Society as a Playmobile diorama - Macron's vision of Europe

Raedwald describes M. Macron's vision of Europe's (sorry the EU's) glorious future:

Here is the barracks with the SimEU army, here the detention prison of the SimEU Office of Internal Security; here is the SimEU Central Bank and the SimEU Ministry of Finance. And the whole thing populated by busy and happy little SimEU citizens on SimEU minimum wage playing safely on social media regulated by the SimEU Prefecture for Internet Safety, after a hard day's work inventing innovative new Euro things at the SimEU Creative Foundation.

This captures the prevalent centrist (I can now use this term as a perjorative) idea that nothing at all happens correctly unless it is overseen, regulated or controlled by a benign government. Macron - and indeed most of the centrist elite he represents - sees government as a sort of Playmobile diorama with people inserted (with due consideration of diversity, naturally) into socially useful functions by a stern but caring emperor.

Macron's vision, uncritically reported by pretty much all of Europe's main news agencies, is for a European Union modelled on France - centralised, managed by an elite through government agencies, mistrusting of democracy and economically protectionist. At the heart of all this is the increasingly common belief that unspecified foreign agents are conspiring to attack the idea of Europe - those little playmobile figures clearly aren't bright enough to decide for themselves they must be tempted into this populism by sinister manipulative forces.

It is not, however, just democracy that Macron and the centrists mistrust - it's business too. I know that all of Europes Macron enthusiasts (do we call them Macaroons?) can summon up cuddly words about a mixed economy and all of them have mates who work for big private concerns but underneath this veneer is a sort of Faustian pact with big business: you go along with us on protectionism, environmentalism and social control, and we'll protect your international interests.

Despite government being very bad at innovation (it always helps to check how regional economic growth is entirely unrelated to government spending on research) our Macaroons want to pile money into government-sponsored research. There'll be an "innovation council" spending taxpayers cash on things like Artificial Intelligence - creating lots of well-paid jobs in universities but little else. And a further splurge of research agencies doing independent scientific research to combat the influence of corporate lobbies (except of course, as we saw with the TPD and with GMOs when those corporate lobbies are helpful to the anti-business, anti-choice ideology).

A lot of the criticism of Macron's vision focuses on how it "involves the EU gaining further powers and greater influence over people’s lives, at the expense of sovereign states" but I've a feeling this misses the point a bit - the vision of applying the French model of government to the EU is about reducing the choices available to communities and of a state that is not subject to the vageries of democracy or the creativity of the market.

The EU's battle lines (regardless of what the UK does in this matter) are drawn - an uncomfortable alliance of socialists, liberals, old-school conservatives and centrist technocrats versus a mish-mash of populists, proto-facists and Trotskyites. Right now it looks like the former will have enough MEPs to at least stem the populist tide. After May, unless there's an upheaval of unprecendented scale, there'll still be pretty much the same set of faces running the EU and speaking for "Europe" as there are now. And any new faces won't be populists or trotskyites, they'll be reliable career-minded technocracts. Which, of course, is why we need to leave.

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The eco-city - ineffective and authoritarian?

Milton Keynes - is it really so bad?

Ever since I started indulging my fascination with urban geography, I have experienced the promotion of certain selected European cities. Places help up as paragons of municipal virtue – places like Montpelier (pdf):

Planning for recent growth in Lille, Montpellier and Lyon began before explicit sustainable design agendas were common. Nevertheless, these cities exemplify a number of planning and design strategies that advance sustainability on the urban scale. Chief among these are: 1) promoting density and diverse use in the city center, 2) developing urban infrastructure and transit systems that conserve energy and preserve the quality of the urban core, 3) counteracting sprawl through the establishment of concentrated patterns of growth in the urban periphery, and 4) “urban recycling:” the adaptive re-use of existing built fabric and the reclamation of urban post-industrial sites.

And Freiberg:

For 25 years - since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster - Freiburg’s guiding principle has been the saving of natural resources. It now has car-free neighbourhoods (while we still tell ourselves that ‘would never work here’) and trams that run through green corridors. It has a football stadium where the stands double up as solar energy factories.

The Freiburg charter sets out twelve principles for ‘sustainable urbanism’, drawing together ideas of diversity, tolerance, walkability, good public transport, high quality design and more. It misses some things out - it doesn’t adequately address poverty and inequality, although its principles help to mitigate them - but it offers a very good way of thinking about cities.

Here are the wonders of ‘old world urbanism’, setting out the agenda for a carbon-neutral, eco-friendly, people-focused city. But is it quite as shiny as the pundits make out?

However, there is another face to Montpellier. Away from the modern developments lie older areas developed in the late 19th and early 20th century. A growing population led to urban sprawl, which took place outside of the city walls (e.g. The Gambetta). Here terraced, ‘2 up – 2 down’ housing is packed into narrow and cramped streets, lacking the open space of the Antigone. Even with the influx of high tech jobs, unemployment in Montpellier rose from 16.7% to 22.4% of the active population. A large majority of these are the North Africans who have made Montpellier their home, but cannot locate within the newer developments. Both lack adequate housing provision and high crime rates are now major problems in Montpellier. Social and ethnic polarisation is therefore highly evident.

Perhaps we are looking only at that which we wish to see rather than at what is actually happening:

It's a brave utopian vision - but, oddly, Rieselfeld is the last place I would want to live. Its housing blocks, built to a uniform height (usually four storeys), are reminiscent of the Eastern Bloc. Because the properties are all the same age, the place lacks character and charm. On the walk to my hotel, I pass an area of pitted waste ground reserved for the last phase in Rieselfeld's development, awaiting the excavators and cranes that accompany any such work in progress. It might be 'the gateway to the Black Forest' (as one resident put it), but the quarter lacks some of the facilities you might expect of a small provincial town.

And residents in the Freiberg tenements speak of the social control:

In Vauban, if Rieselfeld residents are to be believed, green living is compulsory. 'It jumps in your face a little,' Claudia Duppe warned me, 'and there is a lot of social control. If you walk into the quarter with an Aldi carrier bag, it's, "Sorry, I'm not talking to you; you shop at a discount supermarket and you don't buy organic." It feels claustrophobic, because everyone expects you to behave in the same way - and of course you are not allowed to have a car.'

This is the wonder of ‘old world urbanism’ – charmless boxes to live in, neighbours who shun you for buying cheap food and €18,000 a year just to park your car. Indeed to avoid this charge you have to sign a declaration that you will never own a car – something I’m pretty sure plenty of residents ignore.

If this is a better world, it is a better world I don’t want. A dysfunctional, bossy world tossed between trendy urban obsession with ‘sustainability’ and the pretence that creating swanky inner city neighbourhoods can resolve the fact that there aren’t any jobs. Ignoring the simple fact that this economic renewal requires transport links – and that mean roads, cars, trucks and airports as well as trams and bicycle lanes.

There are certainly things to learn from these places – the conformist, Stepford sort of places that the Greens would have us believe is the future of urban living. But the lesson is as much a warning about how authoritarian and controlling the ‘sustainability’ agenda has become as it is about whether these places work any better than Milton Keynes, Atlanta or Calgary.

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Light at the end of the crossing...more Big Society ramblings

Once upon a time, dearest reader, our world was not bounded by the strictures of officialdom - or at least not the officialdom that believes it know better than the man with the job to do. Now understand that there was not - sadly - some mythic age of wonder when we were free, when the sun shone and the birds sang in joy at our liberty. But there was a time when Mr Smith could mow the verges outside his house secure in the knowledge that his local council would appreciate such a selfless act let alone consider actively preventing the activity from taking place. Indeed there was a time when the bloke from the council, the copper, the councillor and the doctor were all on the side of the people.

Now I know that you all understand this but you will also know that elsewhere people seem not to appreciate how we must cross back over the bridge - how we must return to that sunny swathe of grass where local people worked (at least metaphorically) hand-in-hand with local officials. Where there wasn't an endless discussion of 'funding streams', of 'capacity building', of something called "The Third Sector" - a place where there were things to be done and where people saw that these happened.

But onto all this landed the grandiosity of Big Government - starting with Morrision's gerrymandering of London (a far more unforgivable act of political vandalism than anything allegedly tried by Shirley Porter) we saw the panjandrums of municipal socialism matching arm in arm with the developers to a grand future. Whether we speak of T. Dan Smith's corrupt destruction of Newcastle (the spirit of which was captured so well by Lindesfarne in 'All Fall Down') or of the examples described by Julian Dobson more recently, we see the principle that "we know better" writ large.

As often the case the words arrive that capture part of the problem - I've explained my rage at Government, at its uselessness, at its incompetence, at its obsession with efficiency to the point of ineffectiveness and at the sheer brutality of its ignorance. So when I read this (even though perhaps the author didn't quite mean it my way) a little skip, a little glimmer of hope arises. Julian Dobson speaks to Nat Wei of Big Society renown:

So I’d urge you to engage with people’s anger, because if you can’t convince those who are already involved in community action that you and your government colleagues are listening seriously, then the Big Society idea, like so many before, will shrivel and die. Allow the angry and frustrated people to help you and those you work with to define what a Big Society should be.

But what Julian still needs to get is the scale of the anger, the growing revulsion for the socialist nanny state constructed by the successors of Herbert Morrison. The ghastly, interfering, busybody state. The 'we are the masters now' society. A world where bossy barrack room lawyers take command. A world were the mushy comfort blanket of control smothers fundamental liberties. Where banning smoking or hunting is more important than helping people start out in business or build a house or get together with neighbours to fix a fence.

And, Julian, those activists aren't the ones who turn up at conferences, have well-funded community groups or who see it as a political aim. Round here the activists are ordinary men and women who want to do something - tidy up a corner, fix the village hall roof, take the neighbours to the clinic, run a kids football team or clean up the stream. Real folk who don't get on the grand radar of the new panjandrums of Third Sector. They are the Big Society.

There is light at the end of the crossing but only if we let go....

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Beggars and fetid roadside camps - now where have I heard that before?

There is as the old sages say nothing new in all the world. You thought migration and its associated problems were new? Think again.

"It was the lodestone cities, the El Dorados of the dispossessed...which complained to governments that migrant labour mostly native but also foreign, was wrecking welfare and social control services that were adequate only to deal with their own drop-outs: the unprotected aged, the infirm, the mentally unstable, unwanted babies, those temporarily unemployed because of a downturn in the local economy. Droves of statutes, a Europe-wide spate of books and pamphlets dealing with jobless gangs, beggars real and phoney, fetid roadside encampments, terrorized suburbs, attested to the gravity of the domestic problems and to governments' inability to deal with it." (From "The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance" by John Hale)

Sounds a bit like a Daily Mail editorial!

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Nudge, nudge, wink, wink - behavioural economics as a tool of social control

The matter of behavioural economics came to the front of my mind with reading this excellent blog post – in a roundabout way a review of “Nudge. Now the term “behavioural economics” has always seemed to me an oddly oxymoronic description since, if it is concerned with anything, economics is concerned with individual behaviour.

So let’s start at the beginning:

“The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security is so powerful a principle that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations; though the effect of these obstructions is always more or less either to encroach upon its freedom, or to diminish its security.” (‘Smith, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations)

The core premise on which all economics is based rests on the view that – taken in the round – each individual seeks “to better his condition”. And this has been taken to mean that decisions taken by individuals are ‘rational’ – hence the idea of ‘economic man’. Yet Smith – nor the other classical economists – never said that every decision taken by an individual is rational given full information and knowledge. We need to consider that, in aggregate, the decisions of individuals tend to be rational (i.e. directed to the betterment of that individual’s condition) or have a rational intent.

Now, since classical economic models allow for the effect of decision-making in circumstances where an individual has incomplete information, we would be disposing of the child as well as the dirty water simply to dismiss classical models (or for that matter neo-classical models) because of bounded rationality, incomplete self-control and (alleged) lack of self-interest. What we need to appreciate is that our issue relates less to information than to perceptions of incentive. Hence ‘nudge’.

Which brings us to advertising – after all the persistence and success of advertising is living proof of the bounded nature of human decision-making. Advertising does not limit itself to putting across information about the product, where you can buy it and its price. The marketer seeks to appeal to heuristics, to create short-cuts and to reduce the decision-making process to a sub-pavlovian reflex when presented with a brand message.

All this is true but for one sneaking little problem – the advertiser has to live up to his brand promise. It really is that simple – businesses that do not do what they say in their advertising (and I’m talking about brand here not deliberate mis-selling) do not develop good brands. McDonalds presents an image of good fun, tasty food and good value – all things to which people aspire and the availability of which they consider betterment. And (for many people) the company lives up to its brand promise. A promise that does not extend to nutritional value, not being fat or even saving the planet.

We (says he trying to put himself into the mind of the health nudgers) want to believe that the McDonalds consumer is some kind of victim. And here the behavioural economists step away from the snug amoral world of economics and into moral judgment:

“Incomplete self-control refers to the tendency of economic agents to make decisions that are in conflict with their long-term interest. Self-control problems may lead to addictive behaviour, undersaving or procrastination. As opposed to the neo-classical view, restricting the choice set can be beneficial for an agent with bounded willpower.”(from Diamond & Vartianen, ‘Behavioural Economics & its applications’)

It is too short a step from noticing that some folk make stupid decisions to intervening to direct their decision-making in some way (i.e. altering the ‘choice architecture’). This is a moral judgement since in the aggregate (as ever ceteris paribus) the typical human decision is rational – it responds to incentives and is directed to betterment. It is as daft to run a model based on a pre-judged moral position as it is to say that every human makes a rational decision every time.

The problem – as our behavioural economists have found – is that those pesky humans just won’t co-operate. They carry on drinking, smoking, scoffing fatty, salt-laden goodies and indulging in a whole panoply of high risk activities. And the only response is – as we have seen, for example, with smoking and begin to seen with booze and food – ever more insistent ‘nudges’. And some of these nudges aren’t even that they’re outright bans, huge financial blunt weapons and armies of enforcers of the behaviouralists’ moral assumptions.

All economics is about behaviour but the economics that says behaviour can or should be controlled or directed is immoral, inconsistent, judgemental and wrong. We may wish to understand human behaviour better – that is a proper course of human enquiry. But only if this is done for reasons of understanding – sadly the behavioural economics we see too often is designed solely with the intention of control. We have returned to an age before the enlightenment that Locke, Hume, Smith and other brought. Back to the brutal, controlling leviathan and the moral control of the puritan.

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Welcome to Will Hutton's cuddly fascism - his Brave New World

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Will Hutton wrote an article in last Sunday’s Observer arguing in his inimitable, terribly reasonable way that “class” still matters. And what a piece!

Dear old Uncle Will starts with the usual left-liberal stuff about private education – all of which is, of course, just like Eton (not only an exceptionally good school but an exceptionally unusual one even for the private sector). But Will says:

“Britain is a chronically unfair and increasingly closed society and private education plays a central role.”

And he’s clever and important so must be right (and can afford to move to the posh places that have good schools – even grammar schools - as well). But all OK so far, just the usual left wing, politics of envy stuff, nothing new or momentous.

But Will goes further he wants to pull down those who have had the luck to be born into families with engaged parents, rich parents or just plain bloody-minded parents who insist their kids get a good education. Why? Because it’s not fair! We have to chop down all the oak trees so the maples can get more light.

The truth about Will’s article is that there is only one way to achieve the levelling he desires – to abolish parenthood. To declare that only the state has the power to make life fair – and to do this by ensuring that all children are brought up in the same environment, unaffected by the positive or negative influence of biological parents. Here’s Will:

“We owe it to them to create social structures that deliver that (fairness), not structures that manufacture good luck for those who can pay for it and close down opportunity and openness for everyone else.”

There are the words – “create social structures” – the social engineering that the left loves. What Will Hutton seems to want is little different from the frightening social control of “Brave New World”, where parenthood is either wholly constrained or de facto abolished, where Government defined “fairness” is enforced by social services, the police and schools. Where a tiny elite – dominated by the likes of Will Hutton – believe they are bettering mankind.

Well Will, I don’t want your 21st Century social model, your cuddly fascism – I don’t want private provision and initiative emasculated because the state has failed. I want a free society where people stand or fall on their own. And I will not allow my choice and my freedom to be removed for the sake of your misplaced idea of fairness.

As I said earlier Will – life’s not fair.

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