Rousseau - when philosophy ignores reality

Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was born on June 28th, 1712, holds the rare distinction of espousing a particularly unpleasant philosophy, while simultaneously contriving to be a particularly unpleasant person. Samuel Johnson described him as “one of the worst of men; a rascal, who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been." Edmund Burke thought he was possessed of vanity “to a degree little short of madness.” He even managed to fall out with David Hume, as he did with everyone who befriended him. He was increasingly prone to bouts of paranoia.

He took the view that people in a state of nature were naturally good (“noble savages”), but were corrupted by civil society. Progress in the arts and sciences eroded virtue and morality, he said. Before society, he taught, men were naturally free and peaceable to others. But then agriculture and early manufactures enabled people to store value, bringing private property, inequality, and the vices that he thought accompanied them, vices such as idleness, luxury and vanity. 

Voltaire thought that this amounted to asking his readers “to walk on all fours” like a savage. Rousseau seemed to have no concept that primitive tribes routinely made war on each other, as did their simian predecessors, and that it was the evolution of society that brought the civilized values. Rousseau’s book, “The Social Contract” (1762), pointed to a tension between the freedom of individuals and the “general will” for the good of society. Those who did not obey the latter must be “forced to be free.” “Man is born free,” he wrote, “but lies everywhere in chains.”

Rousseau was very influential. Although he coincided with the Enlightenment, he was really anti-Enlightenment in opposing most of its values. He might even be classed as an early Romantic. The later French revolutionaries drew inspiration from his work as they set about the destruction of their society and its replacement by a theoretical one they had dreamed up to replace it. Karl Marx later acknowledged his influence.

Rousseau’s ideal society might be imagined by the fact that he praised Sparta for banning art and literature to concentrate on military prowess, while denouncing Athens for its artistry and intellect.

His book, “Emile” (1762), was influential in education, favouring “natural development” in which a boy would be allowed to live like a natural animal until the age of 12, when he developed reason, and should be taught a skill when aged 16. Rousseau abandoned his own children to an orphanage, however.

Obviously, Rousseau has been favoured by those who despise what society has engendered, and who wish to remake it according to their own vision of a better one. To others, though, his ideas seem fanciful, impractical, and scientifically illiterate, and many think the world would have been better had he never been in it.

A basic misconception about the purpose of politics and government

At least we think it to be a basic misconception. The idea that we should be attempting to design the population to fit the world as we’d like it to be. A version of which is this, about the development of the New Towns in Essex post-WWII:

….while Harlow’s town centre featured work by the English sculptor Barbara Hepworth, all of which implied that the future of the UK was to be guided by civic-minded, social democratic ideals. “I believe we may well produce a new type of citizen,” Lewis Silkin, Labour’s minister for new towns, told the House of Commons in May 1948. “A healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride. In the long run that will be the real test.”

The new citizen, as with New Soviet Man, failed to turn up. Give that we are talking about Essex, obviously failed to turn up.

Thus neatly illustrating one of our basic beliefs. We shouldn’t be designing the world for people as they ought to be. Rather, attempting to harness humans as we generally are to the best result that can be achieved with us. For example, rather than attempting to abolish greed, harness it though capitalism. Sure, it then needs controlling which we do through competition. Instead of those continued attempts to insist that we’ll all gladly do everything from the pure love of our hearts which is that more communal insistence.

Not that there’s anything wrong with love from the heart, nor community. It’s just not the thing that tends to motivate the humans we’ve got - as with Essex not having produced New Silkin Man.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister

On June 27th, 2007, Tony Blair resigned, and Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. It was not a good day for Britain. He had always resented Tony Blair becoming Labour leader and then Prime Minister, but had a free hand on the economy as part of the deal. After 10 years his allies finally out-manoeuvred Blair and forced his resignation. By then Brown’s seething resentment had made him ill-tempered and grumpy, in the habit of shouting and throwing things at his subordinates.

Brown’s premiership was coloured by the Financial Crisis, which took up most of his time and attention. As Chancellor he had spent money like there was no tomorrow, specializing in “stealth” taxes that would slip unannounced into his budgets. He claimed to be a neo-Keynesian, but he was not.

The Keynes policy was supposed to be spending at the trough of a cycle and repaying it in the boom years. Brown was spending in the boom years and had no reserve when the crash came. He claimed to have “abolished the business cycle” by smoothing “boom and bust,” but it turned out that it was only “boom” that he’d got rid of. He always called his spending “investment,” but he used the word as someone might say they had “invested” in a bar of chocolate.

Credit should be given where it is due, though, and he did two good things. In his first days as Chancellor, he gave the Bank of England its independence. The ASI had advocated that for 20 years to stop Chancellors being tempted to create inflationary booms ahead of general elections.

His second great achievement was to keep the UK out of the Euro. Blair, the keen Europhile, had wanted us to join, but Brown drew up his 5 conditions on the back of an envelope. The conditions could not be met, so the UK did not join, and had the flexibility of an independent currency in the wake of the big crash when it came.

One of his worst acts, of which there were many, was to sell Britain’s gold reserves at the trough of the gold market. Indeed, he made it plunge even lower by announcing in advance his intention to sell. He sold 395 tonnes of it at £3.5bn. Had he not done so, it could have fetched over 3 times that sum a few years later.

Otherwise his premiership will be remembered as one in which he was forced to react to events, leaving little space to initiate the supply side reforms that Britain needed. His short term in office will be exceeded by days by that of Theresa May when she formally steps down. Neither featured many significant or memorable achievements.

It depends upon what your definition of austerity is

Apparently we can’t have tax cuts because that would be to continue austerity. This rather depending upon what our definition of austerity is:

Boris Johnson’s plans to slash taxes for high earners is likely to cost more than £20bn and will make it “almost impossible” to end austerity, according to a leading economic think tank.

The assessment of the Conservative leadership frontrunner’s tax cuts comes after his party pledge to end austerity last year.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies believe the pledges will cost “north of £20bn”, its head, Paul Johnson told The Telegraph.

“There’s £15bn of headroom in which to spend while keeping [public] debt on a downward trajectory,” said the IFS chief. “In a world where you don’t want debt to rise and introduce a £20bn tax cut it's almost impossible to end austerity.”

The definition being used here is not a reasonable or workable one. A return to the rough fiscal balance we had under Gordon Brown’s Chancellorship Terror is something we really shouldn’t be describing as austere. At the time we were all remarking upon how his spending imitated that traditional inebriated matelot.

The basic facts are that the tax burden, at 34 and a bit percent of GDP, is at an historically high level. Spending as a portion of GDP is still higher than it was before the Crash. This is not austerity.

We’re not greatly taken with that basic Keynesian settlement, that public spending should blow out in harsh times. One reason being that, as things turn out, that stimulatory flashing of other peoples’ cash becomes seen as the new baseline. Any attempt to return to a more reasonable settlement, where individuals decide on the disposal of, say, the results of two thirds of their own labour becomes those harsh cuts to government.

Which is indeed exactly what we’re seeing here now. The actual Keynesian ideal is that we do have that expansion in those harsh times, then we withdraw it all in more normal. For to fail to do that would be to create a ratchet whereby government as a portion of everything continually jerks up over the inevitabilities of the continued business cycle. This is exactly the - wrong - definition that the IFS is using of austerity here. Now that we’re out of the woods is when we should be returning to that status quo ante, and doing so isn’t austerity. It’s simply good fiscal management.

The mad San Fran vape ban

Inspired by countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, puritanical officials in San Francisco have voted to ban the sale of e-cigarettes. The law is due to be signed off by San Francisco’s mayor within 10 days and, barring legal challenges, will come into force seven months later. Cigarettes will remain on shop shelves as before.

The vape ban will leave San Franciscans unable to access one of the safest and most popular alternatives to cigarettes. The best available evidence shows that e-cigarettes are at least 95% less harmful than smoking and twice as effective as nicotine-replacement therapy for smoking cessation. Aside from inevitably creating an unregulated black market, the simple truth is that these paternalistic zealots are putting more people in the ground in the name of ‘public health advocacy’. 

All of this is premised on a classic argument from the Nanny State playbook: think of the children. Petty bureaucrats are also concerned that vaping is a gateway to smoking cigarettes despite all signs pointing to the contrary. Writing earlier this year for The Washington Times, Carrie Wade and David Bahr of the R Street Institute explain:

Studies supporting the notion that kids who try vaping will dive head first into combustible use are critically flawed — they cannot control for kids who would end up smoking anyway and rarely acknowledge those who use e-cigarettes in the first place. In reality, vape use is highly concentrated in those who already smoke or have tried smoking.

Indeed, the National Academies of Science notes that associations between smoking and vaping do exist, but they are contradicted by population data citing opposing trends in e-cigarette and cigarette use among youth in recent years, and do not confirm person-level positive associations with vaping and smoking.

While accepting that American high school students have started using e-cigarettes more in recent years, Public Health England also reject the idea of a gateway from vaping to smoking. Rather, they follow the evidence and argue that teenagers who vape also tend to be the sort of person that ends up smoking cigarettes. They conclude that “the ‘common liability’ hypothesis seems a plausible explanation for the relationship between e-cigarettes and smoking implementation.” Looking at the data on youth smoking and vaping rates, it’s not hard to see why they’ve arrived at this position (graph originally from Chris Snowdon here):

Even in the implausible worst case scenario—where teenagers who would otherwise be non-smokers are tempted to regularly vape—policymakers have to acknowledge the far greater costs of an e-cig ban. While sensible efforts to prevent youth vaping are welcome, it would take 20 extra teens taking up vaping to negate the benefit of just one person using e-cigs to quit smoking.

So here’s my message to the anti-nicotine San Francisco politicians who think this approach is a good idea: Banning a product that accomplishes your own aims more successfully than any serious tobacco control policy isn’t just stupid—it’s playing politics with people’s health and lives. People who want to quit smoking will die because of the ban, and their blood will be on your hands. 

I’m the Pied Piper, follow me

There are different versions of the legendary story, but the Lüneburg Chronicle records that it was on June 26th, 1284, Saint John and Paul’s day, that the Pied Piper took away 130 children of the town of Hamelin, luring them after him with his melodic pipe, and took them into a cave, from which they were never seen again.

The tragic event was recorded on a stained-glass window, circa 1300, in the Hamelin church where the adults were at prayer when the children were led away. The piper, clothed in multi-coloured fabric (pied), had appeared to offer to free the town from its plague of rats. The mayor agreed to pay him 1,000 guilders, whereupon the piper charmed the rats with his magic pipe into the Weser river. When they all drowned, the citizens reneged on their deal, and the piper took his revenge by leading their children away.

Some versions record that three children alone remained. A lame one could not keep up, a deaf one could not hear the seductive music, and a blind one could not see where he was going. They were left to tell the adults what had happened when they emerged from their church service.

Some interpretations say that the piper is an allegorical death figure, leading children to their deaths from plague. Others have it that it refers to a mass emigration of young people. Whatever the truth, the city of Hamelin marks the event with Rat Catcher’s Day on June 26th, and even today, no music or dancing is allowed on the Bungelosenstrasse, the street on which the children were last seen.

It is easy to see why the story has resonated. Many children are easily entranced by the music of false promises. Commentators have remarked that if children could vote, ice-cream would be elected. Some young people listen to the music of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and eagerly follow the promises of free university education, cancellation of student debt, high minimum wages for youngsters in starter jobs, and “affordable” fixed rents at levels that no landlords can afford to provide.

The music plays its seductive sound of free goodies that someone else will pay for, and the children follow. They are told that their cornucopia will be filled by “the rich,” or by “business,” without also being told what would happen to those groups, or to the economy in general, if redistribution on this scale were to be enacted. They are not told that it would be “the rich” and “business” that disappeared, rather than the children.

Politicians such as these, in their multi-hued (but mostly red) garb, play their sweet music to entice young voters to the never-never land where no-one pays for anything, and goodies come free if you follow them. We who are left know what’s inside that dark cave, because we’ve seen the people of other countries led into it.

The problem with the four day work week

We have a claim that Britons are all behind moving to a four day work week. And why not of course, leisure is indeed a luxury or superior good, as we get richer we devote more of our income to it.

Reducing the time we spend working would be welcomed by many. A recent UK poll found that 74% of people supported a four-day week.

Super, great, let’s do it. Except, well, there’s a proviso here. It’s a YouGov survey, which asked a rather more subtle question:

However, support falls off substantially if a four day week were to shrink the national economy and leave people worse off financially. Under these circumstances, only 17-26% of people would support making the shift.

That is, we’d like the extra leisure but we don’t want to be poorer by having it. Or, the same statement, we don’t think we’re rich enough yet to take that extra leisure.

The importance of this being that the claim about the four day week is being advanced to bolster the case for our all walking more lightly upon the planet:

By working less, we produce fewer goods and services that require precious resources to make. We also consume less in the process of getting our job done.

Consuming less is, by definition, being poorer.

So the claim advanced - we should work less to reduce consumption. Many people would like to work less but only if they don’t have to reduce consumption. The number who don’t want to reduce consumption can’t be used as an argument in favour of reducing consumption now, can they?

Orwell and the Left

Eric Arthur Blair was born on June 25th, 1903. The world knows him by his pen-name, George Orwell, named from the Suffolk river not far from where he'd lived. He is best known today for his two satirical novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both critiques of the brutal Stalinism that ruled the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Orwell wrote much more than those two works, however. In addition to them he wrote four more novels, three non-fiction books and literally dozens of essays and newspaper columns. His style is distinctive in that he speaks in plain, everyday language, avoiding any pretentiousness or jargon. He tells things as they are, with a searing insight and honesty.

To find out what life was like for the poor, he took to living rough, like a tramp, first in London, then Paris. He describes how putting newspaper inside your shirt keeps out the cold of winter nights. While discarded cigarette ends can be reassembled into cigarettes, matches to light them with are rarer, and become a valuable currency on the streets. His experiences formed his first book, "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933).

His "Road to Wigan Pier" (1937) describes what life was like in the North of England, the daily struggle, the occasional sense of hopelessness, and the minute details of the shabby furniture and the plain diet that was all they could afford. It brought home to his educated readers how the majority actually lived, in a way that Cobbett's "Rural Rides" had done in the early 1820s.

Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded. He chose to join the POUM, a Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, and described the chaotic and under-supplied struggle against Franco's forces. His book, "Homage to Catalonia" (1938) caused disquiet on the Left because he described how the Communists had denounced the POUM as Trotskyists and betrayed them.

Orwell's disenchantment with the Soviet Union reached breaking point when the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed in 1939, paving the way for Hitler to wage war in the West. He reviewed Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" (1940), which covered Stalin's 1930s show trials, and remarked, "What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened – for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society – but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them."

Orwell was very English. He was a heavy smoker, rolling his own from strong tobacco. He liked strong tea, beer, roast beef, kippers and marmalade. He wrote about the mythical ideal English pub, "The Moon Under Water," and had a deep affection for the patriotic and unpretentious English working class. He wrote, "people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone."

He led a full life, working at times as an empire policeman, a teacher, in a second-hand bookshop, for the BBC, and as a full-time writer. His experiences come through and colour his writing. Several of his essays achieved legendary status, and some feature in school syllabi today. He set out the rules of good, precise, clear writing:

* Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

* Never use a long word where a short one will do.

* If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

* Never use the passive where you can use the active.

* Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

* Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

He is still highly relevant, rewarding us not only with his fluent prose, but with his honesty. He self-identified as a socialist and a man of the Left, yet he saw and wrote about what people actually did in the name of socialism. His refusal to excuse the cynical brutality of those who claimed to carry its banner but betrayed all of its ideals, made him many enemies on the Left. If Orwell were alive today, he would have no time for the squirming around the brutality and squalor of the anti-Western regimes and movements that many on the Left are so ready to act as apologists for.

The value of charging university students for their education

There’re a number of justifications behind charging university students for their education. One being that such a qualification is likely to lead to a higher lifetime income. Therefore why shouldn’t those who gain the privilege pay for doing so, rather than our taxing the lower incomes of the general public to finance it? We can also consider the choice of courses. An economic decision made where there’s real money at stake should lead to better decision making. We can hope therefore that fees will lead to more engineers and less grievance studies.

One more - fees make the universities accountable to the students:

A university has apologised to students after a review found teaching on a health and safety course fell "short of the standards" expected.

The errors were serious:

An investigation found a lecturer got "very basic scientific information" wrong - for example he claimed that bleach was an acid when it's an alkaline, says the Times.

He also said that "voltage" was named after Voltaire, the French philosopher - when it's in fact named after the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta.

Perhaps not such very great terrors.

The inquiry found the lecturer, who was teaching safety and business risk modules, suggested that oil could be heated to 360C - when it can actually catch fire at 250C.

Ah, no, that is serious.

At which point we could say that this should never have happened and that this shows that we’ve done something wrong to the universities. Which is to be in error for mistakes - and incompetence - are always going to happen. What matters is the response to such, the incentives in place to at least try to avoid:

The students affected were studying for a masters degree in safety, health and environmental management.

The university said it offered students the chance to repeat or substitute the affected modules at no cost - so their qualification wasn't affected.

It also offered compensation - thought to be around £2,000 - to students because of the inconvenience.

By paying the students have become customers. By being a producer taking consumer money the university is at the very least bound by normal contract law concerning the quality of the goods provided.

That is, both sides now have real money at stake. We can expect the decisions on both sides to be rather better. At least, the incentives are there and they’ll no doubt work through the system in time.

Our online freedom is under attack

State control of the internet is no longer a foreign reality, a distant intrusion reserved for the Chinese and Russians. It is about to start happening right here in the UK.

The Government’s Online Harms White Paper proposes the most comprehensive regulation of online speech in the Western world. The Government is placing legal responsibility on social media platforms, and any other websites with user-generated content, like search engines and web forums, to curate the content posted on their site and to eliminate what they loosely deem as “harmful”. This is being called “duty of care” and will require all companies to make huge, costly changes to avoid fines, jail time, or even website blocks. It also calls for the creation of a new regulator, who will have the extraordinary power to decide what is harmful and when websites are failing to comply.

These heavy regulations are prompted by what the Government has called “harmful content” on the internet, such as child exploitation, terrorist material, and promotion of suicide. But the White Paper goes much further by targeting a very wide array of “harms” - raising the question: what is harmful?

The White Paper itself qualifies harms necessitating regulation as legally clear and unclear. For instance, harms with “less clear legal definitions” include “intimidation,” “trolling,” and “coercive behaviour”-- who will define the intimidating and coercive or trolling and how dependent will this qualification be on the majority power in Parliament?

The threat to free speech is palpable. This proposal stands to name the government as the arbiter of acceptability online. But, what’s more, the White Paper’s proposals will block out small competitors from challenging Big Tech.

The Adam Smith Institute’s new paper, Safeguarding Progress: The risks of internet regulation, explains that this regulation is not only a serious threat to free speech, it is also disproportionately costly to start-ups, hurting competition and innovation.

The “duty of care” will require a large number of personnel, costly automated technologies, and sizeable funding for algorithm redevelopment. The capital required for this overhaul is conceivable for big companies like Google or Facebook, but start-ups just don’t have the resources and could be crowded out of the market. No wonder Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg came out in support of state regulation of social media in his Washington Post op-ed. In it, he writes that the government needs to play a role in defining and enforcing the limits of free speech. And what is he doing to uphold these proposed regulations? Companies like Facebook and Youtube are currently employing thousands of people (Facebook currently boasts 50,000) dedicated to monitoring posts and comments, deeming them as acceptable or unacceptable based on company policy. Small start-ups surely lack this capacity, and should regulations be mandated be imposed, they would be scrambling for resources.

Furthermore, the rules companies like Facebook have been providing content monitors are complicated and often criticized (undoubtedly foreshadowing shady government rules). Facebook has over 1,000 pages of guidelines dedicated to outlining what is “unacceptable” speech. These guidelines are by no means comprehensive and are often contradictory. They are, most problematically, often subjective in interpretation. Many feel Facebook has taken too much control and is becoming authoritarian. Critics like Ben Shapiro on the right, for example, feel that their content is being pushed out by a liberal agenda in Big Tech speech policies. Therefore, if the government provides the guidelines, fingers won’t be pointed at Big Tech anymore, they’ll be pointed at policymakers.

But we must also remember that the actions of the technology companies do not sit in a bubble. The increased harshness of their speech policies - which are of course their own private business choices - come in the context of growing state pressure to censor the internet. “PC culture” and the implications it has on companies’ reputations come at the cost of overly cautious censorship.

The choice looms ahead: either accept the offensive pockets of the internet or regulate Big Tech into stagnancy while pushing speech limitations to the point of censorship. Eliminating “the offensive” comes at the steep cost of freedom of speech and innovation.