The Pin Factory Blog

It is not well known that wind energy is less environmental friendly than most people like to believe. Not only are lovely views and unspoilt landscapes destroyed. More important is the death toll on some of the world's most precious and protected birds.

The problem is that the same locations that make wind turbines profitable, those were the wind blows strong and steadily, tend to be the major flyways of migratory birds. Sometimes they even attract birds with rats and other rodents, which use the turbine basis to build their nests. At one of these places at Altamont Pass in California, where thousands of wind mills have been installed, a lawsuit by the Golden Gate Audubon Society succeeded a year ago with a settlement aiming to reduce the number of bird deaths. But after a year scientist are reporting the measures failed.

In the lawsuit, environmentalists cited a 2004 California Energy Commission report estimating between 1,766 and 4,721 birds were killed by Altamont wind turbines each year, equalling 47,682 to 127,467 birds over the 27-year life of the wind farm. The Audubon Society…noted among the birds deaths are between 456 and 1,129 raptors and other birds at approximately the same pace as before the settlement.

Romantic environmentalists like to evoke pictures of smooth running wind mills of the past but in fact they have developed into disgusting meat processing engines with unreliable and uneconomic energy output. The revival of wind mills is ill conceived and generates ideologically driven products which the market had already rejected many centuries ago for a good reason .

I see that 150,000 actually turned out to vote in the mini-referendum on the EU Constitution. (Sorry – minor amending treaty that's not really worth troubling people about.) And of those, over 133,000 voted that yes, they would actually quite like a proper referendum on the subject. For a private vote (in just ten of the UK's 650-odd election constituencies, and without any of the media frenzy and taxpayer-funded TV advertisements that we have in general elections), that's a pretty impressive turnout.

You can see all the details here.

More than that, they the voters indicated that if given the chance, they'd vote no. They were asked two questions:

Should the UK hold a national referendum on the EU's Treaty?
88% voted yes and 12% voted no. Less than 1% did not answer.

Should the UK approve the EU's Treaty?
89% voted against the Treaty and 8% voted in favour. 3% did not answer.

In eight of the ten seats a greater proportion of people voted for a referendum than voted for the sitting MP. ( On average the sitting MPs won 27.5% of the available vote. But of those balloted in this campaign, 31.2% voted for a national referendum.)

Still, the fact that when asked, the general public do come out and do vote against the Constitution (oops, there I go again) will not make a jot of difference in Westminster. Most MPs, with a few honourable exceptions, will stick with their party lines and deny the public their promised say. Mind you, thanks to iwantareferendum.com they might at least feel guilty about it.

While these figures are for the US, the UK situation is broadly similar. The loss of manufacturing jobs is not a result of trade or offshoring, rather of rising labour productivity.

When is a benefit of the Olympics not a benefit? When the Olympians take over your local sports hall or gym, of course. 

Using statistics to work out whether MPs might be playing games with their expenses budgets. Of course, if they simply released the raw information these studies would not be necessary.

Other statistical studies seem of rather less merit. 

Explaining Ken Livingstone. Perhaps Augustus Fink-Nottle wasn't quite the right role model to choose. 

The very early days of a project to map free wi-fi sites across the UK. 

And finally, a teacher on teaching. 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the UK's new school admissions policy, it will be a political disaster.

At present, middle class parents get their kids into good state schools by moving into the catchment areas of the best ones. So the plan is to allocate school places by lottery rather than catchment, so that poorer parents have an equal chance (and so that schools would get a wider social mix too).

While the parents whose kids get into good schools under this scheme will be pleased, they won't exactly be marching on City Hall to express their pleasure. But the middle-class parents whose kids don't get into nearby good schools will be absolutely furious, and campaigning in their thousands. And poorer parents whose kids don't get into their preferred nearby school will be marching alongside them.

And whatever the merits of the policy, its inevitable result is that kids will have to travel longer distances to get to school. That means they are going to be walking or cycling greater distances along busy streets, and (come winter) more are going to get killed or injured. Already there is a spike in road fatalities around the age of eleven, when kids transfer from their neighbourhood primary schools to the more distant secondary schools. The first case of a kid being killed on one of these forced cycle trips will get the media, and parents, baying for ministers' blood.

A better policy would focus on incentivizing state schools to improve, not rationing them by throwing dice. For some ideas, ministers should check here.

52. "Schooling should seek to make children equal."

The trouble with notions such as this is that they end up by restraining the talented. Children are not equal. Some are cleverer, some are stronger, some are faster. Some have musical talent, some linguistic and some mathematical. Any attempt to impose an artificial equality on them inevitably reduces down to the lowest common denominator.

Equality is not a good thing in itself. Diversity is. People of different talents will do different things, and be of service to their fellow men and women in different ways. It should be the aim of schooling to try to avoid any waste of talent, to bring out in each child the maximum of his or her potential. This is not achieved by pretending that everyone is equal, and by denying the talented any recognition.

Children might be equally worthy of consideration as individuals; they might be equally entitled to fair treatment. They are done no service, however, if they are taught that a poor performance is the same as an excellent one. Schools which avoid competitive sports or prize-giving ceremonies do their children no favours. The real world outside school is not like that, and they will be ill-prepared for it.

Even equality of opportunity has its limits. Some children will have more thoughtful or more loving parents. Some will have educational opportunities for foreign travel because their parents choose such holidays. Others will have more access to books because their parents keep them about the house. The ultimate logic of total equality of opportunity is the state battery farm. It is, however, a worthwhile goal for society to try to develop the potential of each child, and not to discriminate against any particular groups.

If children are diverse in their talents and abilities, then schooling itself should be diverse, enabling the parents of each child to find an education suited to it.

Sometimes I wonder whether we are governed by crazed loons: at other times I don't. Now is one of the second:

An inquiry commissioned by Gordon Brown will recommend local authorities have the power to prevent outsiders buying property they do not intend to make their main residence. Those seeking to buy country boltholes that deprive local residents of houses would be forced to apply to the council.

They would have to win planning permission to change the house from fully occupied to a second home and could be refused by the council.

Leave aside the despicable illiberality, the gross intrusion into private property rights, and think solely of the economic effects. Leave aside too the near impossibility of policing such a plan.

This requirement for permission will only affect those houses that people wish to purchase as second homes: those already used as such will not be affected. So there will be a restriction on the supply of second homes while demand will continue to rise. Thus the prices of those already used as second homes will continue to rise,  as the report notes.< br />

And it will also, as is its very intention, reduce the prices (from where they would otherwise be) of those homes which are actually lived in full time.

Which is really rather something of a problem. Those who already own two or more houses are, we might reasonably assume, quite a bit wealthier than those who own only one. Yet the result of this plan will be to distribute wealth from the second group to the first. Even I, froth-mouthed supporter of naked capitalism that I am, don't think this a good idea, that we should be conveying wealth from the poor to the rich.

There's also one other teensie problem with the plan. Having paid the premium to purchase a house to use as a second home, who is going to be mad enough to live in it full time and thus lose that premium? 

Matthew Taylor, the Liberal Democrat MP who was invited by Brown to do the review, said: “For the rural communities that are affected, this is a massive issue. This measure would allow local authorities to say that a property cannot be converted from a full-time home into a second home. “In some communities, 30%, 40% or 50% of the village is dark most of the year.

Thanks Matthew, you've just ensured that those villages will stay 50% dark for evermore.

It's very difficult to escape the "crazed loons" description of government when people come up with plans of such mindboggling fatuity.

The government is contemplating a tax on plastic supermarket bags. This makes me think of the words of Henry Luttrell:

O that there might in England be
A duty on hypocrisy
A tax on humbug, an excise
On solemn plausibilities.

One argument used in favour of progressive taxation is the diminishing marginal utility of income. David Friedman doesn't think it's a very valid one though.

The absurdiity of the current management of schools and access to them. Vouchers please, the Swedish Option. 

Guido reveals quite how much a political family can make these days. 

As ever in politics, sincerity's the thing. If you can fake that you've got it made. 

Just how much of the cost of a nuclear plant is actually the cost of a nuclear plant: and how much is the paperwork? 

Further bad regulation: the problems of tin whiskers and the banning of lead solders. 

And finally, the history of economic thought in four minutes, or, for the traditionalists, the same subject by Sellars and Yeatman's amanuensis.

51. "Capitalism is wasteful, dissipating resources into profit and advertising."

Some claim that resources in a planned economy need be allocated only to production and distribution. With no need for profits or for advertising, costs will be cheaper. In practice, however, profit spurs people to seek out market opportunities. They are constantly looking for needs that can be satisfied, or efficiencies which can be made, and to the gains which these can bring. This is why the market economies are so flexible and adaptable at bringing people the goods they want, by contrast with the sluggishness and unresponsiveness which characterized the socialist economies, and which still characterizes state industries.

Men and women are motivated, each with a desire to improve their lot. They are not automatons, programmed to act in ways which are of no benefit to them. People generally put in more effort and skill when they have some personal stake in the outcome, and stand to reap some of the rewards of their enterprise and enthusiasm.

The search for profit directs people to invest in production, to put money to work generating new wealth, and bringing new goods before people in the process. Advertising serves an important information function. It tells people about products, processes and prices, and enables them to compare. Much of it is directed to informing people about new products and services, and in attempting to break into new markets. It thus contributes to the competitiveness and adaptability of the economy.

Without profit or advertising, there is neither the incentive to seek out new markets, nor the ability to let people know what choices are available. There is no pressure for ever more efficiency in the production of goods and services, and no rapid turnover in the range of those which are available.

Far from being wasteful, both profit and advertising contribute to the superior efficiency and cost-effectiveness of market economies.