The wall that imprisoned half a city
The Berlin Wall built by the East German government in 1961 finally came down on November 9th, 1989, thirty years ago. It was erected to stop the exodus of people voting with their feet to leave what was called the German Democratic Republic, though in fact the GDR was neither German, nor democratic, nor indeed was it a republic. People fled the repression and deprivation of the Communist state to enjoy the freedom and prosperity of the West, and the wall was built to stop them from doing so.
With a Corbynesque contempt for the truth, the Communist authorities called it “the anti-fascist wall,” claiming that its purpose was to prevent fascists coming into East Germany. In fact the traffic was from East to West as the people imprisoned under Communism sought to gain their freedom. East German border guards shot to kill anyone caught trying to escape, and hundreds died during the wall’s lifetime.
The only people moving in the other direction seem to have been the Baader–Meinhof Gang, otherwise known as the Red Army Faction. After committing murders and bombings in West Germany, they were occasionally given refuge in the East by the Communist authorities before returning to the West for their next atrocity.
The other group who went East were a few enterprising young West Germans who dug tunnels under the wall to rescue friends and relatives still trapped in the East. The most successful was Joachim Neumann, who had fled from East Germany a few years earlier using a passport borrowed from a Swiss student. With a few friends he planned a tunnel to rescue his girlfriend. It took them five months of back-breaking work underground in dirty conditions, but they managed it. During the two days the tunnel was in operation, they managed to smuggle out 57 people, including his girlfriend, and other friends and family. The tunnel came to be known as "Tunnel 57" after the number who crawled to safety through it. The GDR Stasi finally cottoned on using ultrasound equipment and closed it down.
When the wall finally came down, it was due to a mistake. The Communist Party head in East Berlin was handed a note at a press conference and mistakenly announced that East Berliners were free to travel West. He was asked "When?" and replied that as far as he knew, it was effective immediately. A crowd of East Germans gathered at the Wall gateway, far outnumbering the guards, none of whom took the authority to use lethal force. Young Germans from East and West climbed the wall to join each other on top of it, and people began to dismantle it with pickaxes. East Berliners flooded West to be greeted with money and food from their Western counterparts.
I was watching the end of a BBC Newsnight special from Berlin when a cameraman walked into the studio live on air and dropped a lump of concrete on the table. The astonished presenter asked, "What is this; what's going on?" The cameraman replied, "It's the wall. They're taking it down."
It was a great day, symbolizing the liberation of many peoples who had endured the brutal repression of Communist regimes, and whose hitherto squalid, stunted lives, were now opened up to all the freedoms and opportunities available in the liberal democracies. It was a great day, not just for Berlin and Germany, but for the world.
Why we shouldn't get our economics from The Guardian
One of their long form pieces:
Consider the financial engineering done by such firms. Like most of the largest and most profitable multinational companies, Apple has loads of cash – around $210bn at last count – as well as plenty of debt (close to $110bn). That is because – like nearly every other large, rich company – it has parked most of its spare cash in offshore bond portfolios over the past 10 years. This is part of a Kafkaesque financial shell game that has played out since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, interest rates were lowered and central bankers flooded the economy with easy money to try to engineer a recovery. But the main beneficiaries were large companies, which issued lots of cheap debt, and used it to buy back their own shares and pay out dividends, which bolstered corporate share prices and investors, but not the real economy. The Trump corporate tax cuts added fuel to this fire. Apple, for example, was responsible for about a quarter of the $407bn in buy-backs announced in the six months or so after Trump’s tax law was passed in December 2017 – the biggest corporate tax cut in US history.
Trumps tax reforms were the solution to this particular point. In the past foreign profits that remained in foreign territories were not taxed in the US. Therefore foreign profits were treated to a tan and a rum punch on some Caribbean island. They were then used as the collateral (in a way, even if not directly) for within the US borrowings which could then be used to pay dividends, buy back stock.
The Trump tax reforms now tax those foreign profits whether they are repatriated or not. Therefore there is no point in not repatriating them so they are repatriated. It’s not necessary to borrow against them, instead they can just be paid out to shareholders.
That is, that tax reform being complained of is the solution to the very problem being complained of. We really shouldn’t be getting our economics from The Guardian. For of course it gets worse:
That is the final trend worth considering. Technology firms drive down the prices of lots of things, and tech-related deflation is a big part of what has kept interest rates so low for so long; it has not only constrained prices, but wages, too.
If we’ve got deflation in goods and services then real wages are, of course, rising, not being constrained. Managing to get the sign wrong is pretty good, don’t you think?
Really, look elsewhere than The Guardian for economics.
The failure of the Forty-five
On November 8th, 1745, the Jacobite army led by Charles Edward Stuart invaded England. It was the last time a foreign army did so - (the Nazi occupation of the Channel Isles in World War II wasn’t England). Charles Edward, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, had begun his rebellion by landing in Scotland in August and raising his standard at Glenfinnan, on the shores of Loch Shiel.
His Jacobites won the Battle of Prestonpans and captured Edinburgh. Prince Charles persuaded his Scots to march South giving assurances of the assistance of both English Jacobites and the support of a French army that would land in the South. They quickly took Carlisle, an important border fort, but manned by only 80 elderly veterans.
Many British troops were on the Continent, involved in the War of the Austrian Succession, but the Duke of Cumberland, commanding British troops in Flanders, was hastily recalled with 12,000 men. The lightly-armed Jacobite army, although small, was effective at charge attacks, but lacked heavy artillery or siege equipment for longer campaigns. They reached Manchester, the only town to add significant numbers of recruits to their cause, and then went on to reach Derby on December 4th. Preston, thought to be a centre of Jacobite support, yielded only 3 extra recruits.
At this point Prince Charles’ army was disillusioned. The expected masses of recruits had not appeared, and there was no sign of the French landing. Charles was by now regarded as duplicitous and overbearing, and he drank heavily. Cumberland was marching North from London, and General Wade was moving South from Newcastle. The Jacobite army, fearing their supply lines and escape route would be cut off, retreated Northwards.
The general view at the time was that the Hanoverian regime would not have collapsed, even if the Jacobites had reached London. The country was too committed to its liberal Parliamentary democracy to return to a monarch who claimed divine right. The final suppression of the rebellion took place at the Battle of Culloden the following April, where the Jacobites took heavy casualties. Charles was pursued through the Highlands and finally picked up by a French ship in September. He was not betrayed during this time, despite a price on his head of £15 million in today’s money. A charming story tells that he rewarded loyal followers by imparting the secret recipe for his family’s drink, the liqueur Drambuie.
Many historians regard the defeat of the ’45 as boosting the confidence of the Scots that they were to remain part of the modern world, and not plunged back into clan governance and divine kingship. This, in turn, is reckoned to have created the intellectual climate that nurtured the explosion of genius called the Scottish Enlightenment, a movement that gave us David Hume and Adam Smith, amongst others.
And yet we should be spending less on renewables each year
One of those shock, horror, reports:
Investment in greenhouse gas emission reduction fell last year despite the growing urgency of the climate crisis, and the benefits of outlays were cancelled out by investments globally in fossil fuels and other dirty industries, finds a report by the Climate Policy Initiative.
Global climate finance hit a record high of $612bn (£476bn) in 2017, according to CPI advisers, but fell back 11% after that bumper year to $546bn in 2018.
Gaia will therefore be boiled in her own salt water stock because we are not sacrificing enough to save her. Except, of course, we should be spending less on renewables each year. Because, as we keep being told, renewables are becoming cheaper. Therefore we can achieve the same amount for less sacrifice:
After nearly two decades of strong annual growth, renewables around the world added as much net capacity in 2018 as they did in 2017,
Oh, that is what is happening. The problem with this is?
Smith's library
The Econ Journal Watch have released a list of all the books owned by Adam Smith and as one of the last men said to know everything, it’s hardly surprising that there are some interesting reads in there.
Smith had a vast range of books from the free verse epic poem Paradise Lost to the far more practical Horse-hoeing husbandry. From the Econ Journal’s list, it doesn’t take much to see the sheer number of books that Smith owned. The range and quantity reflective of his wealth of sources, which of course explained his wealth of knowledge.
Being a true academic, he was able to read many languages. Smith’s range of French titles, such as Histoire de la ligue faite à Cambray or Considerations sur Considérations sur les corps organisés, only go to show the cultural strength of the Auld Alliance. Being both an intellectual and a Scotsman, the interest does not seem out of place. His possession of Institution du droit françois also reflects this fascination with France and its governance.
Smith was a man of logic and reason so his possession of various books on law and legal systems e.g. Principles of Scots law, is in keeping with his character. Indeed Smith’s interest was once again not confined to his native Britain seen by Russian code of laws or Code of Gentoo law. Certainly not a narrow focus!
Smith’s library also served as a travel diary of sorts. He collected books from people he met throughout his life such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Quesnay. Smith had Voltaire’s philosophie de l'histoire, Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise and Quesnay’s Physiocratie, among others. Smith also had books from countries further afield, such as John Bell’s Travels from St Petersburg or Peter Kalm’s Travels into North America, showing his intellectual curiosity knew no bounds.
As you would expect for an intelligent and educated man, he has a large collection of classic works in Latin and Greek (including lesser known authors such as Manilius). He has a wide range of literature and history but a comparatively tiny choice of philosophy. This lacuna is all the more surprising from philosopher and economist when you realise he did have books on philosophy such as Philosophy of rhetoric by George Campbell, just not classical philosophy.
He did have compendia of Plato’s works (e.g. Platonis Opera) but not the individual dialogues that one might have expected from someone who had such an interest in moral philosophy, dialogues which deal with ethical issues for which Plato is known. Smith’s Aristotle collection is similarly thin for a man with such a vast collection, with no works of any pre-Socratics either. His possession of the compendium does not give a particular insight into the aspect of Plato that Smith was interested in.
The Econ Journal Watch’s report offers a fascinating insight into the material that helped to shape Adam Smith.
Unsolved mysteries
There are unsolved mysteries associated with the date of November 7th. In 1872 the US merchant brigantine, Mary Celeste (usually misspelled as Marie Celeste), set sail from New York City headed for Genoa with a cargo of denatured alcohol. On December 5th, the Canadian brigantine, Dei Gratia, found her adrift and deserted off the Azores. The sails were partly set and in poor condition, but there was no sign of anyone one board. Her lifeboat was missing, but her cargo was intact, and the personal effects of the captain and crew were undisturbed. The last entry in her log had been made ten days earlier.
The ship’s papers and navigation instruments were missing, but galley materials were tidily stowed. Despite popular later myth, there was no sign of food prepared or in preparation, but there were ample supplies. There was no sign of fire or violence. The signs pointed to an orderly departure by the captain and crew in the missing lifeboat, but no-one on that fateful ship was ever seen again. The ship itself was towed as salvage, sold and renamed, and saw more service before it was finally deliberately sunk off the Irish coast in an insurance fraud. But the fate of her missing crew has remained a mystery ever since.
Another unsolved mystery began on November 7th, 1974, with the disappearance of Lord Lucan. After his marriage broke up, he moved from the house in Lower Belgrave Street to a house nearby. He lost a custody battle for his three children, and had incurred large gambling losses.
On the fateful evening, the children’s nanny was found battered to death in the basement, and Lady Lucan had been attacked, she reported, by her estranged husband. Lucan himself phoned his mother to ask her to pick up his children, then drove to a friend’s house in East Sussex. He then disappeared. The car was found abandoned at the ferry port of Newhaven. There were bloodstains inside it, and a piece of bandaged lead pipe like the one used in the attack.
A warrant was issued for his arrest, but Lucan has never been found. There were reports of sightings in several countries, one of which led to the arrest in Australia of the British MP, John Stonehouse, who had faked his own death to escape a fraud trial. Detectives thought they had found Lord Lucan rather than another fugitive.
But Lucan’s whereabouts remained a mystery. One theory was that he might have committed suicide by jumping overboard from a mid-channel ferry, but there was no evidence to support this other than his continued absence. He was legally presumed dead in 1992, and officially declared dead in 1999. A death certificate was issued in 2016, in the absence of any evidence that he was alive. But there was no evidence of his death, either.
There is another unsolved mystery, one that concerns the UK in the 1970s. It was a naff decade, characterized by constant strikes and union bullying. The government spent money it did not have, and inflation soared. There were periodic shortages of basic items such as toilet paper and sugar. Public services deteriorated to a low level of quality and reliability. The Prime Minister had to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund to prevent the country going bankrupt. Extremists took over several local councils. The top rate of income tax was 83 percent, with a punitive extra 15 percent to take it to 98 percent on anyone foolish enough to invest in Britain.
The unsolved mystery is why anyone in their right mind today would want to see a return to those days.
We look forward to Danny Dorling's next article on inequality and mortality
Danny Dorling has been prominent among those blaming the recent rise in UK mortality upon, variously, inequality and Brexit. This is, as we all know, proper peer reviewed science from a man eminent in his field.
The CMI’s latest quarterly figures also show that the cumulative improvement in mortality rates recorded so far in 2019 is higher than it has been for the previous 10 years.
Based on data from the Office for National Statistics, the CMI forecasts an annual improvement of 4.9% if the last quarter of this year corresponds with the final three months of 2018.
This comes after a decade of slowing mortality progress, with life expectancy increases since 2011 considerably lower than in the earlier part of this century.
Conor O’Reilly, head of analytics at Club Vita, said that it is now looking “increasingly likely” that 2019 will see the lowest deaths total recorded since 2014.
We look forward to the explanations of how inequality has suddenly reversed, or Brexit uncertainty has become less of an issue. For of course such a change in mortality will gain the same attention as the previous one, won’t it? And be ascribed to the same causes?
When Bolsheviks destroyed parliamentary rule
They called it the October Revolution because in the pre-calendar-change style it was October 24-25, 1917, but the actual dates, post-change, are November 6-7. Many Communist sympathizers like to imply that the Bolshevik Revolution which started on November 6th, 1917, swept away the Tsar. In fact, the Tsar had already been forced to abdicate after the 1917 February Revolution that began in Petrograd, (later Leningrad and now St Petersburg again), then Russia’s capital city. That revolution replaced the Tsar’s rule with rule by Russia’s Parliament, the Duma.
The Bolshevik Revolution substituted rule by the Soviets for rule by Parliament, and established the dictatorship of the Communist Party. Lenin had made his view clear in his 1902 pamphlet, ‘What is to be Done?’ namely that revolution could only come about via the rule of one strong, dedicated leader or group, and that once it had overthrown the government, the leadership would give up power to allow for the full development of socialism.
The Bolsheviks harried the provisional government that replaced the Tsar, finding ready ears among soldiers who deserted the incompetently fought war against the Kaiser’s Germany, and among the urban poor suffering from wartime food shortages. Their slogan “peace, land and bread” resonated with the dispirited and the angry. The Bolsheviks seized power in November by taking over government buildings, telegraph stations and strategic sites. They convened a second All-Russian Congress of Soviets packed with Bolsheviks and formed a new government.
Far from giving up power, the Bolshevik leadership set up the means to retain it permanently, setting up the Red Army, the secret police, and the street thugs who intimidated and murdered their opponents. They murdered the Tsar with his wife and children to forestall any attempt to restore the monarchy and outlawed all political parties except the Communist Party. Elections could feature only Communist candidates.
Their reign of terror lasted 72 years, as Lenin was succeeded by Stalin and then his successors. It featured mass murder, deliberate starvation and constant shortages of food and shoddy, inferior goods, if they made it at all to the empty shelves of the state shops.
European countries, barring the Communist ones in Central and Eastern Europe the USSR controlled by military might, prospered, especially in the recovery that followed World War II. Analysts speculate what might have happened in Russia had there been no Communist Revolution. It had been developing economically, with industry building up, notably aircraft manufacture. It is likely that modern agricultural methods imported from the West would have boosted food production, in place of the disastrous collective farms that were instituted instead.
It is possible that democracy might have developed as a new middle class enjoying economic success sought to exert political influence and spread liberal values. All of these are speculative “what ifs,” because the Bolshevik Revolution thwarted any chance they had of developing. The 72-year nightmare of aggression and oppression that began on November 6th, 1917, ended with the collapse of the Communist system and, ironically, it was on the same date, November 6th in 1991 that President Boris Yeltsin finally outlawed the Russian Communist Party.
A fundamental misunderstanding about modern agriculture
The usual suspects have lined up to insist that European farming must become less efficient in the raising of food. At the same time, more efficient at the raising of wildlife. The two, obviously enough, being ends of the possible spectrum. We can use “wildlife friendly” farming methods on a particular piece of land and that will mean some amount of the production of that land feeding said wildlife. Or, clearly, “wildlife unfriendly” on that same piece of land and as we’re not feeding the birdies the production is feeding us.
The EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP) should be overhauled urgently to stop the intensification of farming practices that is leading to a steep decline in wildlife, scientists from across the bloc have urged.
Five organisations representing more than 2,500 experts have written to Ursula von der Leyen, the incoming president of the European commission, and the European parliament, to demand major changes to the way the CAP operates.
In isolation there’s nothing wrong with either the facts or the logic here:
Proposed changes that would place more emphasis on such measures are still inadequate, the experts found. Instead, they want to see fundamental reforms that support smaller farms that use sustainable methods and maintain high biodiversity.
Who doesn’t like to see the flutterbys mobbing the meadow?
But the fundamental misunderstanding is still there. It is to think of the wildlife on the land we farm, rather than to consider the totality of the land and the wild. If each piece of land we use is used more efficiently for food production then we need to use less land for that food production. If we, for example, returned to properly medieval farming methods* then we’d all be dead even as we ploughed the entirety of Eurasia flat.
It is that very intensity of our use of farmland, that absence of wildlife feeding off it so that we may, which creates the surplus land upon which the wild can and does thrive. A decrease in efficiency would lead to the cropping of all the marginal land in a manner which would make the WWII ploughing of the uplands look mild.
We are continually urged to think holistically these days. Something we should indeed do. Modern industrial farming, precisely because of its intensity and absence of anything other than human food production, is what creates the space for there to be that wider environment.
*One estimate is that around 1300 AD the seed corn to harvested wheat ratio was some 1 to 4. Today it is more like 1 to 60, perhaps 1 to 100. Think how much more land we’d need for bread production if we reverted to the old methods.
An anonymous letter saved King and Parliament
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is commemorated on November 5th, when it was uncovered and prevented following a tip-off by an anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle warning of “a terrible blow” to be inflicted, and urging him not to attend Parliament. The letter was handed to Lord Monteagle’s servant by a stranger in the street.
The Gunpowder Treason Plot was an attempt by a group of dissident Catholics to assassinate King James I & VI and his Cabinet by blowing up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5th November. They intended to initiate a popular revolt and to install Elizabeth, James’s 9-year-old daughter, as a Catholic monarch to succeed him.
The plotters, led by Robert Catesby, smuggled 36 barrels of gunpowder into the Palace of Westminster. This was not difficult in the early 17th Century, because the place was a rabbit warren of assorted chapels, stores and chambers, and had merchants and lawyers, plus others, living and trading in the lodgings, shops and taverns within its precincts. Guy Fawkes, a 10-yar military veteran, was put in charge of the explosives.
A search of the buildings at the King’s request found Fawkes, whom they assumed to be a servant, next to a large pile of firewood in an undercroft below the House of Lords. Fawkes said it belonged to Thomas Percy. Alarmed at the name, a known Catholic agitator, the King ordered a more thorough search, so the party returned. They found that the firewood concealed the barrels of gunpowder, and in Fawkes’ pocket were several slow-burn matches and touchwood.
The explosives would have totally destroyed the House of Lords and probably killed most of those inside it, but the plot was thwarted. Catesby was killed when they attempted to round up the plotters, but Fawkes and the others were tried and convicted and subject to the ritual hanging and disembowelment of the day. A Jesuit, Father Henry Garnet, was tried, convicted and executed for knowing of the plot, possibly via a confessional which he could not divulge.
Historians have speculated the “what if it had succeeded?” The actual result was some tightening of laws against Catholics, but many important and loyal Catholics were allowed to continue in their posts throughout King James's reign. The historian Ronald Hutton concluded that the plot, if successful, would have caused an angry backlash and persecution of Catholics. Most English people were loyal monarchists, making a successful rebellion unlikely. He suggests that England might have become more Puritan in its Protestantism, like several European countries. Instead it went on to pursue civil and parliamentary reform, and eventually, over 200 years later, to enact full Catholic Emancipation.
The failed plot was commemorated for centuries with the ringing of church bells and the lighting of bonfires on November 5th. It has morphed into ‘bonfire night’ or ‘Guy Fawkes night’ and is celebrated with fireworks and bonfires. Children used to make Guy Fawkes figures by stuffing old clothes to make dummies. They would go on the streets with them, asking passers-by for “a penny for the guy.” It is less common now, though I did it as a child to collect money for fireworks. Fawkes came to achieve another immortality because the word “guy” came to mean an oddly-dressed person in the 19th Century, after these ill-dressed figures. It is now used to refer to any male person, presumably because all of them are now oddly-dressed.