Josiah Wedgwood, an Industrial Revolution pioneer
One of the most remarkable and successful pioneers of the Industrial Revolution was born on July 12th, 1730. Josiah Wedgwood was born into a family of non-conformist potters, and showed early talent at 9 years old. He survived a bout of smallpox, but it left his leg too weak to work a potter’s wheel, so he turned to design rather than production.
Wedgwood took the trouble to learn chemistry, so that he could understand and refine the techniques of firing and glazing and the properties of clay. He was a friend of Joseph Priestly, a fellow member of the Lunar Society. He developed several unique glazes and new types of pottery, and found popularity for his products with the top nobility, including Queen Charlotte, whose patronage he traded on.
He virtually invented modern mass-produced pottery by industrializing the industry. He used specialized division of labour to produce high quality at low cost, and sold his wares in every European city as well as to the wider world. He produced less costly versions of his top ranges, to supply the growing middle classes of England. He satisfied the new interest in the classical world by producing works based on ancient designs of vases and plates.
Wedgwood is credited with inventing modern marketing, using mail order, a money back guarantee, and travelling salesmen. He even pioneered “buy one, get one free” and free delivery. Like many of his fellows leading the Industrial Revolution, he keenly promoted the idea of improvement, and of a commitment to making the world a better place. He was an avid campaigner for the abolition of slavery.
It was this notion that humanity could improve itself and that the world could become a better place that was a spur driving the Industrial Revolution. Instead of being content to live fulfilled lives, as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had sought to do, humanity embarked upon that upward curve that we have never left. The Industrial Revolution applied creative technology to doing things better and making things affordable to the masses that had previously been the prerogative of the well-to-do.
We are still living in that world, with creative intellects seeking every day to make it better. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are the spiritual heirs of Josiah Wedgwood, developing and promoting the new products and processes that will enrich our world with new opportunities. Instead of seeking to obstruct such people, we should be encouraging them to flourish. Instead of obsessing with how to make people more equal, we should be making it easier for them to expand the choices and the chances that they make available to others. Instead of trying to cut down the tall flowers, we should be seeking to have as many flowers grow as tall as they can. Josiah Wedgwood, whom we honour on his birthday, was one of the very tall ones.
We don't agree that government is a luxury good - at this level of income
Paul Johnson, of the IFS, is here saying that government is a luxury, or superior, good:
Even so, with political will we could, if we wanted, raise the level of tax closer to the European average. We can afford to. One approach would be to raise taxes gradually as incomes rise — slowly enough that people are left with more money in their pockets than before, and quickly enough that the state’s budget rises as a fraction of national income. As we get richer not only can we spend more on public services, we can spend more as a fraction of our income on them.
Note what luxury, or superior, means here. It’s a technical term meaning “We spend more of our incomes on this as our incomes rise”. A normal good is something we spend the same portion on, an inferior less. Johnson is indicating that government is that superior good, something we can - and thus he implies should - spend more of our income on as incomes rise.
We disagree.
A further technical point being that pretty much everything is an inferior, normal or superior good at some level of income. It’s all Maslow’s Hierarchy all over again, what we desire changes as we sate one such and then move on to being able to deal with the next want.
We agree entirely that at a certain level of income then government is indeed that luxury good. We don’t need to get far above mere and simple subsistence to want to pay people to keep the levels of Thugs and general dacoity down. We might well be willing to pass more of yet higher incomes through government to create that system of social insurance. But, as with everything in Maslow’s Pyramid such tastes do get sated at some point. And something will gradually switch from being a superior good to a normal and then invert to an inferior. Where, as we get yet richer again, we spend ever less of our continually rising income on it.
We would, in fact do, argue that this happened some time ago with government. We’ve already more than enough of it. And as incomes rise off into the future - technology does march on - then government should righteously shrink as a portion of GDP. We’ve got enough, we have a social safety net, we’ve got people regulating the things that need to be regulated. Thus we should be spending ever more of our growing incomes on those things which are, at this level of income, luxury or superior goods, reducing our expenditure on those inferiors.
A bit more of that freedom and liberty sounds good to us.
Another way to put this being that we’ve created that rootstock necessary for human flourishing already. Time now for a bit more of that fructifying created by more choice and less government.
Isn't this the truth
Extensive allegations about corruption in South Africa. About which one says:
Several of the Watsons’ other BEE partners became part of the country’s new political elite; there was a revolving door, in these first years of the new government, between political appointments and BEE entrepreneurs. “The minute you have a system where people make money just by the connections they have, rather than the work that they do, the system is ripe for abuse,” says the political economist Moeletsi Mbeki, long a staunch critic of BEE. “It’s a recipe for corruption.”
Quite so, this is true of systems that allocate economic activity, ownership, legal privilege, on the accidents of social position, the school tie network, race, political party membership and so on. All systems have been used at times and all do spiral into that network of corruption. Some worse than others of course but the direction of travel is always the same.
This being a great merit of markets and simple, pure, cash. If people are able to do whatever it is better than the competition - competition which is free of legal constraint from actually competing - then they should be the people doing that thing. Getting the best results does indeed mean that the economy is going as well as it can given technological constraints.
Further, a market economy has its own feedback mechanism. Those who aren’t the best succumb to that competition and are removed from the economic fray.
Another way to put this being that if politicians don’t have the power to choose favourites then we consumers aren’t subject to the inefficiencies and inadequacies of political favourites. Whether that’s a Duke with a Royal Monopoly or the man the President shared a trench with gaining some favour.
If economic privilege is allocated on anything other than efficiency then the inefficient will gain such privilege to the impoverishment of everyone else. This isn’t a good way to run a society.
Legalising cannabis would make our country safer for everyone
It is less than three years since the Adam Smith Institute and Volteface jointly published The Tide Effect, making the argument that the UK should follow the path set down by its Atlantic cousins in taking steps to legalise cannabis. Since then, there has been a tectonic shift in public opinion on the issue. As of October 2018, support among Brits for the legalisation of the sale and possession of cannabis had leapt to nearly six in ten of all Brits, and over two thirds of those between those aged 18 to 24.
This week, the Adam Smith Institute joined forces with Volteface once again on a new paper, entitled The Green Light: How legalising and regulating cannabis will reduce crime, protect children and improve safety. As featured by the Evening Standard, the paper outlines in detail the compelling and growing body of evidence in favour of cannabis legalisation and sets out a series of policy proposals to guide a pro-cannabis government initiative, with reference to existing systems in Canada, Uruguay and the ten US states who have already legalised.
The resounding conclusion from the available evidence is that cannabis legalisation in the UK would be a wholly positive move. Regulation and taxation would reduce underage usage and increase revenue. Staggered taxes would also allow for a passive crackdown on higher potency, potentially more dangerous strains of cannabis, making it safer for everyone. Perhaps most pertinently of all, the report finds that the presence of a robust legal cannabis market would bring about a substantial reduction in criminal violence.
The entire British cannabis sector has been pushed underground by prohibition, which means its illegal profits tend to finance all manner of violent crime. A University College London study estimated the size of the existing illicit cannabis market at around £3 billion, the vast majority of which is likely to feed directly back into criminal activity of various kinds.
Legalisation would reduce significantly the funds criminals are able to draw from cannabis trade. In Colorado, the black market for cannabis had shrunk by over two thirds just five years after its legalisation. Comparable levels of success are easily attainable in the UK, if the government takes a similar route to legalisation. There is no good reason to continue allowing billions in illicit profits to swill around in criminal circles.
In addition to interrupting illegal income streams, cannabis legalisation has been shown to directly affect rates of various violent crimes. A 2013 study conducted by Norwegian academics in US states in which cannabis has been legalised found a strong correlation between the liberalisation of cannabis legislation and reductions in violent crime. This was especially true of homicides, assaults and robberies, with researchers able to draw causal links between the rapidly diminishing illegal drug market and these kinds of violent criminal activity. Those findings have since been corroborated by another study, this time from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in 2017.
By following the Six Point Plan laid out in the Adam Smith Institute’s latest paper, the government can replicate those outcomes here in the UK. This policy is not a stab in the dark; these outcomes are not hypothetical guesswork. Since the British government would be far from the first to legalise cannabis, we can rest assured that major unforeseen catastrophes are unlikely to spring up in the immediate aftermath of the implementation of this policy.
Legalising cannabis is a common-sense decision. Politicians from across the political spectrum have coalesced behind calls for reform to our antiquated drug laws; from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats to the Green Party, the number of people who see the harm that the current system of prohibition is inflicting on some of the most vulnerable within our society is growing at an unprecedented rate. Now is the time to act.
When China trades with the world
On July 11th, 1405, an immense armada of Chinese sailing ships set sail from Suzhou under the command of Admiral Zheng He, at the behest of Zhu Di, the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty. There were 317 ships in the fleet, carrying about 28,000 crewmen. Over 60 of the ships were large, roughly 500 feet long, versus the more common Chinese ships of 100-foot length. It was to be the first of seven such voyages into the Indian Ocean by Zheng He, visiting Southeast Asia, Thailand, Arabia and the Middle East, India and the Horn of Africa.
The purpose was trade and exploration, and to assert a Chinese presence. They took gold, silver, porcelain and, of course, silk. They brought back exotic animals such as ostriches, zebras and camels, as well as ivory. There was also a giraffe, which was thought to be a qilin, the mythical Chinese unicorn thought to be symbolic of prosperity and good fortune. This showed heaven's favour on the expedition and the rulers who commissioned it.
It was by no means China's first trading foray. They had sold silk for thousands of years, and the Silk Road was well established about 200 BC when the Han dynasty began. One route went South to India, and other went North through Uzbekistan to the Persian Empire. It carried silk, tea and porcelain, bringing back horses, carpets, glass and precious metals.
Even Zheng He's route had been blazed by merchants and diplomats of the Tang dynasty (618-907) and the Song dynasty (960-1279), who traded to Malaya, India and Sri Lanka, and the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Ethiopia and Egypt. Kublai Khan (1260-1294) supported the Silk Road by a postal system, infrastructure, and loans to finance caravans.
Seen in this light, China's new Belt and Road Initiative is a re-establishment of the international trading network that previous Chinese rulers had encouraged. It is strangely named, because the 'Belt' part is the overland routes for road and rail, and the 'Road' part refers to the sea routes. Together they constitute a new Silk Road, perhaps the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken, one that will take years to complete. To facilitate it will be massive construction, including road and railway, a power grid, and intermediate facilities.
It shows that China is determined to re-establish a trading route that will see widespread trade with the world. President Trump might back protectionist policies with tariffs that make Americans pay more for their imported goods, but China is committing itself to the international trade that will enrich its citizens. They know that the future is not self-sufficiency, but specialization, by which people become richer by buying from those who can produce more cheaply, thus leaving them with more to spend on other things.
China's past saw a great trading nation that exchanged goods with distant parts of the world. It is determined that China's future will capture that spirit, and is taking the steps that will facilitate it. This is to be applauded. It will make for a more interconnected world, and as Bastiat observed, when nations send goods across frontiers, they rarely send armies. Trade deals involve negotiation rather than warfare, and negotiated deals don't kill people; they enrich them.
Technology will save us
A standard environmental insistence is that we can’t use the “technology will save us” argument. There is, according to the insisters, always something, some hard limit somewhere, which will prevent us from being able to innovate our way out of whatever problem it is we face. Therefore government control, bans, rationing, must be implemented.
We, as with Julian Simon, are entirely happy to agree that there really are hard limits. But they’re so far away as to be an irrelevance for human conduct. An example today:
A device that can produce electricity from sunlight while simultaneously purifying water has been produced by researchers, an invention they say could solve two problems in one stroke.
The researchers say the device is not only a source of green energy but also offers an alternative to current technologies for purifying water. These, they add, often consume large amounts of electricity and require infrastructure beyond the reach of many communities that lack basic access to safe drinking water – a situation thought to affect more than 780 million people worldwide.
This is not, as nothing is, an entire and complete solution to everything. That “as nothing is” being why planning doesn’t solve all our problems. Because what is needed is those small and partial solutions to parts of our total problem. Nibbling away at the edges rather than trying to leap for the one true root reform.
On the top is a horizontal commercial silicon solar cell and beneath this are several tiers through which saline, brackish or contaminated surface water is run. Waste heat from the solar cell warms the saline water passing immediately beneath it – the water evaporates, passes through a membrane and condenses to yield clean water, releasing heat in the process that warms the saline water in the tier below that – the process is then repeated for the next tier. The purified water flows out of the device and is collected.
There is nothing there that is conceptually difficult. There is indeed waste heat from solar cells. Why not use to evaporate and thereby purify water? The engineering might be a little tricky - attention would need to be paid to how the wastes are discharged and whether the piping will fur up etc - but it’s not as if we’ve got to spend another 50 years getting fusion right.
Every little step forward like this does keep telling us that technology will indeed save us. For the planet’s not exactly short of either sunlight or dirty water now, is it?
The bubble and the beltway
Although people like to point to the differences between the UK and the US, there are similarities that might derive in part from a common background of sharing a vibrant democracy and a tradition of common law derived from case law and the common sense of juries.
In most of continental Europe a ten percent shift in popular opinion might result in a junior agriculture minister being replaced by someone from a different coalition party. In the UK it normally sees a removal van pulling into Downing Street next day, and in the US it results in a new President and thousands of new jobs to staff the new administration.
Another recent similarity has been the separation of much of the political class from the lives and concerns of ordinary people in both the UK and the US. In Britain we talk of the Westminster Bubble, the artificial environment centred around Parliament and government and some of the media. They parrot politically correct speech to each other and share the fashionable concerns that most of the country do not see as relevant to their lives. The world of the Guardian, the BBC, and the senior ranks of the civil service, seem to regard those who do not share their world view as ignorant yokels who simply don’t understand what it best for them. Of course they were for remaining in the European Union, unconcerned about its lack of democratic accountability because they think that bureaucrats are better fitted to govern than those answerable to uninformed and vulgar popular opinion.
In the US a similar pattern of mindset is dubbed the beltway, a ring road surrounding Washington DC that roughly corresponds to the M25 that surrounds the British capital. Within the beltway is a hothouse of concerned opinion that does not resonate with ordinary Americans and their problems. Of course it is more than DC. It is the New York Times as well as the Washington Post, and it includes the coasties of California and the Northeast as well as the mainstream media channels whose bias is so pervasive that its broadcasters don’t even think of it as bias. They regard it simply as sensible received opinion, as do their British counterparts. And in both countries it includes most of those in the hothouse of an academe that no longer even sees the real world, let alone concerning itself with its problems.
When the British people voted to leave the EU, and the Americans elected Donald Trump, both bubble and beltway went into terminal shock, unable to believe the stupidity of their respective countrymen and women. Rather than accept those democratic decisions, part of the political élites of both countries have been trying to reverse them. In the UK they have been using every trick in the book to keep Britain in the European bureaucracy it voted out of. In the US they have tried to undermine the legitimacy of the election, claiming it was Russian interference that swayed it, and seeking to unseat the President by impeachment.
Some part of this divorce of the political class from ordinary people in Britain and America is down to the echo chamber effect, in which they talk to each other and regard the fashionable view as the sensible one, and have no respect at all for alternative opinions. Some part is down to the way that social media allows those who resent the political élite and its patronizing ways to realize that there are many others who share their view, and it emboldens them to express it at the ballot box.
There is one thought that probably terrifies both bubble and beltway. It is that this might not be some brief and unpleasant blip, as the monster of popular opinion temporarily rears its ugly head. It might be that this is the way things are going to be in the future. It might be the new reality. Oh dear. That might even be worse than when the postwar consensus was overthrown.
When Yeltsin's presidency saved Russia
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the liberation by their peoples of the communist puppet states of Eastern and Central Europe, Boris Yeltsin made a political comeback with his election on July 10th, 1991, to become President of the Russian Federation. He became the first elected leader in Russia's 1,000-year history. He had previously distanced himself from Gorbachev, thinking his reforms too slow and timid. He had become a hugely popular figure in 1987, when he'd been the first person ever to resign in protest from the Communist party's Politburo.
Yeltsin was the focus for a popular revolt in August 1991, when hardline Communists in the Kremlin who had opposed Gorbachev's reforms staged a coup to restore the USSR. Gorbachev was arrested on his Crimea holiday, and the hardliners set about crushing resistance in Moscow. Yeltsin stepped out of the White House, Russia's Parliament building, and climbed up onto a tank surrounded by crowds who had gathered to protect the Parliament from the crackdown. Yeltsin declared the coup illegal, and called on troops not to accept its authority. Unable to rely on the loyalty of the military, the coup folded, and Gorbachev was released to return to Moscow.
Yeltsin dismantled the Communist Party and negotiated independence for the Soviet republics, which now became independent states. Once free to implement reforms in Russia, Yeltsin ended most price controls, privatized many state operations, legalized private property, and oversaw the establishment of a stock exchange and private banks. He allowed greater press freedom, and public criticism, and opened Russia to Western popular culture.
His rule was not regarded as successful, however, in that the country descended into chaos as the Communist system lost its authority before there were viable institutions to take its place. There was corruption, lawlessness, a failing economy, reduced industrial output and falling life expectancy. Yeltsin himself was a heavy drinker, sometimes appearing in public seemingly inebriated. He was in poor health, having a quintuple heart bypass soon after his 1996 re-election as President. Russia defaulted on its treasury bills when the rouble collapsed in 1998, and on the final day of the 20th Century, he resigned and handed over to Vladimir Putin.
His experiences illustrate that when a bad regime has to be replaced, as that of Saddam Hussein did in Iraq, those doing that transition need to keep a firm grip on power until the changeover has embedded itself. The Western powers did this successfully in postwar Germany, but failed to do so in post-invasion Iraq. Many idealistic Westerners fondly supposed that after Arab Spring had overthrown their dictatorships, the Arab countries would become benign liberal democracies. It did not happen. Both democracy and the liberalism it is there to protect need institutions such as respect for the rule of law and private property, and some history of living with them.
As for Yeltsin, that moment when he stepped up onto a tank was his defining moment, and earned forgiveness for everything he did afterwards. Those who say that history is only made by impersonal and great forces, might take stock of the occasions on which a single individual has taken a stand that has changed events.
Markets are nice, sure, but what do people really want?
A certain amount of crowing here:
Backlash against self-service checkouts bring revival for traditional markets, as report shows huge boom
Isn’t that great? Humans, as social animals, like to be social?
The latest research shows that markets are soaring in popularity all around Britain as people turn their backs on soulless High Street shops and try to connect with their community.
How excellent.
Market traders across the UK enjoyed a collective turnover of £3.1 billion last year and sales have soared £200 million on average each year since 2012, according to trade body Mission for Markets.
That’s around 6% growth in that past year then.
New data from the Office for National Statistics shows online sales rose by 15.3 per cent over the past year and now make up a record high of 18.2 per cent of all retail sales.
Oh, it appears that the even more soulsuckingly impersonal online shopping is preferred to those communal market experiences. That original contention, that we’re all crying out for more human interaction, might not be true then.
Reality being that of course some people do and many people don’t. This being a problem solved only by markets in the wider sense. Allow those retailing to experiment, see who turns up where and let them get on with it. It is only by leaving be and seeing that we can find out what it is that the consumer actually desires. Laissez faire isn’t the answer to every thing but it most certainly is to some.
Of the £50 million invested by market operators in 2017-18, £37 million came from seven local authorities investing in their traditional retail markets
Ah, sorry, we misunderstood. Rather than hoping to inform us of these exciting retail trends Mission for Markets is trying to cook up figures to justify more of our, taxpayer, money being spent on building their business infrastructure. To which the correct answer is, if there’s such a clamour for that market experience then presumably there’s the private capital willing to invest to profit from it? After all, that’s how the competition, the supermarkets and the internet, are paid for, isn’t it?
One of conservatism's founding fathers
Edmund Burke died on July 9th, 1797, having spent nearly three decades in Parliament, and laying down in his writings and speeches what became the philosophical foundations of conservatism.
Part of that philosophy emerged in his different responses to two different revolutions. When the American colonists began to rebel against what they saw as an irksome rule by a distant Britain, Burke was generally supportive of them because they were seeking to preserve the traditional rights of Englishmen against new encroachments. “They augur misgovernment at a distance,” he reported, “and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”
Burke made speeches in Parliament opposing new taxes on the colonists and urging restraint and compromise in dealing with them. The British constitution had evolved naturally over centuries, and incorporated accumulated wisdom built up over many generations. Burke thought the Americans were trying to hold on to that constitution and the rights enshrined within it. He regarded them as brothers and sisters united by blood and heritage, and hoped that if they secured their independence, they would opt to work in close union with their mother country.
When the French Revolution took place, Burke’s initial sympathy vanished within weeks into outright hostility. This was not a conservative revolution staged to retain traditional values, but an outright rejection of those values in the name of abstract ideas about what their rights ought to be. He thought the French had discarded “the yoke of law and morals.” He contrasted the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, which he described as “an adjustment” of the constitution, with the French destruction not only of their constitution, but the religion and the culture that bound them to each other as a society. They had instead descended into anarchy, he said.
His “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) was an instant best-seller, going through several editions in its first year alone. There was at the time a general optimism in England about what the French might achieve by shaking off their feudal past, and Burke alienated many of his Whig friends, including Charles James Fox, by publishing so extreme a condemnation. People in general were optimistic about France, but Burke was not, and events proved him right.
He became the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro-French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox. Burke's former friendship with Fox never recovered.
A part of Burke's case was that society stores up in its customs and traditions the accumulated wisdom of previous generations, the practices that have been found to work and to be conducive to a fulfilled life. Of course change happens, but it should take place naturally and organically, by evolution, not revolution.
Hayek echoed this in his account of the three sources of human values. Those we acquire biologically and those we think up in our minds are trivial compared to those we receive culturally from society. Burke put it succinctly:
“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.”
Rather than mocking custom and discarding it as outdated, Burke thought we should try to discern what it is about customary ways that have caused them to be retained.
“Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.”
The philosophical basis of Conservatism is not simply wanting to keep things the same. It is wanting change to be spontaneous: evolution not revolution, and based on the tried and tested, rather than on the novel. This is one reason why it has lasted.