Oh yes, excellent joke from Respublica here

This is a bit of a blinder from Phillip Blond's little don't think too hard tank. The proposal is that Google and Facebook should be paying into a fund which will support traditional journalism. There're two problems with this idea.

The first is the obvious: who gets to decide what journalism gets done with that fund? I think we know, don't we? The sort approved of by Phillip Blond and the like. And isn't that lovely, they propose that they get a chunk of other peoples' money to play with.

The other problem is that they've entirely misunderstood the economics of what is happening here:

He argues that the UK newspaper industry is undergoing an existential crisis. Revenues are declining. Titles are being closed. Editorial staffs are being cut back. The result is that public interest journalism is endangered.

By contrast, online media giants such as Google and Facebook, which take newsfeeds from newspapers, are making huge profits.

In the UK alone, he writes, Google generated more than £7bn of revenues in 2015 while, in 2014, Facebook registered £105m in revenues. Much of this income came from advertisers that once supported news publishers.

Schlosberg contends that a portion of those revenues could be used to build a fund in order to help Britain’s ailing journalism industry.

He said: “Google gains traffic by using stories generated by the media but it pays nothing for the articles. At first glance this seems okay because readers can clearly see the story source, but for journalism and the media industry this is proving harmful.

We should note that Google News doesn't actually carry any advertising. So what revenue?

But there's more to this ignorance. One of us earns the daily crust in exactly this industry. Producing electronic journalism for the modern audience. And we positively lust after being mentioned in Google News: a prominent placement of a headline there will bring 50,000 readers to a piece: more than the daily circulation of a local newspaper. Something going mildly viral on Facebook will being 500,000 readers to a piece: more than the daily circulation of a many a national newspaper. And crucially, it is not Facebook nor Google which sells the advertisements that those readers see: it is the publication which is hosting the article.

That is, both Facebook and Google are driving money to the publications, not extracting from nor displacing revenue. Which is, of course, why absolutely every news outlet on the planet now trains its journalists how to write copy that is likely to be picked up by Google News and has the potential to go viral on Facebook.

The electronic aggregators drive revenue to the newspapers, not deprive them of it. So why on Earth should the be charged for the privilege of doing so?

We even know what would happen if the attempt was made. In Germany the law became that a publisher could charge Google News a copyright fee for inclusion. Google said charge us and we won't include you: all the publishers agreed that gaining the traffic was worth it to them and thus they do not charge. In Spain the option was removed: Google must pay. Google closed the service leaving the publishers most miffed.

We like think tanks, we are one in fact. But we do think the emphasis should be on the think part there.

Why it matters what entrepreneurs think about Brexit

Campaigners for Remain and Leave are keen to ally themselves with entrepreneurs. And the media regularly and willingly reports what individuals and groups of entrepreneurs think about the EU Referendum. But should we value their views above the general population?  

I think we should. After all, entrepreneurial companies often produce higher quality innovations, are more efficient and generate a disproportionate share of employment and productivity growth. To a greater extent than most of the population, entrepreneurs are more tuned into the factors that will impact Britain’s future economic success. Afte rall, they also have more skin in the game. If you were to build a scale of people whose views on the EU Referendum deserves to be listened to most, entrepreneurs would be near the top. What public sector workers approaching retirement think about the EU Referendum has less to tell us about what’s good for society than what entrepreneurs think.

So, what do entrepreneurs think about the EU Referendum? Headlines have been made by a few high-profile statements by individual or groups of entrepreneurs, but these – because of the relatively low numbers – should be dismissed. On the level of the individual, two entrepreneurs can have diametrically opposite views. And it’s easy enough to bring together a group of entrepreneurs who are principally motivated by ideal like sovereignty or the European ideal – even ahead of the success of their business. These motivations are legitimate but not unique to entrepreneurs and so not special.

Surveys offer the greater insight. And in survey after survey entrepreneurs are decidedly split on the benefits of leaving the EU. In most surveys, entrepreneurs running large businesses tend to be more favorable to the EU than smaller businesses. Should we take them more seriously? After all, they are self-evidently more successful. Perhaps, but working against this is the fact that entrepreneurs running large businesses are more likely to have the characteristics of managers as opposed to entrepreneurs. This suggests that the pros and cons of Brexit for entrepreneurs – and so for society at large – are more balanced than many on the extremes of the debate would have you believe.

The Entrepreneurs Network is running an event on 16th June with Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, Raoul Ruparel, Co-Director of Open Europe, Allie Renison of the Institute of Directors and Roland Smith, Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute – all of whose opinions we should value very highly. (Perhaps even more than entrepreneur.)

Stop saying 'virtue signalling'

It has become popular to describe certain behaviour as ‘virtue signalling’. By this people mean, in the words of James Bartholemew (who helped to popularize the term, and who I like very much in every other respect), writing or saying things 'to indicate that they are virtuous'. As popular as it is, it’s a stupid term that misuses the concepts it invokes, it encourages lazy thinking, and it’s hypocritical.

The term signalling does not mean the same thing as 'saying' or 'showing off' when it is used by economists or biologists. Signalling means credibly giving information that is difficult to prove just by saying it. For example, banks used to have very grand buildings. Any bank could claim to be safe, but only a bank that had lots of money could afford a grand office.

Education is a classic example of signalling. It’s difficult to show to a potential employer that you’re smart and hard working, but only smart and hard working people can get a good university degree (in theory). Good university degrees might be partially about signalling ability to potential employers.

That’s what signalling is. It’s a very useful concept. It means exactly the opposite of what virtue signalling means – it’s credible and honest. The whole point of virtue signalling is that it’s disingenuous and cheap. A better term would be ‘showing off’. How many times where the term virtue signalling has been used would ‘showing off’ not have just as accurately sufficed? It’s not exactly a novel concept.

For something to actually be virtue signalling, rather than just showing off, it would need some sort of sacrifice, like a sacrifice of knowledge by pretending some obvious falsehood is true.

The other problem with the term is that it assumes your opponents are disingenuous. This is of course very common but it is probably the single worst thing about political debate.

It comes from an underlying assumption that the world is straightforward and your views are obviously correct. To many people it’s obvious that letting Syrian refugees in to Britain is a bad idea, because if even a few of them are terrorists we’re endangering our own people's lives. The people who ignore this are most likely trying to show off how much they care and what good people they are – hence virtue signalling.

To many people it’s obvious that welfare cuts are cruel and unnecessary, and indeed hold back the recovery by taking money out of the economy. If you support those cuts you’re putting ideology ahead of real people, and that makes you a heartless scumbag.

But it’s possible to disagree honestly and sincerely about complicated questions with lots of different moving parts. In a world as complex as we libertarians say it is, it would be astonishing if the truth was obvious about almost any contentious policy issue. Disagreeing with me and being a bit right-on does not mean you are disingenuous. Voting Labour while not spending your life doing volunteer work doesn’t either, nor does being a libertarian but not signing up to join an anarcho-capitalist seastead.

Giving money to wasteful charities might count as virtue signalling, but only if you know that the charities are wasteful. I suspect most virtue signalling accusers assume that it’s obvious that groups like Fairtrade are wasteful or harmful. In fact it probably doesn’t even cross most people’s minds that that might be the case.

Accusing others of virtue signalling encourages you to not interrogate your own beliefs. If you think people only disagree with you because they’re trying to show off how nice they are to their mates, why would you even consider that what’s obvious to you might actually be wrong? As well as being rude and stupid, virtue signalling gives people another mental shortcut to dogmatism.

Finally, saying virtue signalling is hypocritical. It’s often used to try to show that the accuser is above virtue signalling and that their own arguments really are sincere. Of course, this is really just another example of virtue signalling!

Dismissing other people’s false beliefs as virtue signalling means you won’t consider them properly and means they have every right to do the same to your beliefs, which as far as they’re concerned are also obviously false. Sometimes beliefs are honestly, sincerely held, however stupid they seem to you, and if there’s any value to debate at all it requires that we at least consider the possibility that we might be the stupid ones.

At best, virtue signalling is a pretentious way of saying 'showing off'. At worst, it is mental armour against self-doubt. People should stop saying it.

Cannabis is a consumer product – that's how it should be regulated

I spoke at an event, "Regulate: But How?" last night held by VolteFace, a new magazine that is working to bring a bit of sanity to the drugs debate and hopefully in doing so militate for drug reform. The theme of the event was what the key regulatory considerations ought to be if and when we do legalise cannabis. Here are my opening remarks:

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Ladies and Gentlemen:

Harm reduction is an important goal but it cannot be our only consideration if cannabis regulation is to be a success. 

Most cannabis users smoke not because they are addicted but to have fun. If our regulatory framework does not put this insight at the heart of its structure it will fail to deliver the benefits that legalisers promise, and further drug reforms will be hindered. 

It is crucial that cannabis is regulated according to what it is: a low-harm consumer product that most users enjoy without major problems.

Where this hasn’t been done legalization has had, at best, mixed success. Colorado has seen improvements but high taxes and regulations, and a fundamental aversion to anything that might actually increase the user base has held that back. 

So don’t just legalise it to better stamp it out in the long run, like many people wish to do with tobacco. Accept it as a normal part of the lives of the people who choose to use it, as we do with alcohol.

The lighter our regulation, the more scope there is for business to improve the quality and delivery of the product. Once we accept that using cannabis is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, our phobia of letting capitalism in should fade away.

Of course kind of approach would seem anathema to those people for whom even very limited legalization is a hard sell. But this largely misses why people object to cannabis.

Public use is most people’s biggest concern by far. A Pew poll last year found that while 62% of Americans said they’d object to people using marijuana in public if it was legal, only 15% would object to people using it in their own homes. Even among people who oppose legalization, a majority say they would not object to people using it in their own homes. 

This point, I think, militates against the model recently proposed by the Lib Dems for cooperatively-run high street shops to be the primary vendors for cannabis in the UK. 

We don’t want to be accused of turning the UK into a gigantic Amsterdam-style red light district; and we certainly don’t want to make it more convenient for people to smoke on the street than it is for them to smoke in their own homes.

Indeed this model does not appear to be particularly commercially viable either, and when we consider the power that local government planning committees wield over places like this it should be fairly obvious that this is a non-starter, at least as the dominant way for people to buy cannabis.

When I need to buy electronics, books, a takeaway, or indeed legal drugs, I go online. Just today I had a new phone battery delivered via Amazon Prime, less than 24 hours after I ordered it. 

Online shopping allows for greater competition and economies of scale, which reduce costs and offer greater accountability because reputation matters so much.

Indeed there is already a large and relatively healthy marketplace for illegal drugs, albeit one that suffers from unreliability and risks precisely because of government prohibition.    

I suggest that online sales and delivery seem to be the most viable way of making cannabis accessible to those who want it. 

And that is an accessibility that steers people towards using it in their own homes. Indeed it might be most politically saleable for us to continue to outlaw street consumption and, of course, sales, and presume that creating a safe legal alternative will drive most people into the privacy of their own homes, or their friend’s.

But apart from these restrictions on the hard issues of where people can buy and use cannabis we should favour as much free-wheeling capitalism as possible. Plain packaging, price controls, advertising bans, restrictions on preparations and dosage – all these things continue to treat cannabis and cannabis users as the enemy, and will dull the effectiveness of legalisation.

In many respects cannabis will be seen as the test case for further drug reform, so it’s crucial that we get this one right. Red lines where they matter and where people actually care, but not the medicalization in all but name that many well meaning campaigners want. The object isn’t harm elimination, it’s not even harm reduction alone, it’s utility maximization. 

This problem is too important not to leave to the market. 

Child Benefits and Immigration

I am not sure why we are paying parents more than £712 p.a. per extra child when they have two already.  When the population is shrinking, encouraging the birthrate makes sense but when the population is expanding as fast as it is in the UK and we have pressures on schools, housing, roads, trains and the NHS, to name but five, why are we doing this to ourselves?
 
Most of UK population growth is due to children born here rather than net migration from within or beyond the EU.  Yet we are besotted with the migration issue which might even determine the outcome of the EU referendum.  What would be the ideal population size for the UK?  And how should we achieve that?
 
It is not as though destiny forces these extra children on parents who therefore need our help.  They have a choice in the matter and there is no shortage of products to assist them.  They decide to have extra children to please themselves, no matter how much they burden, and even annoy, the rest of us.  Any grandparent knows that, whilst one’s own grandchildren are wonderful, everyone else’s are dreadful and the world would be a better place without them.
 
Limiting the number of children per family receiving state benefit is not a new idea.  When the French did it, it proved too successful and they had to revert. The UK growth is too fast for that to be a problem here.
 
No doubt the loony left will tell the rest of us that large families have a “right” to child benefits for all, that it is a fair and necessary transfer from wealthy families, typically with few children, to the poor.  But children typically cost more than £13.70 a week to rear so actually large families make themselves poorer, especially when there is only one working parent.
 
Part of the reason for large families is cultural and imported with the parents or grandparents.  For most people in the world, notably India and Pakistan, children are their pensions.  But we have adequate pension provisions in this country and there is no need also to pay for these extra children.  And there are plenty of reasons why the Chancellor should stop doing so.

Counterfactuals matter

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has a really great post on car safety in India, which illustrates a major problem with attempts by government to protect consumers by regulating unsafe products out of existence.

According to the Global New Car Assessment Program, 5 out of 7 new cars made for the Indian market lacked airbags and would fail basic UN crash tests. Tabarrok quotes Global NCAP Secretary General David Ward "Global NCAP strongly believes that no manufacturer anywhere in the world should be developing new models that are so clearly sub-standard".

But demonstrating that a product is unsafe is not sufficient to show that regulating it would make people safer. As Tabarrok shows, counterfactuals matter:

Let’s take a closer look. These cars are very inexpensive. A Renault Kwid, for example, can be had for under $4000. In the Indian market these cars are competing against motorcycles. Only 6 percent of Indian households own a car but 47% own a motorcycle. Overall, there are more than five times as many motorcycles as cars in India.

Motorcycles are also much more dangerous than cars.

The GNCAP worries that some Indian cars don’t have airbags but forgets that no Indian motorcycles have airbags. Even a zero-star car is much safer than a motorcycle. Air bags cost about $200-$400 (somewhat older estimates here a, b, c) and are not terribly effective. (Levitt and Porter, for example, calculated that air bags saved 550 lives in 1997 compared to 15,000 lives saved by seatbelts.) At $250, airbags would increase the cost of a $5,000 car by 5%. A higher price for automobiles would reduce the number of relatively safe automobiles and increase the number of relatively dangerous motorcycles and thus an air bag requirement could result in more traffic fatalities.

Substitution effects are basic economics, but regulators often ignore the fact that consumers responding to incentives will switch to cheaper and often (less safer) alternatives.

Take the European Union's recent Tobacco Products Directive:

Cartridges and tanks of e-liquid will be limited to 2ml, a incredibly small amount, and refill containers to 10ml, completely preventing bulk-buying and outlawing the products users find most convenient. The maximum strength will be 20mg, ruling out high strength varieties that most closely approximate cigarettes.

The regulators who drafted this law hope to see the public's health improve as vapers switch to safer, lower strength E-Cigarettes, but it could very likely have the opposite effect. As E-Cigarettes, which are 95-99% safer than traditional cigarettes, become weaker and less convenient, consumers have less of an incentive to switch from tobacco to e-liquids. 

Likewise, attempts to improve public safety by banning low-risk tobacco products like Snus have backfired spectacularly.

Or take for instance, Austin, Texas. Its City Council imposed onerous regulations on private ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft with the stated aim of protecting the public from unsavoury drivers. One of the key sticking points was a finger-print background check requirement that went far beyond what was expected for standard Yellow Cabs.

Uber and Lyft responded by going Galt. They left Austin altogether. What happened next shouldn't surprise anyone. The Drive reports:

Though the city frightened voters with terrifying depictions of a plague of Uber-rape, it’s now come out that people with sexual assault convictions, and even drunk-driving arrests, are actually allowed to drive cabs in Austin, few questions asked. "If you have ever been convicted of theft at any point, you could never get a chauffeur's permit,” a city council member told a local news station. “That just seems like too much.”

Then there are the opportunists who are actually thriving. I talked to one driver who seemed to be enjoying himself in this bizarre ecosystem of random auto-barter. Because of his “local media presence and history of bartending in the city,” he immediately scored an under-the-table gig providing two to three rides a day to executives from a prominent entertainment company, as well as whatever else he could cadge up on Facebook.

Attempts by government to protect the consumer too often fail to consider the counterfactual, if policymakers and regulators took substitution effects seriously, many regulations wouldn't see the light of day.

Fighting for control of our purse strings

The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service says that a new law is needed to stop terrorists and other criminals using Bitcoin-style digital payments for illicit purposes such as money laundering.

Really? We have more than enough laws already, and a quick way to cut crime would be to scrap two-thirds of them, but that’s another story. But the thinking behind this particular proposal is clear: our authorities feel that, because of technical innovation, they are losing control of money, and want to reassert it. Hence all the dire talk to bolster this new power grab. "Shock horror: Drugs are being traded on the ‘dark web’” – that sort of thing. Of course, if drugs were legal (even if regulated, like alcohol) this would not be a problem. (Yet another story.)

But the CPS proposal is another thin-end-of-the-wedge issue. Sure, we all want a way of dispossessing scumbags who pile up secret funds to finance terrorism or to conceal gains from fraud and corruption. But should the authorities be allowed to barge into everyone’s accounts, Bitcoin or regular, as they please, or on some fishing trip, or on the allegations of someone with a grudge? No.

In the early days, many authorities wanted to close down Bitcoin and other digital payments entirely. Again, the excuse was that criminals would use them. Pardon? Since most of the world’s crime is done in regular currencies, that arguments would put the entire boards of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank in the slammer. A neat idea, but not exactly justice.

I remember decades ago, before cellphones and stuff, when Citizens Band radio came out – to the delight of long distance lorry drivers, who could not talk to friends while on the road (and warn others of police patrols). There were appeals to ban it in Parliament, on the grounds that criminals could use it to plot robberies (I’m not making this up). Well, we might as well have abolished telephones and letters (and while at it, heliograph or any other communication device). Again, it was fear of the technologically new.

The Feds say they have cracked the iPhone codes, though MI6 boffins still seem to be scratching their heads. Again, there have been demands to open up the codes so the authorities can snoop at will. Do we really think their snooping will stop at bad guys? Or will junior officials just not be able to resist prying into the text messages of a few celebs that the Sunday tabloids have interest in?

Apple was right to resist the Feds’ legal challenge, on the grounds that people’s privacy and people’s security are intimately bound up and too important to be given over to government politicians and officials. I think the same is true with money, of any kind. One of the joys of cash is that we can use it without the government keeping a track of our spending: after all, control people’s spending and you control their lives. Let’s keep it a private and secure as we possibly can.