Stumbling and Mumbling

A 1980s throwback

Here’s a letter of quite staggering imbecility in the Times:

The Conservatives now wish to eradicate “relative” poverty, defined as those living on less than 40 per cent of average incomes. Simple arithmetic shows that, as you increase the incomes for the relatively poor, the average income would rise, promptly putting some back into the relatively poor category.

There are at least two errors here. One is that relative poverty is defined an income below some fraction of median income. And the median doesn’t change just because the incomes of the very poor rise.
And many would argue that raising the incomes of the poor would reduce average (mean) incomes, because they imply higher taxes upon the rich, who would reduce their labour supply.
Of course, imbecilic letters to newspapers are common.  What’s revealing about this is that it purports to come from Lord Young of Graffham, a Cabinet minister in the Thatcher government. If this is true, it just reminds us how crassly ignorant some Thatcherites were. It's almost enough to make me believe in progress.

That caravan metaphor

You should never argue from a metaphor, only to one. The Stupid Party's adoption of Toynbee's caravan metaphor shows the truth of this advice:

I described society as a caravan moving across a desert. All may move forward, but how far behind do the poor at the back have to fall before they cease to be part of the same caravan at all?

This metaphor fails for at least five reasons:
1. We care about people at the back of the desert caravan because if they fall far behind, they face a certain death. No such fate awaits the poor in the UK.
2. The UK is not an enterprise association in which we are all travelling in the same direction with a common purpose.
3. Why should I privilege my caravan above others? Why should I want to help a Scouser more than a Somalian? Toynbee verges towards the racist in caring more about the British poor than other poor people.
4. The metaphor assumes that there is a stable rank order, so some are always at the front and others always at the back. But this is not true, at least for many of the poor. There's a lot of mobility between the very poor (having no job) and the poor (having a low-paid, insecure job). One problem the poor have is that, in (relatively) good times they are unable to insure themselves against bad times - because they are taxed heavily, robbed by the rich, or simply lack the means to insure against unemployment.
5. The caravan metaphor invites us to think of the poor as weak or slow and the rich as strong and quick. This is a foul lie. Toynbee and Cameron are at the front of the caravan not because they have any skills, but because they have rich parents. At best they're just lucky and the poor are unlucky. I say "at best" because in truth, some people are at the back of the caravan because those at the front have stolen their camels. The poor are poor partly because the rich have - down the centuries - arranged that this be so. They stole the property of the poor, arranged that they get bad education, exploited them in work, benefited from rent-seeking in the state and in companies, and constructed an ideology which says that the rich need big wages to attract and motivate scarce "skills."
And herein lies the biggest weakness of all in the caravan metaphor. It perpetuates the illusion that the poor need help. Most of them don't. They need justice.

Poverty: more than money?

David Cameron says:

Tackling poverty involves much more than the redistribution of money through the tax and benefits system. We have to think about the causes of poverty….We have to disaggregate the problem - to look at the various types of poverty that exist, and the factors that contribute to them. Because for most people, material poverty is a consequence of other factors: family breakdown; drug and alcohol addiction; unemployment; poor education.

I’ve got four problems with this:
1. It fails to ask: are there any limits to what the state should do for people? Isn’t it the job of the state to protect us from other people, rather than ourselves? The reason the state shouldn’t deal with alcohol and drug addiction is that it has to recognize that individual responsibility must start somewhere.   
2. The idea that complex causes have complex solutions might be a form of the representatitiveness fallacy. It’s not always true. For example, the causes of the rise of Nazism were complex. But the solution was simple – biff the bastards.
3. It fails to see that there might be a limit to what even experts can know about the causes of poverty. The Stupid Party’s only had one good idea in its history – Burke’s recognition that the stock of reason in any man is small. It’s just arrogant to believe that we know enough to develop optimum solutions to each cause of poverty. Maybe handing over money - through simple methods - is a good second-best  solution.
4. There is – of course – no recognition of the need to empower the poor; Cameron only asks how we can manage them. But could it be that addiction, poor education and low aspirations are responses to the fact that people feel – maybe rightly – that they have no control over their circumstances?
In this sense, Cameron is right to say that “tackling poverty involves much more than the redistribution of money.” It involves the redistribution of power too. But neither political party will see that.  

The true face of Toryism

Here's more advice for the Stupid Party - if you want to continue your pretence that you're in touch with real people, tell Michael Gove to shut up. He says perfumes 

are...no more likely to have been approvingly peer-reviewed in pharmacological journals than Tennent’s Special Brew.

There is, of course, no such drink as Tennent's Special Brew. Tennent's gut-rot is the misnamed Super. It's Carlsberg who make Special Brew, as immortalized here ("beer of the gods") and here. So Gove reminds us of the true face of the Stupid Party - not a clue about the real world.

Toynbee or Rawls?

Underneath the hilarity, there's a serious question raised by Greg Clark's comment:

It is the social commentator Polly Toynbee who supplies imagery that is more appropriate for Conservative social policy in the twenty first century.

It's: of the countless intelligent egalitarians he could have mentioned, why her? Why not  invoke instead, say, John Rawls. Doing so would have had several advantages, even leaving aside the fact that it would have made Clark look like a serious man.
1. Rawls' difference principle - that "social and economic inequalities are to...be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society" provides an obvious philosophical foundation for Cameron's claim that "the right test for our policies is how they help the most disadvantaged in society."
2. The liberal egalitarianism championed by Rawls attempts to show how equality can be compatible with a smallish state. Toynbee's egalitarianism, by contrast, often spills over into a busy, nosy managerialist state.
3. Rawls attempted to embed egalitarianism into a constitution, rather than leave it at the mercy of day-to-day politics. There's one big merit in doing this - it would help solve the problem of which Daniel Finkelstein rightly complains, that the very poorest are getting poorer. The thing is, vote-grabbing politicians have little incentive to help the very worst-off, because they are, by definition, not marginal voters. "Help for families" is a vote-winner. "Help for the single unemployed" is not. We can't rely upon mere party competition to maximize the position of the worst off. 
Now, the merits or not of the Rawlsians position are of course debatable. But if the Stupid Party wanted my respect, it would draw more from him, and less from some meeja airhead.

Stupid Party on immigration: some questions

Here’s the Stupid Party’s policy document (pdf) on economic migration – it wants “significantly less” of it. I’ve some questions.

The first principle of Conservative immigration policy will be to maximize net benefit to the UK economy (in terms of per capita GDP).

Why? Why no mention of freedom – of people’s right to work where they want, or to hire whom they want? Why should the interests – rights - of foreigners be subordinated to Brits’ desire for a few quid? Isn’t the Stupid Party meant to support those who want to try to better their standard of living? Why does Tebbit’s old advice to“get on yer bike and look for work” not apply to people wanting to cross national borders?

The long-term economic aim of immigration policy should be that migration helps to raise productivity by adding to the labour force skills that are not sufficiently available in the existing population.

The Stupid Party thinks this creates a bias in favour of allowing in higher-skilled migrants; it cites Migration Watch’s estimate that only immigrants earning over around £24,000 make a net positive fiscal contribution.
But does it? In the very long-run, it might be that allowing immigration of skilled workers, whilst stopping unskilled immigration, would actually deter the indigenous population from getting training.
This is because such an arrangement would bid down the wages of skilled workers rather than unskilled ones, and so reduce the return to training.
If you really want to increase incentives for indigenous workers to train, you should restrict skilled immigrants and allow in unskilled workers.
There’s a trade-off between providing incentives to train and reducing inequality. The Stupid Party seem to be choosing the latter. When did it acquire this egalitarian impulse?

The second stage [of policy] would be to control the numbers with regard to the wider effects on society, including the ability of the public services and infrastructure to cope with new arrivals.

Why is this an argument for controlling immigration, rather than for improving public services to make them more sensitive to people’s needs?
Two other things. Why should we have a different attitude to immigration than we do to new-born indigenous children – both are new additions to the population. If we only allow in immigrants if they raise GDP per head, shouldn’t we apply the same rule to children? If not, why not?
Finally, if I were to say that immigration is an issue mainly because we don’t like wogs, how much evidence (this sort of thing apart) to the contrary could you give me?

Cameron's managerialism (again)

David Cameron's latest feeble effort encapsulates three features of the unthinking managerialist ideology that's infecting our ruling class.
Feature 1 - over-confidence about what the state can do, and an ignorance of mechanisms:

We need a quite profound cultural change in the way we think about older people. And a revolution in social responsibility in how we behave towards older people.

But how exactly can government change culture? What policy levers does it have? The point about revolutions is that they change institutions in the hope of changing behaviour. Cameron seems to think behavioural change can happen without institutional change - that we'll wake up one morning and give each other big hugs. He doesn't seem to ask: is this feasible?
Feature 2 - the ignorance of trade-offs.

We need to change the planning rules so that we get fewer small flats, and more homes with gardens. Fewer homes designed for young single people, and more designed for life.

More homes with gardens means more urban or semi-urban sprawl. That'll increase car use and hence raise congestion and pollution. There's a trade-off here - low-density living versus environmentalism.
Feature 3 - the failure to challenge corporate hierarchies.

We still hold on to the idea of retirement at 65. You work at full pelt right up to the wire - then you stop altogether. It doesn't make sense anymore. We need to see retirement as a process, not an event - a slope, not a cliff - then we will realise the potential of older people. Older people need to be able to shift gradually from full-time economic activity into other things.

But of course, he doesn't tell us what he plans to do to force companies to allow more flexible working.
The tragedy here is that Cameron probably just doesn't see that vacuousness can be so ideological.

Cameron's can of worms

Cameron's latest speech raises issues that Conservatives should not raise. He says:

It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being....We have to care about working life, and we have to show that politics can make a positive difference....Our goal is clear: to move beyond a belief in the Protestant work ethic alone to a modern vision of ethical work.

So far, he's preaching to the choir. I reckon my preference for fulfilling over remunerative work has cost me around a quarter of a million quid over the last 10 years.
The problem is that the policies required to create fulfilling, ethical work that promotes well-being must be revolutionary, not Conservative.
For example, Cameron says:

I want a Conservative government to work towards an ambitious goal - to make the British public sector the world leader in progressive employment practice.

He's got his work cut out here. Current public sector employment practices kill people - and if you kill people, they lose an important part of their well-being. The "Whitehall studies" of civil servants health say:

The more senior you are in the employment hierarchy, the longer you might expect to live compared to people in lower employment grades...The way work is organized, the work climate...all contribute to the social gradient in health.

Genuinely progressive employment practice would, surely, have to dismantle the employment hierarchy that contributes to unequal longevity. Strangely, though, Cameron doesn't mention this.
Cameron also says:

I believe that employee share ownership is good for companies and good for society. It creates a common bond between employees and aligns them with the interests of the company.

True. So why not follow John Stuart Mill's call 150 years ago, and have an "indefinite increase" in employee share ownership, to the point where external shareholders are redundant? After all, Cameron cites approvingly (and rightly) the example of the John Lewis partnership.
There's something else Cameron doesn't say. He wants to increase fulfilling work without increased government regulation. Good. An obvious way to do this is to increase workers' bargaining power - say through a citizens' basic income -  so they can choose to reject unsatisfying work or long hours. I could choose fulfilling work over City tedium because I have the economic power to do so. But Cameron never mentions this possibility.
So what does he say? This:

I believe that there is a role for politicians in using exhortation, rather than regulation, to talk up good practice and draw attention to bad practice.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, this is mere wind.
But this is inevitable. The fact is that, if you want fulfilling work and well-being, you've got to attack hieararchy and inequality. And Conservatives can't do that.

Cameron: moron and liar

Cameron's latest speech must be one of the most moronic and dishonest efforts ever. Here goes:

The cause that you champion – corporate responsibility – was always very much part of my personal values when I worked in business.

This is not how others remember it:

Jeff Randall, writing in The Daily Telegraph where he is a senior executive, said he would not trust Mr Cameron "with my daughter's pocket money"...."In my experience, Cameron never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative..." Mr Randall wrote.
Sun business editor Ian King, recalling the same era, described Mr Cameron as a "poisonous, slippery individual".

Then there's the P-word, lifted straight from Blair:

I believe passionately that we're all in this together – government, business, the voluntary sector, families and individuals...I have always passionately believed in the dynamism of the free market and its power to do good.

These aren't the only thing's he's "passionate" about. He's P about climate change, and about (contra Thatcher) the fact that there's such a thing as society. Do we really want a prime minister to be so emotional about so many things? Or is the "passion" just fake?

If a supermarket opens a convenience store on the high street and uses its financial muscle to drive down prices until small shops are forced out of business – and then immediately puts prices up again – we need to complain.

How often does this happen? Cameron's failure to do so suggests this is a Frank Doberman moment: "If that Leahy comes round here cutting his prices and then raising them, I'll say; Oi! Leahy no."
I this does happen, the policy solution is not to whine, but to ensure that planning legislation is sufficiently flexible to allow competitors to threaten the supermarket's dominance. Ever heard of contestable markets?

If employers are making it harder, not easier, for people to combine fulfilling work with their family life, we should speak out.

What's so special about family life? What about people who want to combine fulfilling work with playing the guitar or cuddling their kittens? Why should these have fewer rights than breeders?
And again, the solution to a lack of workers' rights is not to complain, but to improve their bargaining power - by greater trades union rights or a citizen's basic income.

A good neighbour will occasionally go out of their way to do something friendly.
Offering to babysit one night. Or let workmen into your house if you're out one day.
It's exactly the same for business - whether you're a small business like a pub or a newsagent, or a huge global business like Microsoft or Tesco.

So, next time you want a night on the razz, give Bill Gates a ring and he'll come round to mind little Tarquin and Clytemenestra.

I want to explore the potential for a new understanding between business and Government.
With this new understanding, businesses that have publicly signed up to a commitment to responsible business practices would enjoy a lighter touch regulatory enforcement regime. The same rules would apply to them as to all businesses – but the presumption is that they are in conformity unless proven otherwise.

Has he never heard of adverse incentives? Who do you think would be quickest to sign such a commitment?

I remember a couple of years ago BHS had to withdraw a range of underwear for kids after some mums objected to the fact that padded bras and sexy knickers for the under tens were on sale.
BHS's initial reaction was to claim that the underwear was "harmless fun."
That sums up why parents are often reluctant to complain even when they feel uneasy.

But this episode shows exactly that a free market works. BHS realized that its range was losing customers and withdrew it. There was no need for politicians to speak out - the market did the job.
What's as bad as anything Cameron says, though, is an omission. He never mentions the obvious way in which policy can ensure than business behaves ethically - by changing taxes or property rights so that  negative externalities are internalized.
But then, he doesn't really want to improve the market economy. he merely wants to kid people that the Stupid Party and big business are caring - just as, when he worked for Carlton, he tried to kid people that OnDigital wasn't going bust.

Tories and freedom

Whatever happened to the Tories' passion for freedom? This programme (reviewed critically here) reminds us that, back in the 1970s, the Stupid party proclaimed itself, vocally and energetically, the party of freedom and law and order. Its supporters set up the Freedom Association, the Centre for Policy Studies and Adam Smith Institute to advance those ideas.
Today, though, civil liberties and parliamentary democracy are threatened to a far greater degree than they ever were by Old Labour, but there seems less passion among the Stupid Party to defend liberty now than there was then.
The Stupid Party initially supported ID cards, which gives the impression that their opposition now is based on cost-benefit analysis more than principle. And the best its spokesman on constitutional affairs can offer us on the abolition of parliament bill is this:

The Bill needs three kinds of safeguard, and I have tabled amendments on three things. First, purpose: it should only be possible for the fast track to be used to deregulate or make non-controversial simplifications or pass Law Commission Bills. Secondly, reserved matters: it should not be possible to use the fast track for constitutional, important or controversial changes. Those should be reserved for our usual procedures. Thirdly, procedural veto: there should be a procedure whereby a Committee or the Houses of Parliament can simply veto use of the fast track for inappropriate measures.

Not exactly a defence of the principle of parliamentary democracy, is it?
Now, I'm not denying that most of the Stupid Party is on the right side on these issues. Nor do I deny that many are speaking up well.
What I'm asking is: where is the passion and energy - particularly among the Tory leadership -  to support freedom that we saw in the 70s? Where's the organized effort to campaign for freedom?
Or was the rhetoric of freedom in the 70s a fig-leaf to disguise what were merely material class interests and a desire to bash to working class?