Stumbling and Mumbling

Selecting for fanaticism

I’ve long thought that the problem with politics isn’t just what people believe but also the fanaticism and dogmatism with which they believe it. Tory attacks upon Mark Carney illustrate this fact.

Let’s face it, these are motivated in large part not by the technicalities of monetary policy but by Carney’s warnings before the referendum that Brexit would unsettle the economy. In this sense, they are part of the same mindset that demands that Remainers be lock up as traitors: they are an attempt to silence dissent. That’s a symptom not just of the right’s hatred of freedom, but of fanaticism and hysteria – of a belief in one’s cause which is stronger than the evidence warrants.

But of course, fanaticism is not confined to the right. It can be found across the political spectrum - even, I suspect, among people who are sane and reasonable in other respects.

Which brings me to my problem – political institutions (including of course the media) select for fanatics. I’m thinking here of (at least) four different mechanisms:

 - Fanatics are more likely to contribute a lot to pressure groups and parties, thus raising the salience of their pet beliefs. Anti-immigrationers have Migration Watch. Those of us sympathetic to open borders have no equivalently powerful organization, perhaps because we are less willing to pay big money for it.

 - The BBC is more likely to invite partisans onto its discussion programmes rather than those who are more sensible or who see both sides. For example, we hear a lot from the Taxpayers Alliance relative to more sensible economists, and heard rather more from Farage during the Brexit campaign than from more reasonable Brexiters such as Andrew Lilico.

 - Fanatics are more willing to lie to support their cause and – with the BBC being impartial between truth and lie – this gives them an edge.

 - Fanatics are often articulate about their cause, because they have so much practice in repeating it and because it’s easy to be fluent if you rarely use the word “but”. Because people are apt to take overconfident people at their word, this gives them a plausibility they don’t warrant.

If we had rational political institutions, these biases would go the opposite way: fanaticism would be selected against, not for.

For example, one virtue of demand-revealing referenda is that people must say how much they are willing to pay to back a cause. Although the law of large numbers makes it unlikely that people really would have to stump up, such a process forces people to ask: how much do I support this cause? And it would also bring proportion to debates. Imagine if, during the Brexit referendum Evan Davis had been able to ask (say) Farage: “OK, how much are you willing to pay to leave the EU?”

Also, good institutions of deliberative democracy would select against irrational and over-stated arguments, and in favour of more correct ones.

And a BBC that took seriously its mission to inform as well as entertain would banish fanatics from its airwaves in favour of reasonable people.

But of course, we are miles away from such institutions – which means that politics is disfigured by a hysteria we see in few other walks of life.  

The case for basic income

Two apparently unrelated recent events have something in common: they both highlight the case for a citizens’ basic income.

The first is the ruling that Uber drivers are not self-employed and so are entitled to the living wage and other employment rights.

The logic for this ruling has been expressed by Jolyon. Uber drivers, he says, must accept the terms and conditions of their employer: unlike the traditional self-employed, they cannot set their own prices. They lack market power, and so the law should protect them.

But this protection comes at a price. The higher cost of employing Uber drivers means either higher prices for Uber users, thus reducing consumer welfare, and/or less demand for such drivers thus depriving some of much-needed work.

We have therefore a dilemma. How can we protect workers who lack bargaining power whilst at the same time not stifling new businesses and flexible forms of work?

This is where the citizens’ income enters. In giving people an outside income, it empowers them to reject bad jobs. But it also gives them the flexibility to work a few hours as they please. We thus get the best of the gig economy – proper entrepreneurship and flexibility – without the worst: egregious exploitation. As the great Philippe van Parijs says:

[Basic income] provides a flexible, intelligent form of job sharing. It makes it easier for people who work too much to reduce their working time or take a career break. It enables the jobless to pick up the employment thereby freed, the more easily as they can do so on a part-time basis, since their earnings are being added to their basic income. And the firm floor provided by the basic income makes for a more fluid back and forth between employment, training and family.

The second development is the film I, Daniel Blake which has highlighted that the welfare state is costly, inefficient and dehumanizing, even driving people to suicide. As Max says:

Welfare in the UK doesn’t work. Claimants aren’t winning – they get messed around with sanctions, crap placements and form filling, all of which takes time and energy away from the jobsearch. Frontline DWP staff aren’t winning – they have no discretion, they have to deal with claimants presenting complex life issues, and they take a lot of shit from claimants. The public is not winning, because more and more public money is wasted on job centres, Work Coaches, civil servants, the crap Universal Jobmatch system, tribunals, appeals, and the wider social costs of a dysfunctional welfare system.

Again, this highlights the merits of a basic income. Its unconditionality would sweep away a lot of bureaucracy. Welfare recipients win because they no longer face harassment. Taxpayers win because the deadweight cost of redistribution is diminished.  

None of this is to say that a citizens’ income is a fix-all. It’s not. It should be accompanied by other policies to improve workers’ job opportunities and bargaining power such as expansionary macro policy, a job guarantee and stronger trades unions. And important questions remain: how do we best overcome the objection that a citizens’ income is “something for nothing”? How do we deal with the problems of especially high needs among the severely disabled and differences in housing costs? And does a state that has been unable to introduce Universal Credit competently have the capacity to implement such a big and important reform?

If we had serious political discourse, these questions would be properly discussed. But that of course is a big “if.” I used to think a basic income was too much to hope for. Now I fear that intelligent debate about one might be.

Resisting asymmetric Bayesianism

It’s a commonplace that politics is becoming more polarized and tribal: think of Remainers vs Brexiters or Trumpites vs Clintonites. This isn’t simply because people have retreated into intellectual trenches in which they associate only with the like-minded and get their news only from sources that echo their prejudices. It’s also because of another mechanism which is variously called attitude polarization, the backfire effect or asymmetric Bayesianism.

This is the process whereby people who are confronted with evidence that disconfirms their beliefs do not become more open-minded as Bayesianism predicts, but rather become dogmatic. The earliest evidence on this came from a 1979 paper (pdf) by Charles Lord, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper. They showed people mixed reports on the effects of the death penalty. They found that, after reading these reports people who supported capital punishment became stronger in their support, whilst opponents of the death penalty also became more dogmatic. This arises from a form of confirmation bias: we look favourably upon evidence that confirms our position but sceptically upon disconfirmatory evidence.

Reasonable people lament all this.

But here’s my problem: I find it damnably hard not to be an asymmetric Bayesian. One reason for this is that having learned about cognitive biases I now see them everywhere. Yes, I know – that’s the confirmation bias. But of course, it’s easier to see them in others than in oneself: physician, heal thyself.

But my opponents don’t help me. Many who favour tough immigration controls, for example, look like hysterical nativists who don’t even have the wit to recycle Rawlsian law of peoples-type arguments. And many aren’t even trying to convince me; perhaps most political discourse is preaching to the choir rather than an attempt to persuade opponents. (The Left are probably as guilty as the right here).

So, how can I resist the pressure to be an asymmetric Bayesian? Here are four things I try:

 - Construct one's own argument for something one doesn’t believe in. I tried this here, here and here.

 - Look for weaknesses in your own theory. For example in yesterday’s post, I didn’t establish that people in power actually are racist, but merely expressed scepticism about the validity of other explanations. That wasn’t good enough. (In fairness, though, proof on this matter is perhaps unobtainable.)

 - Look for disconfirming evidence. To take yesterday’s post again, I might have pointed out that Indian men earn more than similarly qualified white men. This might be evidence against employer racism. (But is it proof? It’s possible both that Indians sort into high-paying occupations and that they suffer racism which causes their wage premium over whites to be lower than it otherwise would.)

 - Look for intelligent arguments against one’s case. The fact that most of one’s opponents are silly and hysterical doesn’t mean they all are. For example, I especially valued this post by Ben Cobley, and welcome the writing of Bryan Caplan and his colleagues or Andrew Lilico.

Of course, in saying all this I don’t claim to succeed in resisting the pressures of asymmetric Bayesianism. No doubt I fail.

But here’s the problem. My efforts to do so arise solely from intrinsic motivations. External incentives actually encourage asymmetric Bayesianism. The MSM select for overconfident blowhards; Toby Young, remember, actually earns a living. And most politically-engaged people on left and right would rather associate with a fellow partisan than a pointy-headed sceptic. When Michael Gove said that the country has had enough of experts, he was in part expressing a truth.

Whose racism?

Phil McDuff complains about the portrayal of the white working class as a “howling mass” whose “concerns” about immigration must be heeded.

This poses a question: why do we hear so much about the racism of the white working class and so little about the racism of the ruling class?

Take the following facts:

 - People from ethnic minorities are twice as likely to live in poverty as white people.

 - The median net wealth of white British households is almost three times (pdf) that of black Caribbean ones.

 - “Ethnic minorities are still hugely underrepresented in positions of power” says David Isaac.

 - Graduates from ethnic minorities are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white graduates.

 - “Once personal characteristics have been taken into account, all major ethnic minority groups have lower pay [than whites]” says Hilary Metcalf.

 - Ethnic minorities are “significantly under-represented” in top public sector jobs, the arts and creative occupations.

Of course, these might be due to many factors such as differences in cultural capital or occupational sorting. But they might be due in part to racism by the ruling class. Not necessarily overt racism, but also a subtle racism which under-rates and de-prioritizes ethnic inequalities.

What's not to blame for these these inequalities is the racism of the working class*. Hence my question: why do we hear so little about ruling class racism but so much about working class racism?

Certainly, this pattern serves useful functions. It helps to deflect attention away from trends that have hurt workers of all colours such as austerity, the decline of trades unions and power-biased technical change. As Phil says:

Our other “genuine concerns” – such as school and hospital funding, benefits and disability payments, the crushing of industries that formed the backbones of our local economies – are ignored or dismissed out of hand.

It also helps to divide and rule working people, and provide a justification for doing what politicians want anyway – to impose immigration controls.

But it does something else. Over-emphasizing white working class racism serves to stigmatize and delegitimate the powerless, whilst under-estimating ruling class racism helps to legitimate those in power.  If you think I’m making a Marxist point here, you’d be only half-right. I’m echoing Adam Smith:

We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent. (Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.III.29)

It’s through means such as this that inequalities of power are legitimated and sustained. And the tragedy is that so many people fall for such old tricks.

* I  might be overstating this. It’s theoretically possible that employers don’t hire ethnic minorities because they fear that white co-workers wouldn’t accept them. But I doubt this is a significant factor nowadays. It would certainly be odd if bosses were so mindful of white workers’ attitudes on this point when they are otherwise so contemptuous of them.

Blind to costs

One of the more curious recent opinion poll findings has been that people are unwilling to pay to control immigration. A Yougov poll found that 62% would pay nothing to reduce net migration from the EU, and that only 15% would pay 5% of their income to reduce it to zero. Support for immigration controls, it seems, falls away when people are asked to pay for them.

But of course, such controls do have a cost. Although the near-term impact of immigration (pdf) on overall wages (pdf) is roughly zero, it’s quite plausible that tough migration controls would reduce innovation and productivity growth in the longer-run, leaving us worse off. And even if you disregard this, there are shorter-term costs: the deadweight cost of paying for border guards; the loss of export earnings as universities take in fewer overseas students (which should mean a weaker pound and hence higher import prices); and the loss of net tax revenue because migrants make a positive contribution to the public finances.

All this poses the question: given that immigration controls have obvious costs which most people are unwilling to pay, why is support for such controls so strong when people are not confronted with their costs?

One possibility is that voters assume that others will bear the cost. This might be reasonable for the low-paid, non-tax-payers and for older people. But it’s plain wishful thinking for others.

Another possibility is simply that people are lousy at making connections in economics, and so don’t link  controlling immigration with costs of doing so.

However, I want to suggest another possibility – that the supposedly impartial media is deeply misleading here.

Discussion programmes – not just about immigration but anything else – tend to follow a strict format based upon the adversarial prosecution-defence model; there’s an advocate of a position and an opponent – often with both being overconfident blowhards.

What this misses is that policies have costs. The question is not simply: is this policy right or wrong? But rather: is the cost of this policy worth paying?

So for example, it would be reasonable to support immigration controls because their economic cost is worth paying to shore up social capital. It would also be reasonable to oppose them because you place more weight upon their costs – in money and freedom - than to the risks to social capital and of discontent as the popular will is disregarded; this is my position.

Reasonable people should take either position on immigration with a heavy heart.

But this sort of position is often excluded by the adversarial model of discourse which invites only pro- and anti- stances. Such a model encourages fanaticism at the expense of trying to assess costs and benefits. It is yet another way in which the “impartial” media actually serves to coarsen discourse.

But there is an alternative. Rather than have a prosecutor-defender model, discussion programmes could have an examining magistrate model in which examining the evidence is more important than having a ding-dong. This might not make for good TV or radio. But the BBC must ask: is it in the business of entertaining fools, or in the business of improving political discourse?   

The freedom-hating right

The Sun wants the BBC to sack Gary Lineker for “peddling lies.” Let’s leave aside the fact that the Sun is much better at peddling lies that Mr Lineker ever will be. What this shows, yet again, is that the right is now the enemy of freedom.

We should put this demand alongside the Mail and Express’s calls for pro-Remain “traitors” to be silenced; the Tory attacks upon independent institutions such as the Bank of England; the investigatory powers bill; and the fact that many supporters of immigration controls also want (pdf) controls over other areas of economic life. And, let’s remember, immigration controls themselves are attacks upon freedom: they deprive people of the freedom to live where they choose or hire whom they choose.

All these are examples of the right’s hostility to freedom. Yes, this hostility might be popular – but that tells us only that there can be a tension between liberty and the will of the people.

To those of us of a certain age, this illiberal trend might look odd. During the 60s and 70s the cliché was that there was a trade-off between equality and freedom and that the left leant towards the former whilst the right favoured the latter. And western Cold Warriors were forever proclaiming the virtues of freedom against the “evil Empire” that was the USSR.

So, what happened?

In truth, not much. In many cases, the right’s espousal of freedom was only ever a pretence. Whilst they pretended to bemoan the USSR’s lack of freedom, they supported Pinochet, apartheid and the repression of women and gays, and were (and are) untroubled by coercion in the workplace. The only freedom the right truly believed in was freedom for bigots and exploiters.

I say all this because many people still don’t seem to realize it – perhaps because their instincts were formed during the Cold War. There’s an odd type of lefty or ex-lefty who whines about no-platforming and restrictions on free speech at universities whilst under-appreciating the fact that the biggest threats to liberty don’t come from silly teenagers. And many of those who think of themselves as supporters of freedom (such as the Adam Smith Institute?) seem to associate more with rightists than lefties.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It is we Marxists, more so than rightists or centrists, who are the champions of freedom. What we’re seeing now is yet more vindication of this.

Another thing: bigots please note. Paying your TV licence does not give you a right of veto over every BBC appointment.

The upside of relative decline

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.” This piece by Simon Head on the decline of British business reminds me of these words by Eugene McCarthy.

Simon is, of course, reviving an old theme. Back in the 70s, we were obsessed with Britain’s relative economic decline – a decline summed up by the engineering boss who said: “I don’t understand why we’ve lost so much market share in the last 30 years. I mean, we’re making exactly the same products.”

There were several reasons for that decline which are still present: short-termism, a lack of good vocational training, poor employee engagement and bad management; for example Bloom and Van Reenen show (pdf) that British manufacturing bosses are on average worse than those in some other advanced nations. We might add that the US’s big home market gives it an advantage in businesses that benefit from Metcalfe’s law such as Google, Facebook and Twitter – but this can’t explain why the UK also does relatively badly in businesses faced with diseconomies of scale.

I want to suggest something else. It lies in McCarthy’s line. Successful bosses are like football coaches: they must be smart enough to understand the game but dumb enough to think it matters. Britain has a relative dearth of such people.

It used to be said that one cause of the UK’s relative decline was that our industrialists cleaved to an ideal of being a country gentleman; they aspired to become leisured aristocrats rather than tycoons. Here’s Martin Wiener (though Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn and EP Thompson said similar things):  

The consolidation of a “gentrified” bourgeois culture, particularly the rooting of pseudoaristocratic attitudes and values in upper-middle-class educated opinion, shaped an unfavourable context for economic endeavour…Industrialists themselves…gravitated towards what they saw as aristocratic values and styles of life to the detriment, more often than not, of their economic effectiveness (English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, p10)

I suspect there’s still a lot in this. Very many of my rough contemporaries jump off the gravy train or get out of the rat race (I mix my metaphors merely to note their pejorativeness). Alienated by corporate imbecilities or the grunt-work of bureaucracy they downshift to comfier jobs, a couple of non-executive directorships or a hobby business. Those of us who are upwardly mobile and so don’t fit into the corporate upper-class are perhaps especially likely to do this.

Most of the people who are smart enough to understand business are also smart enough to get out of it. The tycoon mentality – the desire to keep making millions you can’t spend – is lacking.

Arsene Wenger says of Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez that “they can raise a little bit above the financial aspect of the game because they are not poor and they have to look really on the football side.” He’s hinting at an important fact – that successful people are usually not motivated by money; the idea of “greedy bosses and bankers” is lazy leftist moralizing. Instead, they have internal, not extrinsic motivations. Often, though, these mitigate against building huge businesses: the man who loves solving engineering puzzles and inventing new products often won’t enjoy the very different challenge of expanding production and sales. So he might well sell up when the business is still small. It’s easier to find intrinsic satisfaction in being an engineer or coder or even trader than it is in being a manager.

In saying this, you might think I’m lamenting decline. Not entirely. Just ask: what does motivate a man to want to keep working once he’s made a few million? In some cases, the answer is: vanity: many very rich businessmen have monstrous egos. Perhaps, then, there’s an upside to the UK’s relative lack of successful businessmen. Sure, we have no Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison. But we also have no Donald Trump or Silvio Berlusconi.  

In defence of Bank independence

The Tories seem to be undermining the Bank of England’s independence. First, Theresa May says there “have been some bad side effects” of low interest rates: “people with assets have got richer…people with savings have found themselves poorer. A change has got to come.” Then Lord Hague says that low rates are “penalising the poor and the prudent" and “losing credibility and producing very dangerous side effects.” And then when Mark Carney queries this, David Davies tweets:

Mr Carney you are an unelected bank official. Theresa May has got every right to tell you how to do your job!

I’m unhappy with these developments. For one thing, as they stand they are plain wrong in three ways:

 - Since 2014, inflation has been below its target. This means that if the Bank has erred, it has been by having too tight a policy. Interest rates have been too high, not too low. Savers haven’t been penalized enough.

 - If Ms May wants the Bank to raise real interest rates, she has the means to do so. She could reduce the inflation target, and remove the Bank’s ability to “look through” short-term price increases.

 - Any successful stimulatory monetary policy will cause people with assets to get richer. This is simply because it will raise expected future GDP and hence raise share prices.

But my disquiet goes further than this.

One problem I have is that none of these statements address the logic for central bank independence. This is that, because central banks have no incentive to stoke up pre-election booms, people will trust them to deliver low inflation. This reduces inflation expectations, which helps reduce inflation at no cost in terms of output. The empirical record is consistent with this theory: see, for example, this paper (pdf) by Athanasios Anastasiou and the many papers he cites.

This is not to say there’s no case against Bank independence. You might argue that it entrenches anti-austerity ideology by reinforcing the notion that aggregate demand must be suppressed. And it’s sometimes said (pdf) that it might cause a lack of coordination with fiscal policy. Personally, I don’t find these arguments convincing. Shifting control over rates back to the Treasury won’t in itself overturn anti-austerity ideology. And in recent years the obstacle to fiscal-monetary coordination has been the zero bound rather than Bank independence. But this debate doesn’t matter: the Tories aren’t arguing along these lines.

Of course, the Bank has made policy errors. But these are inevitable, simply because the economy is unforecastable. There’s no reason whatsoever to suppose that the Treasury would avoid such errors. In fact, pre-1997 history suggests it has been at least as error-prone as the independent Bank.

These attempts to undermine Bank independence are therefore without merit.   

I fear, though, that what’s going on here isn’t a narrow matter of macroeconomic management. There might be more to it. The idea that the government knows better how to set interest rates is part of a pattern. It’s part of the same mindset that thinks the government has the capacity to negotiate good trade deals, or the ability to enforce sensible immigration controls.

This is the same mindset behind the Brexit slogan, “take back control” -  the urge that government must be in control. From this perspective, an independent central bank is much the same as European judges – an unwanted constraint upon government power. When Ms May spoke of a desire to have “our judges sitting not in Luxembourg but in courts across the land”, I doubt she was calling for a strong independent judiciary.

The kindest thing one can say about this is that it over-estimates state capacity. But it might be more sinister. If we read these attacks upon independent institutions alongside demands to silence “unpatriotic” Remainers, what we’re seeing is a step away from liberty and towards totalitarianism.

Sterling's effects

Angus Armstrong has a good piece on sterling’s fall. I just want to add one point, which my chart makes.

It plots sterling’s trade-weighted index against UK non-oil exports relative to world trade volumes.  

If a fall in the pound leads to a significant rise in exports, you’d expect to see the blue line rise after sterling’s fall in 2008-09. But it’s hard to discern any such significant move. Certainly, there doesn’t seem to have been any major long-lasting effect. As the ONS wrote (pdf) in 2013, the depreciation of 2008-09 “appears to have had little impact on the overall balance of trade.”

There are good reasons for this. One is pricing to market. Sterling’s fall has not raised the price of marmite: instead, Tesco and Unilever have absorbed the effect of higher import costs on their profit margins. What’s true of them is true of many other businesses: UK exporters will use sterling’s rise to increase profit margins, not just cut prices for foreign customers.  

This is good news in one respect: it will mitigate the impact of sterling’s fall upon inflation. But if prices in the shops don’t change much, nor will demand.

But this isn’t the whole story. Even to the extent that prices do change, trade volumes don’t change much. The OBR estimates that a one per cent fall in relative export prices raises non-oil export goods volumes by only 0.41% after nine quarters, whilst a 1% rise in relative import prices cuts import volumes by only 0.2% (pages 32-37 of this pdf).

There are several reasons for this. One is simply that demand for tradeable goods isn’t very price-elastic, perhaps in part because monopolistic competition means that UK exports aren’t close substitutes for overseas goods. Even if sterling’s fall does lead to (say) Glaxo cutting the foreign currency prices of its drugs, they won’t sell very many more; Germans aren’t going to get more cancer because sterling has fallen.

Another is that the decision to export is an investment decision; firms must invest time and money in sales and marketing. And the same fall in sterling that appears to make exporting profitable also throws sand into the wheels of this mechanism.

Back in 2009, firms didn’t increase their exports much in response to the lower pound because the same financial crisis that depressed the pound also made firms worry that the bank loans they needed in order to increase exports wouldn’t be available. Likewise, uncertainty about future trading rules today might inhibit firms from investing in export marketing.

We can put all this another way. The current account balance – which is massively correlated with the trade balance – is, by definition, equal to the gap between savings and investment. This tells us that a weaker exchange rate can only reduce the current account deficit if it either increases savings or reduces investment. There is a mechanism whereby this can happen. Historically, rises in inflation – of the sort that (slightly) follows a fall in sterling have caused rises in the savings ratio. But this isn’t a very strong mechanism.

In a sense, the very fact that sterling has fallen so much is consistent with what I’m saying. As Paul Krugman said back in 1989 in a book that strongly influenced my thinking on these matters, “exchange rates can move so much precisely because they seem to matter so little.”

This isn’t to deny any beneficial effect of sterling’s fall. In the social sciences, the question is often not “is this true?” but rather “how true is it?” And the idea that sterling’s fall will give a big boost to the economy isn’t very true. Yes, sterling is a shock absorber – but it’s not a very powerful one.

In this respect, Brexiters who claim to the contrary are at least consistent. One feature of rightist thinking is elasticity optimism. The belief that minimum wages destroy lots of jobs, or that tax cuts have big effects upon labour supply are both examples of this. And the idea that sterling’s fall will be a very good thing is another. Sadly, though, there are good reasons to doubt it.  

On being a little Englander

Nick Cohen says the far left is gripped by anti-western illiberalism and the Home Affairs select committee accuses it of anti-Semitism. Do these accusations apply to me? I don’t think so – but not for reasons that reflect any credit on me.

I have never expressed support for Putin or Hezbollah for the simple reason that I take minimal interest in foreign affairs.

This is because I just don’t have the cognitive bandwidth. In complex societies ground truth matters. And it would take vast amounts of time for me to get even the weakest grasp of this – a knowledge of Arabic being a minimal requirement. I know from economics that media reports are often inadequate and biased: why should I believe things are much different in foreign affairs? And accounts from partisans are equally (more so?) unreliable: whenever I have the misfortune to accidentally hear from someone in the Israeli-Palestine conflict they often strike me as raving lunatics – more so than those who disagree with me on most domestic issues.

You might object here that there are some issues that are clear-cut, such the massacre of civilians in Aleppo or Putin’s repression of free speech. True. But there’s a massive gulf between an obvious problem and the solution. The world isn’t divided neatly between goodies and baddies, and interventions can make things worse.

It seems to me personally, therefore, that in the face of complexity and the high costs of acquiring reliable information, there’s something to be said for rational ignorance. The cost of moving even from being uninformed to badly informed is high.

I suppose I could speak out against obvious human rights abuses, but this would be mere virtue signalling. I’d rather spend my limited time and mental faculties on other matters. And I suspect it’s better for everyone if I do: the world is more fully stocked with self-righteous blowhards than it is with people who have half a clue about some economics. Insofar as I can make a difference - which I doubt - it is by developing my faculties as the latter.

Now, at this stage you’ll have two objections.

One is that I’m a hypocrite. I did support anti-apartheid causes in the 80s, so why should I now claim ignorance of overseas affairs?

I’d contend that that was an exception. Apartheid was such a great evil that it seemed that pretty much anything was superior to it. Subsequent events support this: although South Africa suffers corruption, crime and high unemployment, pretty much nobody would prefer apartheid.

There’s another objection. You might claim that the view I’m expressing is smug, insular and self-satisfied Little Englanderism.

And you’d be right.

However, the only way I could avoid both this objection and Nick’s would be by becoming a liberal polymath. But even if I had the intellectual faculties and inclination to do so, I’d lack the time: I have to earn a living. As Adam Smith said, the division of labour makes a man “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”