Online illegal drugs markets show us the potential benefits of legalisation

Monday saw the worldwide release of the 2014 Global Drug Survey, with particular focus on the recent growth of online markets for illegal drugs. Despite its temporary shutdown in October 2013 - following the arrest of its alleged founder Ross Ulbricht - Silk Road (2.0) remains the most popular anonymous drugs marketplace on the internet. The online element of the survey therefore focused mainly on this site. Growing up in Essex has made me appreciate why purchasing illegal drugs online is a far more attractive option. I have experienced the catastrophic effects of drug prohibition first-hand, and it is part of the reason that the issue means a great deal to me. Friends and acquaintances have had terrible experiences due to contamination from unscrupulous dealers with little incentive to raise their drugs’ quality, and every reason to lace their products with harmful additives. The violence associated with buying and selling drugs in person has affected the lives of people close to me.

As a current university student, I now live in an environment populated by many people who use Silk Road regularly, and for a variety of purchases. From prescription-only ‘study drugs’ like modafinil to recreational marijuana and cocaine, fellow students’ experiences with drugs ordered from Silk Road have reinforced my beliefs in the benefits of legalisation. They have no need to worry about aggressive dealers and are more likely to receive safer drugs: meaning chances of an overdose and other health risks are substantially reduced.

Their motivations for using Silk Road rather than street dealers correlate with the Global Drug Survey’s findings. Over 60% of participants cited the quality of Silk Road’s drugs as being a reason for ordering, whilst a significant proportion also used the site as a way to avoid the potential violence of purchasing from the street. Given that payments are made in the highly volatile Bitcoin, it was also surprising to learn that lower prices were a motivation for more than a third of respondents.

Thus far, governments have unsurprisingly been reluctant to apply the insights that Silk Road provided us with. The political classes remain largely sceptical of attempts at reforming drug laws. However, the UK debate on legalisation is slowly progressing; earlier this month, Nigel Farage spoke in favour of drug law reform, echoing calls for a royal commission from Nick Clegg in February. Ipsos MORI polling last year found that more than half the country supports legalising (or decriminalising) cannabis.

Opponents of reform make the argument that legalisation helps to further normalise drug culture, resulting in increased usage. This is a reasonable claim, and one that seems to be supported by the available literature on marijuana legalisation. However, a marginal increase in the use of safer, regulated drugs seems a worthy price to pay. Legalisation will improve the lives of the poorest and minorities, who are disproportionately harmed by prohibition. It will reduce the violence associated with illegal drugs, ease the pressure on prison spaces and benefit public finances. Instead of criminalising drug users and addicts, it can provide the individuals who currently choose to use illegal drugs with products that are even safer than Silk Road.

Ross Ulbricht, or ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’, set out to explicitly show what it would be like to end the failed War on Drugs. He posted the following in his LinkedIn profile:

“I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.”

Silk Road has given us a real-world demonstration of why removing state violence from the drug market is one of the best steps the UK government could take towards improving the lives of its citizens. Legalisation should be put back on the agenda.

It's not capitalism that Cuba should be worrying about but markets

Cuba is, however gradually, reforming its economy which is great. However, they do seem to be concentrating on the wrong bits still:

Less well known and less common are the cooperatives but they are part of a political balancing act for the government, which needs to move hundreds of thousands of workers off the state payroll but also wants to slow the rise of capitalism. In many ways it prefers cooperatives, where each worker has a stake in the business, to private businesses where owners make profits based on the work of their employees.

That concentration on who owns what is the wrong thing to be concentrating upon. Sure, capitalism is useful, it's also a great bugbear of those over on the left. But it's also not the important point in an economy. What is important is markets: competitive markets at that, with entry and exit. This is vastly more important than whether those entrants (and those being forced to exit) are cooperatives, owned by the government or top hatted pot bellied capitalists like myself.

The reason for this is that there is no possible method of planning a modern national economy. We could use Alchian's (and Hayek's) point that only a market economy produces enough experimentation for us to be able to work out what to do, or that Socialist Calculation problem that means we've still got another century of Moore's Law to go before we could possibly calculate what to do. There is simply no alternative to using the prices and incentives that a market provides for us and so therefore that's where Cuba should be concentrating their efforts. Simply scrap the rules about who may do what, those licencing regimes. Worrying about who owns it is trivial by contrast.

As an aside, to those who will insist that Cuba provides wonderful free health care and so the system mustn't change. Amazingly, I think you'll note that this country, the UK, also manages to provide free health care to all citizens. And we manage to do this without being a communist dictatorship, without being in Stone Age poverty and without shooting anyone who wants to leave. So quite why those three things are considered necessary to provide tax paid for healthcare I'm really not quite sure.

Politics makes us 'stupid' because the world is complex

Ezra Klein has launched his new site, Vox.com, with an essay on ‘how politics makes us stupid’.

The piece is provocative, and Klein uses some interesting examples. Most striking is the study that shows that people’s maths skills get worse when the problem they’re dealing with has a political element and goes against their political instincts. (Klein seems to have slightly misunderstood the study he’s written about, but his basic point stands.)

The basic claim is that people engage in ‘motivated reasoning’ when they think about politics – in other words, they think in order to justify what they already believe, not in order to discover the truth. This, he suggests, is because the politically-engaged people get more loyalty to their ‘tribe’ than they lose by being wrong.

This ‘identity-protective cognition’, as he calls it, makes sense – a pundit who decides that the other side is right about some particular political issue (Klein uses global warming as an example) has a lot to lose in terms of status within the group they’re part of, and little to gain by being right.

Klein says that this has become worse as political parties have become more ideologically uniform and ideological ecosystems, like think tanks, blogs, media, more expansive. Not only is there the external cost of being wrong, but admitting to yourself that you’ve been wrong for a long time is quite difficult too, especially if you’re politically engaged and some of your sense of self is tied up with your beliefs. You could call this ‘rational ignorance’.

Even though that might seem plausible, I think he is assuming too much and is wrong about some of the phenomena he identifies. I’d like to suggest an alternative understanding of political ignorance that, I think, explains more and assumes less.

I think Klein’s fundamental error is to assume that the truth – or, at least, his mode of truth-seeking – is obvious. Basically, he starts off from the position that most people could reasonably see the light if they wanted to. If that’s right, then it could follow that incentive to disbelieve the truth. And “identity-protective cognition” is an interesting way of understanding that.

But suppose truth is not obvious – that we’re ignorant not because we want to be but because, in Keynes’s words, “we simply do not know!”. In contrast to the rational ignorance Klein is discussing, this kind of ignorance comes about because life is complex. The existence of this kind of ignorance is what allows people to disagree without either being willfully ‘dumb’.

To demonstrate his case, Klein uses examples of ideological dogmatism that are based on rejection of the hard sciences. Here he is assuming that a reasonable default position must be to believe in the usefulness of science, so anyone who deviates from that by disbelieving some scientific point must have an incentive to do so. But if they are simply unaware of the fact that science is usually a good way of learning things, them ignoring scientific consensus is simply a mistake.

Klein may see it as being obvious that science is great. But he has probably spent a lot more time thinking about it than most people – for many, rightly or wrongly, the jury is still out on science, as a great man once said. Error, not group loyalty, may be a simpler explanation for people’s refusal to accept what seems to be a well-established truth.

If the truth is difficult to determine, people who have an interest in politics need some way of sorting the truth from the information they can access. Since there is a huge amount of conflicting data and theory in nearly every area of policy (whether garbage or not), people need some way of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

That’s where an ideology comes in. An ideology, I suggest, is a type of ‘web of belief’ that allows people to use what they already believe to be true to sort relevant and true new information from irrelevant and untrue information. As Jeffrey Friedman puts it, ideology “provides pegs on which to hang the political facts of which non-ideologues tend to be so shockingly ignorant”.

This fits with the fact that ideologues are usually a lot more informed than non-ideologues, an important fact that, so far as I can tell, Klein ignores.

Klein’s view is that political ideology ‘makes us stupid’, but ‘closed-minded’ is probably a more accurate term. The vast majority of the public is shockingly ignorant of basic political facts, with the informational 'elite' also happening to be the more closed-minded. The alternative to closed-mindedness may simply be to be extremely uninformed.

This matters because the things Klein blames for politics making us stupid – ‘gerrymandering, big money, and congressional dysfunction’ – are mostly irrelevant if the view I’ve outlined here is correct. In a complex world where the truth is hard to discover, even the purest politics would make us stupid.

This implies a much more fundamental problem with the democratic process than Klein suggests. The trade-off between ignorance and dogmatism may be unavoidable in politics, making a well-functioning deliberative democracy virtually impossible to achieve. This may imply that less cognitively-demanding ways of making decisions, like markets, may be even more valuable than we realise.

The importance of Tiebout effects

An excellent little piece of cheering news about what this coming century holds for us:

When I was done with In 100 Years, one prediction stuck in my mind more than any other. It was the mathematical economists Mas-Colell who, almost in passing, wrote, “I believe that Tiebout effects will be increasingly felt on a global scale.” He should know, having long been involved in government, in Brussels and his native Catalonia Spain. As the Wiki says, Charles Tiebout is the economist fundamentally associated with the concept of voting with one’s feet. His Tiebout model was designed to show how people choose their communities, within limits, simply by relocating and choosing to pay higher or lower taxes and prices (or immigrating, or simply fleeing, and choosing to bear greater risks). It’s the way suburbs emerge around cities – some with good schools and fancy houses, others with very low rents, and the rest at every stage in between. It covers refugee camps, too. That this ineluctable force of human nature will continue is the prediction I most confidently expect to pan out, in a century of global change.

For what this means is that free and liberal society will continue.

Think about what Tiebout really means: that people differ in their desires, differ in the trade offs they're willing to make. We all thus potter about looking for that set of circumstances that best suit us. It can be the trivial of making sure when young and dating that we live near the good booze and a decent supply of potentially willing sexual partners, moving out to calmer climes when we have chosen (or been chosen to) settle down, through to the ability of the self-appointed righteous to cluster together to congratulate themselves on their righteousness. Camden Council for example. This works on hte larger scale as well: we can and should be allowed to leave a political entity where those trade offs don't suit us.

As opposed to those (Camden again) who say that we all have to live by the same rules, make the same trade offs. And that's the cheering part of the above prediction. That if Tiebout is going to hold for this century then that means that we'll continue to have a free and liberal society this century.

Maybe.

Bitcoin and the English Legal System, part III: a warm welcome to Cody Wilson

Preston Byrne, in the third of his "Bitcoin and the English Legal System" series, explains why cryptocurrency, technological advances notwithstanding, still cannot do without the law. A few days ago, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the 2014 Liberty League Freedom Forum with City AM's Marc Sidwell, Big Brother Watch's Nick Pickles, and the authors Daniel Ben-Ami and Nick Harkaway; we discussed the implications of advanced technology for liberty. Seeing as most people are not obsessed with blockchain-based technologies as I, before the talk began I asked the attendees how many of them used cryptography - such as PGP/GPG or cryptocurrency - in day-to-day life.

Of 100-odd individuals present (perhaps fifty more stumbled in later, having overindulged during the previous night's festivities), perhaps six hands went up, underscoring a significant problem with technology-as-liberator: adoption. In a room full of activists who oppose state surveillance, only a handful had taken measures to protect themselves from it - measures which, it should be said, may be taken at nil cost. Just as we criticise our philosophical opponents on the political left for denying individual agency in favour of political action, which is rightly viewed as a "convoluted and roundabout" method of accomplishing individual goals, so too should we criticise our own continuing behaviour which makes this surveillance easier to conduct. Though as the panel discussed, there is a general perception of a "technological arms race" between individuals on the one hand and states on the other, the best technology in the world is utterly useless if it is not employed.

We should nonetheless be grateful that the technology is there, developed and promoted by a handful of brilliant mathematical and political minds. One of these minds belongs to Cody Wilson, designer of the 'Liberator,' the world's first fully-3D printed firearm (as well as designer of a number of 3D-printed components for the AR-15). More recently, Wilson has been working as a spokesperson for the "Dark Wallet" project, a collaboration of some of the world's leading cryptocurrency developers aimed at augmenting the functionality and independence of the Bitcoin blockchain, as well as adding trustless privacy features. The problem they seek to solve arises from a fundamental aspect of Bitcoin's design, viewed by some as a weakness: each bitcoin (or part thereof) is a chain of digital signatures and though in aggregate the network behaves like a ledger, this particular feature renders all transactions public - and thus perfectly traceable back in time, all the way to an individual bitcoin's first creation. Because of this, a number of lawyers have crassly taken to calling bitcoins "prosecution futures," and indeed law enforcement has been able to make a number of arrests in the United States based on analyses of these records.

Wilson will be speaking to the ASI this evening. Although I do not know exactly what he will say, I think it is fair to presume he will not endorse the expansion of industry cooperation with regulatory authorities. Indeed, "if Bitcoin represents anything to us," he has said, "it’s the ability to forbid the government." TheunSystem group of which he is a member has expressed similar sentiments to that of the Freedom Forum panellists, referring also to the idea of an arms race, and arguing their work can "gain a new territory of freedom for several years." "We don't need to cooperate with control freaks," they add; "disobedience is the only way." It is a view with which I sympathise but, despite considerable admiration for their work, respectfully disagree.

When I was younger, it was all too easy to become frustrated with the intransigence of social democracy and the seemingly endless trampling of individual endeavour in the name of collective welfare this system legitimises. Given the widely-publicised abuses of state security apparatuses in democracies everywhere, it is perhaps easier still to look to technology to secure an advantage for liberty outside of legally permissible channels - even if that victory will be fleeting at best.

That notwithstanding, implementation of this technology in full compliance with the law, not civil disobedience, is the way forward. This is not to say that anonymity and privacy are unimportant. Clearly they are, and men like Cody Wilson draw much-needed attention to questions of state overreach at great personal risk to themselves. Where we diverge is that I am of the view that the proper means of accomplishing this change is through democratic consensus.

Bitcoin and its derivations are already challenge enough to state institutions, with its strong cryptography and decentralised character confounding all efforts at state control. No Act of Parliament, no court order, no standing army and arguably not even vast amounts of state-backed computing power are presently thought capable of taking the network offline on their own (at least, not for long).

While Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency protocol, it will not be the last. Commercially, its most significant achievement is in outsourcing the element of discretion from the unilateral act of payment to an algorithm; industry cooperation with state authorities in respect of this aspect of the technology has resulted in favourable regulatory outcomes in the UK and the United States, with the consequence that hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into the sector, and mainstream businesses large and small are beginning to enter it.

Successor platforms close to release will extend this functionality in respect of multilateral, two-way instructions, importing the cryptographic security of Bitcoin into self-regulating agreements and other communications. In theory, the range of proposed uses for these second-generation platforms is limitless: decentralised crowdfunding, frictionless microfinance, autonomous peer-to-peer banks, and even decentralised social networks have been proposed, all of which would be run by decentralised mining from which virtually anyone can profit.

Prudence demands restraint when extolling the potential of these platforms. However, the degree of investor and developer attention upon them suggests they may be deployed in practical roles rather sooner than we think; and just like Bitcoin, I suspect they will take many people by surprise.

This will have implications for conceptions of liberty. What could promote a culture of privacy more efficiently than incentivising households to put the world's most advanced cryptographic technology in their living rooms? What better way could there be to convince a man of the value of free enterprise than to allow him to hold his own commercial bank in the palm of his hand? What kind of world will we live in where a shopkeeper in Kibera can safely invest in a property development in Kensington at the push of a button, while paying no fees?

How then, with deployable personal capital at their very fingertips, will people view state interference in markets and human interactions in which, perhaps for the first time in human history, they have a stake of their own? I suspect they will view it very differently, and in a manner which has the potential to give rise to enduring societal change. But the technology must first get to this point, and prove useful, before any of this change will be realised.

I am grateful Mr. Wilson has agreed to speak to the Institute this evening; the world needs more people like him. But so too does it need transactional technology which empowers individuals, rich and poor alike, to easily deploy and accumulate capital, legally, safely, and internationally, so that they might use it in order to improve the quality of their lives.

Men have been campaigning for liberty, however they define it, within the confines of the law for hundreds of years. I for one am happy to continue doing so for at least a few more, and encourage the attendees of tonight's event to do the same.

Oh how we laughed all those years ago

Many years ago, just after Boris Yeltsin had abolished rationing and freed up food prices, I was in Russia when a little old granny was interviewed just before Easter. She wanted to know why egg prices were going up just before everyone wanted them to dye for the Easter festivities. Oh how we laughed about that, for of course the miracle of supply and demand means that when more people want something prices will rise. Not that we could expect someone subjected to 70 years of communism to quite get that.

This isn't something that's going to happen in our much more sophisticated age and place of course. Everyopne's far too well informed about how the world works these days:

Majority of parents back holiday price caps - new ITV poll More than half of parents say inflated holiday prices should be capped so they are not forced to take their children out of school for cheaper getaways, a new survey for ITV reveals.

Well, I guess that explains the Labour Party then if more than half of those old enough to breed are quite so clueless about the most basic concept in all economics, the price system.

So how do we go about remedial education for half the population?

But firms don't try to maximise short term profits

It's a standard enough trope, that modern capitalism fails because companies only ever try to maximise short term profits. Not enough is done to think of the long term. Yet there's a simple enough point that can be made about this. Any firm at all that invests in anything cannot be said to be maximising short term profits, as David Henderson points out:

He said matter-of-factly, as if there were no doubt, that profit-maximing companies maximize short-run profits at the expense of the long run. "If that were true," I replied, "then drug companies should end all R&D today. Their R&D expenses would fall and their profits would rise. And yet we don't see them doing that. They invest hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs that, in many cases, will not bring good earnings to them for a few years and maybe for 10 or more years."

Any investment in anything more long run than refilling the ink jet printers is evidence that a company is not trying to maximise short term profits.

Now, it's possible to think that perhaps companies should pay more attention to the very long term, this is true, but then we come to a rather different problem. Which is that companies are already the most long term looking organisations around. Governments, famously, never look beyond the next election day, we as individuals are known (indeed, it's often used as the proof needed that governments should nudge our behaviour) to suffer from hyperbolic discounting, paying insufficient attention to the far future. Which really rather leaves only companies as the organisations that do try to look out beyong 5 or 10 years. The major oil companies, for example, are famed for having 30 and 40 year horizons. And there's just no one else in our society that is looking that far ahead.

Raising the minimum wage means lowering the workers' perks and conditions

As Adam Smith himself pointed out all jobs pay the same really. When you take account of what's needed to do them, the terms, the conditions, the "disagreeableness" of them, add in the wages and they're all paying much the same amount. Which has an interesting implication for those who would raise the minimum wage:

There are many other forms of compensation, including fringe benefits, relaxed work demands, workplace ambiance, respect, schedule flexibility, job security, hours of work and so forth. Even a limited accounting indicates that these nonmonetary benefits amount to a substantial percentage of the total compensation employees receive, nearly 30 percent over and above wages of all workers and 20 percent over and above wages for restaurant workers, on the average.

Employers compete with one another to reduce their labor costs, and that competition is expressed in a variety of ways in labor markets — certainly in money wages, but also in terms of fringe benefits, work demands and all other forms of nonmoney compensation. Workers also compete for the available unskilled jobs. The competition among employers and workers will not disappear with a wage increase but will merely be redirected into the components of compensation packages not covered by the wage mandate. Wage floors, therefore, restrain competitive pressures in only one of the many ways in which businesses compete. With a minimum-wage increase, employers will move to cut labor costs in other areas. As such, employers are likely to reduce fringe benefits and/or increase work demands.

We can indeed raise that minimum wage and there will of course be job losses from doing so. It's even possible to insist that the benefits to those who have their wages raised outdo the disbenefit to those who lose their jobs although that's not something I'd be keen to try to prove to the newly unemployed. But we do also have to insist that raising the minimum wage is going to reduce those other terms and conditions under which people work. Might be as something as simple as insiting that the staff buy their own darn teabags, could be more stricness about breaks, or trady arrival, a bit more slavedriving to pressure mor work out of that newly more expensive labour.

But there will be that something that will compensate for those newly higher wages.

Another way of putting this is that a higher minimum wage might move wages but it's not going to change the total compensation on offer. And it's that insight that allows us to suggest something rather more interesting. As we know, employers' national insurance is some 13.8% of wages above the threshold these days. And yet it's clearly part of total compensation. So, what we could do is stop charging that tax upon incomes for those below, say, the full year full time minimum wage of £12,500 a year or so and we would expect that to feed through into wages. For we'd not, again, have changed total compnesation but we would have changed the non-wages part of it.

Another way of making the same point is to say that we don't have minimum wage poverty we have tax poverty. The government is simply taking too large a part of the wages of the working poor.

The New Economics Foundation has been speaking to the papers again

Those masters of economic logic, the new economics foundation, have been talking to the newspapers again. Gothenburg, a city in Sweden, has decided to experiment with shorter working days for the city employees. At which point nef says:

Anna Coote, Head of Social Policy at the New Economics Foundation, a UK-based think tank, welcomed the proposals. “Shorter working hours create a more committed and stable workforce,” Ms Coote told The Telegraph. “There are indications you can make savings by reducing working hours,” she added, citing an experiment in Utah where public sector workers were given a three-day weekend.

According to OECD data, there is a correlation between shorter working hours and greater productivity. The Greeks are the hardest working members of the OECD, putting in more than 2,000 hours a year compared with the Germans’ 1,400, but their workers are 70 per cent less productive than their Teutonic counterparts.

Yes, this is absolutely true, there is a correlation between higher productivity and shorter working hours. However, it is not that working shorter hours makes you more productive, although that could happen, sure. Your last hour of an 18 hour working day is unlikely to be as productive as your first of a one hour working day.

The causation is really working the other way around and for a well understood economic reason too. The average wages in any society will be determined by the average productivity of labour in that society. Thus a higher average productivity means a higher average wage. And we're well aware that most human beings are, most of the time, both greedy and lazy. Meaning that we'd all like to get as much of whatever with as little effort as we can manage. And that laziness also means that as we become increasingly rich we take more of that wealth as increased leisure, that being the point and purpose of going to work in the first place, to be able to afford the things that we want.

Thus more productive labour, in that richer society, works shorter hours. Not at all the other way around, working shorter hours makes you more productive.

There is actually a reason why Giles Wilkes named the nef "not economics frankly".

Is the government helping exports?

Is the UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), is a net hindrance or help to exporters?  UKTI can surely point to successes but could its expenditure of over £400M p.a. (up 70% since this government took office) be better spent? The 2013 research into UKTI commissioned by Daniel Kawczynski MP is important, valuable and deserves more attention. It provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of UKTI as it now is. UKTI can point to successes but overall the emerging picture is one of excessive bureaucracy and ineffective communications. The reports recommendations are sensible but they are not radical enough.

UKTI should become a separate stand-alone agency, integrated with Chambers of Commerce, and its HQ should be cut from 500 to 50.

The UK [potential] exporters and receivers of inward investment should be put in charge.  They should be asked what help, and especially contacts, they want, as distinct from being told how to do their business.  These should be communicated directly to overseas posts.

Overseas UKTI staff are bogged down in paperwork. OMIS and other statistical reports and surveys should be scrapped. Successful exporting and inward investment are a matter of personal contacts, not sitting at computers especially as, in this www age, [potential] exporters have access to the same on-line data.

Measuring UKTI performance by the number of contacts allegedly made, and/or number of exporters, should also be scrapped. The quality of the contacts, i.e. the additional exports arising, matters; the quantity of contacts, which may be no more than unreturned phone calls, does not.  The ineffectiveness of communications within UKTI and with [potential] exporters and overseas FCO posts is probably the biggest complaint by the private sector and within the lowere echelons of UKTI.  The only metric that matters is how much trade has been added, whether directly or indirectly.

UKTI is not delivering the exports we need.  The UK’s share of exports is declining whilst the cost of UKTI soars. It requires drastic overhaul.  The Kawczynski report is important and valuable. It provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of UKTI as it now is and suggests useful improvements but more drastic change is needed.