Quotulatiousness

May 31, 2024

“You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Helen Dale considers the painful notion that political ideas that work for the “elite” (defined in various ways) may not work at all for people unlike members of any given “elite”:

When I reviewed Rob Henderson’s Troubled for Law & Liberty at Liberty Fund, I made this observation:

    The reality that classical liberalism — the closest to my own political views, I admit — has at least a whiff of the luxury belief around it stings. It’s discomforting to acknowledge that what goes by the name of paternalism has its own intellectual pedigree, while liberalism can be a system developed by the clever, for the clever. “Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal,” Henderson says. “This doesn’t make sense. The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”

[…]

Joseph Heath […] uses the phrase “self-control aristocracy” to describe those who really do benefit from maximal freedom. These are people who can make better choices for themselves than any authority could make on their behalf. When the state or large corporates boss them (us) around, they (we) get really bloody annoyed. They (we) know better!

Heath’s phrase is simply a layman’s term for the personality trait various formal tests measure, and which overlaps with executive function to a considerable but as yet unknown degree.

    Because I am self-conscious about my membership in the self-control aristocracy, I am acutely aware of the fact that, when I think about questions of “individual liberty” in society, I come to it with a particular set of class interests. That is because I stand to benefit much more from an expansion of the space of individual liberty than the average person does – because I have greater self-control. So I recognize that, while a 24-hour beer store would be great for me, it would be a mixed blessing for others […]

    What does this have to do with libertarianism? It is important because every academic proponent of libertarianism – understood loosely, as any doctrine that assigns individual liberty priority over other political values – is a member of the self-control aristocracy. As a result, they are advancing a political ideal that benefits themselves to a much greater extent than it benefits other people. In most cases, however, they do so naively, because they do not recognize themselves as members of an elite, socially-dominant group, that stands to benefit disproportionately. They think of liberty as something that creates an equal benefit for all.

My response to reading Professor Heath’s piece was simplicity itself: I feel seen. I’ve even done the night school thing while working full-time. I’ve written books and chosen to play sports that require a long time and lots of skill to master. I retired at 45.

Politically, I’m not a libertarian. Libertarianism is a distinctive and largely American ideology (as the recent and bonkers fracas at its US Convention indicates) with philosophically unusual deontological roots. I am, however, within the British and French tradition of classical liberalism (which does assign individual liberty priority over other political values). And like many classical liberals I’ve been blind to problems of laws and governance for people unlike me.

I disclose this because I’ve worked in policy development in both devolved and national parliaments. I’ve probably given politicians and civil servants alike dud advice. There is almost certainly a shit policy out there (in either Scotland or Australia) with my name on it. However, this mind-blindness doesn’t only apply to people who advocate libertarian politics. I think it applies to a significant number of political ideologies just as strongly as it does to libertarianism.

That is, the ideology serves the inherited personality traits of those who promote it. “You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so” always struck me as a genuinely mean criticism of people who were involved in politics and policy (I may have been one of those people, natch). The problem — as I’ve been forced to accept — is that it’s true.

May 27, 2024

“Product recommendations broke Google, and ate the Internet in the process”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia says the algorithms are broken and we need a way to get out of the online hellscape our techbro overlords have created for us:

Have you tried to get information on a product or service from Google recently? Good luck with that.

“Product recommendations broke Google,” declares tech journalist John Herrman, “and ate the Internet in the process.”

That sounds like an extreme claim. But it’s painfully true. If you doubt it, just try finding something — anything! — on the dominant search engine.

No matter what you search for, you end up in a polluted swamp of misleading links. The more you scroll, the more garbage you see:

  • Bogus product reviews
  • Fake articles that are really advertisements
  • Consumer guides that are just infomercials in disguise
  • Hucksters pretending to be experts
  • And every scam you can imagine (and some that never existed before) empowered by deepfakes or AI or some other innovative new tech

The Google algorithm deliberately makes it difficult to find reliable information. That’s because there’s more money made from promoting garbage, and forcing users to scroll through oceans of crap.

So why should Google offer a quick, easy answer to anything?

Everybody is now playing the same dirty game.

Even (previously) respected media outlets have launched their own recommendation programs as a way to monetize captured clients (= you and me). Everybody from Associated Press to Rolling Stone is doing it, and who can blame them?

Silicon Valley sets the dirty rules and everybody else just plays the game.

Welcome to the exciting world of algorithms. They were supposed to serve us, but now they control us—for the benefit of companies who impose them on every sphere of our lives.

And you can’t opt out.

For example, when I listen to music on a streaming platform, the algorithm takes over as soon as I stop intervening—insisting I listen to what it imposes on me. Where’s the switch to turn it off?

I can’t find it.

That option should be required by law. At a minimum, I should be allowed to opt out of the algorithm. Even better, they shouldn’t force the algorithm on me unless I opt in to begin with.

If this tech really aimed to serve me, opting in and opting out would be an obvious part of the system. The fact that I don’t get to choose tells you the real situation: These algorithms are not for our benefit.

Do you expect the coming wave of AI to be any different?

[…]

The shills who want us to lick the (virtual) boots of the algorithms keep using the word progress. That’s another warning sign.

I don’t think that word progress means what they think it means.

If it makes our lives worse, it isn’t progress. If it forces me into servitude, it isn’t progress. If it gets worse over time — much worse! — it isn’t progress.

All the spin and lobbying dollars in the world can’t change that.

So that’s why I became a conscientious objector in the world of algorithms. They give more unwanted advice than any person in history, even your mom.

At least mom has your best interests at heart. Can we say the same for Silicon Valley?

May 24, 2024

“Great Britain is not yet a basket case. But we do a rather good impression of a failing state.”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Gage considers the plight of modern day Britain in the context of Rishi Sunak’s political suicide note election call:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

The ambition for things to get better is a bar so low it’s a carpet. A favoured genre of meme here centres on the dysfunction and general farce of a country with “Great” in its name. That lofty adjective edges perilously close to hilarity, akin to those countries prefixed by “People’s Democratic Republic”. The excitable kind with an AK-47 printed on its flag.

Call the doctor’s surgery at 8 a.m. An automated voice will reveal you are number 49 in the queue. When you eventually wade through, a soft-centred receptionist assures you in therapeutic tones that there’re no appointments left today. Sorry.

Book a same-day train ticket from London to Newcastle. Without a hint of contrition, the train company demands £786.80. That’s a week or two in warmer, healthier, saner Sevilla or three hours and eleven minutes on a train in Great Britain.

House prices and rents are akin to the board game Monopoly, in which your coked-up crypto-addled mate has lined up hotels on Mayfair.

Go to the supermarket. Olive oil, a civilising elixir which once threatened to heave the primitive British palate out of the Mesolithic era, is prohibitively expensive. If modern Britain were a film scene, it would be that of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas: Fuck you. Pay me.

This all-encompassing one-footed waltz feels like the finale of a political satire. Since the 1980s, we’ve parodied America. We’ve nailed the social pathology but not the prosperity. Essentially, Great Britain is an advertising agency with a nuclear submarine.

This election pits two tribes against each other. One tribe pines for 1997. The other yearns for 1979.

For a sizeable swathe of the population, everything is awful, and nothing will ever change. And thank God for that.

Here, a natural law dictates that anyone under 45 who dares suggest things could be better is to be consumed by a radioactive flood of sadistic nostalgia. The mere whiff of dissent conjures through the pavement a battalion of nostalgians who lament the end of Polio.

“You don’t remember the Seventies!” warn those who yearn for the Seventies. ‘Bodies uncollected! Rubbish piled up in the streets!’. In that fateful decade, striking union workers allowed garbage to pile up in the streets. To this hazy memory, the rest of us are serfs to economic juju.

Whenever I point out that a first-time buyer in London must save for 31 years just for a house deposit, a familiar chorus of denial debunks the theory of free will. “You waste your money on flat whites and trips to Rome!” goes the wearisome riposte.

During the 1970s, that prelapsarian idyll when rubbish piled in the streets, when adults caned children at random, and when Bullseye was on the telly, the average house cost four times the average wage. Today, it’s twelve to one.

To point out mathematical reality invokes spasms of uniquely British nostalgia. It’s a negative nostalgia which glories in just how bad everything was.

Churchill was right. The British people are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst. Memory-mongers paint postcards of perfect penury. Back then, children didn’t talk back. There were no phones or elbows on the table. Back then, that famed sense of community slapped any ribbon of dissent out of those who dared dream bigger than the suffocating confines of community life. The past is a foreign country in which children could count their ribs but they was happy.

Such nostalgia serves two purposes. The first indulges one’s triumph over wistfully disfigured adversity. The other bleaches the parlous state of modern Britain with a mop soaked in a very British version of nostalgie de la boue. Nostalgia, truth be told, is a polite form of dementia.

May 23, 2024

“[O]fficial justifications for mass migration often have a creepy, post-hoc flavour about them”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

While it sometimes seems that there can’t possibly be mass migration issues other than here in Canada and along the US southern border, eugyppius reminds us that all of the Kakistocrats in western countries are fully in favour of more, and more, and even more inflow without restriction:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing centre by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

You might have noticed that mass migration to the West is a huge problem.

It is very bad for native Westerners, because it promises to transform our societies utterly, in permanent ways and not for the better. Curiously, it is also far from great for the centre-left political establishment responsible for promoting mass migration, because it has inspired a vast wave of popular opposition and filled the sails of right-leaning, migration restrictionist parties with new wind. Mass migration is also bad for taxpayers, for domestic security, for the welfare state, for many other aspects of the postwar liberal agenda and for our own future prospects. In short, mass migration is bad for almost everybody and everything.

There is a reason that nations have borders, and this is much the same reason that we have skin and that cells have membranes. You won’t survive for very long if you can’t control what enters you.

Despite the obvious fact that mass migration is bad, our rulers cling to migrationism like grim death. Given a choice between disincentivising asylees and intimidating, browbeating and harassing the millions of anti-migrationists among their own citizens, our governments generally choose the latter path, even though it is obviously the worse of the two.

Additionally unsettling, is the fact that official justifications for mass migration often have a creepy, post-hoc flavour about them. They sound much more like excuses dreamed up after the borders had already been opened, rather than any kind of reason mass migration must occur. When the migrationists really started to go crazy in 2015, for example, we were told that border security was simply impossible in the modern world and that infinity migrants were a force of nature we would have to deal with. That didn’t sound right even at the time, and since the pandemic border closures we no longer hear the inevitability narrative very much, although – and this is very bizarre to type – there is some evidence that high political figures like Angela Merkel believed it at the time. It is well worth thinking about why that might have been the case.

Another excuse that doesn’t make very much sense, is what I’ll call the refugee thesis. We’re told that millions of poor people are forced to endure terrible conditions in the developing world and that it is our moral burden to improve their lot by granting them residence in our countries. That might convince a few teenage girls, but it cannot withstand scrutiny among the rest of us. To begin with, the population of global unfortunates is enormous; the millions of refugees we have already accepted, and the millions that our politicians hope to welcome in the coming years, represent but a vanishing minority – a rounding error – compared to the vast sea of human suffering. It is like trying to solve homelessness by demanding that those in the wealthiest neighbourhoods make their spare bedrooms available to the indigent. Even more telling, however, is that the push to welcome migrants comes precisely as conditions in the developing world have dramatically improved. When things were much worse, we sealed our borders against the global south; now that they are much better, we hear all about how unacceptably inhumane it is to leave the migrants in their native lands.

Other post-hoc arguments, especially those falling in the yay-multiculturalism category, are even less serious. That we need more diversity to “spark innovation” (whatever that means) or that our local cuisines stand to benefit from the spices of the disadvantaged, are excuses of such towering stupidity, that you will lose brain cells thinking about them. As with the refugee narrative, nobody said crazy stuff like this until the migrants had already begun arriving on our shores. And there is another thing to notice about the multiculticult too. This is its blatant flippancy. The premise seems to be that migration is no big deal bro, but also too there are these cool exciting and totally random upsides, like improved local Ethiopian food offerings. It is the very definition of damning with faint praise.

The rest, sadly, is behind the paywall.

May 22, 2024

If you re-define it carefully, you can make any statistical measure look hopeful

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In his Substack, Tim Worstall jokingly called this piece “Larry Summers Explains Why Americans Hate Joe Biden”:

As a good Democrat of course Larry Summers would never put things in quite that headline way. But the implication of this latest paper with others is to explain why Americans really aren’t as happy as they should be given the economic numbers. The answer being that the economic numbers we all look at to explain how happy folk are aren’t the right economic numbers to explain how happy people are.

We can also make — possibly rightly, possibly wrongly, this might be me projecting more than is merited — a further claim. That Americans simply aren’t as rich as those standard economic numbers suggest either. Which would also neatly explain the general down in the dumps attitude toward the economy.

So, the new paper:

    Unemployment is low and inflation is falling, but consumer sentiment remains depressed. This has confounded economists, who historically rely on these two variables to gauge how consumers feel about the economy. We propose that borrowing costs, which have grown at rates they had not reached in decades, do much to explain this gap. The cost of money is not currently included in traditional price indexes, indicating a disconnect between the measures favored by economists and the effective costs borne by consumers. We show that the lows in US consumer sentiment that cannot be explained by unemployment and official inflation are strongly correlated with borrowing costs and consumer credit supply. Concerns over borrowing costs, which have historically tracked the cost of money, are at their highest levels since the Volcker-era. We then develop alternative measures of inflation that include borrowing costs and can account for almost three quarters of the gap in US consumer sentiment in 2023. Global evidence shows that consumer sentiment gaps across countries are also strongly correlated with changes in interest rates. Proposed U.S.-specific factors do not find much supportive evidence abroad.

OK, or as explained by the Telegraph:

    In it, the authors made a shocking claim: if inflation was measured in the same way that it was measured during the last bout of price rises in the 1970s, data showed that it peaked at 18pc in November 2022. This is far higher than the 9.1pc peak inflation shown by the official data.

    The reason for this discrepancy is that, since the 1970s, economists have removed the cost of borrowing from the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The motivations here were not nefarious. The reasoning of the statisticians had something to it.

And, OK, if inflation peaked at 18%, not 9%, then that would explain why folk are pissed. Sure it would.

[…]

OK. But that means that if inflation was higher than we’ve been using then the deflation of nominal to real GDP is also wrong. Just that one year of 9% recorded but 18% by this new measure is damn near a 10% difference. That’s how much we’re over-estimating real GDP by right now. Add in a couple of years of lower levels of that and being 20% out wouldn’t surprise.

Which would mean that — if this were true and I might be overegging it — Americans are in fact 20% poorer than the Biden Admin keeps saying they are. And yes, that would piss the voters off, wouldn’t it?

Gaslighting has been a staple of the legacy media for quite some time now, going into high gear during the 2016 US Presidential elections and then into overdrive during the pandemic. They probably don’t even realize they’re doing it any more, because it feels “normal” to them. Yet they wonder why their popularity and public trust in their pronouncements continues to drop.

May 21, 2024

Idi Amin would have loved MMT

Filed under: Africa, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jon Miltimore talks about the economic disaster of Idi Amin’s Uganda after Amin and his predecessor decided to nationalize most big businesses in the country and then to print money to cover the government shortfalls in revenue that resulted:

Ugandan dictator Idi Amin at the United Nations, October 1975.
Detail of a photo by Bernard Gotfryd via Wikimedia Commons.

Idi Amin (1923-2003) was one of the most ruthless and oppressive dictators of the 20th Century.

Many will remember Amin from the 2006 movie The Last King of Scotland, a historical drama that netted Forest Whitaker an Academy Award for Best Actor for his depiction of the Ugandan president.

While Western media often mocked Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979, as a self-aggrandizing buffoon, they tended to overlook the atrocities he inflicted on his people. He murdered an estimated 300,000 Ugandans, many of them in brutal fashion. One such victim is believed to be Amin’s fourth wife, Kay, whose body was found decapitated and dismembered in a car trunk in 1974, shortly after the couple divorced.

While historians and journalists have tended to focus on Amin’s dismal record on human rights, his economic policies are atrocities in their own right and also deserve attention.

A Brief History of Uganda

Uganda, a landlocked country in the eastern part of Central Africa, received its independence from the United Kingdom on Oct. 9, 1962 (though Queen Elizabeth remained the official head of state). The nation’s earliest years were turbulent.

Uganda was ruled by Dr. Apollo Milton Obote — first as prime minister and then as president — until January 1971, when an upstart general who had served in the British Colonial Army, Idi Amin Dada Oumee, seized control and set himself up as a dictator. (The coup was launched before Amin, a lavish spender, could be arrested for misappropriation of army funds.)

Among Amin’s first moves as dictator was to complete the nationalization of businesses that had begun under his predecessor Obote, who had announced an order allowing the state to assume a 60 percent stake in the nation’s top industries and banks. Obote’s announcement, The New York Times reported at the time, had resulted in a surge of capital flight and “brought new investment to a virtual stand still”. But instead of reversing the order, Amin cemented and expanded it, announcing he was taking a 49 percent stake in 11 additional companies.

Amin was just getting started, however. The following year he issued an order expelling some 50,000 Indians with British passports from the country, which had a devastating economic impact on the country.

“‘These Ugandan ‘Asians’ were entrepreneurial, talented and hard-working people, skilled in business, and they formed the backbone of the economy,” Madsen Pirie, President of the UK’s Adam Smith Institute, wrote in an article on Amin’s expulsion order. “However, Idi Amin favoured people from his own ethnic background, and arbitrarily expelled them anyway, giving their property and businesses to his cronies, who promptly ran them into the ground through incompetence and mismanagement.”

Even as he was nationalizing private industry and expelling Ugandan Asians, Amin was busy rapidly expanding the country’s public sector.

The Ugandan economy was soon in shambles. Amin’s financial advisors were naturally frightened to share this news with Amin, but in his book Talk of the Devil: Encounters With Seven Dictators, journalist Riccardo Orizio says one finance minister did just that, informing Amin “the government coffers were empty”.

The response from Amin is telling.

“Why [do] you ministers always come nagging to President Amin?” he said. “You are stupid. If we have no money, the solution is very simple: you should print more money.”

May 20, 2024

The first post-privacy generation in human history

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You may have mixed feelings about the Zoomers — even if you happen to be a Zoomer — but it’s beyond argument that they are the first generation who have grown up in a zero-privacy world:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Zoomers are the first post-privacy generation in human existence. They will never know a world in which they can try to lose themselves without somehow being tracked. Roughly three years ago, I was speaking with the CEO and founder of a commercial digital advertising company from NYC. He told me that their technology was so powerful that they were able to figure out when people were getting up from their couches to go into another room simply via their own digital advertising software.

It’s very tough to wrap our heads around the complete loss of privacy. For me, I have trouble remembering how it was to be out of instantaneous reach via mobile phone. Pre-mass adoption of cell phones, people would effectively be out of reach i.e. disappear for hours at a time, as the only way to contact them was to call them at home (inb4 beepers, as I never had one). We are constantly tracked and monitored, and our personal data is sold by data brokers all over the globe. One customer of personal ad tracking data is the CIA, as Matthew Petti explains:

    For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they’re leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.

    Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information.” Her office oversees 18 agencies in the “intelligence community“, including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.

    In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.

    Haines’ new framework claims that “additional clarity” on the government’s policies will help protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with “safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information” and write an annual report on how they use this data.

more:

    As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn’t require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policies.

    “The framework’s absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans,” Wyden tells Reason. “The DNI’s framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen.”

Case in point:

    Wyden has been aggressively pushing for transparency on data purchases over the past few years. In 2021, he uncovered that the Defense Intelligence Agency was buying Americans’ smartphone location data. That same year, he sent a letter to Haines and CIA Director Bill Burns complaining about a secretive CIA data collection program. (In an Orwellian turn, the letter itself was classified until 2022.) This year, Wyden revealed more details on NSA data purchases.

    Some of this data is collected and sold directly by the apps. For example, an intelligence company called X-Mode once paid MuslimPro, an app that offers a daily prayer calendar and a compass pointing towards Mecca, to include a few lines of location tracking code. X-Mode then sold the data to U.S. government agencies. MuslimPro claims that it did not intend to sell the data to the government and ended the arrangement after the story broke.

So, yeah … app maker will sell your personal data to a buyer like the CIA.

    In other cases, the data is siphoned from advertising markets. Every time a user opens a website with paid advertisements, their location and attributes appear on a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange, a virtual auction where companies buy ad space. Data brokers posing as advertisers scrape the listings for information on users.

    “Any government with a halfway decent cyber intelligence program is participating in these RTB exchanges, because it’s such an immensely valuable source of data,” says Byron Tau, author of Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State.

    As a demonstration of how powerful RTB data is, an intelligence contractor used data from the dating app Grindr to track gay government employees from their offices to their homes, Tau reported in his book.

The IRS is in on it too:

    Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service, on the other hand, have argued that users voluntarily handed over the information, so the government is free to use it. Tau points out that users don’t really know how their data is being resold, and even the RTB exchanges themselves aren’t supposed to be used for data scraping.

    “A lot of these companies that are collecting data from the global population don’t have a real consumer relationship” with the people they’re spying on, Tau says. “Unless you know how to decompile software and you’re technically savvy, you can’t even make informed choices.”

In an increasingly digitized world, the right to privacy becomes wholly unworkable. Think digital payments by way of credit and debit cards vs. cash.

The economic distortions of government subsidies

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian federal and provincial governments are no strangers to the (political) attractions of picking winners and losers in the market by providing subsidies to some favoured companies at the expense not only of their competitors but almost always of the economy as a whole, because the subsidies almost never produce the kind of economic return promised. The current British government has also been seduced by the subsidies game, as Tim Congdon writes:

Former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1983. She was in office from May 1979 to November 1990.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Why do so many economists support a free market? By the phrase they mean a market, or even an economy dominated by such markets, where the government leaves companies and industries alone, and does not try to interfere by “picking winners” and subsidising them. Two of the economists’ arguments deserve to be highlighted.

The first is about the good use — the productivity — of resources. To earn a decent profit, most companies have to achieve a certain level of output to attract enough customers and to secure high enough revenue per worker.

If the government decides to give money to a favoured group of companies, these companies can survive even if they produce less, and obtain lower revenue per worker, than the others. The subsidisation of a favoured group of companies therefore lowers aggregate productivity relative to a free market situation.

In this column last month I compared the economically successful 1979–97 Conservative government with the economically unsuccessful 2010–2024 Conservative government, which is now coming to an end. In the context it is worth mentioning that Margaret Thatcher and her economic ministers had a strong aversion to government subsidies of any kind.

According to Professor Colin Wren of Newcastle University’s 1996 study, Industrial Subsidies: the UK Experience, subsidies were slashed from £5 billion (in 1980 prices) in 1979 to £0.3 billion in 1990. (In today’s prices that is from £23 billion to under £1.5 billion.)

Thatcher is controversial, and she always will be. All the same, the improvement in manufacturing productivity in the 1980s was faster than before in the post-war period and much higher than it has been since 2010. Further, one of Thatcher’s beliefs was that if the private sector refuses to pursue a supposed commercial opportunity, the public sector most certainly should not try to do so.

Such schemes as HS2 and the Hinkley Point nuclear boondoggle could not have happened in the 1980s or 1990s. They will result in pure social loss into the tens of billions of pounds and will undoubtedly reduce the UK’s productivity.

But there is a second, and also persuasive, general argument against subsidies and government intervention in industry. An attractive feature of a free market policy is its political neutrality. Because market forces are to determine commercial outcomes, businessmen are wasting their time if they lobby ministers and parliamentarians for financial aid.

Honest and straightforward tax-paying companies with British shareholders are rightly furious if they see the government channelling revenues towards other companies who have access to the right politicians and friendly civil servants. By definition, the damage to the UK’s interests is greatest if the recipients of government largesse are foreign.

QotD: “Selfless” public servants

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

WARNING: If you’re an elected government official or if you’re attached to idealistic notions about such officials, do not read this commentary. It will offend you.

Ideally, government in a democratic republic reflects the will of the people, or at least that of the majority. Citizens vote for candidates whom they believe will best promote the general welfare. Victorious candidates, after pledging to uphold the Constitution, go to state capitals or to Washington, D.C., to do The People’s business — to undertake all the good and worthy activities that citizens in their private capacities cannot perform.

Sure, every now and then crooks and demagogues win office, but these are not the norm. Our system of regular, aboveboard democratic elections ensures that officials who do not effectively carry out The People’s business are thrown from office and replaced by more reliable public servants.

Trouble is, it’s not true. It’s a sham. Despite being called “the Honorable”, the typical politician is certainly no more honorable than the typical dentist, auto mechanic, Wal-Mart regional manager or any other private citizen.

Despite being referred to as “public servants”, politicians serve, first and foremost, their own personal political ambitions and they do so by pandering to narrow special interest groups.

Don Boudreaux, “Base Closings”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 2005-03-18.

May 10, 2024

A different take on the Russo-Ukrainian War

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kulak suggests that far from being a model for future wars, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine may not prefigure anything at all about future wars:

Few weeks go by where I don’t read a piece on how Ukraine is the Future of warfare and armies and thinkers need to adjust to the reality that the warfare of the future will involve massive unaccountable amounts of artillery, trenches, conscription and grinding warfare.

While sometimes they point to relevant lessons: Yes the inability of the US to quickly reindustrialize and produce artillery shells at a rate comparable to Russia does speak to a profound rot in American governance, the military industrial complex, and American business regulation more generally,

Often times the conclusions drawn are dangerously delusional: A draft would be more likely to break the American nation than save it. As indeed conscription has resulted in Ukraine’s population collapsing with somewhere between 6 and 10 million Ukrainians (out of a pre-war 36 million) having fled the country, not to escape the mostly static war, but to escape the Totalitarian conditions the Zelensky regime has imposed in response to the war. (1.1 million of whom escaped INTO Russia, for any who deny this [is] largely an ethnic conflict between Western and Russian Ukrainians, as it has been since 2014).

And the thing is all of these discussions rest on a assumption that seems ludicrous the second you stop and think about it: Ukraine is not the future of Warfare, these conditions will be almost impossible to ever create again.

Ukraine had a pre-war Nominal GDP of 199 billion USD. Officially this only declined to 160 billion in 2022 as a result of the war, but there’s good reason to think its actual internal private sector economy collapsed far further [given] it had collapsed from 177 billion in 2013 to 90 billion in 2015 as a result of the US backed Coup/Revolution.

Indeed given the population flight, conscription, and impositions on the populace, it is very likely a SUPER-MAJORITY of that 160 billion GDP in 2022, was actually the result of US and NATO pouring hundreds of billions into the country. Where it was either used or siphoned off as corruption.

Simply put Ukraine has received military, financial and other aid most like in excess of what its entire internal economy produced in the same period, and as of writing it’s still losing territory.

When commentators say this is a war between NATO and Russia they are almost entirely correct. If you combine all the economies that are funding, arming, or fighting on one side or the other of this war you get a majority of the entire global economy.

And they have used all that money to pay off the Ukrainian regime to refuse any peace agreement, even ones their own negotiators had agreed to, and that were clearly in the best interest of the country … you know if you value hundreds of thousands of young men and not having your population collapse more than narrow stretches of land being bought up by Blackrock.

May 9, 2024

“The ability to believe entire gargling nonsense is strong in the [environmental] sector – as with this particular claim that we’re going to run out of rock”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall really, really enjoys kicking the stuffing out of strawman arguments, especially when they touch on something he’s very well informed about:

Some environmental claims are not just perfectly valid they’re essential for the continuation of life at any level above E. Coli. None of us would want the Thames to return to the state of 1950 when there was nothing living in it other than a collection of that E. Coli reflecting the interesting genetic and origin mix of the population of London. Sure, the arguments from Feargal and the like that a river running through 8 million people must be clean enough to swim in at all times is a bit extreme the other way around. One recent estimate has it that to perform that task for England would cost £260 billion — a few swimming baths sounds like a more sensible use of resources than getting all the rivers sparkling all the time.

Some are more arguable — violent and immediate climate change would be a bad idea, losing Lowestoft below the waves (possibly Dartford too) in 2500 AD might be something we can all live with. Arguable perhaps.

But some of these claims are wholly and entirely doolally. So much so that it’s difficult to imagine that grown adults take them seriously. But, sadly, they do and they do so on our money too.

An example:

    Wow. According to this research 40% of the 1.5C C02 budget could be used just for digital & internet use/infrastructure & 55% of the earths carrying capacity for minerals & metals for the same use.

The internet alone could use 55% of the Earth’s carrying capacity of metals and minerals? Well, to take that seriously is insane. That is not mere hyperbolic insult, that actually is insane. I write as someone who has written an entire book on this very subject (available here, for free, save your money to buy a subscription to this excellent Substack instead). There is no metal or mineral that we’re even going to run short of — in the technical, not economic, sense that is — for tens of millions of years yet. As the average lifetime of a species is perhaps 2 million years that should see us out.

So, clearly, they’re using some odd definition of how many minerals and metals we’ve got that we can use. I thought they’d do the usual Club of Rome thing (no, read the book to find out), confuse mineral reserves with what’s available and thus insist we all died last Tuesday afternoon. Rather to my surprise, no, they didn’t. They went further into raging lunacy.

It’s not wholly obvious as they don’t really quite announce their assumption, it’s necessary to track back a bit — and that’s a problem in itself. A top tip about scientific papers — if they say “As Bloggs said” then what that really means is that many people accept what Bloggs said as being true and also useful. You do not have to reprove Einstein every time you do physics, you can just say “As is known”. You’ve only got to reprove Al if that’s what you’re really trying to do.

Thus, if a definition is a referral back to something else, elsewhere, then you can be sure that the definition is a building block being used by others in their own papers. It’s a generalised insanity, not a specific one.

So, what is that limit?

    Here we quantify the environmental impacts of digital content consumption encompassing all the necessary infrastructure linked to the consumption patterns of an average user. By applying the standardised life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, we evaluate these impacts in relation to the per capita share of the Earth’s carrying capacity using 16 indicators related to climate change, nutrients flows, air pollution, toxicity, and resources use, for which explicit thresholds that should never be exceeded were defined

Now this is in Nature Communications. So it’s science. Even, it’s Science. It’s also lunatic. For, tracking back to try to find what those “resources use” are that will be 55% used up by the internet. It’s possible to think that maybe we’re going to use too much germanium in the glass in the fibreoptic cables say, or erbium in the repeaters, or … specific elements might be in short supply? As the book wot I wrote above points out, that’s nonsense. So, what is the claim?

Tracking back we get to this:

    Resource use, mineral and metals MRD kg Sb eq Abiotic resource depletion (ADP ultimate reserves) 2.19E+08 3.18E-02 JRC calculation based on factor 2 concept Bringezu (2015); Buczko et al. (2016) Resource use

That’s from Table 3.

Which takes us one stage further back. This paper here is talking about Planetary Boundaries and as with the building block idea. PBs — I assume — make the assumption that Bringzeu, and Biczlo et al have given us a useful guide to what those PBs are. Which is why they just use their method, not invent a new one. But that, in turn, also means that other people working on PBs are likely to be using that same definition.

[…]

Note what they’re doing. Humans should not take out of that environment more than nature puts back into it each year. That’s some pretty dumb thinking there, as we don’t, when we use a metal or mineral — except in very rare circumstances — take it off planet. We move it around a bit, no more. But the claim really is that we should abstract, for use, no more than is naturally added back each year.

So, the correct limitation on our minerals use is how much magma volcanoes add each year.

No, really, humanity can use no more earth than gets thrown out of a volcano each year. That’s it. To use more would mean that we are depleting the stock and that’s not sustainable, see?

May 8, 2024

The cocoa shortage is really the same economic trend that caused the Victorian “servant problem”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Food — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains not only why your favourite chocolate bar is going to be more expensive, but also why your olive oil will do the same and why it really is the same thing as the Victorian and Edwardian upper class complaints about “the help”:

Upper classes expected maids and other servants to be cheap, eager, and easy to replace. This began to change quickly in the Victorian era, as women found better-paying jobs in commerce and industry that didn’t require bowing and scraping and putting up with constand, casual abuse from oblivious wealthy snobs.

As you might have noticed, cocoa is getting very much more expensive. Futures prices (no, futures are not a good guide to actual market prices but still) have gone from $3,000 a tonne or so (-ish, you understand ) to $12,000 and back to $8,000 or so. According to the usual suspects this is climate change. According to those a little more informed there’s El Nino, there have been a few rusts and plant plagues to deal with. Low prices led to not much planting in recent years — all sorts of little problems that led to that burst of higher prices.

Real prices have changed, the sort of Cadbury’s bar that my wife likes a piece of with her afternoon coffee has gone up by a € a bar in recent weeks (I know, I know, “Send Munnies! Quick!”) and so something must be done.

But there’s a much larger and more significant problem here and one to which there may or may not be a solution. The servant problem.

One of those things you learn when living in foreign is that the poorer a country is the easier it is to get a servant and the cheaper a servant is when you get one. This doesn’t wholly make sense to folk until it’s explained. A poor place is one where wages are low — where wages are low is a poor place. They’re the same statement. So, wages for a servant are low in poor countries.

We can up that a little as well. Poor people spend — truly poor people that is — some 80% of their income on food and shelter. So, when you’re in one of those truly poor places you can gain access to a servant — their fulltime, undivided services — for $2 a day plus a bowl of boiled rice and being allowed to sleep in the barn. Because, if they were out there in the cash economy they’d be paid $2 a day (800 million still live at that level out there) and they’d have to buy their own bowl of rice and a tarpaulin to shelter under out of that.

Servants are cheap in poor places because human labour is cheap in poor places because a place with cheap labour is a poor place. QED.

As places become richer human labour costs more. Which is why the letters pages of The Lady started to fill up with complaints about the uppityness and demands of servants from about the 1880s onwards — about the time that British wages at that low and untrained end first started to substantially rise above mere subsistence. This is also one of our major political problems now that middle class women have the vote. They’re using the franchise to insist that government do something about that servant problem. That’s what all that insistence upon child care subsidies and freebies is about. Those middle class women going off to their terribly important power skirt jobs can no longer afford to hire some working class popsie to look after their kids — so government must be forced to do so instead. The correct answer being look after your own damn kids, obviously.

But cheap labour in poor places:

    Britain is at risk of olive oil shortages as the industry is wracked by a production crisis.

    Fears are growing over the risk of empty shelves as growers across Europe battle a combination of extreme weather, inflation and high interest rates.

Interest rates matter because you plant, wait some number of years, only then do you gain olives. You will then gain them for many decades even centuries, but that wait without income is more painful the higher interest rates get.

There are rusts, plant plagues, afflicting the crop across much of Europe. Of course we’ve those blaming everything on climate change but that’s just the usual bollocks.

However, low wages in poor places. I live in the middle of an oil producing area. Vast waving acres of olive trees in fact. I’ve also lived, until recently, in an historically poorer area of the same country. Where much of the land — little 2 and 4 acre farms (if they were lucky) which might raise a few goats, a sheep (cheese more than anything) and have a couple or four olive trees — has been simply abandoned. The place is getting richer, no one wants to scrape a living on 4 acres of land these days. Rightly so. 4 acres is an adventurous garden, not a living. The absence of those goats is also why the wildfires are getting so much worse — there’s more scrub to burn.

I can take you to places where there are hundreds of acres of such land. Plenty of olive trees in there too, all fruiting and none of them being picked. Because picking olives from the occasional tree is hard bloody work. Spread a net beneath it, hit the tree hard, a lot. Collect up the net with all the olives. Then sort them. By hand. Each single one needs to be checked (for worms and rot) and then nicked. Then you can take them down to the oil mill (every village has at least one) and you hand over the olives and get back the oil, minus a percentage for the mill owner.

May 4, 2024

Process optimization can definitely be taken too far

Filed under: Business, Economics, Food, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer considers systems that have been overoptimized to the detriment of most users and the benefit of a small, privileged minority:

I know a guy who used to make his living as an eBay reseller. That is, he’d find something on eBay that he thought was underpriced so long as the auction didn’t go above X dollars, buy it, then resell it for more than he paid for it Classic imports-exports, really, a digital junk shop. Eventually he got to the point where, with some items, he didn’t ever have physical possession of them; he had figured out a way to get them directly from whoever he bought an item from to the person he had sold the item to, while still collecting his bit of arbitrage along the way. This buying and selling of items on eBay, looking for deals, was sufficient to be his full-time job and pay for a mortgage. But the last time I saw him, a few years ago, he had gotten an ordinary office job. He told me that it had become too difficult to find value; potential sellers and buyers alike had access to too many tools that could reveal the “real” price of an item, and there was little delta to eke out. He’s not alone. If you search around in eBay-related forums, you’ll find that many longtime sellers have reached similar conclusions. The hustle just doesn’t work anymore.

I don’t suppose there’s any great crime there — it’s all within the rules. And there does appear to still be an eBay-adjacent reselling economy; it’s just that, as far as I can glean, it’s driven by algorithms and bots that average resellers simply don’t have access to. It appears that some super-resellers have implemented software solutions to identify underpriced goods and buy them automatically and algorithmically. They have optimized the system for their own use, giving them an advantage, putting other sellers at a disadvantage, and arguably hurting buyers by eliminating uncertainty that sometimes results in lower-than-optimal-to-sellers prices. This is all in sharp contrast to the early years, when my friend would keep listings for lucrative product categories open – in separate windows, not tabs, that’s how long ago this was – and refresh until he found potential moneymakers. That sort of human searching and bidding work stands at a sharp disadvantage compared to those with information-scraping capacity and automated tools. It’s a good example of how access to data has left systems overoptimized for some users. One of the things that the internet is really good at is price discovery, and these digital tools help determine the “optimal” price of items on eBay, which results in less opportunity for arbitrage for other players.

My current working definition of overoptimization goes like this: overoptimization has occurred when the introduction of immense amounts of information into a human system produces conditions that allow for some players within that system to maximize their comparative advantage, without overtly breaking the rules, in a way that (intentional or not) creates meaningful negative social consequences. I want to argue that many human systems in the 2020s have become overoptimized in this way, and that the social ramifications are often bad.

Getting a restaurant reservation is a good example. Once upon a time, you called a restaurant’s phone number and asked about a specific time and they looked in the book and told you if you could have that slot or not. There was plenty of insiderism and petty corruption involved, but because the system provided incomplete information that was time consuming to procure, there was a limit to how much you could game that system. Now that reservations are made online, you can look and see not only if a specific slot has availability but if any slots have availability. You can also make highly-educated guesses about what different slots are worth on the market through both common sense (weekend evenings are the most valuable etc) and through seeing which reservations get snapped up the fastest in an average week. And being online means that the reservation system is immediate and automatic, so you can train a bot to grab as many reservations as you want, near-instantaneously, and you can do so in a way that the system doesn’t notice. (Unlike, say, if you called the same restaurant over and over again and tried to hide your voice by doing a series of fake accents.) The outcome of all this is that getting a reservation at desirable places is a nightmare and results in a secondary market that, like seemingly everything in American life, is reserved for the rich. The internet has overoptimized getting a restaurant reservation and the result is to make it more aggravating and less egalitarian.

As has been much discussed, nearly the exact same scenario has made getting concert tickets a tedious and ludicrously-pricy exercise in frustration.

April 29, 2024

“The Earth goes around the Sun, or so they would have you believe …”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on a recent “grand theory” from Andrea Matranga, an Italian economist who outlined his thoughts in a paper accepted by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, summarized in the sub-hed “Hunter-gatherers were better off than Neolithic farmers, diet-wise — until Earth was hit by seasonal extremes caused by Jupiter’s gravity”:

Reconstruction of a neolithic farmstead at the Irish National Heritage Park in Ferrycarrig.
Photo by Jo Turner via Wikimedia Commons.

Matranga’s own explanation for the invention of agriculture is: “Believe it or not, it is down to extraterrestrial forces”. Yes, that’s an actual quote from a cheeky Twitter thread in which Matranga summarizes his hypothesis colourfully. The real idea is that the period of the Neolithic Revolutions coincided with a time when seasonal temperature and rainfall differences were maximized by coinciding features of Earth’s orbit — features attributable mostly to Jupiter’s gravitational tug on us.

The Earth goes around the Sun, or so they would have you believe, and Earth’s rotational axis is tilted relative to the Sun, which creates the seasons. But the Earth’s motion has other subtle wobbles and shimmies caused by Jupiter: the eccentricity of its elliptical orbit grows and shrinks, and the rotational axis “precesses”, or wobbles, meaning that the face of the Earth pointing toward the Sun at our closest approach to it changes over time.

The implication of this is that over a period of millennia, and particularly in what we think of as the “temperate” zones, the magnitude of climate seasonality will itself change in a somewhat chaotic way. For some periods much longer than a human lifetime, seasonal changes might be almost beneath notice; a few millennia later, they become a dominant feature of human experience. And one hemisphere of the planet — say, the northern one — might end up with a lingering developmental advantage because it was favoured at the right moment by the precession of Earth’s axis.

Matranga pulls together a lot of math, astronomy and geography to show that the local Neolithic Revolutions coincide with maximum local seasonality, and then he builds some economic models of primitive society to suggest what effect this might have had on social organization and population evolution. Alfred Marshall would have told him to burn this part of his paper, but perhaps the equations are necessary for appearances. The crucial point is that Matranga has found a strong possible explanation for the Neolithic paradox — why, and when, humans in many places adopted a form of social organization that seems to have left most of them worse off on average.

For it’s not just the average that matters. In a world that was more or less the same year-round, hunter-gatherers didn’t have to worry about food storage: they could migrate cyclically within a small range, following wild game, to keep up with modest seasonal effects. But if the seasons then got more intense, food storage would become more important to the long-term survival of the group: one winter could now finish everyone off.

April 28, 2024

How Britain got out of the Great Depression (and no, it wasn’t WW2)

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall, in refuting something being pushed by Willie Hutton, explains how the British government escaped from the Great Depression and set off a nice little boom in the mid- to late-1930s:

Piccadilly Circus in London, mid-1930s.
Colourized photo via Reddit.

Well, yes. Except that’s not actually what did drag Britain out of the Depression. What did was expansionary fiscal austerity. You know, that thing the Tories talked of in 2010 and which everyone laughed at? Somewhat annoyingly I was one of the very few (it’s annoying because I was clearly right in what I was saying) who pointed this out back then.

    When we boil this right down it’s an argument about the effectiveness of monetary policy. Absolutely no one thinks that it has no effect. But there’s many who think that it has no effect at the zero lower bound: when interest rates are zero. That’s really the argument that leads to fiscal policy, that idea that government might tax less, or spend more, blow out that deficit and get the economy moving again. We’ve done all we could with monetary policy and we’ve still got to do something so here’s fiscal policy.

To put it as simply as possible. We’ve two major macroeconomic tools, monetary policy and fiscal. The first is interest rates, exchange rates and money printing and so on. The second is the difference between taxes collected and money spent by government — the government deficit or surplus (note, please, for purists, this is being very simple).

OK, either lever or tool can be used to loosen conditions — gee stuff up — or tighten them. Which we use when is somewhere between a matter of taste and necessarily correct given the circumstances. But clearly the total amount of geeing up out of a recession — or tightening to prevent inflation — or depression is the combination of the two sets of policies, applications of levers and tools.

It’s thus theoretically possible to tighten with one, loosen with the other and gain, overall, either tightening or loosening. Depends upon how much of each you do.

Britain in the 30s tightened fiscal policy. The opposite of what the Keynesians said, the opposite of what the US did and so on. Cut — no, really cut, not just slowed the increase in — government spending and thereby cut the government deficit (might, actually, have gone into surplus, not sure). This is, according to the Keynesian line, something that should make the recession/depression worse.

But at the same time they came off the gold standard — Churchill had taken us back in in 1925 at far too high a rate — and lowered interest rates. That’s a loosening of monetary policy.

As it happens, on balance, the monetary was loosened more than the fiscal was tightened and so we have expansionary fiscal austerity. Which set off a very nice little boom in fact. The mid- to late- 30s in Britain were economic good times. Driven, nicely driven, by a housebuilding boom — the last time the private sector built 300 k houses a year in fact (this is before the Town and Country Planning Act stopped all that). Mixed in was that the motor car was becoming a fairly standard bourgeois item and so housing spread out along the roads.

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