30 percent more government doesn't do it, does it?

The IFS tells us that the Scottish Government spends rather more per person than the British - or, if you prefer, the English.

Nicola Sturgeon's spending on Scottish public services is 30 per cent greater than the equivalent funding in England thanks to the Barnett formula, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The impartial Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found a growing cross-Border spending gap, with the SNP administration in Edinburgh having more than £1.30 per person to spend on public services for every £1 in England.

Almost all of this difference - 28.9p out of 30.6p - comes from the Scottish Government's block grant from the UK Treasury, which is calculated using the controversial Barnett formula.

Leave aside the grand proof here we have of Milton Friedman’s contention, that there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme - this was, after all, a late 1970s political fix expected to last for a couple of years.

Think, instead, of what this tells us of the continual calls for just that little bit more of government that we are constantly assailed with. If that little bit more on this and that and t’other were to produce a better society for us all then Scotland would be that better society to which we should all be aspiring.

Is it?

There’s no actual evidence from any real numbers that it is. Lifespans, addiction rates, educational achievements, any other such measure we care to look at, do not skew Scotland’s way in the manner that such hugely greater spending suggests they should. Or, even, as those who insist England should be spending greater such sums insist would be the result of such taxpayer penury.

Which is the correct manner of looking at these numbers. We have just conducted an experiment, a real world one. That greater public spending does not create the nirvana that is claimed. Therefore our solutions to making the world a better place are going to have to come from a different set of actions.

As we’ve been saying for decades now, it’s how the money is spent, not the amount of it, that makes the difference. Thus it is the structure of public spending that needs the reform, not the amount.

No, really - which of Scotland’s socioeconomic achievements is it possible to point to which justifies a 30% expansion of the State? None? Then the putative expansion is not justified, is it?

Why should someone on less than median pay be able to afford the median house?

It’s very difficult indeed to work out precisely what it is that The Guardian is complaining about here:

Low-paid key workers on the frontline of the Covid-19 pandemic would not be able to afford to buy the average priced home in 98% of Great Britain, an exclusive Guardian analysis has found.

Years of rising prices have put homeownership out of reach of many key workers, who have also experienced pay freezes and had to channel their wages into paying high private rents, rather than being able to save for a deposit.

The Guardian’s analysis, which was based on the sums needed for a 90% mortgage, found that a nurse on the median wage of £33,920 a year would not be able to raise a big enough mortgage to buy the median-priced property in almost three-quarters of local authorities nationwide.

Yes, this seems obvious.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the median salary for a senior care worker in the UK stood at £21,243 in 2020.

Based on these earnings, with a 10% deposit to put down, a senior care worker would be able to afford the average priced property in just six council areas in Great Britain, locking them out of 98% of areas.

So does that.

Someone paid less than the average cannot afford the average. Seems simple enough to us. The nurse example, the first one, is only very slightly more complex. The median - even modal - UK household contains two earners. Therefore it’s not a grand surprise that the median - even modal - house costs more than can be afforded upon one income.

The correct response to this complaint is a shrug and “Yes, that’s how numbers work”.

The lower paid do not afford the average car, the average weekly food shop, the average clothing budget, this is what making less than the average wage means. Why would or even should housing be any different?

This is all entirely different from whether housing is too expensive - it is - or whether we should do anything about the price of housing - we should, build more of it. Or even our perennial suggestion, blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. It is also nothing to do with whether care workers should be paid less than the average wage, nurses about spot on it.

Maths just does work out that those with lower than average incomes can buy less than the average. And?

Reasons for optimism - population

Some commentators, famously including Sir David Attenborough, are pessimistic about the world’s population, especially about what they see as its likely future population, and think the planet is headed for a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich led the charge with his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” in which he predicted worldwide famines in the 1970s and 1980s because we’d be unable to grow enough food to feed the rising population. This is the argument by which Thomas Malthus predicted recurring world famines as food supply would necessarily fail to keep pace with rising numbers of mouths to feed. Paul Ehrlich in April 1970 predicted that: “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

It was not just famines that the increased numbers, some suggesting 50 million people, would bring. They would pollute the planet, consume its resources, degrade the environment. wipe out most species, fight over scarce water, and lack decent living space.

Ehrlich wrote just before Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution turbo-charged the world’s food yield. In the years before Ehrlich wrote, the world’s rate of increase in population had itself been increasing, but just as his book was published, it began to decline. Ehrlich and others had missed out on two important things. They underestimated humanity’s capacity to solve problems creatively, and they failed to spot what happens to fertility rates as people grow wealthier.

People in poor countries need children to work to augment the family budget, and to support their parents in old age. But as countries become richer, they can afford to put children into schools instead of fields and factories, and can afford social welfare to support the elderly. This is why population increases have tailed off as wealth has increased. They are negative in rich countries. Fertility rates suggest that the world’s total of over 7 billion will perhaps reach no more than 10 billion, maybe by 2050, and then decline. This is happening because more countries are becoming richer.

The world can handle 10 billion. It has increased its food production, and new technologies including GMOs and cultured meats indicate that it can do so much more. It has developed ways to produce energy and to provide transportation with far less pollution. It can produce more food without depleting rainforests. It has found ways to substitute new plentiful resources for scarce ones, using carbon composites instead of steel, and fibre optics instead of copper. Julian Simon’s “Ultimate Resource” of human creativity has shown itself capable of producing innovative solutions to humanity’s problems.

Paul Ehrlich was systematically proved wrong in his predictions by events, as his pessimistic forecasts never came about. The world is already responding creatively to the challenges that an increased population will bring, but it will be nothing like the increase that a straight-line graph or a rising curve suggested. There is reason to suppose that the world can cope, aided perhaps by the addition of the new creative and better educated minds that are joining it. The outlook on population does not support the pessimism that doomsayers spread. On the contrary, it is grounds for optimism.

We agree entirely with Ed Miliband here

At least, we agree with a part of what is actually said:

Last thing we need is a 'cosy consensus' on climate crisis, warns Ed Miliband

Well, that’s The Guardian headline writer, Ed himself:

The UK must tell the truth about the “terrifying and exacting” scale of the challenge the world faces to avoid climate breakdown as it prepares to host a make or break summit of world leaders later this year, Ed Miliband has warned.

“A cosy consensus” between politicians, policymakers and some NGOs,

We agree entirely. Idle and comfortable groupthink in the face of a problem isn’t the way to do it. Actually thinking about the subject is.

The worst projections - RCP 8.5 and the like - have already been avoided by the fact that we have not turned back to using coal in ever greater amounts. In fact, all that development of solar power - the 80% reduction in costs in mere years - and wind and so on has meant that even the bad projections, like RCP 6.0, also aren’t consistent with reality. A realistic assessment of the effects of what has already been done - the US and UK have had falling emissions for a couple of decades now - tell us that we’re probably somewhere between RCP 4.5 and RCP 2.6.

Perhaps that’s too optimistic but there is still that vital point here. We have done some things, we must include the effects of those things done in our evaluations of what still to do. Which is the very thing the idle groupthink between politicians, policymakers and NGOs is failing to do. What, therefore, we need to incorporate into discussions in order to disrupt that cozy consensus.

Take just the one policy implication here. We are told two different things by that consensus. That solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuel derived. This is certainly true for some applications in some places, for all and everywhere is a little more arguable. Also that poor countries require hundreds of billions to build their generating systems in a non-emittive manner. It cannot be that both are true. Why would anyone require subsidy to build the cheapest form of electricity generation?

OK, they might need it because they’re poor but they don’t need subsidy to build the cheaper system for climate reasons, do they? They will naturally build that cheaper anyway.

Another way to make much the same point. That subsidy required to those poor countries, we’ve already paid it. Paid it by investing to make solar and wind cheap and thus the technology of choice purely upon cost grounds. We already gave at the office that is.

So, yes, let us not be hoodwinked by some cozy consensus. Let us actually think about the problems that face us and how they might be solved. Something that does require we consider what we’ve already done - for only that will reveal to us what still remains of the task.

Making do with the quangos we’ve got

Victoria Street 

SW1 

“Humphrey.” 

“Yes, Minister.” 

“Someone came up to me in the House yesterday and claimed we had too many quangos.” 

“I think you may be referring to Arm’s Length Bodies.  What did you say?” 

“Well, I had to admit that I didn’t know how many we have but I told him the number was just right.” 

“Quite correct, Minister.  We now only have 15 – it used to be more.” 

“Well, I suppose health and social care is a wide remit so we need a range of expertise. How many of the 15 help us on social care.” 

“The Care Quality Commission has just started taking an interest in social carers but apart from that, I regret to say the answer is zero.” 

“No wonder we can’t produce a Green Paper on it, Humphrey.  We have no quango to write it.” 

“We do have one in the works, Minister, as we have frequently announced, but not having a policy means we cannot be blamed for failing to implement it.” 

“What has blame got to do with it?” 

“Everything, Minister. Quangos are a brilliant device: they are part of government and entirely independent at the same time. The NHS is, technically, a ‘non-departmental public body’ which means you are not to blame when things go wrong but you can take the credit when they don’t.” 

“So that was why I was able to wash my hands of the personal protective equipment supply disaster by saying Public Health England was to blame but as it is independent, I could not interfere.” 

“Unfortunately not, Minister. I think I was away at the time. Public Health England is an executive agency and is therefore fully accountable to you.” 

“Lucky the media failed to pick that up. In that case, I’m responsible for quite a lot.  Public Health England has a wide remit.” 

“It does indeed.  It aims to keep us fit and trim, free from sickness and debility. Such is their concern for our safety that when weddings return on April 12th, brides will not be allowed to kiss their grooms unless they have been living in sin.” 

“Humphrey, you’re joking?” 

“Not at all, Minister.  Social distancing must be maintained. And Public Health England is tackling violence against women.” 

“Violence against women?” 

“On 16th March, PHE announced that misogyny had become a pandemic and therefore fell within its remit. They have a seven point action plan to deal with it.” 

“Curfewing men from 6pm?” 

“That is not one of them, Minister. The actions include ‘A whole-system multi-agency approach to serious violence prevention’ and the appointment of ‘a Consultant in Public Health to lead on violence prevention. They [sic] will be responsible for developing and implementing an action plan which will seek to tackle the root causes of violence, incorporating serious youth violence, domestic abuse and violence against women and girls.’” 

“Is Dido Harding in charge of this?” 

“Worry not, Minister, she was at the time of the announcement but there have been developments.” 

“Has anyone informed the Home Office and the police that we have charge of preventing violence against women?” 

“With so many changes in hand that there is the possibility that the whole-system multi-agency communications have had a slippage. What is important, Minister, is that we have an underlying strategy to deal with all these crises.” 

“Really, Humphrey.  Have I been informed about that?” 

“Possibly not, Minister. The strategy is to respond to every crisis with a media release highlighting the role of our nearest ALB.  To avoid adding further ALBs, even for social care, we shuffle the existing deck to give the impression of effective action.” 

“So when we discovered last year that we needed Covid vaccines in a hurry, which of our quangos was given the job?” 

“I had to advise the Cabinet Office that our only candidate was Lady Harding and she was already fully occupied. The Cabinet Secretary, in a rare expression of wit, suggested that she was put to the test and disappeared without trace.  Did I not tell you, Minister?” 

“You certainly did not.  Vaccine procurement was clearly a matter for Public Health England. With their skills, what could’ve gone wrong?” 

“Well, I have to admit Kate Bingham has done a grand job. She’s a very bright person with a formidable and relevant CV and married to Jesse Norman.  Of course, she wouldn’t have fitted Public Health England.” 

“Why not, Minister?” 

“She read biochemistry at Oxford, not PPE. But we should not be talking about PHE any more.  You will recall we responded to all the totally unjustified criticism PHE and Test and Trace received last summer by announcing, on the 18th of August, the marriage of the two as the National Institute for Health Protection.” 

“Glad you reminded me, Humphrey. I remember thanking ‘all my brilliant colleagues at PHE’ and others and especially ‘Duncan Selbie for his leadership of PHE’,  Then I sacked him and put Dido Harding in charge.” 

“You did indeed Minister. The clever part was not to task NIHP with resolving the Covid problems until nine months later when the pandemic would be largely over anyway. It seemed a suitable period before they could be left holding the baby. Not everyone appreciated Lady Harding being put in charge but it was either that or Lady Harding becoming Chair of NHS England.  She was already in charge of NHS Test and Trace and Chair of NHS Improvement which was merging with NHS England, if you are still with me, and therefore lined up to be Chair of NHS England, knocking out Lord Prior.” 

“Who is Lord Prior?” 

“Many people would like to know that, Minister.” 

“Problems present themselves in different ways, Humphrey.  This month the blame merchants have been out in force again.  They claim we were unprepared for Covid. Do we have an answer?” 

“Yes, we have Minister and, if I may say so, its release has been a triumph.  Congratulations. NIHP is no more. On 24th March, we announced its replacement by the UKHSA (UK Health Security Agency) which will be led by Dr Jenny Harries. Our health will now not just be protected but be secure.”  

“I think I said it would be ‘built on the world-class public health expertise of Public Health England (PHE)’ and it ‘will play a leading role in our global response to external health threats.’ ‘It will work to understand ever better the needs of citizens, and to build that understanding into the design and continuous improvement of services.’ It will remove inequalities arising from pandemics by ensuring there won’t be any more pandemics.”  

“I think that may be going a little too far, Minister.” 

“Not at all. If it turns out to be rubbish, we can sack Dr Harries and give the quango a new name.”

So how do problems get solved?

That British retail is changing is obvious enough. The question is, well, what to do about it? Perhaps we should have a plan? Some people who don’t know much about it all, have no particular incentive to get it right, could impose their prejudices upon everyone else? Or, of course, we could not use politics to try to solve this problem:

More than half of the 497 department stores closed across Britain in the five years to November remain vacant,

Quite what such buildings should be used for next we don’t know. More to the point, that they’re - half of them - still empty means no one else does either. Perhaps they should become housing. Or the buildings razed and a park put in place. Or something else be sold from them, like go-kart rides.

The thing being that we have a system to work this out. It’s that market of course. Folks try all sorts of different things and somewhere along the line something that does in fact work will be stumbled across. At which point the greedy capitalists owning the other buildings will take note and try to do the same thing. The universe of possible solutions is best explored by those with the local knowledge and the incentives to conduct the experiments.

As The Observer tells us in fact:

Wolfson may have the best ideas about what comes Next for shops

Seems likely to us. Long time industry professional who is actually paid, daily, to work out what to do with shops might be just the person to work out what to do with shops. The contribution that politics can make to all of this is to give him, and all his contemporaries, the room and freedom to do that experimentation.

That is, hands off and leave it alone. As nurse used to say, if you keep picking at it you’ll only make it worse.

We're really quite convinced that trade doesn't work this way

A fundamental error here:

The war of words with the EU over vaccines has escalated as France’s foreign minister claimed Britain will struggle to source second Covid jabs but that Brussels would not be “blackmailed” into exporting doses to solve the problem.

It’s not Brussels exporting anything. For it is not countries - nor cities - that trade. It is individuals and groups of individuals as companies that trade. It is not even true that it is a political unit that trades.

Some people who have a production facility that happens to be located in a pace where the rule of Brussels holds sway wish to trade with some other people outside that area where the rule of Brussels holds sway. That that external group is the government of another country still doesn’t make it countries that trade with each other. Nor political groupings that do so.

We could claim this error comes from the French Foreign Minster, we could say it’s the journalism of The Guardian at fault here. But it is still true that trade is between people and groups of them, not some reification of political power. The European Union, Brussels, France, they do not, never have done and won’t trade with anyone.

Now that we all properly understand that the correct response to the claim about preventing trade is clear. Who the heck are you to stop people peaceably exchanging with with other? Butt out matey.

Yes, sadly, politics is necessary because we do need a method of making sure the bins are emptied but that’s what the process is for, not interfering in matters that work entirely happily without that process.

All your trade are belong to us

There is a consistent error out there in that people keep thinking that it is the people selling the stuff who garner the advantage in trade. Thus we get the absurdity of people insisting that we must retaliate when people refuse to buy our production - retaliate by making ourselves poorer by refusing to buy, or taxing ourselves for buying, those lovely things made by Johnny Foreigner.

Sometimes though reality does intervene. A ship is. most amusingly, stuck in the Suez Canal and trade is thus interrupted:

Consumers pay price of snarl-up in Suez Canal

Quite so, as it is consumers who benefit from trade it is consumers who pay the price - by not gaining the benefits - of an interruption in trade. This is thus true of tariffs, quotas, Buy British and all the rest.

As we were told getting on for a century ago, trade protection is as:

…to dump rocks into our harbors because other nations have rocky coasts…

Or, to block our canals because others have the mishap of having blocked their own. Just one of those evergreen truths we need to recall. The only logical trade stance is unilateral free trade.

This is not a greatly convincing argument

Owen Jones tells us that:

Given industrial scale tax avoidance on the part of so many large corporations, here is an argument that needs reiterating time and time again. Without much demonised state largesse, no company could profit. The state provides them with roads and other basic infrastructure, and protects their property. It educates their workforce and, through public healthcare, prevents them from becoming so sick they cannot work.

It’s possible to argue that we, we the citizenry, have the rule of law, health care, transport and so on because we think they all benefit us, the citizenry. At which point any benefits to business seem fairly trivial. We also seem to rather like the things that business produces so, again, that they benefit as well seems unobjectionable.

But there is still that argument over how these things are provided. So, which is better - in quality - public health care or private? Public schools or state ones? The British experience is not that that which is tax provided is better now, is it?

So, if we’ve managed to understand Owen’s argument correctly it’s that business must pay more tax because the state provides things expensively and badly. Which is not, we think, one of the most convincing arguments ever put forward.

How excellent, proof that we're not going to run out of metals

People have been telling us for at least 50 years now - the Club of Rome and all that - that we’ll run out of metals within 30 years. The mistake here being that people look at mineral reserves and say they will run out. Which they will, given that the best colloquial translation of the technical phrase “mineral reserves” is the minerals we’ve prepared for use in the next 30 years. That is not, though, the end of the story. For those who understand the phrasing, or even the industry, know that reserves are things that are made, created, by human effort.

Near no environmentalists wanting to understand this point. Except, now, when we talk about fossil fuel reserves, they are making exactly this point:

Oil, gas and coal will need to be burned for some years to come. But it has been known since at least 2015 that a significant proportion of existing reserves must remain in the ground if global heating is to remain below 2C, the main Paris target. Financing for new reserves is therefore the “exact opposite” of what is required to tackle the climate crisis, the report’s authors said.

There we have it. Mineral reserves - and in this there is no difference between fossil fuels and metals - are things that are created through human effort and the expenditure of resources on their creation.

Therefore the debate over what we can use in the future is not bound or limited by what reserves are but by what we can turn into reserves by making that effort. As we’ve pointed out at book length before now those limits are some tens of millions to billions of years in the future. Or, as we might put it, recycling’s a fine thing but we don’t have to do it because we’re about to run out.