52 things that are more important than Brexit - including mushrooms

I know it seems that Brexit (or not-Brexit for that matter) is the most significant and momentous thing that has happened anywhere or anywhen. The chattering classes have nothing else to talk about - everything from the cost of coffee to the price of a flat in Mayfair is washed through the "what does this mean for Brexit" mill. Well I'm here to suggest that when other folk look back at 2017 in fifty years time they'll see some other things that were more important to the future of mankind - even of that small bit of mankind living in the UK.

I did a little list of those things that might be more important than Brexit.

1. Driverless cars and autonomous transport technology
2. Neo-Luddite campaigns opposed to digital disaggregation, AI and robots
3. Better drones enable African development without roads or rail
4. Electricity supply systems (power supply, microgeneration, disagregation, off-grid)
5. Fracking, renewables lead to declining reliance on oil (impact on economy, on geopolitics)
6. Private space travel
7. Colonising Mars
8. Non-national living, seastedding, artificial islands, cruise living
9. Declining fertility rates in rich countries
10. Continuing population pressures in poor countries
11. Migration from poor places to rich places
12. International migration, people trafficking, refugees
13. Integration and community cohesion in a world with more migration
14. Food production and distribution - feeding the world: GMO, animal welfare
15. Changing diets as poor nations become richer
16. Big killers - malaria, AIDS, and so forth
17. Antibiotics
18. Medical technology
19. Continuing urbanisation with associated health and societal problems
20. The future of care and health provision in an ageing society
21. Loneliness
22. Declining rates of functional literacy as technology reduces need to read and write
23. Ideological bias in education - especially higher education
24. Decline in religious worship leading to more extremism from faith groups
25. Intellectual property, copyright and piracy
26. Scientifical and technical literacy
27. Cyberterrorism, cybercrime and cyberwar
28. Pornography and sexual exploitation
29. Women's rights
30. Rogue states, civil war and terrorism
31. Break up of established nations - Spain, Italy, UK, USA?
32. Climate change - resilience, technological response, economic impact
33. Environmental degradation, desertification
34. Reforestation, rewilding
35. Flooding and flood mitigation
36. Water supply and water quality
37. Pollution of the oceans
38. Digital disruption of elite white collar business (law, accountancy, banking)
39. FinTech and its challenge to central banking system of financial management
40. 3D Printing and associated technologies
41. Impact of Internet of Things on human productivity
42. The 'gig' economy, self-employment - rights and protections
43. Chinese monopoly of African resources
44. China becoming a net importer of goods
45. Remote warfare - drones, military robots
46. Nuclear proliferation
47. Mushrooms (or rather fungi in building, medicine and environmental management)
48. Nanotechnology
49. Biotechnology including 'bionics'
50. Break up of blue collar/white collar political order
51. Impact of digital technology on democratic institutions
52. England winning the World Cup (well we can dream!)

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A truly global economy...

From Don Boudreaux:

A truly global economy is simply what happens when governments do not obstruct their citizens’ decisions to trade with foreigners. Each of these countless decisions will be made in light of each buyer’s and each seller’s assessment of the benefits and costs of trading with foreigners as compared to trading with fellow citizens. If, for example, an American retailer believes that the benefits to it of buying inventories from foreign factories are higher than the costs (including the risks) of doing so, it will buy from foreign factories. Competition at the retail level then ensures that these lower costs are passed on to domestic consumers in the form of lower prices or higher product quality (or both). If this retailer discovers that its initial assessment is mistaken, it will stop buying from those foreign factories or it and the foreign factories will re-arrange the details of their contracts. In either case there is no call for government to artificially restrict the retailer’s – or any other of its citizens’ – freedom to engage in commerce with foreigners.

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Ten common lies about about free markets, capitalism and liberal society

Every day - in the papers, on the telly and all over social media - a bunch of people tell a pack of lies about free markets, capitalism and the liberal enlightenment that made us all rich, is still helping make the poor less poor and the rich happier. The Clerisy, as Deirdre McCloskey calls them, having got themselves secure, often tax-funded positions spend their time sneering at the things that made their comfortable lives possible. Hipsterish, right-on web-design consultants and the like go on about the evils of capitalism while plying their lucrative businesses in that capitalist world.

This makes me angry. It's not the hypocrisy, we've all a tendency that way. It's not the smugness, annoying though it often is. And it's not that, as my Dad was wont to say, "they can afford to be socialists". No, it's the lies. Here are ten of them.

The First Lie - Free markets are a bad thing.

Please explain which part of the word 'free' is a bad thing? If you don't like free markets, what you want is markets that aren't free. Markets where only some privileged people can trade. Markets where someone else (usually the government) sets the price. Markets where their effectiveness is determined not by the actions of those in the market but by who is most effective at lobbying - for which read bribing, corrupting - government. If you fetter free markets (which given you always go on about the free market being "unfettered" is what you want) what you create are winners and losers, privileged and unprivileged, rather than having a system where people seek co-operation and mutual benefit. Freedom is a good thing. Free markets are a good thing. So stop lying about this and undermining the liberty of your neighbour.

The Second Lie - Capitalism is exploitative

We hear this all the time. Whether it's about the planet, the workers or some vague and general exploitation. Well it ain't so. Capitalism is a simple concept where things are owned by the people who stump up the resources for those things to be there. Not just cash but ideas, innovation, skills and enthusiasm. No-one's being exploited here and capitalism delivers returns to investors - in doing so it helps make those innovations succeed and those free markets make us all richer.

The Third Lie - We are rich through exploiting other humans

Quite the reverse. The thing that the liberal enlightenment did was demonstrate that the best way to get rich is to help make other folks' lives better. That was Adam Smith's great insight, not the 'invisible hand' but rather the realisation that personal self-interest operating in a free system leads to social betterment. When people point, quite rightly, to the horrors of colonialism and imperialism they are wrong to see in them the reason for our wealth. Some people made money screwing over Africans and Indians but this money was - even at the height of Lord Clive's egregious pillage of India - marginal to England's wealth and economic growth.

The Fourth Lie - Government creates wealth

We need government to protect the liberal society that allows free markets and capitalism to work. The ancient - and it is ancient - system of contracts, laws and administration that protects property was turned (mostly but not always) away from protecting the landed and towards supporting that free society and its mundane trading transactions. But government doesn't create wealth - we had hundreds of years of contract law, the Magna Carta and all that jazz without seeing the transformation wrought by capitalism and free markets. And we had plenty of government inventions during that time - from gunpowder to haute cuisine - without those inventions making the mass of people rich.

The Fifth Lie - Capitalism kills people

All the time you're talking about 'capitalism's death toll' without ever pointing to the bit when liberal society, free markets and capitalism killed these people. Indeed quite the opposite. All the advances in medicine, sanitation and safety made possible by being richer - that's the fruit of capitalism even if we choose to organise these things through government. Since the millennium a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty because of those free markets, free trade and capitalism. Capitalism saves lives.

The Sixth Lie - Capitalists are greedy

Again quite the opposite is true. Capitalism expects that, instead of swimming backstroke in his gold pile, Scrooge McDuck invests his cash. Some of this is invested in boring old working capital and some in high risk, exciting, sexy, hipster innovation. You and I prefer the safe stuff because we've not much to spare let alone risk but Scrooge McDuck can take bigger risks because losing a bit is less of a big deal. Those filthy rich plutocrats (the anonymous pinstriped banker ones are the worst) you rile against are stumping up the investment needed to deliver economic growth, health, wealth and happiness. Moreover they're putting off having something now (spending all that gold) to take a risk hoping that they'll get a bigger return in the future. Because of this all those exciting, innovative businesses happen. This is not greed.

The Seventh Lie - Small businesses aren't capitalists

Now this lie is more inferred that explicit. Bad capitalism is about faceless, distant businesses not our friend's web design business or the trendy coffee shop where you meet to discuss revolution and the evils of free markets. Sorry to disappoint but you're all capitalists and it's in all your interests for that capitalist system to operate as openly and freely as possible.

The Eighth Lie - Trade is something permitted by government

This lie sits behind all the talk of trade deals and the nonsense about a 'global race' so loved by politicians and pundits. Trade is quite simply the process of exchange in a free market (or even in a not-so-free market). We want government to back up our exchange by protecting property rights, preventing theft and ensuring we can enforce a contract. But we don't want the government to say who can and cannot trade or when and where they can trade. Trade is more often prevented by government than enabled. If we want more growth, more riches, the way to go is less prevention and more enablement.

The Ninth Lie - The rich are rich because others are poor

Free markets prevent this from happening. It used to be so before we woke up and realised that posh folk owning all the land and getting peasants to scrat in it wasn't the best way to a wealthy, healthy and successful society. We used to have a system - called it feudalism, oikocracy, whatever - that meant some folk were rich because others were poor. It had lasted from the first cities in the middle east through to the Dutch Republic. Then some places realised (partly government, partly people thinking about a better world) that the way to get rich was to try and make everybody better off. And it worked. We call this system liberal capitalism.

The Tenth Lie - Free marketeers don't care

How often to you say this? Every time something fails, most usually some or other government administrative system. This because of capitalism, we're told. Free markets did this. Because they don't care. If they cared nothing would ever fail. No-one would be poor. This is the biggest of these lies. Free marketers do care. That's why we're capitalists. We want everyone to be healthier, wealthier and happier. And because free markets work people in Britain are vastly healthier, wealthier and happier than our forebears.


By all means disagree. Feel free to stick with your faith that there is some sort of Utopia, some system - True Socialism maybe - that will give even more social benefit, wealth, health and happiness than free markets, capitalism and our liberal society. But stop lying about free markets, capitalism and that liberal society. Stop fibbing that it's anything other than the more successful, more effective and long-lasting means of bettering the lives of ordinary people.

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Things are seldom as simple as they seem...

I'm discussing Council budgets and we get to the matter of shared services and specifically sharing back office functions (things like receipts and payments, payroll, tax collection and so forth). Now these are things that every local council does with the same intention and the same outcome. So, on the face of it, sharing such things ought to be a doddle.

The problem is (and it's not insurmountable since quite a few councils have merged back office with other councils) that, for all the apparent obviousness, things aren't that simple. Even if I allow for a certain amount of bureaucratic sucking of teeth - "ooh, Councillor, I don't think that's possible" - there remains the matter of systems. And unless you merge the systems you really don't realise, other than a bit of saving in senior management, much benefit from sharing.

The problem is that merging large and complicated systems is not straightforward. By way of illustration, our former Spanish bank (Banesto) was taken over by another bank (Santander) but the actual back office systems for the two banks remain - or did in October 2015 - separate to the extent that Santander operators were unable to sort out problems, these had to be done by the former Banesto people who "understood the systems".

Integrating two complicated back office systems - say those of Leeds and Bradford Councils - is only possible given time, money and a plan. To make such a merger worthwhile, we need also to know that the net savings exceed, in a reasonable time frame, the money invested in the merger. It is, while not impossible, pretty challenging to make this calculation with a high degree of confidence. Such a lack of confidence isn't really a problem if the costs are low and the savings are high. But this really doesn't seem to be the case for such back office mergers (or so I'm told).

This problem with complex systems, how they stay in place because changing them is uncertain and expensive, is repeated time and time again. Here's Jon Worth on European railways (quite literally):

After having been stuck again this morning due to lack of collaboration between EU rail firms, I started to wonder: can liberalisation of EU rail actually ever work? And, were it to ever work, what are the prerequisites to making it work?

Jon goes on to set out seven factors about the system (information, accountability, ownership, cohesion, customer rights, maintenance and ticketing) that need resolution through system design if a liberalised railway is to be delivered. Jon concludes, unsurprisingly, that:

So then, that’s the little list of issues to solve. Will the EU, and its Member States, be ready to go that far to make a liberalised railway work? And to foot the costs of doing so? I rather doubt it…

The problem for us is that, given the significance of our legacy systems (in government, transport and finance especially) and the rate of innovation in these areas, we run the risk of economic sclerosis unless we begin to grapple with the challenge of replacing those systems with new ones. There are technical solutions to all of Jon's questions but the current infrastructure (physical and social) is largely unable to carry those technical solutions. The result of this is that people find 'get-arounds' - those railways, instead of sleek transport systems of the future become anachronistic and inefficient systems superceded by driverless vehicles, drones and communications technology.

Too often this is an argument against doing anything or for merely doing things that don't impact the established order - an interactive screen here, an app there rather than having some idea how the system will look when everything is done. For all my liberal instincts, I can't help but think things are seldom as simple as we like to think they are whatever William of Ockham might have said!

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Segregation isn't increasing - immigrant communities are enjoying economic success

We can't deny the existence, and sometimes the significance, of segregation. There are many examples of segregated communities, from the Amish of Pennsylvania through closed orders of monks or nuns to more problematic imposed segregation of East European Roma or, under apartheid, South Africa's Bantu people. These people, however, have either chosen a separate life or had such a life imposed on them. Segregation is not an accident of demography.

Yet Ted Cantle and Eric Kaufmann, in a report for Open Democracy, want us to believe that segregation is a function of demography rather than policy.

This paper comes to a clear view that whilst many areas have become more mixed, segregation is increasing in a number of very particular respects in the UK, especially the growing isolation of the White majority from minorities in urban zones. Further, the extent and pace of this change, within some communities, is very evident.

The contention here is that certain parts of England have, despite the country becoming more diverse, grown more segregated. To reach this conclusion the authors have looked at ethnicity data at ward level demonstrating that, between 1991 and 2011, certain parts of cities like Leicester, Birmingham and Bradford have become more segregated. But this only works if you accept segregation as being defined by "the extent to which an ethnic group is evenly spread across neighbourhoods", something that disregards choice or policy.

At the core of Cantle & Kaufmann's argument is the idea of "white flight" - that White British people are leaving as more non-white people are moving into a particular place:

...between 2001 and 2011 the White British population in England reduced as a percentage of the total population from 86.8% to 79.8% — a decrease of 8%. Although there was a decrease in the proportion of the population who were white in most areas, the decrease was much greater in the areas which had a low proportion of white British in 2001 than in areas which had had a high proportion. Thus for example, in Newham, which had had the lowest proportion of white British in 2001 there was a 50% decrease in the percentage of WB between 2001 and 2011; in Barrow in Furness, where 97.9% of the population were WB in 2001, this decreased by less than 1% by 2011. This does indicate support for ‘more mixing and more clustering’, but they are not equivalent trends, the clustering is noticeably more marked.

Setting to one side Cantle & Kaufmann's deliberately polemic choice of places, what is implied here is that White British people are, as soon as a black family arrives, throwing their chattels onto a cart and heading for Basildon. There is no attempt to understand why people move or indeed where they move to. We know that between 10% and 15% of the electoral register changes in any given year as a result of movement, family break-up and death. And we know that this churn is higher in poorer places with more rented property.

So people, of whatever ethnicity, moving out of Newham - or for that matter, within Newham - should not surprise us. We should welcome this as, in a lot of cases, it's a direct consequence of people bettering themselves. The question we need to answer is why the gaps these folk leave are being filled by people of non-white ethnicity in Newham but White British ethnicity in Barrow. To understand this, I'm going to talk about one place that Cantle & Kaufmann cite in making their argument - Toller Ward in Bradford.

Toller is an invented name to describe an area of inner city Bradford made up of Girlington and a large part of Heaton township (or "behind the hospital" as many might call it). Girlington is, and has been for a long time, a pretty poor place with tightly-packed terraces running down the hill from Duckworth Lane to Thornton Road. With Manningham, this community was one of the first places where Bradford's Mirpuri community came to live. But remember it was poor before that - local comedian Nicky Newsome would sing a maudlin song about growing up in Girlington filled with references to sleeping head to toe in a shared bed and eating meat on a Sunday.

Behind the hospital is a different place. Daisy Hill, Chellow Dene and Heaton aren't poor places but feature large Victorian and Edwardian properties, 1930s semis and a good few more recent (and grand) detached houses. In 1991 this area was, unlike Girlington, overwhelmingly white and middle-class (including me).

Over the years since, the process Cantle & Kaufmann see as a problem, Toller's White British population fell from 46.9% to just 10.4%. Why this happened is nothing to do with "white flight" but a simple consequence of economics and demography. As a middle-class area, the population of the Heaton half of Toller ward is determined by the supply of middle-class people to live in it. And here in Bradford that supply is coming from the City's Pakistani community. These people, brought up in Girlington and Manningham, are simply doing what previous generations have done and moving a little further out from the city centre and a little further up the hill. It really has nothing at all to do with their ethnicity.

Meanwhile, in Girlington a different pattern is playing out. In the poorest parts of the place, the population is less Pakistani as their economic success allowed them to move up the hill. In their place are new immigrants - Roma, Kurds, refugee Arabs, Francophone Africans, Somalis. And this, just as the other economic driver taking the Pakistani population to better homes in Heaton, gives the lie to Cantle & Kaufmann's idea of segregation. In time those new immigrants will move on and move out, probably to be replaced with another generation of immigrants.

So what Cantle & Kaufmann describe as "growing segregation" is nothing of a sort but rather the long established process of immigrant communities improving their economic lot and moving to better areas. We've seen this in London and Manchester with the Jewish community, and in North London with the Indian population. What we're seeing isn't segregation but rather the playing out of immigrant population's integration into our developed, successful consumer society.

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Proper Jobs for Proper Blokes - thoughts on our robot future.

So we're having a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich as we wait out the hour before we get on the plane. And out the window we can see that typical airside scene with a bizarre collection of oddly shaped vehicles buzzing from hangers to planes, from terminals to hangers and on seemingly purposeless but I'm sure important trips elsewhere on the airport. Each one of those little vehicles is controlled by a man (and yes, as far as we could see, they were all men) and by the hanger doors there were other men. All sporting hi-vis clothing, heavy gloves and sensible boot-like footwear.

I don't know how many such men are employed at Leeds Bradford International Airport but they're pretty important to the smooth running of the enterprise - loading stuff on and off planes, waving things about to make sure everything goes in the right direction, hanging about in case there's a fire. A host of good old fashioned unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled manual labour. Proper jobs for proper blokes.

The thing is that, within a decade nearly all of these jobs will be gone. And, just as with mining, steel and shipbuilding, the big losers in this change will be working class men of a certain age. Too far away from retirement to just sack it all and put the feet up, too old and stuck to easily retrain for an unfamiliar, non-manual role. So just like those miners and steelworkers, we'll grow another cohort of resentful, unhealthy and unhappy men. Not just from the airport but men who once drove taxis, trains and buses, men who dug holes in roads, and men who sailed ships.

The future includes a scene where the product of an autonomous factory is loaded (automatically) onto a driverless truck which travels to an automated port to be transferred to a ship without a pilot which will take that product to another automated port, onto another driverless truck to an unmanned warehouse from where it's delivered to your house by a drone. Partly this is wonderful - a fulfilment of man's search to save labour so we can chill out with a beer. Partly it's terrifying, a dystopian, soul-less future without those 'proper jobs for proper blokes'.

We are doing too little thinking about this future. Not just how we make the undoubted economic gains that come from mechanisation, deskilling and robotics but how we share those gains across society without slaughtering the golden geese of our digital future. Some of this thinking is short term - what do we do for those proper blokes doing proper jobs at the airport, what work will there be for a future generation of less intelligent, less skilled men? Some of it is longer term - do we need a different approach to work, tax and responsibility in a world where most tasks are done by robots?

But in framing these thoughts we need to start by dealing with the things which aren't so - like us being more income poor:

Those of us who currently appear to have job security can more than likely look forward to making less in the future than we had once hoped we might. Over the last couple of decades, wages, adjusted for inflation, have scarcely grown throughout a broad range of rich countries, longer in some cases. And this wage stagnation has occurred alongside other distressing trends. The share of income flowing to workers, as opposed to business and property owners, has fallen. And, among workers, there has been a sharp rise in inequality, with the share of income going to those earning the highest incomes increasing in an astounding fashion.

Bits of this paragraph are sort of true (the wage stagnation part, for example) but most of it is nonsense - at least in an article about robots. What is interesting to explore however is this question about capital ownership versus labour. Put simply, this is where we want things to go - we want more people, in some way, to own more of those value-producing robots rather than get the means for consumption either via wages for labour or a benefits system. If those proper blokes wanting proper jobs did so in the context of having a rent income from a share of those robots this might reduce stresses associated with finding enough money to put food on the table, clothes on the kids and roof over the family.

Of course, one of the things with that food, clothing and roof is it will - so long as government keeps its neb out - be a whole lot cheaper than it is now. As an aside this is one of the reasons why the argument about wage stagnation is a bit one-eyed. What costs us £100 to lay on now may, in our automated future, cost only £20 - so even if wages stagnate, we'll all be a whole lot richer for the automation. The problem is that the route to realising those changes lies in removing the most expensive part of the service economy - people. The brake on automation isn't technological but economic - we only keep investing so long as there's a return and if automation destroys the mass market there won't be any automation.

The answer might lie in some sort of redistributive system such as 'universal basic income' but, depending on how it's set, this can only result in a class of de facto drones. A bigger problem is that such an approach doesn't connect income to ownership but rather links it to taxation. In a democracy this risks people voting to take more and more of other people's money. It would be far better to give workers ownership rather than just cash - in trite terms to give everyone a robot rather than a cheque from the government.

Perhaps the answer comes from a hybrid of these two thing. Until recently the UK's private pension system was held up as a fine example of how these things should work and it invested in industry meaning that nearly all British workers had, in one way or another, a stake in the nation. I appreciate that this might be something of a starry-eyed view of the past but it provides a hint of a possible way through the robot problem. After all those robots are capital and that capital has to come from somewhere - why not a fund or funds created by government expressly for the purpose of such investments, for buying robots. With the beneficiaries of the funds' earnings being the UK public and those payments distributed on a 'universal income' basis? Of course, as a good voluntarist, these funds should have what we might call a 'private socialist' structure such as a mutual or co-op and, as such, would be free from the tendency of governments to waste money on infrastructural vanities.

I've just put this here as a thought - I've no idea whether it would be practical (whose making the robots any how - there's no obvious Sirius Cybernetics Corporation) but it gets out from the pretty sterile 'late capitalism' arguments that dominate discussion of our futures. What I do fear isn't the capacity of our systems, ingenuity and innovation to meet (and make better) our future needs but rather a sort of neo-luddism that leads to the fetishing of inefficiency - we see this with organic and biodynamic farming, for example - and the impoverishment that comes from protectionism.

The future, for all its robots, will continue to require people to provide labour but, just as has happened before, the nature of that labour will change. There's a game played by some of trying to guess what jobs there'll be in the future that we haven't thought of yet - it's not just the 'app economy' or the chance to rent out your spare bedroom to visitors but a whole load of other things too. I suspect that we'll still value human service and that, in its widest form, entertainment will be important. And I'm convinced that some of those things we dismiss as 'micky mouse', especially culture things, will become far more valued as skills than the scientific and technical skills we stress today.

In the meantime we've got to work out how we reassure those proper blokes doing proper jobs at the airport that their life isn't going to be crap once the robots take their jobs away. We need to try and avoid the mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s when we assumed the changing economy would provide for those blokes. It might but, it has more chance of doing so if we start thinking about it before they've been given their P45s.

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Creating a Yorkshire Powerhouse - it's down to us not the government in London

My eponymous great-grandfather was born in East London. Tragically he died young - in his thirties - leaving a widow and young children. He died in Wakefield.

This isn't some terrible story of loss or tragedy and nor was my great-grandfather one of those victims of industrial capitalism. He was a wine merchant. Not only is this a noble calling but it explains why he ended up in Wakefield. Put in simple terms there was better business to be had (and perhaps less competition) in Yorkshire than there was in London. As my boss, Judith Donovan, said to me when I arrived in Bradford on 27 July 1987 - "A hundred years ago, Bradford was the richest city in the richest county in the richest country in the world."

How things have changed. Now, too often, Yorkshire paints itself as a victim, bashed and battered by the tides of globalisation, ignored or patronised by the powers down in London. It is a theme we hear again and again from 'leaders' in Yorkshire - that somehow the economic gap between England's greatest county and those southern nancies is down to the perfidy of national government. London is rich because, as if by a dark magic, all the good stuff in England is sucked away from places like Yorkshire for the folk living in that huge city to spend on fancy bus tickets, overpriced coffee and criminally-priced one-bed apartments in Stockwell.

Here's the Yorkshire Post:

Yet the frustration is that Yorkshire has so much more to offer and that this region’s limitless potential will not be maximised until the Government invests sufficient sums in this county’s human capital – school standards have lagged behind the rest of the country for an unacceptable number of years and are having a detrimental impact on job prospects – as well as the area’s transport and business infrastructure so more world-leading companies can be persuaded to invest here.

Today is Yorkshire Day and it is worth giving the Yorkshire Post its due for setting out an agenda for the county that genuinely reflects much of the debate going on up here. But it's a shame that the habit of holding out the cap and fluttering those Yorkshire eye-lashes still remains. No-one's denying that Yorkshire - and the North for that matter - needs investment but when all they hear is the regional politics version of "got some spare change for a coffee" is it really a surprise that government doesn't rush to help out?

Take education. The Yorkshire Post rightly highlights how Yorkshire's levels of educational attainment lag behind those elsewhere in England and in many ways this is a scandal. But what's the bigger scandal - that politicians in London aren't throwing cash at the problem or that the leaders in Yorkshire haven't got any plan, policy or strategy to address the problem? Where's the education 'summit' bringing together political and business leaders from across the county? Why haven't local education authorities - along with schools - pooled their investment in educational development and improvement?

The same goes for transport. Again the Yorkshire Post reminds us that Leeds is the only big city in England without a tram system or metro. And that - quite rightly - the government pulled the plug on that city's latest wheeze, a new 'bus-on-a-string'. I recall sitting in a meeting - in some slightly tatty, anonymous office block in Leeds - and formally giving Bradford's support for what was dubbed 'supertram'. And I remember adding, at the end of the presentation, that it was a great shame said 'supertram' wasn't going to Bradford or, indeed, anywhere near Bradford. The single busiest inter-city commuter route - Leeds-Bradford and vice versa - didn't register.

So - again - where's Yorkshire's transport plan? Have the transport great and good gathered to set out how we'll respond to 21st century challenges in transport? Or have we just sat mithering about ticketing and real-time information as if they're the answer to the question? Why should - other than for reasons of political calculation (hence Cameron launching the 'Northern Powerhouse' in Shipley) - central government do anything for Yorkshire when Yorkshire's not doing much for itself?

Even on devolution, political calculations - both sub-regional and by the political parties - has meant deadlock. Yorkshire - after London itself - is the only English region with a genuine identity. Yorkshire Day really is a thing (my friend Keith Madeley and the Yorkshire Society deserve a lot of credit for this). We really did showcase the glories of the county through the Tour de France and its child, Tour de Yorkshire. And the county really does have everything - except, that is, the leadership to get on with devising responses to our challenges without waiting on someone in London first giving us the thumbs up.

I learnt a couple of important lessons recently. The first was during a meeting with Lord Adonis following the National Infrastructure Commission publishing reports on Crossrail 2 and Transport in the North. The lesson was that London had prepared, done the legwork, written a plan and set out how that city would fund half the cost in the time Northern leaders had drawn up a scope for a possible plan the content of which wasn't set. London will get the money because London knows what it wants. Here in Yorkshire we just ask for more transport investment - we have no plan.

The second lesson is that London's planning is far deeper - more granular as the trendies put it - than any spatial or urban planning anywhere else in England. In part this just reflects the fact that London is a city and has a coherence (and obvious centre) that Yorkshire doesn't have but it also demonstrates that our fragmented systems of government, business leadership and administration won't allow for that level of planning. Here's what I wrote in June about New London Architecture's exhibition:

During a brief visit to London, we called in to the New London Architecture exhibition at The Building Centre - it's just round the corner from the British Museum and well worth an hour of your time not least for the splendid model of central London at the heart of the exhibition. The NLA uses this magnificent visual to present a vision of the new London emerging through investment, initiative and development and is accompanied by a series of short films featuring NLA's urbane chairman, Peter Murray, talking through the challenges - homes, transport, place-making, environment - and setting out what's already happening and how built environment professionals including architects, masterplanners, designers, engineers and builders can deliver a better city.

What comes across in these films is the scale of engagement between public and private sectors - the projects highlighted on the grand model or featured on the wall around the space are mostly private sector projects. For sure there are the great transport schemes sponsored by London's government and supported by national governments but we also see investment in public realm, privately or in partnership with boroughs, by the great estates - Cadogan, Bedford, Grosvenor and the Crown - that enhance the City's character and variety.

Above all there is both a sense of vision - one shared by mayor, boroughs, transport chiefs and developers - and an intense granularity to that vision. We're so familiar with vision being just that - grand sweeping words accompanied with carefully touched up pictures. But this London vision comes with hundreds of individual projects, with emerging plans across the 32 boroughs (all pictured on the walls around the huge model), with examples of individual masterplans for smaller places and with specific project plans ranging from hospitals and university facilities through housing schemes to pocket parks or street markets.

The Yorkshire Post is right to make the case for the county and to present it to the Prime Minister. But we also need to make the case for bringing the county together, for a new agreement - with or without devolution deals - to work together on planning for Yorkshire's future. If - in some few years - we can take people to an exhibition put together by a private organisation demonstrating how Yorkshire's people, businesses, charities and landowners share a clear, radical and creative plan that is being put in place then we will be changing the county for the better.

I fear that, after a brief flurry of excitement and a modicum of political grandstanding, the Yorkshire Post's welcome initiative will be lost. Not because folk in Yorkshire don't want their county to be better but because we've not made our own plans for making the county once again, the richest place in the richest country. So long as we wait for handouts from London this won't happen.

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Housing and inequality

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It's a truism to say that housing costs are one cause of inequality in developed societies and that some places - London, San Francisco, Auckland, Sydney and New York for example - have reached the point where housing unaffordability is undermining growth and development. It's also resulting in exploitative landlord practices, higher levels of homelessness, overoccupation and 'sofa surfing'.

We also know the reasons for this unaffordability - restrictive planning and land use policies. Every study tells us that this is the case yet politicians in all these places claim that can wave some sort of magic wand and build loads of extra housing without changing zoning policies or other restrictions on land availability and development.

One result of this restrictive policy environment is that poorer people are moving to less well of places - against the historic (and beneficial) direction of travel away from poorer places:

It used to be that poor people moved to rich places. A janitor in New York, for example, used to earn more than a janitor in Alabama even after adjusting for housing costs. As a result, janitors moved from Alabama to New York, in the process raising their standard of living and reducing income inequality. Today, however, after taking into account housing costs, janitors in New York earn less than janitors in Alabama. As a result, poor people no longer move to rich places. Indeed, there is now a slight trend for poor people to move to poor places because even though wages are lower in poor places, housing prices are lower yet.

The result of this - plus the evidence that internal migration to richer places has slowed - is that geographical inequalities are heightened, social mobility is reduced and economic growth is slowed.

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Banking, tobacco and textiles - why no outcry when those jobs went?

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I was in Bingley this morning to catch a train. Nothing unusual here but it got me to thinking about steel and jobs and such. Mostly because slap bang in the middle of Bingley is the site of the former Bradford & Bingley Building Society HQ. The thousand or so jobs that went at the two B&BBS locations in Bingley are a reminder that the fallout from the financial crisis was real for many people - we're told the banks were bailed out but that probably doesn't wash much with all those folk who lost their jobs round where I live.

Indeed as I meander round my ward, I come across the evidence of past jobs - I live in a converted mill that once employed hundreds of people and was still a working mill (of sorts) up to the 1980s. The Pennine Fibres mill in Denholme is gone and is now transforming into another estate of family homes and the same goes for the woodyards, the circlips companies and the machining workshops. Thousands of jobs have gone from Bingley Rural since the 1970s - some because there isn't call for what they make, others because someone somewhere else in the world can make it cheaper and others because, like Bradford & Bingley, the folk in charge of the business crashed it into the financial wall.

I can look elsewhere in the country and see jobs destroyed by the malice of government - the cigarette plants in Nottingham, Bristol and Northern Ireland, the businesses that made cigarette vending machines in the Black Country, and the jobs making packaging in Bradford. Thousands of men and women, in the parlance over the press, thrown on the scrap heap by the actual decision of government.

So what is so special about steel. Why are we treating the closure of a couple of steel plants as some sort of existential threat, as a sort of emasculation of the nation? How come those banking jobs in Bingley, the livelihoods of women making cigarettes in Ballymena and the work of merchandisers filling up vending machines across the country - how come they don't elicit the same outcry?

Of course we're bothered about those steel jobs. It's a terrible thing to see a great industry - part of the fabric of places like Redcar and Port Talbot - struggling like this. But do people think that the building society wasn't important to the fabric of Bingley? That it's death didn't cause huge damage to the town and its surroundings? Yet Gordon Brown didn't chair emergency cabinet meetings to consider support for Bingley. No minister's foreign trip was cut short so he could be grilled about the closure and no special fund was set up to regenerate the town.

So forgive me when I'm less than ecstatic at the calls for protectionist barriers, illegal government procurement rules, state subsidy and nationalisation. Literally millions of jobs have gone from our economy over the past few decades yet we have the highest rate of employment ever. And granting special privileges to one particular industry for reasons of either sympathy or economic nationalism is both wrong and an insult to those millions of workers who lost their jobs in businesses neither the Labour Party nor the press gave a fig for.

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Too old to rock and roll? Forget it! Welcome to 21st century ageing.

The so-called WASPI campaign for women affected by the change in their retirement age from 60 to 66 has been a feature of news and comment for a while now. It is one of those odd quirks - not always a good one - of policy changes that some people are caught in the change meaning that, while nearly everyone accepts that the new policy is a good one, they also want it not to affect those caught in the change. In a society where women are not excluded from the workforce and where efforts are made to treat those women equally, there is no justification for having a different retirement age for men and women. Nor, given average life expectance pushing 80 years, is there much sense in younger people being taxed to provide twenty years or more of living for those older people.

But I don't want to discuss this issue but rather for it to provide a little context for a look at age discrimination in the UK. This has interested me for a while but was prompted by someone tweeting a rather unfunny quip about all of UKIP members being old dodderers. It wasn't that UKIP's members aren't disproportionately older but that it was fine to criticise - with references to Stannah and Saga - a group of people purely on the basis of their age. My concern though isn't that some people are unpleasant but whether this disparaging of older people is reflected in a wider set of prejudices that result, not in rude words on Twitter, but in significantly different treatment.

One of the WASPI arguments (albeit not their strongest) is about work. Or rather that women in their 50s and 60s find it difficult to find work:

Living longer inevitably means working longer too. But that’s no help to older women who can’t just grit their teeth and work longer as a result of Osborne’s measure, because they’re not even working now: women made redundant late in their fifties, who can’t persuade employers that they’re not past it;

Now I'm happy to believe Gabby Hinsliff here. I want to believe her. But I find it difficult to find much real evidence that older people can't find work. The number of people over 65 working in the UK has nearly doubled since 2008 hardly an indication that the people made redundant in their 50s will fail to get a job. What I do suspect is that men and women who leave management or professional positions in their 50s find it hard to get a similar job on a similar wage - I've known people who had very senior jobs really struggle to get new employment. For a few there's also the issue of declining health. But there remains something of a cult of youth reflected in the attitudes of the, mostly younger, recruiters.

In short, faced with two equally qualified candidates the recruiter will pick the younger one - "they'll fit in better", "more scope for development", "planning for the future". All quite understandable until you think about the actual facts. The average time people stay in a given job has been falling for years - Forbes reported that 'millennials' (can I say how much I hate that unhelpful term) are switching jobs every 4.4 years. So if you've a well-qualified 59 year old woman in front of you, don't think 'she'll be retiring soon', think 'up to eight years contribution from a really experienced person - more if she wants to stay longer'.

Another, more subtle piece of ageism, is a political act - typified by former MP, David Willetts in his book 'The Pinch':

David Willetts shows how the baby boomer generation has attained this position at the expense of their children.Social, cultural and economic provision has been made for the reigning section of society, whilst the needs of the next generation have taken a back seat. Willetts argues that if our political, economic and cultural leaders do not begin to discharge their obligations to the future, the young people of today will be taxed more, work longer hours for less money, have lower social mobility and live in a degraded environment in order to pay for their parents' quality of life.

It's hard to see how we reconcile this polemical view of my generation - selfish, greedy and so forth - with the WASPI victimhood or the anecdotes of declining income as older people take the only jobs they can get, well below their skills and experience. Yet that is what's happening - we're told (with good reason) that more and more of the government's spending is directed towards the old and we're supposed to get agitated because some how this is an imposition on the young while at the same time the established image of the poor old folk struggling away on a pittance sticks in the public's mind.

And yes it's true that we should stop with this emotive nonsense about 'the family home' or 'life savings' and expect older people to use that money to look after themselves. It really is an imposition on younger people to expect them to provide for older people just so they can pass on loads of expensive assets to their children and grandchildren. Indeed this is the only proper response to the issue starkly described by James Delingpole writing about the NHS:

That’s the good side. Now the bad — and it’s so bad I’m surprised it isn’t more of a national scandal. We read a lot about a service stretched to breaking point but what few of us grasp — I didn’t until I saw it myself — is perhaps the main contributory factor to this: bed after bed occupied by elderly, often Alzheimer’s-afflicted patients who simply don’t belong in wards designed to treat acute, short-term conditions.

Round about 75% of all the money spent by the NHS is spent in one way or another on the elderly. It's not just the 'bed-blocking' Delingpole describes but the industrial quantities of medication that the average pensioner chuffs down everyday, the repeated visits to the GP and the collection of special tests, injections and clinics directed to pensioners. All of this - except the de facto role of hospitals as old folks' homes - is entirely justified since it means more and more people living happy, healthy and active lives into their dotage.

Not only are those old people expensive but there are also more and more of them selfishly and greedily staying alive longer and longer. And this will carry on (perhaps with the exception of rock stars whose lifestyles perhaps preclude longevity) as our contemporaries - I speak as one of those 'boomers' - dash about filling up theatre seats, cruise ships and tea shops while driving carefully within the speed limit in front of the next generation of future selfish old folk.

Now I know a lot of young people will go 'ewww' at this but they've to get used a world quite unlike the one I was brought up in - a world where fashion, music, food and drink, art and travel markets are dominated by the middle aged and upwards and where 'youth culture' is a minority sport in every sense of the word. And this isn't because we've sucked up all the cash but because there are loads of us, we've earned a load of money during our lives and the bit of that cash we've got left we're planning on spending living well.

The ageism that Gaby Hinsliff alluded to in her article about the WASPIs may indeed be the case (although it's hard to find solid evidence for it) but it's a fact that's days are numbered. Not because of some sort of national campaign or shouty MPs but because the market tells us you'd better start respecting older people if you want to stay in business.

There's a bar in Harrogate called (creatively) The Blues Bar and it does more or less what it says on the tin. We're there listening to some good blues rock and, looking around, the whole audience is our age or older - no plaid, no slippers and no comfortable stretch slacks but rather jeans, casual shirts and even the occasional band t-shirt. This is the reality of 21st century ageing.

So however po-faced David Willetts gets, I'm convinced that he's wrong. Us 'boomers' do have a duty - it's not to subsidise the next generation or to get trapped in an inter-generational version of the lump of labour fallacy but rather to have as good a time as possible in the two or three decades left to us on this earth. To travel, to party, to eat, drink and enjoy the bounty of the great world we've helped create - we are the richest generation there has ever been and we should enjoy that wealth rather than find reasons to say 'it's not fair'. The next generation, without a shadow of doubt will be even richer than us, will live even longer and - I hope - will have an even better time with their last couple of decades.

We've a long way to go yet. Organisations like Age UK (and the WASPIs for that matter) are still stuck playing the 'poor old folk' card when in large measure that simply isn't the case at all. For sure, there's age discrimination - from nasty little quips on Twitter through to the difficulties redundant managers have in getting jobs - but in the place that really matters, in the consumer markets, older people are the kings and queens. Let's enjoy it!

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So cut the basic rate of income tax?

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Tax cuts stimulate employment best when they benefit the lowest paid most. Or rather as is pointed out here, the bottom 90% of taxpayers. So while I absolutely support taking the poorest out of tax altogether - indeed I would support an ambition that no-one below median income should pay income tax - a basic rate cut would be a real boost for growth and jobs;

Variation in the income distribution across U.S. states and federal tax changes generate variation in regional tax shocks that I exploit to test for heterogeneous effects. I find that the positive relationship between tax cuts and employment growth is largely driven by tax cuts for lower-income groups and that the effect of tax cuts for the top 10% on employment growth is small.

But then we knew tax cuts were a good thing didn't we?

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We know what happens when a developed nation has no immigration

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We know the answer to this because of Japan - here's a report in New Geography:

Japan’s working-age population (15-64) peaked in 1995, while the United States’ has grown 21% since then. The projections for Japan are alarming: its working-age population will drop from 79 million today to less than 52 million in 2050, according to the Stanford Institute on Longevity.

Since hitting a peak of 128 million in 2010, Japan’s overall population has dropped three years in a row. These trends all but guarantee the long-term decline of the Japanese economy and its society.

Bear in mind that Japan's population is 127 million today - it will fall but the precise figures are hard to predict because of longevity. The New Geography article sets out some of the consequences:

...by 2020, adult diapers are projected to outsell the infant kind. By 2040, the country will have more people over 80 than under 15, according to U.N. projections. By 2060, the number of Japanese is expected to fall from 127 million today to about 87 million, of whom almost 40% will be 65 or older.

Put simply Japan can't afford to do this. It can barely afford the cost of health and care today. And this is the reason why Japan's economy is struggling. Moreover, it points to the reason why the UK, Germany and the USA stand an outside chance of affording health and social care costs at least for the time being. We have had relatively open borders allowing us to maintain the size of our working age populations - without this immigration we would be facing the same time bomb as Japan faces.

It's not just a fiscal time bomb it's a social one too:

Japan’s grim demography is also leading to tragic ends for some elderly. With fewer children to take care of elderly parents, there has been a rising incidence of what the Japanese call kodokushi, or “lonely deaths” among the aged, unmarried, and childless. Given the current trends, this can only become more commonplace over time.

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Big state, small state...on Simon Wren-Lewis's ideological obsession with big government

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Sometime the careful manufacture of a straw man is a useful tool to present an argument. Indeed, the thing with a hypothesised model as the basis for criticism - even if the real world is different - is that it allows people to marshall the strengths and understand the weaknesses of their ideology.

But this is a story about the other sort of straw man. The more common one constructed in order to provide sustenance for a given position regardless of the actual truth. Perhaps the most common straw man out there is the argument against any reform of the National Health Service on the basis that the only alternative is a "US-style health system". No-one proposes such a change but the opponents of the changes that are proposed always used this straw man to frame their argument.

However, for shockingly bad straw men, this blog post from Simon Wren-Lewis is a masterpiece. The core facts are (sort of, arguably) correct but are carefully placed alongside other facts to which they do not directly relate. All this to make this point about big government:

Perhaps it reflects the power of an ideology that its protagonists want to see no evil. Perhaps it is because those hurt by austerity somehow do not count. But the claim that Osborne’s cuts have been such a success that they will cause a “deeper intellectual wound to the left than we currently understand” is simply delusional. These are fantasy ideas from those living in an imaginary world, while in reality the policies they support do serious harm.

To  arrive at this position (and I've no quarrel with people thinking big government is just grand - it's just not a viewpoint I share) Wren-Lewis has had to strangle the evidence. Because the ideological bias is revealed - the protagonists of a small state are "evil" - it is clear that this was the starting point for the construction of the straw man rather than a more considered assessment (something we'd expect from an Oxford academic but don't get here) of the arguments for and against reducing the size of government.

So let's look at Wren-Lewis's arguments:

The first one relates to the idea - widely held but wholly inaccurate - that there is no longer any constituency still arguing, on principle, for a big state. I find this odd since the majority of our public policy discourse and especially that driven by Wren-Lewis's colleagues in academia demands ever more regulation, control and direction from government.  Perhaps if he had a conversation with some sociologists this might clear up his weird belief that support for a big state "...lost all its influence with Margaret Thatcher and New Labour, and it has also lost its influence in the rest of Europe." In historical terms the state remains large - reducing the government portion of GDP to 35% from its current level approaching 50% is an argument about the size of government but doesn't fundamentally challenge the central welfarist argument of modern government - a position supported (to differing degrees) by left, centre-left and centre-right.

Wren-Lewis next claims that 'small state people' (he manages to use the preferred term of abuse 'neoliberal' as well but 'small state people' is wonderfully patronising) are not as good as him because - he claims - not to have any "fixed ideological position" about whether the state should be large or small. Whereas, of course, the sad little state people are attached to their ideology. The problem is that Wren-Lewis doth protest too much - he is absolutely wedded to the idea of big government and to the view that government actions determine the direction of the economy not the aggregated choices of private individuals. It is true that, if (for whatever reason - call it ideology if you must) government sets out to reduce its size then this will have the short term effect Wren-Lewis describes. But this is essentially an argument for the big government macroeconomy that created the very financial crisis Wren-Lewis wants to blame on 'private sector activity'. The idea that the choices of big governments had no role in wrecking the economy a decade ago is a wholly indefensible position more revealing of Wren-Lewis's ideological preferences than any assessment of the facts.

Before his final piece of ideological legerdemain, Wren-Lewis arrives at the debate over whether the reductions in government spending have had a social cost. Which he presents via this little rant about food banks:

The number of food banks in the UK has grown massively over the last five years. The Trussell Trust estimate that more than half of their clients were receiving food because of benefit delays, sanctions, and financial difficulties relating to the bedroom tax and abolition of council tax relief.

Now I'm not going to deny that changes to welfare resulted in some hardship but the frank truth was that our system was unsustainable - even in a world where big government is OK. Wren-Lewis wants to argue that the reforms have been 'duds' - yet he knows that this is not the case. It is the old methods such as the Work Programme that evolved from Labour's New Deal schemes that are duds not the use of financial incentives to drive different choices. The problem is that the system of redistribution we have in the UK is now almost entirely paid for through borrowing (or if you prefer it the other way - because so much of the money raised in taxes goes in welfare payments there isn't enough left to provide the services we actually want government to provide so we have to borrow).

Finally Wren-Lewis arrives at his intellectually-dishonest conclusion in which he calls people on the right 'evil' and argues that the polices such people propose cause 'serious harm'. What Wren-Lewis cannot admit is that not only might that supposed harm be mitigated through some welfare-enhancing private action (those food banks, for example) but also that the policies of big government might also cause 'harm'. There are a whole series of government interventions and regulations that reduce trade, undermine enterprise and limit private choices - all of which might be described as 'harm'.

Wren-Lewis built a fine straw man. Truly magnificent in its vanity. But there's no truth in the central premise that people like Wren-Lewis are not wedded to the idea of big government in the manner that others (George Osborne in the main) are wedded to the idea of small government. And Wren-Lewis clearly demonstrates his ideological commitment to big government which means his splendid straw man collapses into a shallow polemic.

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Socialism in action...doing what it does best, making poor people poorer

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Venezuela is fast becoming today's example of socialism and of how it starts with excitement about liberty, crushing the Yankee Devil, taming big business and eliminating poverty. And soon turns to control, suppression, rationing and shortage:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced Wednesday that the country will introduce a mandatory fingerprinting system in supermarkets. He asserted that the plan will keep people from buying too much of any single item. 

But, you ask, why would anyone want to buy 'too much of any one item'? When I go to the supermarket, I buy to suit my immediate requirements. Since capitalism has given me a fridge freezer, I'm able to buy good for the whole week but that's it. The reason for buying 'too much of one item' is simple - the buyer anticipates shortage. We see this occasionally when some tabloid newspaper creates a scare over a consumer product's availability. But for government to seek to stop such buying behaviour, shortages have to be the norm.

And this is the case with Venezuela - the country where a smart phone app locating supplies of loo paper was developed. The government, having condemned the businesses making and distributing food and other consumer goods decided that it should intervene - controlling supply, setting prices and generally throwing its weight around in the marketplace. Such activity is justified, the government says, so as to allow the nation's poor to live more dignified lives.

The problem is actually pretty simple - by fixing prices artificially low (to help the poor) Venezuela's government created shortages. Now they've blamed variously the CIA, the political opposition and business in general for the problem using these perceived attacks on the socialist revolution in Venezuela to justify first the introduction of ID systems (described in the Guardian as "a grocery loyalty card with extra muscle") and now the use of fingerprinting to prevent 'hoarding'.

"We are creating a biometric system … to function in all distribution and retail systems, public and private," Maduro said in a televised address on Wednesday. "This will be – like the fingerprint scan we use in our electoral system – a perfect anti-fraud system."

So what's the problem here? Essentially the problem is socialism and its adherents' belief that you can abolish the market. For what Venezuelans are doing is variously: buying cheap stuff in Venezuelan shops and taking it across the border for resale at the price it should have been or else simply reselling it to other Venezuelans. Either that or else not having bread, oil, flour or loo paper because there's none to buy in the shops.

We can laugh a little as we are reminded again that fixing the price and supply of basic goods - especially while indulging in an inflationary splurge of oil money on public infrastructure - really isn't a great way to manage the economy. We can make jokes about the stupidity of socialism and make fun of Venezuela's fans like sweet little Owen Jones. But we should not forget that the current leader of the UK's opposition supports price fixing - for energy prices, for train fares and probably for anything else that gets him the votes of the ignorant.

Socialism is lovely. It's adherents are often caring, sharing folk who want the world to be a better place. But, put into action, socialism results in poverty, unemployment, authoritarian government and shortages of life's essentials. The losers in all this are those without the connections or the wherewithal to survive - the very people that socialism claims to support - the poor. As one Venezuelan put it:

 "The rich people have things all hoarded away, and they pull the strings," said Juan Rodriguez, who waited two hours to enter the government-run Abastos Bicentenario supermarket near downtown Caracas on Monday, then waited three hours more to check out.

The terrible thing is that this man, having spent five hours getting basics at a supermarket, still believes the socialists when they blame the rich. It's good politics but, like those who want to blame immigrants, simply isn't true and those setting out the policies know that it isn't true. The fault here - and every time with socialism - rests with the government.

Every time socialism is tried - and Argentina is now having another go at it - it fails. Yet another generation of people who care about the poor, who hate America and believe business is exploitative will come along, get power and prove again that socialism doesn't work. The saddest thing here is that, as that man in the Caracas supermarket queue points out, the rich seldom lose out under socialism - it's the poor that lose out.

Socialists may often be lovely caring people. But socialism is evil.

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Schools, hospitals and money...give me just a little more choice!

We live in a world of choice. Think for a brief moment about how many different types of cheese you can buy in your local supermarket. Consider the aisle filled with varied and exciting bread. And ponder on a world where one relatively small space can contain over 45,000 different products from, it seems, everywhere in the world. Still further, if you live in Bradford at least, a different journey can also take you to market stalls and shops selling great locally sourced fresh vegetables, fantastic hand-crafted sausages and super fresh caught fish.

Note as well that, when it comes to that convenient portable communications device we all love, there's a still more bewildering choice of handset, of contract and of places where we'll get some informed help making our decision. It truly is a wonderful world, a world created by that simplest of simple ideas - one that's been around since the dawn of time - free exchange for mutual benefit. Or if you want it put a different way - the market.

Yet when it comes to three things that are pretty fundamental to everyone's lives - education, health care and money - we're told that free choice is a bad thing and instead government must decide on the nature, quantity and distribution of these essential requirements. What makes this so very odd is that we can see how free choice in free markets improves the lives of everyone, yet we continue to tell ourselves that somehow markets would be a bad thing in these three vital areas.

Instead of the liberty of markets, what we choose instead for the provision of schools, hospitals and cash is a thing called 'government'. And what a thing that is - confused, secretive, lying, deceiving and troublesome. I was talking the other day with some public health folk and (I forget the precise details) the matter of 'who runs the NHS' arose. Scales fell from my eyes as I appreciated that no-one actually runs the NHS. For sure there's a chap called Simon who has the title 'Head of the NHS' or similar but he doesn't really run this vast many-headed hydra except that, because there is no consumer sovereignty in health care, there has to be a process for allocating the money set aside by government to pay for said health care. And Simon is in charge of that process.  He doesn't run hospitals, he has no say over primary care, he doesn't train doctors or nurses - he sits atop a pile of other people's money and uses it as a bully pulpit.

The same goes for schools - there's no-one in charge and no market either (although there is a chimera of choice in the ability of parents to 'express a preference'). We have Michael who is in charge of Ofsted, we have a collection of 'Directors of Children's Services' in 'Local Education Authorities' and we have the management of individual schools (governors and school 'leadership teams'). As with the NHS these people aren't 'in charge' of the system and there is no fair or efficient system - nor can there be outside of a choice mechanism - for the distribution of either funds or for the making of 'allocation' decisions.

For both health and education we use bureaucracy moderated by the unseemly rabblerousing that is political debate as a proxy for the market. But the systems are too large for effective central direction so some things are 'devolved' to different parts of the system. Except that two things remains - one is what we might call the Widdecombe Principle and the other is our expressed preference for consistency.

The first of these two things refers to Anne Widdecombe who explained that central direction would never change so long as the Minister was dragged kicking and screaming into the Newsnight studio to explain. Even though ministers - like the Head of the NHS and the Head of Ofsted - are not really 'in charge' of the system, they are the ones who get verbally berated when stuff goes wrong.

The second factor is what we say to opinion pollsters - essentially that we don't like 'postcode lotteries' and therefore we don't like difference and variation within national systems. Our slightly warped idea of 'fairness' tells us that everybody should get the same, even if that 'same' is mediocre because the avoiding of difference destroys innovation, initiative and creativity.

All this brings me to the third thing government won't let choice and markets play with - money. It seems to me that what we might called 'modern applied macroeconomics' is predicated on the continued 'control' of money by government. But, just as with health and education, there's only an illusion that someone is in charge of the system. There's Mark who is the boss at the Bank of England - he gets to set interest rates (and, were I a cynic, keeps his job if he doesn't stray too far from what HM Treasury wants to do) but it doesn't seem to me that he's really in charge.

There may be very good reasons for all this lack of choice - that idea of fairness, the convenience for all of a defined and guaranteed currency. Plus, of course, the big important thing for government - collecting taxes. Indeed the scared rabbit reaction of banking regulators to 'cybermoney' like Bitcoin is rather revealing of this fact!

It seems to me that the next few years - perhaps a couple of decades - will see a huge tug-of-war between these big three government monopolies and a set of technology-driven innovators. Some of these innovators will be looking for a fast buck through exercising some sort of arbitrage while others will be seeking to develop choice models within the systems themselves - building on the availability of data to disrupt that desire for sameness I described earlier.

I don't know how this contest will play out but I hope that, whatever the long term role for government systems, it results in more choice. Or rather in systems where consumer sovereignty is allowed to operate. I hope for this result because it will deliver the greatest rate of improvement for the least effort (and probably least money). There's a big debate in the NHS about a future funding gap - it seems to me that the solution to this challenge isn't running the good old centralised NHS and trimming a bit here or rationing a bit there. Rather the funding gap is closed by allowing innovators to innovate and the best way to do this is by the development of real choice systems rather than the current 'plan and provide' approach.

The same goes for education. And for money. Choice is the best driver of improvement both through consumers exercising that choice and through providers responding to consumers is developing new, different and better way to serve their needs. And what works for bread and cheese, what delivers for mobile phones, TVs and insurance, will given a chance deliver for schools and hospitals and will provide a more stable economy less open to the abuse of politicians buying their way into power or bankers manipulating their way into wealth.

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How the ragged troused philanthropists were right...

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'The present system means joyless drudgery, semi-starvation, rags and premature death; and they vote for it and uphold it. Let them have what they vote for! Let them drudge and let them starve!'.

So proclaimed Frank Owen of the 'ragged trousered philanthropists' who had the audacity to vote Conservative. And thus was born the myth of the Tory working class - trained, almost dog-like, to nod to their betters and defer to their thoughts.

It always seemed that 'the left' are deeply concerned at the prospect that any 'worker' might vote for a political party other than one 'of the left' (whatever that means). After all, Tories "despise the working class", how can a member of that class vote for them?

All this explains why the Conservative politicians for whom 'the left' reserve the greatest vitriol - even hatred - are those who challenge their perspective. When Norman Tebbit, Eric Pickles, Patrick McLaughlin or even Nadine Dorries speak up the sound of left-wing hackles rising can be heard right across the nation. These people are the acme of class traitorhood, the very personification of false consciousness, the quislings of the working class.

The left is quite comfortable with David Cameron and George Osborne because they are what Tories should be: inherited wealth, top public school, Oxford, horse-riding - all the stereotypes of left-wing iconography. It makes for an easy campaign, roll out Dennis Skinner ranting about privilege, talk about 'out of touch Tory toffs' and add in images of top hats (or that over-used Bullingdon photograph - I wonder whose copyright it is, they should have made a fortune).

The problem is that it really isn't as simple as that, this class divide malarkey. For sure we can show people about the idea of surplus value with three slices of bread and a knife but that doesn't make it true nor does it put a roof over someone's head and a meal on the table. More to the point Norman, Eric and Nadine are proof that, not only does the Conservative Party not "despise the working class" but people from that class can get to powerful positions in the Party. This is not how it should be!

Today a man earning fifty or sixty thousand a year as a skilled operator working on shift is considered working class (and will most likely be a member of that working class institution Unite the Union) whereas a man earning half that amount from his fields is a rentier ("boo-hiss"). The argument to those ragged trousered ones a hundred years ago - that they should throw off those capitalist shackles - no longer stands since the ragged trousers have been replaced with designer clothes, two weeks in Tenerife and a new (-ish) Audi.

It seems the 'philanthropists' were right - invest in the free system and everyone gains. We don't know whether Owen was right (although there has been the occasional hint as to socialism's inadequacy as a system) but it doesn't matter because capitalism worked. The 'conditions of the working man' (the improvement of which Disraeli had set as the Conservative Party's mission) were raised and continue to rise.

We will continue to see the myth of the working-class Tory peddled - the idea that independence, self-reliance, hard work, decency and choice represent some sort of misplaced confidence in the capitalist system, a confidence that will fail the working man. And the belief that some syndicalist wonderland will come forth from the casting aside of capitalism.

Those values - working class Tory values - that the left rejects are in the soul of the Conservative Party. But we are, above everything, pragmatic and know that the consequence of Frank Owen's system is not Utopia but Venezuela.

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The housing crisis that isn't...

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Today there will be much hand-wringing from 'experts' on housing about 'Help to Buy', mostly from people resident in or near London, living in houses worth (theoretically) a great deal more than they paid for them and earning good money. Squeals of concern will be directed at using government loans to help people get onto the 'housing ladder'. There will be so many bubbles it will be like the Boleyn Ground after a win!

It is interesting to note that these squeals weren't directed - for the same reasons - at Ed Miliband's egregious proposal to seize land from people who have chosen not to build houses on it (presumably because that would be uneconomic). And then use government borrowing to subsidise RSLs and councils building "affordable housing".

However that's not the point I'm making here - the point is that we're told by London-dwelling 'experts' that there is a housing crisis (sadly some daft Bradford-based councillors seem to believe the same thing) and, to coin a phrase, 'something must be done'. So - understandably - politicians respond, the propose to do something.

The problem is, however, that there isn't really a housing crisis at all. There's an employment crisis. Here's exhibit one:

Those are three of 59 properties listed at £50,000 or less in Bradford by the local paper. And we could repeat the same story for a host of other cities and towns across the North of England. Yet, in London - even in multiplied deprived East London - you won't find a two bedroomed property for under £200,000 (and that will be somewhere where you daren't go out at night and need three locks on the door). For interest £200,000 will get you a four bedroom detatched house in Bradford.

If housing is so important, so central to everything, why are people leaving Bradford, Liverpool and Hull to take their chances in London (not to mention those trooping there from Romania and points east)? The answer is simple - there aren't any jobs. Or more specifically there are fewer jobs than there are people to take those jobs. As a result more and more people flock to London (and to a lesser extent regional cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham) because they believe there's a better chance of a job.

We - by which I mean all us folk who sound off about these things, pundits, sort-of-economists, folk who sell mortgages - have chosen to describe this as a housing crisis. And indeed it manifests itself as such - you only have to read Ben Reeves-Lewis on the Landlord Law blog to get this picture. But it is a problem of employment - the dysfunction created by the success of London rather than by the failure of the North.

The challenge facing London - and ipso facto, the UK government given how important London is to the economy - is to provide housing that falls within reasonable aspiration of affordability. And there are three ways to do this - ship people who aren't contributing economically (the young, the old, the unemployed) to places like Bradford, scrap the planning and building controls that hold back development or subsidise housing.

So it really shouldn't surprise people that the government - and all three main political parties - support subsidy since the other options aren't politically acceptable. So let's get used to the bubble - it really is the only choice facing the government (assuming that 'something must be done').

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Quote of the day...

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If people in Asia work harder than us, study harder than us, achieve better educational standards than us, are less burdened by chronic public debt than us and have more successful global companies than us – why does Ed Miliband assume they will be at ‘the bottom’, to be vilified and patronised to win empty applause at a Labour conference?

Apart from the on message last sentence, this is a great article from Jeremy Browne.

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Fracking and the legacy of the mines...

Harry Stone was a miner born
He worked to win his wages
Riding down the cages
And raging at the seams
He worked his stall from dusk till dawn
Sweet sweat and raw endeavour
Black diamonds bound together
By a strong and simple means

For two-hundred years and more England built its wealth and success, in large part, on the exploitation of its minerals  - as someone said we're an island of coal in a sea of oil. And, for all the machismo of coal-mining, it was a dangerous life and the winning of coal left great scars on the landscape, polluted the environment and created unstable landforms. The blasting of the coalface and the shifting to the tunnel-ridden rocks led to subsidence and even earth tremors.

Yet the coal ripped from the ground was the fuel for our industrial revolution. That coal provided the heat and light, the power to drag us from bare subsistence agriculture to today's warn, healthy and pleasant condition. Those men who rode the cages down into the dark - the ones who died in accidents, the one's who coughed up their lungs - they played a great part us us being wealthy.

Today the land around the mines - 'scarred like the face of the moon' as the Cornish tin and clay mined landscape was once described - slowly recovers. Where once there were ugly, deep-grey heaps of waste and spoil, we now see young woodland, ponds, trails and fields. In places the structures of the minehead are preserved - a reminder of why the town is there and what men did in times past.

Today a new fuel is there for us to win, a fuel that can power our lights, our homes, our industry for a hundred years and more. It's a fuel that doesn't require men to crawl into dark holes, to destroy their health with dust and fumes. It's a fuel we can win from the surface without despoiling the landscape, without any significant - let alone long-lasting - damage to the environment. It's a fuel that can replace the last few coal-powered generators and ensure that we can all keep our homes warm at a reasonable price.

And the fuel is shale gas. Compared to the damage - to society health and environment - that coal-mining causes, the winning of shale gas is benign. Yet people living in places that have gained from the wealth of mining without the costs of winning that wealth would stop us all - including the children of those miners - from enjoying this benefit:

The prospect of fracking is what has unsettled Fernhurst. Towers burning off excess gas and oil wouldn’t fit in with Tennyson’s vision of ‘Green Sussex fading into blue’. Beyond that, there is a terror of toxic and radioactive leaks and long-term pollution of aquifers. Marcus Adams, leader of the Frack Free Fernhurst campaign group, told me, ‘I find it extraordinary that the government allows companies to use this fracking technology when we don’t properly understand it.’ Adams is no environmentalist, merely an ordinary if concerned bloke who has lived in the area for many years. He is convinced that permission to explore will lead to permission to frack, so he and some likeminded neighbours want to thwart Celtique’s initial proposal.

Compared to the cost of mining - a cost that people like Marcus Adams didn't pay although they live with the benefits of that mining - the impact of fracking is vanishingly small. And, short term. Part of me shrugs at the opposition - I'm sure the opposition would be there wherever the extraction took place - but another part is angry.

Angry that the twisting and misrepresenting of the facts by environmental campaigners, the frenetic lobbying of the 'renewable' energy companies and the scaremongering of media results in a risk that the benefit of a 100 years of cheaper energy will be denied us. That we should slide into a world of brown-outs, industrial decline and ever higher energy prices just to protect - for a few years - a few acres of Sussex.

If this attitude had prevailed in times past we wouldn't have dug those mines at Wentworth, at Heanor and in Ashington. Instead we'd have left it there and carried on burning wood and scraping a living - in a good year - from a third of an acre of poor field.  But we did dig those mineshafts and win that coal, it did help make us rich.

And the least thanks we can offer the miners who won that coal is to go and win the shale gas, to provide the fuel to power future generations and future industry.

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Benevolent lying...

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A wonderful observation by Dan Murphy about the IMF and World Bank:

Over the years current and former employees of both groups have explained that bias is down to the belief inside the financial institutions that their rosy projections can take on a life of their own by inspiring that elusive beast "investor confidence" and unleashing a deluge of cash upon their clients. They see it as a form of benevolent lying.

I find this a fascinating take on the problem of these international - and essentially unaccountable - organisations. I recall being taught - back in the early 1980s - that the two babes in the Bretton Woods were essentially superior bodies since they didn't suffer from the self-interest or realpolitik of bilateral interventions. Now it seems that the truth is sneaking out - their guesses are just as self-serving as the guesses of political leaderships in client countries. And the prescriptions - based on these optimistic guesses - have dreadful consequences:

"However, not tackling the public debt problem decisively at the outset or early in the program created uncertainty about the euro area’s capacity to resolve the crisis and likely aggravated the contraction in output. An upfront debt restructuring would have been better for Greece although this was not acceptable to the euro partners."

However Murphy suggests we shouldn't be surprised:

In the middle of that decade (1990s), the so-called Asian financial crisis hit much of the region, with capital flight threatening private banks, government coffers, and project finance alike. Thailand and Indonesia accepted IMF loans in exchange for "structural adjustment programs" (government spending cuts, foreign investor friendly legal changes, promises to have fully convertible currencies), while Malaysia, against dire warnings from the IMF, imposed currency controls and sought to stimulate the economy out of the downturn with an expansive government budget. The results? Malaysia weathered the crisis better than its neighbors, with fewer job losses and much less political turmoil.

Perhaps the time has come for politics to reassert its ascendancy over the cosy internationalist boondoggle. It seems that, whatever the choices made, it is better for them to be made by politicians we can kick out rather than on some distant scapegoat of an international institution. Especially one with as lousy a record as the IMF!

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