Single Issue Fanatics and central planning

There is that concept that if only those who truly know - the Rolls Royce minds in Whitehall - were to really think about things then and therefore we’d all be told the right things to do. A - not the only, but a - problem with this idea is that said RR thinking can - will be, perhaps - infected by Bernard Levin’s Single Issue Fanatic. Which will, obviously, bias the results and therefore what we’re all told to do.

The SIF, by excluding any recognition of trade offs or the views of others violates the wisdom of the crowds argument - that we only narrow in on the right answer when all views are considered.

Ministers have been accused of wasting £800m of taxpayer cash on heat pump subsidies for “wealthy families” in an unrelenting net zero push.

The Government will spend £2.7bn on handouts of up to £7,500 for households installing environmentally-friendly heat pumps or biomass boilers in the five years to spring 2030.

However, its own analysis has concluded that around 30pc of the subsidised installations would have happened regardless, equivalent to £810m.

This is always a problem, any system of subsidy must be measured by the marginal gain from the subsidy. That is, the totality of what happens minus that which would have happened anyway. But more:

The Tories have pledged to overturn what is effectively a net-zero ban on air conditioning in new homes.

A Conservative government would rip up green rules that block developers from installing cooling systems and leave families “suffering unnecessarily” in hot weather.

It’s only just recently that the subsidy scheme for extant houses has allowed “dual use” - that is, both heating and cooling - systems to be subsidised. The original exclusion of them was the influence of those Single Issue Fanatics within government - air conditioning is bad, d’ye see? No doubt because it reduces the suffering of those vile proles who have so harmed Gaia and who must thus sweat in the heat of this world as well as the next. We think we have that argument correct.

That SIF infested central planning has meant however many hundreds of thousands of new builds not having the very cooling systems that this week proves we require.

Ho Hum all praise the glory of central planning.

Tim Worstall