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April 2011

Lefty logic

Dear BBC Management,
I was disturbed to read in yesterday’s Guardian that the Metropolitan police have made contact with BBC journalists to request unbroadcast footage of the protests in central London on March 26th.

Mm, hmmm.

It took a full week following the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests, for example, for the true story of police brutality to emerge after footage released by a passer-by reversed the police’s false and self-serving account which had been parroted by an obliging media.

OK

In response to the Met’s request, BBC Management should now issue a public statement mounting a strong defence of the confidentiality of its journalists’ material and sources.

Err?

The argument is that because previously unseen footage was of use in solving the Tomlinson thing then no one should release unseen footage?

What?

On the attribution of witticisms

It\’s fairly standard practice that over time good little phrases, sayings, witticisms, get attributed to the wrong people. As who actually said what to whom disappears into the mists of history it\’s as if there\’s a form of gravitational force attracting the attribution of this or that to just one or two historical figures.

Which figures it is depends on the country: Twain* never said many of the things that Americans attribute to him and even if he did, some of those were repetitions of points made by others.For us in the UK it seems to be Churchill.

It could have been either of them who originated the \”two certain things in life, death and taxes\” and it could have been one of myriads of other people**. I really don\’t know: but I would bet that a likely attribution in the US would be Twain, in the UK, Churchill. Similarly, I\’ve seen Disraeli\’s*** \”lies, damned lies and statistics\” attributed to both.

Which brings us to this:

In the words of the famous political theorist, JCR Clarkson

\”Socialism is such a crap system, it took a nation populated by Germans… and made it poor\”

He may have said it but the original is actually PJ O\’Rourke. Who himself, I\’m told, is actually the most quoted person in the modern dictionary of quotations. It is always acceptable to quote the Peej, on the basis that if you\’re going to nick jokes make sure you nick good ones.

But one should actually quote him….

* Twain obviously did say some very good things original to him. But more gets attributed than he actually said.

** Oscar Wilde is a very different case as he made a point of repeating others\’ quips.

*** Was it Dizzy?

Odd idea Sir Simon

No one can create a job

Eh?

There\’s around 30 million jobs in the UK economy and each and every one of them was created by someone.

Why, I even created a job myself a month ago. Admittedly it\’s in the Portuguese economy, but it was still a job created.

It\’s true that politicians don\’t create jobs, rather entrepreneurs do, but jobs are indede created. At least a couple of million a year in the UK economy in fact.

NHS reforms

Yes, this is the point:

Campaigners\’ fears are not about pace and scale but about the underlying intent of the proposed legislation. It is clear now that the endgame is to transform the NHS into a system that finances but does not provide healthcare – a national insurance system which pays the bills while care is provided by competing private, publicly owned and voluntary organisations. There is nothing yet to suggest this has changed.

It has long been true that the French system has been ranked as the best in the world by the WHO and similar organisations. The French system is a system that finances but does not provide healthcare – a national insurance system which pays the bills while care is provided by competing private, publicly owned and voluntary organisations.

If we wish to have the best health care system in the world it doesn\’t seem all that odd that we might copy the structure of the best health care system in the world.

And yes, we do know that even the limited amount of competition currently found within the NHS does improve health care.

GP commissioning, seen by many as the heart of the reforms, is the bait with which Lansley hoped to reel in the GPs. Most have spotted the hook, and believe the price they are being asked to pay is too high. They recognise that they will be held responsible for cuts and rationing, and that that will do irreparable damage to the patient-doctor relationship. As one doctor noted: \”Do I want my GP to look at me as a patient, with a focus on curing my ailments, or as a business person focused on reducing costs and maximising income? For me it\’s simple, I prefer my GP to remain a GP.\”

Whether or not it\’s the GP who does the business calculations it is true that someone, somewhere, has to do them. One of the faults of the NHS as it is is that no one is in fact doing them. And given Hayek\’s point, that knowledge is local, the GPs probably are the right people to be performing this task: informed, on the spot, probably the best people (other than the patients themselves) to be doing it.

Yes, I\’m sure there will be problems with the reforms, the system is simply too large for there not to be. But the basic idea, the very point of it all, the introduction of more competition and that competition guided by the most informed people within the whole system, seems perfectly sensible to me.

Howard Reed: entire numpty

Howard Reed\’s just released a report claiming that remutualising Northern Rock is going to be just great for everyone. Kittens will happily gambol sort of stuff.

We\’re going to hear a great deal about this as Our Chuka tries to convince us all that giving it away rather than selling it is just dandy. We\’ll start with the lie indirect:

This suggests that the proceeds from a Northern Rock flotation or trade sale in the near future would not be sufficient to cover the £50 billion or so of support from public funds already provided in the run-up to and following nationalisation.

That statement, as it stands, is true. But worthless.

For there\’s been two very different sorts of public funds provided. There\’s been the losses, subsidies. And yes, of course, we\’d like to get these back. But we might not, it has to be admitted.

Then there\’s been the financing that has been provided from public funds. Something very different indeed. This is the government lending money to Northern Rock which NR then lends to other people (or slightly more accurately, has already lent to other people). On which interest is paid. And the capital will be paid back in the future. It\’s only when you add these two together that you get the £50 billion.

More: much of that £50 billion in funding is actually in the bad bank, the bit that no one is even thinking of selling.

So while it\’s true that privatisation won\’t get the £50 billion back nor will any other solution other than simply time. As people pay off their mortgages which that £50 billion funds then the money will flow back into hte government. But to reject privatisation because that alone won\’t repay the £50 billion is what we might call the lie indirect.

And then we come to the real lunacy:

The aftermath of the financial crisis has seen a huge reduction in net lending to businesses . Figures from the Bank of England (2011) show that net business lending in real terms averaged around £1.6 billion a year between 1998 and 2005, before increasing to £7.4 billion in 2007 at what turned out to be the height of an unsustainable lending boom. The aftermath of the 2008 crisis has seen a collapse in lending, with net lending falling to minus £3.9 billion in 2009 and minus £2.1 billion in 2010.
The one growth sector for business lending, particularly for the small business sector, has been among mutually owned banks and building societies. For example, between 2007 and 2010 the Co-operative Bank doubled the annual amounts it lent to small businesses8.
A mutualised Northern Rock would be able to take a longer view on returns to capital than an independent plc or a subsidiary of a larger bank fixated on short-term returns to capital. It is likely that this would be useful for small businesses and community run businesses (such as social enterprises) in particular.

Northern Rock doesn\’t lend to businesses. Northern Rock has never lent to businesses. It\’s a mortgage bank for Jeebus\’ sake! Even their commercial department only does commercial mortgages!

They know precisely nothing about lending to business. Haven\’t a sodding clue. Working capital? What the fuck\’s that?

Howard Reed seems to think that giving the entirely clueless money to spray around the economy is going to help us recover from having had the entirely clueless spraying money around the economy. Man\’s a loon.

Won\’t stop Our Chuka from quoting him though.

Umm, what is the New Scientist talking about here?

Even if solar cells like this are eventually built and put to work, they will still contribute to global warming. That is because they convert only a small fraction of the light that hits them, and absorb most of the rest, converting it to heat that spills into the environment. Sustainable solar energy may therefore require cells that reflect the light they cannot use.

Umm, Eh?

Consider a rock, sitting in the sunshine. Photons hit it, yes. If it\’s dark rock, most are absorbed, not reflected. That\’s why rocks get hot on a sunny day, because the photons are turned into heat.

So now we have a special rock, a solar cell. Some of those photons that would have been absorbed, become heat, are now going off and making electricity. So, err, we\’ve got less heat than if we just had rocks instead.

It seems that the New Scientist is thus trying to tell us that it\’s rocks that are responsible for global warming. Presumably we just paint the whole place white then?

Britons do not support higher taxes

One of the basics is that you don\’t believe what people tell you. You watch what they actually do as a guide to their desires, not what they\’ll spout. In economics, revealed preferences.

And one of the arguments going on at the moment is about how much Brits are prepared to pay in extra taxes. From opinion polls (some more validly worded than others) we might think that lots are prepared to pay lots.

Leave aside that sneaky feeling that in reality lots are prepared to say that others should pay lots.

Compare and contrast instead how many actually pay extra taxes as compared to those who say they\’re prepared to.

Well, there are in fact some. And \”lots\” is a relative term. But we do in fact know how much taxes are too low by.

£1,000 a year.

No, that\’s not £1,000 per person. Not per family, it\’s not £1,000 million, it is simply and exactly £1,000 for all 65 million of us each and every year.

That is, taxes are too low by something like 0.00000016%.

And how can we find this out? Well, a UKIP councillor has updated something I did for The Times back in 2006. Gone and asked, how many people made voluntary donations to the costs of government, over and above their legitimate tax bill?

And the answer provided to Councillor Richard Lowe? The answer is in full here. Just over £7,000 in the 7 years from 2002 to 2009.

Or £1,000 a year.

So, err, sorry lefties. No, there is no evidence that by their actions, Britons actually desire to pay higher taxes. Well, not more than a collective £1,000 a year at least.

Ritchie tells us all about the evils of competition in the NHS

No, really, he does. And it\’s terribly evil of course.

For twenty years NHS reforms have made the NHS less efficient, more bureaucratic, less patient focussed and more costly.

There has been one explanation for this phenomenon: since the early 90s all NHS reform has tried to introduce two things into our health service. The first is the market, the idea being that this would create competition between suppliers. The second is patient choice, the idea being that this would create pressure on suppliers to really compete.

There have been two profound errors in this logic.

There is no market in healthcare – and can’t be

And on he goes.

The biggest criticism of the NHS is that it is riddled with bureaucracy.

The criticism is based on fact. The NHS is riddled with bureaucracy. However, the question has to be asked, why is this the case?

The answer is quite straightforward. This bureaucracy was introduced when the NHS was turned into a quasi-market.

To be a market the NHS had to be broken up into large numbers of quasi-independent units all contracting with each other, all transacting with each other, and all having to spend vast amounts of time managing those contracts and transactions before then accounting for them.

There were several hundred Primary Care Trusts (or their predecessors) when the process of marketisation began. This number has been reduced to 150 or thereabouts now. But shortly they’ll be replaced by 500 GP consortia.

And then there are Foundation Hospitals. And Ambulance Trusts. And Mental Health Care Trusts, and on and on and on, all of which are undertaking all those contracts, transactions and accounting.

All of this is ludicrous. There is one NHS, paid for out of one taxation fund, ultimately accountable to one minister in England (and others, I admit, in Scotland and Wales), consolidated into one final central account. Which means that all that separate accounting is at the end of the day a complete waste of time.

So, is there actually anything wrong with what he says? Well, this being the Murphmeister, yes, of course there is.

You see, we\’ve actually had a number of natural experiments and we can see the results of them. For example, NHS England has adoptde more market oriented changes than have either NHS Wales or NHS Scotland. And the result has been that quality of care in England has risen faster than in either Wales or Scotland at lower cost.

Which is the sort of result we\’d actually expect from a market drvien system….even if we have had to build a bureaucracy to provide said markets.

For example:

This policy change provides a natural experiment that researchers can exploit. Hospitals compete in geographical markets because patients prefer, among other things, to be treated closer to home. Hospitals thus vary in the extent to which they face competitive forces simply because of geography. Exploiting this fact allows researchers to look at outcomes pre- and post- competition policy across different markets.

In recent research along with Rodrigo Moreno-Serra (Gaynor et al. 2010), we look at all admissions to hospitals in the National Health Service – around 13 million admissions – pre- and post-policy. We find that hospitals located in areas where patients have more choice are of a higher clinical quality – as measured by lower death rates following admissions – and their patients stay in hospital for shorter periods compared with hospitals located in less competitive areas. What’s more, the hospitals in competitive markets have achieved this without increasing total operating costs or shedding staff. These findings suggest that the policy of choice and competition in healthcare can have benefits – quality in English hospitals in areas in which more competition is possible has risen without a commensurate increase in costs.

So the only thing wrong with Ritchie\’s contention is Ritchie\’s contention. I know, how surprising! More competition means better health care with no rise in cost. And given that we\’d rather like to have better health care at no increase in cost, more competition is therefore what we\’d rather like.

I can\’t help but feel that Murphy would be well served by checking what other people have already found out before he starts to reinvent the wheel.

Is this Monbiot\’s mid life crisis I see before me?

I think it is you know.

It\’s either that or we\’re gearing up for a full blown Hitchens moment.

Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate-change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don\’t suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.

We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right.

And when the glorious day arrives and he starts to understand economics?

We might make a classical liberal out of him yet….

What a loon

The co-host of the BBC\’s Springwatch programme said that everyone must do their bit for the environment. \”If I didn\’t recycle and shop locally, I couldn\’t see the point of being human,\” he told the Radio Times.

That\’s Chris Packham.

Art, religion, the beauty of a summer\’s day. love, no, all are worth less than bloody recycling.

Setting out his radical approach, Packham said: \”There\’s no point bleating about the future of pandas, polar bears and tigers when we\’re not addressing the one single factor that\’s putting more pressure on the ecosystem than any other – namely the ever-increasing size of the world\’s population.

\”I wouldn\’t actually penalise people for having too many children, as I think the carrot always works better than the stick. But I would offer them tax breaks for having small families – say, 10 per cent off your tax bill if you decide to stick with just one child. And an even bigger financial incentive if you choose not to have a family at all.

\”I read the other day that, by 2020, there are going to be 70 million people in Britain. Let\’s face it, that\’s too many.

And he doesn\’t seem to realise that that ever expanding population thing is already being solved. As the world gets rich people are having fewer children. We just don\’t need to do anything more than simple economic growth.

I just knew Ritchie would get this wrong.

Ahem:

But as the Observer reported yesterday, US bank Wachovia, now parts of Wells Fargo, money laundered hundreds of billions for Mexican drug gangs in the USA.

No, that\’s not what happened. And you can find out what did happen simply by reading that very Observer report.

\”For the time period of 1 May 2004 through 31 May 2007, Wachovia processed at least $$373.6bn in CDCs, $4.7bn in bulk cash\” – a total of more than $378.3bn, a sum that dwarfs the budgets debated by US state and UK local authorities to provide services to citizens.

The total amount of money handled was in the hundreds of billions.

The investigation has identified that at least $110m in drug proceeds were funnelled through the CDC accounts held at Wachovia.\”

The amount that has been identified as drug proceeds is a hundred million and change.

Now I\’m perfectly willing to believe that there was more drug money laundering than has so far been uncovered. But absolutely nobody, other than the Murphmeister, is quite so doolally as to think that the entire amount of hundreds of billions was the laundering of drug money.

Shouldn\’t a leading forensic accountant be able to tell the difference between these two propositions?

Between 100% of a flow of money being drug cash and 0.025% of it being so?

No Ritchie, no

Two things follow. First it shows that Willetts does not undertsand the demand for education – which is a classic Giffin good because of this perverse incentive to buy it, whatever the price.

You mean Giffen Good.

And even then you\’ve got it wrong.

You\’re intimating that demand for education is fixed, whatever the price. A Giffen Good is when the demand for the product rises when price rises. Education isn\’t one of these: although, oddly, wheat noodles in North China do seem to be.

Subs! Subs!

Tsk, at The Guardian:

The magnitude nine quake (one of the five most powerful ever recorded) and the 30m to 40m tsunami (the highest ever seen in Japan)

I don\’t think so. A 10 metre tsunami, a 30 to 40 foot tsunami…..but not a 30 to 40 metre tsunami. No, we\’ve really not been talking about a 100 foot wall of water sweeping in.

Could just be a typo, sure, but again it\’s evidence that all too many of the Arts graduates that produce our newspapers just don\’t have an instinctive understanding of numbers.

The Normans still win

Fascinating stuff:

People with \”Norman\” surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress.

The research is from Greg Clark (A Farewell to Alms) so cannot be dismissed. But I wonder how he\’s separated out the two possible effects here.

For there is the obvious one that we can all think of: rich peeps get to inherit and the effects of this are still evident 1,000 years after the Normans stole the whole country.

But there\’s another one. The effects of primogeniture. It\’s the sons that carry the family name and it\’s the first son that gets the familial wealth. Or at least, it has been for most of that millennium. Indeed, much of Clark\’s other research has been about how said primogeniture led to downward social mobility of the not first sons and thus spread the habits of the bourgeois through the population.

I don\’t know if this is the actual paper being described, probably not. But the conclusion is certainly interesting:

The evidence above suggests that England was likely a classless society of
complete long run social mobility all the way from 1200 to 2009.

And if anything, that mobility has decreased in recent times……

Today\’s PR release from the pork barrel

Roads should be safer, eh?

The Road Safety Foundation and RAC Foundation have urged the Government to spend “just a fraction” of the money lost to Britain because of crashes.

The report ‘\’Saving Lives, Saving Money: the costs and benefits of achieving safe roads\’’ calls for an investment of £8 billion over the next decade.

It calculated that accidents cost the British economy up to £30 billion a year.

Much of the Bill is picked up by the National Health Service while ordinary drivers are finding themselves out of pocket as insurance premiums soar

So who is it that is actually saying this?

The Campaign for Safe Road Design is run by the Road Safety Foundation. And who is behind that? Well, how about the Institute of Highway Engineers? Or the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation?

Yes, that\’s right children. While we don\’t call them unions beause they are in fact professional bodies that is what they really are. Unions for professionals. And their pitch is that more taxpayer money should be paid over to the sort of work their members do.

Hey, it might even really be a good idea but the source is a tad tainted really.

There Institute of Advanced Motorists called for better training to tackle the problem.

“The IAM wants to see incentives for all drivers to improve their skills so that they are well prepared to cope with the wide variety of road conditions highlighted in this report,” said Neil Greig, the director of policy and research.

Yes, that\’s right. The people who get paid to provide advanced driving training think that there should be more incentives for people to get advanced driving training.

This is news in the same sense that Davind Cameron asking people to vote Tory is news.

But then Mondays are always easy days to get this sort of stuff into the newspaper.

Fuck Yeah!

Via, a decent court ruling.

The case stated raised four questions for consideration by this court. Having analysed the issues, this court considers that the four questions in essence amount to one question: in a case of cash forfeiture does a customs officer have to show that the property seized was obtained through conduct of one of a number of kinds each of which would have been unlawful conduct or is it sufficient for the officer to point to criminal conduct of an unspecified kind?

….

Applying the provisions of section 242(2)(b) of the Act, our answer to the question is as follows: in a case of cash forfeiture, a customs officer does have to show that the property seized was obtained through conduct of one of a number of kinds each of which would have been unlawful conduct.

Of course, it still doesn\’t go far enough. The idea that the State can just take your stuff because you\’ve been a naughty boy, rather than levy a specific fine for a specific crime, is a foul and vile blot on a free society.

Yet at least now they\’ve got to show that you\’ve been a naughty boy in a specific and illegal manner rather then stealing your stuff just because the h\’officer is sure you\’re a bad\’un.

In which we answer Ilkka\’s question

(why the hell is it that we conservatives can usually see the unintended consequences of policies at a glance before we even finish reading their explanations, but the same feat just seems so very, very hard for the soap avoiders?)

Because that\’s why we\’re conservatives, because we can see the unintended consequences…..

Thus the disdain for the grand new plans and the desire to stick with, roughly speaking, the devils we know.