No, of course we can't trust Britain's economic data

So, that answers this Telegraph piece:

Can we really trust Britain’s economic data?

So, what time’s the footie then?

Ah, you’d like a little more would you?

Yes, the things said are true, an economy is a big complicated thing, difficult to measure, best possible is being done and so on. But we find an extra 2% of GDP down the back of the sofa - from which we can conclude that detailed Keynesian demand management is a very silly idea.

But there’s a much, much, larger problem here. We have endless whingeing about child poverty levels - which are something we don’t even measure. For poverty is now defined as less than 60% of median household income. So we’re measuring inequality of household income, not poverty at all. Beyond that even in these days of late blooming fertility those with children are going to be younger than those who have had them - and household income does tend to rise with age. You know, career progression, all that stuff.

Our measure of wealth deliberately excludes everything the government does about wealth. Currently everyone else pays £6k a year in taxes so your kids can fail their GCSEs. That’s wealth you’ve got which isn’t included in any analysis either of total wealth or wealth distribution. Similarly the NHS. OK, it’s health care that’s indifferent at best and yet purely by being alive in this place at this time you’ve a lifetime supply of it. Something not included in our wealth statistics. They don’t even include the state pension in the pensions wealth statistics. Let alone the wider benefits system which can indeed be modelled like an insurance policy and so have a capital value.

And that’s before we get to consumer wealth. Everyone’s a supercomputer in their pocket, WhatsApp makes international phone calls free to everyone - the Duke of Westminster and the most recent asylum seeker together.

The economic data we’ve got simply is not fit - as with that Keynesian demand management idea - for the purposes people try to use it for. We certainly can’t trust it because it’s measuring the wrong things for any useful purpose.

Measuring the wrongs things and badly - no, that’s not the evidence base upon which to run a polity.

There's a difference between selling something and destroying it

So Dear Old Brum has gone bust. At which point there are those crying out that the assets must not be sold:

“As the process of balancing the council’s books begins, local communities are rightly concerned about the fate of publicly owned historic places and buildings and arts and culture venues,” the letter states. “Birmingham’s financial reconstruction must not come at the cost of its priceless heritage.”

The letter lists sites including the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Aston Hall, Moseley Road Baths, Symphony Hall and Cannon Hill Park as “precious, publicly owned places” that should be saved.

Neil Mendoza, the chair of Historic England, said: “Cultural and heritage assets are incredibly precious and important parts of communities. They’re not things to be bought and sold.

“This is a serious situation, and heritage and community considerations need to be taken into account as well as the obvious legal ones. People in Birmingham are really upset at the idea these things might even be considered as assets to be sold.”

They are assets and it should be considered, that sale of them. It’s entirely possible that the sale doesn’t make sense, just as it is possible it does.

But the point we want to emphasise, insist upon, is that selling an asset does not mean destroying that asset. That, say, Moseley Road Baths is privately, not council, owned does not make Moseley Road Baths disappear. It just changes who owns the place.

This is, to us, part of a larger mistake more generally made. We often hear of demands to “save an iconic company” when what is meant is to save the particular and current legal form of it. The underlying economic asserts do not cease to exist if a particular legal wrapper goes bust. What changes in bankruptcy is who owns those assets, not the existence of the assets themselves.

That is, don’t get hung up on the legal or form of ownership. The things themselves, sure, they might well be worth saving. Or not, as the case might be. But the form of ownership, or even who owns, isn’t the thing that must necessarily be preserved. That’s to reify the current legal arrangement which is an absurdity. Even if we do want to save the thing itself it’s the thing that is to be considered, not the who or how.

Well, George Monbiot is right here

On the subject of HS2:

In 2010, when a high-speed rail line from London to the north – HS2 – was proposed by the outgoing Labour government, I wrote an article arguing that the numbers didn’t add up. The environmental benefits had been inflated by a series of blatant accounting tricks and concocted figures. What the government called the “business case” for the scheme was in fact a cost-benefit analysis, in which the supposed economic benefits had been amplified by outright assaults on common sense. The case for HS2 always was a baggage train of bullshit.

After reading all available documents and finding no justifications for the assumptions the Department for Transport had made, I pressed it for an explanation. After a flurry of panicked phone calls, it eventually told me there was a model for justifying its analysis, but this was “frightfully complicated”. It did not volunteer to send me a copy. The books, it seemed to me, were cooked – thoroughly and fatally.

Well, one of us did read the cost benefit analysis and as we pointed out here, it didn’t pass the most basic CBA tests. And let’s be honest about it, if your economic argument is such that even George Monbiot can see through it then you’ve not got a strong case.

But as ever with George he doesn’t grasp how right he is. He identifies a larger problem from this:

I think it is one instance of the endemic disease that plagues this country, a disease that withstands changes of government, democratic scrutiny and the Tories’ austerity programmes. It’s a disease whose name everyone knows in Brazil, where I used to work and learned my politics. But it is seldom diagnosed here, though it seems just as prevalent. Clientelism.

Yep, we’re fine with that. Not with it happening, but with the identification.

The favours can be widely distributed: a government might buy the votes of a particular interest group with pre-election handouts. Or, in the case of elite clientelism, they can be targeted at a few key players.

Yes, quite so.

Which is, of course, the case for small government neoliberalism. Sure, we all agree that there are some things that must be done and that also only government can do. But we should - must - limit government only to those things which meet both tests. Because government - in any form of democracy, another valuable idea - is going to be run by politicians. Whose interest is always going to be gaining those who will vote for them.

That’s exactly the clientelism George is complaining about - state money, taxpayer’s money, being spent upon buying votes. Could be unions with promises of higher pay, bureaucrats with more clipboards to carry, grifters wanting to build something without value for money checks, possibly even greenies who want renewables at thrice the costs of fossil fuels. But that’s what the game is, deploying that 45% of the economy that the state commands in order to buy votes for those doing the deploying. Clientelism.

This is not exactly new, panem et circenses as political advice is a couple of millennia old by now.

The reason we mention this at length is that Monbiot has shown himself, at times, to be amenable to reason and evidence. We therefore still nurture that hope - extreme as it is - that we can get him over to that side of righteous small government liberalism before too long. As anyone motivated by reason and evidence does become. For just look at what government does when given free rein.

How to deal with the world changing

We could we suppose, have some vast army of people - call them GOSPLAN just for fun - who then tell us all what to do, in detail, when something out there changes. Or, well, we could just leave things be perhaps?

Meta, the owner of Facebook, has paid £149 million to surrender lease on a London office block having not moved in any staff two years after signing the deal.

Oh well, made a mistake, loses money and there we are.

Britain’s return to the office has stalled this year, with occupancy levels averaging about 30 per cent, according to data from Remit Consulting — about half the levels before the pandemic.

Given the record shortage of lab space in the UK, British Land is unlikely to have trouble finding a life sciences tenant. Analysts at BNP Paribas Exane estimate that the landlord may even be able to achieve 50 per cent more rent than it was due under the lease to Meta.

Asset unwanted in its current form is to be transformed into a more valuable asset. The very definition of increasing wealth - moving economic assets from lower to higher valued uses.

Seems like a system that works. No bureaucratic direction or plan, just prices coordinating behaviour.

As we say, it’s a system that seems to work. Possibly we could even use it elsewhere as well. Say, that shocking oversupply of high street shops that could be turned into more valuable housing? Or those vast expanses of Green Belt that could be turned into more valuable housing?

After all, we have just proven that the free market does move property to higher value uses, haven’t we.

Good Lord, people actually believe this guff

That green energy, all those renewables, is really cheaper than fossil fuels is something we’ve seen people say. But we’ve never really believed that they, themselves, believe it. For if they did then there would be no need for subsidies, laws, forcings and bans. People will naturally gravitate to the cheaper option and climate change will be solved.

But here we have someone who really does seem to believe this mantra:

Clean energy provides not only a key means to Britain achieving net zero within the timeline we’ve committed to, but also offers households a vital financial lifeline through decreasing the price of energy.

Oh well. But this is not what worries us here, not at all. Markets do refute such delusions even if it might take some time. Precisely because markets work through prices, those easily visible numbers that tell us about relative costs.

What strikes us as significantly dangerous is this:

The UK must now double down on its commitment to achieving a clean grid by 2035 – or risk breaking its net zero by 2050 pledge. Put simply, we cannot view these timelines, informed by expertise from top climate scientists and the Climate Change Committee, as malleable to political whim. They are gradated, clear pathways that must not be tampered with at this stage of innovation and investment as we transform our economy.

This is a demand that we cease to have democracy - at least upon this subject. For it is an insistence that however the next election - or next however many elections - goes this policy must be followed. But the entire point of having an election is to enable changes in policy. If we the demos decide we don’t like the law then we elect someone else and we get different laws. That really is the purpose of the system, that policy change is possible without uprisings.

Yes, this point does also cover other laws that have those “legally enforceable targets” and so on. They’re an abomination unto democracy.

The British constitution, that unwritten mishmash, has a central concept to it - no parliament may bind its successors. For the very obvious reason that the entire point of a new parliament is to change how the place is run - if that’s what the demos decides it wants.

Ossifying a highly contentious policy into the skeleton of the political system is inherently anti-democratic. Shame on those proposing such a thing. It’s not mattocks and pruning hooks time as yet but this attitude that you’ll do whatever we tell you whatever you say in an election is what does lead to such distressing episodes.

Shocking these health inequalities

The government, and the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) in particular, is concerned with health inequalities and it believes women in particular are unfairly treated. Women, worldwide live longer than men so why is that unfair to women? The August 2022 DHSC policy paper claimed “this country’s health and care system belongs to us all, and it must serve us all. However, sadly, 51% of the population faces obstacles when it comes to getting the care they need.” The DHSC policy paper was, naturally, wholly unbiased. As the paper puts it “It’s brilliant that we have received almost 100,000 responses from women [sic] across the country.”

According to the DHSC: “Although women in the UK on average live longer than men, women spend a significantly greater proportion of their lives in ill health and disability when compared with men.” Strangely the Office for National Statistics figures, which it cites, do not support this claim: “Female HLE [healthy life expectancy] increased for those aged 10 years and over between 2011 to 2013 and 2018 to 2020, with the increases being statistically significant in those aged 20 years and over (Figure 2).” Disability-free life expectancy (DFLE) remained the same for men vs. women throughout the five years 2015 to 2020 (Figure 4). Shame the figures are not what the DHSC would like them to be.

On 25th September 2023, the DHSC ministers wrote to the chief executives of integrated care boards (ICBs). By then the Minister for Women’s Health had been joined by the Women’s Health Ambassador and her deputy and the Chief Nursing Officer. The letter said that £25M was being made available for “Women’s Health Hubs” (at least one per ICB): “Hubs bring together healthcare professionals and existing services to provide integrated women’s health services in the community, focusing on improving access to care and reducing health inequalities.” Each hub would cost £595,000, but see below, the DHSC cannot know how the money should be spent of why a hub in Darlington should cost the same as one in Mayfair.

Equalling the treatment (health cost) given to women and men means they have to be treated for the same health problems.  The flaw in this equality idea is that they don’t actually have the same problems.  The male menopause is joked about but, of course, there is no such thing.  

One might think assessing the value for money or performance of these hubs would require quite a bit of discussion and serious contemplation so it was hardly generous of DHSC to require 16 questions on the template plus 11 questions on the data sources page to be answered within a week, i.e. issued 22nd September response by 29th September. Template question 16 for example: “Q16. What is the best way for DHSC to access data from your hub to measure or evaluate the implementation and performance of hubs models? If you think a combination of the approaches listed is best then select multiple responses.”

The interesting thing about Q16 is that the DHSC clearly has no idea what these hubs, or removing the non-existent health inequalities, are supposed to achieve. Shocking.  

Tax foreigners living in foreign countries

Monty Python once - humourosly, you understand - suggested taxing foreigners living in foreign countries. Gordon Brown seems to have taken the show seriously:

A $25bn global windfall levy on oil and gas profits, paid by the richest petrostates, would amount to less than 1% of global oil and gas revenues and only 3% of the export earnings of these major producers. Each of the richest petrostates can easily afford to pay. The UAE has seen its export earnings rise from $76bn to $119bn; it can afford to contribute $3bn without any impact on the energy prices paid by its domestic consumers. And it is not alone: with Qatar’s export earnings, mainly from gas, rising from $53bn to $86bn it too could easily afford $3bn, as could Kuwait with its export earnings increasing from $63bn to $98bn.

Of course all those foreigners would just live to hand over the cash for Gordon to spend. Just love to.

One thing does occur to us, where is the contribution from Venezuela? Russia? You only have to give the money away if you’re a relatively free and efficient producer? Socialist and authoritarian hellholes are let off the fine? Does wonders for incentives, that does.

Rather more importantly, the people responsible for climate change are those who use fossil fuels, not those who produce them. It should be those who use fossil fuels coughing up therefore.

But, you know, we still think it an idea worth laughing about. Yes, let’s try to tax foreigners living in foreign to fund our spending. Why not? Farce becoming history, didn’t someone say something about that?

Could we suggest a negotiating line? Yes, yes, of course we’ll respect you in the morning, after you’ve handed over the cash.

Often enough free ain't free, Emily in Paris edition

Amazingly the real Paris isn’t like Emily in Paris. Apartments are rather smaller for example - as anyone who has ever tried to live that artistic life in the garret will recall. As the French themselves insist interacting with Parisians can have its downside too. But it’s this part of the description that interests us:

With Emily’s fourth season approaching I’d suggest another kind of escapist speciality tour: one that introduces foreigners to France’s free preschools; its practically free universities; and its universal healthcare.

Things that are not free to produce and or provide turn out not to be free.

The tax wedge is the gap between what your employer tries to pay you and what you get in the palm of your hand. For France this is 47% of your wages. For the US this is 30% of your wages. As it happens - and they don’t need to exactly match up - this is approximately the difference between how much of GDP flows through government in the two polities.

17% of all economic activity is flowing to pay for those “free” things. Which isn’t a definition of free that we think is useful. In fact, we think it’s downright misleading and therefore dangerous.

Things that cost to provide are never going to be free - it’s always who delivers them and how are they paid that is the question.

We shouldn't have Net Zero in the first place

Matthew Parris gets close to the right question:

We’re no nearer the truth of net zero’s costs

But it’s still not the right question. For, “We’re going to have Net Zero now, what does it cost?” is the wrong query. The correct question is here’s the cost now, how much - or how close to - net zero can we get for that?

The base point here has an elegant simplicity. There are costs to allowing climate change to happen. There are costs to stopping climate change from happening. Our goal is the maximisation of human utility over time. Therefore we wish to have the minimal - ie, utility maximising - amount of costs. But, here’s the tricky bit, the minimal aggregate of both sets of costs, those of mitigating climate change and those also of suffering it.

So far everyone should be agreeing. Those who insist there is no climate change and therefore no costs to be carried from it, those also who insist there is, that’s it’s near terminal for the species therefore we should be willing to bear near any burden. Everyone’s base calculation should be the same - what’s the blend of policy to mitigate plus costs of allowing to happen that is utility maximising? Then that’s what we should do.

This is not an oddity by the way, it’s the logical argument at the heart of the Stern Review. This is entirely and wholly mainstream.

Therefore the question “What’s the cost of the target we’ve decided upon?” is logically the wrong question. For the correct one is “What is the cost of not mitigating? Therefore we’ll spend up to that amount to mitigate.”

That is, the cost of what we’re going to do is the first thing to work out. Because that then determines what we do do. We have, in fact, policy about climate change determined by people asking entirely the wrong thing. Failing to grasp even the basics of the logic of the subject.

But then that’s government for us, eh?

The joyousness of George Monbiot's latest squinny

George has discovered another thing that is murdering us all in our beds as we live ever longer lives in ever better health. Now it’s ammonia:

Many rural people will be surprised to see how polluted their air is, but that’s because the media seldom mention the major source of these particles: ammonia from farms. A study by researchers at University College London found that even in cities, ammonia from farms produces more particulate pollution than the cities themselves do. Farm ammonia contributes 25% of the PM2.5s in London, 32% in Birmingham and 38% in Leicester, while these cities generate from 13-24% of their own PM2.5 pollution (the rest blows in from mainland Europe or comes from construction and road traffic outside the city, shipping emissions and dust from distant deserts).

Well, yes, although the paper we’ve found indicates that farms and ammonia aren’t the source of the particles, they are what allow the particles to form out of dust and so on. But OK, let’s run with George.

It is true that very few areas of the world meet the standards for non-pollution:

We explore if this guideline is attainable across different regions of the world using a series of model sensitivity simulations for 2019. Our results indicate that >90% of the global population is exposed to PM2.5 concentrations that exceed the 5 μg m–3 guideline and that only a few sparsely populated regions (largely in boreal North America and Asia) experience annual average concentrations of <5 μg m–3. We find that even under an extreme abatement scenario, with no anthropogenic emissions, more than half of the world’s population would still experience annual PM2.5 exposures above the 5 μg m–3 guideline (including >70% and >60% of the African and Asian populations, respectively), largely due to fires and natural dust.

That is, the PMI 2.5 limit that WHO currently insists upon is something that’s simply not achievable in a world which includes weathering - dust that is. As to why we’ve a limit so nonsensical that’s just because WHO halved the limits recently.

Yes, we do in fact mean this. The current guidelines, the ones that lead to those stories about 98% of Europeans being killed by air pollution, are based upon a standard that is not achievable even if there were no humans at all to produce pollution. We would suggest these standards are perhaps a little too strict. As in, ludicrous.

At which point the most obvious point to make is that the ULEZ - or any more of them - is clearly nonsensical. The pollution isn’t caused by the vehicles so limiting vehicles won’t change the pollution. And don’t forget that our proof here is direct from the pen of George Monbiot.

We can, and should, go further though. As George says, if the pollution comes from both fertiliser (ammonium nitrate, that artificial stuff that keeps us alive by feeding us) and also from animal dung then we’ll have to stop using both. That means, of course, no meat. But that also has a further effect. For if we can’t use the usual fertiliser, and also we can’t use animal dung because we haven’t got any, then we’re going to have to draw straws for the 90% of humanity who get to starve to death.

Oh, and we’ll also have to kill off that rewilding idea because we’re going to have to use absolutely every scrap of land to feed the 800 million of us left after that cull. Because if we’ve not got fertiliser of any type then that’s just the amount of land we’re going to have to use - all of it.

At which point perhaps it might be possible to inject some sense into the conversation. As always, everything is a series of trade offs. So, on the one hand we’ve air pollution standards the same as we had before Sept 2021. On the other hand, trying to meet this new standard, the death of 90% of humanity, the wiping out of every piece of nature that’s not a food crop and even then we still cannot meet the standard because meteorology and geology - that dust.

We suggest - just as a proposal you understand, a subject for discussion - putting the WHO back in its box and firing up the barbie for a steak. You all will be driving around to partake, yes?