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Idiotarians

Criminals? What? Us?

For years, literally decades, the British vigorously pursued a strategy of criminalisation, and strove to brand all Republican opponents of British rule, especially members of Sinn Féin or the Provisional IRA, as \”criminals\”.

Pesky Brits, insisting that those who shoot, bomb, main, kneecap, are \”criminals\”.

Even the argument that they were all freedom fighters not criminals doesn\’t work: for you\’re only a freedom fighter if you win. As Geo. Washington would have found out if he\’d lost, as the Stern Gang would have done, as William Wallace did find out.

Lovely comment though:

Nah, this is a fish reporting live from his very own barrel. Prepare the shotguns.

That Spirit Level thing

Wilkinson was shocked by what he believes is part of a worrying trend in political discourse, also happening in the US, where a few people, often attached to right wing institutes, have set themselves up as professional wreckers of ideas.

It\’s really an amazing thing to complain about, isn\’t it?

That intellectuals* should not examine critically new ideas? Consider the evidence in favour or against such a new idea? Should, in fact, when presented with a load of old tripe of a political argument dressed up as social science just roll over and say \”Ooooh, how nice!\”?

Arguably the most profound conclusion is that economic growth among rich countries has finished its work because it is no longer increasing life expectancy and the only way to do that is to better share the wealth we have.

Err, no, that\’s not a conclusion the book reaches actually. It does conclude that further economic growth doesn\’t increase happiness and that therefore further economic growth isn\’t needed/isn\’t desirable. But then they\’re wrong about that as Andrew Leigh has pointed out…and they\’re wrong in logic as well, given that it seems to be the process of economic growth, not the level of it, which produces the happiness. A rich yet static society is unhappy in the same way that a poor but static one is while a poor and growing is happy in the same way that a rich and growing one is.

* I use the term loosely

Oh well done Seumas, well done!

Instead of wringing their hands at the state-owned banks\’ cash hoarding, ministers have the power to drive the recovery by instructing them to lend to infrastructure, transport and green technology projects.

That isn\’t \”politically directed lending\”…

Well done indeed. Politicians directing lending for political reasons isn\’t politically directed lending.

As the late great DA put it, next to prove that black equals white and get killed on the next zebra crossing.

A glorious statement of ignorant leftism

Since when was giving people a choice a good idea?

The coalition\’s obsession with self-determination, whether on schools or GPs, penalises the least able

In short, no one should have choice because some are too ignorant to make use of it.

If uncertainty about preserves is a problem one can probably live with, or possibly enjoy, a similar helplessness in the face of big, irreversible decisions is, to judge by a new study, State of Confusion by Professor Harriet Bradley of Bristol University, something that should worry a government that advertises choice as an unmitigated good…….After surveying 3,000 people on their attitudes to choice, Bradley says: \”I believe most people want the state to make these big decisions for them.\” This is not only because, in many cases, consumers are well aware that the choice of, say, school or hospital is – unlike a commercial selection of jams or phones or holidays – an utter fiction. The process of choosing is itself oppressive when the issues are life-changing, relating to health, money or careers.

An obvious question presents itself. Did Professor Harriet Bradley choose to become an academic? Work, strive, to become a Professor? Decide to write a book?

Wouldn\’t she be happier stacking shelves in the supermarket if that\’s where the State would place her to relieve her of the anguish of having to make a decision?

And if not, why not?

Is there perhaps some special class of people who both should decide for themselves and also decide for the peons? Those special enough to cope with the difficulty of choice and to alleviate others of it?

Because if that is the argument then they can all go fuck themselves quite frankly.

So now they\’re arguing against social and geographical mobility?

What a weird argument. The usual complaint is that the country doesn\’t have enough social mobility.

I\’m not blind to the awful, stomach-churning stress of living alongside tenants who believe in the right to do what they like and be protected from eviction. But transience is the enemy of community. A well-functioning community, in which people know each other and are used to getting together to solve problems, can contain the disruption caused by antisocial householders and prevent isolated incidents from turning into sustained campaigns.

Estates with high levels of social problems are the ones with the highest turnover of tenancies: they are situated in the areas of worst-quality housing, with the poorest reputations, and with the worst amenities. People are housed in them because they are desperate: they quickly realise it\’s not a good place to live and they move to better housing as soon as circumstances allow.

So we shouldn\’t have social or geographical mobility in order to make council estates better?

Recast this is the \”know thy place, peasant\” argument and it\’s as unappealing coming from Lynsey Hanley as it is  from Sir Jonthan Porritt Bt, CBE, when he tells us that we should all be peasants in the fields again.

With an Old Etonian Baronet telling us what to do of course.

As I\’ve been known to say

It\’s something that really bugs me about the British left:

So there is a value to industrial action that is innate to the process, regardless of the outcome: it keeps the vocabulary, the mechanics and the muscle of conflict alive. These are things we\’re going to have more and more use for.

They can be so concerned about the process that little is left to consider the outcome. Here it\’s that strikes never seem to achieve very much but as long as they keep alive the the process of conflict they\’re great.

In other areas it\’s that markets create winners and losers….ignoring the way in which they make everyone better off over time. Or that capitalism is exploitation, which we shouldn\’t have, again ignoring what happens over time.

And it gets more important than that as well. The claim is that we should be am modern social democracy, more like the Nordics. But no one seems willing to go and look at what the Nordics are, extremely, classically, liberal economies with lots of redistribution on top. But no one on the left here argues for that classical liberalism for that\’s not the desired process…failing to see that you can only actually have the huge redistribution and continued economic growth if you have the classical liberalism underneath to provide the wealth to be redistributed.

I could go on with examples (workers should have greater employment rights to reduce the ability of companies to make them unemployed….yet in aggregate we see that strong employment rights increase unemployment….) but you get the point.

You probably got it first time I whined about it. The British left does much too much whining about the process of doing things and pays far too little attention to the actual methods of reaching the goals they claim to desire.

Ooooh, dearie me Paul

I don\’t really think you want to say that:

Secondly, the Tory vision of Big Society is based on bare ideological assertion. Voluntary groups are staffed by volunteers, who are by definition amateurs. Take away the centralised finances allowing these volunteers to organise and how will volunteer amateurs be able to provide anything, lacking as they will the finances required for service-provision? The fantasy that services provided by trained professionals can be replaced with spontaneous volunteer groups, and without significant falls in quality or reliability, reflects right-wing preferences for a smaller state not serious policy-making.

So mutuals won\’t work because what do the customers know about management? So, bang goes the idea of having the Building Societies back. Co-ops won\’t work because what on earth do the workers know about the upper reaches of managment? Look forward to John Lewis filing for bankruptcy next Tuesday arvo.

And of course the Friendly Societies, those mutuals, burial clubs, insurance companies, pension, unemployment benefit thingies, they never existed because of course free people in a free society never can managed to get together for their own mutual benefit.

No, you see, they always and everywhere require the professionals from the State to come and show them how it\’s done, don\’t they?

As indeed does every private sector company that has ever existed. Absolutely none of them have at all been founded by amateurs who just got together and started doing stuff. Bill Gates and Paul Allen, James Dyson, Edison and FA Woolworth, all government trained and subsidised experts before they even started.

Sweet Jeebus, damn near every organisation, club, company and and drinking hole in our entire society was started by some amateur volunteer just trying things out for size.

Germaine Greer

Does a book review.

This part she gets right:

A number of explanations for the intractable rate of maternal mortality that continues to bedevil the world are suggested – but poverty is left out. Doctors Allan Rosenfield and Deborah Maine wrote their seminal article on maternal mortality for the Lancet in 1985; in 1999 Rosenfield received a $50m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to set up a programme called Averting Maternal Death and Disability. If brilliance and application had been enough Rosenfield might have done it. But mothers are still dying, and for the same reason: poverty. Poverty leads to illiteracy, low status, poor nutrition, teenage pregnancy, poor physical development, lack of infrastructure, and lack of resources and expertise.

Poverty is indeed the source of most woes. But given that, given that she acknowledges that, this is insane:

The authors have no critique of globalism to offer, nor do they appear to grasp how western economic power keeps the developing world too poor to develop. Astoundingly, they suggest that what women need is more sweatshops. \”The factories prefer young women, perhaps because they\’re more docile and perhaps because their small fingers are more nimble for assembly or sewing. So the rise of manufacturing has generally raised the opportunities and the status of women. The implication is that instead of denouncing sweatshops, we in the west should be encouraging manufacturing in poor countries, particularly in Africa and the Muslim world.\”

Poverty\’s the problem but economic development isn\’t the solution?

Is this some special feminist logic which I, as a mere man, have no possibility of understanding?

Slightly unfortunate naming here

Thirty-seven years later a new campaign has been launched, backed by a host of trade unions, including the UCU, PCS, CWU, RMT, NUJ and NUT, under the name Right to Work.

For \”right to work\” already has a meaning in American English.

It means being able to take a job without having to belong to a union: ie, no closed shops.

Not quite what these British unions quite mean by it really.

Snigger

From Danny Dorling\’s new book, \”Injustice, why social inequality persists\”, from the intro, this gem:

Within rich countries, the portrayal of children\’s abilities as lying along bell curves (as if these are natural things) is unjust.

What?

Bell curves are unnatural? Children? Abilities?

Lordy be, height, weight, dick length, tit size and lifespan length lie upon bell curves. The thought that the smarts to deal with the world similarly lies along such a statistical representation of so much of the rest of the human experience is hardly revolutionary. And to describe it as \”unjust\” is simply to prove oneself as a mimping whiffler.

One other joy:

In the US to not have a car these days is not to live as a \”normal\” human being. But in Britain almost half the children of lone parents have no access to a car.

1) I\’m quite happy that kiddies aren\’t driving down to the offie myself.

2) To compare the social standards of one country to those of another does not, in fact, work. Many in India are vegetarian for religious reasons. This does not mean that many in England who eat meat are breaching English religious standards. Many in China eat rice as their preferred source of carbohydrates. This does not mean that those in England who eat potatoes are therefore rice deprived. And, of course, that England as a more urban country than the US, one with more communal, socialistic even, methods of transport like the Tube (and I most certainly, while not being either the child of a single mother or having sired children on a mother I am not married to, did not desire or have a car when I last lived in London) and thus a car is less of a requirement….I thought that was supposed to be a good thing?

3) Absolutely everyone has access to a car. It\’s called, for those who wish to rent it for a short time only (in the sense that \”prostitute\” is a synonym for \”very short term conjugal rights\” or \”short term wife\”) \” a taxi\”.

Mimp. Whiffle.

I might try to do a longer critique of this book as if that\’s what we get in the intro the rest of it should be fun.

Potlatch

Fans boggled at last week\’s decision by the grime star Wiley to give away more than 200 new tracks for free online. First, they asked, is it for real? And then, why is he doing this? And finally, where do I even start listening to it all? Wiley\’s absurd generosity will be part of the man\’s legend for years to come – the giveaway is an assertion of his creativity and work rate. It\’s like the potlatch ceremony practised by some Native American cultures. In potlatch, status isn\’t established by possession of goods, it\’s determined by the willingness to give them away.

Seen as sheer waste, potlatch horrified western colonisers and ended up illegal for much of the 20th century.

It isn\’t just the Native Americans of course: it\’s a common theme in Papua New Guinea as well. But the thing which amuses me about these sorts of references is the squeals of delight with which a certain sort of lefty siezes upon the practice.

See, see, we can have a society where worth, value, of a person is not determined by what they own!

To which my response is always, yes, indeed we can. And we\’ve had many variations of society where status, value, worth, is not determined by what a person owns. We\’ve had, just in our own cold and rainy island, societies in which status was determined by how many men you had killed (warriors only, of course, killing women and children didn\’t count), whether you were the first male brat out of a high class vagina or not (difficult to think of aristocracy as being anything other than that), the fervency and narrow mindedness with which you followed the strictures of one preacher or another (various forms of Calvinism etc), to yes, societies where the amount of lucre you had piled up determined status (although that\’s really rather an un-English thing: think of the distaste for \”trade\”).

But the point isn\’t that there was this or that method of measuring status, the point is to recall that every version of every human society has had a method of measuring status.

Human beings really are status seeking beings. The method of ranking it, enforcing it, discovering it, may change, but that there will be a social hierarchy is a given. And that\’s the bit that our squealing lefties seem to forget.

No, this does matter, for the desire for an egalitarian society may be there: there may even be problems that flow from an inegalitarian society. Maybe (not that I think for a moment they are in detail) they\’re right in The Spirit Level*: that social inequity is bad for everyone, cause death and destruction.

However, that does not mean that the logical leap to stating that economic inequity causes all of these things is true. It could be (no, I don\’t assert that it is here, just point to the possibility) that it is the social inequity which causes all of these problems. Even that inequity by birth, by religious faith, by martial valour, causes more such problems than economic inequity…..that martial one most certainly does given the wastage of those the valour is proven upon.

Which is rather why, despite my continued protestations that I am on the left, I don\’t share the common obsession with egalitarianism. Egalitarianism of what?

Simply because we are human beings there is always going to be inequality of status within the society. For that is what we humans do, seek and acquire status.

So if we equalise economic status, will the new status hierarchy produce the same effects again, more of the same effects or fewer? It\’s at this point that we can all start to disagree again: I tend to value the onward and upwards that this strange capitalism/markets hybrid produces along with that economic inequality. Others can differ. But to think that if we managed to eradicate the economic inequality we would therefore eradicate the status inequality, the hierarchy, is simply wrong.

* One of my criticisms of The Spirit Level is that their explanation of why inequality does all the damage they claim it does veers around a lot, between claiming that it\’s economic inequality (which they are using as their measure) which does the damage but through the mechanism of status inequality. But if the above is correct, that status inequality will always be with us whatever the economic, then ironing out the economic inequality isn\’t going to do much good, is it?

Oh dear

Yes, the cretins are out in force.

Financial speculators have come under renewed fire from anti-poverty campaigners for their bets on food prices, blamed for raising the costs of goods such as coffee and chocolate and threatening the livelihoods of farmers in developing countries.

The World Development Movement (WDM) will issue a damning report today on the growing role of hedge funds and banks in the commodities markets in recent years, during which time cocoa prices have more than doubled, energy prices have soared and coffee has fluctuated dramatically.

Yes, really, a doubling of wholesale prices threatens the livelihood of farmers.

The nonsense starts here. More on this later.

Will Hutton\’s investigation doesn\’t look good.

Willy lays out his approach to this study he\’s doing on pay multiples:

My instinct is that the parents\’ gut reaction is the one on which to build a consensus. Most of us subscribe to the view that proportional effort deserves proportional reward, even while recognising that luck and other people\’s efforts matter – a set of principles to which even egalitarians and libertarians can rally. It is proper that great efforts should be proportionally rewarded and recognised; individuals do make a difference ( the libertarian stance) even while they operate in wholly social contexts (the egalitarian position).

No, no, no, no, no.

We are not interested in basing pay or reward on effort put in. We want to base it on results coming out.

We really don\’t care that someone works 80 hour weeks or 1 hour weeks. What we care about is what do they produce in that time which the rest of us value?

We don\’t give a child an A grade because they\’ve spent a long time on their homework. We give them an A grade because they\’ve got the right answers.

Even though we do measure government\’s contribution to GDP by the amount of tax money we pour into it, we shouldn\’t: we want to be measuring it by what we get for what goes in. The reason we don\’t is that it\’s very difficult, although as those recent studies on the productivity of the NHS show, we learn some very interesting things when we do measure output properly.

Similarly, we don\’t measure corporate success by the resources used (the \”effort\”) to produce. We measure such success exactly the other way around: it is the excess of production over resources or effort put in that makes profits.

So it is with individual wages. The effort put in, the time spent, is not the measure we want to be basing rewards or pay upon. We\’re interested in results, not inputs. To take this case being talked about, the teacher earning £200,000 a year (and yes, it\’s a multi-year pay award, some of the cheque is for work done in previous years, and so on and so on). If he was able to turn around a school in an hour a week then he\’s worth that £200,000, just as much as if it takes him 100 hours a week to achieve the same result.

Note please that there\’s still room for the complaint that no one is worth that much, that it\’s a collective enterprise, that it\’s all just luck, all of the traditional complaints about such pay. My point here is that Hutton has leapt upon the wrong thing to measure when determining merit.

It absolutely is not effort which justifies pay: it is results, output.

Think of it this way. We\’ve two head teachers. Both work 80 hours a week. One\’s shite, entirely terrible, should be sacked for incompetence (that William Tyndale bloke for example). The other is our sterling example already mentioned. Both have the same effort going in: but we most certainly do not determine their \”fair wage\” on the basis of that 80 hours.

We all agree that one should be getting nothing for their 80 hours of effort and while the other might not be worth that £200,000 we are at least willing to keep paying him something.

But if this is what Hutton is going to base his report on, this idea that fairness is determined by inputs, not outcomes, then his entire study and report is going to fail. Because he\’s started from entirely the wrong assumption.

But then with Willy t\’was ever thus, eh?

Interesting question

The group are the first of 52 dissidents to be released by the authorities as part of a surprise deal between the Catholic Church and the government in Cuba struck last week after a politically embarrassing hunger strike to near-death by dissident Guillermo Farinas.

The Cuban authorities have promised to release all 52, but it is not known how many will go to live in exile in Spain. Both the US and Chile have also offered them asylum.

How will this be described over on the wilder shores of the left?

Proof that the already near perfect socialism is getting even better? Perhaps by claiming that American stooges have now been purged from the system?

CiF of the Day

Quite wondrous:

It was not the dictatorships of the former Soviet Union and her allies which bothered the West, but the lack of market\’s for the West\’s corporations.

Democracy means power of ordinary people. And capitalists are not ordinary people, they are ordinary parasites. So the USSR and the Eastern Block states were the most democratic when they weren\’t ruled by parasitic elites sponsored by parasitic capitalists.

The Soviet government\’s administrative policies were efficient and accurately reflected the ethnic make-up of regions.

There was virtually no emigration during the Soviet Union, as the vast majority of people were satisfied with their lives in their native country.

Each para is a snippet from a different comment by a different person.

Quite which planet they\’ve been observing over the last few decades I\’m not sure but it doesn\’t appear to be this one.

What a glorious Guardian piece

It\’s not an unusual trope, for people to say that boxing is a working class thing. It\’s certainly been used as an argument to explain the preponderance of black boxers (especially in the US) since the 50s.

Only those suffering at the bottom of the economic pile are willing to risk having their brains bashed out  for the chance (however slight) of fame and fortune.

But I must admit, I\’ve never seen this argument made:

However, in the case of Kuwait and the UAE, the failure of their national teams to match past glories highlights some insidious societal ills off the pitch.

Across the Gulf region, the bloated oil resources at the disposal of the various ruling families have allowed the creation of gold-plated cradle-to-grave welfare states, where the locals want for little. Even a normal middle-class family may have up to four Asian house servants, indulging and catering to a child\’s every whim. This frenzy of fawning affection has left in its wake a generation of pampered youth with little inclination for hard work.

That people can be too rich, fat and happy, to play soccer.

Plus there\’s the joy of seeing the Guardian describe \”gold-plated cradle-to-grave welfare states\” as \”insidious social ills\”.

Socialism means caring for the rejected and down trodden in our society!

In 1933, in a preface to On The Rocks, Bernard Shaw derided the principle of the sanctity of human life as an absurdity to any good Socialist, calling for extermination to be put \’on a scientific basis\’. Shortly after, in the Listener, Shaw wrote;

Appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly: in short a gentlemanly gas – deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel. It might be useful in war, but if another war does not come, we shall find a use for it at home.

Shaw reasoned that to kill off the acquisitive classes is \”quite reasonable and very necessary\” since \’no punishment will ever cure them of their capitalistic instincts\’.

Though Shaw was more concerned with the extermination of the idle, the unfit and opponents of Socialism, he defended the rights of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews – but preserving the clever ones. Writing to Beatrice Webb in 1938, he said;

We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting they do it as humanely as they can afford to

With a \’humane lethal gas\’ no doubt.

Along with Shaw, the Webbs and HG Wells, even Virginia Woolf was a supporter of State murder; after passing a line of the profoundly mentally ill, she wrote \”Imbeciles – every one of them a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.\”

Please, someone teach Johann Hari some economics!

Goldman Sachs and all the other nasty speculators made a fortune out of starving people.

So we\’re told.

There are so many things wrong with this it\’s unbelievable.

Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into \”derivatives\” that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in \”food speculation\” was born.

No, you never did have to prove that you were either a farmer or a baker in order to trade in wheat futures. The whole point of any form of futures market (which in itself is a derivative) is to allow speculators, those not directly involved in the market, to buy and sell. For it is they that take the risk off the shoulders of the farmer or the baker.

But much, much, worse is that he\’s got the entire process of speculation wrong.

At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn\’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level.

Let\’s agree that this is what happened.

Now, let us also consider what we would like to have happen.

Back in 2006 there were concerns that biofuels were going to take a huge chunk out of the market: what could feed people was going to fuel cars. Thus food in the future was going to be in short supply. Let us stick with wheat.

What we want is some method of reducing the future demand for wheat while also increasing the amount of wheat that will be planted. We want both consumers and producers to react rationally to this mooted future shortage. We want consumers to substitute for wheat: eat rice, cassava, teff, rye, oats, instead. We want producers to change their production processes: it\’s a standard of farming that you can go for extensive or intensive methods and there\’s a spectrum between them. You can add a little more fertiliser for example, but you\’ll only do so if the rise in price is great enough for the marginal production to cover the cost of your marginal fertiliser use. And of course we\’re all making predictions, something which is difficult about the future.

What might we use as a transmission method for this message? Use less wheat and grow more please because it\’s going to be much more expensive in a year or two?

Well, actually, what we did use to do this is the futures market. The price of wheat for delivery later that year, for delivery next year, went up as all those speculators saw an opportunity to make a profit. Even the price of wheat now went up as people saw that you could buy now, store, and then sell when the price had risen (so both spot and futures markets contributed to the price rise). They could give a shit about the starving and less than two shits for for the farmers\’ profits of course. But their very actions, piling into wheat futures, sent the message humming along the wires that wheat\’s gonna be in short supply soon and it\’s gonna get more expensive!

And what was the result of this message? Yes, demand fell and supply rose:

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn\’t happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn\’t because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent.

Riiiight, we\’ve got our higher prices leading to lower demand, good. Oh, and supply rose did it? That\’s the other thing we\’re looking for, isn\’t it? Excellent. So, our filthy, lucre seeking, bastard speculators have actually managed, purely through the application of their own greed, to do exactly what we wanted to happen.

They\’ve reduced demand, increased supply and thus solved the looming shortage of wheat.

We should also remember something else. Derivatives markets (futures, options etc) are by definition zero sum for the speculators in them. For every £ that Goldman Sachs made in that market, someone else lost a £.

This doesn\’t apply to the system as a whole though: the transfer of risk from farmer and baker to the speculators is of value, as are the price signals that the system as a whole produces. But for the speculators within it, it\’s zero sum. So, just as many people have lost money (or rather the amount of money lost is the same as the money made) as made it in bringing us these two useful things: risk transfer and price information, a prediction about the future.

Now the thing is there\’s no mystery to any of this at all. It\’s laid out (in his usual exhaustive manner) in page after page of Adam Smith\’s Wealth of Nations. Here in fact.

The interest of the inland dealer, and that of the great body of the people, how opposite soever they may at first sight appear, are, even in years of the greatest scarcity, exactly the same. It is his interest to raise the price of his corn as high as the real scarcity of the season requires, and it can never be his interest to raise it higher. By raising the price he discourages the consumption, and puts everybody more or less, but particularly the inferior ranks of people, upon thrift and good management. If, by raising it too high, he discourages the consumption so much that the supply of the season is likely to go beyond the consumption of the season, and to last for some time after the next crop begins to come in, he runs the hazard, not only of losing a considerable part of his corn by natural causes, but of being obliged to sell what remains of it for much less than what he might have had for it several months before. If by not raising the price high enough he discourages the consumption so little that the supply of the season is likely to fall short of the consumption of the season, he not only loses a part of the profit which he might otherwise have made, but he exposes the people to suffer before the end of the season, instead of the hardships of a dearth, the dreadful horrors of a famine. It is the interest of the people that their daily, weekly, and monthly consumption should be proportioned as exactly as possible to the supply of the season. The interest of the inland corn dealer is the same. By supplying them, as nearly as he can judge, in this proportion, he is likely to sell all his corn for the highest price, and with the greatest profit; and his knowledge of the state of the crop, and of his daily, weekly, and monthly sales, enable*70 him to judge, with more or less accuracy, how far they really are supplied in this manner. Without intending the interest of the people, he is necessarily led, by a regard to his own interest, to treat them, even in years of scarcity, pretty much in the same manner as the prudent master of a vessel is sometimes obliged to treat his crew. When he foresees that provisions are likely to run short, he puts them upon short allowance. Though from excess of caution he should sometimes do this without any real necessity, yet all the inconveniences which his crew can thereby suffer are inconsiderable in comparison of the danger, misery, and ruin to which they might sometimes be exposed by a less provident conduct. Though from excess of avarice, in the same manner, the inland corn merchant should sometimes raise the price of his corn somewhat higher than the scarcity of the season requires, yet all the inconveniences which the people can suffer from this conduct, which effectually secures them from a famine in the end of the season, are inconsiderable in comparison of what they might have been exposed to by a more liberal way of dealing in the beginning of it. The corn merchant himself is likely to suffer the most by this excess of avarice; not only from the indignation which it generally excites against him, but, though he should escape the effects of this indignation, from the quantity of corn which it necessarily leaves upon his hands in the end of the season, and which, if the next season happens to prove favourable, he must always sell for a much lower price than he might otherwise have had.

What Hari has got wrong, because he doesn\’t understand even the most basic points about economics, is that this greed for profit produces exactly the outcome we desire. The high prices which would accompany the coming shortage are brought forward in time and thus influence both consumption and production now and into the future. Meaning that the highly undesired famine doesn\’t happen as consumption falls and production rises.

Or, in short, futures allow speculation upon the future: which is why we have them, for speculation upon the future allows us to sidestep the very things which we do not desire to happen in that future.

Now, of course, you could design an alternative method of doing this. The wise, omniscient and  altruistic  politicians and bureaucrats could send a fax to all farmers telling them to plant more. Signs could appear in every breadshop telling us all to eat our crusts.

Except, of course, those wise, omniscient and altruistic politicians and bureaucrats are precisely the fuckers that got us into the mess in the first place by insisting that we should put wheat into cars rather than people.