. Austell granite. When kaolin extraction occurs in these areas a mica-rich waste product is produced which is currently disposed of in tailings storage facilities. In this study a tailings sample containing 0.84% Li2O…

0.84%, if someone else has already done the grinding the rock down to get it out, is pretty good for an Li source (1.3, maybe 1.4%, is something that you’re willing to grind down the rock to get, like all those spodumene mines).

Imerys took over English China Clay, therefore owns all those slag piles (maybe gangue pits, again, the technical language slightly escapes us) where that lithium enriched zinnwaldite sits unloved and awaiting attention.

So, what next? The statist (we’d possibly say Mazzo) idea is that government then plans everything and so - but that’s ludicrous. It is true that government is feeding some cash into this but that’s also ludicrous. Because there is no way, no way at all, that this potential source of lithium is not going to be explored given that the lithium price is $50,000 a tonne and the like. We can also prove that. There are two - at least - companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange (Zinnwald Lithium, European Metals) that have raised private sector money to extract lithium from zinnwaldite under the village of, umm, Zinnwald. The same sort of mica - hey, it’s even got the same name! - which is sitting there as waste in the old China clay pits.

Well, yes, that’s an exploration that’s going to happen then, isn’t it?

But here’s our real point here. So, we all decide that EVs are the very thing. This means much more lithium is required. So, what happens then? Well, there used to be two methods of gaining lithium. Extraction from salt brines and mining spodumene. Mineral reserves around the world were of those two that were already licensed, already proven to be profitable at then current prices. Mineral resources were those that we were pretty sure could be so but hadn’t bothered to fully prove.

At which point some say we can’t have EVs because mineral reserves weren’t enough. Or, the slightly more awake, that resources weren’t.

Umm, well, yes. We’ve seen one list of 200 companies looking for traditional - brines and spodumene - lithium sources. Yes, they’re finding them. But there’s more than that. As with Cornish Lithium there’s the idea of extraction from geothermal waters. Or, here, from mica in the wastes of old processes - or as in Germany/Czechia, from new mining of that same mineral. That is, we’re not just finding new deposits of those old minerals, we’re working out new minerals to get our target from.

And how has this happened? Well, the price of lithium changed. So every geologist, capitalist and general wide boy started to think about how to produce more lithium. Ain’t free market capitalism great? And this really does work. In fact it is working.

Because what’s really happening here at British Lithium. The change in price has meant people are going looking for that change that slipped down the back of the sofa. We’ve known for decades the lithium is there, it just needs that push of the price change to do something about it.

‘Ere, Jethro, there might be money at the bottom o’ that slurry pit. Best be we look.

It’s a hell of a system, isn't it?

The water companies and environmental insolvency

Another day and there’s another Professor Richard Murphy report. This one is “Cut the Crap” and it suffers from the usual problem, it’s by Professor Richard Murphy. The claim that it’s by the Corporate Accountability Network shouldn’t be taken seriously - other than Professor Murphy there’s no input from anyone other than the Fat Controller figurine on the model railway set.

The claim, as laid out by The Guardian:

England’s water companies are “environmentally insolvent” because they do not have the financial means to raise the £260bn needed to deal with their sewage spillages, academic research has found.

The report, by Prof Richard Murphy of the Corporate Accountability Network and Sheffield University, recommends nationalisation without compensation and raising the necessary funds through government ISAs for the public and higher charges for heavy water users.

Even in just that brief summation we can see the usual Professor Murphy problem - as the report has been written entirely solo no external checks on basic logic have been made. The claim is made that the current system cannot finance the required charges. Therefore the system must be done away with. Then the suggestion is that more finance be made available. But if more finance must be made available then doesn’t that mean that the current system could manage the finance - after all, more finance is to be made available?

In more detail the report - sorry, Professor Murphy - looks at England and shrieks in horror at what is found. Without then doing the most basic of logical checks - OK, so what about other, similar systems? Like, say, Scotland where exactly the same problems of Victorian infrastructure and rising population are to be found? With that interesting difference that the water there is done by an already nationalised company.

Well, the informed will know why Professor Murphy doesn’t make that comparison. Because the situation in Scotland with sewage overflow is worse - they’re even worse at monitoring it let alone preventing it. Given that state owned is worse than capitalist therefore it cannot be true that nationalisation is the answer - despite that being the preconceived conclusion that Professor Murphy desires to work toward.

The muttering about capital, borrowings and dividends is an irrelevance. As Murphy says “ total investment exceeding £91.5 billion had taken place over this period.” which does seem like a fairly large amount. Given that the suggested new financing method is more borrowings (however tax privileged through ISAs) it cannot be that borrowing to invest is a problem. We cannot solve a problem of people borrowing to invest by then insisting that people borrow to invest.

But here’s the great gaping hole in the logic being used. Apparently, to make sure that the rivers are as clean as some campaigners would like would cost £260 billion. At which point everyone’s insolvent because they can’t raise £260 billion. But the correct response to £260 billion is that the rivers aren’t going to become as clean as some campaigners would like. As we’ve said about Feargal Sharkey and Surfers Against Sewage. The costings of the demands - whoever pays for them, however - are such that they’re a frivolous waste of societal resources.

There are, close enough, 25 million households in England. Rounding a bit both ways, this makes £260 billion a charge of £10,000 per household. The only people to pay this £10,000 are households - whether through tax or water charges makes no difference. In order to clean up sewage overflows enough that folk may swim in the river at Hebden Bridge every household must pay £500 a year for 20 years (before any finance charges, recall). The rational answer from households is that the Hebdenites can go use a swimming pool like everyone else.

This is not entirely frivolous either. Sure we’d all like a cleaner environment and we’d all, possibly, be willing to pay something to get it. But that much? For that little difference? Double everyone’s water bill, at least, to make a marginal improvement in the rivers?

Do note that not even Murphy claims this will solve all storm overflows. We already deal with 95%, perhaps 98%, of the crud and this £260 billion will only take that to perhaps 99%. There will still be sewage overflows even after this spending. So, will people be happy to be charged this much to make Feargal happy?

No, no they won’t and that’s nothing, at all, to do with the ownership structure of the industry. It’s that the target is wrong in and of itself.

Then there is this issue of nationalisation which is political posturing at best. The claim is that water companies currently constrained by how much they may charge cannot solve this problem. Therefore nationalise them and then lift the control on what may be charged. But if the amount to be charged is to rise - as Professor Murphy insists it will have to - then the water companies are not environmentally insolvent, the basis of his claim that they must be nationalised. Further, the nationalisation doesn’t change the basic fact that to meet the - too strict - targets then households must pay more. And to repeat, if charging more is the solution anyway then where’s the insolvency?

At which point we can become rational again rather than following the lacunae in Professor Murphy’s logic. Take the occasional sight of reality rather than remain inside the ideological blinkers.

We have two suggested systems here. Capitalist companies and a state owned water company. Either of those will, in order to meet those desired by some water standards, have to charge very much more than the current costs. OK. So, which of those two organisational structures should we use to deploy those greater funds to improve the water standards?

Presumably we should use whichever system is more efficient at deploying funds to cleaning up the water. Which means using the English system of capitalist companies. Because the English companies have cleaned up the water more than the Scottish state owned company since the reorganisation at the time of the English privatisation. At lower cost too. In fact, we have four organisational models to look to. England capitalist, Wales a cooperative, Scotland state owned corporate and NI remaining with local councils. In terms of the three interesting measures, price, water quality in the taps, water quality in the rivers, the greatest improvements have come in England, followed in this order by Wales, Scotland and NI.

The further away from a vibrant capitalism it gets the worse it gets that is. The solution therefore cannot be to abandon the vibrant capitalism, can it?

The conspiratorially minded will now start asking why Professor Murphy does not do that comparison with the other water systems of the Home Nations and we’d have to say no, don’t do that. There is no conspiracy here. Just the obvious reason. Comparisons across ownership structures are not made because everyone, even Professor Murphy, knows that such a comparison would hole the desired argument below the waterline. The Enmglish water companies are more efficient in the deployment of funds which is why they must never be compared with mutuals and state owned companies because that would destroy the argument to make them mutuals or state owned.

But then as we said at the beginning, we’ve another Professor Richard Murphy report here, the problem being that it’s a report by Professor Richard Murphy. Cut the crap, really.

The Government is deliberately bankrupting Thames Water. So, you know, stop doing that

Apparently Thames Water requires more capital. Well, we believe in capitalism so why not, if that’s what it needs? Because the government is deliberately, with malice aforethought, preventing Thames Water from raising more capital.

Of course, it’s possible that the government doesn’t realise this, is instead snookered by its own bureaucracy. If it’s that second then the solution is easy. Simply stop preventing the raising of new capital by putting the bureaucracy back in its kennel and we’re done. If this is all purposeful then that’s something else - one aspect of which would be as with constructive dismissal in employment law. The pain and grief of the compensation payments to those robbed, by policy, of their investments would be large.

The papers are full of the story, Telegraph, Guardian and so on. It’s the FT which gives the crucial clue.

First, OFWAT:

Ofwat has today announced new powers that will enable it to stop the payment of dividends if they would risk the company’s financial resilience, and take enforcement action against water companies that don’t link dividend payments to performance.

The change will require company boards to take account of their performance – for customers and the environment – when deciding whether to make dividend payments. It will also require companies to maintain a higher level of overall financial health.

Then the FT:

The big problem for Thames Water was a rule that from April 2025, regulated opcos couldn’t pay dividends if their credit rating is Baa2(opens a new window)/BBB(opens a new window) with a negative outlook. Since Moody’s has the Thames Water holdco at Baa2 with a stable outlook,

OfWat has deliberately and specifically changed the rules. Thames Water cannot pay dividends - even if it is profitable, it cannot pay dividends. But Thames Water requires more capital, so we are told. Who would put capital into a company that cannot pay a dividend? Even if profitable?

Which brings us to the Telegraph report:

The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, which owns a 32pc stake in Thames, is said to be reluctant to inject fresh capital into the business after a series of poor investments in the UK.

City sources said they were aware that another of Thames’s nine predominantly overseas investors was yesterday also still yet to decide whether to pump in money to save the company, which has 15 million customers.

Hope remains that a deal can yet be done, however. The Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), Britain’s biggest pension fund and Thames Water’s only UK shareholder, is supportive of injecting fresh money into the business, senior sources added.

Why would foreigners put more capital into Thames Water if the government is deliberately, with that malice aforethought, preventing them from gaining dividends from their investments? Or, of course, government preventing them because government doesn’t understand what its own bureaucracy is doing.

Government, though those changes to the rules at OfWat, has caused this problem. The solution is not for government to make further mistakes, it’s to undo the one already made. If a return can be made on more capital put in then more capital will be put in - the problem of not having enough capital will be solved.

It really is all incredibly simple if only we can get over that near impossible hurdle - of getting government to admit to a mistake which needs to be reversed.

Rising water bills - well done to Feargal Sharkey, Surfers Against Sewage

The Times suggests that water bills are going to have to rise, substantially:

Water companies are drawing up plans to increase household bills by up to 40 per cent to pay for the cost of tackling the sewage crisis and the consequences of climate change.

In a move that has alarmed ministers, England’s privatised utilities said that they needed the extra money to meet strict pollution targets.

We’d just like to say well done here, well done to Feargal Sharkey and Surfers Against Sewage. They, and others (Hello! to Mr. Monbiot), have been shouting that the rivers and oceans should be cleaner than they are. Well, maybe they should be.

But every benefit comes at a cost. It is not possible to have two entirely separate water drainage systems, one for sewage and the other for storm run off, without there being some expense associated with having two separate water drainage systems. That expense seems to be 40% on water bills.

No, there is no way out of this - there’re only us chickens here to pay those bills. It doesn’t matter whether it’s government or capitalists who fund the upgrades. Either the capitalists do and they make a return, the government does and it does, or government does then charges us the cost in our tax bills. The cost of that upgrade to the system is a few hundred pounds a year, forever, on every household bill for water, whether it appears directly on the water bill or not.

It’s even possible to suggest that perhaps we don’t in fact want to clean up the rivers. Sure there’s a joy in wild swimming in the river at Hebden Bridge. But perhaps 25 million households will baulk at each paying £250 a year for that to be possible - Hebdenites might need to use a swimming pool instead.

We could even call into evidence that standard economic observation, the difference between expressed and revealed preferences. Plenty of people will say they’d like cleaner rivers. But if they’ll not pay for it then they don’t really mean it, do they?

And again, we do insist that this is nothing, at all, to do with who owns, operates or funds the water system. If Britain wants cleaner rivers then Britain will have to pay for cleaner rivers.

The rises are due to be announced next year and could result in annual bills increasing from an average of about £450 to £680,

Hey, maybe people do want to pay this much. We do tend to doubt it though.

The larger point here being that there’s an optimal amount of pollution and it isn’t none. What that optimum is depends upon how much it costs to not have it as compared to how much people are willing to pay to not have it. That’s just how reality works. Sorry about that but there it is. Stuff costs money so, how much are you willing to pay to get what you say you want?

Cornish Lithium and the failure to understand capitalism

Cornish Lithium is a plucky little attempt to extract lithium - that new “white gold” for EV batteries - from the geothermal waters underneath Cornwall. With our weird metals hat on yes, there’s lithium under them thar’ hills, yes it can be extracted. Whether it can be done economically, well, that’s going to be the interesting bit.

At which point we’d like to mutter something about how the country’s got a much greater problem than local lithium for local people. For the three major papers that we might hope would understand at least something about business and the economy seem not to. The FT, The Times, The Telegraph. They’re all bleating about how Cornish is giving off an alarm signal, that it might go bust!

Err, yes, this is how capitalism works. In order to do some new thing, in order to try to do some new thing, it’s necessary to have a big pile of money. Capital. Which is gained from other people - the capitalists. When you’re trying to sort out some new method of extracting lithium you might burn through £50 million - £100 million! - of that capital, that other peoples’ money.

The aim, of course, is that at the end there will be lithium which can be sold to provide a return to the capitalists.

However, at this stage of this game the process, the organisation, simply eats capital. Which it needs to gain a constant supply of. For no one funds a project to completion, it’s always funded to stages. Is there lithium in the water, can it be extracted, can we get licences to do so and so on - each is a funding stage. For failure at the earlier stage means there’s no point in bothering to fund later ones.

Every junior miner (that is, one not producing yet) is, by definition, in danger of going bust if the next chunk of capital doesn’t turn up. Always has been, always will be because that’s the way the system works, that’s capitalism.

And as we say if we’ve the three major broadsheets (no one expects The Guardian to understand this sort of stuff) can’t even recognise capitalism in action then we’d suggest that we’ve something of a societal problem. You know, given that we are, at least nominally, still a capitalist society?

Sorry, these Broken Plate people are insane, no, really, they are

As we’ve pointed out before, the very idea behind the Broken Plate idea is, umm, broken. To the point that we’d have to conclude that actual adults seriously proposing this as a method of measurement have lost the plot to the point of requiring some of that care in the community stuff. From the PR email for today’s report:

“More healthy foods are over twice as expensive per calorie as less healthy foods”

They are attempting to measure the costs of food by calorie count. They also claim that veggies or salads - say lettuce - are “healthy” foods and that potatoes and or rice are not. Which is how they gain their result that healthy foods are more expensive - per calorie, recall - than unhealthy.

This is insane. Or, as we could also put it, knock our old Granny down with a wet feather. There really was a reason why she placed a balanced meal in front of us. A wodge of calories from some stodge - potatoes, bread, rice, whatever to be recipe and culturally conformant - and some meat, possibly soya, peas, eggs, for the protein and then some veggies or salad to give us the vitamins and micronutrients. Granny also knew that you didn’t get your calories from the lettuce, nor the protein or the vitamins from the tatties. The idea was that the plateful fed across all those major nutrients by also including components from across the food groups.

These people, now, today, are measuring the cost of lettuce by the calorie content. No, really, that is what they’re doing.

At which point we really should be doing some analysis as to who is displaying the insanity. Sure, there are always those wearing tin foil caps somewhere out there. But a healthy society manages to ignore - or tender mercifully to - them instead of taking their claims as a useful basis for government policy.

These people are measuring the price of lettuce by the calorie content. Are they mad for saying it or us for listening?