On The Myth That You Can't See Evolution Happening

 

A strange assertion from evolution-deniers is that the theory of evolution is questionable because "It has never been seen to be occurring". It's a strange assertion because it isn't in the least bit true. Imagine teaching a child to tell the time by showing him how long a second is, how seconds convert to minutes, how minutes convert to hours, how hours convert to days, how days convert to weeks, and so on.  As long as he had enough multiplication data he wouldn’t be unapprised of what a year is like, nor a decade, nor a century, nor millennia.

Evolution is a bit like that - once we have the data that explains how it works, we don't need to live for thousands of years to see evolution happening in individual species. Evolution in the simplest observation would be changes in allele frequencies in a population over time. An allele is one of two or more alternative forms of a gene that may occur on a chromosome, affecting the expression of a particular trait. If we are looking for the simplest evidence that evolution occurs, then our observing bacteria is enough to piece together parts of a jigsaw - it gives us evidence of changes in the genes and gene frequencies in populations.  Bacteria are an effective model because they have both huge populations and incredibly fast life cycles, and as such one can observe quite easily the changes in the frequency of any one allele in a set of genes.

Imagine a huge colony of bacteria with a compound in the substrate; those that can tolerate the compound probably will survive and those that cannot probably will die.  The ones that survive will do so because of a natural variation within the population, and this allele will yield dominance in the colony due to the negative selection against other alleles on that loci.  That is evolution at work - the demonstrable observation of a colony of bacteria and change in the allele frequencies of a specific gene coding for a product through changing generations. This manifests itself with clear observations of mutation and natural selection, from which we can see evolution at work in organisms.

Here's a good real life example. In Japan we have something called "the nylon bug" which arose from a strain of bacterium. These bacteria have evolved a completely new gene for the digestion of nylon. This gene, called nylonase, allows these bacteria to live where there is otherwise no food. This capacity occurred due to a single-step mutation that survived because it improved the fitness of the bacteria possessing the mutation. The acquisition of that function trait was so successful that it has given rise to an entire species of bacteria.  

Evolution is full of examples of similar kinds of mutation and natural selection that have played out in populations. There are types of radiotrophic fungi that have evolved to withstand the highly radioactive interior of the Chernobyl reactor. We have a similar example in the UK, where there are piles of ore outside old lead mines. Lead is toxic to snails, but within the last one hundred years or so, local snails have evolved a mechanism to live in lead-rich areas by incorporating the lead into their shells. 

From this information alone we can see evolution at work, just as a young boy can see linear time at work by looking at the clock on his mantelpiece. We can piece together an epistemological jigsaw and use componential analysis to work out that evolution is occurring in every living organism and has been for billions of years.

Why Robots Won't Make Most Of Us Unemployed

Two articles came to my attention today; one in The Daily Mail Fail forewarning of robots bringing an end to half of today's jobs by 2025, and one in The Guardian lamenting an apparent decrease in social mobility. I’ve put them both together in a blog post because the error of reasoning that underlies their contentions is more or less the same in both cases – failure to understand the elasticity of future changes.

Let’s start with the Mail’s fear of enhanced technology bringing an end to half of today's jobs by 2025. It’s certainly true that augmentations in technology will mean an end to many roles currently undertaken by humans (one need only think of all the jobs we used to do that are now being done by machines). But that doesn’t necessarily mean what the doomsayers believe it will mean – you see, as history shows quite clearly, humans have the capacity, imagination and skill to do other things.

Imagine if you were having this conversation with a journalist at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and he told you how fearful he was that these new farming, printing and transportation machines would bring a gradual end to humans’ ability to work. You'd simply have to tell him that a lot changed after the Industrial Revolution, and that those changes saw more people on the planet than ever before, and more jobs than ever before. The key reason why there probably is nothing to worry about is that what constitutes ‘work’ (where work means earning a living) changes with growing societies and increasing technological advancements.

In the early 19th century you wouldn’t have been able to imagine how people could earn a living, say, making films or television programs, doing stand up comedy, providing complex domestic litigation, designing cars, driving taxis, flying planes, building speedboats, producing Kindles, playing football, working at a bowling alley, advertising on websites, fixing telephone lines or analysing DNA or quantum mechanics.

The same is true of this generation – the future ‘work’ that lies ahead is currently bound by technological limitations and unawareness of the activities that are currently not jobs but will be one day. As technology increases and those robots do things we used to do, we go on to do things we never used to do. In other words, we lose jobs thanks to technology (and make our lives a little easier in the process) and we create jobs thanks to ingenuity. That the Mail (and it turns out, The Guardian and The Telegraph) have been so short-sighted in their panic is poor on their part.

I now turn to The Guardian's take on the apparent decrease in social mobility. Dr John Goldthorpe, collaborator in the analysis, said:

“For the first time in a long time, we have got a generation coming through education and into the jobs market whose chances of social advancement are not better than their parents, they are worse.”

In illustrative terms, a similar thing is happening to the above, except the effects are being seen here in the labour market. That is to say, as job-types differ, we see different flows in social mobility too. Once upon a time, owning lots of land was the key to having the most social mobility. Now, it is not so important. There is a decrease in social mobility in some quarters of society, but they are offset by increases in social mobility in other areas of the labour market.

Moreover, let us not forget another important fact that was omitted in the article - that general prosperity and well-being are about more than just earnings and career prospects. A proper analysis must factor in all sorts of other pertinent things like improvements in technology, services, scientific capabilities, access to knowledge, health and medicine, worldwide communication, and so forth, that give this generation so many huge advantages that their parents and grandparents never had.

All this does, though, lead me on to what I think is the most important issue related to the above – that we have a generation of young people for whom upward social mobility may be like a passing cloud they can never catch up with. The spectres highlighted in the articles above are not so much a worry for the reasons the writers claimed – they are a worry because there are a large number of young people who lack the basic literacy, numeracy, social awareness, family support, mental health, hope and aspiration to be a force in the job market, or in many cases, get a foot on the ladder at all.

Social mobility, like natural selection in biological evolution, is a strong genetic factor in human progression. People at a young age look to climb the social ladder, increasing their skills and earnings along the way - which means that people with better abilities are generally (not always, but often) in higher positions.

Thanks to what were at the time up and coming advancements, like stream powered cotton mills, coal mining, increased agricultural machinery and major increases in the production of metals, textiles, and many other manufactured goods, there were thousands of job opportunities emerging for people at the incipient stages of the Industrial Revolution - creating a new middle class and transferring lots of wealth from the richer faction of society down to those now taking part in industry. As this continued, 19th century social mobility rose fairly consistently throughout all the UK population, as opportunity to work begat further opportunities to work. While it was far from all rosy, there were the embryonic foundations for what is now a very prosperous modern Britain. Similar developments are occurring throughout the world in countries that are currently as poor as Britain was a century or so ago.

There is currently a generation of young disenfranchised people that may not have the kind of leg-up that their 19th century counterparts had. Yes, it's true that in terms of quality of life and access to things, the current crop have it astronomically better than those before them - but a labour market that continually manages to replace more menial human tasks with machine capability may well struggle to find jobs for many of today and tomorrow's youth who lack the basic literacy, numeracy, social awareness, family support, mental health, hope and aspiration to climb the ladder. And if that is the case - it is there that the State will have to show its mettle and give them much more of a helping hand than is currently the case.

 

Current Politics Briefly Explained With Poker Analogy



There's trouble at t'mill in Ed Miliband's Labour camp, with pressure from some of his party members for him to stand down. Of course, most of us know he's not Prime Minister material, but I find these disgruntled Labour party members' behaviour quite peculiar, given that Ed Miliband is perhaps the best magician in politics right now: he's managed to make his party favourite for the next election while simultaneously having the worst policies in modern Labour Party history (I'll leave it up to you whether you want to include Clement Atlee's socialist party as modern history).

In terms of policies and political credibility, the current political landscape is roughly along the lines of this poker hand analogy. UKIP has about the equivalent of Jack high; The Liberal Democrats have a pair, as do The Green Party; Labour has two pair; The Conservatives have an eight-high straight, and The Libertarian Party has a full house.

Unfortunately, with the current backdrop we live in a nation in which many don't understand the rules of poker. There are an emerging number of hardcore Brits who think high cards trump all other hands; many neo-socialists and Gaia demagogues who think poker is about acquiring pairs; many who over-inflate straights, and a great many who haven't got to grips with the true value of a full house.

Alas, there isn’t a Royal Flush party (I doubt any bunch of humans could create one) – but if there were ever to be a party that would be roughly equivalent to having a four of a kind hand, it would be a party that understands all of the following. That….

Capitalism and science are the primary vehicles for improving people's prosperity, well-being and living standards all over the world.

Heavy regulation is bad for the economy, as it usually hurts the people the policies intend to protect.

Price controls create scarcity; they do not help those struggling to pay their bills.

Small business subsidies are a crass interference in the market of supply and demand.

The minimum wage creates unemployment, hikes up prices and places an unfair burden on employers of low-skilled workers.

Market forces shield workers from discrimination far more than governments do.

The banking industry suffered because it was too heavily regulated, not because it was left 'unfettered'.

Chancellors don't really ever balance the budget or induce growth.

Tax cuts are not what cause deficits.

In the arms race between green governmental policies and greener scientific and technological capabilities, the latter is almost sure to win out.

Inefficiency, waste and poor management are predictable features of public sector, nationalised and government-owned services.

Having a 'trade deficit' does not mean that the country is poorer because of it.

Protecting British businesses over foreign ones hurts other British businesses as well as foreigners.

Buying cheaper products from abroad is better for our country's people, not worse.

Protectionism, import tariffs and farm subsidies help a privileged few, but they make everyone else poorer.

Without interest income there'd be virtually no investment at all.

Big governments create too many hidden costs and only relatively few superficial benefits in the free market.

If Only They'd Get The Message About The 'Living Wage' Fallacy

Oh ah, finally the ill-conceived ‘living wage’ pressures being applied on businesses have brought about the outcome people like me keep banging on about – redundancy and unemployment. After coming under intense pressure to pay their workers a ‘living wage’, Ritzy cinema finally relented – an action which amounted to a reduction of about 20 staff members.

I just hope all the misinformed people who keep going on about a living wage are very pleased with themselves. Might it be too much to hope for that they could just realise that the more they apply this ‘living wage’ pressure, the more we’ll see of this kind of employee reduction?

Sadly, it’s not the first time I’ve had to talk about this minimum/living wage fallacy:

“As well as unfairly loading the burden on firms that employ low earners, it also encroaches on low end business, it reduces job availability, and it often causes inflation of prices as firms try to recoup their losses on increased wages. A minimum wage does two further things. It shifts capital from employers in an unstable competitive market to low paid workers, and it induces some employers to let their staff go because they cannot afford the wages. If you’re getting £7 per hour and only bringing £6 per hour worth of benefits to your company, you’ll likely find yourself on the dole. If you are a lower paid man or woman going from here to there in different jobs, you will find less work available with every rise in the minimum wage – and the higher the rate the more unemployment. This might amount to a road block for young, unskilled workers and the unemployed – which is why tax credits are a more effective method because they target those who have children or high level benefits, and need high wages to make it worth their while signing off benefits, but who don’t have the skills or experience to command that kind of salary. “

Why is such a simple thing so difficult to grasp for those on the economic left? If prices (that’s goods, services and wages) are artificially set higher than their natural profitability or productivity, the costs will have to be offset elsewhere, either by increased prices for customers or, as is the case here, a reduction in staff. I’m sad to say that I think the only explanation for this continued fallacy is that a great many supporters of the living wage are not interested in what’s best for low paid workers, they are only interested in self-congratulation and moral posturing. That is to say, in seeming to support the underdogs they don’t mind hurting them as long as there are enough credulous people out there conferring praise on them.

We see a similar thing going on with trees and paper. Some people claim to care about preservation of trees. Such people stridently champion paper recycling as the best way to preserve our forests. The reality is, if they really cared about trees they should be against paper recycling, not for it. It is not hard to find out that paper is cheap and that recycling is worse for trees and for consumption. Trees are farmed for economic reasons too, and in commercial terms they are planted for future sales. To give you a compelling analogy, does anybody think that if we recycled chicken breasts there'd be more chickens in the world? Of course not. It's the same with trees. People who are for paper recycling share this commonality with people for the ‘living wage’ – they are either outrageously misinformed, or they are not interested in the number of trees in the world and the number of low-skilled people in work, only in moral posturing. 

What makes me so sure of this? Easy, it’s the fact that they have been told time and time again that there is a better way to stand up for the underdogs – a way that boosts their income but doesn’t jeopardise their employment - yet they continue to ignore it. All the government has to do to help low earners is take them out of tax and national insurance – thus making their wage more like a living wage, but not jeopardising employment levels or penalising employers of low-skilled workers.

I hope that, in my lifetime, politicians and social commentators begin to get this simple message (illustrated well in the cartoon below) – if you artificially remove the lower rungs on the ladder, you make it difficult (often impossible) for people to climb it, or in some cases, get on it at all.

On Being Offended

Consider these 4 statements, and which ones are good positions to hold:

1) Everyone has a right to be offended

2) Everyone has a right not to be offended

3) No one has a right to be offended

4) No one has a right not to be offended

I think statement 4 is a strong 'yes' - 'no one has a right not to be offended', because there is no right that protects you from hearing something that offends you. Things are bound to crop up that will offend, because the honest pursuit of facts and truths makes that inevitable.

Given the foregoing, the statement 'everyone has a right to be offended' (statement 1) has concomitance with statement 4 'no one has a right not to be offended' - as both involve the environment of free expression, frankness, and probability of being challenged or affronted.

This leaves statements 2 and 3. Some people advocate the principles of statement 2 - 'everyone has a right not to be offended' - but as a viewpoint I think it is manifestly unhelpful, as such a right would be to insist on being quarantined from any contra-views that might affront you. Similarly I can't even envisage a condition under which 'some people have a right not to be offended' is ever going to be useful to anyone. As for statement 3 'no one has a right to be offended' - that is also one to reject if we agree that free expression, frankness, and being challenged are qualities bound up in our having a right to be offended and no right not to be offended.

Brand Buffoonery

From what I can see from a brief perusal, Russell Brand really is an incompetent buffoon whenever he pontificates about economics and politics. His misunderstandings of the market are beyond ludicrous. I don't know (and have no interest) in what his comedy is like (or however it is he makes his living), but his political and economic ramblings would be genuinely hilarious were they not so apparently influential among half-witted enthusiasts who seem to be craving the Brand brand. It's also unsurprising to find that Brand’s so-called ‘revolution’ has the support of fellow half-witted commentators like Johann Hari and Owen Jones. These are people who, like Brand, get it wrong just about every time they open their confused little mouths. They are like 14 year old Trotskyites awaiting the mental epiphany that most teens experience before they hit adulthood.

Whatever this 'revolution' is that Brand is trying to propagate, it's a revolution based on a peculiar misunderstanding of what's actually happening in the world. Brand’s revolution (hardly an original one) is what he refers to as:

“A socialist egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth, heavy taxation of corporations and massive responsibilities for energy companies exploiting the environment.”

He also thinks profit stinks, telling us that:

“David Cameron says profit isn't a dirty word, well I say profit is a filthy word.  I think the very concept of profit should be very much reduced because wherever there is profit there is also deficit. This system currently doesn't address these ideas.”

Oh dear oh dear – what a mess. I’ll leave the environment part because I’m going to do a series on green issues when I get time, and in previous blogs I’ve addressed the fallacy of heavy taxation of corporations and the misleading notions surrounding massive redistributions of wealth. What I want to do here is correct this self-proclaimed revolutionary’s misapprehension about the ‘evil’ nature of profits.

Here’s the reality. Try to picture all the voluntary transactions going on in the world today. The entirety of all market transactions is producing mass amounts of societal value. We know all those transactions produce societal value for one simple reason. The people who parted with their money to transfer some of their cash towards a profit for the sellers or providers did so because they thought that the goods or services being sold were worth more than the money they parted with. Similarly the vast majority of workers in the world do so because the alternatives are less desirable. Profit, far from being a filthy thing, is exhibition of huge societal benefits across the world. Profits give exhibition to value in the same way that losses give exhibition to lack of value.

It’s true that some profits are excessive – but that doesn’t make profit filthy, it means something else. If a business is making a huge profit it means there is room for competition to come in and enter the market. Where there is a lack of competition it is usually because of poor governmental systems – either a corrupt government (like in many African countries) or a government that regulates too heavily. You’ll have to ignore the irony that Russell Brand, Owen Jones, and their kind want a world with more government regulation, not less. You could also be kind to Brand and overlook the irony that it is thanks to profit that Brand was able to make his money in the first place. But make no mistake about it; free trade and competition are the principal things that engender economic prosperity – and where they are being unhelpfully stifled or retarded by exogenous forces, human prosperity is being stifled and retarded too.

Another notion of Brand’s revolution is the assertion that “Capitalist, consumer culture inures us to unfairness,”. Even leaving aside the fact that evidence of human psychology shows the contrary (and that in places where capitalism is not so prominent the results of the same experiment showed people to be ‘more’ selfish not less), Brand speaks the very opposite of the truth here. In most cases, a free market of voluntary transactions proves to be terrifically efficient at diminishing or eliminating unfairness. Consumers are alert to the practices of businesses to which they part with their money – they will penalise poor quality (be it goods, services, cleanliness, prices, treatment of workers, and so forth) and this puts selection pressure on businesses to up their game. In a free market of mutually voluntary transactions, fairness, customer concern, employee rights, and good general business practice make up the foundations on which a capitalist society function.

The '85 Richest People' Fallacy

Forbes tries to shock us with the news (from an Oxfam report) that The 85 Richest People In The World Have As Much Wealth As The 3.5 Billion Poorest. It’s the sort of fact that can very easily elicit cries of ‘global injustice’ and calls for greater equality in the world. The reality, though, is very different.

All this talk of 'making the world more equal' may come with noble intentions and genuine concern for the poorest people on the planet, but unfortunately the philosophy and economics that bootstraps it is mistaken. Consequently, these mistakes lead to a plethora of bad ideas and injudicious policy proposals that only hurt the people they are trying to help. Contrary to a lot of leftist propaganda, many of us want the world to be more equal, we just realise that redistributionist polices implemented by the State are much less successful than free trade (and the concomitant necessities like rule of law, property rights and a stable government that protects its citizens).

This isn't just an elaborate libertarian theory; it is empirically demonstrated by observing the progression explosion of the past 200 years and the increased real income per head that has occurred in every country that has seen the positive effects of free trade for its citizens. Yes, the rich become richer, and in some cases the wealth gap increases, but this is not really relevant - what's relevant is everyone's absolute gains because of free trade - and the most significant shifts in absolute gains are seen in the poorest people becoming less poor. Anyone who claims to care about the well-being of the worst off in society should care about what's making their absolute standard of living better, not how they compare to the richest people in the world.

The best that can be done to help the world’s poorest is to open up trade and development opportunities – this is exactly what happened to all the countries that were once impoverished and now prosperous. What's so amazing (as I touch on here) is that nothing in the entire several hundred thousand year human history has done for the material prosperity and life expectancy of the human race what capitalism and science have done in the past 200 years. Blaming capitalism for the remaining poverty and hardship in the world is like trying to throttle a goose that has already laid plenty of golden eggs, and still has plenty more still to lay.

To prove the point, consider how easily misled people are by the fact that the 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest. The way Oxfam arrived at this fact is adding up the total wealth that was attributed to the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population (which amounted to $1.7 trillion), and compared it to the Forbes rich list, counting the aggregate wealth of the top billionaires until it matched $1.7 trillion (which turned out to take them down to number 85).

Alas, although the analysis does show that the 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest, it doesn’t really tell us anything meaningful or change-inducing. Here’s why. Suppose the redistributionists got their way and were able to steal the wealth of the 85 richest people and distribute it evenly amongst the world’s poorest 3.5 billion people. Each of them would get a mere $485. Better than a smack in the eye, you might insist, but the trouble is, nothing sustainable would have been achieved by this mass distribution. What about next year or the year after? And what use would the $485 be to those in war-torn countries, without a stable government, or in places where resources are scarce?

In fact, my redistributionism thought experiment actually goes to show precisely the principal flaw in the agenda of the Robin Hood-types who want to make the world more equal by redistribution rather than free market trade and participation in capitalism. Allocation of resources outside of trade only briefly suspends the problem, it doesn’t solve it. Once upon a time just about everyone in the UK and US was living on the poverty line. What changed for them was the industrial revolution, progression explosion and scientific enhancements as economies became vastly more productive and human prosperity increases.

The 85 richest people in the world consist of one or two heirs who inherited their fortune – but most of the people on the list made their wealth in the same way that all economic prosperity occurs, through free trade. Wealth does not come from magic fairies, nor is it created from a vacuum. It is created by the voluntary transactions and exchange of currency of millions of people every day.

What People Keep Getting Wrong About Food Banks

Something I've been hearing rather too much of recently - from politicians and from political commentators - is that the increasing number of people relying on the foodbank scheme is evidence that poverty* is increasing in the UK.

People who make such a claim are confused. It is evidence of no such thing. Irrespective of whether or not poverty is on the increase, the number of food bank users is not the right metric to use to determine the number of people in poverty. Increased food bank use does not necessarily mean increased hardship - it probably means increased help for those in situations of hardship. Here's an illustration that will show why.

Imagine a village called Poppellville consisting of 100 people. Ten years ago 30 of the people in the village were below the median line and only 2 of them were getting help from food banks, as the foodbank scheme was still in its infancy. Fast forward to the modern day, 18 of them are below the median line, and 16 of these 18 are receiving help from the foodbank scheme. Clearly this increase in people using the foodbank scheme in Poppellville is not coinciding with an increase in poverty. In absolute terms, there has been an 800% increase in the number of people in Poppellville now benefiting from food banks over those ten years, while poverty has dropped by 40% in that same time period.

That illustration sums up what's probably the case in the UK. Rather than food banks being an indication of increased economic hardship, they most likely are a demonstration of our increased ability to respond to economic hardship with donations of food for those that need it.

* For simplicity's sake, I'm using the woeful definition of poverty that the UK Child Poverty Act 2010 uses - a definition over which I've been critical in the past.

The Guardian's Confusion About Manufacturing

I just read this lament in The Guardian about how the UK and the Eurozone are 'suffering' from a steady manufacturing slowdown. Basically, they think it's really bad that our manufacturing industry is declining because it means we must be suffering economically. Alas, their confusion is in failing to see the changing landscape of our economy - we do not manufacture as much in terms of raw materials - what we 'manufacture' more of nowadays is services (anything from litigation to TV programmes) - and they are what contribute greatly to our economic prosperity.

If the weight of economic prosperity really was measured in terms of weight of manufactured goods produced then Newcastle or Leeds would be wealthier than London's city centre, and Detroit would be wealthier than Manhattan. You would also see investors being keener to invest in companies that manufacture goods than in services, but we find that's also not that case.

The Latest Bright Idea About How We Choose To Eat

The ludicrously misinformed Tory MP (and former GP) Sarah Wollaston is at it again. I had a few choice words to say about her in a recent Blog post – but this time she’s gone overboard with her litany of misinformation and shoddy reasoning.

First the misinformation: you’d expect an ex-GP who is now chairwoman of the Commons Health Select Committee to be better informed than this, but Wollaston’s claim that binge-eating obese people cost the government a lot of money is false. A study showed that smokers and obese people actually save the health service money, because although they cost more than healthy people between the ages of 20 to 56, they also die sooner than the healthy group, meaning it costs less to treat them in aggregate terms. Plus, add in the State pension savings for those who die young and you’ll see the case against Sarah Wollaston’s claim is even more compounding.

Now the shoddy reasoning: Wollaston exclaims the need for regulation to force stores to offer discounts on fruit and vegetables. The only way to achieve this is price-fixing – that is, fixing the amount that supermarkets can charge for healthier foods like fruit and vegetables. But it is beyond foolish to even entertain the idea of price-fixing because price-fixing is guaranteed to get the situation wrong. If the price is fixed too low then demand will increase and willing suppliers will diminish, creating a shortage of supply. If the price is fixed too high then consumption will decrease, which in the case of fruit and vegetables will achieve the opposite of the desired effect. The only way to optimise the price is to leave it to market forces, which, of course, involves no price-fixing at all.

With people like Sarah Wollaston in The Conservatives, it’s little wonder that there are so many rumours about several Tory MPs wanting to follow Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless and switch to UKIP.

 

 

 

Why We Don't Need An Energy Revolution

"Pessimism won’t do. We need an energy revolution."

No, no, we do not. The Guardian's Zoe Williams is worried about human-induced climate change, and insists we should invest in alternative green technology - except by 'invest' she means throw taxpayers' money at it. I have good news for her - she can relax, because the situation will resolve itself through market forces. Here's the rub of the situation. Humans are causing climate change, but they are also penalised for their carbon externalities through green taxes and numerous regulatory measures. That is to say, because prices have been changed to account for the increased emissions, the only investment that is needed is investment that is more economically viable that the current prices.

The imminent effect of those price changes will tell us the best course of action. If, for example, our ability to augment our solar capacity enables that venture to be price competitive against our current carbon industries then consumers will respond to it. If it doesn't, they won't (that point alone illustrates how State interference can only impede the process). The costs (present and future) of staying with our current carbon trends have already been factored into the increased prices of our externalities. We don't need to throw taxpayers' money at it at all - because people's preferences for economic viability will drive this, as already happens in virtually every other market process.

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

Stop The Tyranny Or I'll Give You Something Nice

Robert Frank is generally considered to be one of the smartest economists in America. In an essay on consequentialism, however, he seemed to hit a stumbling block with this issue regarding why the British supported intervention in the Falklands rather than philanthropy:

"The British could have bought the Falklanders out—giving each family, say, a castle in Scotland and a generous pension for life—for far less than the cost of sending their forces to confront the Argentines. Instead they incurred considerable cost in treasure and lives. Yet few in the UK opposed the decision to fight for the desolate South Atlantic islands. " 

Two obvious things he's missing. In the first place, governments always severely underestimate the cost of wars - they go in hoping for a quick and inexpensive resolution - they act as though they hope they won't have to fight lengthy and costly wars. And in the second place, military mobilisation acts as a deterrent to aggression for dictators.

Somehow I don't think the warning: "Stop invading other countries and maltreating your citizens or else we'll pay for each one of them to have a Scottish castle and a generous pension for life" would have had much of a preventative effect on the likes of Adolf Hitler, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein or the current vicious Islamic thugs slaughtering people in Iraq with the intention of establishing a caliphate.

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

The Men Who Made Us Spend - Or Did They?

I just got around to watching a three part BBC programme I've recorded called The Men Who Made Us Spend. The general contention was that our preferences for goods and services are less implicitly part of our mental constitution, and more the case of manipulations by capitalists, the media and society, turning us into their playthings.

While there clearly is self-serving media and corporation manipulation intended to filtrate into our psyche, the idea that we are malleable puppets able to have our preferences drastically altered to be manipulated at will is bunkum. Businesses exist to maximise profit, which means looking for ways to extract money from our bank account to theirs. Clearly the best way to achieve this is not to try to change our natural preferences to suit their aims, it is to conduct their aims in accordance with our natural preferences. In other words, highly marketable things, like chocolate, cakes, attractive TV presenters, trendy clothes, accessible novels, addictive video games, alcohol, and box-office hits at the cinema are easy to sell to us precisely 'because' on average we like them more than healthier, safer, more circumspect alternatives. Imagine if instead of supplying beer, wine and spirits, pubs tried to make us healthier by offering only selections of bottled water, fruit juices and teas and coffees. It would obviously be much costlier than catering for our natural pub preferences, and inimical to the success of the pub industry overall.

The primary reason free markets are so successful is not because they can change our preferences at will, it is because they can satisfy the preferences we most naturally have. Of course, those preferences change along with cultural and societal changes, and businesses are excellent at driving people's tastes in the direction they think will generate the most revenue, but they don't do this in a vacuum - they have to work with what's already in us at any one time.

Here's some practical advice that works for me, and I feel confident will work for you. The best way to avoid the susceptibility of corporate and media manipulation is to avoid the susceptibility of peer pressure and status mongering. If you can resist the gravitational pull of conformity and of being shaped to fit a populist mould you'll be impervious to the thrall of those bad influences.  

In my book The Ecstasy Of A New Morality I imagined a man on a desert island with no human contact, and I talked about how he might gradually develop an intrinsic moral system by interacting with other animals. I also expanded that to a similar desert island thought experiment that can also be applied to considering how much we humans are conditioned by how others view us. To see how extreme the social factor is, think of something like style and ownership. Imagine oneself to be on the island but yet fantastically rich, living in a huge mansion, with expensive furnishings, a fast car, fine artworks and a stunning garden. In this scenario any pleasure you had in your opulent situation could only be derived from its intrinsic pleasure – there would be no sense of pleasure from others’ reactions, because there is no one there to react. It is difficult to say just how much contentment a life of such solitary richness would bring, but I suspect with the loss of that all important component of status gravitas one's equity would lose a lot of its meaning and joy.

Questioning how much we humans do without the motivation of securing prestige, approval, popularity and positivity from others leads us to some pretty candid conclusions about what is rewarding for reward's sake and what is rewarding for the responses of others. The extent to which we can resist the pull of outside thralls is roughly commensurate with the extent to which our spending will be built on self-determination.

* Photo courtesy of bbc.co.uk

Time Is Money, But Money Is Also Time

With an upcoming wedding and honeymoon, I recently bought some extra annual leave from my place of work. I valued the extra time more than the money, so I acted rationally. It would, therefore, be foolish to look at the money I’d spent on the extra annual leave and claim I’d wasted my money, just as it would be foolish to stop a shopper after they’d left the checkout at Tesco and claimed they’d wasted the £75 they’d just spent on shopping. In both cases – mine and the Tesco shopper – we valued the thing(s) being purchased more than the money spent on those purchases. Simple enough, right?

Alas, Emily Gosden, in this Daily Telegraph article about how households are apparently 'wasting £120m' a year using tumble-dryers in summer, seems to not understand this basic principle of a voluntary beneficial allocation of resources:

“The declining popularity of the traditional washing line is costing British families at least £120m a year, as tumble dryers are routinely used throughout warm summer months. More than half of all households who own a tumble dryer use it at least once a week during the summer, according to the Energy Saving Trust. The organisation, a charitable foundation which offers advice on cutting energy bills, said that a typical household could save £18 from their annual electricity bills “by line drying clothes instead of tumble drying” during June, July and August. “

Here’s what Emily Gosden is missing. Just like the case with me and my extra annual leave, what British householders are losing in money by tumble-drying they are more than making up for in gained time in not having to go outside to put their clothes on the washing line and then bring them in after (as well as factoring in the lack of guarantee that the period of time in which the clothes are out there will remain dry). Unlike money, time is a precious resource that cannot be retrieved – so those using tumble dryers are those for whom the time saved more than pays for the £18 per year lost (which, let’s face it, at 5p per day, is hardly much).

The Energy Saving Trust wants to offer us advice by telling us that “A typical household could save £18 from their annual electricity bills by line drying clothes instead of tumble drying during June, July and August “, but this is an absurd one-sided perspective that fails to account for the gains distilled from that £18 annual cost. Those for whom the extra time gives value over the cost will use the tumble dryer more than the washing line. Those for whom the financial saving gives value over the extra time spent putting the washing on a line, getting it in, and sometimes multiplying this task due to inclement weather, will use the tumble dryer less than the washing line. Each will be acting rationally according to their preference. What isn’t rational is to tell us that as a nation we, collectively, are wasting £120m using our tumble dryers.

Finally, take each household’s £18 and translate that to minimum wage hours and it’s less than 3 hours. Let’s be super generous and skew the figures drastically in the Energy Saving Trust’s favour and suppose that each household’s weekly total washing line activity is just half an hour. Let’s then multiply that by the number of weeks in just the warmer months of the year (May-September). That amounts to:

22 weeks x 30 minutes = 660 minutes (11 hours)

Given that even at such a conservative estimate, using the tumble dryer from May to September saves 8 more hours than the 3 the £18 saves (or £32.48 more cash if you want to translate it into monetary savings), it’s clear that tumble dryer users understand the rational allocation of their time and money better than both Emily Gosden and the spokesperson for the Energy Saving Trust. It’s not surprising, of course – for too often we have to remind interfering busybodies that most of us know how to run our lives better than they do.

The Guardian Goes Off The Rails Again

The Guardian really does have some disingenuous half-wits writing for it. Here we have Patrick Collinson ranting about rail price hikes and complaining that:

“In reality, fare increases aren't really paying for infrastructure but are instead covering the gradual withdrawal of government subsidies, which have fallen by 9% in real terms since 2010-11.”

Well whoopedoo, what about that – the taxpayers are paying less in subsidies, with the fares actually being paid for by…..wait for it……the people who actually use the trains. Surely not!! Contrary to Patrick Collinson’s wishes, most of us humans have evolved to understand that privatisation is not the bogey that the old socialists used to make it out to be, but the most efficient, right and proper state of affairs for the majority of industry. Why should the council maintenance man pay to subsidise the broker’s commuting? When you multiply those types of example nationwide you see how preposterous it is. Next we have this absurd swipe at profits:

“Passengers are also paying for the vast profits made by the rolling stock companies formed at privatisation. Just one, Angel Trains, made £372m in 2013 by its measure of underlying profitability.”

That’s the kind of squalid statement that sets out to paint a railway company as being greedy, unsympathetic fiends – when, in fact, a bit of digging shows the crassness attached to the claim. Sure, £372m is a big profit, but what does that actually amount to per customer? I can’t find any precise figures for Angel Trains rail users per year, but I did find out one or two things which will help. Angel Trains has 4,500 vehicles, which even at an outrageously meagre estimate of 10,000 passengers per vehicle per year works out at 45 million passengers. Divide the £372m profit by 45 million passengers and it works out at just over £8 per year “underlying profit” made on each person. Half the amount of passengers and it’s still only a profit of £16 per year per person – hardly the sort of profit that can be said to be ‘vast’ and worthy of public opprobrium.

But on top of that, I noticed that Angel Trains have invested over £3.4 billion in new rolling stock and refurbishment programmes since 1994, as well as donating over £135,000 to numerous charities since 2008.

I know being on the economic left entails the default position that success in business should be sneered at with socialist agitprop, but they really ought to be a little bit more responsible when it comes to the companies they are smearing with their conspiracy theorist anti-privatisation propaganda.


EDIT TO ADD: As is usually the case, the measure of success is in the evidence. Here's evidence that the number of rail passengers has doubled in the times of privatisation, following years of decline under the State: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britain#mediaviewer/File:GBR_rail_passenegers_by_year.gif
 

Is Real Happiness Better Than A Superior Simulated Happiness?

In addition to my Blog on happiness a few weeks ago - here is an interesting auxiliary thought I had: what would we choose when the offer on the table is real happiness or a higher level of simulated happiness induced through some kind of man-machine matrix? In other words, to what extent do we want the actual reality when an illusory, but happier, reality is offered to us instead?

Suppose you are faced with this dilemma for real.

Option 1) You can have your mind permanently plugged into a computer simulated machine that will increase your life's happiness by 30%.

Option 2) You can opt for carrying on your life as it would have been.

In fact, we can even substitute happiness for whole life experience (WLE). Option 1 certainly increases your WLE by a significant margin, but in doing so it robs you of the real life lived and replaces it with an enhanced simulacrum of that life.

Whether you'd choose Option 1 or Option 2 depends on whether you most value the literal way that your actual sensory experiences impinge upon your mind's engagement with reality, or whether that superior simulated engagement with reality could be chosen as a replacement for the actual lived experience. Perhaps this simulated reality takes you to a level of life experience unlike anything you'd experience if you picked the real life alternative. But if you're like me, you probably place a premium on actually having done the things that give your life fulfilment.

Even if the simulacrum could enhance my life quality by 30%, my instincts lead me towards choosing the inferior but real actual life lived. I want my relationship with my wife and kids, my holiday to New York, my visit to Mount Kilimanjaro, the books I write, the meals I eat, the friends I engage with, and the family I enjoy spending time with to be things I've actually done, not simulated illusions of those experience topped up with an extra 30% of qualitative improvement.

The strange thing about this is that we spend most of our actual life doing everything we can to enhance our engagement with reality and make it the best life possible - yet when offered the very thing we strive for through a simulated reality, most of us probably would reject it and instead opt for the actual. I suppose this has parallels with induced experiences through alcohol or drugs - sometimes the mind-altering experiences create a reality more interesting and exciting than everyday perceptions, but we know they are ersatz experiences compared with the lucidity of the un-altered state of mind.