Why we really do want to abolish solar power subsidies
Long time readers will recognise the skeleton of this argument: that solar power is becoming ever cheaper really very quickly. Whichis exactly why we should immediately abolish all and any subsidies for it.
That solar power is becoming cheaper very quickly is obviously true: but it's also true that the general engineering opinion is that it's goint to continue to do so and that it will soon be cheaper than coal produced 'leccie from the grid:
He says the key to making solar panels competitive — whether in the United States, China, or elsewhere — is to bring the cost of installed panels to a level competitive with the current cost of electricity from the grid, without subsidies or tax benefits. Once that goal is achieved — which the researchers estimate will likely occur by the end of the decade — then much larger PV factories will become economically viable worldwide. “This common goal, which can benefit all nations, is an opportunity for international cooperation that harnesses our complementary strengths,” Buonassisi says. Improvements under way in every step of the PV manufacturing process — from thinner silicon wafers to greater cell efficiency to better ways of mounting the cells in a panel — could end up making them highly competitive with other sources of power, Buonassisi says. “Today’s technology is not quite there yet,” he says, but adds, “We could be hitting grid-competitive costs … within the next few years,” which could lead to a surge in installations.
That's just excellent, of course. Cheaper power for all is something to be desired not rejected simply because the current supporters of the technology are ageing hippies. Admittedly, it's a close run thing but that cheaper power does outweigh the hippies thing.
At which point the hippies leap up and shout that it's the subsidies that make solar cheaper so we must continue them. Something which fails on two grounds. The first being that I'm afraid industry doesn't work like that, it doesn't turn on a thruppeny bit. The solar industry has built up a sufficient head of steam that it's going to get there whatever the current level of subsidy: thus we don't need to pay it any more to get to the desired goal.
But the much more important point is that the existence of price efficient solar cells is rather like a public good. Assume that it does become gloriously cheap: no one is not going to sell it to us here in England just because we're English or anything. Quite the contrary, they'll be falling over themselves in order to take our money. Which means that we, the English, can simply stop subsidising solar power in England. We'll wait thanks, wait for that decade or less, then we'll buy the cheap and efficient cells and install them.
Normally we think of the public goods problem as being one of preventing free riders. My suggestion here is the opposite of course: that given the similarity to a public good we should position ourselves to be those free riders. Abolish the subsidies now, wait until the prices comes down some more then install them when they are cost effective without subsidy.
What's not to like about this plan?
A little detail about the Simon Ehrlich bet
Tyler Cowen is recommending a new book about the Simon Ehrlich bet on prices of natural resources in the 1980s. Given my background in the weird metals business thought I'd add the trivial details of why Simon won. No, not the general economic principles of substitution, greater efficient of extraction and so on, but the real reasons, in detail, for the win. The bet was about these metals:
Copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten
Simon won because copper, tin and tungsten went down by more than the other two went up. But why did those three fall in price? You can track the prices here.
Copper dropped in price in that decade because we worked out a new method of extracting copper. Before the 80s all copper was extracted from copper sulphides. Then someone worked out that a technique used on some other metals, solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX-EW), could be used on copper oxide deposits. Now we always knew that there were mountains (and quite literally mountains) of copper oxide lying around but we didn't know how to get the copper out of them. Now we did and the first plant entered service in 1982. It's not too much of a stretch to think that given a new method of processing entire mountains that the copper price was going to fall. Which it did indeed do.
Tin was a more interesting case. Under the usual UN agreements that we must try to plan everything there was something called the International Tin Council. This tried to manage the world tin price so as to be "fair" to everyone. Not surprisingly, given the cocentration of interest, the producers dominated and so the tin price was kept very high. This increased demand and the tin price started to fall at the end of the 70s. The ITC kept buying in tin to support the price and thus went bust in 1985. Yes, we had the collapse of a producer cartel.
Tungsten, that was a combination of China opening up and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both led to floods of material out of both countries depressing the price.
This is not to say that Simon just got lucky in this particular decade (as many supporters of Ehrlich try to make out). Rather, that Simon's bet was really that these sorts of things do happen. New technologies are found, market inefficiencies are removed, new entrants do come into markets. And they do so consistently enough that long term prices for commodities like minerals do indeed fall. Simon's ultimate point was correct: I'm just providing the proximate reasons for why that is so.
Cooperation works for humans, not competition
This isn't as much of a breakthrough as the Mail thinks I'm afraid:
ls 'survival of the fittest' finished? Scientists 'prove' that generosity - not selfishness - is the only way modern civilisation can survive
We've known for some years now that the correct solution to the prisoners' dilemma is tit for tat: as long as the game is running in repeated iterations. And given that life is a repeating series of interactions with very much the same people this is thus the winning strategy in life. If someone cooperates with you then cooperate back: if they do you over then do them over back. We also know from the ultimatum game that people will damage their own interests in order to enforce their vision of fairness. So there's no real surprise about the idea that cooperation works for human beings: we've seen both that in the way that life is actually lived it brings rewards and also that humans seem hard wired to punish those who do not.
Although this isn't really entirely true. For these games and studies have been done pretty much entirely with US students. That's the walking meat that most economists have unfettered accerss to after all. And we do find that when the same games are played with people from very different economies then the results are very different. Whether it is living in a cooperative society that changes the results or that the innate cooperation leads to the different society hasn't been worked out as yet.
However, as sure as eggs is eggs we're going to get someone writing a screed for The Guardian insisting that this finding shows that markets are all icky. You know the sort of thing, if humans naturally cooperate then we don't need all this competition stuff and so should have socialism under the guidance of the wise and all knowing. That group of wise and all knowing always, but always, including the writer and their friends. The problem with this argument being that markets are a form of cooperation.
Indeed, we can go further than that: it's this cooperation in repeated transactions plus the willingness to punish defaulters that actually makes markets work. Those replays of the two games in very different societies show that in generally non-market societies the results are different from those in market ones. And it is those very differences which make the whole idea of cooperating through markets work.
Thus, far from having found that we don't need markets because we naturally cooperate what we've actually found is that we have markets because we all naturally cooperate. Or rather, that those of us who live in market economies do, which is why our market economies work.
Yes, let's abolish the census
Danny Dorling is bemoaning the decision to abandon the census:
It is only because the census is our most accurate count of the population that we can tell, using it, whether mortality rates, university admission rates, employment rates or almost any other rates are rising or falling for particular groups in particular parts of the country over time. In calculating rates the numerators tend to be more reliably measured: deaths registered, students enrolled, or paying jobs in these three cases. Errors tend to be greater in the denominators, the population estimates. The census counts, corrected for estimates of under-enumeration, are the best denominators we have. An ID card system that relied on people being compelled to register their place of residence would be more accurate, but also far more intrusive. The most important task of the decennial census is in updating annual population estimates for small areas to remove systematic bias so that a huge number of studies and also funding calculations can be enacted.
We would expect Dorling to bemoan this for of course he's a social geographer. This is the very meat and drink of life to him.
However, Dorling is also something of a lefty (no, really, no kidding, he is) and like most of the English such he cannot abide knowing that something is going on somewhere without there being some government plan to make everyone do that thing in the approved manner. Which is why he insists that we should continue to do the census so that he and his mates can have the detail they desire to run our lives for us.
At which point we should remember the wisdom of Sir John Cowperthwaite out in Hong Kong. He refused to allow the compilation of GDP statistics on the grounds that some damn fool would only try to do something with them.
We also know that, as Hayek pointed out, the centre can never have sufficient information to be able to plan our lives for us. That census does give them the illusion that they do though. So, a very good reason for abandoning the census is so that no one does have, or even thinks they have, sufficient information to plan both the national and personal lives of us all. Another way to put this is that if they can't see any problems then they won't have any damn fool problems to try and solve them.
The life and legacy of Ronald Coase
Yesterday, at the age of 103, one of the greatest minds of our time, Nobel prize winner and emeritus professor at University of Chicago Law School Ronald Coase passed away.
His contributions to and influence on economic science are of monumental importance. His groundbreaking research has set the stage for a joint field of law and economics, and has also influenced the new institutional revolution in addition to a number of other fields and areas of research in economic theory.
It would be unfair to say he only made two major contributions since both of these (written 23 years apart from one another) not only won him the Nobel prize, but have continued to influence the economic science ever since. The first was his 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm where he introduced the concept of transaction costs in microeconomic analysis. He believed that firms exist because they economize on transaction costs - costs like market entry, acquiring information, managing a company, bargaining, etc. If these individual transactions can be reduced into fewer transactions by organizing a hierarchical body, then entrepreneurs will form firms. With microeconomic theory at the time focusing only on production and transportation costs, Coase's inclusion of transaction costs was a breath of fresh air into economics. However, in 2009 Coase said he was surprised how much The Nature of the Firm was being cited since it was "little more than an undergraduate essay".
The second was his 1960 paper The Problem of Social Cost, widely considered to be the seminal contribution to the joint field of law and economics. It is from this paper that the Coase theorem was later developed (it was Stigler who actually coined the phrase "Coase theorem"). In The Problem of Social Cost, Coase examines how a cost imposed on society by an individual firm (an externality such as pollution) can be solved by mutual negotiation and consent if transaction costs are zero and if property rights are well-defined. This idea was subject to vast misinterpretation, which Coase tried to clear up in his subsequent interviews and texts. Regarding the theorem, he later stated: “All it says is that the people will use resources in the way that produces the most value, that’s all ... I still think it’s an obvious point. You wouldn't think there was a need for a Coase Theorem, really.”
The path to greatness
Born in a London suburb, he received his BA from the London School of Economics in 1932 and was a member of staff at LSE from 1935 until 1951 (the same time Hayek was there). During his student times he spent a year in the US as a travelling scholar, where he studied the American automobile industry. It was from this experience that he formed ideas for The Nature of the Firm. For Coase, becoming an economist was pure luck, as he himself admitted, since he wasn't interested in economics until he met Sir Arnold Plant on his final year who introduced him to Adam Smith's invisible hand and explained the coordination mechanism of the price system to him.
It is also interesting that, at the time, Coase was more of a socialist, wondering why people thought Lenin was wrong to posit that a government can be centrally run in the same manner a big firms like Ford or General Motors (Lenin used the Deutsche Post to make his point). In answering this question, he developed a crucial insight about why firms are formed. Even though firms are like centrally planned economies, they are dissimilar to governments in that they are formed by people's voluntary choices, and are governed by the price mechanism. The cost of using the market induces people to make the choice of forming a firm to lower this cost, which leads to the most efficient production processes taking place within a firm: not a government.
During WWII, he worked for the Central Statistical Office of the War Cabinet in London, an experience he cherished as he saw how large organizations tend to operate. He left LSE in 1951 first to join the University of Buffalo, and then the University of Virginia in 1958 (James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock were there at the time). While working in Virginia, he studied the Federal Communication Commission's allocation of radio frequencies.
In his 1959 article, he suggested that the Commission should sell the frequencies to the highest bidders in order to solve the externality problem. It is here where he first suggested that with well-defined property rights, radio frequencies could be allocated in the market just like any other good. It wasn't until 1994 that his suggestions were actually implemented. What is interesting about this article is that he presented it to a group of economists from the University of Chicago (including Nobel prize winners George Stigler and Milton Friedman) trying to persuade them that if property rights were properly defined market actors would yield an efficient solution. George Stigler recollects on that night:
“We strongly objected to this heresy. Milton Friedman did most of the talking, as usual. He also did much of the thinking, as usual. In the course of two hours of argument, the vote went from 21 against and one for Coase to 21 for Coase. What an exhilarating event! I lamented afterward that we had not had the clairvoyance to tape it.”
It was from this anecdote that The Problem of Social Cost was written. Coase was hired by the University of Chicago in 1964. In 1965 he became the editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, a position he occupied until 1982. It is believed that his leadership was partly responsible for the journal achieving its influential status. Coase himself said that he used the journal to create a new subject, which he was successful at: not to mention that in this process he influenced the creation of many others.
Oliver Williamson and Douglas North (both Nobel prize winners) on several occasions single out Coase as their major influence behind the new institutional revolution. In 1991, Coase received a Nobel prize in economics "for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy."
As with many great economists, Coase was active and fully engaged in his work until the very last day. (Elinor Ostrom graded PhD papers on her deathbed, and Paul Samuelson wrote op-eds just a few weeks before he passed away.) In his last years, he shifted his attention to China, which culminated in a co-authored book in 2011 (at the age of 101) entitled How China Became Capitalist (with Nina Wang). In the book, the authors claim that the Chinese transition wasn't because of deliberate actions of the communist party, but small, marginal changes in society. They dubbed China the product of human action, but not human design, as "China became capitalist while it was trying to modernize socialism". Not since Milton Friedman was there a more respected Western economist in China.
Perhaps the best description of Coase as a person, as well as of the essence of his work, was summarized by Gary Becker: "Coase didn't say a lot, but I began to realize that every time he did say something, it was really profound."
Misinterpreting the Coase theorem
The simplest interpretation of the Coase theorem is that individuals can resolve their disputes in their best interests without the need for government intervention, assuming no transaction or bargaining costs are involved. However, since transaction costs do indeed exist, there is a need for government to lower these costs via an efficient institutional design and properly defined property rights. In other words, courts and efficient institutions are necessary to solve disputes: but not laws that for example prevent smoking, or Pigouvian taxation of externalities like pollution. The right to create social costs like pollution or smoking would simply end up in the hands of those who value it the most.
Consider the following example that Coase himself has noted. A confectioner has machines that shake the office of a nearby doctor when operating, thus preventing him from performing delicate examinations. The answer, Coase would say, is not to enforce a government regulation to put the confectioner out of business. If the value of the machines to the confectioner is higher than the harm imposed on the doctor then there is scope for a mutually beneficial agreement of a payment (compensation) from the confectioner to the doctor for using the machine. It works the other way around as well - if the doctor's work is valued more than the confectioner's, he can make payments to the confectioner to stop production during his work. Another example is a factory whose pollution imposes costs on a dry cleaning business, but whose profits are much higher than that of the dry cleaner. If the factory owner values his production more than what the dry cleaner values his, he can simply pay him the cost he's imposing onto him.
Coase wasn't trying to describe a perfect world without transaction costs (he actually resented such inapplicable economic analysis), but rather make it clear what the role of transaction costs is in designing the institutions of an economic system. The theorem is actually a great showcase of the real world - a world full of transactions, bargaining and choices that are not only constrained by budgets, but by the design of an institutional system within which these choices are made. It is the real world where the Coase theorem has found many of its applications. An example I always think of is the hunting of elephants in Kenya and Botswana. While poaching was banned in Kenya to save elephants from extinction, in Botswana local farmers were given property rights to elephant herds. The ownership of elephant herds would incentivise the farmers to preserve their long term value. As a result in Kenya, which applied the ban on hunting, since the 1970s the amount of elephants has dropped from 140,000 to only 16,000 today, while in Botswana their number has grown from 20,000 to 68,000.
Apart from the externalities problem, Coase also had a few things to say about public goods. In his 1974 paper "The Lighthouse in Economics" he challenged the classical a priori view that a lighthouse is a typical example of a public good that cannot be provided by the private sector at a profit. He showed that in 19th century Britain, all lighthouses were privately provided and charged ships for their use as they entered a port.
The legacy
Finally, from the Institute bearing his name (), a closing point:
"Coase was critical of economics for being static and preoccupied with formalizing concepts that date back to Adam Smith. He believed that the goal of economists should be to change fundamentally the way we look at a problem. This goal was part of the inspiration behind the Ronald Coase Institute, which a group of scholars formed with Ronald Coase in 2000 to assist young scholars whose research has the potential to help transform their economies. Coase’s support for these young scholars was an act of generosity illustrative of a lifetime of scholarly generosity and confidence in the power of ideas. Ronald Coase himself was an outstanding example of an economist who changed fundamentally the way we think about problems, and the impact of his ideas continues strong today."
Here is a list of some of his most notable writings (a full list of publications can be found here):
- 1937: "The Nature of the Firm." Economica 4 (November): 386–405.
- 1938: "Business Organization and the Accountant." Reprinted in James M. Buchanan and G. F. Thirlby, eds., L.S.E. Essays on Cost. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.
- 1959: "The Federal Communications Commission." Journal of Law and Economics 2 (October): 1–40.
- 1960: "The Problem of Social Cost." Journal of Law and Economics 3 (October): 1–44.
- 1972: "Durability and Monopoly." Journal of Law and Economics 15 (1) : 143-149.
- 1974: "The Lighthouse in Economics." Journal of Law and Economics 17 (2): 357–376.
- 1992: "The Institutional Structure of Production." American Economic Review 82(4): 713-719. (Nobel Prize lecture)
And these two books that reprint some of his most important work:
- 1988: The Firm, the Market, and the Law. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
- 1994: Essays on Economics and Economists. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Why Ronald Coase matters
The great economist Ronald Coase has died at the age of 103. Vuk Vukovic explains what made Coase such an influential and profound thinker.
Yesterday, at the age of 103, one of the greatest minds of our time, Nobel prize winner and emeritus professor at University of Chicago Law School Ronald Coase passed away.
His contributions to and influence on economic science are of monumental importance. His groundbreaking research has set the stage for a joint field of law and economics, and has also influenced the new institutional revolution in addition to a number of other fields and areas of research in economic theory.
It would be unfair to say he only made two major contributions since both of these (written 23 years apart from one another) not only won him the Nobel prize, but have continued to influence the economic science ever since. The first was his 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm where he introduced the concept of transaction costs in microeconomic analysis. He believed that firms exist because they economize on transaction costs - costs like market entry, acquiring information, managing a company, bargaining, etc. If these individual transactions can be reduced into fewer transactions by organizing a hierarchical body, then entrepreneurs will form firms.
With microeconomic theory at the time focusing only on production and transportation costs, Coase's inclusion of transaction costs was a breath of fresh air into economics. However, in 2009 Coase said he was surprised how much The Nature of the Firm was being cited since it was "little more than an undergraduate essay". Continue reading...
On the appalling inequality in the United States
It is true that when we look at the Gini index and other measurements of that type then the United States is highly unequal by the standards of the advanced countries. It's also true that if we look with a fresh pair of eyes then it's not that unequal in fact:
Almost every single person in America has access to basic food, clothing, water and sanitation. I haven't been to states like Louisiana and cities like Detroit, but from what I can tell, nobody is scrambling for the basic necessities required for sustenance.
The US may indeed be unequal but it's only in the last 40 to 50 years that any society at all has been able to make such a claim. Something is being done right.
An almost-classless society: I've noticed that most Americans roughly have the same standard of living. Everybody has access to ample food, everybody shops at the same supermarkets, malls, stores, etc. I've seen plumbers, construction workers and janitors driving their own sedans, which was quite difficult for me to digest at first since I came from a country where construction workers and plumbers lived hand to mouth. Also, (almost) all sections of society are roughly equal. You'll see service professionals owning iPhones, etc. as well. This may be wrong but part of it has to do with the fact that obtaining credit in this country is extremely easy. Anybody can buy anything, for the most part, except for something like a Maserati, obviously. As a result, most monetary possessions aren't really status symbols. I believe that the only status symbol in America is your job, and possibly your educational qualifications.
It may well be that an Indian student isn't seeing everything in this society so new to him. But it is indeed true that while monetary inequality in the US is back up at the levels of the 1920s it simply isn't true that life as it is actually lived is as unequal as it was. That country, like others in the advanced capitalist world, has largely conquered the problem of providing the first set of Maslow's heirarchy of needs for all. After that the inequality in positional goods just isn't all that important.
An open letter to the government on the Lobbying Bill
The government's Lobbying Bill is a serious threat to free speech and will curb the activities of think tanks, charities and other groups whose participation in political debate is vital for the political system to work openly. That's why we've co-signed the letter from other think tanks, below, urging the government to drop this bill.
We wish to highlight our grave concern about the Government’s Lobbying Bill, a piece of legislation that poses a significant threat to legitimate campaigning freedom of speech, political activism and informed public debate.
Part II of the bill threatens the ability of charities, research and campaigning organisations to inform the public debate, fulfil their missions and raise awareness of important issues. The current drafting would capture a huge number of organisations who would not presently be considered as relevant to electoral law and who do not receive any state funding. It also threatens to dramatically expand the range of activity regulated far beyond any common sense understanding of commercial lobbying.
We do not regard the Cabinet Office’s assurances as sufficient given the widespread legal doubts expressed from across the political spectrum. It cannot be a prudent approach to legislate on the basis of assurances that enforcement will not be to the full extent of the law. The exceptions offered are unclear and unconvincing.
The lack of clarity in the legislation further exacerbates its complexity, while granting a remarkably broad discretion to the Electoral Commission. The potential tidal wave of bureaucracy could cripple even well-established organisations, while forcing groups to reconsider activity if there is a perceived risk of falling foul of the law. This self-censorship is an inevitable consequence of the bill as it stands.
We urge the Government to reconsider its approach and to urgently address the fundamental failings in this legislation.
Yours Sincerely,
Mark Littlewood, Director General, Institute for Economic Affairs Simon Richards, Director, The Freedom Association Tim Knox, Director, Centre for Policy Studies Matthew Sinclair, Chief Executive, Taxpayers’ Alliance Jo Glanville, Director, English PEN Emma Carr, Deputy Director, Big Brother Watch Eamonn Butler, Director, Adam Smith Institute
Rest in Peace Ronald Coase
Ronald H Coase, the Chicago-based British Nobel economist, has died at the age of 102. I first met him in 1976 at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in St Andrews, where he delivered a paper on 'Adam Smith's View Of Man'. But he was best known for his work on transaction costs and social costs.
Coase introduced the idea of transactions costs in 1937. Before then, most (mainstream) economists simply assumed that trade and commerce were costless. In fact, he noted, the costs of simply making the deal might be higher than the price of the good or service itself. People need to gather information about what they are buying and whether they can trust the supplier, they have to put time and effort into striking a bargain, they might have to draw up contracts and monitor the service they get.
This idea spills over into how we deal with social costs. The fact that transactions are not costless means it makes a big difference who is blamed for externalities. To take his example, a fence could prevent a rancher's cattle from destroying a farmer's crops. But how can they agree who should pay for it? If the farmer has to bear that cost, the farmer will build a fence to keep them out. If the rancher has to compensate the farmer, the rancher will build the fence.
This in turn had important consequences in terms of the public choice economics of James Buchanan and and Gordon Tullock and others. Welfare economists had looked at 'market failure' and concluded that government must intervene to correct it. But they assumed away the transaction costs of making political decisions. And when you look at those, the corruption, the rent-seeking, the interest group politics and all the rest, you find that the outcome might be even less desirable than what the market can do.
Banning adverts for unpaid internships will only hurt young people
During the closing weeks of 2012, Labour MP Hazel Blears claimed to have attracted cross-party support for a private bill that would have effectively made advertising for unpaid internship positions illegal. Thankfully for those that are eager for valuable work experience regardless of short-term financial rewards, her calls to effectively exclude tens of thousands of would-be interns from pursuing their preferred vocation fell upon deaf ears. The bill has since faded into obscurity.
Monday saw Nick Clegg criticise the movement to protect interns from themselves, with his spokesman citing potential “unintended consequences” - such as the creation of a “black market” for unpaid internships - as grounds for opposing the ban. Speaking to Graduate Fog, the Deputy Prime Minister’s spokesman explained:
“We want to bring an end to the ‘who you know not what you know’ culture. But there are possible unintended consequences of legislating on this issue – it could actually be entirely counterproductive and force these valuable opportunities back on to a kind of ‘black market’ where the vacancies are filled by people with the best connections.”
I don’t think that Hazel Blears and co. harbour a desire to deny all but the well-connected a chance to hone skills that will help them to secure preferential employment. Nonetheless, in the words of Milton Friedman, “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results”. The result of prohibiting advertising for unpaid internships would be the substitution of meritocracy for nepotism.
The rhetoric surrounding unpaid internships has, for the most part, been overwhelmingly negative in tone: skewing the debate towards the emotive rather than the factual. Whilst more reasonable detractors cite cases of interns being treated poorly by employers (and there are a number of such cases), oft-repeated comparisons to “slavery” are hyperbole at best, and callously trivialise the plight of millions of actual slaves living in the world today.
An individual choosing to be paid in experience rather than money should be allowed to do so, free from a coercive state severing access to the former option through banning certain job advertisements. The appropriate response of those who rue interns lack of access to paid employment should be deregulating the labour market, rather than denying young people the opportunity to improve their future job prospects by acquiring indispensable knowledge and skills.
Extrapolating general ‘anti-internship’ sentiments from a few extreme cases masks the true story: one of a practice that provides saleable skills, easier access into highly competitive professions, networking opportunities, and a plethora of other benefits. At present, I am lucky enough to be completing an unpaid placement at the ASI; hopefully, the constructive nature of such a placement is evidenced by the very existence of this blog post. I don’t claim that every intern will be as lucky as me in his or her remit, but I do know that I am definitely not alone in gaining substantial benefits from an unpaid internship.