Even drug prohibitionists should be embarrassed by Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens has been around a lot promoting his new book, Drugs: The War We Never Fought. I have not read his book, nor do I intend to – unless it is significantly better than the extracts he has published from it, I would rather not waste my time. Hitchens’s thesis is that it is misleading to talk about a ‘war on drugs’ in the British context.

This is actually a fair point. The War on Drugs is an American phenomenon, and British drugs prohibition has, indeed, been a lot less heavy-handed than America’s. Not that that would be difficult. Even still, it's quite an overstatement to say that there is a 'de facto decriminalization' of drugs in Britain. There are over 10,000 people in jail in the UK for specific drugs offences, and many more for drugs-related offences.

This is just about all that Hitchens has right. His article for the Mail on Sunday this weekend was a study in the use of logical fallacies, and he is remarkably inconsistent in his reasoning.

Using false generalizations and question-begging, Hitchens concentrated on cannabis, “one of the most dangerous drugs known to man”. But his argument – that cannabis is much more dangerous than is commonly believed – was staggeringly weak. His justification for this premise in full:

“The cannabis user can cause terrible distress to others. He could wreck his life and the lives of his friends and close family through irreversible mental illness. He could destroy his good prospects. Its use by teenagers is associated with under-achievement in school. Many who fail in school go on to fail in life, and so become an unquenchable grief to those who love them, and a costly burden to us all.

“Campaigners for cannabis legalisation often claim that the drug, especially in comparison with alcohol, promotes peaceful behaviour. I am unconvinced by this broad claim, partly because of the frequent newspaper accounts of violent acts by people who are known cannabis users. . . . 

“There are also several cases, which I have for the most part set aside, of killings by mentally ill people who have been taking cannabis.

“It is not possible to say whether they were ill in the first place because of cannabis, or whether they were already ill for some other reason, and cannabis has made their problems worse.”

That’s it. No survey data, no medical evidence – nothing, except some specious anecdotes and flimsy correlations. Contrast this with actual, you know, medical research which says, basically, that it’s not good for you, but you could do worse. There isn’t a clear link between cannabis use and violence to others. The risks of psychosis are slim. And Peter Hitchens may be surprised to learn that there have been several cases of killings by mentally ill people who have not been taking cannabis as well.

Like many other hobbies, cannabis is a potentially harmful thing to use. There are troubling studies that suggest a link between suicide and cannabis use (and studies that do not find such a link), but Hitchens does not cite them.

Of course, all of this is beside the point. As in all scientific questions, the jury is out, and it is absurd to think that a few studies should be able to determine how other people are allowed to live. As an adult, I should be able to stick whatever I damn well like into my body. Provided that I am aware of the risks, nobody is better placed to make my personal cost/benefit calculation for any given action. Nevertheless, it is staggering to see how weak the premises of Hitchens's argument are.

There seems to be some sort of convention that people criticising Hitchens must first praise his consistency and intellect. I don’t know why; he is not an interesting writer or a profound thinker. He huffs and puffs, and rarely writes well enough to justify his affectations.

He is also considerably less consistent than he might appear. He follows his authoritarianism to its next logical step – he wants alcohol banned as well as cannabis, though he does try to wriggle out of that by saying that “alcohol is too well-established here for such measures to work” – but what about other dangerous hobbies, like horse-riding (worse than ecstasy), boxing, rugby, or sky-diving? What about sex with people in high STD risk groups? What about driving to work instead of getting the train (twelve times less lethal than driving)?

Hitchens is silent about all of these things. He might simply be inconsistent. He might be a coward who is only prepared to attack things that are already illegal or, in the case of alcohol, under assault by the health lobby. He might believe that the pleasure that some people take from driving is more important than the pleasure that some people take from using cocaine. If he does, then he is simply advocating for a law based on Peter Hitchens’s own preferences, and is certainly not a serious thinker.

There are many good reasons not to use drugs, and there are a few good reasons not to legalize drugs. Peter Hitchens has given none of these. As he has never tried drugs himself, he even manages to undermine the best argument against taking drugs – that they turn you into a pompous, incoherent bore. Hitchens's paper-thin arguments should be mocked and ignored, and nothing more.

Update: Apparently Hitchens has admitted trying 'illegal drugs'. Why hasn't he handed himself into the authorities?

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Prohibition returns

Contrary to some excitable headlines, Tasmania has not banned the sale of cigarettes to anyone born in the 21st century. Such a move has been proposed, but it is most unlikely that the Australian state’s Lower House will allow it to become law. Nevertheless, it is another sign that anti-smoking campaigners are ready to come out of the closet and admit that they are prohibitionists. For decades, any suggestion that advocates for a ‘smoke-free world’ secretly wanted to criminalise the sale of tobacco were met with denial and protestation. This was not a witch-hunt against smokers, they said, only a campaign for better education, or restricting advertising, or protecting bar-staff, or saving the children.

The Tasmanian ruse, which was first mooted in Singapore, retains a ‘think-of-the-children’ element by forbidding those born after the year 2000 from purchasing tobacco products. Since the eldest of these people are currently twelve years old, this is not immediately controversial, but in a few years time it will mean prohibition for the first wave of adult consumers. This crucial fact seemed to escape some Tasmanians, like the gentleman who told ABC News that the proposal "definitely has my support mate because I believe that children shouldn't be smoking." This sentiment is, of course, besides the point. The real question is whether future generations should be treated like children forevermore; the Peter Pans of tobacco control.

This is not the first time tobacco prohibition has raised its head this year. The advocacy journal Tobacco Control kicked things off with a special edition featuring several articles about what it calls the ‘endgame’. In February, the historian Robert Proctor published the first overtly prohibitionist book of the new era, the title of which—‘Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition’—requires little explanation. More recently, an academic named Craig Dalton has set up a website to campaign for a “ban on retail tobacco.” In a clever rhetorical twist, Dalton portrays a total ban on the sale of tobacco as less mean-spirited than the current approach:

“When will we finally reach the logical conclusion that banning tobacco is much more compassionate than squeezing smokers with more and more painful stigmatisation?”

This is a text-book example of a false dichotomy. Option B is better than Option A therefore we must do B, never mind that C, D, E, F etc. have been unexplored. Never mind either that options A and B are both the creations of the same group of extremists. Dalton seems to acknowledge that the doctrine of ‘denormalisation’ lacks humanity, but only in order to move towards a still more draconian phase.

A detailed game-plan for the “logical conclusion” of the anti-smoking endeavour appeared in Tobacco Control as a faux-retrospective article titled ‘How smoking became history: looking back to 2012’ in which Richard Daynard imagines living in 2032 when smoked tobacco is banned worldwide. In this fantasy, New Zealand outlaws sales in 2020, a prohibition which “went so smoothly that many countries followed suit”. Twelve years later, the work of tobacco controllers is limited to campaigning against smokeless tobacco and “stamping out cigarette smuggling where it still arises”.

How simple it all sounds, with that brief reference to smuggling being the only acknowledgement of the serious unintended consequences associated with alcohol suppression and the War on Drugs. And yet, even at this late hour, the word ‘prohibition’ remains verboten. Proctor talks only of the ‘abolition’ of the cigarette industry, Tobacco Control uses the euphemism of an ‘endgame’ and Dalton is eager to distinguish his ban on “retail sales” from America’s ‘Noble Experiment’ of the 1920s:

“A comparison to the days of alcohol prohibition are not entirely relevant as this is not a ban on the substance desired by smokers – nicotine, which will still be available – but a ban on its most deadly form of delivery: retail tobacco sales.”

This is little more than sophistry. If smokers found pharmaceutical nicotine products to be suitable replacements for cigarettes, we would not be having this discussion. As for his contention that “we cannot assume that a black market will flourish with a retail ban”, copious historical evidence exists to the contrary, not only for drink, drugs and tobacco but for all sorts of products.

Proctor’s insistence on talking abut ‘abolition’ rather than ‘prohibition’ presumably reflects the positive connotations of the former (being primarily associated with the end of slavery) and a desire to distance himself from the toxic legacy of Al Capone et al. Under his scheme, cigarettes would not be sold or manufactured commercially but people would be free to grow their own tobacco. As a historian, he must know that this differs in no way from the Volstead Act, which effectively abolished the drinks industry, but did not forbid the consumption or domestic production of alcohol. Proctor’s ‘abolition’ is prohibition in both intention and detail.

Advocates of the so-called ‘endgame’ also espouse “ending commercial sales but allowing tobacco growing for personal use”, but they are still more optimistic about the post-abolition world. In an article entitled ‘What are the elements of the tobacco endgame?’, they suggest that there is a real possibility of reducing the smoking rate to just 0.5% of the population. To put this in context, after a century-long War on Drugs, 0.5% of the British population have used heroin in the past year. By contrast, smoking prevalence in the UK is 20% and there are 1.2 billion smokers in the world—a number that rises every day. Undaunted by these figures, the authors retreat into their dream world and worry that “some might argue that even this [0.5% smoking rate] is insufficient, as this prevalence would still kill many.”

It is doubtful that even a smoking rate of 0.01% would satisfy them. For the moral entrepreneur, the only tolerable rate of consumption is zero and surely nobody imagined that the stated goal of a “tobacco-free world” could be achieved by persuasion alone. The lurch towards prohibition should therefore not be surprising. And yet their squeamishness about using the P word, and the scramble to find a more friendly-sounding term, would not be necessary if these advocates believed that prohibition was a noble goal. They know they are naughty boys and girls, these crusaders, and they hope the public will be fooled if they coin new terms for their discredited ideology of suppression.

There will be a certain historical neatness if this decade sees a gathering storm of prohibitionist fervour followed by a struggle to undo the damage in the next, as it will mirror the second and third decades of the last century when America’s idealism got the better of it. If New Zealand does indeed ban tobacco in 2020 it will coincide with the centenary of the 18th Amendment, which came into force in January 1920, and will be a fitting tribute to humanity’s endless failure to learn the lessons of history.

We can, of course, have a debate about how the prohibition of cigarettes might differ from the prohibition of drink or the ‘abolition’ of marijuana. We can, if we must, listen to those who promise that the laws of supply and demand, and human nature, have changed in the 100 years since the “retail sale” of whisky and cocaine was banned. But what we must not do is pretend that the ‘endgame’ of tobacco control is anything other than prohibition, nor that those who support it are anything other than prohibitionists.

Wealth taxes are immoral and counterproductive

The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says we need a wealth tax. No we don’t. A wealth tax is immoral and counterproductive.

Right now, Mr Clegg and his government should be focusing on creating wealth, not shuffling it around. We need a growth agenda of lower taxes and less red tape in order to get businesses expanding and employing people. A wealth tax, like any other kind of tax, simply shifts potentially productive resources from the private sector to the government. And governments are not usually thought of as being ‘productive’ or  as ‘wealth creators’, are they?

Mr Clegg is talking about a wealth tax partly because he has a party conference coming soon and wants to give his left-of-centre members some red meat. And partly because his government can’t balance its books.

But the wealthiest 1% already contribute 30% of tax receipts: just how much of their flesh does he want? And the national debt is rising – it will rise another 40% by 2016, to £1.5trillion, at which point we will be spending around £70 billion on interest payments alone – not because the ‘rich’ don’t pay enough, but because the government spends too much. Indeed, it spends £700 billion a year, compared to just £450 billion (inflation adjusted) back in 2000. What is that extra £250 billion buying us, except waste and inefficiency?

Brains and money flee high tax countries. I know. When I graduated, the top rate of income tax was 98%, and other rates were teeth-grittingly high too. So like many others of my generation, I upped sticks and emigrated. Eventually I came back, but many others did not. And those are bright, productive people who were lost to the UK. And the effect continues. When US taxes in New York were significantly higher than those in London, thousands of US high-flyers came to London. After the Brown-Osborne ‘expat tax’, many have gone home again. A lot of them could afford the tax, but say they just don’t feel welcome any longer. And now, mobile French businesspeople are buying properties in London to escape M Hollande’ tax hikes on ‘the rich’.

We want more productive capital in the UK, not to tax it out of existence. It is immoral to tax people on their accumulated wealth anyway – and remember that most of those in the 'Rich List' have made their own money, and have not inherited it. Taxing income is one thing: people have money coming in to pay it. But if you tax the value of a house, say, the family living in it might not actually have enough income to meet the bill. You can't pay your tax bill in old masters, town houses, or share certificates. So you have to sell them. But who are the buyers? Not the rest of the population who by definition are too poor to own such wealth. So the price of assets drops. With all 'the rich' trying to sell at the same time, asset prices tumble. They have to sell even more to raise the cash, and prices tumble again. It becomes a fire sale. But it is not actually the rich who suffer most. As asset prices slide, and share prices decline, the value of people's pension funds shrinks. A wealth tax actually robs everyone of their savings, not just the wealthy.

As people’s savings shrink and they feel poorer, they are less likely to go out and spend, which the politicians want us to do in order to revive the economy. They are less likely to give to good causes and help build the Big Society. The tax is simply counterproductive. So what is in this idea, other than stupidity? The politics of envy, perhaps. As Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin put it, ‘If envy taxes made us rich, we would be a very rich country indeed.’

Prohibition returns

Contrary to some excitable headlines, Tasmania has not banned the sale of cigarettes to anyone born in the 21st century. Such a move has been proposed, but it is most unlikely that the Australian state’s Lower House will allow it to become law. Nevertheless, it is another sign that anti-smoking campaigners are ready to come out of the closet and admit that they are prohibitionists. For decades, any suggestion that advocates for a ‘smoke-free world’  secretly wanted to criminalise the sale of tobacco were met with denial and protestation. This was not a witch-hunt against smokers, they said, only a campaign for better education, or restricting advertising, or protecting bar-staff, or saving the children.

The Tasmanian ruse, which was first mooted in Singapore, retains a ‘think-of-the-children’ element by forbidding those born after the year 2000 from purchasing tobacco products. Since the eldest of these people are currently twelve years old, this is not immediately controversial, but in a few years time it will mean prohibition for the first wave of adult consumers. This crucial fact seemed to escape some Tasmanians, like the gentleman who told ABC News that the proposal "definitely has my support mate because I believe that children shouldn't be smoking." This sentiment is, of course, besides the point. The real question is whether future generations should be treated like children forevermore; the Peter Pans of tobacco control.

Continue reading.

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Going to Mars

The sad death of Neil Armstrong reminds us that after 12 Americans walked on the moon no-one else did.  They were able to do it very quickly because they broke it down into stages - Earth orbit, lunar orbit, lunar descent, lunar ascent, home.  Werner von Braun wanted a direct flight but was over-ruled and graciously accepted the change, making it all possible with his Saturn V rocket.  Not a single one failed, and the first manned flight of it went round the moon.

Mars is more difficult technically because it involves a greater distance and longer journey times.  Here's how it might be done much sooner than people are now predicting.

1.  Send the unmanned ascent stage to land on Mars.

2.  When we know it has arrived safe with all systems working, send the return vehicle (complete with supplies for the voyage) to Mars orbit.

3.  When we know that it has arrived safe with all systems working, send the astronauts.  They could fly direct to the planet, using a short route, or dock in Mars orbit with a waiting descent stage.  From Mars orbit they descend, do their research, and use the waiting ascent stage to reach the return craft waiting in orbit.

What Apollo did not do that we now can do is to send some of the hardware ahead.  This means we do not have to carry the entire mission hardware with us, and can therefore use smaller vehicles and faster, less time-consuming trajectories.

I cordially invite some of our techno-geek readers to suggest ways in which this might actually be done…

[The historically minded might note that Neil Armstrong put the first footprint on the moon 8 years after President Kennedy's famous challenge.  It was only 66 years after the Wright brothers' aircraft first flew]

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Should the government fund the arts?

Should the government fund the arts? No, says Pete Spence, the newest addition to the Adam Smith Institute team at The Economist's debate site. Pete makes a strong argument against taxpayer subsidies for the arts, arguing that they should be opposed not because of the cost, but because of the harmful impact of government money on the arts themselves:

The unspoken question throughout Mr Davey's piece is who defines what art is. Culture is valuable, but not when dictated to us. It should be organic, its ability to change through time to reflect the zeitgeist of the time being one of its defining features. Government agencies must be careful not to seem to support the party of power to avoid attacks as a propagandist, while not being too radical, for fear of facing cuts to funding. These pressures see funds directed towards the mediocre and the predictable. Government funding is no guarantee of success: for every “The King’s Speech” there is a “Sex Lives of the Potato Men”.

What's more, the nature of government funding means that the system will choose which 'good art' to fund. In other words, if people don't like Tibetan nose flute orchestras enough to pay themselves, they will be forced to do so by their betters at the Arts Council. A bad model, says Pete:

To appreciate the arts does not require us to be able to tell a Monet from a Manet. It is up to individuals to decide whether their lives are more enriched by watching a Hollywood film than by attending the opera. Richer people are more likely to go to the sort of “elite” arts that are funded by the government. When Mr Davey speaks of making prices affordable, he in fact refers to a subsidy to the middle classes. It is unclear why fans of Adele and “The Dark Knight Rises” should have to pay for my enjoyment of Italian opera.

Well, indeed. The Economist holds a running vote on the topic. Right now, 42% have voted No to taxpayer funding for the arts. If you agree with Pete that the arts are something government is better left out of, please do go and vote No as well.

Money is not a creature of the state

If bread were a state monopoly for long enough, The Economist would be aghast at its privatization. That's George Selgin's conclusion after reading the magazine's report on the origins of money. A decent effort, he says, but with a glaring flaw: its claim that coinage, the root of commodity money, was exclusively the preserve of the state:

is it true that minting developed, and could only develop, as a government operation? Goodhart's article is supposed to offer proof that this was so, by pointing to two instances in which the collapse or withdrawal of government coinage gave way, not to private coinage but to barter (in the former Roman empire) or to the use of a non-metallic money (rice in 10th-century Japan).

One needn't be a logician to recognize the inherent shortcomings of such a "proof by example." That the withdrawal of state-run mints has sometimes failed to prompt the establishment of private ones hardly establishes that private mints have never existed, much less that they never could exist. One may, on the other hand, disprove the claim that private mints have never existed by means of a single, contradictory example.

As a matter of fact, there have been numerous episodes of private coinage, including some very successful ones. What's more, it is far from clear that the very first coins ever made--the famous electrum lumps of Lydia, in Asia Minor--were government products. . . .

It ought to go without saying that there is no technological reason why coins couldn't have been a private invention, or couldn't have been privately manufactured at any time to the same standards, if not better ones, than their government-made counterparts . "A mint, Sir" Edmund Burke once reminded Parliament, "is a manufacture, and it is nothing else." A factory, we would now say. And since when are governments very good at, let alone uniquely capable of, running factories? As for state-sponsored enterprises generally doing a better job of quality control than their private-sector counterparts, if you believe it I must see about coming up with a few tons of ca. 1958 Chinese steel to sell to you.

In fact, all of the most significant coinage-related inventions--the manual screw press and its steam-powered counterpart are only the most famous examples--came from the private sector, and most were taken up by governments only reluctantly and after (sometimes deadly) resistance from government mint authorities. How often, on the other hand, have government authorities themselves been responsible for technological breakthroughs? (No, Tang wasn't invented by NASA.) Were it to come to a wager, I for one would much sooner keep a grip on my money than stake it on Croesus or Pheidon or any other ancient king.

I'm a big fan of Selgin's. He combines rigorous economic theory with a deep appreciation for history, like the two blades of a pair of scissors. When faced with the recieved wisdom-worshipping Economist, it's nice to have him on our side. Read the whole thing.

This green energy thing might be more expensive than we're being told you know

There's always a suspicion when someone has a grand plan that they've not quite thought of everything. That's one of the reasons I so like market mechanisms: they correct for such failures faster than any other method. And there might be one rather large cost that we've not been told about as yet about this green and renewable energy thing. Which is why I famously prefer the as close as we can get to a market solution of a carbon tax over letting anyone construct a grand plan.

The problem is that modern machinery needs very accurate voltage all the time. Something which a renewables heavy grid just isn't all that good at producing. Not consistently at least and that's rather the point.

The problem is that wind and solar farms just don’t deliver the same amount of continuous electricity compared with nuclear and gas-fired power plants. To match traditional energy sources, grid operators must be able to exactly predict how strong the wind will blow or the sun will shine.

But such an exact prediction is difficult. Even when grid operators are off by just a few percentage points, voltage in the grid slackens. That has no affect on normal household appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and coffee machines. But for high-performance computers, for example, outages lasting even just a millisecond can quickly trigger system failures.

What would happen to an aluminium smelter if power fell away would be too too expensive to even think about: you'd probably have to replace all of the pots. That, for the uninitiated, is the expensive part of an aluminium smelter.

Anyway, as a result some of those industries and companies are thinking of moving out of Germany. And those that aren't?

Even August Wagner, head of a textile firm with roughly 180 employees in Bavaria, is taking precautions against feared power interruptions. A stop in production would be catastrophic for him. “When we dye our materials, there are thousands of meters in the dye factory,” he said. “If the power goes out, all of the goods are lost, and we have huge losses.”

Wagner now regulates the power supply of his production himself so that it doesn’t come to that point. What’s more, for a few months, he’s had an emergency power source standing in container next to the production facilities. Since then, other businesspeople in the area have been dropping by to take a look at his setup.

Aurubis, a major copper producer and recycler in Hamburg, has also spent about €2 million to protect against unwanted power emergencies. “If grid stability doesn’t markedly improve, we’ll have to rely on emergency power supplies this and the coming winter,” the company say.

Obviously, such back up power is grossly less efficient than the proper sized kit that feeds the grid. But there's also a large capital cost there: a cost which isn't being included in the estimates of how much green energy is going to cost us. It's actually possible that it's all going to be even more grossly expensive than we already think it is.

As I say, beware of those with grand plans. They're almost certain to have forgotten some terribly important point.

Compensation is compensation and wages are only a part of it

One of the oft used statistics these days is that US incomes have pretty much stood still over recent decades. Sometimes this is refined to median incomes: Joe Sixpack hasn't been doing any better and isn't that a telling indictment of the neoliberalismgrindingthefacesofthepoorintothedustofthepast30years.

The problem with the contention is that such claims always use household incomes and wages and salaries. Households have changed in size (got smaller) so incomes per capita have indeed risen. The other one is that using wages and salaries doesn't show compensation. Especially in the US where a major part of one's compensation for a job, but not of wages or salary, is health care insurance. Now some seem to think that this is free to the worker in some manner: that the employer pays it and it doesn't change wages. Not so:

Using our model, we characterize the compensating differential for employer-sponsored
health insurance (ESHI) -- the causal change in wages associated with gaining ESHI. We also characterize
the welfare impact of the labor market distortion induced by health reform. We show that the welfare
impact depends on a small number of “sufficient statistics" that can be recovered from labor market
outcomes. Relying on the reform implemented in Massachusetts in 2006, we estimate the empirical
analog of our model. We find that jobs with ESHI pay wages that are lower by an average of $6,058
annually, indicating that the compensating differential for ESHI is only slightly smaller in magnitude
than the average cost of ESHI to employers.

In short, even if not quite perfectly accurately, if you get $6k's worth of health care insurance from your employer then you don't get $6k's worth of wages from your employer. Which brings us back to those stagnant wages. Yes, health care insurance is usually an employer provided benefit in the US. Health care costs have been rising strongly in recent decades. From some 8 or 9 % of GDP to what is it now, 17%? Worker wages and salaries may have stayed constant but worker compensation hasn't: the extra that employers are paying is going on those rising health care insurance costs.

We've our own fools and propagandists over here who try to blind us with these sorts of numbers. One that comes to mind is the TUC's claim that since the labour share of income has fallen therefore the profit share must have risen. Either not realising or not letting on that the profit share hasn't changed much over the last 30 years either. It's the other two components of national income, mixed income and taxes minus subsidies, which have risen.

All of which leads to a conclusion. It's worth you learning some of these basic numbers and statistics about the economy. Not so that you can do anything about them you understand, just so that you'll recognise when you're being lied to.

About time we abolished national pay scales, isn't it?

I think it's about time we abolish those national pay scales for public sector employees. Just devolve wage negotiations down to the actual employer, the school, or the hospital. Of course, this would enrage the public sector unions as they gain much of their power from negotiating those national wages. But then that would be part of the fun, enraging those who should be enraged.

The reason we should do this is because national pay scales lead to low grade employees in high wage areas:

National pay bargaining for teachers should be scrapped because it leads to lower GCSE grades for pupils, particularly in middle-class areas, according to a study.

 

Schools in these areas find it harder to recruit good teachers since national pay scales prevent them competing with local private firms by offering higher salaries.

....
‘Our findings present strong evidence that the centralised wage setting of teachers’ pay has a negative impact on pupils’ learning.’

The logic isn't hard to understand. When local wages are high then all the bright people go and do something else than cram knowledge into the anklebiters' heads, for the national pay scale keeps teaching wages below local.

The same researcher, Do Carol Propper, has previously found that something very similar happens in the NHS:

In many sectors, pay is regulated to be equal across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. When the competitive outside wage is higher than the regulated wage, there are likely to be falls in quality. We exploit panel data from the population of English hospitals in which regulated pay for nurses is essentially flat across the country. Higher outside wages significantly worsen hospital quality as measured by hospital deaths for emergency heart attacks. A 10 percent increase in the outside wage is associated with a 7 percent increase in death rates. Furthermore, the regulation increases aggregate death rates in the public health care system.

So, about time we abolsihed national pay scales then I think. After all, the evidence is that they kill people and make the little darlin's even more stupid than the state school system normally leaves them. Neither is all that much of a recommendation now, is it?