Skip to content

September 2014

It would help if Scotland knew what the Swedish model was

A go-alone Scottish economy is viable – but would it be any better?

Scots may dream of a Swedish-style state but, lacking concrete plans, Ireland is the likelier model

People generally get this wrong. And it’s reasonably important that they get it right instead.

Both Sweden and Ireland are more free market, more capitalist, than the UK or US. This is why both places work in their different ways. Just look at any of the listings of economic freedom: more free trade, lower corporate and capital taxation, less regulatory intervention into the economy.

The differences between the two aren’t in those basic economic structures. Sweden layers a high tax, high redistribution welfare state over the top of that. As does Denmark, which as Scott Sumner points out is, absent that welfare state, probably the most capitalist and free market economy on the planet, even including Hong Kong.

Ireland doesn’t do that tax and redistribution thing. Which is fine, that’s a political choice.

But that’s also why Scotland just ain’t ever going to follow the Swedish or even Nordic model. Because the polity of the country simply doesn’t believe in that free trade and capitalism bit. They want the high tax, high redistribution: which is fine, as I say, that’s a political choice (even if not one I like nor one I’d want to live under). But they don’t want to have the liberal economic order which makes it possible.

Thus they’d be fucked of course, Venezuela on the Clyde here we come.

That Swedish model relies upon the vigour of the free market and since Scotland doesn’t understand nor want that then they can’t have the Swedish model.

Well, yes, but….

When our children and grandchildren look back at the Sun’s page 3 (for I have no doubt its days are numbered) they’ll see it in much the same way as we watch the casual sexism in Mad Men now. It will seem embarrassingly anachronistic. I know this because it is embarrassingly anachronistic now. It exists in an era where women build and fly planes, debate in the UN, run businesses and generally demonstrate that they are more than the sum of their parts. Page 3 is a relic of a bygone era, but it’s still here.

Sure women are more than the sum of their parts. Just as men are more than merely their dicks. But just as men still have dicks (and still think with them at times) so do women still have parts.

Parts that are specifically designed (hmm, evolution doesn’t do design but you know what I mean) to get men thinking with their dicks. There is no other explanation for the female breast.

That women do “build and fly planes, debate in the UN, run businesses” is just great. But quite why that means that we should stop being a mammalian, viviparous species, why we should stop acting like one, is a little beyond this bear of little brain. Nice wing line there! Super barrel roll, that speech was delish, stunning profit line: whoa! titties!

If that last were all that’s said then one could understand the ire. But it ain’t, is it?

And if women didn’t know this, and play to it, there’s be no explanation for the boob job, would there? And that’s not limited to the cosmetic type either: how often do you see the justification for reconstruction after cancer surgery and the like being “but it’s part of who I am as a woman”?

OK, if that’s true, and as a society we say that it is for the NHS pays for such out of our tax money, then in this society titties are indeed part of being a woman. So what the hell’s the problem with celebrating all aspects of humanity and femininity, not just some?

Yes, Hillary will run, Yes, Hillary will win….

…the Democratic nomination.

The two biggest factions of the Democratic Party — let’s call them pragmatists and idealists, or Clintonites and Obamanistas — have all but acceded to her presidential nomination two years in advance, although Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and others will be testing her for weaknesses over the coming months.

And how I’d love to see her go down to a grand defeat at the actual election.

I’ve no objection to a female President (not that it’s my country, but) but seriously, this particular woman? Yech.

However, the rather more difficult question is which Republican could actually beat her? They’re not exactly stuffed with talent these days, are they?

Oh fucking great

FRANKFURT— Deutsche Lufthansa AG LHA.XE -1.55% pilots plan to walk off the job on Tuesday, the latest in a series of strikes over retirement benefits at Germany’s flagship airline, the pilot union said on Monday.

Pilots represented by union Vereinigung Cockpit will strike from 0700 GMT to 1500 GMT on Tuesday at Frankfurt Airport, Europe’s third-busiest airport. The strike will affect long-haul flights, the union said.

Guess which bloody numpty is flying, on Lufthansa, through Frankfurt, on Tuesday?

Sigh.

Well, there’s a certain truth to all this I have to admit

As a love-letter to an adopted country goes, Portuguese academic João Magueijo’s missive to Britain is perhaps somewhat lacking in affection.
…
According to Magueijo, the English are “always fighting. I never met such a group of animals. English culture is pathologically violent.

“The English are unrestrained wild beasts and are totally out of control.”

Seems fair.

“It is not unusual to drink 12 pints, or two huge buckets of beer, per person,” he writes.

“Even a horse would get drunk with this but in England it is standard practice.

“In England real men have to drink like sponges, eat like skeletons and throw up everything at the end of the evening.”

That too.

This however:

“When you visit English homes, or the toilets at schools or in student lodgings, they are all so disgusting that even my grandmother’s poultry cage is cleaner,” he writes.

Portuguese restaurant and or public toilets can be pretty noisome….

This is what happens when a craft becomes a profession

The professional classes then colonise that former craft:

 But then who am I to criticise Stephenson when journalism is as much of a rich kids’ game? Lindsey Macmillan of the Institute of Education found that journalists used to come from families 6% better off than average, whereas now they come from homes that are 42% richer. Indeed, British journalists, the supposed tribunes of the people, now hail from wealthier backgrounds than, er, bankers, an awkward fact that ought to cause embarrassment all round. I look at my younger self today and wonder if he could become a journalist on a serious newspaper. My parents were teachers. They were comfortably off by the standards of 1980s Manchester, but they could never have afforded to rent me rooms in London and cover my expenses while I went from internship to internship. They had to look after my sisters as much as anything else.

When the standard method of entry was a lowly paid couple of years on a local or regional to be followed, maybe, by a climb up to the nationals then that “right background” didn’t make a difference. When acting meant living on sixpence (rather than the nothing of interning or “parts to gain exposure” ) for a couple of years and doing Rep then again, that sorting system of separating the sheep from the hams didn’t favour background.

Once these, and other such crafts, become professions then it’s obvious enough that those from the professional classes will try to colonise those former crafts.

Quite what we do about it is another matter. No one wants either Rep or local newspapers any more and there’s no point in running them just as socially equitable training grounds.

We could say much the same about being a solicitor or an accountant. Many a working class boy has made good by doing their articles while working in the past. Now it’s graduate only entry (in effect, if not in possibility) and once again the selection process favours background.

What’s so odd about this?

Couples who have been “living in sin” and women who had children out of wedlock will be married by Pope Francis at a ceremony at the Vatican on Sunday, in a further sign of his determination to make the Catholic Church more inclusive and compassionate.

They will be among 20 couples from Rome who will tie the knot in St Peter’s Basilica, in the first such ceremony led by the Pope in his role as Bishop of Rome since he was elected in March last year.

For the Vatican, it will be the first such event since Pope John Paul II joined eight couples in matrimony in 2000.

The prospective brides and grooms had varying personal backgrounds, the diocese of Rome said in a statement.

“There are those who are already cohabiting, those who already have children, who got to know each other in Church,” the diocese said.

It’s rather the duty of the priest to aid congregants in moving from a state of sin, such as cohabitation, to one of not sin, like marriage, isn’t it? And it is rather one of the foundations of the Catholic faith that we all err, all sin, but that a confession of such a sin, repentance, plus the attempt not to do it again is meritorious. Well, if not meritorious at least the best way that we sinful humans can deal with matters.

So, priest marries those who have decided to stop sinning. And the news value of this is?

On the subject of Ian Paisley, Lord Bannside

We are in the quiet period, when we speak no ill. At which point something that Natalie Solent first made me aware of:

I have it on good authority that Ian Paisley, who once scornfully called the Catholic Sacrament “a biscuit”, faithfully works to solve the daily problems of his Catholic constituents.

This is something agreed upon by many:

The DUP Policing Board member added that his father maintained warm relations through the years with many of his Roman Catholic constituents in North Antrim and never had a problem shaking any of their hands.

Ian Paisley, who does not speak to Sunday newspapers because of his strict “Never-On-A-Sunday” beliefs, has always claimed that while he is opposed to the Papacy and Roman Catholic doctrine it is his Christian duty to love all, including individual Catholics.

And:

Despite Paisley’s hatred of Rome, many Catholic constituents think he is an effective MP.

Chris McNabb, a reporter on the Ballymena Observer, says: ‘He’s not loved by Catholics, but is respected.’ Two years ago, when parents in the nationalist district of Cushendun fought a proposal to close Culranney Catholic primary school because it had only ten pupils, it was Paisley who petitioned the Department of Education on their behalf. A local Sinn Fein councillor, James McCarry, says: ‘To be honest, he has worked for both sides of the community. When Catholics get jobs, but Protestants won’t work with them, they go to Paisley, and he delivers the goods. That’s quite ironic.’

It puzzles people. Having established his credentials as a bigot by denouncing the Pope, mixed marriages, the allocation of houses to Catholics and the appointment of Catholic teachers to state schools, he is attentive to Catholic constituents who seek his help. The mainly Catholic population of Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast, owes its wind-powered electricity and improved harbour to his efforts.

And in his obituary:

As an MP at Westminster and Strasbourg, and later as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, he scrupulously served his Catholic constituents as faithfully as his Protestant ones.

In the European Parliament, he cooperated amiably on Northern Ireland matters with his fellow Euro-MP, the nationalist John Hume. “I am anti-Roman Catholic,” he told his supporters, “but God being my judge, I love the poor dupes who are ground down under that system.”

In his Westminster seat he had one of the largest majorities in the entire country, 20,000 or more. I’m just wondering, as I have absolutely no idea, but is that larger or smaller than the protestant majority in that seat?

Timmy elsewhere

At the ASI:

More errors in how to react to the news of climate change. You can’t reject “neoliberal” cures for the problem given that all of the calculations showing that it’s worth trying to cure assume already that we use neoliberal solutions.

Err, no, really, just no

By 2050, a completely new type of human will evolve as a result of radical new technology, behaviour, and natural selection.

This is according to Cadell Last, a researcher at the Global Brain Institute, who claims mankind is undergoing a major ‘evolutionary transition’.

In less than four decades, Mr Last claims we will live longer, have children in old age and rely on artificial intelligence to do mundane tasks.


2050 is past my likely check out time. But somewhere between a bit less than a third to perhaps half of those who will be alive in 2050 are already alive now*.

So there’s unlikely to be much evolution really…..

*Bit difficult to say really: if average lifespan is 70 (around and about right for the planet) then in a static population size 50% of those alive in 35 years’ time will be already alive. But there’s population growth still coming…..but to complicate that at least some part of that growth is the demographic transition and longer life spans, not necessarily more children being born.

Scottish independence is not a constitutional crisis

Scottish independence: Britain is facing its greatest constitutional crisis in 300 years

Sigh.

A crisis is when everyone’s running around screaming that they’ve no idea what to do. What’s actually happening today is that 5 million people are being allowed a democratic vote on what they would like to do. This is no more a constitutional crisis than the Americans voting on whether to amend the constitution is one. Because that’s what’s actually happening: people are voting on whether they’d like to change the constitution.

This may be a good idea or a bad one (the vote itself is, to my mind, a thoroughly good one, yes, this is what democracy is meant to mean, the people get to decide how and by whom they will be ruled. I also hope the answer is Yes but that’s not democracy, that’s just personal prejudice) but it simply isn’t a crisis.

Well, Ritchie should like this!

Sir James Mirrlees, a Nobel prize winning economist who sits on Scotland’s Council of Economic Advisers, reckons that the degree of integration between the two economies guarantees them against asymmetric shocks, and therefore the likelihood of the larger country having to bail out the smaller one. Well perhaps, but Nobel prize winner or not, I’m not inclined to trust the word of an economist who at a recent conference quite seriously endorsed the completely bonkers idea of a top marginal rate of income tax of 100 per cent, this on the grounds that some people will continue to work regardless.

But of course Sir James is a neoliberal who also insists that corporation tax should be abolished and that income from capital should be taxed at a lower rate than that from labour. Even to the extent that all savings and all income from savings should be entirely untaxed: only that money that is spent on consumption should be taxed (ie, a progressive consumption tax).

So while he might like some of the man’s views it’s most unlikely that he would accept them all.

No, no it doesn’t Ritchie

To make the economy work as neoclassical economics suggests it does requires perfect information, rational expectations, equal access to capital, and so much more.

Simply nonsense.

And do note that he’s saying neoclassical there: he’s including Keynes (who was most certainly a neoclassical) in his list of economists who are simply all wrong.

So is The Guardian worth £500 a year?

The Guardian’s launched a new membership scheme. Top ranking costs £540 a year to be a patron. Cheaper than membership of the London Library I believe.

Two questions arise. The first being that ever loved point, revealed preferences. They’ve done the focus groups, checked that everyone says this is a great idea, Oh Yes, I’ll sign up.

But what is the gap going to be (and there will be a gap, the only question is how large) between talk and coughing up the cash?

The second is, well, is it going to be worth it for me? After all, the paper does provide a near unlimited series of stories for me to chunter about and correct. Should I aid in the survival of the source of so much of my material?