Did you know that the public health campaigners are complete loons?

Well, if you didn't know that the public health campaigners are complete loons then perhaps this will help to persuade you. The European Union is taking the next step in reforming the entirely absurd sugar regime, making it marginally less awful. The public health wallahs are shouting that this might make sugar cheaper, to the point where everyone will explode from eating too much of it. No, really:

Controversial agricultural reforms by the European Union could cause sugar levels in food and drink to rise, experts have warned.

Campaigners said it was “perverse” that the EU was planning to lift sugar production quotas at a time when health authorities are advising people to reduce their consumption of the ingredient.

Under the current system production of sugar within the EU is restricted to 13.3 million tonnes a year. However the quota is due to be scrapped in 2017 as part of a series of reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy.

The move is expected to make sugar cheaper for food and drink manufacturers, prompting fears it will encourage them to use rising levels of the ingredient. Dr Aseem Malhotra, science director of Action on Sugar, a campaign group, said it would be “disastrous” for public health.

Oh dear.

They've really not understood what's going on here at all.

In the nightmare world of EU agricultural policies the abolition of quota does not mean that prices are going to fall. For what actually happens is that if you grow sugar beet then there's two prices which you can sell that deformed mangelwurzel to the processor at. One, a guaranteed one, much higher than a free market price, is only available if you have quota to go with your sugar beet. The other price is very much lower than a free market price and almost no one ever tries to grow beet without quota as a result.

The important point about the abolition of quota is not that it abolishes quota. It is that if there is no quota then beet with or without quota cannot gain that guaranteed price. Thus the price on offer to Europe's sugar beet growers is going to fall: all other things being equal we'll thus have less beet being grown. And thus less sugar being taken into storage and then subsidised by the EU when it is later dumped on the food manufacturers.

The abolition of quota will lead to less sugar being produced. And the public health campaigners are arguing against the abolition of quota to stop less sugar being produced.

Go figure.

On the idea of the three day weekend

The idea of reducing the working week raises its head again. This time it's the idea that we should have a three day weekend:

Professor John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, caused a stir this week by advocating a four-day working week. This would improve our mental and physical health, reduce stress and we would all "enjoy ourselves more".

One reason to bring in a four-day week is that we work the longest hours in Europe.

Sadly this is not true, we do not work the longest hours in Europe. We might work quite long hours at paid, market, work this is true. But in return we do rather less unpaid, household, labour. The net effect of this is that we have more leisure hours than much of Europe does.

And there's a good reason why this is so too: the division and specialisation of labour.By doing market work we are able to do that dividing and specialisation which, as Adam Smith pointed out, allows there to be greater productivity. Household labour can generally only be divided between the two adults in a household: obviously less efficient than being able to divide and specialise with the 7 billion in the global economy.

By organising ourselves so that we do more market work and then purchase in more of that household labour (in the form of drip dry shirts, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, microwaves, prepared food and so on) we are thus able to have a higher standard of living while also enjoying more leisure.

We have also been doing more of this as the decades pass. Leisure hours continue to rise as household labour hours drop away.

But let's imagine that we really do want to increase the days spent in leisure as a matter of public policy rather than as a matter of personal choice. The obvious solution is to nationalise the power industry again, put the unions in charge of it and then get Heath back into No 10. We all had four day weekends back then and that worked out really well, didn't it?

How not to read a report, brought to you by Geoffrey Lean

A lovely example of how to propagandise rather than actually report from our Geoffrey Lean over at the Telegraph. Things are terrible and only going to get worse, of course:

Ours is the first generation than can largely take plentiful, cheap food for granted. Now, report after report is suggesting it may also be the last.

Two days ago, a Ministry of Defence study of “global strategic trends” raised the spectre of global demand outstripping supply over the next 30 years. And two days earlier, a Commons committee warned that Britain’s own food security is imperilled.

Prices have been rising twice as fast as general inflation and appear to be accelerating. The MoD report suggests that they could eventually settle at twice their present level.

That's not, quite, what the report actually says. What it does say is this:

By 2045, food production is predicted to have increased by nearly 70%, to feed a larger and more demanding population13 – and it is possible that demand could outstrip supply. Some types of consumption are likely to grow particularly strongly. As affluence grows in the developing world, the demand for more protein-rich diets is also likely to increase. China, for example, has seen meat consumption increase by 63% between 1985 and 2009, and this trend seems likely to continue.14 Pollution and soil erosion are likely to adversely affect agricultural land – some estimates assess that, globally, as much as 25% of agricultural land is already degraded.15 Climate change will almost certainly have adverse effects on some agriculture, but may open up new areas for cultivation, with positive impacts on particular crops in certain regions. On balance, even though the quality of some areas is likely to have been degraded by 2045, the global arable land area is projected to remain relatively constant (estimates range from a 10% decrease to a 25% increase),16 with some potential increases in crop productivity in the high latitudes, and decreases across the tropical regions.17 Furthermore, warming, acidification and overfishing also threaten to reduce the amount of food that can be harvested from the oceans. Estimates of future food prices are highly varied and may be more volatile, although most projections indicate a general increase.18 Analysis by the International Food Policy Research Institute suggests that average prices of many staple grains could rise by 30% even in the most optimistic scenario.19 Disruption, and possibly congestion, of global trade routes may lead to sharp increases in food prices – particularly in those countries dependent on food imports. When the effects of climate change are taken into account, the price increase above present levels could be as much as 100%.

And when we go and look at that source report we find something very interesting.

If climate change is bad and population growth is high then the price of maize "might" rise by 100% in real terms (ie, after the effects of general inflation). Note, not "food" but "maize". The price, even in this worst scenario, of wheat might move by 30%.

However, note also one of the drivers of that food price rise: that people are getting richer and thus are able to have (ie, there is effective demand for) a richer and more varied diet. And whether food is "cheap" or not rather depends upon both the price of food and also the incomes of those trying to purchase said food. And even in that worst case scenario the incomes of the poor of the world (obviously, the people we're actually concerned about here, the change in the price of maize is going to make near no difference at all to rich world people like ourselves. Tuppence on a pack of cornflakes is too trivial to worry about for us.) rise faster than the price even of maize over the 2000 to 2050 time period being studied.

That is, yes, food rises in price but it also becomes cheaper, more affordable.

It makes sense that the MoD found this, that the original report found this, for it is also the same result Oxfam has found. Precisely because it is not a "shortage" of food, nor climate change, that is the major driver of future food price increases. Rather, it's that the poor will be getting rich and be gaining access to that petit bourgeois pleasure of three squares a day, some of them even with a little meat in them.

This is a problem, if you want to describe it as a problem, of the great success of the neoliberal, globalised, world economic order. Finally, for the first time since the invention of agriculture, the poor are able to eat well. This pushes up food prices, sure, but only and exactly because food is becoming more affordable for all.

We find it very difficult indeed to describe this as something we ought to worry about. More an occasion to get out the bunting and the flags really, time perhaps for Breughel-like scenes of the yeomanry feasting and drinking as we celebrate the good fortune of billions of our fellows.

Another bonkers regulation from the EU again

It appears that the European Union is about to foist upon us yet another near insane regulation:

Worse still, after a decade and more of needlessly increasing the cost of waste disposal, to the detriment of other public services, the European Commission has today produced a new legislative proposal which takes us into altogether new territory.

According to its press release, it plans to set a new target for recycling, requiring 70 percent of all municipal waste and 80 percent of packaging waste to be recycled by 2030, and totally to ban the landfill of recyclable waste by 2025, aiming "to virtually eliminate landfill" by 2030. At most, it will accept an irreducible minimum of five percent of waste, that cannot be recycled.

The institution seems to be in the grip of the misapprehension that more recycling is, in and of itself, a good thing. This is incorrect.

Some recycling is obviously and clearly a good thing: you can tell this because you make a profit by doing it. Melting down old cars to make new ones, collecting copper scrap, smelting old gold fillings to make new ones (yes, it does indeed happen) make profits. This is an indication that the activity itself has added value: we are all richer as a result of this having been done.

There are also things that it would be insane to try to recycle. It's technically feasible, if you expend enough energy, to turn concrete back into cement. But it would be absurd to do so: better to bake some more cement.

Then there's a third class: things that are not profitable to recycle themselves but which we would like to for other reasons. It's not profitable to recycle most radioactive material but we'd also rather not have it lying around the countryside. Thus recycling it, even at a direct loss, might be a good idea for those more general reasons.

It's important to have these three types in mind. In terms of household and general waste, recycling the metals in them does make sense financially and so they come under that first type. And it's possible to argue that all of the other waste should be recycled for that second reason. We're running out of landfill for example, or we're running out of "resources" with which to make new stuff. But neither of those things is actually true. We've no shortage of suitable holes in the ground only of ones that anyone will licence. And there is no general shortage of "resources" at all. And, given that magic of markets thing, those that are in short supply are already in that first type of things worth recycling as their price is high.

We thus end up, as a result of the zealotry of some in the political system, with regulations like these new ones. Using incorrect type 3 arguments to force us into type 2 recycling, the type that makes us all poorer.

An unpublished letter to the LRB on high frequency trading

Lanchester, John. "Scalpers Inc." Review of Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code, by Michael Lewis. London Review of Books 36 no. 11 (2014): 7-9, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n11/john-lanchester/scalpers-inc Dear Sir,

It is striking for John Lanchester to claim that those who believe high-frequency trading is a net benefit to finance (and by extension, society) "offer no data to support" their views. Aside from the fact that he presents such views in the line of climate-change deniers, rather than a perfectly respectable mainstream view in financial economics, it doesn't really seem like he has gone out looking for any data himself!

In fact there is a wide literature on the costs and benefits of HFT, much of it very recent. While Lanchester (apparently following Lewis) dismisses the claim that HFT provides liquidity as essentially apologia, a 2014 paper in The Financial Review finds that "HFT continuously provides liquidity in most situations" and "resolves temporal imbalances in order flow by providing liquidity where the public supply is insufficient, and provide a valuable service during periods of market uncertainty". [1]

And looking more broadly, a widely-cited 2013 review paper, which looks at studies that isolate and analyse the impacts of adding more HFT to markets, found that "virtually every time a market structure change results in more HFT, liquidity and market quality have improved because liquidity suppliers are better able to adjust their quotes in response to new information." [2]

There is nary a mention of price discovery in Lanchester's piece—yet economists consider this basically the whole point of markets. And many high quality studies, including a 2013 European Central Bank paper [3], find that "HFTs facilitate price efficiency by trading in the direction of permanent price changes and in the opposite direction of transitory pricing errors, both on average and on the highest volatility days".

Of course, we should all know that HFT narrows spreads. For example, a 2013 paper found that the introduction of an algorithmic-trade-limiting regulation in Canada in April 2012 drove the bid-ask spread up by 9%. [4] This, the authors say, mainly harms retail investors.

The evidence is out there, and easy to find—but not always easy to fit into the narrative of a financial thriller.

Ben Southwood London

[1] http://student.bus.olemiss.edu/files/VanNessR/Financial%20Review/Issues/May%202014%20special%20issue/Jarnecic/HFT-LSE-liquidity-provision-2014-01-09-final.docx [2] http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhasbrou/Teaching/2014%20Winter%20Markets/Readings/HFT0324.pdf [3] http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1602.pdf [4] http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/faculty/milne/322/IIROC_FeeChange_submission_KM_AP3.pdf

Sometimes it's the little things that matter in tax systems

A little story that helps to explain why the Greek economy is in the depths that it is:

But as happens so often in Greece, the bureaucrats had other plans. In a country where you are viewed favorably when you spend money but are considered a criminal when you make it, starting a business is a nightmare. The demands are outrageous, and include a requirement that the business pay taxes in advance equal to 50 percent of estimated profit in the first two years. And the taxes are collected even if the business suffers a loss.

I recall something similar from time in California: you must put up a bond for the amount of sales tax that you will be collecting in the future. Plus a fee for the privilege of opening a business in that great state.

This just isn't a sensible manner in which to be running a tax system. Yes, of course, tax must be collected for there are things that we really do need government to do (even if not as many as they attempt to do). And it's probably a good idea to have certain measures in the tax law to make sure that people don't dodge said righteously due taxes. But to add to the capital requirements for starting a business in this manner is simply ludicrous. It's a difficult enough, and expensive enough, enterprise at the best of times. Rather better, therefore, to leave the possibility of avoidance there in the process of leaving some room for a business to even start.

Our own dear HMRC seems to have cottoned on to this point: it's no secret at all that many new firms bolster working capital by delaying PAYE tax payments to the Treasury. It's not exactly desirable in the scheme of things but when looked at in the round better that such companies survive their growth pangs than that HMG gets its money on the nail.

The new Adam Smith Institute website

If you're a regular reader of the Adam Smith Institute, you'll have noticed that we have a new website. I'm a big fan of the design – that and the rest of the site has been done by freelancer Rob Bell (who I strongly recommend for quality, value and ease-of-doing-business if you're thinking of getting a site designed yourself).

But the changes have been a little more than cosmetic: moving to Wordpress from Drupal means that we can manage the site at the back end more cheaply and easily than ever before, and if/when we want to redesign the site in the future it should be relatively simple.

Most importantly, the site is now fully responsive to mobile and table screen sizes, so reading on your phone should be a very pleasant experience from now on.

Naturally, there have been a few hiccups – we've imported all our old research and blogposts and maintained most URLs, but some old images have been lost and some posts with special characters in their URL may not be working. Thanks in part to Google's caching of old pages and the Wayback Machine, all of these things can be fixed manually. If you spot anything amiss, just let us know in the comments here.

There are some other minor niggles that need to be sorted out – we have pages about (for instance) Adam Smith that were almost never visited on the old site and we haven't found a good way to link to on the new site just yet. As is often the case, the balance is between style and function, and it will take a while to get everything working properly.

We'll be experimenting with some other changes, like keeping the Research section for ASI reports only and putting longer think pieces (clearly labeled as such) on the blog. We're also using tags for posts to make it easier to find what you want from our archives.

If you have any comments or suggestions, do please let us know!

Danny Dorling tells us what inequality is really all about

I've been lucky enough to get a copy in proof of the next Danny Dorling book, "Inequality and the 1%". And I've got to tell you it's a corker, although perhaps not for the reasons that Professor Dorling might hope. For example, he tells us in the first chapter what inequality is really all about. No, it isn't, as you might have thought, that the rich and poor are moving ever further apart and that this is, in some manner, a bad thing. No, he's quite insistent that it's really about the growing gap between the 1% and the other 9% of the top 10%.

The bankers and the CEOs have seen their incomes soar above what can be earned by other members of the upper middle classes like, oooh, say, senior journalists at The Guardian, Oxbridge professors and the like. And this is a very bad thing indeed and something must be done. Because those ghastly people in trade are now able to monopolise all of the positional goods d'ye see?

A couple of generations ago nice houses in London, the Georgian rectory in the countryside, these could be afforded by many of the professional classes. Now they're only available to those who decided to do commerce and won't somebody think of the poor intellectuals trailing in their wake?

That is, the entire current concern about inequality is a massive whingefest by those who look down upon their intellectual inferiors but find that they then get outbid by them them for the finer things in life.

It's clearly rich in comic possibilities to take this argument seriously. So perhaps we should take this argument seriously so that we can make fun of it. The major problem with Britain today is that Guardian journalists cannot buy nice houses in Islington. Discuss.

Teaching economics in schools

At the weekend I spoke at a conference in Berlin organized by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation on teaching economics to teenage school students. I took them through my preferred method, which is to avoid jargon and equations, but to build up understanding instead by starting with first principles and building up logically upon them. Value, I said, is necessarily subjective. Because we are different we value things differently. Value is in the mind; it does not reside in the object itself, and it is because we value things differently from each other that we trade. From value I build up to price, and to specialization and trade, and so on. Those who have looked at my "Economics is Fun" videos on YouTube will see how this works. My audience took delight in the fact that my first 30 seconds dealing with value completely destroyed Marx's labour theory of value, and with it 'surplus' value and exploitation and all the class hatred that follows from it.

My aim fundamentally is not to teach students a set of facts or rules, but to inculcate a way of thinking. I take the view that understanding is more important than learning.

Sometimes I teach this in schools by working through ten widely held and widely propagated views that are in fact wrong. These include claims that the world is running out of scarce resources leaving none for our children, or that the world will become so over-populated that it cannot sustain the numbers.

In showing why and where these are incorrect, I try to have the students thinking things through for themselves and taking a more critical attitude toward popular nostrums. My experience has been that young people appreciate this approach, and that it armours them in the years to come against much of the nonsense that politicians in particular talk about economics.

When ignorance trumps incentives

When something bad happens it is often helpful to think about why it has happened in two ways: did someone have a reason to make it happen, or did it happen by accident? This can also be expressed in a slightly different way: were incentives to blame, or ignorance? Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus have made a compelling argument that ignorance explains more about the world than we often realize, using the 2008 financial crisis as an example. This post is an attempt to summarise their argument.

Economists often remind us that incentives matter. Indeed this is sometimes said to be the cornerstone of ‘the economic way of thinking’. Russ Roberts gives the example of death rates on British ships bringing convicts to Australia in the 18th Century – rather than attempting to raise ship captains’ awareness of the badness of letting their passengers die, the government gave captains a bonus for every convict that walked off their ship. This was very effective.

Clearly this way of thinking can be very powerful. It is the foundation of the price system, which is the mechanism that markets use to allocate resources effectively in a world where information is dispersed: if demand for pizza rises, the price of pizza rises, giving cooks and restaurant owners an incentive to sell more pizza. It helps to explain why some people stay on welfare payments for long periods of time: the welfare money they lose when they go into work represents a significant disincentive to work. Or, if you offer something like a bailout to businesses that go bust, you reduce the incentive for them to act prudently to avoid going bust.

This last example is what is known as moral hazard. And it is a popular and compelling explanation for the 2008 financial crisis. Banks expected to be bailed out if they went bust, so they acted more recklessly than they would if they thought they would be on the line for their mistakes.

However, Friedman and Kraus argue that this popular and compelling explanation may in fact be wrong. A good way of testing it would be to compare how the bankers involved in making bad decisions acted where perverse incentives applied, and how they acted where perverse incentives did not apply.

One strong piece of evidence against the incentives narrative is that bankers seem to have acted the same way with their personal investments as they did with their business investments.

Many bankers lost a lot of money personally in the crisis because their personal portfolios were not ‘bailed out’ in the same way that their banks were. If we are to treat the ‘incentives story’ as a falsifiable proposition (as all claims about the world should be treated), this might be a fairly strong reason to disregard it.

This may be where ignorance comes in. If bankers acted the way they did because they were unaware of the risks they were taking, then we would expect their private and business investments to be pretty similar.

However, it is strange that so many bankers seemed to make the same mistake. We know that they were not acting in a neutral environment: as Friedman and Kraus have shown, regulations like the Basel accords and the US’s recourse rule directed banks to prefer mortgage debt to business debt. Other regulations directed banks to rely on the risk judgments of three specific ratings agencies, giving those agencies protection from competition.

(On the ratings agencies point, astonishingly, it seems that nobody realized that these agencies were basically protected from competition. Both bankers and regulators assumed they were being subjected to market forces, leading to everyone trusting them a lot more than they would if they knew they were dealing with protected monopolies.)

These regulations were designed to make banks act prudently: the regulators had no incentive to make banks act badly. It seems possible that they did not realize the error of their ways until it was too late. Perhaps regulatory ignorance was to blame.

It is important to stress that the regulators should not be blamed personally. They probably made the best choice they could have made given the information available to them. Rather it is the position they found themselves in that seems to have been to blame. If a single bank (or even a handful) makes a mistake, that bank will suffer but the whole sector probably won’t. It is only when a whole sector of a market (or almost all that market) makes an error that we should worry. (Incidentally, as shaky as the housing and financial sectors were, the real trouble did not begin until monetary policy tightened unexpectedly, as Scott Sumner outlined at our recent Adam Smith Lecture.)

Given ignorance, we should expect errors to take place. Because regulation necessarily applies to everyone in a market, a regulatory error affects everyone.  That may be the fundamental problem with regulation, and a reason to have a strong ‘prima facie’ objection to regulation. It is better to have one hundred firms making one hundred different mistakes that happen at different times and in different ways to one hundred firms making one single mistake that happens at the same time for everyone.

None of this implies any special knowledge on the part of firms. Indeed regulators may be much more expert than the firms they are regulating, but the danger of a collective error would still give us a reason to generally object to regulation in principle, no matter how sensible it may seem.