Quotulatiousness

June 1, 2012

This is why I always cheer for whoever is bidding against Toronto to host the Olympics

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

If publicly funded professional sports stadiums are bad for the local economy (and they almost always are), “winning” the bid to host the Olympic Games is far worse:

The history of the modern Olympics (and of other large-scale sporting events) reveals a consistent pattern. Organizers or local politicians in the host city commission “impact studies,” which almost always promise extravagant economic benefits. Studies performed after the event, however, find no positive effect at all — let alone one approaching the initial estimates. So it isn’t surprising that a PriceWaterhouseCoopers study commissioned by the British government forecasts that the Games would add about $9.4 billion to London’s GDP between 2005 and 2016. That seems like a large number until you realize that the London metro area’s GDP is roughly $712 billion annually. If the Games’ benefits were spread evenly throughout the decade, they would increase London’s GDP level by 0.1 percent each year.

Further, that $9.4 billion benefit pales compared with the cost of hosting the Olympics. In 2002, the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimated that the cost would be $2.8 billion. Ten years later, London’s budget for hosting the Games is $15 billion. Costs already run above that figure and are likely to rise to approximately $38 billion, according to an investigation by the TV network Sky Sports. That would easily dwarf the economic benefits that the PriceWaterhouseCoopers study predicts. Security alone will be extremely costly: more British troops will patrol London than there are currently at war in Afghanistan. And these figures don’t count many hidden and indirect costs of hosting the Olympics — most prominently, disruption to business and traffic congestion. Traffic in London is already difficult; with special lanes for Olympics-related traffic, daily commutes will become a nightmare. (London’s transportation commissioner, Peter Hendy, helpfully advises commuters to go to the pub to avoid rush hour.)

Update, 5 June: The good news just keeps on coming for the London Olympics:

The boom to the economy that the Government hoped the Games would bring to the capital appears to become a bust with tens of thousands to tourists spurning the hiked prices, congestion and heightened security.

While bookings for July and August are down by 35 per cent on last year other European capitals appear to be prospering from London’s gloom.

French ministers, who lost the Olympic bid to Britain, might be quietly rubbing their hands with glee not only for dodging the £10 billion Games bill but also with a 50 per cent rise in tourism bookings. Similarly Barcelona and Berlin have seen their tourist numbers soar by 100 per cent over the summer.

This is an example of why, when the announcement was made that Paris had lost out on the bid for the 2012 Olympics to London, Reason titled their coverage “Lucky Paris“.

May 29, 2012

QotD: London slang of the 1930s

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have come up in the ‘forties (it is first mentioned in an American book, Herman Melville’s White Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’ for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the ‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with it — a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct1. Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.

The swear words also change — or, at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ‘fucking’. No doubt in time ‘fucking’, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

1. It survives in certain abbreviations, such as ‘use your twopenny’ or ‘use your head.’ ‘Twopenny’ is arrived at like this: head — loaf of bread — twopenny loaf — twopenny

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.

May 24, 2012

Unsupport your unfavourite Premier League team

Filed under: Britain, Football, Soccer — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

Duleep Allirajah explains why he’s a “90-minute Quisling”:

Years ago, long before Google came to the salvation of lazy football writers who couldn’t be bothered with microfiche searches, the term ‘unsupport’ was coined in the football magazine, When Saturday Comes.

It meant, as the name suggests, the exact opposite of supporting a team. You wished defeat on another team, hated that team with a passion. So, for example, in the last day of the Premiership season, many neutrals wanted Manchester City to win the title. This was not through any great love for the oil-rich upstarts in blue, but because they were unsupporting Manchester United. In the Premiership era, Manchester United are simultaneously the best supported and, at the same time, the most unsupported club in the land. Unsupporting is the football equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion: all the time United are successful, hatred of the side occurs as an equal and opposite reaction.

You can tell a lot about people by the team they hate. Take Manchester United unsupporters. They assume two forms. In the blue half of Manchester or on Merseyside, the Anyone But United (ABU) sentiment is an expression of bitter local rivalry. But throughout the rest of the country, ABU represents an increasing disenchantment with modern football. Manchester United is essentially a proxy for the gentrification and commercialisation of the game. When fans sing ‘Stand up if you hate Man U’, it’s not simply green-eyed envy of United’s success, it’s also a howl of protest against the corporate takeover of football. United embodies everything the traditionalists hate about the Premier League: the hype, the desecration of 3pm kick-offs, the relentless merchandising, the prawn-sandwich munching ‘plastic fans’, and the absentee foreign owners

The constant appearance of Manchester United and Chelsea at or near the top of the English Premier League have always seemed to me to be a good argument in favour of a salary cap in the NFL style: otherwise richer clubs will always be able to buy their way to a higher season finish than poorer teams.

On the other hand, the NFL could learn from the EPL with their promotion/relegation system (I say that in full knowledge that my beloved Vikings would have been relegated after the 2011 season if such a scheme was implemented). Of course, structurally the NFL and EPL have many differences preventing the adoption of the other sport’s practices, but as (I think) Gregg Easterbrook pointed out, Ohio State … sorry, The Ohio State University’s football team could have beaten both of Ohio’s professional teams for much of the last decade.

May 5, 2012

HMS Ocean heads up the Thames for Olympic security exercise

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

An interesting set of photos in the Telegraph showing the Royal Navy’s largest ship, helicopter carrier HMS Ocean being brought up the Thames for a security exercise in advance of the London Olympics:


A tight squeeze as the tugs work HMS Ocean through the Thames Barrier


HMS Ocean passes in front of the O2 Arena on her way up the Thames

April 30, 2012

New frontiers in border control bureaucracy

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Travelling by air to the UK is a good way to discover the joys of forming queues. The British national pastime of days gone by has been making a stirring new appearance at British airports. The agency responsible is doing everything it can … to suppress information and forbid photography of the queues of people waiting for hours to get through customs:

Heathrow Airport has been ordered by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to stop handing out to passengers leaflets acknowledging the “very long delays” at immigration, which have become a serious government concern in the runup to the Olympics.

Passengers flying into the airport at the weekend reported having to wait for up to three hours before clearing passport control. But after leaflets apologising for the problem were handed out by BAA, which owns Heathrow, the UKBA warned that they were “inappropriate” and that ministers would take “a very dim view”.

The airport operator was also told to prevent passengers taking pictures in the arrivals hall, according to the Daily Telegraph, which obtained correspondence from Marc Owen, director of UKBA operations at Heathrow. Pictures of lengthy queues have been posted on Twitter by frustrated travellers.

April 2, 2012

The August riots: another study that finds exactly what it expects to find

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Neil Davenport on the most recent report on the causes of the August riots in Britain:

Once again, an independent panel, this time set up by the government, rolls out a rehearsed number of ‘social factors’ to explain away the disturbing events: unemployment and lack of opportunities for young people; ‘forgotten families’; police harassment and a widespread ‘culture of materialism’. The panel, which visited 21 communities and interviewed thousands of people affected by the riots, says its wide-ranging recommendations ‘must be enacted together’ if the risk of further riots is to be reduced. In a conclusion that bizarrely echoes Tony Blair’s time in office, panel chair Darra Singh says that everyone must have a ‘stake in society’. It makes you wonder why ‘stakeholder society’ policies didn’t actually work in the first place.

[. . .]

None of the enquiries have examined the broad cultural changes that have taken place in British society which, more often than not, are institutionalised in English schools and other state agencies. In fact, this is the ‘social context’ that ought to preoccupy researchers, not the handwrung staples of poverty and unemployment. To approach the riots in this way is not to rehearse ‘teachers aren’t strict enough’ platitudes. It is to examine the kind of destructive values that have been passed down from the top of society: namely, the fostering of assertive victimhood whereby nobody is expected to be accountable for their own actions. It really is somebody else’s fault.

What every schoolchild learns from an early age is that both emotional hurts and tick-box disadvantages — from minor medical problems to class/ethnic background — constitute a person’s default status. It is only by placing demands on state providers that these ‘hurts’ are temporarily assuaged. This is what is meant by a culture of entitlement — victim status has to be recognised and then rewarded by state providers. The higher the perceived victim status, the greater the expectation that somebody else must make provisions or allowances (or even an educational maintenance allowance). In this sense, looting from JD Sports becomes justified, even acceptable, because of the expectations that somebody must pay for a looter’s inflated sense of grievance.

Indeed, many of August’s looters rolled out a lexicon of ‘hurts’ in order to justify their destructive, anti-social behaviour. According to this cultural script, social solidarities are entirely alien because young people have been socialised to dwell on their self-esteem above all else. Far from other people or a wider community being a source of support, they are more often seen as a target for all sorts of imaginary grievances. Local shopkeepers and random individuals attacked during the August riots were, in some way, being held responsible for young people’s poverty and lack of employment prospects. As one of the blasé looters put it, ‘we wanted to show the rich that we can do what we want’. If young people have grown up with the belief that they are automatically held back by social disadvantages, often promoted by state agencies themselves, then a local community itself can become a target for retribution.

[. . .]

Once again, another report on last August’s riots is an exercise in advocacy research, whereby the research neatly matches already rehearsed conclusions. The government panel’s recommendations, failing to recognise the profound significance of the riots, follow the line of wishful thinking and delusion pursued by radical commentators. Furthermore, the panel’s instinctive elitism simply echoes the radical left’s own distrust of ordinary people. Institutionalising the claim that most people are naturally incapable and useless is what destroyed informal communities in the first place. As the nannying, hectoring tone of the latest report into the riots shows, what could be more morally debilitating and soul-destroying?

March 9, 2012

Dalrymple: “British police have … become simultaneously bullying and ineffectual, a disastrous combination”

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Theodore Dalrymple on a recent article by British author China Miéville in the New York Times Magazine decrying the cruel, disproportionate sentences handed out to London rioters:

Some figures: in 2011, there were 12,699 knife attacks in London known to the police (up 13.6 percent from the previous year); 58,160 burglaries (up 8.8 percent); and 68,754 street robberies (up 13 percent). The average national detection rate for burglaries is about one in 12, though even this is an overstatement, due to police manipulation of the figures. Approximately 800,000 domestic burglaries took place in Great Britain in 2009; this means that some 67,000 were detected by the police. In that same year, 6,136 people went to prison in Great Britain for burglary (for an average of 17 months each). Considering the 800,000 burglaries annually, a domestic burglary attracts on average four days’ imprisonment: hardly indicative of judicial ferocity, and not much of a deterrent to burglary.

One cannot say often enough that the victims of crime are, like the perpetrators, more likely to be poor than rich. For example, single-parent households in Britain have a more than one-in-20 chance of being burgled in any given year; and since most burglars are recidivists, indeed multiply so, it follows that the class of victim is much larger than the class of perpetrator. Leniency toward criminals is not therefore a form of sympathy for the poor, but a failure to take either their lives or their property seriously. For Miéville to talk of “panicked reaction” in these circumstances is a form of moral exhibitionism. He is showing off in front of his peers.

The notion that the disorder in London (and elsewhere in the country) is a protest against injustice — a thread that runs through Miéville’s article — is both crude and laughable. It is true that the British police have, after years of liberal-inspired reform, become simultaneously bullying and ineffectual, a disastrous combination.

February 28, 2012

Occupy London has become an open-air asylum

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph on the state of the Occupy London protests:

Even though I am an absolutist with it comes to the right to protest, I couldn’t help feeling relieved when a court decided this week that the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral should sling its hook. For what started life as a middle-class shantytown packed with self-righteous haters of the rich — an annoying spectacle, yes, but hardly the end of world — has in recent weeks descended into something far more degenerate. Occupy London is now effectively a holding camp for the mentally ill, a space where the psychologically afflicted and deeply troubled can gather to eat, drink and be un-merry. And to have such a makeshift lunatic asylum on the steps of St Paul’s is not good for London nor for the inhabitants of the camp, who clearly need somewhere better to go.

On the five occasions I have visited Occupy London, I have noticed a steady decline in the calibre of the campers. To begin with, the inhabitants were mostly young, with red cheeks and purple hair, talking utter rubbish, of course, but not unpleasant to look at. Before long, that contingent seemed to disappear, to be replaced by straggly-haired conspiracy theorists banging on about 7/7 and the chemicals in our food. Now the camp has the distinct whiff of rotting food and decaying socks, and its dwellers are all sad-eyed and pathetic, many of them old, confused, and clearly too fond of booze. “GET TAE F**K!” one of them was shouting, at absolutely no one, the last time I was there.

[. . .]

All those commentators who wrote glowing reports about the camp a few months back, who took their organically fed children on day trips to visit it, who slammed anyone who criticised it and said we didn’t understand its “historic momentum” or “strategic function”, are now nowhere to be seen. That’s not surprising. What they giddily described as a turning point in radical politics has turned out to be more like a modern-day Bedlam, where respectable people on their way to work peer with increasingly wide-eyed bemusement at the strange, mumbling folk inside this unhygienic and collapsing institution.

February 19, 2012

Tim Worstall on the dilemma facing the social housing authorities

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:45

I don’t know what the actual situation is in Britain, but here in Ontario the responsibility for public housing is a regional or municipal responsibility. There’s no automatic mechanism for planners in one area to anticipate the need for additional housing, so apartments, townhouses and other subsidized accommodations are informally “swapped” between city, town, and regional governments. Would-be tenants are able to refuse being moved from one municipality to another (if you’re in Oakville, but the offered housing is in Pickering, for example).

I suspect, based on Tim Worstall’s thought experiment here, that the British system does not work quite the same way:

What’s the first thing that rational planner is going to do? Note that there’s a number of people living in London without the means to afford housing in London. And no particular economic reason for living in London either. She’s also going to note that’s there’s great swathes of housing up North which is indeed affordable. And given that there’s no particular economic reason for those in London to be in London why shouldn’t they be on benefits up North in the much cheaper housing?

This will be, after all, greatly to the benefit of society even if a bit tough on the personal liberty side. But then that’s what planning of all these things is about, doing what is best for society, yes?

So you can see the amusement: the Statists, the planners, those who insist that society is more important than the desires of any mere individual, are in something of a bind. The current reforms to the housing market are producing exactly what a rational planner would produce. The poor are sent off to be poor in cheap housing, individual desires be damned.

February 7, 2012

“London is too big and too anarchic to be seriously pasteurised by the games. It’s so big, so filthy, so nasty that it could probably eat twenty Olympiads for breakfast and spit out the Ferroconcrete bones.”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:40

Faye Planer interviews Will Self in Bristol University’s Epigram on his views about the upcoming London Olympic extravaganza:

I hear that you are unenthusiastic about the prospect of the Olympics this summer. In your eyes, what is the greatest folly of this whole affair?
Rather unenthusiastic is putting it waaaaay mildly: I think the Olympics suck dogshit through a straw. People believe they encourage da yoof to take up running, jumping and fainting in coils — but this is nonsense. They’re a boondoggle for politicians and financiers, a further corruption of an already corrupt self-appointed international coterie of Olympian cunts, an excuse for ‘elite’ athletes to fuck each other, snarf steroids and pick up sponsorship deals, and a senseless hitching of infrastructural investment — if there’s any reality to this anyway — to a useless loss-trailing expenditure on starchitectural bollix. The stadia themselves are a folly. The new Westfield is a temple to moribund consumerism — in ten years time they’ll all be cracked and spalled; a Hitlerian mass of post-pomo nonsense.

If the Olympics did not exist, would it be necessary to invent them?
They didn’t exist for thousands of years. The modern Olympics is a fatuous exercise in internationalism through limbering up and then running down to entropy. The modern Olympics have always been a political football — nothing more and nothing less — endlessly traduced and manipulated by the regimes that ‘host’ them. This one is no different, presenting a fine opportunity for the British security state apparatus and its private security firm hangers-on to deploy the mass-suppression and urban paranoiac technologies in the service of export earning. Some peace, some freedom.

[. . .]

‘Really, one may say that the whole Olympic process was a pasteurisation of the city… the microbes disappeared and from a hygienic point of view maybe that was positive, but really what happened is that the variety was destroyed in the process…’ Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said this about the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Do you believe that London is being pasteurised too?
No, I’m quite confident that London is too big and too anarchic to be seriously pasteurised by the games. It’s so big, so filthy, so nasty that it could probably eat twenty Olympiads for breakfast and spit out the Ferroconcrete bones.

H/T to Charles Stross for the link.

February 3, 2012

The end of London’s diesel locomotive plant

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

I’ve updated my earlier post on the labour dispute at London’s EMC plant now that the current owners have announced the closure of the facility.

Update, 5 February: Mike P. Moffatt at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative debunks some of the media coverage of the closure:

After the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, GM Diesel closed their La Grange, Illinois plant and consolidated their production to the London plant, though kept the head office, research, design, and manufacturing of some components in La Grange. EMD London was a direct beneficiary of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade agreement, something I have yet to hear in the media. The domestic locomotive market, by itself, would not have supported the level of production we have seen over the last two decades.

In 2005, GM Diesel sold the Electro-Motive Division (including the GM Diesel plant in London and the head office in La Grange) to a couple of U.S. private equity firms, who re-named it Electro-Motive Diesel. In 2010, those firms sold EMD to Caterpillar.

[. . .]

We need to keep in mind that:

  1. EMD has always been a U.S. corporation.
  2. The intellectual property from research and design, etc. was from the head office in La Grange, Illinois.

So that leaves “know-how” which Cohn mentions in a follow-up paragraph. On Twitter, Colby Cosh asked: “Cohn talks about “know-how” but (a) know-how isn’t IP and (b) Cat doesn’t seem to have much use for the workers who have it, do they?” Caterpillar, however, did send a number of employees from London to their new plant in Muncie, IN, to train newly hired workers. I am Facebook friends with an EMD worker and I remember him objecting loudly to this last fall. But did Caterpillar really buy EMD so that it could obtain the talents of a dozen guys to teach advanced welding techniques?

There are a lot of narratives to this story, many of them unpleasant. A narrative about a U.S. company buying Canadian IP at 15 cents on the dollar does not pass the sniff test, however.

Update the second, 7 February: Andrew Coyne gets his inconvenient, yucky facts in our lovely flag-waving, anti-capitalist nationalistic fantasy:

EMD never received any subsidies from the federal government; certainly not since Caterpillar bought it. Indeed, looking through the hundreds of pages of “grants and contribution” in the Public Accounts, it may be the only company in the country that didn’t. The Harper visit to which Olive refers was to promote a tax break for the purchasers of locomotives, not the manufacturers. The visit occurred in 2008, two years before the Caterpillar purchase.

It’s not clear how the foreign investment laws could have been invoked to cover a purchase of an American company by another American company, or if they could, why this should be the pretext for “demanding job guarantees.” Presumably if it is wrong for a firm to close a plant or lay off workers, it is just as wrong whether it has recently been the object of a foreign takeover bid or not. Perhaps you will say we should bar all companies from closing a plant. Okay: why would they ever open one? If workers, once hired, cannot ever be laid off, why would they ever be hired?

Of course, there’s always Olive’s suggestion of a punitive tariff, through which the cost of keeping jobs in London locomotive plants could be shared by consumers and businesses across the country. (You’re welcome.) This would recreate the system of foreign branch plants that existed in the days before free trade, small factories producing exclusively for the domestic market. Rather than lament at foreigners stealing our jobs and technology, the nationalists could once again lament at being tenants in our own land.

January 29, 2012

Step aside, Ottawa: London may have “Frost Fairs” on the Thames in future

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

The Thames River used to freeze over solidly enough that temporary buildings could be erected on the ice. Northern Europe may be facing those kinds of cold winter temperatures in the future:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

January 26, 2012

The fate of London’s diesel locomotive plant

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

In the Toronto Star, Martin Regg Cohn (who claims he “is not an anti-globalization crusader”) does his level best to put forward a case for massive government intervention in a labour dispute between Caterpillar and the Canadian Auto Workers:

At the old locomotive plant now owned by U.S.-based multinational Caterpillar Inc., the Canadian Auto Workers union is not even on strike. The CAW has been locked out since New Year’s Day because it refused to sign its own death warrant by agreeing to slash wages in half for most workers from $34 an hour to $16.50.

When a powerful multinational negotiates in bad faith, it becomes a story that governments in Queen’s Park and Ottawa can no longer wash their hands of. To put it in language that resonates with Premier Dalton McGuinty: When a bully tries to humiliate people, you can’t just watch in silence.

When high-paying skilled local jobs can be shredded at the whim of a combative multinational giant, it dramatically undermines all the upbeat rhetoric we hear from McGuinty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper about Canada’s global appeal. It sends a signal that Ontario is not so much open for business as it is closed for unions.

We jump directly from Caterpillar’s demand for wage reductions to an assertion that the company is negotiating in bad faith (I guess, from the union’s point of view, anything other than a wage increase is proof). No indication whether the company’s demand is economically justifed — if sales of the plant’s railway locomotives are as bad as the wage offer implies, then the next step will be closing the plant — just straight over to bad-mouthing the company.

And, of course, it’s merely objective reporting to use pejorative descriptors when discussing the eeeeevil multinational firm. Not content merely to malign the company, he then calls on the Premier to support the union to the hilt:

So what can our anti-bullying premier do?

If I were McGuinty, I would ask myself a simple question: What would Bill Davis do?

The former Tory premier of Ontario wasn’t perfect, but he was always plugged in. He took labour seriously, listened closely to business and wooed foreign investors (remember Renault?). He knew how to leverage the power of the premier’s office to stand up for Ontario’s greater interests.

A phone call to Caterpillar’s corporate braintrust would show that Ontario’s premier is no pushover. If that didn’t work, a phone call to Harper — who is still trying to live down the tax breaks he gave the locomotive factory’s former owners a few years ago — might find a receptive ear.

And finally we get to a good point: the foolishness of governments in giving special tax breaks to certain industries or companies. If it’s in the company’s best interests to locate in your jurisdiction, they’ll probably do it. If you have to bribe them with tax breaks, low-interest or interest-free loans, or other special incentives, then once the incentive runs its course, the company has no further requirement to stay in your location.

Update: In the National Post, Kelly McParland has some suggestions for union leaders:

1. A lot of people (the membership figures suggest it’s the vast majority) think unions are concerned solely with their own members and couldn’t give a bird’s turd for anyone or anything else, including other working stiffs, members of other unions, the fortunes of the company they work for or the customers they deal with. When you display a total lack of interest in others, they generally adopt the same attitude towards you.

[. . .]

4. Union politics might consider moving out of the stone age. The world evolves over time, but unions persist in peddling the same trite bromides as if it’s still the dawn of the industrial revolution. The “us against them” mentality; the pretense that all employers exist to exploit workers and can never be trusted; the assumption that every contract must be succeeded by an even richer one no matter the health of the industry, the economy or the company; the fealty to leftwing political parties — all are symptoms of an exhausted, outdated perspective that has barely changed since “modern technology” meant the telephone.

If unions really want to save themselves, they might take a lesson from the market economy. If no one buys what you’re selling, it’s not because they buyers aren’t bright enough. It’s because people see no value in your product.

Update, 3 February: The plant is being closed. Here’s the official announcement:

Progress Rail Services has announced that it will close Electro-Motive Canada’s (EMC) locomotive production operations in London, Ontario.

Assembly of locomotives will be shifted from the London facility to the company’s other assembly plants in North and South America, which will ensure that delivery schedules are not impacted by the closing of the London facility.

All facilities within EMC, EMD and Progress Rail Services must achieve competitive costs, quality and operating flexibility to compete and win in the global marketplace, and expectations at the London plant were no different.

The collective agreement and cost structure of the London operation did not position EMC to be flexible and cost competitive in the global marketplace, placing the plant at a competitive disadvantage. While the company’s final offer addressed those competitive disadvantages, the gulf between the company and the union was too wide to resolve and as such, market conditions dictate that the company take this step.

December 6, 2011

Guardian study finds that August rioters were motivated by Guardian editorials

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Brendan O’Neill on the recent study, carried out by the London School of Economics and the Guardian:

Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it? A four-month Guardian/London School of Economics study into the riots that rocked English cities in August has found that the rioters were pretty much Guardian editorials made flesh. Concerned about government cuts, annoyed by unfair policing, shocked by social inequality and outraged by the MPs’ expenses scandal, it seems the young men and women who looted shops and burnt down bus stops weren’t Thatcher’s children after all — they were Rusbridger’s children, the moral offspring of those moral guardians of chattering-class liberalism.

This is a blatant case of advocacy research, of researchers finding what they wanted to find, or at least desperately hoped to find. For months now, the Guardian has been publishing articles arguing that the rioters were politically motivated, under headlines such as ‘These riots were political’ and with claims such as ‘the looting was highly political’ and the riots were a protest against ‘brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. And now, lo and behold, a Guardian study, Reading the Riots, has discovered that the rioters were indeed ‘rebels with a cause’, with 86 per cent of the 270 rioters interviewed claiming the violence was caused by poverty, 85 per cent arguing that policing was the big issue, and 80 per cent saying they were riled by government policies. Reading this study, we are left to marvel either at the extraordinary perspicacity of Guardian writers, or at their ability to carry out research in such a way that it confirms their own political preconceptions.

This study looks less like a cool-headed, neutral piece of sociology, and more like a semi-conscious piece of political ventriloquism, where rioters have been coaxed to mouth the political beliefs of the middle-class commentariat. This is not to say the Guardian and LSE researchers have been purposely deceitful, inventing evidence to suit a political thesis. Advocacy research is more subtle and less conscious than that. It involves a kind of inexorable pursuit of facts that fit and evidence that helps bolster a pre-existing conviction. So mental-health charities keen to garner greater press coverage always find high levels of mental illness, children’s charities that want to raise awareness about child abuse always find rising levels of child neglect, and now Guardian researchers who want to show that they’re right to fret about Lib-Con policies and outdated policing have found that these are burning issues amongst volatile English yoof, too.

December 5, 2011

Debunking memes: the Gini co-efficient as a spark for rioting

Filed under: Britain, Economics, France, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Theodore Dalrymple shows that the widespread habit of journalists in Britain to attempt to attribute the root cause of August riots to the Gini co-efficient fails the common-sense test:

An August feature story on the riots in Time offered a particularly striking example. The author suggested that to understand the riots, we should start with “something called the Gini co-efficient, a figure used by economists to indicate how equally (or unequally) income is distributed across a population.” In this traditional measure, the article notes, Britain fares worse than almost every other country in the West.

This little passage is interesting for at least two reasons. First is the unthinking assumption that more equality is better; complete equality would presumably be best. Second is that the author apparently did not think carefully about the table of Gini coefficients printed on the very same page and what it implied about his claim. Portugal headed the list as the most unequal of the countries selected, with a 0.36 coefficient. Next followed the U.K. and Italy, both with a 0.34 coefficient. Toward the bottom of the list, one found France, with a 0.29 coefficient, the same as the Netherlands. Now, it is true that journalists are not historians and that, for professional reasons, their time horizons are often limited to the period between the last edition of their publication and the next. Even so, one might have expected a Time reporter to remember that in 2005 — not exactly a historical epoch ago — similar riots swept France, even though its Gini coefficient was already lower than Britain’s. (Having segregated its welfare dependents geographically, though, France saw none of its town or city centers affected by the disorder.)

As it happened, when I read the Time story, I had an old notebook with me. In it, among miscellaneous scribblings, was the following list, referring to the riots in France and made contemporaneously:

    Cities affected 300
    Detained 2,921
    Imprisoned 590
    Burned cars 9,071
    Injured 126
    Dead 1
    Police involved 11,200
    Average number of cars burned per day before riots 98

And all this with a Gini coefficient of only 0.29! How, then, could it have happened? It might also be worth mentioning that the Netherlands, with its relatively virtuous Gini coefficient, is one of the most crime-ridden countries in Western Europe, as is Sweden, with an even lower Gini coefficient.

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