The Absurdity Of Quota-Based Discrimination

 

After just reading an article about Coca-Cola possibly not coming down hard enough on a shameful 'Be less white' element of a training session (assuming this is factual), I was reminded of a headline last year that the BBC is going to spend £100 million of taxpayers' money on increasing diversity on TV. On Facebook at the time, I made a comment that BAME individuals make up nearly 23% of screen contributions, but only 14% of the UK population - and that it's a shame the BBC thinks this is a good use of taxpayers' money, given that BAME people are already more than well represented relative to their ratio of the total population. Amazingly, I was told that that kind of sentiment plays into the hands of the 'white lives matter' brigade. Alas, this is the nature of the beast these days - even a valid statistical observation of a television network's demographic is easily met with accusations that you're not really on the side of BAME folk after all.

I'm going to reiterate two points I regularly make, and then invite you to join me at an intriguing place you might not have considered before. First the reiteration:

Point one
Artificial disadvantage lowers overall quality. I don't care about the skin colour of people making television programmes - I care about equal opportunity to express talent, and I care about quality. And there is no question that quotas lower the quality - in fact, they can't fail to lower it overall, because people are being selected for reasons other than their ability. Talent and competence are two of the best forms of discrimination. Besides, people are much friendlier to discrimination than they let on. Humans tend to discriminate against others based on ethnicity whenever they choose a life partner, because they habitually choose someone who is ethnically similar to them. And when we do choose a life partner, we are literally discriminating against every other person on the planet.

Moreover, it doesn't occur to many people that artificial disadvantage probably isn't actually that much of a good thing for those benefitting from it at the surface level. Ultimately, in the long run, it can't be good for a person to know they have been selected for reasons outside of the criteria for which they have always desired to be selected. Trying to artificially create diversity for diversity's sake almost always leads to sub-optimal outcomes, especially if consumer demand is not driving the thing being consumed.

Point two
We should pretty much always start with the basis that as long as it imposes no unfair cost on anyone else, then everyone should be able to discriminate against everyone else, and everyone else should be able to discriminate against us. And anyone who disagrees with that ought to come up with a pretty good exception to the rule. Moreover, despite what they say, nearly everyone behaves as though they believe in this principle. This is where both the right and left need to take notice. Many on the left need to understand better that most unequal outcomes are not the result of unfair skews in the system; and many on the right need to understand better that equality of opportunity will be easier to attain, and bear more societal fruit, if there are fewer instances of capitalising on unmerited advantage.

I support fair discrimination, but that doesn't make me anti-anybody, because I support your right to fairly discriminate against anyone you want. To make the point even clearer, I'm a writer, but I support your right not to socialise with writers, hire writers or dine with writers - but that obviously doesn't make me anti-writers.

We don't choose our tastes or feelings, and so our actions are good if they satisfy our tastes or feelings and do no unfair harm to anyone else. Under that condition, if Bob doesn't want to date African women, and Sue doesn't want to hire white men, then it is perfectly rational for them to do so. Of course, I'm wholly opposed to harmful or unfair discrimination, not just because it is ethically wrong but because it imposes other externalities on society too. When racist Roy opens a pub and puts up a sign outside saying 'No Muslims' he's announcing that if a Muslim tries to come in for a drink he's going to call the police and ask the taxpayer to subsidise his bigotry (you could also add that the Muslim is making a demand on the taxpayer by trying to enter a pub to which he's disallowed entry, but I think that would be a step too far). Consequently, an optimum society is one in which the law makes no imposition on who Roy can serve, but also where Roy becomes a better person and makes every customer welcome.

Now for the really intriguing point
Suppose I open a theatre and insist on hiring everyone on merit, irrespective of skin colour or ethnicity. If a cast of mine has majority white or majority black representation, then so be it, I’ve hired on merit (to the best of my ability). It sounds like some people are trying to say that I’ve imposed costs on would-be actors by not hiring them based on skin colour or ethnicity. But it's not obvious what costs you think I am actually imposing on them. Besides, if I'm imposing a cost on would-be actors by not hiring them based on merit, are you imposing a cost on them by not opening a theatre? If you're not imposing a cost on would-be actors by failing to open your own theatre, how am I imposing a cost on them by opening a theatre and not hiring them? Under both scenarios they are not getting hired, but at least I'm doing 'something' for would-be actors by opening a theatre.

If not hiring would-be actors constitutes a societal cost, then both of us are equally guilty. If it doesn't impose a cost on society then your objection makes no sense. If there is only one theatre in a town, and that theatre owner is discriminating against people he doesn't hire, then everyone is refusing to hire actors for a performance they want to act in, but only the theatre owner is affording some people the opportunity to act in the theatre.

Also – you’d presumably think it’s ok for an actor to refuse a role in a play because he wanted to discriminate against the theatre, but why then do you think it’s not ok for the theatre to refuse a role for someone on the same grounds? You may think it’s obvious why the two situations are different, but with a little thought you’ll soon find that you can’t easily justify the difference.

As I often say, we've got no chance of making important changes to the world unless we get our own heads sorted out first. In fact, if you are given 25 years to sort your head out and change the world, you should probably spend about 24 of those years sorting your head out, and the final year trying to make large-scale positive changes in the world. It's not easy to come up with a system in your head whereby you have a reliable framework for knowing what you should believe on any number of issues. For example, take discrimination, and think when your intuition says it's ok and when it's not. It's presumably ok for a heterosexual male to discriminate against other people by only marrying one woman. It's ok for a car salesman to discriminate against the guy who can't afford to buy his BMW in favour of a customer who can. And presumably if you're casting for a play, or hiring workers for your firm, it's up to you who you recruit. Some people don't actually think such freedoms should exist, but let's ignore them - no reasoning is likely to get through to them.

I personally think people should be pretty much free to do what they want if they are not imposing any tangible harm on others, so I don't really have many (any?) situations where I think we shouldn't be free to discriminate. If you find you do, what you have to do is take a case where you do think the discrimination is unjustified and compare it to the cases where you don't, and see what you think are the key differences. Are they different in any way that's relevant? If not, they are probably not instances of unfair discrimination.

For example, actors are allowed to discriminate against directors. I'm sure no one disagrees with the proposition that actors should be free to take any role they want. If Robert de Niro had two films to choose between, and he chose to work with Martin Scorsese over Steven Spielberg, no one thinks that's wrong. I'm sure no one has a plausible objection to the idea that actors can chose which directors they work for. And if that's true, it seems plausible ethically to say that Scorcese can choose to cast Robert De Niro over Tom Hanks if he wishes. Actors are different to directors, but are they different in any significant way that undermines the ethical proposition that each can discriminate against the other if they wish? I see no reason why they are. From this we can probably infer that in any competitive industry where competence and talent and skills are primary, it's ok to discriminate fairly.

Some argue that people who have a lot more bargaining power than others are better candidates for having tougher discrimination laws imposed upon them. So tenants deserve more power than landlords, and employees deserve more power than employees, that kind of thing. But I've never been convinced by that line of argument. In a rental arrangement landlords have more at stake than tenants, and employers have more at stake than employees. Employees and tenants need only find another job or apartment, whereas employers might lose their whole business if it becomes insolvent and landlord's their entire property if they default on their mortgage payments. Or consider that Joe the plumber strikes it lucky and ends up dating Michelle Pfeiffer. Joe can't bear to live without her, but Michelle Pfeiffer has many other viable options. Michelle Pfeiffer has significantly more bargaining power than Joe, but few would suggest that she should be forced to stay with him. The argument for justified coercion because of more bargaining power is a highly dubious argument.

In asking the BBC to over-represent, we would be asking them to judge people not on talent or merit, but on skin colour or ethnicity. I remember watching The Apprentice last season where there were at least 7 BAME candidates at the start of The Apprentice as part of the total 16 candidates, which is a 43% BAME representation in a population where 14% of the UK population is BAME. Clearly the BBC is overly-politicised, and loves virtue signalling, but all this showed is that statistically if many of those BAMEs were in there for a diversity box ticking exercise (and statistically it looks like at least 5 of them must have been), then some people are being unfairly discriminated against on the basis of traits that have nothing to do with merit. Now alright, you may say that The Apprentice isn't that important to you in the grand scheme of things, but if you endorse unfairly discriminating against people (in this case non-BAME people) then sooner or later you’ll end up with scenarios that you really do dislike.

Consider this. Suppose you’ve written your best ever novel, and you’ve poured your heart and soul into it, and you’re so pleased with it, but your agent tells you that they are not going to go with it, they are going to go with what you (and her) consider to be an inferior novel because the publisher needs one or two more BAME authors on their books. Tell me truthfully that you could just swallow that with alacrity! The reality is, you’d be outraged from the pit of your stomach, however you reacted outwardly. 

Intuitively I think a good rule of thumb is roughly this; if in a Rawslian-type 'veil of ignorance' scenario we are unwilling to apply a law equally to everyone, then we shouldn't be willing to apply that law to anyone. I'd be surprised if anyone can think of an exception to that. Similarly, granting freedoms to a subset of the population group that you’re not willing to grant to the entire population strikes me as a bad thing. That's why I think individuals should be free to discriminate fairly however they want, but the government should be compelled to treat everyone the same before the law.

Consequently, as everybody agrees we should be free to date who we like or go to any shop we like, it seems reasonable that no one should be forced to hire, serve, or rent a room to someone they don't like. If we always support policies or systems that increase overall utility, then it's virtually certain that any random person selected from the population will be better off than they would be under a system that decreases overall utility.

The Feminists Do Women A Disservice Here - Failing To Understand Why There Are Not More Female CEOs

There has been a lot of hoo-ha in the past couple of days about the reasons leading companies have given for male dominance of boardrooms. Several article writers have gone to town on what they consider pathetic excuses for women's under-representation in the boardroom:

• “I don’t think women fit comfortably into the board environment” 

• “There aren’t that many women with the right credentials and depth of experience to sit on the board - the issues covered are extremely complex”

• “Most women don’t want the hassle or pressure of sitting on a board”

• “Shareholders just aren’t interested in the make-up of the board, so why should we be?”

• “My other board colleagues wouldn’t want to appoint a woman on our board”

• “All the ‘good’ women have already been snapped up”

• “We have one woman already on the board, so we are done - it is someone else’s turn”

• “There aren’t any vacancies at the moment - if there were I would think about appointing a woman”

• “We need to build the pipeline from the bottom - there just aren’t enough senior women in this sector”

Not only are most of the above dismal cop-outs, they fail to do any justice to what's really going on, and why there aren't more women in leading roles in FTSE 100 companies. Previously on here I've been through the reasons why the sex pay gap myth is one of the crassest examples of non-thinking currently going on in the debating sphere (see links at bottom of page) - but the reasons why there are not more women in top jobs in FTSE 100 companies is a bit more subtle, slightly more complex, and actually, in my view, more of a credit to women than the feminists realise.

To try to summarise it in a nutshell: the main reason there are not more women in top jobs is because, on average (and remember, we are always talking about on average here - there are always exceptions and outliers), women have better reasons than men for not wanting to be in those jobs. Those reasons are evolutionary, biological, sociological and cultural - and they are, in many cases, examples of where women have a better grasp of well-being and quality of life than men.

To see why, consider a typical man whose preoccupation is climbing the greasy pole of career success. His life consists of working 70-80 hours a week, under highly competitive and stressful conditions, which often involve ruthlessness and one-upmanship, and a narrow focus on a single pursuit. He may well make it to the top, but at what cost to other areas of his life - family, friends, emotional well-being, kindness, empathy and a generally balanced life?

And we all know what the primary phenomenon is that drives people to the top - the pursuit of status; it's the ultimate peacock's tail. Status-mongering is hard-wired into male evolution - for reproduction and survival. In the modern age, humans have developed a socio-cultural sophistication that enables them to be driven by things other than genetic biological stimulus - but status is here to stay, and probably always will be.

Status doesn't dominate your chances of passing on your genes as it once did in animal hierarchies, but it does play a key part in assortative mating. Because women generally desire socio-economically upwards pursuits in the men they wish to have children with, status is a much more important thing for men than it is for women, which is why men are generally far more competitive than women, and why this plays out in the workplace statistics.

In fact, someone (I forget who, possibly a character in a movie) made an interesting observation whilst standing by the Hudson River looking over at the Manhattan skyline - he said that pretty much the whole thing has been designed, bit by bit, by the driving force of the male pursuit of sex and genetic propagation: that it's one big agglomeration of peacocks' tails.

Men are generally more interested in status, and will regularly invest time and energy in pursuits that are traded off for many of life's other rich tapestries of experience. There is a lot more to this complex subject, from both sides (obviously!!) - but the myopic narrative peddled by feminists that women are so unfairly underrepresented in the workplace, and the blinkered attempts above from representatives of leading companies trying to have a stab at the matter, are both inadequate to the task of explaining this.

With a plot of normal distribution (shaped like a bell curve) the data points tend to be close to the mean - so for example, in human height, most adult humans are between 4ft 5 and 6ft 5. But not everyone is; some people are 6ft 8 or 6ft 9, and they are mostly men. In other words, if you met someone on the street who is 6ft 8, it is overwhelmingly probable that it's going to be a man.

Similarly, if you heard that someone had been arrested for road rage, it is overwhelmingly likely to be a man. The differences between men and women in terms of aggression is not as large as the difference between the number of men and the number of women who are likely to be in prison for a violent crime, because at the furthest extreme end, the majority of the most violent people in society are male.

Like the above examples, you are going to find that, on average, the outliers in terms of individuals pursuing a status-driven career to the top of a FTSE 100 company are mostly men. Women are, on average, less likely to be driven by status (and more power to them for seeing through the superficialities of status-mongering in my view), and are therefore less likely to be in the boardroom.

That may change - and boardrooms may benefit hugely from having far more female representatives - but I doubt it will change that much, because many smart people do not want to climb greasy poles, work 70-80 hour weeks, spend very little time with family and friends, and scale their career so far upwards that they end up sacrificing many of life's other rewarding pleasures. It is very likely the case that more of these smart people are women than men.

A close analogy may be in the school playground, where all the testosterone-filled lumps are trying to court the relatively empty prestige of being a star on the football field, while all the smart kids are sitting on the outskirts devouring calculus, chemistry and Cervantes.

Further reading on the fallacy of the so-called 'unfair' sex pay gap:

The Truth About Sex Pay Differences - Things Aren't As They Are Made Out To Be

Career & Maternity: When The Irresistible Force Meets The Immovable Object



Guess Which UK City Is Twice As Homophobic As The Others...

Here's an interesting statistic, which may also prove to be an interesting test of your intuition. A recent-ish YouGov survey asked UK respondents whether they thought in general that homosexuality is ‘morally wrong’. The results showed that in the majority of regions of the UK the people who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ hovered around the 15% mark. 

Before you click on the link to find the answer, what does your intuition tell you the results were in London? What percentage of good ol' diverse, highly populated, cosmopolitan London responded with the view that homosexuality is ‘morally wrong’? Surely somewhere as diverse as London would return results of about 5-10%, wouldn't you think?

No! It turns out not to be the case: the people in London who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ turned out to be 29%, nearly double what it was in most other regions. Why might the figure be nearly double in London? My guess would be that the reason is the same reason that makes London so different from other regions in the UK - it's the diversity. Diversity, for all its qualities (and they are plentiful) probably also means more diversity of opinions that we don't share or like - including many ethnic, cultural and religious groups that don't share our tolerance, love and respect for homosexual men and women. That seems to me the most likely reason for what is a very interesting finding (see the link here). 

Getting The Discrimination Balance Right

Combating racism is one of the most essential things humans do, and like every case of seeking the common good, it is a work in progress. Sadly as the actions of some minorities after the EU referendum result confirmed, we still have a way to go yet.

But that's not what this blog post is about - pretty much everyone knows what I said above, and everyone worth their salt is all for kicking racism out of society.

No, the purpose of this blog post is to say that when it comes to racism and discrimination, and indeed other forms of supposed unfairness in society, progress doesn't just mean weeding these things out of society, it also means not going so far the other way that we become trepid little mice unable to cope with a world in which a lot of our discrimination is good and necessary (a danger that is starting to materialise in many pockets of society).

Take, for example, something that happened a couple of months ago, when the BBC sought to target supposedly “under-represented” parts of Britain with an internship that white people were not permitted to apply for.

In order to “rectify the imbalance of people who do not recruit black and Asian people”, only black, Asian and non-white ethnic minorities could apply for the BBC internship, despite it emerging later that the corporation is already scoring above what is expected of them in that area of diversity.

The way things are going, there is a real danger that the prejudice and unfair discrimination accusers will swing things round 180 degrees and cry foul against people accused of discrimination for not discriminating. Make sense? If not, here's what I mean.

If we carry on like this, I can envisage a time when there is widespread paranoia that unfair discrimination is occurring whenever there is, say, a TV drama show without a certain number of Muslims and homosexuals, or a university without a certain number of black graduates, or when a police force has more than a 50% proportion of white officers, or when there is a Cabinet consisting of more of one sex than the other.  

With some degree of irony, the unfair discrimination cards that we used to nobly play against genuine injustices are starting to make appearances as faux-discrimination cards played by discriminators against those accused of not discriminating enough.

The antidote to this shift is to realise that most discrimination is actually perfectly fine, and actually to be encouraged, because the majority of the time when we discriminate we do so because we understand the trade off better than our accusers.

Don't get me wrong, where there is still genuine unfair discrimination we should help weed it out. But genuine unfair discrimination doesn't occur half as much as most people think - it is simply the result of people making rational choices, like choosing a Cabinet or a work force based on merit, not on sex or skin colour.

Rational discrimination occurs everywhere, and for good reason. At school in wanting to date girls I fancied, I was discriminating against girls I didn't fancy. But that's perfectly okay. When I go to the pub I want to sit and talk with friends I know, and discriminate against strangers by not joining them at their table. But that's perfectly okay too.

Vegetarians want to discriminate against burger bars by not eating in them; lesbians want to discriminate against heterosexual men by not having sex with them; women usually want to discriminate against employers that run garages by not working for them; economic think tanks want to discriminate against not very bright people by having bright people contribute to their research; and the Congolese social group in my city wants to discriminate against non-Congolese people by only wanting fellow Congolese people to attend - and all of those things are perfectly fine.

Not only are the majority of our life's discriminations fine, but even at times when certain patterns appear to be evident people should first check to see if there are other good reasons for this before making accusations of 'unfair discrimination'.

Or in other words, they should adhere to the wisdom of Chesterton's fence. That is, if you see a fence somewhere that you think is doing no good, don't pull it down until you've first understood why someone built it in the first place. Only when you're sure the fence is serving no beneficial purpose should you pull it down.

The same is true of the many cases where there aren't more of a certain type of person in those roles - instead of assuming a system isn't working fairly, you have to instead consider why it doesn't already work in the way you assume it should (something our Prime Minister Theresa May failed to learn when she was Home Secretary) .

Because the thing is, quite often you'll many of those patterns are not cases of unfair discrimination at all - they are simply a reflection of a wide society made up of individual choices bootstrapped by rational assessments of taste and merit.

The Answer To The So-Called 'Inequality' Problem Is Not More Equality

Today the Wall Street Journal has pointed us to lots of research to show why there is no empirical evidence for Thomas Piketty’s highly flawed inequality theory being correct. Naturally this blog's author doesn't find that in the least bit surprising - I wrote my own critique of Piketty's ideas in 2014, which also came to those same conclusions.

Often people's intentions are noble and their goals are good, but their ideas on how to achieve those things are defected with fantasy. With Piketty's notions of inequality, however, the intentions and goals aren't even that worthwhile either, because we don't much need more equality - what we actually need is more freedom.

One of the most significant cultural memes in our modern society is the egalitarian one that obsesses about making an unequal world artificially more equal. What we should strive to improve more than anything is not equality, it is freedom.

Those who place a higher premium on equality over freedom miss one of the most vital things about being human - that as well as our similarities in terms of human qualities, it is our differences that engender the variety of things that make us prosper. Consequently, if you artificially impede some freedoms for the purposes of greater equality you impede the diversity that drives people's striving for progress.

For it is precisely those different tastes and abilities that give exhibition to the choices we make in creating such a diverse society and a diverse economy. It is because of these vast differences that people co-operate in trade, and it is because of this collective co-operation that people are incentivised to strive for innovation.

Consequently, then, what people striving for greater income equality ought to be striving for is greater opportunity, because it is opportunity that engenders value, and it is value that increases absolute well-being. Life is about ideas, and putting those ideas into practice. This involves a continual trial and error process best enjoyed when freedom enables it.

One of the most oppressive things that can be demanded in society is when people try to make equal, things that are better off unequal. We are equal only to the extent that we are all uniquely different and better for it. The celebration of and striving for optimal diversity is the antidote against the medicine of fabricated equality.

And I say 'optimal diversity' precisely because although we can have too little equality, such as in cases where opportunity is needlessly limited for some groups, we can also have too much diversity, such as in cases where a departure from a desired uniformity is socially and individually damaging (see here and here for more on this).

Have The Pauperised North Been Architects Of Their Own Downfall?

I saw an article today that claimed that nine of the poorest regions in northern Europe are in the UK. Ignoring a bit of dodgy geography attached to the claim, it is certainly true that many of the northern parts of England that used to rely so richly on industrial manufacturing have failed to keep up with pace of the service industry-based economic growth seen in London and much of the South East.

This article piqued my interest because it has to be said that, if the truth be told, some of the people in the north are in no small way architects of their own downfall. Not wholly, of course, but certainly in part, particularly given that the fundamentalism of the hard economic left is so often so strident and anti-progress. I mean, this current crop of Corbynites are the ones who thought that the socialist Ed Miliband was too right wing, which speaks volumes really.

For those of you who don't know, in terms of left and right economics the UK is a pretty divided place. Since the war, and the Clement Atlee socialist government, Britain had been awash with economic hardship and putrid nationalisation projects that were being choked by overly-powerful unions. This went on until the 1979 Thatcher years, when she and her party upset a lot of people by transforming an economically impotent Britain into one of the world's economic superpowers again. It's true that a lot of this comes from, and remains in, London - but power law distributions make this unsurprising - the whole point is that much of Britain is an economic powerhouse once again, and it's largely thanks to Thatcher's terms in office in allowing the free market to bear the fruits it couldn't under a stultified socialistic system.

The economic left have a different picture, but despite the myths, Thatcher didn't destroy our industry. Manufacturing output was actually higher when she left than when she began - and what the left is missing is that although the industries they are constantly talking about (like coal and steel) declined as a proportion of the aggregate economy, other sectors (like service industries) expanded. To capture the point, next time you’re in London – the country’s economic epicentre – have a walk around and see how many sectors are providing manufactured goods compared with service-based goods.

You might also like to note that the exact same thing happened in all the other prosperous economies too - it's just the way the world was changing, and sadly, too many Brits couldn't bring themselves to change with the economic tide - instead foolishly assenting to callow ideas that placed a premium on Britishness - "British jobs for British workers" and all that xenophobic guff.

When steel and coal industries declined across Europe and America, that declension was offset by huge expansion in service industries, all making those countries richer. The UK miners, led by Arthur Scargill (their megalomaniacal, economically illiterate leader) were perhaps most symptomatic of the prudence of the economic right vs. the foolishness of the economic left. The Thatcher government had a strategy to discontinue unprofitable industries - as it should with its responsibility to its taxpayers - because despite emotional attachments up north, this unprofitability couldn't carry on under the pretext of it being British unprofitability (replace 'British' with 'white men' and see how it sounds a lot like racism)

The reality is that due to the changing landscape, Britain's coal industry had been declining long before Thatcher. In fact, it's quite famously known that more coal pits were closed under Wilson's Labour governments than under the Tory Thatcher's ones. The reason is obvious - but also widespread across other advanced economies - we saw not only the rise of cheaper coal abroad, but also the rise of first oil and then gas and later nuclear as less ecologically unfriendly sources of power. With that comes a decline in industries that relied on coal, in favour of industries that relied on oil and gas.

A few misjudged trade unionists would have preferred to have kept subsidising inefficient and less profitable coal mines (and have the taxpayer pay to prop them up), all in name of Britishness, but as well as sounding a lot like racism to me, it certainly sounds illogical and economically parochial.

Alas, I came to the conclusion that many in the north of England - where the majority of these industrial disputes took place - had been orchestrators of their own plight. Many have spent the last 30 years on unemployment benefits, whinging that 'Thatcher has ruined our industry', and they've never got over it. I don't dispute that it was a hard pill for them to swallow, as jobs were lost, families broken up, communities clubs shattered, and so forth - but equally what holds us together is going to have to be much more than industrial nationalism.

In global economies, climates change all the time - and we humans have to adapt to those changes. So when I hear the north of England say they have been left behind, forgotten and marginalised by the much more prosperous south, I feel compelled to say that, actually, their failure to respond to the changing economic climate, and their preference for wallowing in self-pity is surely a significant factor in the bringing about of their own marginalisation.

That was a bit of hard cop, now for a bit of soft cop. The fact is, economic changes are really hard on societies that are set up to not adjust to a changing climate that easily. But what it emphasises most critically is that having poor adjustability and an over-reliance on one speciality is a problem that can go on to bite the society on the bum. Communities that are not well-equipped to enjoin themselves to diversity are going to get caught out eventually in a global economy that dynamically shifts and changes all the time.

It may surprise you to know that it was once forecasted that economic progress in Manhattan was coming to a close because the island had nearly reached its capacity regarding the horses it could contain. If you’re only focusing on quantitative change your narrow vision only has you looking to see where you can fit more horses; whereas if you’re focusing on qualitative change you look to advance beyond horses to industrial machinery, and eventually from industrial machinery to computers. Here's another example; the Great Irish Famine wasn’t just due to unfortunate infestations in potatoes – it was over-reliance on one single crop that severely added to the plight. Whether it is potatoes for food or horses for transportation, it is important to diversify, because diversity leads to increased qualitative change. That's another reason why you can be sure that our technology will continue to progress - we diversify our skills and our imagination by not having an over-reliance on too narrow a range.

What the UK has seen is that from the earliest periods of the Industrial Revolution talented people and money have been gradually gravitating towards the ever-more prosperous south (in fact, the whole process began in Scotland, where the incipient stages of the England-Scotland union, when passed in an act, was really England giving de facto permission to the wealthy elite of Scotland to move south with their money and join London's political establishment).

So although the north created a great proportion of Britain's wealth during the Industrial Revolution, the steadily increased London investment was soon going to make it the financial epicentre of the UK. I don't have any research to hand, nor am I sure if any exists, but if you measured the number of people in England moving from the north to south versus the number moving south to north, I'll bet the former figure is more than double the latter figure.

Not only are power law distributions concentrating a lot of wealth and growth in regional areas of England that are service industry-rich, it's also bound to be the case that an awful lot of talented people from the north are moving south, making it harder for the north to compete with the success of the south.

Alongside that, the other thing that disadvantages communities built on past manufacturing glories is that large-scale manufacturing countries like China, America, Germany, Japan and the ever-emerging nations like South Korea have much more of the global market share of consumable goods than our own industrial regions, which adds to the weight of the proposition that while it has been a tough culture shock for many of England's northern regions, at the heart of their stasis is a failure to keep up with the market changes in a highly evolving and competitive global economy.

The Home Secretary Is Hasty Over Police Diversity

Home Secretary Theresa May has just issued a so-called “wake-up call” to the police about its chronic shortage of black and ethnic minority officers – a failure she claims reduces public confidence in the force.

Alas, this is a nonsense narrative that fails at every basic level. Just because blacks and ethnic minorities are heavily outnumbered by white people in the police force does not mean that there is overt discrimination going on, much less that this supposed imbalance can and should be corrected by any kind of state mandated action. You would think someone pretty foolish if they said that the primary reason that there are so few female garage mechanics or female bricklayers is because women are being discriminated against. It's a short-sighted and hasty thing to presume that imbalances of gender or ethnicity in the workplaces are naturally due to discrimination.

Why might blacks and ethnic minorities be under-represented? Given that if you're an employer discrimination is an illogical thing to do as it harms you as well (as I explained in this blog post), the most obvious answer to the question is that blacks and ethnic minorities are under-represented because they are more difficult to recruit - probably due to a combination of the number that don't want to work in the police force, and the number that are unqualified or ill-equipped to do so.

Those who condemn discrimination and the supposed undermining of civil liberties by arguing that the police should positively discriminate in favour of more black and ethnic minorities are missing the fact that their proposal is simply another kind of discrimination with the signs reversed. Quite simply, you cannot artificially smooth the path for one group (whether it be for more black officers in the police force or more women in Parliament, or whatever) without artificially hindering the path of the rest of the group (or groups) that fall outside of the purview of the group for whom you are trying to positively discriminate. 

I'm all for looking for new ways to encourage more black and ethnic minority people to acquire the skills and enthusiasm to make themselves candidates for the police, if such things are lacking. But no one should be given a job purely because of their ethnicity or skin colour just to fill a quota.

Jobs should be awarded on two things; on merit (skills, experience, personality, enthusiasm) and on the basis that certain groups of people do actually want these jobs. If most women don’t want to be bricklayers, and if most police officers are white due to the pretext of merit, desire, or some other reason, then this needs to be acknowledged before anyone makes an automatic assumption of unfair discrimination and tries to redress a hastily perceived imbalance.

Racism, Nationalism, And Why Britain Has Too Few Working Immigrants

Last night on BBC3 there was a programme called Is Britain Racist? It had all the predictable exhibitions of prejudiced behaviour, plus the reiteration of already quite well know facts about how we harbour subliminal racism based on an evolutionary legacy of groupism (the tendency to think and act as members of a group, and conform to group patterns).

Clearly, although we are evolutionarily primed for groupism, the best way to diminish human prejudices is to integrate, be kind and accepting, and look to mutually understand one another. Mobs that are overtly nationalistic have their priorities the wrong way around - they supplant ordinary acceptance of others in favour of prioritising country, when they should be supplanting passion for country in favour of acceptance of others. I'm talking here not of the divisive topic of immigration, about which I've blogged before and probably will again, but about how to treat people who are in this country.

Those that are overly-natavistic should give up this insidious nationalism: it is an unworthy demi-god that seductively calls for our allegiance by playing on our worst fears and insecurities. It is using 'nation' as a projection of the many ways humans can feel marginalised and hostile towards past issues they've never dealt with - most notably their inferiority complexes. Because you know really, what we attack is that which we hate, and what we hate is that which we fear - it is what Evelyn Waugh eloquently called 'The concealed malice of the underdog'.

All around us we see the United Kingdom becoming less united by the year. We have a Scotland whose citizens are getting more and more enchanted with independence, and surely will soon be breaking away. We have Wales, whose assembly is not independent, but many of whose citizens are enjoying the devolution of powers that will likely grow and grow into eventual independence too (unlike Scotland, however, the majority of people in Wales do not currently want independence, as they know they rely too much on money from central government, and are fully aware that they would be hopelessly poor without it). And lastly, we mustn't forget Northern Ireland - which, while much more peaceful in this present period, is still a hotbed of division and dissension, and is very hard to govern. Even England is experiencing a stratification between north and south, with London and the South East enjoying far more growth than other regions in the country.

To top it all, in this rather Disunited Kingdom, at least in terms of nation states, the speech today from Home Secretary Theresa May hasn't gone down too well due to her stirring up various divisive sentiments in terms of immigration. The reality is something you'll not hear a Tory say, but there is an awful lot of pressure on this country in terms of immigration, not because we have too many working immigrants, but because we actually have too few, coupled with an over-regulated economy that fails to enable market supply infrastructure to keep up with market demand infrastructure.  

The reason we have too few working immigrants is because we are going to keep needing a high immigration of low-skill workers to cope with the supply-side needs of the growth of large businesses, and also because the civil service desperately needs as many people as possible paying taxes in order to sustain the welfare payments to the rapidly increasing number of elderly folk and the welfare payments to the steadily increasing number of young people without the requisite education, literacy and numeracy skills to compete in the current labour market - people who are, I'm sad to say, likely to remain marginalised and forgotten in a subterranean subculture of welfare-dependency to which the government has no realistic antidote, and may never have.

The Truth About Pay Differences Between The Sexes - Things Aren't As They Are Made Out To Be

David Cameron wants to force companies with over 250 employees to disclose sexes pay gaps. He's doing this because he has swallowed the ubiquitous myth that women are systematically unfairly discriminated against in the workplace. 

The reality is, there isn't much of an unfair pay gap between sexes, despite common myths to the contrary - although there used to be, but for good reason. Britain has changed a lot in the past few decades, from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based one. When physical labour was the driving force in the economy, male labour was valued higher, so it was easily understandable why there was a sexes pay gap.  

However, as service-based industry has emerged more prominently, coupled with increased technology that make domestic jobs less time-consuming, and women's lib, the wage gap has narrowed so much that it has equalised. In fact, if you measure just male and females in their 20s and 30s, females earn slightly more. Obviously this tails off in the late 30s and 40s as motherhood becomes the primary driving force in the re-introduction of a wage gap - but it's not to do with discrimination, it is to do with biology and life choices.

An easy way to tell the public that there is a discriminatory sex pay gap is to distort the picture by including the maternity/child-raising years in the overall figures. The pay gap over their careers factors in women leaving work to have children, and taking part-time jobs in motherhood. This skewed reality is a bit like a school publishing pupils' attendance records, including the summer holiday in their statistics, and then claiming pupils are spending lots of weeks not attending school. To get a fair statistic on school attendance you must obviously only include the weeks when pupils are due to be in school. Similarly, to get a proper reflection of sexes pay, you must focus on the comparison when both men and women are pursuing careers with both eyes on the job market. That's why, when this is done, the years between ages 22 to 39 show women earning slightly more than men. From the ONS report:

"Hourly earnings figures reveal that, in April 2014, women working for more than 30 hours a week were actually paid 1.1% more than men in the 22 to 29 age bracket and, for the first time were also paid more in the 30 to 39 age bracket. So women in full-time work aged between 22 and 39 are now, on average, earning 1.1% more than their male counterparts."

It certainly is the case that people's differences do contribute to different decisions having to be made in society that will affect their career and job prospects. But what we mustn't let people get away with is the idea that businesses systematically discriminate unfairly at will. Let me explain why that notion is wrong.

When Minister for Women and Equalities Nicky Morgan says "Businesses need to value diversity in their workforce and pay attention to the role of women in their organisations.” - she is being disingenuous in trying to claim to be on the side of women by painting a slightly false picture of the extent to which businesses do value both sexes equally. For fairly obvious reasons employers would not discriminate against women because it wouldn’t be in their interest to do so.

While there'll never be a completely fair market, nor a perfect solution to the dual desire of motherhood and optimal career pursuits, it's logical that businesses won't discriminate against women for the sake of it because if they do they will lower the pool of quality, and their profits too. Suppose there are two free schools - one set up by Jack and one by Jill - and 40 teachers for hire (20 women and 20 men). Jack is a misogynist and Jill isn't, so Jack discriminates against the women. Who is likely to have the better staff list of teachers? Clearly it's Jill. Jill looked to hire the best staff out of a male & female pool; Jack looked to hire more men, meaning he increased his chances of picking sex over quality. This plays out all through the market. A restaurant with a sign saying "No women" (pretend it's legal) would lose out on half the population's custom, and more once you factor in all the males that would go somewhere else because of it. Unfair discrimination is bad for business, and any half shrewd business person knows this, so would be a fool to discriminate.

There are other wage differentials to note, but they are driven by other factors, namely the differential in abilities and in preferences. Men and women are different in a number of ways - and it's no bad thing that those differences are reflected in market patterns. There are substantially fewer female bricklayers or garage mechanics than there are males, just as there are substantially fewer male nurses and primary school teachers than females. The reasons are primarily down to abilities and in preferences, not systematic discrimination.

The same is true of other work factors - risky work, manual work, driving work, outdoor work, long shifts and unsocial hours - it's not that there are no women in these roles, it is simply that males outnumber them, again due to abilities and preferences. Equally, if you focused on the skills and preferences for, say, social care, bookkeeping, personnel officers and child-care workers you'd see a similar pattern in the other direction, with women outnumbering men in those roles. Naturally, the labour value of all these jobs is dictated by all the above factors and more.

Moreover, generally you'll find two other key reasons why men earn more on average than women do. One is that women tend to be less competitive than men, because they do not have he same biological and socio-cultural needs to be as concerned about status as men do. The other reason is that men are, on average, more likely to put their skills towards more scalable earnings (inventing, engineering, technological advances, etc) - because men are much more geared towards working with things, whereas women are more likely to work with people (as ever, these are all on average, there are always many exceptions, of course).

The upshot is, yes, I grant you, evolution has made females prisoner of their biology in respect of child-bearing - but nevertheless having children does affect women's roles and pay, which is why, as women are having children later, there is no evidential pay gap between women and men in the first two decades of their working lives, but an evident one as women go into their forties, and often work less, or take on lower paid roles for parental flexibility.

Generally, discriminating harms discriminators too - and while some people are arguing that the sex make-up engenders discrimination, the reality is that sex make-up engenders outcomes that in most cases (most, but not all) aren't discriminatory at the root.

Ladder-Climbing Needn't Be A Zero Sum Game

You've probably heard of the term "Keeping up with the Joneses" which is all about living up to the statuses others have attained, or in many cases acquiring a better status than others. Robert Frank, one of the most popular economists in America, has written a book called Choosing the Right Pond in which his central thesis is that ladder-climbing is a zero sum game, because if Tom acquires a better social status than Dick, Dick has acquired a worse social status than Tom, meaning on aggregate there is no gain.

While I agree that being obsessed with prestige is bad for people, to me it's obvious that Robert Frank is wrong (and uncharacteristically off form) in his assumption that ladder-climbing is a zero sum game - it need not be. That is to say, for every win there doesn't have to be a concomitant loss. Tom can acquire a better ladder position than Dick while at the same time seeing Dick acquire a better ladder position than him. The reason why is clear when we see ladder-climbing for what it really ought to be (and often is), not as a world full of people climbing the same ladder, but as a world full of people each with their own ladder and lots of climbing potential. Now, sadly, it is certainly true that people are often overly competitive in trying to obtain prestige - but they are the ones for whom status is an unhealthy thing, because they are more worried about their relative position in a sphere of rivalry and one-upmanship than they are getting to the top of their own ladder of potential.

Once we break away from metaphors and see how this happens in everyday life you'll know exactly what I mean. Suppose we randomly picked seven people from Trafalgar Square this lunchtime - Mary, Hristo, John, Hank, Gabriella, Ahmed and Debra. Each of them values their own skills, talents, interests and achievements, but they also realise that they are in a group in which every member has different skills, talents, interests and achievements, and that no one in the group is particularly worse off because of that.

Hank is a big muscular American doorman. Physically he is the strongest, toughest, and is top of the ladder on machismo. Ahmed is nowhere near as physically tough, but being a theoretical physicist he is top of the ladder when it comes to analytical thinking. Debra isn't as tough as Hank or as analytically smart as Ahmed, but being a teacher she is top of the ladder when it comes motivation, patience and tutelage. Hristo is a painter and decorator, which means he is the expert if you need your living room renovated. Gabriella is a dancer, and is queen in her ballet shoes. John is unemployed, but there are several things at which John excels that the other six do not. No one can touch John on his skateboard, or on the running track. If all seven were having a 400 metre race, John would win hands down.

Everyone in the group has different skills and talents, but here is the other important thing; their individuality means that their skills and talents need not come at the cost of anyone else's skills and talents. Gabriella can be queen of the ballet without having that status in the least bit ruined by the fact that John would trounce her in a race, or that Hristo can artex a ceiling to a higher level.

Clearly, as long as folk are not so terribly insecure that they constantly need validation and reinforcement by being seen as better than others or of a higher social standing, everyone can thrive by being the best that they can be. That is to say, what should matter is doing the best you can do in an absolute sense, not in a sense that's relative to other people's achievements.

You are going to find yourself in many situations where you are top of the ladder in a particular context, but low down on the ladder in other contexts. In one group you'll know the most about history and be looked upon to speak the most wisdom. In another group you'll be the one who can best inspire confidence in people's ability to mentor. In some groups you'll be the best at DIY, in other groups you'd best to delegate these responsibilities to someone better suited.

Here’s the other important thing that stops it becoming a zero sum game. In a group in which literary insight is highly valued, people will value literary insight if you can provide it. But people who don't have any literary interest do not lose any status in the literary circles by being unapprised of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce and Jane Austen. Similarly, people who value having the right 'look' in fashion or sporting prowess or the rarest collection of fine art are going to have kudos in some groups, but their accomplishments will be of little interest to those unaffected by such a milieu, because people outside that milieu wouldn't confer status or prestige on anyone because of fashion, sporting ability or collectable art.

Clearly then, status is not zero sum - there can be multiple winners. Chris wins if he gets to the top of his field in piano playing. But his status imposes no cost on me if I want to get to the top of my field in theological prose. The only people who get despondent about other people's relative success are those who are competing for the same ground - and that's a despondency they can avoid by becoming more rounded people..

Forget All-Women Shortlists, We Need All-Merit Shortlists

Labour MP Austin Mitchell has made a tit of himself recently with some ill-conceived remarks about women in Parliament. However, despite a lot of misjudged waffle he is right about one key thing - that all-women shortlists are un-democratic and pretty much always a bad idea.

On Newsnight feminist Labour MP Stella Creasy took Austin Mitchell to task for his views, reminding him that “Only 23% of MPs are women, barely more than one fifth” despite women making up just over half the population. So what? Less than 1% of garage mechanics are women, but that doesn’t mean women are being discriminated against in that profession, it probably means that very few women want to mess around with oily engines all day. Less than 13% of primary school teachers are men, but that’s also not evidence of discrimination, it is evidence of there being more women candidates for the role of primary school teacher.

Even if it is true that women are under-represented in Parliament, representatives are voted in democratically, which only goes to show that in a democracy more men get voted in than women. Perhaps voters have a greater preference for men MPs than women. Or perhaps not. Either way, you have to decide how much you value democracy, and to what extent you’ll let democracy run its course. Britain and America celebrated the first democratically elected president in Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein. When it turns out he was too sectarian they influenced his un-democratic removal. Some people championed democracy in Palestine - and then they got Hamas, and everyone knows what a disaster that has turned out to be.

More women in Parliament may well be desired - but the problem with artificially advancing one group is that you have to artificially disadvantage other groups in the process. Why should one group, be they men, white people, heterosexual people, or whoever, be discriminated against purely on grounds that they happen to belong to the wrong group on a particular issue? Promoting MPs just because they happen to belong to a group called ‘women’ is not only unfair on the other group called ‘men’ it rather deindividuates the individuals in question too. The process of demanding high calibre MPs while at the same time artificially increasing the probability of low calibre MPs by swerving merit-based selection is not something we should champion.

Don’t get me wrong, it may well still be the case that society still has too much of a bias against women, and that there is a serious redress needed – but that redress must come about by changing attitudes, increasing openness and opportunity, and extension of choice where it is lacking – not by affirmative actions that discriminate unjustly against the group(s) not in favour. Merit-based societies are the best way to go, precisely because they are unbound by group preferences. Imagine the absurdity of trying to artificially improve the education results of under-performing working class students by changing the meaning of grades instead of encouraging their academic prowess. From now on if you go to a private school you need A-level As to get into a top university, whereas if you go to a State school grade Cs will do. Just as such a system would undermine scholastic gradation, so too do all-women shortlists undermine the qualities perceived by a democratic body (the electorate) to be worthy of selection as an MP candidate.

As black student Clarence Thomas once pointed out, “As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it.” MPs that are in Parliament because they are women have every reason to feel the same.

Finally, the other reason why all-women shortlists should be discouraged is because a democratic process like our voting system (it isn't exactly wholly democratic, but it's close) is the only power the citizens of the UK have against their elected MPs. Democratic accountability - and how I wish there were more - means feedback from political performances. Remove the ability of the electorate to vote in or vote out individuals based on their skills, merit, views and performance alone and you unleash discord through the gradual disempowerment of the voter. As we've seen in previous blog posts (here and here), diversity has to be considered with all its merits and demerits factored in.   

 

* Photo courtesy of bbc.co.uk

Foreign Footballers Are Like Foreign Foods – They Benefit Us At Home

England captain Steven Gerrard thinks reducing the number of foreign players in the Premier League will make the league better, and enhance the quality of our international team. Rio Ferdinand thinks the same. Greg Dyke is right on board with this, claiming that having a maximum of two non-European Union players will bolster home talent. I had a few choice words to say about it in this blog here.

Now it emerges this week that the Adam Smith Institute has unsurprisingly found what we suspected all along, that:

1) There is no link between native play time in the Premier League and performance of English national team

2) There is no link between amount of minutes played by Englishmen ten years ago and performance today

3) There is no strong link between foreign players and Premier League quality

I have a few more comments to make on this issue. If people involved in football understood more about economics they would know even without doing much research that diversity into the market improves the market. Anywhere you look, you find that competition improves goods and services, in terms of quality, prices, and choices available. A country that trades globally performs better than a country that only trades within its own borders. A university that invites students from all over the world does better than one that constrains entry to one country. The examples are endless. But here’s the key point in analogy to football – extending the quality through diversity doesn’t just improve the system overall, it improves the home grown participants too.

Let’s take food as an analogy that explains why it’s the same for football. A few decades ago in England there was almost no foreign cuisine. If you walked into the city centre your choices would be limited to British food; roast dinners, fish and chips, pies, fry-ups, bread, pastries and stewed meats and broths. In the modern day, take a walk into a busy city in the UK and you’ll find your dining options are much more plentiful. You could enjoy all those British options, but in addition your choices extend to a meal from places as diverse as China, India, Spain, Italy, France, America, Bangladesh, Australia, Japan, Greece, Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, and if you are in a very cosmopolitan city, African and the Caribbean too. 

If you are a provider of British cuisine you currently have to compete against all of the aforementioned nationalities. The couple who would have had a Sunday roast decades ago now could have a Mexican fajita or a Greek lamb moussaka for their Sunday lunch. The chaps who used to leave the pub and get fish & chips on the way home could now acquire any number of takeaways – pizza, Indian, Chinese, kebab or McDonald’s, to name but a few. A pub or restaurant that serves a mediocre Sunday roast, and a fish and chip shop that serves horrible fish and chips, will lose custom to their foreign counterparts, or to other providers of better English cuisine.

That’s why more foreign food is good for British food too. The importing of foreign cuisine puts intense pressure on the quality of British cuisine, and makes it better. The same goes for football players. 30 or 40 years ago UK players pretty much made up the entire league’s quota of players. If you were a good English player you had a fair chance of being picked for your club because your competition would have been only other players from the UK. Nowadays, a good quality English player has to compete with talented players from the rest of Europe and South America, all looking to earn their living playing in (usually) England, Spain or Italy.

Just as with cuisine, having foreign players in the English league improves both the quality of the league and the quality of the performers, including British players. In recent times, and just taking into account Englishmen, it takes players as good as the likes of Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, David Beckham, Ashley Cole, Gary Neville and Alan Shearer to make it in teams predominated by foreigners. Not only are they all world class players who did a lot to contribute to the successes of their clubs, their talent would have been enhanced by being in an environment in which they competing for places alongside world class foreign players. If they’d have been competing only against other UK players I’m certain that neither they, nor the clubs for whom they play(ed), would have had anything like the same talent or success.

England has done poorly at international level (since 1966) not because we lacked good players, but because other teams had better players. As good as Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry and Ashley Cole were for their clubs week-in week-out, it’s just simply the case that due to a mixture of being outperformed, and perhaps lacking a bit of luck, other nations (like Spain, Brazil, France, Germany and Italy) had technically better players, and did better in the international competitions. Besides, apart from one or two disastrous campaigns, we haven’t been a million miles short of another trophy, as those who can remember Italia 90 and Euro 96 could testify. Plus, we only lost on penalties in several of the other tournaments (France 98, Portugal 04, Germany 06, Poland/Ukraine 2012). Apart from this World Cup just gone, we’ve had good enough players to excite the fans’ hopes and expectations, even if they’ve soon turned to disappointment. 

But one thing’s for sure, as the Adam Smith Institute’s research has shown us, reducing foreign players will not make all this better, and turn us into world-beaters like we were in 1966 – it will diminish the quality of the overall English League, and it will enable us to produce fewer high quality English players for our international team.

* Photo courtesty of skysports.com