Our planning system (not development rights) reinforces poverty and supports the wealthy over the poor

 With the government announcing a further relaxation of planning controls (or an 'extension of permitted development rights' as it is usually described) there has been the entirely expected outcry from a host of organisations. Bodies representing councils, planners, architects and even the always reliable NIMBY lobby have leapt to the defence of people not having rights to develop their property.

The decision to end the need for a planning permission to extend homes upwards, to replace redundant commercial or industrial property with housing, and to convert empty retail premises to homes has been variously described as "disgraceful" (RIBA) and "a serious error" (RTPI). Alan Jones the president of RIBA even went as far as to exonerate the planning system of any failings:

“There is no evidence that the planning system is to blame for the shortage of housing, and plenty to suggest that leaving local communities powerless in the face of developers seeking short-term returns will lead to poor results.”

This opposition to planning liberalisation (hardly surprising from a set of people so invested - financially and intellectually - in the existing systems) has been given a little fuel by the publication of a report commissioned by the government and undertaken by the planning departments of UCL and Liverpool University. Of course, it's worth stressing the words 'planning department' here when considering how to read the report but it does criticise some of the impact from the previous liberalisation of development rights, usually dubbed "office-resi". This report, we're told by fans of a more intrusive planning system, explains how extended permitted develoment rights (PDRs) resulted in substandard housing, a new generation of slums.

Interestingly the actual report stresses that the situation is "more nuanced" than shown by "some previous research" and "newspaper reports". The authors conclude, having visted 639 schemes under new PDRs and previous change of use planning permissions, that in terms of exterior design, amenity provision (parking, open space, etc), links to transport and deprivation levels there wasn't much difference between developments under the two planning regimes:

Looking across all categories of change of use and all 11 local authority areas considered, rates of making exterior alterations, such as new windows, doors, balconies and cladding, are broadly similar between planning permission and PD schemes. In terms of noticeable additional amenities, such as provision of parking and open space and facilities for refuse and post there are no obvious differences between planning permission and PD consented schemes overall. There was also little difference between PD and planning permission units in terms of energy performance or council tax banding (and hence potential property value). In terms of access to services, transport and green space, and in terms of general level of deprivation within a neighbourhood, there is overall little difference between PD and planning permission schemes.

The only substantive difference lies in 'space standards' - put simply, developments under relaxed PDRs delivered significantly smaller homes. There's a clue in the report as to why this might be the case when they observe that "...there is still significant variation between the percentages meeting the standard between each LPA." Local market conditions are as much to do with the development of homes with reduced space standards as the extension of PDRs (although the latter has made this easier).

I have quite a lot of sympathy with those arguing that these developments amount to a new generation of slums (although I would go further and argue that this applies also to developments that go through a full planning process) but the reason for this is to do with land supply not the planning permission system (plus, to a more limited extent, the impact of changes to the benefits system in respect of single people under 35). In and of itself the lack of planning 'controls' doesn't automatically result in this sort of development - indeed this is what seems to be the case in the study.

The two factors that are more important that the PDR regime (with the location determining which is more significant) are: (1) the continued lack of land supply for new housing as a result of the local plan system, green belt and other constraints; and (2) the benefit regime for those under 35 that sets a cap at the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) shared accomodation rate.

Taking the benefit effect first, we can see how this contributes to hidden homelessness (sofa surfing, lodging, etc) and street homelessness. There is too little available to rent at or near the LHA shared accomodation rate. In many places this will be confounded by young people in work who also cannot find affordable accomodation so remain as de facto 'hidden households'. The reason why places like Bradford city centre have been popular for those seeking to meet this need is that they have a surplus of poor quality office accomodation, very low yields on commercial property, and a collapsed housing market. While provision under relaxed PDRs doesn't resolve the difficulties that this local environment might create (crime, drug abuse, street drinking, deprivation and poverty) is does meet an otherwise unmet need - one that the existing planning system has struggled to meet.

The impact of too little land supply is, however, the primary contributor to our housing crises. This isn't to say that other factors (job insecurity, finance availability, market velocity) aren't also important but that five decades or more undersupply of land meant too few homes being built, higher house prices and the emergence of an often problematic private rental sector. Bear in mind that the choice for a potential tenant of a sub-standard bedsit built under relaxed PDRs isn't a lovely spacious flat but an equally sub-standard bedsit in a converted four-bed semi (and remember that most small HMO conversions are allowable under existing PDRs).

Where these structural elements are absent from the housing market then the relaxing of PDRs would create far fewer problems. It is notable that the UCL/Liverpool report shows developments in wealthier areas like Richmond and Waverley are more compliant with space and quality standards perhaps because the flats are either for market housing or else that they are meeting a wealthier part of these areas' unmet housing need. The problem isn't the regulations - and when the head of RIBA thinks there's no evidence showing the planning system contributes to housing shortages, we really do have a problem - the problem is the general lack of housing supply either as a consequence of other government regulation (eg the housing benefits system) or else as a result of local government severely constraining the land available for development.

The right criticism of the government shouldn't be to defend a planning system that has prevented us meeting housing need but rather to argue that liberalising PDRs should be done in the context of liberalising land supply. Small, poor quality housing is the inevitable consequence of our current system. We see it in how HMOs are squeezing out family housing in inner suburban London. We see it in the extent of flat-sharing, sofa surfing and temporary accommodation. And we see it in the problem of illegal lets and the abuse of sub-letting.

All of these problems either exist because of, or are made worse by, the chronic shortage of housing and the planning system's inability to meet that need. The voices at the LGA and among the assorted planning vested interests attacking the government's efforts to meet need are doing so by defending a planning system that actively prevents the provision of homes and the meeting of housing need. If these organisations were arguing that it's foolish to liberalise PDRs without green belt reform and having a vastly increased land supply, then they might have a point. Instead they're arguing for the status quo - a current system that damages economic growth, fails to respond to need, protects the environment poorly and, above all, reinforces squalour and poverty by supporting the interests of the wealthy over the interests of the poor.

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Quote of the Day: California, Death of the Dream -

Welcome to California

California. Woke central, progressive California:

"The statistics for poverty, driven by high costs and diminished opportunities, are shocking. California suffers the highest poverty rate, adjusted for costs, of any state in the country, according to the U.S. Census. A recent United Way study found that close to one in three families in the state are barely able to pay their bills. Fully one in three welfare recipients in the nation live in the California, although it is home to barely 12 percent of the country’s population. Today eight million Californians live in poverty, including two million children, by far the most of any state...

...Hispanics and African Americans do worse in California than al­most anywhere else in the country. Based on cost-of-living estimates from the Census Bureau, 28 percent of African Americans in the state live in poverty, compared with 22 percent nationally. Fully one-third of Latinos, now the state’s largest ethnic group, live in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state. Over half of all Latino households can barely pay their bills, according to a United Way study—a figure which rises to 80 percent for undocumented Latinos. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy."

This is a state dominated by the progressive left. Yet by any measure it's doing worse that places like Texas and Tennessee run by folk those progressives consider to be dumb racist hicks . Having all the right pronouns doesn't get anyone a better job, a decent education or a house they can afford.



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Is social conservatism essential for a strong society?

The more you look at the actual sociological data (rather than the dominant ideological clap-trap) the more it seems that social conservatism is the essential glue needed for that strong, stable society we crave for. Maybe Harinam & Henderson are selective in their data for this article but it makes a compelling case.

Go to church.

But why do some areas exhibit higher rates of upward mobility than others? For Carney, social capital is the key. Places with more civic activity, regardless of income, have more upward mobility. In fact, Chetty, calculating an area’s “social capital” score, found a strong correlation between civic activity and upward mobility, with religiosity (e.g. going to church) leading the way. Both white working-class and black inner-city neighbourhoods lack the civic institutions that allow for upward mobility. Furthermore, research suggests that a 15% increase in the proportion of people who think others are trustworthy raises income per person by 1%.

Take personal responsibility and follow the 'success sequence'- "graduate from high school, work full-time, and not have children outside of marriage"

According to Haskins and Sawhill, individuals in families that adhered to the success sequence had a 98 percent chance of escaping poverty. By contrast, 76 percent of those that did not adhere to any of these norms were poor. In a 2003 analysis of census data, the authors demonstrated that had the poor followed the success sequence, the U.S. poverty rate would have fallen by more than 70 percent.

Support the family and marriage

Whereas 8 percent of children born to married parents end up in poverty as adults, 27 percent of children born to unmarried parents live as impoverished adults. According to a study by social scientists Robert Lerman, Joseph Price, and Brad Wilcox, “Youths who grow up with both biological parents earn more income, work more hours each week, and are more likely to be married themselves as adults, compared to children raised in single-parent families.”

The authors report that not only does controlling for family make-up pretty much eliminate differences between races but that the single best thing to reduce social pathologies like depression, alcoholism, suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence is to cut the rates of child abuse. And child abuse is dramatically higher where children are born outside marriage.

It's one article and I'm sure there's plenty to question but it matches the work on child and young people of Robert Putnam as well as robust evidence on how social stability benefits the less well off far more than it does us well-connected middle-class folk. What is very clear, however, is that the collapse in traditional families sits right at the heart of the problems we see in inner-city communities. And it's no surprise that, for these communities, the people who look to escape a world of poverty, violence and drugs turn to the stability of the church as pretty much the sole wholesome thing on offer.

I am mixed on the matter of social conservatism given its association with anti-gay messages and a traditional, essentially subservient role for women. But the argument here is compelling - finishing school, getting a job and keeping a job, getting married and staying married is still the best route out of poverty. Our social policies should, therefore, focus on supporting these outcomes - well-funded schools with good discipline and a focus on outcomes, real support for people in work aimed at keeping them in work and a substantive and genuine commitment to reward marriage.

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They're all protectionists (the left that is...)

Like some free, fair and open international trade, for example

Indeed Donald Trump could have said this:

"You know, for decades, we have had a trade policy that has been written by giant multinational corporations to help giant multinational corporations," she said. "They have no loyalty to America. They have no patriotism. If they can save a nickel by moving a job to Mexico, they'll do it in a heartbeat. If they can continue a polluting plant by moving it to Vietnam, they'll do it in a heartbeat….I have put out a new comprehensive plan that says we're not going to do it that way."

OK Trump might have been blunter, focused more on the jobs of ordinary workers, but the message is the same - you're a traitor to America if you "move jobs" to another country. And, as Mike Riggs says in a message straight to the heart of kids in America - "Elizabeth Warren hates your cheap foreign-made electric guitar". That's the only guitar you can afford because a host of regulations and restrictions mean the cheapest American axe will set you back over a grand.

Everywhere you look you'll see leftists (and especially the cool right on sorts) enthusiastically lining up to back protectionist measures. It's all wrapped up with the usual wibble about climate change, the NHS and 'chlorinated chicken' - here's centre-left loudmouth, Jess Phillips:

So is the NHS within that agreement? Also is, as my son called it "swimming pool chicken" going to be the norm. Also how will these long distance import/export markets work towards our climate targets?

Jess is very keen on a trade agreement with the USA just so long as her long list of protections isn't affected - she's happy for consumers not to have cheaper food, to limit where the NHS can buy drugs and services, and to scare consumers with entirely fictional nonsense about US food safety. And let's not get started on how these folk are torn apart by the new cult of climate doom - "you can't ship things around the planet, think of the polar bears" (and the post box filled with the latest cut and paste myths from worshippers at the Church of St Greta or the Temple of Attenborough).

And who pays the biggest price for this protectionism? Oh yes, it's the least well off who face higher food bills, longer hospital waits, drug shortages and every pricier energy, transport and clothing. Just to satisfy the ignorance of wealthy people like Elizabeth Warren and Jess Phillips. As my Dad put it, they can afford to be socialists.

It's time we told these folk to take a long hike somewhere they can't do any more harm.

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Being poor is bad for your health and being ill is bad for your wealth

Babbling on about health inequality has become the latest obsession of the sort of Labour politician who rises to being a council leader or perhaps the shouty sort of backbench MP. This obsession leads to this sort of nonsense:

‘Shocking’ health inequality and poverty go hand-in-hand, meeting told

So says Susan Hinchcliffe, leader of Bradford Council as she comments on a report showing that people living in Ilkley - one of the wealthiest places in the North of England - live 21 years longer than people in Tong, one of the UK's most deprived communities. That both these places are in the Bradford metropolitan district is a quirk of political geography.

What's nonsense here is, of course, the idea that we should be shocked that poor people have less good health outcomes than rich people. This fact has been pretty much common knowledge since people first started thinking about health. So the solution isn't to, in some way, redirect resources from Ilkley to Tong (at a guess the per capita spending on healthcare in Tong is significantly higher already) but rather to reduce the poverty.

The second common misunderstanding here is that there is something about the place that means people are healthier - or for that matter richer. While place has some impact on health (air quality, for example) most health outcomes are entirely unrelated to where people are born or where they live. People in Tong are less healthy because they are poorer. And they live in these places because they have the affordable housing that poor people need.

And for some of the people in Tong, the reason they are poor is because they have poor health. Illness and disability can and does lead directly to reduced income. We can probably all think of someone we know who, because of their health, dropped out of a career or because of their disability never embarked on one. It's probably true that we could do more to reduce this effect but it's also true that we can only really resolve the poverty not the inequality.

So Bradford's "shocking" health inequality is entirely a consequence of Bradford's income inequality. And we don't fix this by making people in Ilkley poorer (or less healthy) but rather by making people in Tong richer. Indeed, we should stop using geography as a measure - especially given the degree to which otherwise intelligent people completely fail to grasp what local area statistics tell us - and should focus on people who are poor wherever they live.

Nationally we spend something like £6 billion on public health and a further £6 billion on various activities dubbed 'prevention'. If we were serious about improving health outcomes - and reducing that health inequality contingent on geographical concentrations of wealth or poverty - then we would shift most of this spending away from nannying people about booze, fags and burgers and spend it instead on programmes to reduce poverty. But I guess that doesn't fit the script.

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The dark side of rural decline - West Virginia's drug epidemic

West Virginia - mountain mama's drug den

I'm often cynical about moral panics around drugs and drug use as they tend to exaggerate or make use of tragic anecdotes to fuel the idea that it has reached epidemic proportions. I do, however, think the problem in parts of West Virginia is genuinely shocking:

Huntington, the second largest city in West Virginia, once had a population of more than 100,000 people, but that number has reduced to some 48,000, and almost one-quarter of these, some 12,000 citizens, have either latent or active substance-use disorders.

Here we see the trend of rural depopulation combined with a widely reported and discussed US problem with opiates. As with other rural and small town places where the reason for there being a population - agriculture, mining, forestry - has ended, those with any get up and go have got up and left. What's remains are the old, the poor and the sick (including some who tick all of these boxes) - and, for reasons ranging from broken families and poor education to the lack of jobs and ill health, what we've got is a drugs problem:

Beyond the numbing accountancy, though, the epidemic has done little to impress itself onto the wider American culture. So far, OxyContin has produced no Hogarth, no Coleridge, no De Quincey, no Easy Rider or Drugstore Cowboy, no Junkie or The Long Weekend. There is no country music equivalent of Bowie’s Berlin period, or not one with any wattage. There is some book-length journalism, a sliver of fiction, some recovery-themed Christian hip-hop and, perhaps by analogy, the zombie-themed television series The Walking Dead. Then a blank. The destruction of much of working-class America by opiates and opioids has happened silently. There seems almost nothing creative to say about it, or no way to say it.

To be fair this might not be so true of country music as a survey by Addictions.com shows country is now the genre most likely to reference drugs in its lyrics:

Out of eight categories, country leads the way with 1.6 mentions per song on average, followed closely by jazz and pop music. Hip-hop actually falls in the last place at less than 1.3 mentions behind folk, challenging the assumption that all rappers are lyrical drug peddlers.

And some of those lyrics - even back in 1980 - speak directly to that rural decline and how getting out, for all the homesickness, is the only option for most folk:

When I was in school I ran with a kid down the street
And I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed
But I was smarter than most and I could choose
Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news
When I was eighteen Lord I hit the road
But it really doesn't matter how far I go

There's a magic about rural places, a sort of ache in our hearts to return to a better, clearer, less crazed world. A world where waiting - dreckly as the Cornish say - is a reminder that that's how good things come. But the truth is that this life isn't real, it's the worst sort of bucolic myth because it means that the pain in rural places is ignored - as Steve Knightley wrote in his song 'Country Life':

My old man is eighty four
His generation won the war
He left the farm forever when
They only kept on one in ten
Landed gentry county snobs
Where were you when they lost their jobs
No-one marched or subsidised
To save a country way of life

It's not straightforward - not everyone trapped in rural or small town poverty turns into a junkie or a drunk - but if you take away the means of making a living from a community then there's a big chance it's going to fall apart. Mostly this is about people leaving (and, as J D Vance described in 'Hillbilly Elegy', taking their dysfunction with them) but the literally left behind see that old working class certainty gone with any work being poorly paid, temporary and wholly without the prospect of that good American - or British, or Italian - life they were promised.

The worst part of all this, whether it's in West Virginia, the Welsh valleys or Sardinia, is that the problems of these places are literally 'out of sight, out of mind'. No-one goes there because there's no reason to do so, nobody sees the collapse of community and the decline of rural life. In the USA, the election of Donald Trump, supposedly on the back of votes from the 'left behind' in places like West Virginia, at least pointed the attention of city dwelling folk to these communities. I've a feeling though that, just as we see everywhere else, grand folk will swan into town write some reports and swish away leaving behind a bit of regeneration cash that will tart up some buildings and fund some social sticking plaster for a year or two.

I guess there's a race on between the despair of drugs or hard drink and the hope of education, social support and an economy that works. Right now the dark side is a long way ahead mostly because there's really no purpose to a place that has no jobs and no prospect of jobs. When we did a master plan for Airedale, the bit of West Yorkshire that runs north-west from Bradford up to Skipton, one of the comments was that the towns looked inwards to their industrial history not up onto the hills to see the salvation of being a beautiful place. Maybe the long term for deep rural places lies in rediscovering the wild and forgetting about digging coal, felling pines or growing corn?

In the meantime, we (that is rich city dwelling folk) have a bit of a duty to pay more attention to these places, as much attention as we give to the problem places in the city. If we don't their pain will continue and so will the anger of many who live there - an anger directed at their city-living lords and masters.

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Government should try to fix poor people's economic circumstances not fix their diet

A fascinating interview on Vox with three US sociologists who look at (and have a book about) the mythology and misunderstanding around home cooking - not least that for the first half of the 20th century most American upper middle class families employed a cook. At the heart of their observation, based on a close study of nine families is that Michael Pollan's contention - “We’re going to have to fix our diet before we fix the whole economy.” - doesn't reflect the actual lives of less well off Americans:

But in a lot of cases, there are other, non-food problems that are making it really hard for them to feed their families the way they’d want to. In one of the more extreme examples, there’s Patricia, who is living with her daughter and two grandchildren in a hotel room. She doesn’t have a kitchen. So yeah, she’s heating up frozen pizza — she doesn’t have a stove. And it seems like, no, “fixing our diet” is not going to fix this.

This is an extreme case but one of the researchers explained:

A lot of people in the study had their own houses. But a lot of people in the study didn’t have basic kitchen tools. Their stoves wouldn’t work. They’d have pest infestations. The electricity would get cut off, or the water, for a period of time. A lot of people didn’t have tables or enough chairs for everyone to sit down. So really basic things of this kind of image of what dinner can look like and how you should do it didn’t map up with a lot of the experiences of the poor families in our study.

So when we talk about bad diet, reliance on instant food, not sitting down together as a family - not, so to speak, meeting that middle class ideal - we forget that this lifestyle requires more than just the ability to cook, it needs also the resources to do that cooking and enjoy that dinner. Shouting at poor people about "junk food" is bad enough but when the government plans to deliberately make that food more expense we are actively making the lives of the poorest less tolerable.

Right now the UK government is consulting on a set of restrictions for HFSS food promotions (usually and lazily tagged "junk food" by the media) that includes bans on 'buy-one-get-one-free' offers and limits to advertising. The effect of this approach is likely (along with things like the sugar tax) to just make it harder for the less well off to feed their family. This research reminds us that we need to fix the economic circumstances not fix their diet.

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Yes. People really are this stupid...

In the Guardian obviously:

I don’t know whether the left has been sleeping, but there has been a dominant narrative that has remained quite unchallenged in the media. This narrative suggests that there is no connection between the super-rich and abject poverty, that you can keep getting richer and richer, and this has nothing to do with people getting poorer. And it wasn’t always like that, people in the past have known that maximising at the top means you are depriving somebody else further down.

Now Karl Marx got a lot of things right but the lump of labour idea wasn't one of them. The painful truth for these numpties is that the "super-rich", by creating new wealth ake everyone better off - Facebook and Google and Amazon may seem trivial things but they have provided enormous additional value to the lives of people across the world. And something like 2-3% of that additional value goes to the people who created those firms. The thing is that 2-3% of trillions of dollars is an awful lot of money.

For a non-stupid commentary on the "abolish billionaires" rubbish read this...

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How the left use the myth of the noble savage to keep black people poor

We are often reminded that levels of poverty across the world have fallen. We need to remember that the natural state of man isn't some sort of bucolic utopia but abject, brutal, painful poverty. Before the 19th century all but a fortunate few lived in absolute poverty, the sort of 'less than a dollar a day' subsistence that is still the reality for too many in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We also need to consider that we're not so very far from returning to that terrible past - read about the decade after WW2 or take a look at Venezuela today.

There are some people, however, who (as they would doubtless put it) challenge the neoliberal narrative of poverty decline. They are, I guess, the economics version of climate change deniers:

Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor.

What an idyllic description of life in Africa, India and America before bad people arrived. It's like one of those old romantic characterisations - the noble savage living a carefree life unconstrained by the hideous trappings of civilisation. From its progenitor in Rousseau through to Engels and other early socialists comes this idea that somehow man fell from a state of near perfection to a corrupt state obsessed with possessions. It is still found in literature (popular science fiction is riddled with it) and has a more troubling home in academia where it still exercises a malign influence on international aid strategies and policies.

At the heart of this argument, promoted by Oxfam as well as elite academics at top London universities, is the idea that people like subsistence agriculture (not the academics or aid workers obviously, just the darker coloured peasants). That those "robust systems of sharing and reciprocity" are in any way real. And that disease, famine, murder, rape and brutality aren't more typical of the noble savage's world. What's still more depressing is that rich white academics like Jason Hickel (whose article I took that Rousseau-esque quote from), living a lovely life among the western elite want to deny the opportunity for that life to poor black and brown people elsewhere in the world.

It is a ridiculous idea that, presented with the idea of faster travel, with piped water, with telephones and safe packaged food, people will choose to remain scraping at half an acre of garden with a blunt hoe. Yet Hickel - and so many of his fellow left-wing academics - persist with the idea that somehow there's a way to maintain the noble savage in their mythical perfection while allowing them to have (doubtless state funded) access to a few of those good things that are enjoyed by the western elite. We have an ideology so invested in opposing neoliberalism that it is prepared to use a myth, the noble savage, to justify keeping black people trapped in brutal, abject poverty.

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Are the motives for taxation to blame for poverty?

Government needs revenue to do the things that governments do. And, without getting into the slightly loopy world of magic money tree beliefs, the only source for that money is the taxpayer. This, not the stuff about austerity or ridiculous arguments about 'punishing the poor', is why lower taxes are desirable. Only a relative few anarchistic folk actually believe that there shouldn't be any tax (or government for that matter) and this means we have to put up with politicians making decisions about who to tax and how much to tax them.

It's also true that in the UK's modern liberal democracy part of that taxation is intended to relieve poverty. And this is right and proper - the criticism of the very bad report by some law professor from New York wasn't that there's no poverty but rather that the chap seemed to think poverty was deliberately created by an evil government (I paraphrase his risible 20-odd page report). The report also ignored the self-evident fact that the reasons for poverty are not entirely external economic, fiscal or environmental forces acting on individuals. Simply using taxation for redistribution does not resolve the problem - P J O'Rourke, in 'All the Trouble in the World' pointed out that, when you add up the poverty (the gap between what people have and what we think they should have) and subtract from it the money spent by government on relieving that poverty, there is no poverty in the USA.

The same goes for the UK - we spend over £100 billion every year on projects and programmes intended to alleviate poverty and for some reason this has failed to get rid of that poverty. It could be that £100 billion isn't enough (I doubt this) but it is more likely that, as with a great deal of what government does, that money is badly spent - we give money to people who don't need it (wealthy pensioners, for example) and take money away from those who probably do (homeless young men maybe). We behave like the operators of Victorian workhouses towards some groups (those unemployed young men again) punishing them for minor mistakes, disorganisation and oversight whilst we lavish money without question on others (middle class mums perhaps).

It seems to me that the problem here isn't simply that government is bad at spending money efficiently (it probably is) but more that the motive of the people levying the taxes and managing the handouts is about punishing wrong behaviour or choices not the effective collection of the cash needed to provide the services and support people require. It's like this:

The avowed point of the taxes, according to Macron, is not just to subsidize environmental programs, but to force people to "change habits" by making fossil fuels more expensive.

Now you might be nodding and saying "absolutely, climate change y'know" but the reality is that this is the same mindset as that which asks the benefit system to withdraw cash from some 30 year old recovering drug addict who forgets an appointment. It's a short journey from nudge to freezing in a tatty sleeping bag in a Manchester shop doorway. Government really does believe that its purpose is to shape us into better people - thinner, less drunk, without nicotine-stained fingers, quietly employed. In the civil servant's (and too many politician's) mind we should be Mr Potter's 'thrifty working class' living in homes kindly rented from grand organisations, municipalities and supposed charities. Look at the great and good of local government as they get all excited at the prospect of building more council houses to cram the poor into - a new generation dependent on the state for the roof over their head. It may be better than Potterville's slums but it's not inclusive, optimistic or aspirational.

It makes me angry that conservatives don't say this, choosing instead to treat most of the poor as Mr Doolittle - the undeserving poor to be controlled or managed rather than people who, given better incentives, will stop being 'undeserving' and become the sort of aspirational citizens government keeps telling us they want ! The motives for taxation - changing bad habits as often as raising revenue - are the problem and government needs to focus its efforts on actual social outcomes rather than on vain attempts to create the perfect man through fiat, order and direction.

Poverty is a scourge but, given the money we (supposedly) put towards its relief, it should not persist. That it continues isn't a failure of capitalism or the market, it is entirely the failure of government - bad policy, misplaced priority and the inevitable buying of votes by promising free stuff to people - wealthy pensioners, middle class mums, public school kids heading to university - who really don't need it. The sad truth is there's no votes in eliminating poverty, no incentive to get rid (what would the growing poverty industry of think tanks, 'campaigning' charities and consultants do?) of its curse, and every incentive to carry on blaming the poor for being poor rather than government for putting its efforts into looking like it cares rather than seeing less poverty as a measurable, achievable outcome from over £100 billion in public spending.

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A new feudalism? Housing costs, business structures and the pricing out of the middle class

US geographer, Joel Kotkin has been speaking for a while about how the nature - social and economic - of his home state of California is changing towards what he calls a "New Feudalism":

Today California is creating a feudalized society characterized by the ultra-rich, a diminishing middle class and a large, rising segment of the population that is in or near poverty. Overall our state now suffers one of the highest GINI rates — the ratio between the wealthiest and the poorest — among the states, and the inequality is growing faster than in almost any state outside the Northeast, notes liberal economist James Galbraith. The state’s level of inequality now is higher than that of Mexico, and closer to that of Central American banana republics like Guatemala and Honduras than it is to developed states like Canada and Norway.

Kotkin (and fellow author, Marshall Toplinsky) describe how, once housing costs are considered, the supremely progressive state of California has the USA's highest rates of poverty. Despite this, Californian politics is dominated by the wealthy few and those who live off advocating for the poor. As Kotkin & Toplinsky despair that "no prominent California politician, left or right, has addressed seriously the collapse of the state’s dream of upwardly mobility".
The causes will be familiar to anyone looking at the development of and challenges facing London:

The real problems lie with policies that keep housing prices high, an education system that is a disgrace, particularly for the poor, and a business climate so over-regulated that jobs can be created either in very elite sectors or in lower-paying service professions. Even in the Bay Area in coming decades regional agencies predict only one in five new jobs will be middle income; the rest will be at the lower end.

The result of this situation is that feudalism - a modern serfdom - Kotkin describes. A wealthy few, that shiny knights and ladies of the elite serviced by poorly paid workers unable to join the asset merry-go-round. Even relatively well-paid workers will be trapped by a choice between their job and moving to another, more affordable place - stay renting forever (or hope for the financial break that gets them into the gentry) or move somewhere colder, poorer and far way where they can buy a home and raise a family.

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Something happened - and that something was the free market

Man's natural state is grinding poverty:

Among economists and anthropologists, this is “settled science.” Economists left and right might bicker over minor details, but they agree that poverty is man’s natural environment. As economist Todd G. Buchholz puts it, “For most of man’s life on earth, he has lived no better on two legs than he had on four.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Douglass C. North and his colleagues write in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History that “over the long stretch of human history before 1800, the evidence suggests that the long-run rate of growth of per capita income was very close to zero.”

For tens or thousands of years nearly all men lived in that grinding poverty. There were little flickers of light showing what was possible - in China, in Baghdad, in Florence - and then, bang, we suddenly and sustainably got rich, dragged ourselves out of poverty, and created the wonders of our modern world from dishwashers to the internet, from recorded music to space travel.

And that bang? It was the liberal enlightenment, the idea that creativity and innovation wasn't the preserve of aristocratic patronage but was for everyone. It was what we sneeringly called the middle class - whether suited banker or white van man - that made that great noise of human improvement. It wasn't government, it wasn't posh landowners, it wasn't socialism, it wasn't a cumulative process of incremental improvement - human betterment is a consequence of freedom - free speech, free enterprise, free assembly, free worship, free trade. Improvement came because we decided people shouldn't have to have permission from their 'betters' if they wanted to try something out.

So if you want to limit freedom - stop folk exchanging freely, prevent people from saying what they wish, halt people's right to gather together, limit what they can believe in and worship - any of these things and you offer future humanity a worse world. Above all, if you think free markets are a bad idea and need limiting, regulating and controlling by our betters, then you offer future generations a less wealthy, less healthy and less happy world.

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Memories of what once was haunt our politics

OK this is about about Youngstown, Ohio but the same sentiment could pass for a thousand other places across the USA, Britain and Europe:

In places like Youngstown, many people still remember what life was like when employment was high, jobs paid well, workers were protected by strong unions, and industrial labor provided a source of pride – not only because it produced tangible goods but also because it was recognized as challenging, dangerous, and important. The memory of what it felt like to transform raw ore into steel pipes and to be part of the connected, prosperous community that work generated still haunts the children and grandchildren of those workers.

These memories of what once was haunt today's politics and the minds of economists. The problem is that those economists know only the dry, utilitarian core of their discipline - free trade works, economic liberalism makes the world richer. And all this is undeniable but what it reminds us is that utilitarianism and Benthamite consequentialism should not be the only drivers of what we do and how we think about the world.

I don't think we can get back to those halcyon days of factories, unions, strong men and robust communities in places like Ohio, South Yorkshire, Livorno or Roubaix - this is, if you like, the mistake of Blue Labour and Red Tory analyses. But what we should do, rather than peer in faux-concern at the poverty consequential on the loss of those days, is ask what is needed to find again the ties that bound those communities together and made them strong.

John Sanphillippo writes brilliant photo-essays about America's suburbia and, in a recent piece about Orange County, California, he started with what I think is a really important remark:

There are things that we can do as a society to work through our big structural difficulties at an institutional level. And there are other things that can be done independently at the household level by individuals. I don’t have the technical skills, political skills, social skills, credentials, patience, or desire to engage the large scale systems. To be honest, I don’t think most people do. But there are all sorts of things that ordinary people can and should do on their own that can make a huge difference on the ground at room temperature. Collectively all our separate choices create the world we inhabit.

To do this we have to break with those memories of what once was, to forget pretending large factories with their unions, job security and dominance of a community will ever return. We've also to stop seeing the answer lies with holding out a cap to national government crying "fill it with money, we're hurting" - it's not that redistribution is a bad thing but rather that it stops things getting worse it doesn't make them better. The starting point is where Sanphillippo is pointing - outside our front doors.

Right now the neoliberal elite (apologies for calling them that but it's all I've got) are in denial. They know that their world view is challenged by folk struggling in Youngstown, Oldham or Fosse De Sessevalle and they know also that the voice of far-left and far-right echoes round these communities as they search for what they lost when the steelworks, cotton mills and coal mines closed. The problem is that the populists, whether rightists like Farage, Trump or Le Pen or leftists like Mélenchon, Corbyn or Sander, don't offer anything that works - all these would-be demagogues offer is a false hope and strong words of blame.

It seems to me we've to offer people two things - hope based on empowerment and control, and the idea of aspiration. Maybe if we start with those neglected local things - the fallen walls, the crumbling highway, the kid who needs a lift (or a bike) to get to an apprenticeship, the local school looking for readers, the doctors wanting help getting folks to and from hospital, a thousand things too small to get the notice of big government but important to you little place. Forget about grand national schemes and think instead about our neighbourhoods - because it really does work:

The Knight Foundation, an American charity that supports journalism and active citizenship, ran a programme called 'Soul of the Community' that showed how there is an "important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth" and what "most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place". If people love where they live, that place will succeed - it's Sam Gamgee going round The Shire planting a grain from Galadriel's garden in every corner.

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On safari with the poverty tourists

Since the Brexit vote in Britain and Trump's election in the USA, there has developed a genre of journalism that involves the writer departing from their comfortable, elite environs (London, New York, San Francisco) and venturing out into the badlands where people voted either the leave the EU or else for Donald Trump. On safari with their patronising pencils:

Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.

Or by the seaside smugly observing poor people struggling:

The elephants that lumbered up and down Blackpool’s beach have long gone. Britain’s political parties have stopped decamping to the town for their annual jamborees. Even the deckchairs have left: the local government sold all 6,000 of them three years ago to a company in the affluent county of Cheshire. The one thing that hasn’t disappeared is the people.

This sort of poverty tourism feeds a set of consumers eager for the latest instalment of voyeurism, the next explanation as to why these stupid people voted for Brexit or plumped for Trump. We get depressing descriptions of people's lives interspersed by showing how they're all bigoted, racist, misogynist, overweight and unhealthy. What there isn't is any attempt at all to understand why, at least not beyond glib, smug quips about "shit life syndrome" or lurid reporting on illiberal attitudes towards druggies, welfare queens and high school drop-outs.

The whole approach - whether it's a Financial Times journalist going to Blackpool, a Guardian writer venturing to Stoke, or some San Francisco researchers driving through rural Wisconsin - reeks of 19th century anthropology where intrepid researchers ventured into the dark jungle in search of lost tribes to write up in their next book - published to great acclaim and talk of how brave, how brilliant. What we don't get is any real sense of understanding as journalists turn for insight to the public sector elites that dominate many of these places - to the very people who are failing to turn them round.

It's no surprise then, that the descriptions focus on the dysfunctional lives of people who live in these places, on the drugs and alcohol, the depression and the sense of hopelessness. What's lacking from this poverty tourism is any sense of empathy, any appreciation of what having a shit life is really like. And why so many people with those shit lives are in Blackpool, Stoke and rural Wisconsin. It struck me as telling that the UK edition of J D Vance's gripping 'Hillbilly Elegy' describes it as "a great insight into Trump and Brexit" - it may be that but more importantly it's a revealing story of the struggles faced by the white working class in the deindustrialised Mid West. That Trump and Brexit were stuck on the book's front cover tells you everything you need to know about the interests and priorities of bien pensant bookshop browsers in London or New York.

What's missing is any suggestion as to what - other than familiar cries for more government cash - should be done to change shit lives into lives that are all right. We get little criticisms of government like this:

For Jonathan Portes, chief economist at the DWP between 2002 and 2008, the lack of a plan was, in retrospect, part of the problem. “There’s an argument for saying you can’t do [welfare reform] separately from having some sort of place-based economic strategy as well — and we never really had that,” he says. “Just telling them, ‘Well there’s 5,000 new jobs in London every week, and people seem to find it perfectly easy to move 600 miles from rural Romania to take one of these jobs, so why can’t you move 200 miles from Blackpool?’ — it’s true but it sort of ignores the social context.”

The truth, of course, is that we had decades of place-based economic strategies some funded through ERDF Objective One and Two, others by UK government funding (City Challenge, SRB, Estate Action - a potpourri of place-based regeneration) but, in the main, the places that were poorest in 1968 are more likely to be poor in 2018. And, while all this money helped, the economic fundamentals for places like Blackpool, Barnsley or Stoke haven't changed all that much.

When you read Vance's book, you get a little sense of the irritation many like him (hillbillies, rednecks, chavs, pikies - the white working classes of Britain and America) feel at the way they're portrayed in these poverty tourism pieces. We're given the idea that such folk are dull, listless, ignorant and essentially helpless, that only the intervention of bright, engaged, educated and empowered people from outside can resolve the problem. We're to say "there, there" and provide a big middle-class hug to all these sad, incapable poor people out there in the sticks.

Perhaps instead of that hug, we should try a little bit of understanding? Get underneath why their lives are shit? Maybe we can stop hassling them about lifestyle too and focus instead on the things that could help? But then, I've a suspicion, the journalists, academics and think-tankers believe they're done their job by pointing at Blackpool as saying "ewww, isn't it horrid" (albeit taking 5000 words to do so). After all their readers will now be armed with all they need to hold forth about the evils of capitalism, the failures of Tory welfare policies and the noble work being done by the public sector elites in these towns, people who are sacrificing the comforts of civilisation to do good work in these sad, broken places.

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We need a better discussion of poverty and welfare

A while back I wrote about how conservatives needed to start talking about poverty.

Two days ago an old cinema in Shipley caught fire – it’s now being demolished as an unsafe building. One tweet I saw suggested that it might have started from a tramp lighting a fire to keep warm on a cold, snowy night. It may turn out that there was some other cause but, sadly, this suggestion could very well be true. For whatever reason there are people sleeping rough on even the coldest night – and this is poverty.

Too many of us look at this and throw up our hands in despair. After all we’ve had a welfare system for over 100 years and a welfare state for nearly 70 – and still there are people who end up unable to heat their home, wondering whether they can feed their children and lacking in any hope or aspiration. So when I see people “defending” the welfare state, I want to scream and point to the terrible injustice of poverty.

In rounds terms the UK government spends about £100bn on alleviating poverty (this is just the welfare budget bit of it so the true figure is maybe a bit higher) - there really ought not to be much poverty left if this money was distributed well. The problem is partly that government really isn't very good at running things and that we design general systems lacking the responsiveness and flexibility needed to respond to the reality of poverty. But fixing that won't fix poverty.

In one respect us Conservatives have it right - the best way to eliminate poverty is for people to have a job and the opportunity for personal betterment. But, even when we move away from relative measures of poverty, there remains, at any given time, a lot of people who by any measure are in abject poverty. When Bradford Council's corporate scrutiny committee looked at this, my back-of-the-envelope estimations gave a figure of 15,000-20,000 people in the City who are genuinely wanting, really are poor. Stretch this across the nation and we get to a figure of about 2 million or so people who are in poverty.

Blessedly, for many of this 2 million, the situation is temporary, they get the benefits sorted out, maybe pay off some debt or get a job and are able to move to a more stable place, at least for the time being. But this still leaves a lot of people - I don't know how many, suspect no-one knows for sure - who are living in terrible poverty and can't get themselves out of it. And, yes, we do a fine job most of the time helping them, either through the benefits system or through the wonderful thing that is people's charity. The thing is, however, that this isn't getting to the heart of the problem, it's treating the symptoms rather than the cause.

As conservatives, people who believe in the free market society that made most people much richer than past generations, we need to resist the temptation to line up with the progressive left and say that cause is down to the system, that liberal capitalism is somehow the reason for that ex-soldier sleeping rough outside Tower Hill tube station or that single mum crying herself to sleep because she's nothing to feed the kids tomorrow. If there are a million people stuck in terrible poverty, there are an accompanying million reasons for that being so.

It seems to me that our nationalised and centrally-directed welfare system, for all that it works for most of its users, simply cannot give the time and attention to people that would allow plans to get that ex-soldier or that single mum out of their poverty. If we are to redesign a system, it needs to come with space to allow better support for such things as mental health, drug and alcohol dependence, disability and budgeting. And, yes, this means challenging spending reductions in local government and looking at how we can make ideas like the (badly named) troubled families programme work. It also means recognising that providing emergency cash, food and clothing has to be part of a system - things like food banks should be seen as part of society's response not as a reflection of failure.

It also strikes me that we need to see how the creativity of private initiative can be directed to helping these million or so folk stuck in poverty. Big government isn't innovative (probably rightly) but there are a lot of people working in and around government who could be given the opportunity and incentive. I'm struck by the degree to which charities and voluntary groups are ready to take risks, do things a bit differently, in order to help those they were formed to help. How we get more of this should be something exercising the mind of government. David Cameron's 'Big Society' was a good start that was, sadly and wrongly, castigated by people in the voluntary sector suffering from a bad case of 'not invented here syndrome'.

The elimination of poverty is not something that can be achieved by government on its own, least of all by tearing down the system of liberal capitalism most likely to deliver a long term answer. That Cameron observation that "there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as government" should be our starting point. The task of government is to enable people who want to help to do just that, to remove the controls preventing support. At the same time government needs to start being more trusting of the people who walk in through its doors seeking help.

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The Inner City - urbanism's dirty secret

From Chicago through Dublin, Glasgow and Manchester to Lyons, Barcelona and Vienna, the Inner City is urbanists' dirty secret. We've spent decades bashing away at solutions and nowhere are we any closer to what the right policies might be.

Just a reminder what it looks like - this is Baltimore:

Take, for example, McElderry Park, a 103-acre area just east of Johns Hopkins University's centrally-located medical center. The neighborhood, which was once middle-class, is now a severe version of the city's downward spiral. About one-third of families there live in poverty, and workforce participation levels are 54%. Nearly three-quarters of residents don't have any college education, meaning they are generally supported either by the government, or low-wage service jobs—which make up an increasingly high percentage of jobs in the city. The neighborhood's physical emptiness symbolizes another discouraging trend, population loss, which is at the heart of Baltimore’s problems.

As Scott Meyer who painted this picture observes, this isn't an anomaly in Baltimore or indeed any large city in the USA. And we know - we see the riots, despair and dislocation in our own cities - that it's not an anomaly in Europe. In the USA, Donald Trump made much of the inner cities in his campaign - in that blunt and divisive style of his, he said stuff like:

“Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever...You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.”

Set the rhetoric aside for a second, hold back your distaste for Trump - doesn't he have a point? If that sad, declining picture of Baltimore is any guide then these seemingly intractable problems of the inner city are genuine. And Trump is right - if you're a decent parent how are you going to raise your children, keep them out of trouble, keep them alive and off drugs when the only thriving industries are crime and welfare?

And is isn't new. Here's P J O'Rourke from 1991 in New York:

Mott Haven was once a district of substantial apartment houses, comfortable if not luxurious, the tract homes of their day. These sheltered the Jewish middle classes on their way from the Lower East Side to White Plains. Now the buildings are in various stages of decomposition, ranging from neglected paint to flattened rubble. Abandoned buildings are office space for the local criminals, who deal almost entirely in drugs. (There's not much felonious creativity in a modern slum.) Scattered among the remaining turn-of-the-century structures and the empty lots piled with trash are various housing projects with large, ill-lighted areas of "public" space, dead to all traffic and commercial activity. Squalor and overcrowding are often spoken of as almost a single phenomenon, but in New York's poor neighborhoods the lower the population density, the greater the filth and crime.

Or, to make clear this isn't a problem merely of US inner cities, here's The Economist in Paris:

For all the schemes and money, the banlieues are a world apart. From 2008 to 2011 the gap widened between unemployment rates in “sensitive urban zones” and in surrounding areas. Schools have a high turnover of often-inexperienced teachers, gaining merit by doing time in the banlieues. Job centres are understaffed. The unemployed say their postcode stigmatises them. Drug dealers compete with careers advisers to recruit teenagers. “Here, drug trafficking has always helped circulate money,” says Stéphane Gatignon, Sevran’s Green mayor. “It’s how people scrape by, despite the crisis.”

Every city has its dark side, the place where the crime, drugs, squalor, poverty and despair lives. We've spent millions - we're still spending millions - on these places. We do up the houses, Smarten up the schools. Put in neat pocket parks. We even try to do up the people - schemes of training, child care, job support. And yet if we take a map of England's poorest places from 1968 and a map from today, there's a frightening correlation. For sure some bits of inner London and a few streets of Salford and Manchester are now swish and gentrified. And in the seaside towns and mining villages the collapse of their industry created new places of poverty - Blackpool, half the size of Bradford, has twice as many children in care. But not much else has changed.

We sort of know what needs to be done. That old line about escaping the ghetto - finish school, get a job and keep it, get married and stay married - is still true. But the problem is that not only does this not happen enough, there are young people on the edges of these places - people who start out OK - whose lives collapse them into the slums. Immigration helps, especially immigration from even poorer places, but only when you've an economy that generates the jobs those people need. That's France's crisis - in a country where one-in-ten of working age is out of work, the banlieues have double that rate and even higher rates of youth unemployment. It's no damn use having employment protection, mandated working hours, minimum wages and child care if the result is there aren't any jobs - especially if you're black or an Arab.

Britain's most dysfunctional places are different - mostly filled with native white communities (often mixed with long resident afro-caribbean communities) rather than immigrants. In an economy, even in the North's big cities, that creates jobs, not great jobs but a step on that ladder, too many decide to step aside from that world. A community settling for a half-life on benefits topped up with bits of crime and casual, cash-in-hand work. What's gone is the thing - whatever it was, church, club, union, workplace - that showed those growing up how it worked. There's no-one saying "learn something at school, get a skill if you can, get a job - any job - and keep it, try to make your relationships work".

Instead we get the well-meaning and the bothersome. The former do a lot of good by stopping the whole place falling into utter chaos and letting some few young folk escape the life of the slum. These social workers, policemen, housing officers and folk delivering job programmes are, however, mostly a sticking plaster, more about giving a broken community a hug than fixing the break.

The bothersome on the other hand are different - these are the folk who know better - they want people to change their lifestyle, to conform and are more worried about delivering stop smoking clinics and fat clubs than seeing behind the eyes of their 'clients'. There they'll see someone who wants to know why they should bother being 'healthy' when booze, fags, easy sex and crap telly are the only things that take the edge of pain away from a shit life.

It's no surprise that, in this world, the people most likely to escape are those who've found god. Church, mosque and temple provide a place of calm and the faith a direction - all those beliefs will point to the very things that allow people a road to a better life. Educate yourself. Work hard. Respect others. Do the right thing. In times past we also had secular institutions embedded in these working class places that did the same - trade unions, clubs and pubs (often with sports attached), friendly societies, allotment clubs. A host of activity done by the community not to the community.

These places weren't perfect but, in dealing with the imperfections - sexism, cliqueiness, casual racism - we've lost sight of the good things like community, shared experience and decent role-models. What we have left, with the death of these institutions, are the institutions that are least wanted and most exploiting - crime, landlordism and the external state.

I've often suspected that, in part, we don't want the responsibility of trying to fix these broken places. We've been happy to manage their problems rather than invest in the intensity needed to provide a new hope. For sure, it's easy to say to people "your life, your responsibility" and then make sure they don't starve (while locking up their sons and taking the children off their daughters). But is that really what we should be doing? Or should we be looking for the skeletons of past institutions are trying to breathe new life into them?

It's easy to point at the city as the problem with its lack of personal scale, its busy-ness and its tolerance of wealth and poverty in the same place. But rebuilding the bones of an old community, helping shape strong people - that to me seems worth doing. To do this we need to set aside fifty years of sociological presumption, to lift the stone and see glorious life not nasty bugs. Instead of make people's habits the problem, we should be asking how we build back the social infrastructure that once held places together and pointed people to a better life - even when sometimes those things involve booze, fags, burgers and cake.

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Why we need faith in The Market

Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” John 20: 24-29

This is the dilemma of faith. You will, I'm sure recall when Arthur Dent is introduced to the babel fish in Douglas Adam's 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy':

The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that something so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

"The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.'

'But, says Man, the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and vanishes in a puff of logic.

'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

And, as many have observed, faith does matter because it represents the unprovable premises on which we build our arguments. We are right to, as St Thomas did, doubt but if we only accept that which is before our eyes, what we can see, feel, taste or hear, then we deny things that are really important - love, honesty, creativity, hope.

Here, in a critique of something called 'neoliberalism' (the existence of which I doubt but that's another story) we see the denial of the transcendent, refusing to accept something exists because it is abstract, incorporeal:

The market, which is essentially a useful tool (and like all tools limited) has been converted into a false god The Market. Markets make poor gods for many reasons, but primarily because they don’t exist. A market is a space, not a thing; it is a vacuum; it is a space within which human beings trade stuff. Trading stuff is also useful preparation for doing other stuff, like making, healing, building, growing and creating. The market does not do any of those things - people do - but the market helps people by because people can use trade to get the useful things they need from others. Markets can help people be productive, but they are not productive in themselves.

So The Market exists because people want to exchange. The accumulation of all those exchanges, however conducted, is The Market. And the benefit we get from this exchange - trade as the writer rightly calls it - is that we can focus on the things we're best at, on what David Riccardo called comparative advantage. Here's Don Boudreaux:

...the only economic reason for trade is that each of us produces some goods or services at costs lower than the costs that our trading partners would incur to produce those same goods or services. That is, each of us has a comparative advantage in supplying the goods or services that we sell to others, and a comparative disadvantage in supplying each of the many goods and services that we buy from others.

So The Market does exist (whether or not you use capitals) even though we can't take your hand and plunge it into the spear wound so as to prove its existence. Even where, as with some very important things like health and housing, the state has tried to control (or even abolish) the market, The Market still exists. The best examples here are criminal markets. We have for all sorts of 'good' reasons made some products illegal yet there still exists a market for those products - this is the dilemma of public health's approach to smoking. We are nearing the point, may even have reached it, where further increases in the price of tobacco only act to increase the illegal part of the market - with all the risks associated with criminal markets (we see these with the market in illegal drugs, for example).

The question that our writer poses (although mostly fails to answer) isn't whether or not markets exist or even whether they are a good thing. Rather the question is whether we should 'worship' those markets. Since there is, so far as I'm aware, no actual ritual worship of The Market, I have to assume that this is meant metaphorically and refers to the viewpoint that The Market is the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. But is the belief that the market, under most circumstances, is the fairest means to allocate resources an act of 'worship'? It may be faith just as a belief in the efficacy of democracy, government or the 'rule of law' is an act of faith but it is not worship.

The debate that prompted the comment about markets began with a simple question: if it wasn't the liberal belief in markets that led to the fastest decline in absolute poverty the world has ever seen then what was it? Inevitably this discussion became one about the UK rather than the world and, as these things do, resulted in the assurance that inequality and poverty are essentially the same, and that government is the primary agent of poverty reduction (more specifically that taxation is essential to poverty reduction).

As a conservative I am not a market fundamentalist but I do not believe that, in the long run, taking money forcefully off one set of folk to give it to another set of folk represents any sort of solution to poverty. I'm also a pragmatist and this means that, given the evidence, open markets deserve our support as they are better able to meet human needs than planned systems managed by government. This doesn't preclude regulation or even direct government provision, it merely recognises that we have to balance the social benefits of such actions against the disbenefits of interfering with the market.

We live in a world largely created by the action of markets, by that specialisation that is central to Adam Smith's ideas and to the concept of comparative advantage. The Market is not an end in itself worthy of worship but rather, for all its abstract nature, a means by which we make for a better world. Without our faith in the efficacy of markets there would be no specialisation, no free exchange and less innovation. Believe!

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Capitalism will save the world (if we let it)

We need to understand - and this isn't an argument for any variety of Brexit merely stating what will be - that global economic growth, driven for much of the great boom fuelled by us stopping with the world war rubbish, won't be coming from Europe or the USA.

28 March 2012 was a big day for mankind, according to some statisticians. It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of global GDP, up from 38 per cent 10 years earlier. This convergence makes sense. If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people everywhere else. A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce around a fifth of its wealth.

The success of global capitalism - of those greedy, rapacious business people exploiting stuff - is palpable. Levels of poverty - real grinding poverty, less than a couple of dollars a day - are now lower than at any time in human history. So my fellow capitalists, take a second out to pat yourselves on the back. Because it's not socialism, not the actions of government employees and not the decisions of politicians that has achieved this wonder. We did it, us capitalists. We got those poor people out of poverty. And left to our devices not only will the remaining 10% of really poor people be saved from that poverty but millions of others who are poor by our western standards will also clamber up onto that shining mountain that is our fabulous consumer society.

The jobs for us all is to stop the usual idiots - protectionists, socialists, Marxists, trade unions, aid workers, NGOs - from preventing capitalism from making all the world richer, happier and healthier. Let's do it.

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Don't give a single penny of your hard-earned, post-tax income to Oxfam

It's always a little depressing when you read something from a university - an elite university to boot - that is really dumb. And even more depressing when you discover that the author of the dumbness isn't some over-idealistic second year student but the "Director for UK Poverty" at international development charity, Oxfam.

Yes I know, I know. You all though Oxfam was all about feeding starving folk in war-torn Africa. Well think again. Oxfam's connection to its original mission of relieving famine is tenuous at best. This 'charity' (and I place it in scare quotes deliberately) has ceased to be one dedicated to such a purpose but has become instead a lobby organisation using its income to create jobs such as "Director for UK Poverty" that have precisely zero connection to the idea of relieving poverty and everything to do with promoting an odious - and discredited - political position.

Here's a taster:

So, even if it is difficult to see how people can escape from poverty without working, it is also increasingly difficult to claim with any degree of understanding that work is the route out of poverty. Lots of jobs which are essential to our society and economy – and indeed to bigger business – need wider support.

By wider support, Oxfam mean higher taxes and more welfare benefits. And the idea that there is any - even the tiniest - comparison between children growing up in the soft embrace of the UK's welfare system and children growing up in, say, Congo or Laos is utterly, criminally wrong. The life chances of UK children with access to free healthcare, free education, generous welfare payments and extensive social services is better than those for most of the world's children. Yet this man from Oxfam wants us to believe that, in global terms, what he calls poverty in Britain is comparable to actual elsewhere in the world.

The article continues for some time in this vein, presenting selected facts and gratuitously exploitative graphical comparisons all wrapped about with references to 'social justice' - as if that actually means anything. And the solution? The pathetic, risible, thoughtless, ill-informed and crass solution? The 'social justice'?

Take more money off someone else, live up to the adage, "there's always someone, somewhere not paying enough tax and it isn't me". It sickens me that the only response to inequality these people can dream up is higher taxes on an undefined group of "tax avoiders". And, in this case it reminds me why we should not give a single penny of our hard-earned, post-tax cash to Oxfam.

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Interesting stuff I found down the back of the sofa (plus a comment on grammar schools)

Trade is good.

Clearing out my pockets - here's a few things (other than lint and misformed paperclips) I found:

Big cities are bad for health (this sort of reminds us what public health really is about):

Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the vaccine alliance Gavi, points to the recent increase in the scale of densely populated urban areas, many without adequate sanitation, as turning containable illnesses like Zika and Ebola into pandemics. Dense urbanization may not have created Zika, which causes newborns to have unusually small heads, he notes, but it has accelerated its spread from a mere handful to a current tally of 1.5 million cases this year.

Tokyo doesn't have a housing crisis - because it has sensible (aka laissez faire) planning rules:

Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).

Ideology presented as fact - the curse of economics (here's a good example of the genre):

Is there a good economic reason why Brexit in particular should require abandoning austerity economics? I would argue that the Tory obsession with the budget deficit has had very little to do with economics for the past four or five years. Instead, it has been a political ruse with two intentions: to help win elections and to reduce the size of the state. That Britain’s macroeconomic policy was dictated by politics rather than economics was a precursor for the Brexit vote. However, austerity had already begun to reach its political sell-by date, and Brexit marks its end.

And globalisation (meaning free trade and immigration since you asked) is good for the working class:

There isn't an economy in the world — now or ever — that could have endured such massive blows without a major hit to its people. But the worst that has happened in America is stagnant wages. Remarkably, our quality of life has continued to improve.

They never tell you how fast Africa is growing (or that it's down to capitalism - also socialism was what made Africa poor):

Some of Africa’s growth was driven by high commodity prices, but much of it, a McKinsey study found in 2010, was driven by economic reforms. To appreciate the latter, it is important to recall that for much of their post-colonial history, African governments have imposed central control over their economies. Inflationary monetary policies, price, wage and exchange rate controls, marketing boards that kept the prices of agricultural products artificially low and impoverished African farmers, and state-owned enterprises and monopolies were commonplace.

The rise of the far-right is down to the EU (prize for spotting the huge factual error in the article):

All “civilised” politicians in the founding EEC nations agreed nationalism must be overcome. Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Socialists, Euro communists, all the mainstream Continental political groups agreed that old-style patriotism was at best embarrassing, at worst dangerous and wicked. This meant that ordinary Frenchmen, Germans, Dutchmen, Belgians who wanted to stay French, German, etc had no-one else to vote for but extreme nationalists. Anyone wishing to oppose ever-closer union had no other home than among the xenophobic fringe parties.

It's not just technology but finance that's changing car ownership:

With the rise of companies like Uber and Lyft, it’s clear that we will need to see advances in new ownership models to support tomorrow’s transportation landscape. In fact, Uber recently received a $1 billion credit facility led by Goldman Sachs to fund new car leases. Uber (and Wall Street) are also recognizing the need for more flexibility with this deal — especially at a time when Americans are making larger monthly payments than ever on their cars and taking out record-size auto loans.

The impact of Brexit on projections for housing requirements (sexy stuff I know):

In summary, the current basis for UK estimates of housing need are already predicated on a 45% drop to total net-in-migration by 2021, so for Brexit to have any downward pressure on planned housing targets in Local Plans, it would need to be assumed that Brexit resulted in European net-migration to the UK falling to virtually zero over the medium to long term. This seems unlikely.

A brilliant article - essentially a film review - on small town poverty and decline in the US mid-west (and a glimpse of why Trump):

In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.

Finally I can't resist a comment on grammar schools. They really aren't the answer to educational challenges but at least the Conservatives are looking at system reform rather than saying the solution is putting more money into institutions - big urban comprehensives - that are failing children.

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