Just a little observation about being a nation of fat porkers

Much is made these days about how we’re all obese and falling over like weighty flies at great cost to the NHS. So much so that supermarkets offering us a deal on food prices must be banned from doing so.

As we’ve noted before we don;t in fact believe all of this. Obesity saves the NHS money anyway and it’s up to each one of us how we live our lives and meet our end. The restrictions aren’t justified and shouldn’t be justified that way anyway that is.

Some of the evidence called into play doesn’t quite make sense:

What would most surprise a time traveller from a hundred years ago about an affluent 21st-century society like ours? Cars would hardly be a shock: the Ford Model T began production in 1908. Similarly, tower blocks and skyscrapers were already becoming familiar a century ago: Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, considered the world’s first skyscraper, was built in 1885. No, the most striking change would be the people themselves. The physical appearance of the average person today is radically different to the average person of 1921. We are much fatter now.

That’s true of the great bulk of us, yes.

We are so accustomed to our prejudices against fat people that it’s easy to forget they are the accidents of a particular cultural moment. The two oldest carvings of human beings (the Venus of Hohle Fels from about 35,000 years ago and the Venus of Willendorf from about 25,000 years ago) depict women who would now be classified as obese. Even if, as archaeologists suggest, these statuettes were not intended as portraits of ideal beauty, they were evidently symbols of power. The paintings of Rubens are almost a cliché of changing beauty standards but they also represent different social attitudes. It was not just Rubens’s nymphs and pagan goddesses who were fat: his Virgin Marys and even his Jesuses were too. Fatness suggested authority and moral solidity.

Not just the moral solidity. Fatness suggested being rich. Because only richer people were gaining that sustained excess of calories to make them so.

Which tells us something important about this past century. This is the first time in human history that the majority of the people have been rich - because this is the first time in human history that the majority of the people have been able to have that sustained excess of calories to be fat.

We can indeed mutter all sorts of things - about swimsuit design perhaps - over the problems that generalised obesity brings to us as a society. But we really do have to remember that this is a victory, that it’s even possible.

For that we are all fat may or may not be a problem but that we all can be is indeed that victory of technological advance over Malthusian constraints.

Reasons for optimism - education

The grounds for optimism concerning UK education at both school and university levels are based on the assumption that it will change. Critics have not been short of ammunition, pointing out that children from East Asian countries regularly score well ahead of their UK peer group in ‘hard’ subjects such as mathematics, physics and engineering.

There has been concern that the measures which purport to show a higher percentage passing with higher grades are in fact measuring grade inflation, and that the subjects have been dumbed down to make high scores easier to attain. There is concern, too, that a typical UK university is no longer what Disraeli called “a place of light, liberty and learning,” but a place that will not tolerate the expression of views that might offend some people. Critics also allege that in a scramble for diversity, political correctness and equality, universities have lost sight of quality.

There are, however, indicators that suggest these criticisms may soon be met. Every year more schools choose to be self-governing as ‘free’ schools or to attain ‘academy’ status. This combines with the parental choice that has become widespread to create a situation in which parents can put pressure on the system by preferring schools with rigorous academic standards rather than ones which pursue a ‘woke’ agenda of social and diversity awareness instead. Since the schools’ revenue from the state is based on enrollment, the choices of parents will increasingly lead schools to follow the preferences of parents and students or risk closure.

An important technological development will speed the process of change. The application of artificial intelligence to education makes it possible for each child to have an individual electronic tutor that can teach them at the pace they are capable of attaining. These will be accessible outside the classroom as well as within it, and will transform the way children are taught. Teachers will no longer have to attempt to lead a class forward all at the same pace.

Further grounds for optimism about the future of education spring from the fact that variety will increase as both schools and universities have the option of specializing in particular disciplines. Some will choose to become centres of excellence in subjects such as mathematics or music, and as they acquire that reputation, will attract the brightest and the most promising students in those subjects to their doors.

University education has become increasingly international, and will almost certainly continue to do so. UK universities have many students from other countries studying at them, and increasing numbers of UK students are choosing to study at foreign universities. This enables students to choose the institutions and courses best suited to their needs and abilities.

The greatest improvement will come from the change in which the state no longer provides education, but guarantees access to education instead. The state will provide most of the money for education, but it will be directed to independent, self-governing institutions rather than to state-owned ones. This leads to competition between providers of education, and will raise standards accordingly.

We're afraid we just don't trust the Fabian Society

That the Fabian Society is always going to insist that Tories bad and spending more - much, much more - of other peoples’ money good is just obvious. To have a report that says that not spending more - much, much, more - of other peoples’ money is going to cause civilisation to collapse in a heap is thus just part for the course.

We can argue against such claims, of course we all can. That special measures introduced for the pandemic get un-introduced at the end of it seems sensible to us, just as the one example. That the special welfare provisions put in place end seems to us no more remarkable than that the pubs are allowed to - eventually - reopen. Special times do indeed lead to special measures and normality is accompanied by the reversal of them.

This is not the Fabian way:

Government failure to maintain the £20 a week Covid top-up payment for universal credit will overwhelmingly hit the incomes of working and disabled people, and put more than 700,000 into poverty, according to a study by the Fabian Society.

That Fabian way being that any increase in spending must become permanent because more spending of other peoples’ money is good, d’ye see?

The thing is we just don’t trust them. From their actual report:

Poverty is measured as 60 percent of median contemporary income, after adjusting for housing costs and size of family. Note this is a different measure than we used in our previous report Double Trouble (for that study we used a fixed-line measure of poverty rather than a poverty line based on changes in median income, to avoid the perverse situation where rising unemployment leads to a fall in the cash value of the poverty line).

The reason we don’t trust them? They change their definition of poverty according to what best suits the insistence that more must be spent. Always.

When it is convenient, as in this report, to use a measure of relative poverty to argue for more tax and spend then they do that. When a relative measure would lead to less tax and spend - this being their complaining above about perversity, that when median incomes fall this means that fewer are in relative poverty, or that the relative poverty line falls - then they switch to an absolute measure of income.

This is intellectual casuistry and no, we shouldn’t trust people who do this. Humpty Dumpty is meant to be a joke in a children’s book, not a blueprint for the design of national policy. Sadly, so too is the Queen of Hearts and her efficient manner of dealing with such behaviour only a joke.

The first rule of economics - incentives matter

There is indeed a problem with the development of antibiotics. Far too many bugs are gaining immunity to the ones we use - largely because we use them and evolution happens. Far too few new antibiotics are being developed. This is a problem we’d like to solve because we’d really not want to return to a world in which sepsis is the likely outcome of any surgery.

The problem is one of incentives. It costs hundreds of millions to billions to develop a new antibiotic. The patent which allows that cost to be recouped lasts 20 years from filing, usually about 10 years from approval. But the entire point of having this new antibiotic is that we’ll use it very sparingly as the last resort. Only those infections that don’t succumb to our extant supply will be treated with it. Further, we really don’t want widespread use because that would just encourage that evolution thing to make it not work again.

A system based upon volume sales therefore doesn’t work as a development incentive for new antibiotics.

The answer is, obviously, change the incentives. Some say that therefore drug development, or perhaps just antibiotic, should become a government function. The recent success of that in the development of coronavirus vaccines might show that not to be the path to take. Changing the incentives for the system we know works, those private developers out there, seems more sensible:

And the UK is experimenting with a new subscription-style payment model that pays drug companies upfront for access to novel antibiotics, so decoupling profit from volume sold.

More detail here:

The NHS is offering 2 contracts to pay pharmaceutical companies at the start of their work for access to innovative antibiotics, incentivising them to bring new classes of the drugs to patients across the UK for the first time in almost 30 years.

Of particular interest are antibiotics that can provide alternative treatment options for serious infections, such as bloodstream infections, sepsis and hospital-acquired pneumonia.

The high cost and low returns associated with antibiotic research and development makes it commercially unattractive. This is why the drugs will be paid for by the world’s first ‘subscription-style’ payment model for antibiotics and will be made available to UK patients as soon as possible, potentially as early as 2022.

We do not say that scheme will be perfect - human design never is in this vale of tears. Rather, that the development of antibiotics faced an incentives problem. The answer is to change the incentives. Because, you know, incentives matter.

Reasons for optimism - technological environmentalism

There are many differences between behavioural change environmentalism and technological environmentalism. The latter does not involve us all living more simply, becoming poorer, turning our back on progress, being prevented from doing the things we want to do, and living narrower lives, denied the opportunities to live more comfortable ones filled with new opportunities.

Children might have fun camping out on the streets and claiming that extinction of the race is imminent because we have “destroyed their future,” but the reverse is true. The human race is not threatened with extinction, and their future has been saved, not destroyed. Pointing to the worst-case scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5, environmental activists have predicted massive rises in ocean levels and in global temperatures. The reality is that RCP 8.5 will not happen. We have already done enough and are doing enough to prevent that outcome.

RCP 8.5 assumed a continued increase in coal-burning, whereas coal-fired power stations are being phased out, their place taken by the much less polluting gas-fired stations, and by non-emitting renewables such as solar, wind and nuclear. This process is increasing, with oil use declining from a peak, and set to be phased out, first as a transport fuel, then as a power generator. Vehicles in future will not use fossil fuels or emit the carbon and pollution they generate.

A number of technological innovations are assisting the process. Cultured meats will cut down on the number of cattle and the greenhouse gas methane they produce. Genetically modified crops produce more food on less land, without needing the concentrations of fertilizers and insecticides that would otherwise be needed, or the depletion of rainforest land. Tree cover has increased in many countries, and will increase as less land is needed for food, and new tree strains are developed, including faster-growing versions of big carbon absorbers such as white oak and horse chestnut.

New and efficient forms of carbon sequestration are being developed, with the aim of achieving a net carbon reduction over the century, rather than simply curbing its increase. Some involve it being stored in the oceans, some in deep caves. Innovative techniques for converting it into fuel or feedstock show promise, but are not yet at a commercially viable stage.

The upshot is that we are not facing extinction, or even RCP 8.5. The most likely outcome might well be RCP 2.6, the least damaging of the IPCC four scenarios. Under that circumstance the temperature rise would not reach 2C before it began to decline. These are circumstances well within our power to deal with, and ingenuity might make that ever easier than it seems now. 

There is a profoundly conservative assumption by some that the present status quo must be preserved at all costs, and that we must all take drastic and immediate happening to stop it changing. Not everyone shares that view. Some take the view that things change, and that coping with the change is a more reliable and achievable goal that trying to stop it.

Who? What! Us?

The argument in favour of a technocracy shielded from the whims of politics is that the technocrats will get the technical details right in the absence of political pressures. That does assume that there won’t be politics within the technocracy and among the technocrats, obviously. Also, that people with technical knowledge end up taking the technocratic positions.

At which point the latest from Brussels on vaccines.

Sorry, but the reality is a little more complex – and not quite such a stunning UK victory.

True, Britain got a month’s head start on the EU by approving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at the start of December, and then AstraZeneca’s at the end of that month. It had to accept the terms offered by the pharmaceutical companies, however, both in paying a higher price per dose, and by waiving their civil liability in the event of adverse effects.

Yes, this is by a journalist but it’s clearly the story they’re telling themselves internally. This is where we get to test that claim to technocracy - liability. For it’s an entirely standard part of a vaccination program that the manufacturers are shielded. This is why the decision to shield them here, this is why there’s the vaccine compensation fund. The vaccine will kill some few people and will damage some still small but larger number.

No, not might, could, but will. Doing anything to 500 million people will damage some and kill some smaller number. That’s just the way reality works, it would be true of asking people to cross the road or spend an extra 5 minutes in bed. The benefits, overall, of vaccination are so great that this is just a cost that we have to bear as a society. Or even, a cost that some few of us will bear directly and the rest of us compensate for financially - however much money doesn’t make up for everything.

That the technocrats of Brussels didn’t know this is the indictment of the system. After all, if we’re not gaining the benefits of the technical knowledge then what is the purpose of a technocracy?

It is possible for the idea to work. This discussion with Kate Bingham shows how. Select an actual expert and give them the freedom to do expert things and it does indeed work. Politics being the process by which the expert is selected, the boundaries of the necessary freedoms determined. But of course those experts are not found within the political system in normal times which does rather kill the technocratic case more generally.

This sounds remarkably like a self-solving problem

It’s possible that this is all true and yet even if it is it doesn’t sound like a problem:

The results are pretty bleak. You’ll have heard a lot about the extra saving going on during lockdown. People not being able to spend on holidays or restaurants has led to a staggering £125bn in extra savings. But this report crucially notes that not everyone is racking up the cash. Pre-Covid, 10.7 million of us were over-indebted or had low savings. That has now risen to 14.2 million.

The generational aspect of this is huge. Overall, the number of financially vulnerable adults rose by 3.7 million (or 15%) to 27.7 million. For those aged 18-34, the rise is 40% while it has actually decreased among retirees. There’s some rubbish written about income inequality having soared during the pandemic (it hasn’t, although the savings increase has been top heavy since it’s the rich who splurge on holidays). However, I’m increasingly worried by the prospect of an unequal recovery in the coming months with the rich and old out consuming while unemployment rises and the young (particularly, poorer parents) are left to struggle with higher debt. That’s not a society building back better, it’s one growing apart.

Nice to see that confirmation that income inequality hasn’t increased - it doesn’t in recessions. The richer among us gain more of their income from profits than the poorer do. As profits are what crash in recessions inequality of income falls during them.

But that inequality of recovery. It’s worth going back to a cod-Keynesian model. During a recession savings rise, cutting into demand and thus compounding the fall in the economy. The solution is for savings to be spent, increasing demand and thus ending the recession. The argument about government deficits and pump priming and all that is simply to accelerate this process.

OK. We also know that the people worst hit in recent times are those in consumer facing services. These being the very things we expect to boom as the lockdowns end and those savings are unleashed into the economy. It’s the very unleashing which increases demand and thus employment and the incomes of those who provide the things being spent upon.

That is, even if this is all an actual problem it seems to be one of those self-solving ones. Assume that we have a recovery and the worry goes away, doesn’t it? Because this is the very worry that a recovery will deal with.

It's not the British Government that's messing with music

We do not say that this couldn’t have been better handled. But we would insist that it’s not the British Government causing the problems here:

My passport would need to be submitted to the Spanish embassy and held there until the visa was processed, causing problems for when I had to travel for other work. Apparently the normal visa cost would be nearer £150, but with the embassy currently open one day a week, the promoter had told my agent the only option would be to pay for the £600 fast-track one.

The concert in Spain, one of the few remaining non-Covid cancellations in my diary, is part of a tour that also takes in recitals in France and Denmark. Pull out of one engagement because the numbers don’t stack up, and risk losing the work in the other countries as well. Too many visas, even at £150 each (and that figure obviously doesn’t include cost of travel to the embassies, the lost work time, or the extra costs to agents and accountants) and it’s clear that your livelihood is going to take a nosedive. Brexit means that musicians now need to apply for a short-term work permit before travelling to work in a number of EU countries, each with their own different requirements.

Just a small hint that we’d pass on. The British passport system specifically allows at least one more than one passport to be issued to a person. Exactly so that one can be floating around the varied visa systems while the other is being used to travel. We’d suggest that people use the part of the system set up to aid with this problem.

Slightly more to the headline point we’d point out that these visa requirements are not things being imposed by the British government. They are, obviously enough, being imposed by the varied ones of the remnant European Union. They are also not new.

True, it’s new that they are being imposed upon Brits. But they have been imposed all along on non-European Union citizens who desire to do that little bit of musical touring across the area. What we are now seeing is the costs imposed upon non-EU musicians plus, of course, the costs imposed upon EU citizens by the barriers to their enjoying music made by non-EU citizens.

This is true of all of the varied limitations and problems being mentioned, like those for oysters, the colour of ink forms are filled in with and so on. It is only now that we’re subject to them for our own exports that we can see the costs we’ve been paying these decades in imports we’ve not been able to have from non-EU economic actors.

Whether this changes your calculus of whether Brexit was a good idea or not is an entirely different question. We simply want to point out that these are the hoops that 6.5 billion people have had to jump through for decades to send us their lovely produce and musicians. These are, that is, the costs we had to bear when we were still EU members, those loss of all of those lovely things.

The real point about climate change is how cheap the solution is

Ambrose Evans Pritchard takes us through the carbon tax as a solution to climate change:

Britain should opt for the Smithian purity of a tax-neutral carbon price, and let others bluster about green deals. That would be the proper showpiece for COP26 in Glasgow, where Adam Smith taught the world.

We’re obviously in favour of such Smithian solutions, even as we’d note that it’s really Arthur C Pigou under discussion. Stick the one crowbar into the price system and we’re done. As to what the price should be:

The Stern-Stiglitz High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices three years ago opted for a range of $40 to $80, rising to $50 to $100 by 2030. That is the global gold standard. But facts on the ground have already run ahead.

“We think $50 will do the job,” said Kingsmill Bond from Carbon Tracker. “Large numbers are a pipedream that makes it less likely to happen. All you need is a realistic signal and markets will come forward with technologies nobody has even thought of.”

Quite so. Bill Nordhaus got the Nobel for suggesting one variant of this, Nick Stern his peerage for another. The revenue neutral carbon tax is the solution to the problem as described.

The thing to really note though is how cheap this is. UK emissions are around the 500 million tonnes a year level. $50 a tonne means $25 billion, or between friends, let us call that £20 billion. Or about 3 or 4% of our current total tax take.

Note that we do not need to charge that much more in tax - revenue neutral is the point here. Instead we just need to shift what we tax.

Assume, just for a moment, that the mithering mob are correct, this is a civilisation threatening problem. To solve it we need to shift - shift, not increase - 4% of our tax burden. That’s really pretty cheap. This does assume, of course it does, that we use the efficient method among those available to us of solving this problem but then that’s rather the point, the carbon tax is that.

Note that the alternative is not to do nothing. Whatever the truth of it all not being a problem in the first place there is no political outcome where nothing is done. There are too many licking their lips at being able to control society for the initial contention to be rejected. Thus we’re left with a choice of things to do.

The end lesson of this being how incredibly cheap a carbon tax is as a solution to climate change. Really, all it does require is that shift of 4% of the tax burden. Again, shift, not increase.

Whether or not the underlying problem requires that is one thing, but to avoid the idiocies that are going to happen if the fools are allowed to plan matters that’s an absolute bargain.

Sharing the spoils, and sharing the loss

“Amsterdam ousts London as Europe’s top share trading hub”, claims the FT, seeing further proof that Brexit was a huge damaging mistake.

Of course Amsterdam hasn’t become “Europe’s top share trading hub”. It has only overtaken London in trading shares in EU-based companies; London’s dominance in trading shares from the rest of the world has continued. Also the data only measures trades that go through the stock market; the off-market private trading between the big market participants isn’t included.

But is this a sign that other EU centres are giving London a run for its money? Are the smaller continental bourses getting better than London and so luring trading away? Of course not. 

“The shift”, the FT notes, well away from the headline, “was prompted by a ban on EU-based financial institutions trading in London”. So it is not that Amsterdam is providing a better or more efficient service, but rather that the EU has indulged in its usual protectionism (or, possibly, a post-Brexit hissy fit), erecting artificial regulatory boundaries to protect the inefficient markets inside Fortress Europe from their competitors.

Brussels’ excuse for putting up the barriers is that they do “not recognise UK exchanges as having the same supervisory status” as their own. Yet six weeks ago EU-based investors were allowed to trade in London, under the Brexit transitional arrangements. What has changed in the meantime? Has the London Stock Exchange slashed its regulation and lowered its standards? Has the Square Mile become the Wild West overnight? Have the ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ rumours come true? Of course not; London’s regulatory system has continued as it did before, yet suddenly the EU refuses to recognise it.

This is childish behaviour by the EU; rather than co-operating, treating each other as grown-ups and mutually recognising working regulatory systems, the Commission is sulking that ‘if you won’t play our way, we are taking our ball home’.

But the EU’s petulism is damaging for its citizens. London still has the expertise, the people and, crucially, the quantity of money managed there to create more efficient, innovative and effective markets. But if trading is spread across various smaller European exchanges, lacking London’s deep resources, costs will be higher and markets more erratic. Price differences will appear between different continental stock markets, allowing wily traders to profit from arbitrage at the expense of private and institutional investors.

By shutting its people out of their preferred market of London, the EU is downgrading them to a second-best service. If pension funds and other investments face higher costs and increased volatility, the ultimate losers will not be London’s bankers but Europe’s workers.