Quote of the day: On London (and UKIP)

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From a quite brilliant article by Alex Massie:

And of course in many respects Farage is right. Britain, and London especially, really is an unrecognisable place these days. It’s just that most of the changes have been for the better, not the worse. There is little comparison between London 2014 and London 1974. The latter was a tired and failing place, the clapped-out capital of a clapped-out country.

Forty years later and London, remarkably, is once again one of the world’s greatest cities. A place, as it has always been, for Britons to seek their future but also a global city in which what you did before you reached these shores  - and where you came from – matters vastly less than what you do now you’re here. A city, in fact, that rejects the idea of inevitable decline. A city that has the kind of dynamic optimism we more commonly associate with the United States than with little old Britain.

We want to spread that excitement, optimism and change across the rest of the nation. And we don't achieve that by stopping people moving around, by enforcing petty language rules or by playing cynically to xenophobia by talking about being "uncomfortable" around foreigners.

Moreover, if the rest of England wants to succeed it needs to be more like London and less like the land  Nigel Farage's grumpy old bloke party wants.

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Rent-seeking at work...

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From New York:

This week, New York held an auction for individual yellow-cab medallions, the rare and wonderful permits that give drivers the right to operate a taxi and pick up street hails. Winning bidders paid as much as $965,000 for the latest batch of medallions.

That's right folks, you pay nearly a million dollars for the right to drive a cab in New York. This suggests that not only are there not enough taxis but that, as a result, the price of a taxi fare is higher.

And the winner? The City Council that has assumed the power to say whether you can take someone from A to B for a fee.

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Further proof that The Observer is just a paper for snobs...

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In this case food snobs:

Oh God. I fear my carefully honed reputation as a paragon of good taste is about to be destroyed. I feel like some Bible-bashing Republican senator who's been caught strapping himself to the wall bars in a secret torture garden, my appalling morals revealed. And so I am forced to explain. Pizza Hut UK has just launched a new product; an item so terrifying, so nightmarish, so clearly the product of a warped and twisted mind in matters edible, that I feel I have no choice but to try it.

I am doing this so others do not have to.

'Patronising' is a sauce that Jay Rayner (for it is he) likes to smother on when he's writing about the sort of food that the lower-classes consumer. Food that is, by definition, bad for them (and the poor dears don't know any better):

But there is another kind of waste, summed up by the Pizza Hut cheeseburger crust pizza, and that's overconsumption.

Presumably paying less than ten quid for a cheap pizza is far, far worse that spending two-hundred and fifty quid for a fancy five-course meal in one of those restaurants Mr Rayner and his pals like to dine out at. That grand expensive meal isn't waste but a big, fat-laden, meat-filled pizza (that Jay is very rude about) is waste.  Jay then leaps into a great long and sort of fact-filled diatribe about how Pizza Hut is killing people in the Middle East and China with their vast pizza treats.

Of course the truth is that the (largely mythical but that's a different story) reason for increased weight isn't Pizza Hut or McDonalds or Burger King or the fried chicken shop on the corner or any of those places that the likes of Jay Rayner like to sneer at. But it suits the Observer folk's snobbish, selfish agenda to target the preferences of less rich diners. Not because Jay and his mates give a stuff for those people but because they want to banish all those cheap food outlets and have the poor press their noses up to the glass staring in at posh Observer readers stuffing themselves with over expensive artisan-baked bread and hand-formed burgers served with twice-cooked chips and washed down with an over-priced imported 'premium' lager.

It's nothing to do with the environment, with waste or even with other folks' waists. It's because people like Jay Rayner are ghastly, selfish and self-important snobs.

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Jim and Sandra move to the countryside. A story of planning policy.

Jim was fed up. Fifty hours a week running the print and design business, endless repairs to a house he didn't really like and Sandra moaning on and on about her job and how she wants more time with the horse.

For the bloke looking in at them, thought Jim, it looks a great life. Big four-bed detached, Range Rover and enough cash to have a couple of decent holidays every year as well as eating out regularly and the occasional weekend break.

But Jim was fed up. Tired. And ready for a change.

That chance came when the two guys with the web design business called and offered silly money for the business. A few sums, a chat with the accountant and it looked like a deal. The buyers want to keep on Steve, he's three years from retirement so he's probably sorted. Looks like best part of a million quid once the value of the old mill building he'd bought for a song thirty years ago is factored in. The buyers probably want to convert it to trendy loft apartments.

What to do thought Jim as he headed to the King's Arms for a pint and a ponder.

In the pub there's the usual crowd and Jim parks himself on a stool in the main bar. Propped up at one end is a copy of the Sunday Telegraph and Jim has a quick flick through, not really reading much just absorbing the headlines. As he's doing this one headline leaps from the page:

MPs fight to save the National Parks from suburbanisation 

This strikes a chord for Jim. Not the politics but the idea of moving to the country. I'll look into that he says to himself. Maybe find an old barn or farmhouse to do up - would be a project and at the end a great place to live.

Once he's home Jim tells Sandra about his thoughts. She's thrilled, full of ideas and excited at the prospect (and a second horse). Jim does some research and finds out that the government is relaxing the rules on converting farm buildings by removing the need to get planning permission so long as certain conditions are met such as keeping the same footprint, height, design and materials as well as complying with rules on flooding, highways and so forth.

Jim sets to with looking for an opportunity - he's got two possible places in mind. One's a smallholding on Dartmoor where the farmer has finally had enough of 80 hour weeks, no holidays and an income less than the minimum wage. Getting half-a-million for the farm means he can retire - nice bungalow in Torquay and enough cash to provide an OK pension. The other's a ramshackle set of farm buildings near Honiton, not as nice a location (and a nicer price), where there's already a planning permission for a barn conversion.

Jim and Sandra want the Dartmoor place. It's the sort of place they like, they're not bothered about the isolation and it's not so far into Plymouth by car. With the new relaxed rules they can use the farmhouse (perhaps with a little extension to give another bedroom although this would still need planning permission) and build three good houses on the footprint of the barns, two to sell which should recoup much of the cost of buying the farm and a third for the kids when they visit.

Looks like a deal, thought Jim, we'll drive down on Saturday and make a good offer. But first it's a pint at the King's Arms.

Down the pub Jim is telling Clive the landlord about his plans, he'd be sorry to leave but no point in waiting too long - "I'd be too old then" jokes Jim.

Clive frowns, picks up the newspaper. "Looking at a national park are you? Maybe you should read this then."

Jim reads the piece Clive points to:

As reported in the Daily Telegraph, the Government is planning to exempt National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) from measures that would allow landowners to convert barns into up to three houses, without having to get planning permission.

Jim read it several times. The deal was off. No way was he taking the risk of buying the farm now, not if he might not get the permission to do what he wanted. Bad news for Joe, the farmer, who'll have to stay there longer or else take a lot less money. Joe won't get to retire, move to Torquay and live his life out in modest comfort.

Apparently having him (and a couple of other families) living up there isn't as sustainable as Joe staying on his uneconomic farm struggling to make a living. And him converting the place would 'change the character of the area irreversibly'. What nonsense thought Jim, what nonsense.

Still Dartmoor's loss is somewhere else in Devon's gain. The National Park has won its point, Joe, the farmer, is still struggling on trying (and mostly failing) to make a living and Jim with Sandra and the horse are spending their wealth in Honiton. And Dartmoor remains a place where only the rich can buy the few houses that come on the market, not the old farms needing conversion but the little cottages and already converted farms. The place is trapped in an environmental timewarp condemned to an unviable, unsustainable economic base because the advocates of viability and sustainability are plain stupid.

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Do economists not read Christaller?

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Andrew Lilico a very good and highly respected economist has written a piece about geography. I know he thinks he's writing about economics but he's wrong - and that's why the article is poor.

Here's the gist of the argument:

We could simply refuse to grant permission to build more houses or more factories or more offices in the higher population-density regions. Over the past two decades, for all the complaints about planning restrictions, the surpluses of dwellings over households in London and the South East has risen – we've built properties faster than the population of households has risen. We could, instead, build fewer houses. That wouldn't immediately prevent the population in these regions from growing, because existing properties could be used with more dwellers.  But it would result in property prices in London and the South East rising even faster, relative to the rest of the population, than they have done recently. The consequence would be, eventually, that it would become economically unattractive to live and work in the high-population density regions. That would drive more population and more business activity into lower-population-density regions.

I guess that, for an economist, it all makes sense - indeed Andrew Lilico points out that this is simply the price mechanism used to drive a regional policy. And this is where Walter Christaller comes in - where the matter becomes a question of geography rather than economics. Perhaps it's Walter's active involvement in the Nazi Party that puts economists off him or maybe his love of central planning.

Christaller developed a thing called central place theory:

Walter Christaller, a German geographer, originally proposed the Central Place Theory (CPT) in 1933 (trans. 1966). Christaller was studying the urban settlements in Southern Germany and advanced this theory as a means of understanding how urban settlements evolve and are spaced out in relation to each other. The question Christaller posed in his landmark book was "Are there rules that determine the size, number and distribution of towns?" He attempted to answer this question through a theory of central places that incorporated nodes and links in an idealistic situation.

The point is that successful (large) places are at the nexus of other settlements. That success is less a function of (as many earlier geographers argued) the location of resources but a consequence of trade, exchange and interaction. Andrew Lilico assumes that the economic success of London is contingent on financial investment rather than human interaction - it is the building of houses, offices and factories that precedes economic activity rather than these things (as Christaller's theory predicts) being a consequence of human activity.

Just as importantly, Andrew Lilico also assumes that immigration is to fulfil a specific demand for labour rather than movement to a place where the opportunity for higher wages exists (typically from rural to urban). In modern economies where, in the main, resource location is irrelevant - thus we get a development of CPT (from another German geographer called Losch):

Losch started from the "bottom" of the model by considering one "equivalent customer" or one unit of consumption and build up from there. In the Losch model, the ten smallest market areas, each with a different k-value are plotted with each network surrounding a central place. These networks were then laid over each other and positioned to produce the largest number of places for each k-value. This model produced wedges of city-rich and city-poor areas spread out around a major central place.

The real problem with Lilico's idea is not only that urban economic activity largely precedes the building of houses, offices and factories (especially in the modern economy) but also that, if you prevent investment in London, you cannot assume that this investment will automatically transfer to Newcastle or Belfast - it's as likely to go to Amsterdam, Indianapolis or Jakarta.

The 'empty places' Lilico refers to in Scotland, in Northern Ireland and in in the North of England are empty because they lack economic value. And they lack that value because of geography.

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Sarah Palin, Foreign Policy Sage

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At the time the lovely Mrs Palin was the subject of much snickering, pointing and general ribaldry from the oh-so-wise punditry. What she had said was this:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next.

Looks like she had a point!

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"De-growth" or how Greens think drinking less take-out coffee is an economic policy

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The Greens and their associated useful idiots are a pretty strange bunch. But nothing is stranger than when these good, kind and utterly barmy people start talking about work:

“Why do we work? What do we do with the money we earn?” asks Anna Coote, head of social policy at the New Economics Foundation. “Can we begin to think differently about how much we need—to get out of the fast lane and live life at a more sustainable pace, to do things that are better for the planet, better for ourselves?”

Now I'm not sure how many hours Ms Coote puts in or precisely how much she gets paid to spout this sort of stuff. But I'll guess that her take home pay is a damn sight more that the average pay for the average British worker.

And here lies the problem. I once had a conversation with a hairdresser about his business. He wasn't moaning just making the matter-of-fact observation that, with the shop open long hours, the time spent managing stock and staff plus the time at home in the evening book-keeping, paying bills and planning, his hourly income was below the minimum wage.

If Ms Coote and her sort - comfortably off, employed people - had their way, the cost of basic things like having your hair cut or the windows cleaned would soar. Even worst people would have us believe that somehow we can get out of the fast lane - presumably while they carry on with big salaries and pleasant jobs, the rest of us can lump it on less money.

Such people - when they aren't weeping crocodile tears about 'the poor' - believe that every job is like theirs. The sort who subscribe to Sierra Magazine where they suggest:

"...you move to a smaller house or an apartment, downsize to one or no car, or simply have fewer lattes to-go, a smaller paycheck could reduce consumption overall...” 

Isn't that lovely! We're going to save the planet by having fewer take-out coffees! These people really do live in a bizarre otherland. OK it's not quite living in teepees and growing organic vegetables. In fact it's probably worse because it implies some sort of moral urbanism exists in the green mind - presumably because the core constituency for modern greenery is decidedly urban and hipsterish. It's more about planting herbs in gutters than a return to the land.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against down time - all work and no play does make for a dull life. But the idea that there is some sort of Malthusian imperative requiring "de-growth" is ridiculous. If people only want to work 20 hours a week that's fine by me and I hope they enjoy the free time but don't try to pretend that your different lifestyle is somehow not consumption, somehow superior to those folk who like a take-out latte and a shiny new car.

What Ms Coote and her friends fail to appreciate is that by stopping all their consumption they end all those businesses, all those jobs that serve such sinful indulgence. All the baristas, the car salesmen, the brewers and cake makers - gone. And with less money circulating that means lower tax revenues - less money to sweep the streets, teach children and care for Ms Coote's elderly relatives.

If these ideas come to pass we'll be less healthy, less happy and live shorter lives. But we'll have saved the planet!

As I said these people are utterly barmy.

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