Truth - everyone is doing better here than anybody has ever done

I'll admit to finding Jordan Peterson a little irritating (and maybe a tad puritan) but this is absolutely true:

"Everyone is doing better here than anybody has ever done on the face of the planet throughout recorded history, and the whole West is like that!" he told me. "To call that all a tyrannical patriarchy is indicative of a very deep resentment and ahistorical ignorance that's so profound that it's indistinguishable from willful blindness."

Amidst all the cries of poverty and austerity, we should keep reminding ourselves - as Barak Obama observed - that if someone in the West is given the whole of history to choose the best time to be born, they should choose now. We have become trapped in a sort of depressive ennui about our societies, focused only on their failings and, worse still, blaming those failings on the success.

Every problem from teenage pregnancy through drug addiction to problems with train timetables is blamed on capitalism, neoliberalism or austerity. It's probably not true that any of these things are to blame but it sets a tone that, if we smash the golden egg that made us rich (free market capitalism), all these things will go away. The problem is that the people waving the hammers at that egg want to replace it with a different, rotten, egg called socialism - something we know creates inequality, division, death and starvation.

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Effective measures to address social mobility and inequality are politically unpopular

A great deal is spoken about equality and, as a result, we have two concepts that are seen as core to the resolution of inequalities: social mobility and income redistribution. In the case of the latter, we've tended to look at redistribution in terms of social class but now there is a fashionable concern that that we should be looking at intergenerational inequalities:

But while there are strong grounds for optimism in some areas, pessimism dominates overall. Pessimists about young adults’ chances of improving on their parents’ lives outnumber optimists by two-to-one. That marks a dramatic, and very rapid, turnaround in outlook. As recently as 2003, optimists outnumbered pessimists by nearly four-to-one. The gloom that has settled across our society since then is common across advanced economies, though Britain is more pessimistic than most.

The Resolution Foundation's work is pretty comprehensive, so it's disappointing when their resolution to the problem identified (today's young people having a better life than their parents) is to give them £10,000 - collected by taxing the existing older population. For me this illustrates the problem we have with developing political solutions to core social problems like equality - the winners in the game of inequality these days want solutions that do not mean them giving up their advantage. You might be able to sell them the Resolution Foundation's bung (although the track record of political responses to inheritance taxes aren't good - as Ed Milliband and Theresa May have found out to their cost) but it really does little or nothing to address the central concern that young people won't be rich enough to buy a stake in our society.

The same applies to social mobility. This is pretty much the subject of Robert Putnam's Our Kids where he explores the barriers to social advancement faced by American young people - driven less by race or location and more by a reborn social class divide (Putnam uses parental education as a proxy so you could argue it's a test of education effect rather than class effect). It's hard to cram a whole book into a sentence or two but, it seems to me that Putnam's findings - for all that we can't get a perfect transfer to UK circumstances - are a better reflection of the social realities facing our next generation than those from the Resolution Foundation.

The problem for the Resolution Foundation is less that working class kids are falling further and further behind middle class kids because of collapsing social capital (essentially Putnam's argument) and more that middle class kids can't afford to buy the assets - typically houses - that their parents were able to buy. For sure the report talks of pay stagnation and job insecurity but its primary thrust is that the resolution of the inequality (ie young people are less able to buy assets than their parents' or grandparents' generation) comes via higher taxes on wealth and specifically real estate wealth.

Not only do I think that the Resolution Foundation's answer is overcomplicated, state-driven and divisive, I'm also pretty sure it won't work. Young people may, at the end of it be a little better off but giving them £10,000 on their 25th birthday isn't going to get most of them onto the housing ladder. Moreover, the Resolution Foundation's proposals for dramatic hikes in property taxes will benefit squeezed local council budgets far more than they will the housing options of young people. And local councils - at least if what they say is a guide - are more interested in building council houses for rent than they are in helping young people buy houses. The result of the report's policies will be some cheery councillors not happier young people - this is not progress.

The problem we have is that the most obvious policy response to the problems of intergenerational inequality and social mobility are not politically easy to deliver. These might include:

Scrapping the strategic planning system including the 'green belt' - nearly everyone says there are too few houses, allowing people to build more homes seems an obvious solution. What would a world without planning look like?

Replacing locational bases for school place allocation with a lottery - most children are in urban areas but, even here, school allocation makes a huge difference. We know that when children from lower social class (as measured by parental education level) are educated alongside their middle class neighbours they achieve better. Our locational system of allocation results in social sortition and less social mobility

Making divorce more difficult and promoting a culture where the order is "get married, have children" not "have kids and maybe sometime later get married, perhaps if he's still around" - yes folks, the children of single parents and children born outside marriage do less well at school. This is the case even when we control for other variables (and, yes, not every child of a single parent fails, just on average such children are more likely to perform less well)

Tax incentives or subsidy for single income households - the effect of a household where one parent doesn't work is also positive. Just as we should encourage marriage, we should encourage stay at home mums or dads - pay them the money we're already allocating to childcare maybe?

Not sending so many young men to prison - Putman reports again and again that the struggling young people he interviews have a father in prison. Again the evidence tells us this forced form of family breakdown results in poorer achievement, lower income, increased child delinquency. It's also a disaster for the young men we lock up - instead of 90,000 in prison we should aim to (at least) half that number

You see the problem? Put forward a manifesto saying scrap the green belt, end parental choice in school places, make divorce harder, subsidise stay-at-home mums and stop locking up so many young men. Go on. It'll be fun. Except for your candidates. It's much simpler to say "my government will pay x to y" or "we'll make it easier to dump you hubby because he snores" or even "we'll tax an unspecified bunch of rich people and companies so we can give you a tasty little cash bribe". This doesn't solve the problem but is more likely to get you elected.

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Free markets are better for fairness and equality than the state

Yet again we have evidence of how systems dominated by non-free, constrained or licenced systems (or else directly controlled by the state) are less fair and equal than free systems:



Business - that's the free market - is by far the best sector for social mobility. Rather than as with the law (what a surprise) where the man at the top being ten times more likely to be privately-educated, he's only four times more likely in the private sector.

This is because, unlike state-controlled systems like law, medicine, the army and the civil service, the private sector doesn't have the luxury of relying on Daddy and thereby ignoring 90% of the population. If you're good, your chances of getting to the top in private business are far higher. As a result private business is more innovative, more diverse and more creative than the public sector. This is because without that innovation and creativity businesses fail. And without diversity you miss out loads of people who'll bring to the skills, talents and originality you need to succeed.

Every time we look at the world, we see that free systems - markets, trade, speech, assembly, choice - deliver a more equal society. A society that can't be gamed so much by the wealthy, well-connected and fortunately-born. As I've observed before, it beats me why the left has such a down on freedom when it delivers the goods on fairness and equality better than their preferred state-directed utopia.

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The progressive left don't believe in free speech - and will redefine speech to pretend otherwise...

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Free speech is important. It's not just me saying that most people think free speech is one of our core values:

When asked what British values are, the most-chosen answers from all respondents were: respect for the law (69%); respect for free speech (66%); democracy (64%); respect for private property (62%); and equality between men and women (61%).

Now I know we can argue over what we mean by values but there's no doubt that most people have been raised with an essential belief in free speech. The problem comes when we begin to discuss what we mean by this free speech. Do we actually mean that people have the right to say whatever they like free from consequence? Take this comment from Norman Tebbit:

‘I’m not a particular friend of Leon Brittan, but this gentleman could equally well get up and accuse me of things like this – and I wouldn’t care for that. In fact I’d probably go round and smack him on the nose.’ 

This comment was in the context of parliamentary privilege - a peculiar form of free speech where there are, quite literally, no consequences. But in the context of free speech the words that upset Norman Tebbit enough for him to 'go round and smack him on the nose' are protected whereas the consequential physical violence isn't. However, in most circumstances, if we can demonstrate that the words spoken are untruthful, offensive and damaging then we have recourse to the law to get them withdrawn and to secure compensation.

None of this restricts free speech. You are quite at liberty to libel someone but you do so at the risk of having to withdraw the words and pay the offended person. However, we have added some other constraints on free speech within the criminal law through, for example, the Racism and Religious Hatred Act 2006. These constraints take the form of acting in response to words seen as incitement (in the case of the Act above, incitement to hatred). We have also seen constraints placed on 'offensive' or 'threatening' speech where it is broadcast or published including via social media like Twitter or Facebook. And finally we have direct and specific restrictions on free speech in the form of bans and controls on certain forms of commercial speech. The best example here is the ban on advertising tobacco products.

So while we say free speech is important we have allowed limits to be placed on speech that mean it is not always free and unlike the USA we have no First Amendment merely the goodwill of parliament in protecting our freedom. And this allows people to play a game of redefining what we mean by speech in order to justify censorship. Here's Anshuman A. Mondal setting out the premise for his justification of such censorship:

However, in his seminal book How to Do Things with Words, the Oxford philosopher J L Austin developed something known as 'speech act theory'. He argued that there were two broad categories of speech: the first, which he called 'constatives', are simply descriptive and informational; the second he called 'performatives', and they don’t simply say something, they do something. These forms of speech are therefore a kind of action.

In my book Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie, I argue that the giving and taking of offence are performative speech acts in Austin’s sense. They act upon the world and the work they do is political insofar as they aim to establish a power relation between offender and offendee. Put simply, to offend someone is to subordinate them, to put them down. Conversely, to take offence is to draw attention to that subordination.

So we have two sorts of speech - one (facts and figures or stuff like that) Mondal would allow to be free while the other (opinions, observations and exhortations) should be constrained because to use such language is an act of oppression. Mondal argues (from his premise based on one philosopher's work) that the second type of speech isn't speech but action and thereby no different from Norman Tebbit's smack on the nose. Thus:

If some forms of speech are actions, then it follows that restricting or regulating them does not necessarily diminish freedom in speech in general, just as restrictions on some acts – say, robbery or murder – do not jeopardise freedom as such. Otherwise, the only true freedom would be anarchy.

Now this may be an entirely circular argument since you have to accept Austin's philosophical position that certain types of speech are actions, but it also raises a definitional problem because you have to set the boundary between speech that is protected and speech that isn't. And it is clear that Mondal intends this definition to be in the hands of the offended person - if they are offended then the speech should not be protected. Not only has Mondal redefined speech but, in doing so, he also redefines freedom (or rather suggests there is more than one sort of freedom):

If giving and taking offence is the idiom through which struggles over freedom and equality are being articulated in contemporary society then a society that desires a balance between freedom and equality is perfectly entitled to restrict and regulate offensive speech acts, either by legal means or through moral pressure. This is not the threat to freedom of speech that some might take it to be, but rather a shaping of the kind of freedom we, as a political community, believe to be desirable.

In essence we have the progressive dilemma - a vocal assertion of civil liberties combining with the desire to control the words people use through fiat. To square this particular circle it is essential to redefine both parts of the term 'free speech'. Thus some speech is redefined as action (not objectively different from a smack on the nose) and freedom is framed in the context of equality rather than individual autonomy. Neither of these new definitions make sense to the ordinary person, we are in a world where it isn't possible for a black person to be racist or a woman sexist.

Lastly such a redefinition hands to others an absolute power over what is said - I cannot predict whether what I say will 'offend' because the choice to be offended is not in my control. Moreover, Mondal want certain protected groups to have a monopoly in the use of law to police that offence. It is commonplace to see someone who isn't actually 'offended' by some speech arguing that the speech is 'offensive'. In effect no speech is protected and what we understand as free speech ceases to exist.

The result of this is that things that needed to be said don't get said for fear of someone badging what is said offensive. And this has enormous and damaging consequences for our society. Free speech is important, too important to be defined by whether or not someone is offended by that speech.

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A comment about wealth...

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The ONS has published the latest figures on the UK's wealth. And this has resulted in a load of, mostly ill-informed, articles either celebrating the rise in numbers of millionaires or bemoaning the alleged increase in wealth inequality.

Here's once such:

On the other hand, the data suggest that wealth disparity across Britain is worsening. The richest 10pc of households now own 44pc of total household wealth – an increase since the current Government came to power in 2010. The top 10pc owns about five times as much as the poorest half of the population, who between them account for just 9pc of overall wealth. 

Bear in mind that we are talking here about wealth not income, which means that this observation really doesn't matter a jot. The question we need answering is how wealth will change over time not how it is distributed right now. Indeed, if we look at the least wealthy half of the population, this will include a huge chunk of the population living in houses with whacking great mortgages, young graduates in their first jobs with student debts to pay off and school leavers with no assets and £150 of credit card debt.

All of these people probably have negative wealth, but for a lot of them, this will change. Folk will pay off their mortgages turning the homes into wealth, student debts will get paid off and that youngster will join a pension scheme. So the issue isn't whether the top 10% own 44% of total household wealth but how many currently living without wealth will become wealthier simply by the process of continuing what they're doing right now.

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Thomas Piketty, New Fascist?

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On the face of it Piketty's work is orthodox, envy-ridden social democracy. Backed up by dodgy charts. But when we poke around at the words in the FT article there's an odd smell:

US inequality may now be so sharp, and the political process so tightly captured by top earners, that necessary reforms will not happen – much like in Europe before the first world war.

Here's the thing - the masterpiece created by the Great War was Fascism. It's authoritarian, directed, Listian autarky was the solution to those very problems that Piketty alludes to - essetially the excesses of capitalism.

The essence of the the New Fascism is that there must be a new authoritarian, directed, Listian solution - but petty nationalist autarky is rejected just as is personal liberty, choice and the idea of individual achievement. The fruits of success are not ours but the state's to determine.

The deepest irony of the New Fascism is that its adherents use the old discredited Fascism as a threat to beat us into submission. We are told that we must embrace their new order or suffer a return to that frightening past, a past that scarred Europe so terribly:

Short of that, many may turn against globalisation. If, one day, they found a common voice, it would speak the disremembered mantras of nationalism and economic isolation.

But Piketty and others propose the same solutions as did Gentile and Spirito - that identity is subsumed in a wider society and individual sovereignty is a false aspiration. Above all this is the central idea that the state must enforce society's sacrifice for the greater good. In this case it is a vain search for material equality built on the idea that we are unequal because the powerful have stolen from the weak.

I don't comment here on Piketty's economics but on the imperative behind his words - that liberty must be sacrificed on the altar of equality. This is the New Fascism.

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In which the North/South divide proves (again) that "The Spirit Level" is bunkum

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The Work Foundation (pdf), in one of those studies that seem much cleverer than they actually are, has pronounced that, the further you get from London, the more “equal” places become:

What you're seeing there is a near perfect correlation between distance from London by train, and inequality. The further away you are from the capital, the more equal your city is.

Which rather begs the question doesn’t it? For what we see here is that income inequality (as an aside this is not ‘wealth’ as the New Statesman rather ignorantly puts it) is much higher in London than anywhere else in England. And this really isn’t a surprise, not even a little one – there are relatively few multi-millionaires in Bradford but a significant smattering all across London.

The problem is that we’ve been told – relentlessly by acolytes of Wilkinson & Pickett – that more equal places are more successful. It seems to me that, in little old England, we have a microcosm of why “The Spirit Level” is so utterly wrong and probably misguided.

People in London and the South East live longer,

Life expectancy in the south-east is 79.7 for males and 83.5 for females, while in the north-west it stands at just 77.9 for males and 81.1 for females.

Although life expectancy has grown in every region of the UK over the past four years, in some areas the growth has been considerably faster than in others. 

Growing differences appear to reflect increasing wealth in the South - particularly in the capital.

And have better mental health:

Many of the risk factors for mental illness are linked to deprivation, so a general pattern occurs with the three northern regions (North East, North West and Yorkshire & Humber), showing worse measures than the three southern regions (South East, South West and Eastern England) and the two midlands regions (West Midlands, East Midlands) in between.

Only in crime rates does London top the pile and it would be easy to suggest that its size and the problems with policing in a large city make that inevitable.

Yet, in reporting on the Work Foundation’s little calculation, the New Statesman misses the point (quite staggeringly):

But the really interesting question is whether you want to reduce urban inequality. The "Spirit Level" argument – that high inequality causes a number of bad outcomes – has only been shown to apply on the national level. Is there anything bad about inequality in cities on its own terms?

It seems to me that the “Spirit Level” argument cannot be true at one spatial level and untrue at another. Since it isn’t true at the level of the city  - no-one would claim Liverpool or Newcastle as more successful, happier or better places than London (blind local pride aside) - it cannot be true at the level of the nation.

Not that this will stop people trying to argue that all the world’s ills can be laid at the door of the wrong Gini co-efficient.

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A point about the equal marriage debate...

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It's just that I'm a stickler for these things. The debate - and the decision of parliament isn't about marriage it's about the institution of marriage. Let me explain.

Imagine that my partner (of whatever gender) and I decide to get married in the ancient pagan Armenian style by leaping over a fire. Maybe that good old Saxon way of jumping over a broomstick. Or a thousand other ways including wearing a big white dress and walking down the aisle.

At the end of this ceremony we are married. All the bits that we talk about - love, commitment, eternity - can be included. We can throw a bash - lashing of grub and gallons of good ale.

Except for one small detail. The government doesn't think us married. So all those privileges granted to married folk simply because they are married aren't granted to us. Jumping the fire won't suffice. We have to sign a register in front of witnesses and collect a piece of paper from the representative of government that says we're married.

The gay marriage thing is about this bit of bureaucratic procedure not the love, joy and commitment bit. If there were no privileges granted in law to married people then there would be no need for the piece of paper and no need for the debate. And no need for us to be bothered about who exactly is getting married to who.

And because it's about a piece of paper rather than love, commitment or eternal partnership, there is absolutely no justification for witholding the privilege that paper grants simply because the couple are both women or both men.

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Is JUST West Yorkshire being intentionally disingenuous?

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In its latest bulletin (something it produces with staggering frequency), JUST West Yorkshire provides the following headline. Indeed it is the main headline on the whole bulletin:

The North is 40 years behind the rest of the country in terms of racism 

Now you and I understand that the term "The North" usually refers to Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria and the North-East. So I was rather surprised given the years of innovation and effort put in by people in Bradford (where JUST has parachuted itself thanks to the generosity of those nice folk at Joseph Rowntree) to address issues of racism and community cohesion.

So I check out the article and (you have to smile) it's a link to a report in the Dail Mail that it headed with the above offending headline. But when you read the acticle it refers to "a study" led by David Craig who is:

...professor of community development and social justice at Durham University

And his study is about the North-East not the North:

The report says racism remains a ‘major issue’ in the North-East, with black and minority ethnic (BME) people still experiencing racism at individual and institutional levels across public and private sectors, and in particularly in the criminal justice system.

I'll give JUST the benefit of the doubt on this occasion (although they should know better than to faithfully re-cycle Daily Mail articles) but hope that, in future, they don't try and damage race relations in places like Bradford with wild allegations of racism.

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Look, it was a mistake. It was quite funny. Why all the fuss?

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I thought Liverpudlians prided themselves on a sense of humour, on an appreciation of the ridiculous. Well I guess that the Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospital isn't managed by scousers - although it seems to employ them:

The advert, on the Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospital's website, invited applications for a trainee anaesthetist.

But it concluded by stating: "Usual rubbish about equal opportunities employer etc".

Any one who's worked in HR (or in advertising) will know exactly how this came about. And the person responsible will get a bollocking and will bore friends, colleagues and relations for ever with the story (suitably embellished).

However the management have got all po-faced. Rather than have a laugh, say "it's a mistake, sorry folks", they had this to say:

"The wording on this advert in no way reflects the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust's position in relation to equal opportunities, to which it is fully committed.

"The trust is conscious of its duty to promote equality and is a Stonewall Diversity Champion employer.

"The trust will be conducting an investigation into this incident to ensure that this cannot happen again."

For heaven's sake, grow a sense of humour will you.
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