When Congress passed the anti-slavery amendment

It was on January 31st 1865, 154 years ago today, that the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment that banned slavery, and sent it out to the states for ratification. Nearly two years earlier, Lincoln had used Presidential war powers to free slaves in Confederate states as they came under Union control, but the amendment made slavery unconstitutional.

It was one landmark among several that made illegal the ownership of one human being by another, the total denial of liberty. It predates written records and was practised in many cultures. Slavery involved suffering, and many captured slaves died in transit. The Arab slave trade, for example, which lasted over 1,000 years, typically saw 6 or even 10 die for every one that reached the destination. In the Atlantic slave ships, some 15 percent died en route, while the remainder suffered appalling conditions.

Other landmarks in the campaign for its abolition included the 1807 UK Act, inspired by Wilberforce, that abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire. In the half-century following, the British navy seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard. Wilberforce himself lived to see the 1835 Slavery Abolition Act pass into law.

A US landmark was the 1807 Act under Jefferson that banned the import of slaves, although it left the domestic practice in place. By the civil war it was estimated that one-third of Southern families owned slaves, so the 13th Amendment made a vast difference to the lives of millions.

The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights specified that, "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms." No person today may legally be enslaved or held in slavery, and the most basic human freedom to live free from bondage is enshrined in international law. To those who say slavery is still with us in the form of human trafficking, chattel slavery, forced marriage and child soldiers, Steven Pinker gives an eloquent distinction between what it is now, and what it was for most of human history:

“There is an enormous difference between a clandestine, illegal, and universally decried practice in a few parts of the world and an open, institutionalized, and universally approved practice everywhere in the world."

That experimentation machine we need

There are myriad methods of doing things, cornucopias of things to be done. We need, desire, some system of sorting through what can be done, what we’d like to have done, to see where a match can be made. A way of doing something we want done. The difficulty is compounded as the onward march of technology means that both are a moving target, what can and what we want.

At which point a story from something we’ve been doing this past 6,000 or more years, growing rice:

Junpeng is part of a pilot project to see if it’s possible to grow more rice with less water and fewer greenhouse gases. The dramatic difference between his two crops points a way to help the world’s 145 million small rice farmers, and could also greatly reduce global warming emissions from agriculture.

The project, backed by the German and Thai governments and by some of the world’s largest rice traders and food companies, has seen 3,000 other farmers in this corner of Thailand’s “rice basket” near the Cambodian border trained to grow sustainable rice according to the principles of a revolutionary agronomical system discovered by accident in Madagascar in the 1980s.

Jesuit priest Henri de Lalanié working in the highlands observed that by planting far fewer seeds than usual, using organic matter as a fertiliser and keeping the rice plants alternately wet and dry rather than flooded, resulted in yields that were increased by between 20 and 200%, while water use was halved. Giving plants more oxygen, minimising the competition between them and strictly controlling the water they receive is thought to make them stronger and more resilient to flood and drought.

The original finding was serendipity. The growth has been people trying it and finding it works. The end result highly desirable, but it’s the method of getting there which is important. Suck it and see and do more of what works.

This is, of course, a market method of testing innovation. The government involvement is telling people about it, not insisting that they do it nor planning who or how.

It’s not an outcome of bureaucratic planning now, is it? And thus our estimation of the value of bureaucratic planning above market experimentation is?

Mass murder of Stalin’s state "enemies"

On this date, January 30th, in 1930, the Soviet Politburo ordered the extermination of the kulaks. Stalin had decreed they were enemies of the Revolution, and they were castigated and humiliated before large numbers of them were murdered. The kulaks were peasants who were slightly better off than field labourers, having perhaps a couple of cows and a few acres of land.

This, to Stalin, made them part of the hated property-owning middle class. He wanted production of food to be done large-scale on collective farms. The kulaks were an obstacle to a peasantry totally dependent on, and subservient to, the state, and must be eliminated. Stalin declared, "The resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle and it must be deprived of the productive sources of its existence and development." This meant confiscating their animals and their grain, needed for the Red Army, and leaving them to starve. Then their land was seized.

Many were sent to gulags, with hundreds of thousands dying along the way. Some were executed, and others left to starve to death. Solzhenitsyn put the number killed at 6 million. It is reckoned that this policy led to the great Soviet famine of 1932-33 that killed millions more. It was one of the great disasters of Russian history, and it was entirely man-made.

Historians estimate that this wanton act of mass murder was but a drop in the bucket that Stalin later filled with the blood of his peoples. By coincidence, on the same date, January 30th, three years later in 1933, another mass murderer, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

Statistics matter Mr. Lammy, statistics matter

David Lammy does seem to major in an insistence that Britain treats those of differential melanin contents differently, even unfairly. At which point we’ve got to insist that statistics matter. Really matter, for they’re how we understand the world around us:

More than half of the inmates held in prisons for young people in England and Wales are from a black and minority ethnic (BME) background, the highest proportion on record, the prisons watchdog has said, prompting warnings that youth jails have hit “American” levels of disproportionality.

About 51% of boys in young offender institutions (YOIs) – prisons for boys aged 15 to 17 and young adult men aged 18 to 21 – identified as being from a BME background, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) found.

In addition, the inspectorate found 42% of children in secure training centres (STCs) – prisons for children up to the age of 17 – were from a BME background.

The proportion of BME boys and men behind bars in YOIs in England and Wales is nearly four times the 14% BME proportion of the wider UK population.

It’s that last line which is the error. For ethnicity as a portion of the population varies by age cohort - obviously enough, mass immigration is a recent enough phenomenon. Rough numbers from Nomis tell us that in these age groups some 23% or so of the population are BAME.

Thus the number of young men in those prisons is disprortionate, yes, and we’d love to know why too. But we still have to start with the right numbers.

For example, when we consider who has the top jobs - as has been done recently - there is the other side of this same number. The young are indeed more likely to be BAME than the general population and thus the old less so. Who is it that has the top jobs? Those who have aged into them. That may or may not be the entire explanation but it’s an important point to take into consideration before we make any conclusions.

For statistics really do matter, they’re how we make sense of a complex world.

Madsen Moment — Private Foreign Aid

Families sending money abroad is more direct and more impactful than big-ticket public aid. It’s time to talk up philanthropy, and recognise the power of individuals to change the stars of their friends and relatives overseas.

133 years of petrol-driven cars

On January 29th, 1886, Karl Benz took out the first patent for a petrol-driven car. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen was a three-wheeled automobile with a rear-mounted engine. It had steel-spoked wheels and solid rubber tyres. It went on sale for 600 imperial marks, or just over $4,000 in today's money.

There had been earlier "horseless carriages," including Richard Trevithick's steam-driven vehicle, demonstrated in London in 1803, and said to be the first such vehicle. But the Motorwagen, with its lightweight 954cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine, represented a real breakthrough because of its energy efficiency. It ushered in the age of the private motor car.

Not surprisingly, the coach companies tried to use government to stop motor cars, much as cab companies try to stop Uber. In the UK early cars had to have a man walking in front with a red flag, until the law was repealed in 1896. Horses and carriages were expensive, but cars could be made cheaply, and after Henry Ford came along, they were.

Planners have never liked motor cars. They give the drivers too much independence, the freedom to go wherever and whenever they like. Planners prefer to move people together in units to preordained destinations. Planners prefer public transport for that reason, and many have tried to make life difficult for private motorists. Private cars have proliferated despite them.

No-one foresaw for many years the polluting gases that petrol engines emit, or the health-harming particulates of diesel engines. But they do now, and the age of the internal combustion engine that Benz heralded is drawing to a close. I have driven a Tesla for four years, and predict, along with others, that fossil fuel engines will be banned from cities within years. This does not mark the end of private transport, however, or of the freedom and opportunities it has brought to ordinary people for decades. On the contrary, self-driving cars and people-carrying drones will make it available to those unable to drive, and artificial intelligence will largely solve the problem of congestion and collisions.

The effects of unilateral free trade on British food prices post-Brexit

We all know - for we’ve all complained about it often enough - that the varied estimations of what Brexit will do to food prices have their flaws. Most obviously, near all of them assume that we’ll charge ourselves tariffs on imports. Some even claiming that we’ll still pay the revenue off to the EU which is a most odd allegation.

We ourselves argue that we should have unilateral free trade. Not because of Brexit but just because we should have unilateral free trade. If Brexit allows that, fine, but the point is the free trade, not whatever governance arrangements make it possible.

We’ve not been aware of any detailed modelling telling us all what the effects upon prices of such unilateral free trade. Fortunately the National Farmers Union comes to our aid:

The Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute looked at a bespoke Free Trade Agreement with the EU (tariff and quota free, with 5% facilitation costs); a switch to World Trade Organisation defaults (8% facilitation costs) and unilateral trade liberalisation (zero tariffs on imports, UK exports face MFN tariffs, 8% facilitation costs).

It model captures the impacts on commodity markets as a result of changes in trade flows with the EU and the rest of the world. The results are presented as changes in farmgate prices, production and output value.

That report is here. The NFU complains that the unilateral free trade option is the worst, for it leads to declines in the prices of all the major outputs of the farming industry. Therefore we should all support the unilateral free trade option as that’s what will reduce the price of what fills our bellies - those outputs of the farming industry.

Beef comes down by 45%, pigs/pork by 12%, poultry by 9%, wheat by 5% and so on. Exactly why the NFU complains and exactly why everyone else should be supporting that unilateral free trade position.

It’s entirely true that 5% off wheat isn’t a sufficient reason for Brexit and opinions differ on the value of the step itself. But we do have to decide what we’re going to do as we do leave. The option that benefits us out here the most is unilateral free trade so unilateral free trade it ought be then.

Or, as we might put it, why make food more expensive than it need be for 65 million people in order to benefit the 55,000 farmer members of the NFU?

We are an adversarial culture

Some people bewail what they describe as the "adversarial political culture" they think has come over Britain. Politics has certainly become more divisive, more ill-tempered and more abusive. Part of this comes from the conviction by some that their cause is so just and so important that they are no longer required to behave like decent human being in pursuit of it. They think it so virtuous and so vital that it justifies any actions that might advance it. Their self-judged virtue allows them to be vile.

But politics in the UK has always been adversarial. So has our law and our science. We pit parties against each other, facing their opponents in Parliament separated by two sword lengths, not in the horseshoe chambers favoured in continental Europe. The electors make judgements about who wins, and they vote accordingly.

In law we don't conduct a joint inquisition to find the facts. We have one side making the whole case for the prosecution and the other doing likewise for the defence. The jury looks on and decides who has won. It is adversarial.

In our scientific activity we set theories against each other, and contrive experiments to tell us which ones have won by making better predictions and explanations than the others. This adversarial culture is part of our national psyche. We prefer trial and error to system building. This is one reason why we did not sit easily in the European Union. They have coalitions where we have a winner-takes-all political culture. Their law is inquisitorial, ours is adversarial.

Moreover, European law tends to be by statute, top down, telling people what they can do. English law is Common Law, made up of countless prosecution versus defence decisions reached over the centuries. It tells us what we cannot do, and assumes that what is not prohibited is allowed.

So yes, our culture is adversarial; it always has been. That politics has become more bitter is not because it is adversarial, it is because some people have lost their tolerance and sense of decency.

Smokers respond by buying underground cigarettes

Underground or 'fake' cigarettes are flooding the country and costing £2bn a year in lost revenues, according to the Local Government Association (LGA). Furthermore, their sale is said to be hampering the government's programme to encourage smokers to quit.

The 'fake' cigarettes are sometimes counterfeit, packaged to resemble well-known brands, and sometimes are actually well-known brands that enter the country illegally without paying tobacco duty. Sniffer dogs have been used to uncover secret stashes hidden behind walls, under floorboards, and in secret panels. They are sold from shops, private homes, and on the internet.

What did they expect? Many voices, including ours, told them what would happen if plain packaging laws were introduced. This was not theory. We had seen what happened when Australia did that. Plain packaging made cigarette packs easy to copy. Underground cigarettes were harder to keep out of the hands of underage smokers. They are also not amenable to controls for quality, and many contain a higher proportion of hazardous substances than their legitimate counterparts.

Many voices, including ours, also told them that eye-watering tax increases on tobacco would not bring in the revenues that governments anticipated because the higher prices would tempt more people to buy contraband versions.

The response of the LGA is unsurprising. It is a call for tougher penalties, greater enforcement, and bigger fines "to help councils' enforcement work against rogue traders, reduce crime in our communities and protect the health of children and young people." Presumably they also call for "more resources," as nearly all government bodies do these days.

As long as the incentives remain high, it is doubtful if such measures will make the desired difference. There is a proven way to pursue most of those objectives without driving people to criminality. It is to promote vaping as a far safer alternative, to allow more advertising of smoke-free products, and to remove the petty regulations, including those that originated in the EU, that hold back the proven way to lead people away from tobacco smoking.

The terrors of Brexit

Agreed, opinion on the merits, methods and morality of Brexit differ around here as they do elsewhere across the nation. Yet we are still connoisseurs of the desperation inherent in some of the stories. For example, that companies may leave, or even plan their way around things:

Thousands of British companies have already triggered emergency plans to cope with a no-deal Brexit, with many gearing up to move operations abroad if the UK crashes out of the EU, according to the British Chambers of Commerce.

Before a crucial week in parliament, in which MPs will try to wrest control from Theresa May’s government in order to delay Brexit and avoid a no-deal outcome, the BCC said it believed companies that had already gone ahead with their plans represented the “tip of the iceberg” and that many of its 75,000 members were already spending vital funds to prepare for a disorderly exit.

It said that in recent days alone, it had been told that 35 firms had activated plans to move operations out of the UK, or were stockpiling goods to combat the worst effects of Brexit.

Well, yes, there’s likely to be a change in the basic operating environment in the near future for these companies and so we would rather hope that a certain amount of planning and preparation goes on. You know, management does get paid to do some managing, it’s not all just fat cats sleeping on soft piles of lucre.

Again, the merits of that change are not the point here, rather the desperation with which the point is being put forward.

There are 5.7 million businesses in the UK. The BCC represents 75,000 of them. 35 is not a large portion nor proportion of either number. It’s not even certain that this is a larger such than activate such plans on any normal day in fact.

To repeat for a third time, the decision itself is something we can all disagree upon. But there’s more than a whiff of desperation to at least some of the arguments being put forward.