On Two Types Of Fairness

Do you think women should always be paid the same as men for doing the same job, or can you think of any conditions under which one or the other should be paid more? Your answer to this question is based on how you perceive fairness? Let's explore this further.

There are usually two kinds of perception of fairness, which we'll call Fairness A and Fairness B. Fairness A says if workers are treated equally while at the same time benefiting from their endeavours then we should support a flat tax rate for all (say 25%). That means that Tom who earns £100,000 per year and Dick who earns £30,000 per year each pays the same rate of tax, but Tom pays more due to having higher earnings.

Fairness B says that it's fair to treat people unequally to try to bring about a fairer equalisation overall. That means that Tom who earns £100,000 a year and in absolute terms already pays more tax than Dick on £30,000 per year also pays a higher rate of tax than Dick, because it is seen as a good thing that high earners, although not often willing to help out voluntarily, do instead have the compassion to accept or embrace the kind of taxation that redistributes the top-end money to those with less.

Isn’t our tax system like that?

Yes, currently it is. Fairness A is often referred to as flat taxation and Fairness B is often referred to as progressive taxation. Those on the left tend to prefer progressive tax - but it is hard to be consistently progressive because people's ideas of fairness are inconsistent. That is to say, people are clumsy, and they tend to cherry pick between Fairness A and Fairness B while believing they are sticking firmly to either A or B. If you asked them whether women should always be paid the same as men for doing the same job, they'd probably say yes. But then that can go against their progressive ethos, because there are conditions under which unequal pay for men and women could be progressive (and, in fact, this once was the case).

For example, a married man with a non-working wife and children would find it harder to live than a single, childless woman doing the same job. In fact, it used to be thought to be justified to pay a man more than a woman on those grounds. Given that once upon a time most men were working breadwinners and most women were stay-at-home-housewives, it was thought to make sense to pay men more, as that extra money also benefitted the wife and children. Whether you think that's good depends on how you view the situation of a single, childless woman getting paid the same as a married man with a non-working wife and children. Most people now are proponents of the “equal pay for equal work” maxim, whereas one hundred years ago those people would have been in the minority.

The question, then, for proponents of Fairness B is why they'd support richer people paying a greater rate of tax but not support the same method of equalisation when it comes to single women being better off than their male colleague who's married with three children?

One good response might be that although we’ve been selectively a la carte over the years, we’ve done so for good reason, because it’s important to adapt to changing landscapes. Now that more women are working women, the ‘equal pay for equal work’ maxim makes the previous male-dominated sensibility seem rather outmoded. 

Another good response is that tax policies are largely based on buying votes. Creating a tax system that hits the minority hardest and benefits the majority at their cost is seen as a good way to buy votes, which is what governments base their tax systems on. Here's a simple illustration. Imagine you are governor of an island with a population of 150, and you want to obtain votes for re-election in a democracy. Out of the population, 100 of those 150 earn £25,000 per year and the other 50 earn £100,000 per year. Your rival governor candidate wants everyone to be free to spend their own money, and you want all the money to be pooled into a state pot and shared out evenly among the 150 people.

Under your opponent's system two thirds get to spend £25,000 and one third gets to spend £100,000. Under your rule those £25,000 earners who make up the two thirds get to have a share of the £100,000 earned by the minority group. Under your system everyone in the two thirds group is £25,000 better off and everyone in the one third group is £50,000 worse off (for those still counting, each of the population has £50,000 to spend). My prediction is that on Election Day your opponent will obtain one third of the votes and you'll obtain two thirds.

Before universal suffrage, the primary voters were men who earned money, so it was best for the government to adopt a flat rate tax policy. When universal suffrage came in, things changed, because now there were a lot more votes to buy, so it made sense to appeal to the majority (the low and medium earners) against the minority (the high earners) . A political party that promised to tax the wealthiest people at a higher rate and distribute it to the poorer people would gain plenty of support, so their policies were tactical. 

This is what we find in the modern age in the UK. In the UK the median income is lower than the average income, meaning most people earn less than the UK’s average wage. This presents a tactical no-brainer for political parties; endorse progressive taxation because then if you tax the wealthiest more than the poorest you bestow gifts on the majority of the people – which, for most people, basically amounts to voting for your own gifts.

This all sounds nice; surely voting for things that you like is a positive thing, and surely a nation in which the majority benefits from the government’s beneficence is a good thing too, right?

It depends how you look at it. If you like efficiency then no, it’s not great, because it is a recipe for profligacy. The reason being; if you buy something that’s worth less than it costs, you’ll find lots of wasteful spending. And if you spend other people’s money you’ll spend it less wisely than if you spend your own. Free markets are efficient because the product or service price from a supplier won’t usually be less than its production costs, and it won’t usually be more than the consumer is willing to pay for it.

In progressive tax systems things change. Most people reading this Blog will contribute far less than what would be their average share of a government’s spending policy, which means their incentive to see prudence and efficiency is diminished. Consider this illustration: Imagine you and I are at a large banquet with 98 other people, where the richest few are going to pick up the vast majority of the bill, and what’s left will be split between the rest of us. If everyone decides to have an extra bottle of wine per person and a supplementary box of chocolates, the proportion of the wine and chocolates costs with regards the overall bill will be less for you and I than the value of the wine and chocolates.

So even if we’d ordinarily not be willing to pay for the extra wine and chocolates, we won’t mind having it because the cost for us will be significantly less. What’s worse, there are bound to be lots of stuffed diners who didn’t really want the wine and chocolates who would not care too much because the majority of the expense is being taken care of by the richest few. This is what’s happening in real life with our politics.

Fantasy Stories About Tax

Here we have another characteristically dodgy article from Duncan Weldon in The Guardian, who foolishly believes that the way to sort out the public sector crises of unaffordability is to throw more and more money at them (I argued here that that is the precise opposite of what we need). Like giving more chips and ice cream to a morbidly obese child, pouring more money into crisis-ridden services is only going to conceal the deeper rooted problems, and will consequently make things worse in the end. This is a point that has been made on here repeatedly in recent times.

What I haven't mentioned quite so recently is the other big problem seen throughout articles like the one above - a misunderstanding of who tax actually affects and in what way. Take, for example, the call for higher corporation tax on the basis that by taxing big corporations more there will be more to redistribute to struggling families. It's a simple idea, but like many simple ideas, it is simply wrong.

The main problem is that the definition is factually inaccurate, because corporations don't actually pay tax - only individuals pay tax. The cost of corporation tax is primarily borne by customers (with increased prices of goods or services) or employees (with decreased wages) to avoid being borne by shareholders (through lower dividends). Corporations pay tax only in the sense that the cheque or debit is written in the name of the company. If the cost of taxes ultimately falls on individuals in the form of higher prices of consumption and lower wages (or in some cases increased unemployment) then a tax policy that tries to hurt corporations is simply a tax policy that harms the people the lefties are trying to help.

Abolishing corporation tax and taxing at the level of shareholder dividends and high-end consumption at an increased rate, coupled with a reduction in the top rate of income tax, would do more to boost the UK economy than any of the flimsy policies most MPs proffer. But because the abolition of corporation tax and top rate reductions are about as attractive as a fart in a space suit to most of the electorate, no political party is brave enough to implement them.

Another thing not often realised is that the cost of tax to an individual is greater than the sum of money paid to the IRS in 1s and 0s. To see why, suppose that the demand for highly skilled workers like doctors, surgeons, IT directors and financial advisers is very inelastic. If taxes on high skilled jobs are high, it will reduce numbers of doctors, surgeons, IT directors and financial advisers, which will mean that consumers pay the price through higher fees for those services.

Where the demand is inelastic, high taxes on such workers reduce the number of suitable people willing to train for those jobs, with the result being that customers in need of their services bid up their wages at a cost to their own pocket. In other words, the cost of the tax is a transfer from those that pay the tax to those that consume the services of those in the high skilled industry.

A similar issue arises with the minimum wage, where the state-enforced increased cost to employers is a cost that is passed on to consumers with higher prices or fewer jobs. Further, PAYE taxes (that's income tax and national insurance) are a tax on labour, which of course means that you get less than the optimum amount of it. Whether PAYE taxes are paid by the employer (before he pays wages) or by the employee (when he receives wages) doesn't matter much - they are essentially the same tax on labour.

The place where the ultimate burden of tax falls is largely contingent on supply and demand's elasticity. If the supply of labour is elastic then that means prospective employees won't be particularly sensitive to wage levels, thereby placing the burden on employees. If on the other hand employers have to increase wages to hire good workers then the tax burden falls on the consumers of what those workers produce.

Income taxes interfere in the market of trade by diminishing value in society too. This happens because income tax means there are fewer transactions, as exchanges that would otherwise benefit both parties now do not take place. Suppose I am willing to pay no more than £11 per hour to have some work done, and I have some workmen who are willing to do the work for £10 per hour. That being the case the transaction should take place and both buyer and seller will be happy with a £10 an hour hourly rate.

But once the government imposes 20% income tax, things change, because now the most the workmen can earn from me in net pay is £8 per hour, which means they'd be unwilling to do the job for me. In order to satisfy the workmen's earning needs, the 20% income tax means that the workmen have to charge me £12.50 an hour to clear £10 an hour. What then transpires is that either the work doesn't get done because I'd rather not spend that much money, or else I end up doing it myself and making a much less good job of it.

The upshot of all this is that tax is not some kind of magic money tree that can be obtained without negative consequences. People who wish to tax us out of crises usually miss three vitally important things:

1) Tax something and you usually get less of that thing, which in many cases means the nation is worse off by the reduction.

2) Tax something to bestow benefits to one group of people and you usually find that what you give to them in one hand you take it out of their other hand a short time after.

3) Tax something and you also end up hurting other groups you have usually totally forgotten about.

Don't Campaign Against Tax Havens: They Are Good For Us

My favourite blog posts are the ones where I take a common viewpoint held by the majority of people and explain why it is a myth. Today it is the turn of tax havens. Thanks to faulty headline-grabbing propaganda, like the latest offering from The Guardian's Richard Murphy (he's the guy behind Corbynomics), most people think tax havens are outrageous places in which tens of billions of pounds are being stored offshore, denying UK citizens valuable tax revenue that could be used on public services like schools, health care and roads. Nice idea. But like many nice ideas, it veers far from the truth.

First off, so what of the complaint that if the money stays in the private sector in tax havens then UK citizens are being robbed of vital tax revenue? To answer this, consider if the money stays in the private sector in a tax haven, who else benefits from that apart from the person with the money? In the first place, the money is invested, which generates plenty of jobs and lots of economic growth. And in the second place, what is less obviously true is that if a UK Billionaire keeps £500 million in a tax haven then all the time he's not spending it he makes everyone else in the UK better off in terms of more resources and lower prices. This is because money earned but not spent is like conferring a gift to the UK taxpayers.

Moreover, it's important to remember that the primary contribution high earners make to society is not in the taxes they pay, it is in the goods and services they produce. Most of these big corporations make small profit margins on each unit sold - they just sell lots of units, which means they are creating an awful lot of value to consumers.

When it comes to tax havens, what is also being missed by a lot of people is that tax havens actually make us better off in another way, in that they provide vital competition to tax rates in the UK. A popular view from the left is that because of tax havens governments have to increase our taxes to make up for all the tax they are not getting from money stored in places like the Cayman Islands. In actual fact, the opposite is true - tax havens keep our UK taxes lower not higher.

To see why, suppose there is just one quite expensive Bakery in town (call it Bakery A). Along comes another Bakery in competition (Bakery B), offering townsfolk lower prices for bread. The very worst thing that Bakery A could do in response would be to raise its prices even more. Their best response would be to try to out-compete Bakery B for custom. This is the nature of competition, and how it lowers prices and improves efficiency.

Similarly, tax havens are like Bakery B - their more competitive tax rates place competitive pressures on governments that might be tempted to tax us highly. Competition for prices occurs with tax just as it does with bread, laptops and cars. Governments must be competitive with their tax rates, otherwise more and more money will be stored in places with lower tax rates. Tax competition is a key driver of economic growth in the world, as this incentivises politicians to keep taxes on savings and investments low. When tax rates are excessive, there is less economic growth. Tax havens provide the necessary competition to militate against this happening - they are not the bogey that many will have you believe.

Instead of calling for politicians to tackle the grave injustices of tax havens, campaigners should be calling for a more fruitful tax systems here, based on lower rates, reduced complexity and bureaucracy and increased market freedom.

When Jack Thinks He Knows Jill Better Than Jill

In 1998, inspired by watching a baseball game, the economist Don Boudreaux wrote a short essay entitled Much More Than Meets the Eye. It's a neat essay and well worth sharing (I've reprinted the whole thing below) for the way Boudreaux uses a sporting analogy to illustrate the widespread presumption of over-simplicity in the economy.

That is, just as the skill and dexterity combined with lots of practice goes into the prowess of playing baseball, similarly society and the economy appear to be a lot simpler and easier to organise than they really are. Because of this, third party politicians operate under the delusion that they know people's wants and needs better than the individuals themselves, and can govern their lives better than they can.

I have to admit, ever since being a young lad and first getting into those academic subjects like economics that would titillate and enhance the mind ever since, our sluggishness in evolving beyond this state of stultifying dependency has struck me as strange. While I understand the human need to help others, I remain perturbed by how, in a Jack and Jill scenario, we let so many Jacks dictate to us Jills what our preferences are and how much we should value things.

It remains utterly peculiar to me how almost everyone loves the idea that Jack knows enough to forcibly prohibit Jill from selling her labour for lower than the rate that Jack (with only a tiny fraction of all the facts) establishes is best for Jill. It remains utterly peculiar to me how almost everyone loves the idea that Jack knows Jill's perceived trade off in the pleasure of eating chocolate versus the prospect of being a few grams heavier as a result.

The same applies to Jill's wine, beer, cigarettes, number of hours she can work, whether she is allowed to charge the market rate for renting out her apartment in London, and the extent to which supply, demand and consumer choice ought to be factored in to getting a train, obtaining a university degree, and so forth (there are still many people who support nationalisation of railways and the scrapping of tuition fees).

I do sense that market-friendly thinking is on the rise, and with the mass-sharing of ideas thanks to the global online connectivity, and with hopefully enough people wanting to reap the benefits of critical thinking, it would be nice to see this trend continuing. For now though, there's still quite a way to go. 

Here's the short essay…

Much More Than Meets the Eye

Last October I watched a few telecasts of the Major League baseball playoffs. I noticed the Atlanta Braves’s all-star pitcher Greg Maddux and asked myself: “What makes this guy so special?”

I studied his pitching motion. “It looks like something I could do with a bit of practice. Why am I not making millions of dollars pitching in the Major Leagues?”

Of course, I know that I could never hurl a ball with Maddux’s combination of speed and accuracy—even if I could mimic very accurately the outward manifestations of his expert pitching style. Every single pitch delivered by Maddux is the result of countless precise muscle movements, only a tiny fraction of which are visible. In short, it is impossible really to observe how Greg Maddux pitches. All we can observe are a few rough external movements—how high he raises his leg, how far back he cocks his throwing arm, and so on. If skilled pitching indeed involved mastery of nothing more than the external movements every fan sees, then the world would be so awash with skilled pitchers that Greg Maddux would have to work two jobs to earn enough money to feed his family.

Maddux’s unusual expertise is invisible. This expertise is his rare knowledge of how to coordinate the tens of thousands of sequential minute muscle movements necessary to get the ball over the plate at lightning speed. Not only can no observer ever see the complex coordination of indescribably exact muscle movements in Maddux’s feet, legs, back, shoulders, arms, hands, and fingers, but Maddux himself could never hope to articulate to even the most perceptive listener just what he does.

In fact, we can never really see, or learn by words, how any pitcher pitches. We see only the surface phenomena—the tip of the iceberg. To watch a big-league pitcher pitch is to risk being misled into thinking that we see how to pitch. The actual pitching process is vastly more complicated than anything that can be observed, measured, recorded, communicated, or mimicked.

In this way, the market is like adroit pitching: everyone observes the surface phenomena but no one ever sees the underlying mechanism—invisible in its entirety—that gets the job done. Not even the most astute economist, entrepreneur, or financial analyst ever sees more than a sliver of the vast and intricate invisible workings of the market process that daily transforms raw materials and human creativity into billions of consumer goods and services.

Leonard Read explained what he called the “white magic” of the market process in his justly praised article “I, Pencil.” No one knows how to make an ordinary pencil; no one can ever know how to make a pencil. And yet pencils are produced in such huge quantities that they are virtually free for the taking. We have pencils not because some one person planned from the beginning the cutting of cedar trees, the mining of graphite, alumina, and bauxite, the extraction of petroleum and clay, or the organization of transportation to get supplies to pencil factories and pencils to retailers. When you contemplate the enormousness of all the tasks that are required to make a single pencil, you understand that no one can know how to do more than a tiny fraction of these tasks.

We have pencils (along with indoor plumbing, electric lighting, microprocessors, disposable diapers, camcorders, concert halls, . . . ) only because for each of the countless tasks required for the production and distribution of each good there are a few people who specialize in knowing how to perform these tasks. But no one knows—or can know—how to perform all of the tasks required to produce even the most commonplace of goods. The free market works as well as it does because, when property rights are respected and fully transferrable, the resulting prices tell each of the producers at the innumerable different production “sites” just what (and how much) to produce and with what particular combination of resources.

For example, if the supply of crude oil falls, the resulting higher price will prompt manufacturers of paint to produce less petroleum-based paints and more linseed-oil or water-based paint. The resulting higher price of petroleum-based paints will prompt pencil manufacturers to paint fewer of their pencils with petroleum-based paints and more of their pencils with paints made of substances other than petroleum. As F. A. Hayek taught, the pencil manufacturer need never know why the price of petroleum-based paint rose; all that is required for this manufacturer to act appropriately is for him to conserve on his use of petroleum-based paint. The higher price of such paint achieves this goal.

Every hour of every day millions upon millions of specialists around the world adjust their plans based upon prevailing prices in light of their own unique knowledge of their specialties. Each of these adjustments, in turn, spawns further price changes that cause yet others to adjust their plans. This great web of mutual and continual adjustments allows the free market to deliver the goods (both literally and figuratively).

But this web, though we know it exists, is invisible. We see only its surface phenomena—goods on supermarket shelves, physicians’ offices filled with magnificent diagnostic equipment, beer trucks making their daily rounds. No one ever sees the immense expanse of human cooperation across space and time—or the vision and gumption of entrepreneurs, or the highly specialized skills of workers—all of which are necessary if we are to enjoy even the most mundane of modern goods and services.

People who would plan an economy, or even regulate an industry, commit the cardinal sin against sound economics: believing that they can consciously improve that which they cannot hope to know. Just as it is utterly ridiculous for me to imagine that I can learn to pitch merely by studying videotapes of Greg Maddux, it is equally ridiculous for politicians or bureaucrats to imagine that they can improve upon the free market with knowledge only of the tiny part they are able to observe. Such conceit is toxic for a free society.

Donald J. Boudreaux

Brexit Ought To Mean Leaving The Customs Union

In case you’ve forgotten, I wrote an article back in December explaining why Brexit must involve leaving the customs union. More recently Ryan Bourne at CapX adds weight to this by alluding to the shocking 12,651 different taxes associated with Common External Tariff (CET), and how the EU is internally trade liberating but outwardly protectionist, as UK businesses outside the EU could face two-way tariffs if they import and export simultaneously.

As we all know, after leaving the EU, the UK will be able to set its own trade deals in keeping with WTO rules. Given that the pain of tariffs is entirely self-inflicted – rather like ramming a broom handle through the spokes of your bike as you’re riding it – the sensible post-Brexit policy for Philip Hammond and Theresa May will be to abolish tariffs altogether and allow manufacturing industries to import more cheaply from anywhere in the world. For as Ryan Bourne points out in the article – a fact that is utterly pain-inducing:

“The CET, coupled with non-tariff barriers imposed by the EU, has resulted in agricultural and manufactured goods prices being around 20 per cent above world prices.”

This should tell you two things. Firstly, as I’ve often remarked on here - that people in the agricultural industry in the developing world are being screwed over here, unable to compete with the EU’s protectionist racket. And secondly, we consumers are being screwed over too because we are paying more than the market value for our goods. Because in case you’ve forgotten, consumption is the primary benefit of trade.

Remember, it’s not Steve’s Steel that pays the tariffs to export, it’s the customers of Steve’s Steel that pay when it is imported. Apparently the EU buys 44% of our exports, whereas we buy just 7% of theirs, which means they tax themselves a lot more than we tax ourselves. The alternatives to exporting to the EU are exporting to non-EU countries or not exporting at all and increasing our home-grown consumption – both of which are more sensible than taxing ourselves - and the EU countries would be wise to adopt the same approach. The outcome – tariff-free trade for both parties, and mutual benefits for both importers and exporters. It’s a no-brainer really. 

How Numbers Can Easily Mislead

I see a lot of headline-grabbing warnings in the media about how activity x, y or z is a huge danger to a, b or c. They bandy figures around like if you do x you'll be 80% more likely to get this type of cancer, or y increases the risk of a heart attack in men by 70%, or z makes a more than 5 degree temperature more likely by 75%.

When stated like that, activities x, y and z can quite easily cause alarm - and they often do, whether it's how many cups of tea you drink a day, how often you have a fried breakfast, how many cars are on the road or whether you smoke in a house with children - someone has got something to say about it and some stats to throw at it.

But those figures mean very little unless you know the base probabilities to begin with. For example, suppose drinking an extra two cups of tea a day (from, say, 4 to 6 cups) increases the probability of your getting prostate cancer by 40%. On first inspection it may sound advisable to stick to the 4 cups of tea a day.

But suppose drinking 4 cups of tea a day only makes your chance of getting prostate cancer 15% - a 40% increase in probability from 4 cups a day to 6 cups a day only adds another 6% to your chance, which is still only a 21% chance. You may well feel that all those extra cups of tea over your lifetime is worth a 6% increase in probability. However, if you just saw the headline "2 extra cups of tea increases the chance of prostate cancer by a whopping 40%" then taken at face value it may put you off tea for life.

We routinely hear claims of the kind that eating two rashers of bacon a day raises the risk of bowel cancer by 18%. But without a base rate (how common is bowel cancer?) this information is not very useful. As it happens, in the UK, bowel cancer affects six out of 100 people; so a bacon-rich diet would cause one additional case of bowel cancer per 100 people.

Here's another example. Suppose 40 million of the UK population ticks a yes or no box to say whether they trust the media, and then the media tries to clean up its act. Next year there is a repeat poll and the results show an 18% increase in people who now trust the media. At first glance that sounds like it could be quite a lot of people changing their mind - after all, 18% of 40 million is 7.2 million people.

But, of course, that's totally the wrong way to think about it, because we need to know the base rate - that is, the number of people who trusted the media in the first year. Apparently the actual figure is that only 6 out of every 100 people say they trust the media, so an 18% increase the year after is only an extra 1 person in every 100 now trusting the media.

Numbers are misleading - they can shock in large quantities, but that often skews the real picture. When a few years ago Vince Cable projected that our joining the Euro would increase our GDP by a few billion pounds, lots of Liberal Democrats got excited, and many pressed for us to join.

What should have been obvious is that that GDP figure is spread over the entire population of Britain, and doesn't add up to much at an individual level (for example, 4 billion divided by 63 million works out at just over £60 each). Would you want to lose the pound sterling for an extra sixty quid in your pocket? (that was then, of course - now almost every Brit is glad we didn't touch the Euro with a barge pole).

Yet another example. Imagine that there is a new illness discovered, colloquially called 'MXDA', the symptoms of which are swollen hands and occasionally swollen feet (with neither causing the other, and either can occur independently of the other). With MXDA swollen hands occur in 99/100 people diagnosed with it. Swollen feet occur in only 1/100 people diagnosed with it. Consider this question: which of the two following statements is most probable:

A) George contracted MXDA and had swollen feet

B) George contracted MXDA and had swollen feet and swollen hands

The vast majority of people answer B, even though the answer is obviously A. It's fairly evident that even though George has swollen feet, there is still a 1 in 100 chance that he does not have swollen hands, and given that the two probabilities are independent, it is impossible that B is more probable than A. Belief to the contrary is known in philosophy as the 'conjunction fallacy'.

Understanding base rates, probabilities and logical thinking can help us in everyday life decisions too. Take insuring your household products (a subject I once blogged about here) Using similar logic to the above thinking, then in terms of probability when it comes to insurance of household products the cards are stacked in the favour of the insurer not the insured. It should be fairly evident why: insurers must cover the cost of pay outs and the administration costs to sell insurance, so insurance must be a winning hand for the insurer overall (ditto casino owners, bookmakers, amusement arcade owners, and so on - the fact that they are in business at their customers' expense tells us all we need to know).

Should someone who has spent £20,000 on a conservatory spend an additional £30 to insure against it being damaged by the weather? The obvious answer seems like yes, but it depends on the 'base rate' - the odds of the conservatory being damaged by the weather. If the odds of it being damaged are 1000/1 he'll be £10 down on the deal. Maybe it's still worth it, but what about £3,000 insurance against a 1000/1 chance that a £2 million conservatory will be damaged? It's the same as before in terms of odds and ratio, but our man may think an extra £3000 could be better spent elsewhere.

One final point, when it comes to perceived rationality things aren't always as they seem - sometimes it's important to think a bit further outside the box. For example, generally it is thought that people who understand probability won't buy a lottery ticket* because they know the vanishingly small chance of winning the jackpot pretty much makes any lottery ticket purchase tantamount to a waste of money.

That might be true if those gambling odds were all there is to the purchase, but there are other factors that might make a ticket purchase worthwhile, just as there are other reasons why going for a night out at the casino is not necessarily irrational despite the probability being in the casino owner's favour. In buying a lottery ticket you might also be buying the dream and the excitement, which may well be worth the value, particularly if you enjoy the whole TV show that goes with the lottery experience. And in case you're wondering, I don't buy a lottery ticket, I'm not an idiot! Haha! Just kidding!  

* I remember reading about the high number of lottery winners who squander their fortune, some of whom even go bankrupt within a few years. It could be that the paradox of lottery players is that if they are willing to spend a few pounds each week on lottery tickets in the first place they are not likely to be the kind of person who optimises their spending commensurate with their budget. Therefore, one would expect that a high number of lottery winners had proclivities for profligacy. "Proclivities for profligacy" - That's one hell of a statement.

On The Philosophy Of Art & Morality

In this paper, I will consider supposedly subjective things like taste and opinion and look to challenge long-standing views about their subjectivity - instead attempting to show why they can be thought of as being inextricably related to objectivity.

 

To read the full paper, click on this link.

 

Hope it's informative and in some way enjoyable too!

Free Movement Of People Does Not Equal A Level Playing Field

In the air at the moment are grave concerns about EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU, and whether both groups will get to securely live where they want to. To me, the problem smacks of politicians having too much interference in people's liberties. With increased liberty comes a reduction in problems concerning free movement of people.

A policy that enforces compulsory free movement of people also mandates an open borders policy, which most certainly does not necessarily mean freedom if the policy impinges on the freedoms of the indigenous population, particularly if it affects their economic infrastructure.

As with everything, a market approach to border control and movement of people has to factor in all the costs as well as benefits, and to all groups too. I'm going to assume that readers will have already worked out the various permutations of who benefits and who has costs imposed upon them.

For that reason, I'll assume you can see the obvious corollary, which is that there would be far fewer problems attached to freedom of movement if so much of a nation's infrastructure was not tied up in politics and taxpayer-funded state spending. A nation that has schools, hospitals, social care and welfare paid for by taxpayers cannot very easily endorse a politically-mandated complete free movement of people, because of the burden it can place on those taxpayer funded services (not to mention problems surrounding social and cultural integration).

That is to say, even a market approach to movement of people has to, for the time being, be consistent with a level of border control, and the protection of its citizens against those that damage cultures by not contributing to its economy, or make the society more divisive, fractionated and vulnerable (with immigration from Islamic countries being the obvious case in point).

The best way to protect the liberties of the people contributing to a nation's economy while also protecting the liberties of people wishing to work wherever they wish is to have free movement of labour but not have complete free movement of people (note: I am not talking here about situations involving refugees and asylum seekers - that is a subject beyond the scope of my intention here).

As long as people are free to work (and retire, of course) in any country they wish, nations avoid almost all of the costs of migration and enjoy almost all of the benefits. They have less chance of suffering from labour shortages, and wage inflation, and inflexible labour markets - and they enjoy the numerous additional benefits, which I documented quite comprehensively here.

The problem with having complete free movement of people disconnected from their ability to work is that in a bloc like the EU with severe wage differentials there is a strong pressure for labour migration that has a knock-on negative effect of the citizens of the wealthiest countries. If all countries in the EU were of a similar economic standard in terms of wealth and jobs there wouldn't be so much of a problem.

But a quick Google search tells me that a Hungarian worker migrating to the UK could earn in one year here what would take him about four years in Hungary. For perfectly understandable reasons, the economic incentives for people in Eastern Europe to seek employment in countries such as the UK, Germany and France is far greater than the other way around. Consequently, then, unless everyone who migrates is guaranteed a job, there will be a disproportionate migration strain on countries like the UK, Germany and France.

Because of this, a more prudent solution would be to tie labour to free movement rights. Rather than having border controls based on a woolly perception of what the nations possibly wants, it would be better if they were based on what the nation definitely needs. I was reading in Forbes that in late 2013, an estimated 13.5% of points-tested immigrants who had arrived in Australia earlier that year were unemployed, whereas just 1% of immigrants who arrived by being sponsored by a company were unemployed.

 

Clearly, businesses could be much better than politicians at overseeing a successful migration policy. And as for the matter of the security of EU citizens already working here, the government would be absolutely mad to jeopardise their status, and they jolly well know it.

We Seem To Be Confused About This One...

There is nobody more confused in mainstream media at the moment than Paul Mason - a man so bad at economic social commentary that he doesn't even attempt the verbal adroitness required to conceal it. The latest target of his peculiar anti-growth agenda (and there are plenty) was the complaint about the so-called 'absurd' amounts of money millionaire chief executives make running their companies compared with the people that buy their products and use their services. He also gave his usual rant about how the economy is benefiting a few at the top at the expense of the rest of the population. The image above is designed for confused people like Paul Mason.

Alas, the sentiment the wine glasses image evokes is ubiquitously believed to be true - in particular it's a popular complaint from the left, but it rather skews the reality of what's going on. I will illustrate the point by talking about supermarkets. The next time you're feeling disgruntled at the profits of the average supermarket compared with the real income of the average person, I want you to consider just how much better off we consumers are because of supermarkets - so much so, in fact, that we do better out of this than any of the supermarket fat cats.

I was reading in Forbes recently that families are around £400 a year better off because of the supermarket price war triggered by the rise of the discount supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl, thanks to which the competition has driven down food prices at places like Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons. So it's not simply that shoppers get more for their money in discount supermarkets, they benefit right across the board from competition full stop.

I'm asking you to consider that the supermarket fat cats get a few million quid for their roles, but families get £400 each! Hang on, I hear you say, £400 is nothing compared with a few million quid. True, but given that there are around 27 million families/households in the country, that's £400 x 27 million benefits (which is £10.8 billion pounds of gain cross-nationally). Moreover, £10.8 billion is an annual benefit (give or take a few pounds) for consumers, in addition to - and this is also important - the consumer surplus they receive from all the goods consumed.

On the other hand, the supermarket gains are part of a whole range of capital gains that resulted from years of investment (purchasing the land, building the store, paying solicitors fees, government fees, etc), and the concomitant capital sums required to keep the business going to the level it is now, and apply economic duress to competing firms' prices as they do their bit in society to displace less efficient businesses.

Not only is there no injustice in the pay of the executives, what we're seeing quite clearly is that their influence in the world of retail competition is benefiting consumers in the UK to the tune of billions of pounds. The above image has got it all wrong; what really happens is that as the top glass gets larger it doesn't just fill the top glass - it fills all the other glasses too. And if you're unsure quite who is possibly overpaid and who isn't, check out this Blog post here.