A welcome to the 8 billionth

This week we bid a warm welcome to the 8 billionth human being. We look forward eagerly to their intellectual and artistic contributions and to their role in enhancing the common lot of humankind.

Some people regard humans as a kind of pollution to the planet. Indeed, some treat humanity as the greatest threat posed to the Earth. We do not. We share the view of the late Julian Simon that human beings constitute “The Ultimate Resource.”

Although some have suggested that the world’s population will rise to 50 billion or more, the rate of increase is slowing, and projections suggest that it might reach 10 billion, and then start to decline. A major reason is that as nations become richer, their birthrate declines, and the world as a whole has been growing richer. Coupled with this is the fact that as education, particularly that of women, is extended, birthrate goes down. The world is not going to drown in people.

Others have claimed that Earth’s resources are being used up, and there will be precious little left for future generations. This is incorrect. Human ingenuity has developed ways of satisfying our needs with fewer resources than it previously took, and has also enabled us to tap new sources of them. “Water wars” will be no more likely than “peak oil” was. We are clever enough to find new ways of doing things.

We are also clever enough to mitigate the effects our presence has on the environment by inventing technological means of diminishing it. It will be human creativity, the infinite resource, that will enable us to live, not more simply, but more cleverly and more cleanly.

This week saw us lay another place at life’s table, and we look forward to the contribution the 8 billionth person will make to humanity’s achievements, inventions and adventures.

If only John Harris would pay attention

The British right’s hostility to climate action is deeply entrenched – and extremely dangerous

John Harris

D’ye know, we’re really not sure about that. We, of course, think of ourselves as being on the left, as all liberals - even the classical kind - are. The aim is to make life better for all, including and especially the poor. So, we advocate that peace, easy taxes and the tolerable administration of justice which achieves that task. We get labelled as being of the right because we insist that markets are the way to get that job done. Given that we’re right - as in correct - on this we must be labelled as we are, far-right, in order that the easily swayed do not begin to understand the point.

For we’ve not been hostile to climate action in the slightest. We’ve spent the past 15 years at least advocating the correct plan to deal with the problem. As they gave Nordhaus the Nobel for, Stern a peerage, assuming that the IPCC is correct about the existence and problems of climate change then the solution is a carbon tax at the social cost of emissions. Job done.

For that is what the actual science says. Do, please, note that “assuming” in there.

Harris contrasts our modest, moderate and correct analysis with this:

There is a very good book that explores all of this, published last summer: White Skin, Black Fuel, authored by the Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, and a group of “scholars, activist and students” called the Zetkin Collective. It roots the right’s climate politics in things that are as much psychological as political: nostalgia for an age of empire founded on coal and oil, a yearning for the machismo of heavy industry, and a view of the global south as a deep threat. The latter’s climate-based suffering must be othered and ignored, and its people have to be shut out, even as climate breakdown makes large-scale human movement more inevitable than ever.

One of Malm’s recent books - his publisher sent it to us surely by mistake - advocates the use of Leninist war communism as the correct reaction to climate change. That war communism that emptied the cities, dropped industrial output by 80%, caused a famine that killed perhaps up to 10 million and had to be abandoned after 3 years to return to the more market based system of the New Economic Policy.

It’s us that are to be regarded as dangerous, while Malm is “very good”?

Perhaps we could make just that tiniest, littlest, suggestion to John Harris? Could you start paying attention?

One Penny on the Income Tax

From time to time, a strange proposal raises its head in the UK. This is the suggestion to raise taxes to finance some suitable and of course very worthy causes, e.g., the National Health Service or education. This financing is to be done by raising income tax by “one penny”. And why not? The cause is eminently worthy. And one penny doesn’t sound like very much. Except of course, this is another example of politicians using words that don’t quite mean what they sound like, in order to make us part with more of our money.

In fact, “one penny on the income tax” is an almost perfect example of what should be called a stealth tax.

This is for two reasons. First, the strange use of “one penny”. Presumably, this goes back to the days when there were 240 pennies in the pound. Since there is no unit describing 1/240th, it is easier and natural to refer to talk in absolute number of pence. But that was 50 years ago. Since there are now 100 pennies in the pound, why not talk about percentage points? True, some of this may simply be inertia. But it is difficult to abandon the suspicion that it is because one penny somehow sounds very much less than one percent.

The second reason why referring to “one penny on the income tax” is invidious, is because it actually disguises the relative size of the tax increase involved. If you only pay the basic rate of income tax, the tax amount of your taxable income taken from you is 20% (that is to say, one-fifth). If you add “one penny” to the basic rate of tax, this means actually increasing your tax payments by 5% or one-twentieth, since your tax rate is now 21%.

If you are a higher rate payer per year (40 or 45%), the increase is proportionately less, although of course, in absolute terms, your tax rises by more. However, your tax burden will rise by between 2.2% and 2.5%. It could, of course be argued that a 2.2% or even a 5% rise in any person’s tax burden is not particularly onerous. But that is beside the point. Whatever tax burden is, actual and/all proposed, taxpayers should be aware of it. They should not be tricked or cajoled into paying higher taxes by stealth or obfuscation.

So how much is actually “one penny on the income tax”? In 2019, when the Liberal Democrats launched one of the regular proposals along these lines, The Telegraph calculated that the cost for an average taxpayer would amount to £170 per annum. But going out and telling voters, “we intend to take another £170 off you” presumably doesn’t sound very innocuous, or attractive.

But as voters and taxpayers, should we not insist on honesty from our elected representatives?

Seldom meet together....but the conversation ends in a conspiracy......

As we’ve noted before one useful manner of reading Wealth of Nations is as a prolonged scream against the restrictions of the medieval guild economy. Against the idea that only this elite caste may be allowed to perform this function, only that other over there that other. For by restricting the numbers in the elite the conspiracy raises the income of those in it as against those of everyone else.

‘Unqualified experts’ should not have role in child welfare cases, court told

Gosh.

The family court should not ordinarily permit the instruction of “experts who purport to be ‘experts in alienation’,” in cases involving decisions around child welfare, the Association of Clinical Psychologists (ACP-UK) has advised a senior judge.

Well, that makes sense, if people aren’t experts then don’t allow them to be used as experts.

In a court document seen by the Observer, lawyers for the ACP-UK claim those who profess to be “experts in alienation” display a “confirmatory bias and an unhelpfully narrow lens, which is likely to render them unsuitable for conducting, in an open-minded way, a psychological assessment of the family”.

That looks suspiciously like an insistence that only those who think the right way should be allowed to do the work. But perhaps that’s us just being cynics.

At a hearing before Sir Andrew McFarlane, Mills also warned against using psychologists who are neither practitioners regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council nor academics who are chartered members of the British Psychological Society.

And now we’re not being cynics. The actual claim is that only those who are members of the correct guild (s) may be so used. To the benefit of the incomes of all those in the guild (s) and the disbenefit of everyone else.

One of the reasons that Wealth of Nations is still such a good guide to the modern world, that some two and a half centuries after publication, is that human scheming and guild manipulations haven’t changed all that much over the 246 years. It’s only necessary to read the daily newspapers to spot the machinations.

Misunderstanding Keynes really isn't a good idea

We often enough disagree with Keynes the economist. Often because we both understand him and also understand what he didn’t. Things like political incentives for example.

It’s fair enough to say that in recession government should expand demand and then repair that roof when the Sun shines. Except political incentives don’t work that way - that spending never does get cut. We particularly recall Polly Toynbee’s insistences over the decades - quite, she’s not an economist and this is rather the point we’re making - that when Brown was running surpluses she insisted that there was money there to spend so spend, gloriously, when deficits have appeared she’s argued for spending, gloriously, upon the need revealed by the deficits. Add to that the desire for politicians to spend and not to cut nor tax and we gain a ratchet effect.

Or, more simply, we never do get to that Sun nor the roof repair.

This is different though from the mistake of minsunderstanding Keynes when he was in fact right. As here:

People have predicted that robots will destroy the labour market for decades. As far back as 1933 the economist John Maynard Keynes prophesied widespread technological unemployment was coming “due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”.

No. Keynes did not say that there was going to be some outbreak of that technological unemployment, not as a general feature of the economy. He said that it would be some transient condition. From that same essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren:

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment.

That’s actually the next - and unquoted above - sentence. In the introduction there’s a further discussion:

We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption;

Technological unemployment, as a thing, does not exist. Technological unemployment as a stage, a transience, does.

Getting this right of course tells us what to do about it. The planned and managed economy is slower to adapt than the free market one. Thus the route through the stage is to be more free market and less planned. We do not face an end stage problem about which something must be done, we have an ephemeral issue which is best solved by getting out of the way.

Interesting what you can show if you actually understand Keynes, isn’t it.

Accepting the analysis, what's the solution?

Andy Beckett, in The Guardian, proffers an analysis of the British economy:

Britain’s new reality as a relatively poor country on the fringe of Europe is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. If you’ve paid off your mortgage, work in finance or a senior corporate role, use private rather than public services, and live in a prosperous part of London or the home counties – still one of the wealthiest regions in Europe – then Britain’s decline may seem little more than a melodramatic media story. This year, the pay of FTSE 100 chief executives has risen by an average of 23%.

But for the rest of us Britain has undeniably become a poorer, colder, less healthy country. Deprivation that is common today, such as people living without heating or regular meals, would have seemed dystopian to most Britons only a few years ago.

We’d not agree in all detail there, obviously. But the idea that Britain is, economically, a largely middle income Northern European country with an absolutely world beating SE and capital city grafted on is true enough to be a useful starting point for an analysis. The question then becomes, well, what do we do next?

The standard view shared by everyone to the more authoritarian side of our position - that’s near everyone of course - is that we should collectively stop doing those things that make the SE rich and do more of the things that make the rest of the place not rich. We must stop doing all this selling high value services to foreigners and make more low value things that can be dropped on feet. We must add less value within the domestic economy that is.

Which really doesn’t sound all that good a solution to us. We have in front of us the results of an experiment, a market experiment. Selling law, accounting, banking, insurance and all the rest to the world makes people rich. Crafting whippet flanges less so. Our solution to make more people more richer would be to sell more of those high value things to foreigners and mourn the mistily flat-capped past rather less.

We’ve gone out and done the experiment that is. These things make the populace rich, these other things don’t. Since we desire that more of the populace be richer let’s do more of the rich making things and less of those that don’t achieve that goal.

The elite view is the opposite of this good sense of course. The entirety of some political stances seems to be that if only we stopped people doing those value additive things then, well, umm, something something. Which does leave us with an interesting if annoying question.

The SE and London are rich, globally rich. Many other parts of the country are not. The Establishment view is that the rich parts should stop doing what makes places rich and everyone should do more of what makes places not rich. The question is then how did we end up with a consensus which is so entirely demented?

Yet another reason why George Monbiot is wrong

We will admit to - very occasionally - having a sneaking admiration for George Monbiot. He is willing, just the occasional time, to change his mind. As with nuclear power after Fukushima. Given that the combined earthquake and tsunami knocked over three entire reactor cores and no one at all was killed from that - but 13,000 or so from the earthquake and tsunami - then, well, yes, nuclear power is pretty safe.

True, reality does have to give Mr. Monbiot a really hard slap in the face to get that mind changed but even that’s a much better reaction than all too many out there.

More normally matters are a little different. Monbiot does seem to have an almost puppyish enthusiasm for the next Big Thing. Or recently found out Old Thing - here we think of his insistence, stemming from a very strange and minor Indian activist, that the Brits stole £40 trillion from India. The new thing now:

It turns out, there’s something really massive we can do which is to replace protein-rich and fat-rich foods that we now get from the flesh and secretions of animals with food produced by bacteria.

We’re not quite sure whether that’s a step up or down the food chain from all those others insisting we should be eating insects. But still:

“The way we produce our protein-rich foods at the moment requires a massive amount of environmental resources, a huge amount of land - far more than the land for anything else, particularly when it comes from pasture-fed meat, which is the most damaging of all farm products,” says George.

No, that’s factually wrong. But then there’s this:

“Our food system is by far and away the most damaging impact we have on the living world. Worse than fossil fuels, worse than plastics, it is the worst thing we’re doing. It’s the biggest cause of habitat destruction, of wildlife loss, of extinction, of soil degradation, of freshwater use. And one of the biggest causes of climate breakdown and water pollution and air pollution. And anything we can do to reduce that burden would make an enormous difference.”

Again, no.

We’ve no worry at all about eating bacteria. We’ve long been in favour of the output of yeasts in fermentations* so we see no real problem with going the stage further. Nor, even, with insects. We’d only insist that it has to be demand led - people get to choose and only do as they wish.

But there’s still this vast logical problem with what Monbiot is thinking here. For everything that is alive dies, everything that has been alive gets eaten by something or other other that is alive. Sometimes, distressingly, while still alive, as with crocodiles and necrotising fasciitis. But life dies and gets eaten. So, our changing our place on that food chain doesn’t, in fact, change that circle of life.

If humans stop eating bovines and consume only bacteria, well, what next? Roughly the same weight of mammals will be out there, being eaten by something or other. We eat cows, we’re eaten by the worms. The replacement might be that cows are eaten by lions and the lions are, in their time, eaten by worms. Sure, if the lions are armed with lasers that would be pretty cool but other than that we’re not seeing the huge difference here. All the plants are going to be eaten by some form of herbivore, the herbivores by carnivores, the carnivores by the bugs and, well? Whether we’re in that cycle or not, we’re not seeing that huge difference.

And that’s the problem with this whole idea. The only thing in it is that the one apex predator should be replaced by another. Humans by lions with lasers, say. Which could be, as we say, pretty cool with those lasers but other than that it seems to be nothing but misanthropy writ large.

Which is, we think, why George so often does go quite so wrong. We ourselves have our dislikes among our fellow humans but we don’t regret the entire species. We’re not sure if Monbiot is on the right - the correct - side of that same judgement.

*Why, yes, of course we mean bread, not beer. What do you think we are, journalists?

We don't believe Which? here for a moment

Which? magazine wants us all to know that there are vast areas of the country which are “food deserts”. We do not believe this for a moment. It’s nonsense.

The big supermarkets need to step up support for low-income customers marooned in England’s “food deserts” to enable them to readily access healthy groceries during the cost of living crisis, according to the consumer group Which?.

The scarcity of affordable, healthy food is so acute in some of the poorest parts of Birmingham, Liverpool, Bradford, Durham and the Welsh valleys that the vast majority of neighbourhoods in these areas should get targeted help, Which? says.

The study found nearly half of neighbourhoods in the north-east of England – and about a third in Yorkshire, the West Midlands and the north-west of England – lacked easy access to supermarkets, and had poor availability for online deliveries and low levels of car ownership, making it much harder for low-income households to put food on the table.

The reason it’s nonsense is in there, they’ve got the facts but don’t realise they do.

Just as an aside there’s some chatter about how there are more food banks in these “deserts”. Well, possibly the causation runs the other way? Who is going to set up a business selling food in an area where people get food for free?

But the nonsense. 20 years back the idea of food delivery to the home - of groceries, not a takeaway - was something limited to Hovis ads and they harked back near a century themselves. Today anyone in the country can book that online delivery from any of a number of different grocery suppliers.

We did in fact check this. A midweek delivery pass - which we believe means free deliveries on midweek days for one month - seems to cost £4. Perhaps we’ve not quite got that detail quite right but it does seem to be of that order. According to ONS the average household grocery bill is some £60 a week. Add a bit to that for the recent burst of inflation and call it £280 a month. The delivery cost is 1.5% or so of that bill.

This is not nothing, we agree, but it is pretty trivial. It’s most certainly less than the price difference between a full service supermarket and a corner store.

Which? is claiming that there are food deserts in Britain. When in fact each and everyone of us has a handful of supermarkets in our own front room - or wherever else we keep the computer, tablet or mobile phone. It’s simply nonsense. Abjectly so. Geographic access to good, cheap and nutritious food is better now than it ever has been in all of human history. This really isn’t the right time to be complaining about the lack of such access.

But then we suppose that these campaigning organisations do have to find something to complain about. Where would this form of indoor relief for the sprogs of the upper middle class be without something to whinge about, however absurd it might be?

There is no such thing as tax avoidance

We fear that MPs are suffering from a logical failure here:

However, a recent report by an All-party Parliamentary Group is attempting to dispel this as a myth. Some politicians have also attempted to confuse the position by categorising tax planning between acceptable tax planning and unacceptable tax avoidance, despite there being no legal distinction between the two.

This simply doesn’t make sense. There is indeed a thing called tax evasion, by definition it is illegal. There is also tax planning, paying the amount the law demands. Then there are attempts at tax avoidance. But while people may attempt a dodge or three upon examination these become either illegal - tax evasion - or legal - tax planning.

There is therefore no such thing as tax avoidance, there is only the attempt to avoid taxes. This is indeed a very different thing. It also means that there need be no change in any prosecution policy because if people evade tax then that is, by our very definition, already illegal and something that can be prosecuted.

There’s an interesting example of this right here:

The APPG report has been prepared in conjunction with Tax Watch

Julian Richer funds Tax Watch. Julian Richer sold his business, Richer Sounds, for vast piles of money and paid not a bean in capital gains tax. Entirely, wholly and absolutely legally. The company was sold to an employee trust, public policy has been to encourage such actions by making the receipts from having done so free of those taxes. Those who follow the law to the jot and tittle should not be put in fear of the law now, should they?

We really must praise Willy Hutton for this

Willy’s managed to reference a specific report and entirely ignore the findings of the report. Which is pretty good going even for Mr. Hutton. The complaint is about the interaction of economic and health inequality. Hutton is insistent that it’s the former that leads to the latter. It’s that life is so unfair in Britain which leads to the illness. In this Willy is entirely in line with current bien pensant thinking of course.

This is also entirely the opposite of what the report he references actually says on the point.

It is their birth weight (heavier babies fare best), what they then got to eat, the strength of family ties and parenting, their access to great early years education, as a telling report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies on health inequalities released on Friday confirmed.

Well, no, the report actually says:

Reverse causation argues that the poor health of a group with some characteristic – low social

status – is because poor health causes that characteristic, at least in part. That healthier people

make better marriages, for example, is institutionalised in many societies. More relevant today

are the effects of health on education and on earnings. Poor health in childhood and in young

adulthood limits educational opportunities, though once educational qualifications have been

earned they are largely impervious to illness. That is not so with earnings or income, which are

often severely affected by sickness or approaching death. It is unclear to us why this channel

should be controversial, often denounced by those who work on the health gradient. Of course, it

does not preclude income causing health, though it is surely not a good idea to rely solely on one

mechanism and ignore others.

As we’ve been saying for a long time now, health inequality will cause economic inequality. And at least some health inequality is just inevitable, that moving finger of fate having written and all that. It simply is not true that health inequality is purely an outcome of economic inequality. It could be, partly, we can see mechanisms by which it might be, but it is also absolutely true that some of the causation will work in that reverse manner.

It is also not true - or at least not obviously so - that austerity contributed to the slowdown in improving lifespans:

However, it is far from clear that austerity bears primary responsibility for the slowdown in

mortality progress. After the financial crisis in 2008, different European countries had different

experiences of austerity – some with a great deal, some with none – and there is no systematic

negative relationship between the degree of austerity experienced and subsequent health

outcomes among wealthy countries.

Finally, there’s one more point the report makes, one that we’ve been shouting about. Which is that for much of this we simply do not know.

Until we are able to merge death records into the census

What is meant here is that we simply do not know what the connection is between childhood conditions - economic, social and so on - and lifespan. Because we measure lifespan by age and place of death. We do not - and we’ve checked this ourselves, both with a Registrar and with ONS - have any statistical linkage between place of birth, place or conditions of upbringing, and place of death. That’s on the long form death certificate which is not an input into any of the currently used statistics. It is possible to get some sort of proxy by linking in, as there, the census, but this has not been done.

International migration is such that some 14% of the UK is currently foreign born. Whatever those childhood influences for them are, they’ll be the ones of their source country, not this one. Internal migration rates are obviously vastly higher than this. And when we get to the most detailed level of statistics - the sort that say this council ward in Glasgow has life expectancy 11 years lower than this other ward in Kensington and Chelsea - then migration rates are such that we’ve really no useful information at all about that link between childhood and age of death. Simply because the portion of the population that dies in the same 3,000 or so household unit it was born into is tiny.

The IFS is doing good work here really looking into the subject. Will Hutton takes it as supporting his preconceived ideas. It really would help if he actually read - understanding it is perhaps too much to ask - the report.

This is also true of all those others wailing over the same points and subject. Current bien pensant thinking on the subject is wrong. Partly because we’ve simply not the statistical base to make the conclusions some do and further, the logic used over causality is incorrect as well.