Remind us again why government should run all the schools

This story might cause a little pause for thought:

One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.

That story's too good to want to check if it's actually true or not. But if it is then why would we continue with an education system that has had more than a century to try to get things right but has manifestly failed to do so?

Quite, Gove and others are onto the right sort of policy, freeing the education system as much as possible from that dead hand of said state.

John Blundell, 1952—2014

The Institute has lost a talented and much valued friend, and those who work to spread economic and personal liberty have lost a staunch and effective campaigner. From the ASI's foundation in 1977, we worked with John, who was then Press & Parliamentary Officer for Federation of Small Businesses. During his spell in that post from 1977 - 1982, he was also a Lambeth Councillor, and combined knowledge of what worked for business with deep insights into the workings of local government. He was a leading figure among the very small band who worked to restore free markets and opportunities to a nation worn down by years of centralism and state planning. He engineered a joint publication between the ASI and the Federation of Small Businesses in 1979. Called "An Inspector at the Door," it detailed the various powers of officials to enter premises and seize materials. It was a media sensation, with numerous articles about Britain's "Society of Snoopers." Margaret Thatcher expressed her concern in Parliament, and set up a commission to review and curtail some of those powers.

It was an early example of John's effectiveness and his skills as an organizer and a communicator. Those skills saw him in good stead when he went to the US, where he became President of the Institute for Humane Studies, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Charles G Koch Foundation, and the Claude R Lambe Foundation.

His appointment in 1993 as Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs was an inspired one. He rapidly reinvigorated the IEA and restored it to its former glory and influence. Assiduously he built up its network of supporters and its range of influential publications. John's own temperament, outgoing and enthusiastic, helped turn the IEA's meetings into ones not to be missed. John's benign presence not only left its stamp on the IEA, but on the numerous outside bodies that he generously helped to build up and support. Internationally he helped to establish other institutes, and was a stalwart of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by F A Hayek to propagate liberal, free-market ideas.

John had many publications to his credit, including "Waging the War of Ideas" (2003), together with some important works he co-authored or edited. Under his leadership the IEA supported and publicized works by outside bodies, often hosting launches in the IEA's premises. Those premises were transformed during John's tenure, giving the IEA the space it needed for its extended tasks.

He was a good friend and a loyal one. We shall miss his huge personality and his wry humour. He made a major contribution to making the world into a better place, and will deservedly be remembered for that.

What joy, it's Marianna Mazzucato again

This time she's running a conference telling us all how it's absolutely vital that the UK economy be planned the way that Ms. Mazzucato thinks it ought to be. Which is, if we are fair about it, a plan that rather ignores one of the most basic economic points about economies:

This is encouraging news and shows that the UK is hopefully on the path towards ‘rebalancing’ away from an economy biased towards financial services, towards growth of innovation and productivity in the ‘real economy’.

Hmm. For this to be either true or desirable we'd need to show that we actually have an economy biased towards financial services.

The key problem that he and other international policy makers have is to make sure that such rebalancing tackles finance on two equally important sides. On the one hand, rebalancing so that finance funds the real economy. This means addressing the dire situation that figure 1 shows below, i.e. the degree to which finance has been financing itself leading to the exponential rise in the value added made up of financial intermediation, compared to that of the real economy (everything but finance and agriculture).

Hmm, so, OK, finance has been a greater part of the value added in the economy in recent times. It's still difficult to understand why this is a bad idea.

The second key issue that rebalancing must address is not just how to get more value added from the ‘real economy’ and less from ‘financial intermediation’ (finance financing finance), but also how to de-financialise the real economy itself!

Hmm again.

So, back to this question of whether the UK economy is in fact excessively financialised. And there's two parts to that question. In the general economy we're no more financialised than other advanced economies. We have roughly the same sized pensions industry, insurance and retail and commercial banking industries, mortgages, savings products and all the rest. And we need only invoke Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to see why a richer nation might want more of such financial activity. Once the basic needs are met we move on to wanting to have security which is exactly what savings and insurance do for us.

But it is also true that the total financial sector in the UK is larger than it is in most other countries. Almost nowhere else has anything even remotely comparable to The City. but to say that is a problem would be to make the poor departed spirit of David Ricardo cry. For we do seem to have a comparative advantage in being the financial marketplace for the world and that's an advantage that we should be exploiting.

So if we look at the domestic economy we don't seem to be excessively financialised. And if we look at the total economy that financialisation is about our successfully selling services to Johnny Foreigner. Neither of which are obviously problems that require solutions. Making Ms. Mazzucato's conference, and possibly the good professor herself, somewhat redundant.

Ahhrgh! Terror! The robots are coming to take our jobs!

We've another one of those little horror stories that the robots are coming to take all our jobs. This is a follow up, concerning Europe, on a US report that decided that near half of all jobs could simply disappear to the robots (who are coming to take all our jobs, recall) in the next couple of decades. Sadly, both reports fail to note one obvious and simple fact:

Having obtained these risks of computerisation per ISCO job, we combine these with European employment data broken up according to ISCO-defined sectors. This was done using the ILO data which is based on the 2012 EU Labour Force Survey. From this, we generate an overall index of computerisation risk equivalent to the proportion of total employment likely to be challenged significantly by technological advances in the next decade or two across the entirety of EU-28.

The answer being, no not 42, more than 50% of all jobs are threatened by technological obsolescence in the EU over that next couple of decades.

Is this something we should be worried about? Clearly the authors of the paper think it worth bringing to our attention, but is it actually worth worrying about?

Well, no. Because even the most slerotic of European economies is going to destroy and create more jobs than that over that same time period.

Using the UK as a rough example, there are around 30 million jobs in the economy. 3 million of these are destroyed each year: around 10%. The economy also creates around 3 million jobs a year. Roughly you understand: and a recession isn't, in general, when more jobs get destroyed, a recession is when fewer jobs get created, that's what makes the unemployment rolls go up.

So the claim is that 50% of jobs in the EU might get destroyed by robot competition in the next two decades. And yet we would expect, just as a straight line estimate, that the EU economy will destroy and create four times as many jobs as that over that same time period, 200% of the current static workforce.

Even if this is something that we want to worry about it's a worry at the margin, it's a little bit more of a known and understood process that we can in general observe that we can deal with, rather than some horrific step change in our lives that we'll have trouble adapting to.

There is one more point here. If you do want to worry about this it's important to note that it's not large companies that create jobs, it's new and small ones. So, if you want to make sure that the robotic unemploymentaggeddon doesn't in fact carve a swathe through Europe you'll need to reduce the regulatory and legal burdens that new companies face in establishing themselves. Deregulation, ease of entry into the market, these are the solutions even if you do want to panic.

Goodbye, Green Belt!

Last night BBC London News aired a short film I took part in about the Green Belt. As part of a series of ‘authored’ pieces about various solutions to London’s housing crisis, I suggested that we should allow construction on the Green Belt around London to increase the supply of developable land. Land, as Paul Cheshire likes to point out, is the key. The graph above shows how closely house price rises have tracked land price rises. Land-use restrictions on the Green Belt are quite strict: under the National Planning Policy Framework, local councils face a very high burden of proof to approve new developments on Green Belt land. If they were made less strict, then the supply of land and housing would increase and the price of both would fall.

I usually think of people who want to preserve the Green Belt as being motivated by financial considerations. If you own your house, you don’t want its value to fall, so you have a strong incentive to oppose any measure that will increase supply. Perhaps a large proportion of people involved in campaigns to ‘protect the Green Belt’ own their own homes. (And if not, that would certainly falsify this view.)

But filming with the BBC made me realize that this explanation is too neat and too unfair. The preservationist I interviewed, Dr Ann Goddard, was not preoccupied with preserving the value of her home – she believed, as many do, that relatively unspoiled natural areas are valuable and important to protect from development. The meadow she took us to was very pretty and I would regret losing places like it as well. Throughout our conversation Ann made it clear that her idea of England was entwined with its image as a ‘green and pleasant land’, not just somewhere for endless suburban sprawl.

Much of that greenery is worth keeping, but I suggest that the question is not ‘what’ but ‘where’. Since Green Belt land rings cities, it is much more difficult for city slickers to access than, say, gardens or parks. And lots of London already is covered in gardens or parks – more than half, according to one estimate. Allowing London to expand outwards would eat away at the Green Belt, but also allow more people to have gardens and for more (and bigger) parks to be built.

I also realized how important symbols can be: to Ann the meadow we went to WAS the Green Belt. If we’d taken her to a piece of intensive farmland (34% of the Green Belt around London) maybe she would have cared less about the prospect of that being turned into a village. And I wonder if focusing on intensive farmland is the key to changing people’s minds. In the end, if the battle over the Green Belt is about ideas and symbols rather than pocketbooks, a change of language might help us.

A masterly piece of political game theory

This is a subject of some controversy so please, put aside your thoughts, passions and logic on the subject itself, abortion, and instead just think about the political tactic being employed here. In general in the US it is the left that is strongly in favour of the right to abort. In general again, it's generally the conservative right that is against. Also, again in general, it is the left that is in favour of detailed and sometimes expensive regulation of activity and it's the right which is against. So, what would be a useful political tactic if you were against the general availability of abortion? Quite, regulate it:

The last restriction under the law goes into effect Sept. 1. All abortion clinics at that point must have upgraded their facilities to ambulatory surgery centers. Busby says many can’t afford it and more will close.

“This would basically force all the clinics to become mini-hospitals,” Busby said. “They have to have hallway widths a certain length, and a janitor’s closet, male and female locker rooms, which is completely unnecessary – and a bunch of other regulations that are really not appropriate or do anything to increase the safety of one of the safest procedures in the country.”

Pro-life groups supported the law, saying it would protect women by making abortion safer. At the time of the passage of the law, The Texas Tribune quoted Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell saying: “There’s nothing in this legislation that will close a clinic. … That’s up to the clinic. If they want to put profit over a person, that’s up to them.”

The right has been saying for years that regulations can be expensive and those who would regulate have been shouting that that's nonsense for the same amount of time. Rather a case of the biter bit.

Sadly, of course, no one is going to learn anything from this. Certainly not those who generally propose regulation: for do note that while they argue that clinics should not be subject to this level of regulation they're not, not at all, arguing that mini-hospitals can be trusted to work out whether they need a janitor's closet for themselves. Still regulation for thee even if not for me.

Time for a human rights review?

The Times law report (15^th July) concerned a Muslim school-age immigrant, granted asylum in France, who had come to the UK instead on the grounds that she was not permitted to wear the burka in French schools. She claimed that to be a human right and therefore the Home Secretary was wrong in seeking her return to France. The rights and wrongs of human rights and clothing indicating religion are not my concern.  The issue here is the extent to which foreigners are entitled to legal representation to fight their cases at UK taxpayers’ expense.  Some lawyers claim that justice has no price but can that really be so?

In this case, Mr Justice Hickinbottom refused a judicial review of the Home Secretary’s decision.  On 24^th June, the Court of Appeal, being the Master of the Rolls and two other Lord Justices, resoundingly supported the earlier judgment.  The appellant needed to show that there was a “flagrant violation” of the European Convention on Human Rights.  In this case, there was no violation at all, never mind flagrant.

Although the report does not say so, it is hard to believe that this school-age asylum seeker had the funds to cover the original hearing, still less the appeal. Perhaps we will be paying for a further appeal to the European Court of Human Rights itself even though the ECHR has already ruled several times that France is entitled to ban the burka in schools so long as it does not do so in general.  Other forms of education are available, e.g. distance learning.

Some will feel that an asylum seeker is lucky to be accepted at all and such acceptance should not entitle them, free of charge, to the full panoply of rights built up and paid for by the citizens.  Obviously as time goes by and they integrate, so their rights should build up but not immediately and certainly not before they have gained admission.

One solution would be to require asylum seekers as part of their acceptance to sign, with legal advice, a binding agreement that they are not entitled to legal aid until assimilated into the country as defined by learning the language to conversational level, paying UK taxes for, say, five years and not being found guilty of a crime normally punishable by a prison sentence.

Some will say that the last is both unfair and inefficient.  In effect they would be deemed guilty before being judged and self-defence by someone without the language would clog up the courts.  But the present system lands the UK taxpayer with the not inconsiderable cost of prison followed by a failure to expel them, as we legally can, because deportation is appealed and the Home Office is overwhelmed by cases.  The UK taxpayer funds not only the legal costs of asylum seekers’ “rights” but all the associated civil service, police and imprisonment costs.

Time for a review?

Mariana Mazzucato's extremely strange economics

Mariana Mazzucato's got another installment of her rather strange economics in the paper. This is the follow on from the insistence that government funds all innovation. Here's she's decrying the rise of "finance" and how it doesn't actually develop the economy and thus, well, and thus politicians should do it all for us I think. One interesting little thought is that she doesn't seem to have understood Piketty:

Indeed, the origins of the financial crisis and the massive and disproportionate growth of the financial sector originated in the 1970s, as finance became increasingly de-linked from the real economy.

It's also true that Piketty doesn't really understand his own data either. Yes, there has been a rise in the wealth to GDP ratio and yes, it did start in the 70s. For the US and UK this was a rise of about 150% of GDP. And yes, this has almost all been in financial assets. So we can indeed say that finance has risen in importance as a part of the economy.

But what has also happened is that pensions savings have risen by 150% of GDP over this same time period. That is, that the rise of finance seems very closely correlated with the baby boomers saving for their retirements.

It's difficult to see this as a problem really.

Then there's this entirely bizarre point she makes:

In the attempt to "rebalance" economies away from speculative finance towards the real economy, there have been proposals to reform finance so that it helps to fuel more innovation. Various measures have been tried to help those few small and medium enterprises willing to go after difficult high-risk investments, the backbone of innovation. Yet these reforms have been inadequate, slow and incomplete, with the proportion of profits from quick trades in the financial sector, rather than long-run investments, rising not falling. And one of the key tools for long-termism, the financial transaction tax, has still not been applied.

She seems not to have read the EU's own report on the FTT (which I wrote about here). The EU itself states that the introduction of an FTT will reduce investment in business, so much so that the economy will actually shrink compared to where it would be without the FTT. So Mazzucato is apparently recommending a course of action, in order to increase investment, which we know will actually reduce investment.

It's an odd policy world she inhabits, isn't it?

The rest of it is just that we should have a Public Investment Bank and everything will be sweet. Which, given the things that politicians like to invest in (Olympics, HS2, Concorde, write your own list) is a very sweet but most misguided hope.

Rising demand hits static supply: what shall we do?

So here's a little puzzler. Imagine that we had some good or service that was in limited supply. And that then demand for that good or service rose. What could or should we do to deal with  this problem? For obviously some of those who desire that good or service are going to be disappointed given that we cannot increase supply. The obvious logical answer is that we should increase the price of that good or service. This will, in the way that rising prices tend to do, reduce demand for that good or service. Further, we also know that that limited supply will go to those who value it the most: we working this out by concluding that those willing to pay a higher price are those who do value something more highly.

Then we get the Mail:

What a rip off! Hotel room prices in Glasgow soar 158 PER CENT to up to £448 a night as city prepares to host Commonwealth Games

A night in a hotel will now cost an average of £344 for the Games period A year ago prices were on average of £78 per room The most expensive night - Sunday 27 July - will cost an average of £448

That's the house magazine of the angrier part of Middle England complaining about the solution to that difficult problem that, well, when a sporting event is going on more people want to stay in a city which has, in the short term at least, a static supply of hotel rooms.

No wonder we all have problems getting economically rational political policies put in place, eh?

Len McCluskey is not entirely correct about the NHS and TTIP

According to Len McCluskey the upcoming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is going to mean the end of the NHS. As one might expect from such a source he's slightly, umm, shading, the reality of what is going on here.

Now Cameron is set on giving these US investors new powers to sue any future UK government if it makes changes to health policy that might stop the dollars rolling in.

The deal will mean that American investors will be able to haul any UK government that tries to reverse privatisation to a tribunal – the “investor state dispute settlement” that would operate outside the law of this land. These tribunals will have the power to award billions in damages and compensation for lost profits and the loss of projected future profits, with no right of appeal. Yes, that is right – no right of appeal.

In short, the British public would face massive costs to bring NHS services back into public hands, making it nigh on impossible.

What is actually happening here is two things. The first being that the investor dispute system under the TTIP is arbitration rather than court action in the state in question. This is for the fairly obvious reason that the disputes will be between the government of the country and the investors and the government of a country controls (well, D'oh!) the legislature of that country and therefore what the law is. And as we've seen that's a very dangerous place for investors to be in. Those who lent money to Greece in Greek law bonds found themselves having a 70% haircut imposed after the Greek Government (and legislature) changed the collective action clauses (what portion of a bond issue must agree to changes in those bonds) after the bonds had been issued and paid for. Those who lent money to the same government but in English law bonds got paid out in full. Because the Greek Government didn't have the power to change English law in that manner.

We might not think that that could happen in our own dear courts in England and Wales. But this is a deal that includes the entire EU and as we've seen this has happened in the past couple of years here in the EU. So what is being offered is legal certainty to investors, that certainty being ensured by insisting that governments cannot change the rules of the game after the whistle has blown. All of which seems fair enough.

As to the second part, what this actually means, it just means that governments must adhere to whatever contracts they sign with foreign investors. If the contract says that it can be cancelled with no compensation to be paid then it can be cancelled with no compensation to be paid. If the contract says that compensation must be paid upon cancellation then compensation (whatever a government might do to change the law later) must be paid.

In this it is very similar to current law on such things as nationalisations for example. Any government is allowed, under international law, to nationalise anything that it might wish to. The UK Government could, if Red Ed were elected to power, simply decide to nationalise all private sector providers of health care and or health care services. Nothing at all to prevent them doing so: but under current law they would have to pay a fair market price for those assets. Under the new TTIP system they would also have to pay a fair market price for them.

The only people who could possibly complain about this would be those who would like to nationalise things without fair market price compensation: you know, thieves.

The whole TTIP system is simply a method by which governments can be forced to stand by the contracts they have signed with people not employed by those governments deciding whether they have or not. Which, given the power that governments do have to confiscate things from people, all seems entirely fair and just.