Around the world, the government-charted monopolies and cartels that run the taxi business responded with protests and violence to the emergence of technology-empowered competitors such as Uber, which does not undercut traditional taxis on cost — in New York, its drivers earn about three times what a traditional cabbie makes — but is much more convenient for those who do not live or work in areas that are generally well-served by traditional taxis. As in most cities, New York law imposes price uniformity on taxis and long protected them from most competition, with the entirely predictable result that consumers are the worst-served parties in the taxi business. (It does not help matters that, unlike their London counterparts, famously steeped in “the Knowledge,” the typical New York cabbie cannot find the Brooklyn Bridge without GPS or turn-by-turn instructions from the passenger.) The lack of consumer focus has some perverse consequences here in New York: The taxi fleet schedules its shift change from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., meaning that taxis all but vanish from the streets during the hours when they are most needed. The New York Times calls this an “apparent violation of the laws of supply and demand,” which, New York Times geniuses, is exactly what happens when you use regulation to take supply and demand effectively out of the equation. A platform that combined Uber’s on-demand service with Google-style driverless cars would probably put the traditional taxi out of business — assuming that the cartels are not able to use government to strangle innovation in its cradle.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Race On, for Driverless Cars: On the beauty of putting the consumer in the driver’s seat”, National Review, 2014-06-01.
January 23, 2015
QotD: Taxicab cartels
January 22, 2015
Rumours of privatization in Ontario’s liquor control monopoly?
In the latest issue of Michael Pinkus Wine Review, Michael talks about the hints and portents (dealing with the Ontario government requires a certain amount of Kremlinological observation skills) that a tiny measure of privatization may be coming:
There’s a rumour in the wind that a certain amount of privatization is coming to Ontario (wouldn’t that be nice), but I wouldn’t get my hopes up about it just yet – no time line has been given and I am sure that ‘more study’ is necessary … and of course, if track record is any indication, this government will find some way to either screw it up or make it such a complicated piece of legislation that it’ll take years to get through all the red tape behind it. I once heard Jerry Agar, of NewsTalk 1010 fame, say (and I’m paraphrasing here) ‘if you want something screwed up get government involved’; he’s a proponent of the private sector because they can do it more efficiently than government if only ‘the man’ would just get outta the way … I would have to agree with him here. So far the government has made a mess of our liquor system that even repressed, despotic and 3rd world countries have better access to alcohol then we do.
Sadly, I believe it might be too little too late for some of Ontario wineries who have suffered this long, but might not be around to see the light at the end of the tunnel (if and/or when it comes). Yes, this might be the end of the line for a number of our precious wineries and we only have ourselves to blame for their demise. They have been as vocal as any sector, crying for help, not necessarily a hand out (which the grape growers seem to get) as much as a hand up – basically they’ve been pleading with each government: “please give us access to (our own) market (at the very least) and we’ll show you what we can do”, all to no avail.
Why the pessimistic attitude? Let’s look at the facts. It takes some rather deep pockets to own a winery in Ontario, that or a good credit rating, because money is the number one thing required to open the doors. But making it is more of an uphill battles then in any other business I this province. Post-1993, when the majority of the wineries around today opened their doors, your cellar door is the only place you can sell your wine – sure you could tap into the LCBO and the restaurant market, but that’s it. And although recent federal regulations have been lifted regarding the selling and especially shipping of wine across the country, many provinces have yet to enact their own legislation governing the practice, hence leaving the entire topic, not to mention hundreds of wineries, in limbo, unable to tap the rest of the country as a market for fear of breaking the law. With so few avenues to sell home-grown wine the government has basically handcuffed the industry – let alone the number of asinine rules that govern the industry from within (more on that next time) – it has all been put in place it would seem, so that wineries are destined to fail; that they remain open is a testament to their resolve and passion.
China (barely) misses growth target … as if we can trust their numbers anyway
Ah, well, I haven’t ridden this old hobby horse for a while, so let’s just let Tim Worstall explain why this time, we might be able to get a bit of perspective from the otherwise unreliable official Chinese government economic figures:
Many observers have been slightly sceptical of Chinese GDP numbers for some years now. Regional GDP numbers don’t seem to quite match with other regional numbers (say, oil consumption, other proxies for economic activity) and national numbers don’t necessarily reflect the sum of all of those regional numbers either. There’s absolutely no doubt at all that the place has been getting richer but whether quite so much or quite in the manner being reported is another matter. And then there’s another group of observers (this one including myself) who have some experience of how communists report economic numbers. There’s a plan, the Communist Party is in charge of executing that plan and, amazingly, the plan is always reported to have either worked or been exceeded. Anything less would reflected badly on said Communist Party. As I’ve also been exposed to the old Soviet accounting systems I’m more sceptical than most on this point.
So, there’s that slight worry that a slowing China (or one not growing at the former breakneck pace perhaps) will also lower growth in other countries. We’re pretty sure that’s going to happen. But we’ve also got this other thing to ponder. If the Communist Party is allowing the reporting of numbers that don’t meet the plan then what’s going on with that?
Is this some sea change in the management of the numbers? They’re actually reporting the correct numbers? Or are those suspected massages of the numbers still going on but they underlying reality is so bad that they just couldn’t get up to the planned target? This is, I agree, all wild surmise. But it is a surprise that the numbers came in below target because that’s just not what we’ve come to expect in such a political system. And that could be very bad news indeed.
Rickspeak, end of season edition
The Daily Norseman‘s Ted Glover goes into another deep trance to help explain to the masses (that’s us) just what the heck Vikings general manager Rick Spielman was really saying in his end-of-season talk with the local Minneapolis/St. Paul sports media:
Spielman met with the local Vikings beat writers on Wednesday, and covered a wide range of topics, from Adrian Peterson, to everything else. So, what did he say?
Well, you know it’s not what he said … it’s what he meant. And how do we know what he really meant?*
It’s simple.** You just need to know how to read between the lines and interpret accordingly.***
*We have no idea what he really meant
**It’s not simple, because I’m making everything up. And making this up is hard, man. So freaking hard.
***Again, there’s no reading between the lines. If I could read minds, dude, I’d use that power for evil and rule the world. Let’s all be thankful I’m just an idiot with a keyboard instead.
So, thanks to the local beat guys, we bring you Rickspeak, the post season edition. What Rick was actually quoted as saying will be first, and then our ridiculously satiric and completely made up interpretation* will follow.
*Or is it completely made up? (Yes. Yes it is.)
The seductive appeal of the big project
In a Forbes post from a few years back, Warren Meyer looks at the appeal of the megaproject to those inclined to think that what society really needs is someone in control:
What is it about intellectuals that seem to, generation after generation, fall in love with totalitarian regimes because of their grand and triumphal projects? Whether it was the trains running on time in Italy, or the Moscow subways, or now high-speed rail lines in China, western dupes constantly fall for the lure of the great pyramid without seeing the diversion of resources and loss of liberty that went into building it.
Writers like Thomas Friedman and Joel Epstein in the Huffington Post have eulogized China and its monumental spending projects. These are the same folks who, generations ago, tried disastrously to emulate Mussolini’s “forward-thinking” economic regime in the National Industrial Recovery Act. These are the same folks who wanted to emulate MITI’s management of the Japanese economy (which drove them right into a 20-year recession). These are the same folks who oohed and ahhed over the multi-billion dollar Beijing Olympics venues while ignoring the air that was un-breathable. These are the same folks who actually believed the one Cuban health clinic in Sicko actually represented the standard of care received by average citizens. To outsiders, the costs of these triumphal programs are often not visible, at least not until years or decades later when the rubes have moved on to new man crushes.
These writers worry that the US is somehow being left behind by China because its government builds more stuff than we do. We are “asleep.” Well, here is my retort: Most of the great progress in this country occurred when the government was asleep. The railroads, the steel industry, the auto industry, the computer industry — all were built by individuals when the government was at best uninvolved and at worst fighting their progress at every step.
In particular, both Friedman and Epstein think we need to build more high speed passenger trains. This is exactly the kind of gauzy non-fact-based wishful thinking that makes me extremely pleased that these folks do not have the dictatorial powers they long for. High speed rail is a terrible investment, a black hole for pouring away money, that has little net impact on efficiency or pollution. But rail is a powerful example because it demonstrates exactly how this bias for high-profile triumphal projects causes people to miss the obvious.
Which is this: The US rail system, unlike nearly every other system in the world, was built (mostly) by private individuals with private capital. It is operated privately, and runs without taxpayer subsidies. And, it is by far the greatest rail system in the world. It has by far the cheapest rates in the world (1/2 of China’s, 1/8 of Germany’s). But here is the real key: it is almost all freight.
QotD: The practice of selling army commissions
A lot has been said about the purchase of commissions — how the rich and incompetent can buy ahead of better men, how the poor and efficient are passed over — and most of it, in my experience, is rubbish. Even with purchase abolished, the rich rise faster in the Service than the poor, and they’re both inefficient anyway, as a rule. I’ve seen ten men’s share of service, through no fault of my own, and can say that most officers are bad, and the higher you go, the worse they get, myself included. We were supposed to be rotten with incompetence in the Crimea, for example, when purchase was at its height, but the bloody mess they made in South Africa recently seems to have been just as bad — and they didn’t buy their commissions.
George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman, 1969.
January 21, 2015
“Sir, please put the Sriracha down. Now!”
Megan McArdle worries that the otherwise welcome introduction of spice to the awesomely bland North American diet of yesteryear may have gone just a tad too far:
It has come to my attention that some of you are becoming unable to eat good food unless it is spiced to within an inch of its life.
I’ve been noticing this for a while. It started with friends who put hot sauce on everything, even on dishes that were perfectly good without hot sauce. With dinner party hosts who proudly declared that the secret to good cooking was just to douse something in Cajun spices until you noticed the powder forming drifts on the side of the pan. With people who reported that an Asian restaurant was “good” because it had left their taste buds numb for hours.
Then, during the holiday season, I saw a Slate food writer declare that American apple pie is not as good as French apple pie because it is “bland and goopy,” and I began to suspect that something had gone seriously wrong with our food culture. When I saw an article on restaurant chefs who are daring to bring back prime rib, I became sure of it.
I’m as excited as anyone about the majestic spread of foreign food throughout our nation’s urban downtowns, its strip malls and cookbook aisles, its fruited plains and amber waves of grain. I can’t think of a national cuisine I don’t like, and that includes foods that will sear the taste buds off a water buffalo’s tongue at 20 feet.
I love me some spices … but I also like the idea of not feeling my tongue in pain for hours after I’ve finished eating my meal.
Al Stewart, “Lord Grenville”, Royal Albert Hall October 15th 2013
Published on 25 Oct 2013
Al Stewart, Lord Grenville, Royal Albert Hall October 15th 2013
From the Facebook page:
You simply don’t want to miss Al Stewart with a full band, led by musical director Peter White, at the Royal Albert Hall in London – 16 May & the second night, 22 May 2015. They added the second night due to the high demand for tickets. They’ll perform the albums “Past Present & Future” and “Year of the Cat” in their entirety. Grab those tickets now.
Napping
James Lileks takes a nap. It therefore (of course) provides the basis of a “Bleat” posting:
Another item of no surprise to any readers of this site is my enjoyment of, and insistence upon, and devotion to, difficult sentence structures. Also naps. I love naps. Didn’t use to; then we had a child. At first I napped on the floor, thinking it Spartan and manly, but eventually I saw the case for sleeping on a surface that did not leave flat indentations on my skill if I slept for more than 20 minutes. I don’t believe in napping on the sofa, Dagwood style; I don’t believe in napping while reclining in a chair. There’s a reason we sleep in beds. No one ever says “I don’t know how much sleep I’ll get tonight, so maybe I’d better sit in a chair and see how it works.” Bed. The humidifier for white noise. Phone on Airplane Mode. Set the alarm, and see you later.
It’s never occurred to me to study my naps, or chart them, or pick them apart for quality. There are good naps and bad ones. There are short naps that leave you refreshed, and short ones that leave you groggy. Long ones that seem to add a year to your life, and long ones that make you feel as though you emerged from a bog of tar. To be fair, long naps never leave me logy. Short naps can make me feel angry, because they weren’t longer naps.
But. I read a review for an app called Power Nap HQ, and it seemed interesting: it took nap data, based on your movements. You entered how much time you wanted to sleep, set a backup alarm, chose a sequence of sounds, and laid it next to you. It would report back on your movements, indicating the depth of the nap, and it would also record any abrupt sounds you made. Nicely designed, too. A buck. Bought it.
Calibrated the device, set all the options, and pressed the button to start the nap. Laid it next to me.
Got itchy. Dry skin. Scratched a little, and wondered if this would register on the device. This was the signal for my upper lip to report in as “slightly chapped,” requiring more minor motion, and I thought I might be confusing the app, which thinks this is light sleep. Or perhaps it doesn’t take any motion seriously until I’m inert for a long period of time. So I laid still.
Then I thought: now it’s going to think I’m asleep.
This nap wasn’t working out very well. You start to think about napping, napping doesn’t happen. You start to wait for the between-two-worlds moment when you’re aware that you’re having a dream, or are thinking of something you certainly did start but grew out of something you’d already forgotten, then the moment never comes. But the next thing I knew I was awake.
Sort of. Half awake. The alarm had not gone off, so I had not reached the desired quantity of sleep. I was up because my body was done with the noon ration of Diet Lime Coke, and wished to offload it. This I did, wondering how the app would read my absence. It would detect the motion, then the absence of motion, then motion, then – providing I got back to sleep – the absence of motion. I did what a man’s gotta do, then returned to bed to complete the nap. Fell back asleep. No dreams.
Woke, and thought: damn, I beat the alarm. Must be close. If I have one superpower, it is the ability to gauge the passage of time; if I knew what time it was 35 minutes ago, I can tell you what time it is now within a minute or so. This extends to naps: if I wake before the alarm, I usually know what the time will be. I laid there, waking, considering how the rest of the day would play out, then realized that the app would interpret my motionlessness as sleep. THE DATA WOULD BE IMPRECISE.
So I picked up the phone to see how long I’d actually slept.
I had overslept by 40 minutes.
The alarm had not gone off. The backup alarm had not gone off. It had not collected data. Other than that, best dollar I ever spent. Now I can remove it from my phone and sleep without worries.
QotD: Teddy Roosevelt and the rise of the Progressives
When, after a generation of that sort of compromising, the so-called Progressive party was organized and he [Theodore Roosevelt] seized the leadership of it from the Westerners who had founded it, he performed a feat of wholesale englutination that must forever hold a high place upon the roll of political prodigies. That is to say, he swallowed at one gigantic gulp, and out of the same herculean jug, the most amazing mixture of social, political and economic perunas ever got down by one hero, however valiant, however athirst — a cocktail made up of all the elixirs hawked among the boobery in his time, from woman suffrage to the direct primary, and from the initiative and referendum to the short ballot, and from prohibition to public ownership, and from trust-busting to the recall of judges.
This homeric achievement made him the head of the most tatterdemalion party ever seen in American politics — a party composed of such incompatible ingredients and hung together so loosely that it began to disintegrate the moment it was born. In part it was made up of mere disordered enthusiasts — believers in anything and everything, pathetic victims of the credulity complex, habitual followers of jitney messiahs, incurable hopers and snufflers. But in part it was also made up of rice converts like Roosevelt himself — men eager for office, disappointed by the old parties, and now quite willing to accept any aid that half-idiot doctrinaires could give them. I have no doubt that Roosevelt himself, carried away by the emotional storms of the moment and especially by the quasi-religious monkey-shines that marked the first Progressive convention, gradually convinced himself that at least some of the doctrinaires, in the midst of all their imbecility, yet preached a few ideas that were workable, and perhaps even sound. But at bottom he was against them, and not only in the matter of their specific sure cures, but also in the larger matter of their childish faith in the wisdom and virtue of the plain people. Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts. He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government. His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority. He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen. He was not for democracy as his followers understood democracy, and as it actually is and must be; he was for a paternalism of the true Bismarckian pattern, almost of the Napoleonic or Ludendorffian pattern — a paternalism concerning itself with all things, from the regulation of coal-mining and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights. His instincts were always those of the property-owning Tory, not those of the romantic Liberal. All the fundamental objects of Liberalism — free speech, unhampered enterprise, the least possible governmental interference — were abhorrent to him. Even when, for campaign purposes, he came to terms with the Liberals his thoughts always ranged far afield. When he tackled the trusts the thing that he had in his mind’s eye was not the restoration of competition but the subordination of all private trusts to one great national trust, with himself at its head. And when he attacked the courts it was not because they put their own prejudice before the law but because they refused to put his prejudices before the law.
In all his career no one ever heard him make an argument for the rights of the citizen; his eloquence was always expended in expounding the duties of the citizen. I have before me a speech in which he pleaded for “a spirit of kindly justice toward every man and woman,” but that seems to be as far as he ever got in that direction — and it was the gratuitous justice of the absolute monarch that he apparently had in mind, not the autonomous and inalienable justice of a free society. The duties of the citizen, as he understood them, related not only to acts, but also to thoughts. There was, to his mind, a simple body of primary doctrine, and dissent from it was the foulest of crimes. No man could have been more bitter against opponents, or more unfair to them, or more ungenerous.
H.L. Mencken, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy”, Prejudices, part 2, 1920.
January 20, 2015
A tight squeeze indeed
The USS Iowa crosses the Panama Canal at Miraflores Lock near Panama City, Panama Wednesday, March 28, 2001. At 108.2 feet wide, the Iowa-class battleships are the largest vessels ever to scrape their way through the 110-foot-wide locks of the canal. They were designed so that they could just fit through the waterway. (AP Photo/Tomas Munita)
H/T to Tyler Rogoway, who has a few other photos of Iowa-class battleships moving through the Panama canal.
Recap: The First Six Months I THE GREAT WAR
Published on 19 Jan 2015
World War 1 broke out in summer 1914, a little over 100 years ago. Our channel is following the historic events week by week. For everyone who recently joined this channel: this recap is specially for you! Catch up with the last six months, hence the first six months of the war. Between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the Battle of the Marne and the Christmas Truce, hundreds of thousands of soldiers had to die. This is modern war.
Victimology
In last week’s Goldberg File, Jonah Goldberg explained why the media as a whole are much more concerned about an anti-Muslim backlash than they are about any terror attack:
Dear Reader (including my Twitter followers who are just scanning this for the hidden glottal stops),
So Charlie Hebdo is selling like hot cakes, giving new meaning to the Profit Mohammed. And, just as I suspected, the images are pissing off lots of Muslims who aren’t terrorists. And, again just as I suspected, the New York Times et al. can’t help but make that the real story. No doubt millions of people hashtagging “Je Suis Charlie” were sincere — or thought they were — but the real reason that slogan spread into nearly every ideological quarter is that sympathizing, empathizing, and leeching off the moral status of victims is the only thing that unites Western societies these days. Celebrating winners is divisive. How long did it take for the Sharptonians to leap on the Oscar nominations?
What is remarkable is how short the half-life of solidarity for Charlie Hebdo was. The moment it dawned on people that there must be consequences to the Hebdo attack, not just group hugs and hashtags, the divisions, gripes, and handwring re-emerged.
Simply put, victimology is the language and currency of our politics. Fighting for victims is a calling and minting new victims and grievances is a trillion-dollar industry. Heroism, fidelity, courage, duty, temperance: Their stock value may be volatile but the long-term trends have been bad for a while. But guilt and resentment are the gold and silver of our realm, a perfect hedge against the civilizational recession.
And so before the street-sweepers even put a dent in the discarded “Je Suis Charlie” signs, the media was already on the prowl for signs of Western overreaction. The New York Times editors warned that “perhaps the greatest danger in the wake of the attacks” was a backlash against Muslim immigrants.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want an anti-Muslim backlash, but in all of this talk of Islamophobia, it seems the most acute and relevant phobia is the fear our elites have of their own people. The rabble can’t be trusted to keep things in perspective. While the story was still unfolding in Paris, Steven Erlanger, the New York Times’s London bureau chief, was invited on Shep Smith’s show for a “phoner.” Erlanger couldn’t resist starting the interview by warning Fox about how “careful” it needs to be covering the story. The Eloi must be ever vigilant not to arouse the Morlocks, don’t you know. It was this sentiment that no doubt motivated the Times to edit its own reporting on the attack, removing any reference to the fact that one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers spared a woman’s life — and advised her she needed to convert to Islam. You can almost hear the editors saying, “Look, if we leave that in, the little people might get the impression this had something to do with Islam. We know it does, but we can handle that truth. The flyover people might miss the nuances.”
By the way, how much have you heard about the anti-Muslim backlash over the last decade and a half? Well, here’s a fun fact. In every year since 9/11 the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes in the U.S. has dwarfed anti-Muslim hate crimes.
In 2001 — you know, the year when the World Trade Center was knocked down by Islamist terrorists — there were still twice as many anti-Jewish incidents as there were anti-Muslim ones reported to the FBI. By 2002, things got back to “normal” and anti-Jewish outstripped anti-Muslim hate crimes by roughly a factor of five – and it’s stayed that way ever since. In 2013, nearly 60 percent of anti-religious hate crimes were against Jews. Just over 14 percent were against Muslims. Now, I’m not saying America is anti-Semitic, far from it. It’s easily the most philo-Semitic country in the world, save for Israel (and if you spent time listening to Israelis criticize themselves, you’d consider that a debatable proposition). But when was the last time you heard a reporter from the New York Times fret over the need to be careful lest we encourage an anti-Semitic backlash?
Mark Knopfler on twenty musical milestones
Mark Knopfler talks to Paul Sexton about some significant way markers in his life and career:
2. On how his love of guitars developed as a boy:
“I knew what the Fender catalogue smelt like, what the grain of paper was like, I wanted this thing so badly. I was always in trouble at school. I would be making metallic noises at the back of the class and playing ‘Wipeout’ runs on my desktop”3. On his first guitar, a twin pick-up Höfner V2:
“I managed to get my dad to buy that, bless him. It cost him 50 quid, which was a big stretch for him. I didn’t have the nerve then to ask him for an amplifier, so I used to borrow friends’ acoustic guitars. Looking back, they were pretty bad, pretty often, but I learned to play on them”4. On teaching himself to play:
“I learned to fingerpick on acoustic guitars, and playing with a flat pick on the electric, so I had that sort of dual education. Being self-taught, you can really go off in the wrong direction for years. It’s a guitar teacher’s nightmare”[…]
16. On playing the old Dire Straits hits:
“People will always want you to play songs from the songbook, that’s part of what you’re doing playing live. You’ve got to please yourself, but at the same time it’s a celebration. You’re all there to have a good time together. I enjoyed writing the songs, I enjoyed recording them so I’m going to enjoy playing them. If I get up there and play ‘Romeo & Juliet’ or ‘Brothers In Arms,’ it’s because I want to play them. It’s important to me that it’s important to people, that you’ve created milestones in people’s lives”
QotD: Neuroscientific claims
One last futurological, land-grabbing fad of the moment remains to be dealt with: neuroscience. It is certainly true that scanners, nanoprobes and supercomputers seem to be offering us a way to invade human consciousness, the final frontier of the scientific enterprise. Unfortunately, those leading us across this frontier are dangerously unclear about the meaning of the word “scientific”.
Neuroscientists now routinely make claims that are far beyond their competence, often prefaced by the words “We have found that …” The two most common of these claims are that the conscious self is a illusion and there is no such thing as free will. “As a neuroscientist,” Professor Patrick Haggard of University College London has said, “you’ve got to be a determinist. There are physical laws, which the electrical and chemical events in the brain obey. Under identical circumstances, you couldn’t have done otherwise; there’s no ‘I’ which can say ‘I want to do otherwise’.”
The first of these claims is easily dismissed – if the self is an illusion, who is being deluded? The second has not been established scientifically – all the evidence on which the claim is made is either dubious or misinterpreted – nor could it be established, because none of the scientists seems to be fully aware of the complexities of definition involved. In any case, the self and free will are foundational elements of all our discourse and that includes science. Eliminate them from your life if you like but, by doing so, you place yourself outside human society. You will, if you are serious about this displacement, not be understood. You will, in short, be a zombie.
Bryan Appleyard, “Why futurologists are always wrong – and why we should be sceptical of techno-utopians: From predicting AI within 20 years to mass-starvation in the 1970s, those who foretell the future often come close to doomsday preachers”, New Statesman, 2014-04-10.
