Looks like that rental problem is being solved
The Guardian gives us another whingefest over the price of rental housing currently. To which the correct answer is yes, we know there's a problem, so, what are we going to do about it? Stop concentrating, for a moment at least, upon the ghastly inequity of it all and tell us how to solve it.
At the end of which whingefest we're told:
Last year, the Association of Residential Letting Agents (Arla) said: “We expect the situation to only get worse for tenants when inevitably the costs are passed on through higher rents.”
The good news is that Arla was wrong. The average UK rent rose by just 0.75% in the past year, and fell in London, according to the Landbay Rental Index. Landlords need to remember that they can huff and puff about squeezing tenants for more rent, but tenants have only got £23 left.
Real rents are falling and even nominal rents in London are. Hmm, so, something is being done and the problem is, however slowly and hesitantly, being solved. That's good then, but how?
As it happens a builder has just released its results:
Telford Homes plans to increase the number of rental homes it builds as demand from investors to enter the sector intensifies.
The company will develop more so-called build-to-rent schemes in London over the coming months, and its board “continues to evaluate” whether a formal partnership with an investor could enable it to build rented homes more quickly to grow its division.
“We are increasingly being approached directly by institutions and rental operators seeking investment opportunities and each trying to achieve significant scale as swiftly as possible,” the company said.
Chief executive Jon Di-Stefano said the amount of money targeting the sector was "phenomenal".
Large scale investors are, well, investing we suppose, in the sector. Putting their money to work in building housing that people can then rent. Prices of rental housing are, concurrently, falling.
Perhaps, just a possibility, all that stuff about markets actually works then? The price of something is determined by that intersection of supply and demand. Increase the supply and the price falls. Sure, it's all most unpopular to believe such neoliberalism but it does seem to be a reasonable description of reality, doesn't it? Build more housing and housing becomes cheaper.
Note what is not necessary for this to happen. That the house built be determined to be "affordable," that tax money be used to build them, that they be not for profit, nor even that the developments be centrally planned by the wise oracles who would determine our lives. Simply allow that market red in tooth and claw to operate - here, by actually allowing people to build stuff - and we get to solve those problems of a shortage of supply and the consequent high prices.
The first two pages of every economics book ever are correct then. Now all we've got to do is run the rest of the country in accord with that basic insight about our species and this universe.
We agree with George Monbiot - industrial farming it is then
George Monbiot uses a recent paper to argue that we should all give up meat and dairy because there are more efficient manners of growing a minimal diet. Quite possibly there are but then who wants to live a minimal life, subsist upon a minimal diet? The point is not existence but utility maximisation, no?
However, he is right about this:
The most important environmental action we can take is to reduce the amount of land used by farming.
As has been pointed out numerous times any form of organic farming requires more land than industrial such. Simply because, at root, industrial farming is the substitution of the products of factories and chemical vats for more land.
Though roughly twice as much land is used for grazing worldwide as for crop production, it provides just 1.2% of the protein we eat. While much of this pastureland cannot be used to grow crops, it can be used for rewilding: allowing the many rich ecosystems destroyed by livestock farming to recover, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, protecting watersheds and halting the sixth great extinction in its tracks. The land that should be devoted to the preservation of human life and the rest of the living world is at the moment used to produce a tiny amount of meat.
Assume this is true, now, do we have any evidence that efficient farming does free up land for such rewilding? Actually, we do., New England. A century and a half back the area was a quiltwork of small farms. The forests we go to gawp at in autumn didn't exist, they'd been clear cut. What we do go to see these days is almost entirely new growth. Rewilding that has occurred as a result of mechanical farming and the railroads opening up the mid-West.
We get our food from the more efficient land and production methods these days. The contention that doing so allows rewilding is proven. Which is why we should indeed be using those industrial farming methods, precisely and exactly because they reduce our call upon the land, leaving more of it for other forms of life - and for us to go gawp at.
If your argument is that we should eat a particular way in order to reduce the land we use to feed ourselves then you are indeed arguing against organic farming and in favour of industrial such. Odd how the usual suspects tend not to make the connection, isn't it?
A certain inability to understand trade offs on display here
Whether this level of pollution is something we absolutely have to put up with is debatable. But that there is a trade off is certain, a point which isn't being grasped here:
An average car in inner London will be responsible for almost £8,000 in health costs during the course of its lifetime, researchers say.
Pollution produced by vans and cars costs almost £6 billion in damage to health annually in the UK, according to experts from Oxford and Bath universities.
They said that exposure to nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter caused by vehicles – particularly those which run on diesel – is linked to about 40,000 premature deaths a year.
This translates into billions of pounds in associated costs for healthcare and “life years lost”, the study, released ahead of Clean Air Day on June 21, found.
This also leads to costs of £650 million in London alone.
Leave aside whether we think those cost estimations are correct or not - let's just assume they are. So, what else do we need to know?
What is the benefit which comes from these same activities? If we want to think about cars alone, then the ability to get around seems to be something that we humans rather like. That's why every society in which people have been able to afford a car they go and buy one.
Note that the insistence is not that those third party costs of the pollution are justified by that desire to be able to transport oneself. Only that it is the correct question to be asking - Yup, we've costs here, are they justified by the benefits?
Similarly with those £650,000,000 costs in London. The same 10 million people in that same area also produce some £ 378,424,000,000 in economic value each year. Or some 500 times those costs. Is that worth it?
No, we don't say we know the answer - we've an intuition that a bit of pollution is inevitable with 10 million people in the same river valley - but that is the correct question. Knowing the cost is useful, but only because it's part of the correct question, is it worth it?
What people wanted for 1500 years was the Industrial Revolution
It's more than a little odd to see the Archbishop of Canterbury succumbing to a variation of the Whig school of history. To be rude about said school, the one which said that everything good in history led to the English being Top Nation. And that England being Top Nation was thus that peak of history. Here the English are replaced by the EU:
Mr Welby said Brexit was 'only one of a number of challenges that Europe is facing, and may well not be the most serious'.
'There is no sense in which I suggest that Brexit or other crises currently around will derail the European Union or bring about the downfall of Europe,' he said.
But he effusively praised Brussels, saying: 'The EU has been the greatest dream realised for human beings since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
'It has brought peace, prosperity, compassion for the poor and weak, purpose for the aspirational and hope for all its people. It has always been challenged and always will.'
For most of the past 1500 years near all of the people of Europe have been cold, hungry and despairing at seeing one quarter of their children perish before their 5 th birthday. They've also been distinctly less than enthusiastic about European unity- most wars over that period of time include at least one side or the other fighting against the idea.
We have actually solved those heating, hunger and health problems - except in the most tragic and rare circumstances. And it wasn't an organisation founded in 1992 which managed it. Instead it was the Industrial Revolution that did, that rise in wealth brought about by the triple application of technology, capitalism and markets.
Most certainly, Europe is better than it has been for most of that 1500 years. But getting it right about which has achieved that is rather important. For doing so tells us which things we need to keep doing in order to make matters better again. You know, that advancing technology, capitalism and markets. Not whatever political organisation is the very thinnest layer of icing upon that particular cake.
Madsen Moment – Immigration
Once we take back control of all of our migration policy we can set rules and follow them. Importantly we can make immigration work for migrants, for communities and meet business needs. Let's not ignore the concerns or pressures of communities but meet their needs and at the same time let business greet employees they need. Brexit presents an opportunity, and one we should all relish. Watch the latest #MadsenMoment now!
John Vidal manages to miss why we use the market system
John Vidal, over in The Guardian, wants to tell us all how appalling it is that large businesses get on with the design, growing and provision of seeds to the world's farmers. Better, by far, would be a more traditional system:
Instead, it is coming from the likes of Debal Deb, an Indian plant researcher who grows forgotten crops and is the antithesis of Bayer and Monsanto. While they concentrate on developing a small number of blockbuster staple crops, Deb grows as many crops as he can and gives the seeds away.
This year he is cultivating an astonishing 1,340 traditional varieties of Indian “folk” rice on land donated to him in West Bengal. More than 7,000 farmers in six states will be given the seeds, on the condition that they also grow them and give some away.
This seed-sharing of “landraces”, or local varieties, is not philanthropy but the extension of an age-old system of mutualised farming that has provided social stability and dietary diversity for millions of people. By continually selecting, crossbreeding and then exchanging their seeds, farmers have developed varieties for their aroma, taste, colour, medicinal properties and resistance to pests, drought and flood.
That's the system which didn't produce the Green Revolution, the large scale and centralised seed selection and provision being the one that did. But instead of our cavilling about reality, let us take Vidal's argument seriously for a moment:
Instead of working in a well-funded research institute, as might be expected of a Fulbright biotech scholar, Deb is now part of the worldwide farmers’ movement to limit corporate control and to redefine what knowledge is, and who owns it. Like many others, he has found that the best way to save traditional agricultural knowledge is to grow seeds and give them away. He believes that’s the future. Pray that he’s right.
Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. The point being that we don't know whether it is or not. We can adopt an argument from evolution itself if we like. It's the changing environment that selects for fitness so, as time unfolds and the environment changes perhaps we will find that the capitalist and centralised system works better, perhaps that mutual and low tech one will. So, what is it that we should do here?
Obviously, we should use markets. The root of which is to just leave people to get on with things as they wish. We'll find out which works better by observing which works better. It's precisely because of the disagreement about, uncertainty over, which works better that we should not be planning the matter but leaving peoples' behaviour alone.
Another way to put this is that markets are where differences of opinion do battle with each other. As we've such a difference here we've got to use markets, don't we?
We're deeply puzzled by Will Hutton's logic here
Opinions on Brexit differ, obviously, that's why the resort to a referendum to find out what the majority actually though on the subject - for purists, a plurality if you prefer. Opinions on trade differ too but that's a clearer subject upon which there is an objectively right answer. It's the combination of the two subjects by Will Hutton which does rather puzzle us:
The poverty, inequalities and hopelessness that propelled the Brexit vote – seven out of the 10 poorest areas in northern Europe are in England, and all voted for Brexit – must be decisively addressed. Britain must simultaneously recommit to full EU membership as its benefits and the colossal costs of exit become ever clearer, and stand solidly with Europe as dark and menacing forces stalk the globe – not least an imminent transatlantic trade war and the wider threats of Donald Trump.
It's that trade war bit that puzzles. Sure, Donald Trump is shouting that he's going to tax Americans by making their purchases of certain European goods more expensive. The EU's reaction has been to threaten to make purchases by Europeans of certain American goods more expensive by the application of tariffs. That is, the damaging to us part of the trade war is being imposed by our own, by the EU upon the European citizenry.
This is not sensible, as Jagdish Bhagwati points out:
This is an elementary economics error. As Joan Robinson, one of the most prominent economists of this century and a member of the Cambridge School, famously said, if your trading partner throws rocks into his harbor, that is no reason to throw rocks into your own. It may sound "fair" to do so, but it is downright silly, even self-destructive.
So Will Hutton's point is that, in order to combat the damage of a transatlantic trade war, we must be full and forever members of the organisation - the European Union - which is imposing the downright silly, even self-destructive, bits of that transatlantic trade war?
Oh well, Will Hutton will be Will Hutton but there's little reason for the rest of us to pay attention.
The Government's greenfield housing policy is achieving one goal - annoying the CPRE
A primary goal of government's recent housing policy has been to annoy, enrage even, the Nimbys and Bananas at the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. To insist that we shall reject the views of the not in my back yard and build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone crowd.
It appears to be working:
Having analysed new Government data, the Campaign to Protect Rural England has learned that 3,332ha of the green belt were lost to housing in 2017, up from 2,105ha in 2013 and 3,328 in 2015/16.
That's not an error, that's the point:
Rebecca Pullinger, Planning Campaigner at the Campaign to Protect Rural England said: “Whilst the increase in the proportion of development taking place on brownfield land is promising, the lack of reduction in greenfield development is alarming news for those who love the countryside. Developers are still able to force through land hungry, greenfield development even when brownfield options exist, often only benefitting their own profits.
CPRE has identified is a need for a national policy that empowers councils to refuse applications for housing on greenfield land where suitable brownfield options exist.
That is also not an error, that's the point. To, however marginally, free ourselves from the restrictions of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors and build houses people want to live in where they'd like to live. Instead of where the Nimbys and Bananas think they should be allowed to squat in squalor.
Under previous rules, at least 30 new homes had to be built per hectare (the equivalent to two and a half acres), but new regulations mean developers can get away with erecting just 26 homes per hectare.
Good, someone has noticed that modern British housing is, by far, the smallest in Europe and it would be a good idea to allow rather more than just 300 square metres for a new house and garden. We should relax said rules further. To, like, having no insistence upon density at all.
The complaint is that 8,240 acres a year are being concreted over. This in a country of 60 million such acres. We could thus do this for a millennium and end up with some 10-14% of the entire country nothing but housing and buildings and factories and civilisation. Actually, just about what we have been doing since William the Bastard stole the entire place. For Britain is today about 10 to 14% civilisation, the rest of it being land we can extend it to. We should do more of that given the number of people here who all would like to have room to swing a cat.
That decline of the nuclear family allows us to solve the gender pay gap
We're not sure that Sir James Munby has things quite right here:
Britain should "welcome and applaud" the collapse of the nuclear family, the most senior family judge in England and Wales has said.
In a speech Sir James Munby, the president of the High Court's family division, said the modern British family was "complex" and "takes an almost infinite variety of forms".
He said that "whether through choice or circumstance", many people "live in families more or less removed from what, until comparatively recently, would have been recognised as the typical nuclear family.
The nuclear family is still, after all, the modal arrangement. Not something we expect to change all that much in a species descended from a millennia or two (to look only at English household arrangements and to be strict about the meaning of "nuclear") to hundreds of millennia (with a wider definition of nuclear to mean extended familial grouping) of such families. That being rather the way evolution works, there's a tendency for us to be doing things because we're descended from people who did those things. It's when the environment changes that they become non-optimal strategies.
We're also liberals and thus hugely applaud the increase in the ability of people to live their lives as they themselves wish. However, the specific point of interest here is this:
The most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics show that there are around 10,000 same-sex couples in the UK who have dependent children.
There are, roughly speaking, two competing theories about the gender pay gap. It's all about misogyny, capitalism perhaps, the oppressions of The Man. Or, it's just about primary childcarers and that just tends to be women. That rise in the number of same sex parents gives us a population allowing us to tease out the two effects. We could, perhaps, look at the incomes of the primary childcarer in such relationships as opposed to the other. Or see whether male primary childcarers see the same income limitations as female - something we could also look at through the rising number of cis- and hetero- male primary child carers.
We're pretty sure what would be revealed - we'll see the same career structures and income changes among primary childcarers regardless of sex, gender or that of partner. But even if it turns out the other way around, that it is actually The Man causing it all, we'd like to see the research done.
Because it would be useful to be actually able to identify, properly and fully, the cause of the perceived problem, wouldn't it? For only when we've done that can we possibly try and craft any solution to it - or even decide whether it's something that it's worth trying to solve.
The British electricity market looks pretty competitive to us
There're a number of different ways to look at a market and ponder whether it's competitive or not. Our problem being that the movement of prices in one that is perfectly competitive and one perfectly rigged will be the same. We can't therefore look just at those prices to try and make our determination.
We can though think about what should be true if it is a competitive market, look for that occurring and thus come to a determination. One of those things being, well, if the market is competitive on price then we'd expect to see those attempting to be the lowest cost provider experiencing significant difficulties in keeping going. For trying to be the lowest cost provider - without any particular low cost production method - is a precarious place to be in a competitive market.
Everyone is already charging just the minimum necessary to keep afloat and you're coming in lower? You're going to have a little problem there or two, aren't you?
Britain’s cheapest energy supplier risks being pulled from the market after the regulator found that a catalogue of customer service failings at the cash-strapped company has continued despite its warnings.
Hmm.
The Sunday Telegraph exclusively revealed that Iresa, and a clutch of similar sized suppliers, are on the brink of collapse due to rising costs and break-neck competition in the overcrowded market.
Note what our claim is not. That the electricity market is perfectly competitive in each and every nook and cranny of either the country or market. But if we expect the low cost suppliers to have solvency problems in a competitive market, we see the low cost providers having solvency problems, we are entirely justified in assuming that we've a pretty competitive market, aren't we?