Looks like @LouiseMensch is making a play for today’s worst person in the world

Nadine and Frank we already know are making unsubstantiated attacks on people doing difficult jobs. Louise has decided that she should support their attacks and also make up lies about her parliamentary colleagues while she’s at it.

Attacking MPs I can forgive, party politics is such fun after all. But what really tipped the scales in her favour was supporting the restriction of choice in abortion advice in the name of increasing the choices of women.

 

Filed under: Blogging, Politics, Society

Most importantly, write to your MP

Link provided via Sunny from Abortion Rights. Contact your MP through this Abortion Rights page. Takes only a few seconds and it does work.

If you think abortion is a right and you are not an arrogant sod who thinks they can boss women about then please do write.

Filed under: Blogging, Politics, Society

What do you call a Liberal who Opposes Abortion?

While I’m talking about abortion, I’ve always wondered why certain liberals are so opposed to abortion.

So we have a couple of strands to liberalism which I think make good public policy and good personal philosophy.

The key thought - and although most proper philosophers think Mill overrated, he is the go-to guy for my-first-liberalism-workshops – is that you shouldn’t harm other people or restrict their actions unless they’re going to harm you or someone else. Even if they are doing something which you think is a bad idea, like smoking, you should leave them to it. A lot of the debates on abortion really hinge on whether you think a Zygote, Foetus or Embryo is a person who needs protecting or not.

But the harm principle isn’t really the foundation of liberalism, the foundation is the thought “what if I’m wrong?”

That is why we shouldn’t interfere with the actions of others, because my judgement is, in general, only likely to be as good as yours. In specific cases your judgement about your life is, as a rule, going to be better than my judgement about your life.

I don’t have the necessary information to decide things on a case by case basis for you, so it should be left to you. I think that abortion is one of those subjects where even the most voracious critics really have to consider “what if I’m wrong? What is a Zygote/Foetus/Embryo isn’t a person”

Decisions should generally be left to those with the most information and the best incentive to get the decision right. This is a pretty basic, even Hayekian, point. That means, especially with respect to abortion, the woman involved. I don’t think anyone has any more incentive to become au fait with the morality and practice of abortion than a woman considering one.

You might disagree with the decisions of women who choose to have abortions, but they are in a much better position to make that decision than you. Opposing abortion is in much the same ballpark as supporting the smoking ban, the absolute certainty that an outsider knows the best.

Filed under: Blogging, Politics, Society

Nadine Dorries and Frank Field on Abortion

So Nadine and Frank, I hope I’m on first name terms, want to restrict women’s rights to an abortion. They aren’t being honest about their intention, nooooooooo, they’re only thinking about the women! They are leading with mendacious attacks on BPAS and Marie Stopes who provide both abortion and counselling to those considering abortion.

Nadine and Frank’s argue that this is a conflict of interests and that BPAS and Marie Stopes actually hate women and manipulate women into having abortions when they don’t really want them for ideological and pecuniary purposes. A pretty vile accusation, even by Nadine’s standards.

About 20% of women who get advice from BPAS don’t get abortions, I will take Nadine and Field seriously when either 1) Hell freezes over or 2) They provide a serious study quantifying the effects of this conflict of interest. If BPAS and Marie Stopes are providing bad advice it will show up in the number.

Basically put up (some empirical evidence) or shut up (and leave us alone).

Filed under: Politics, Society

My name is Luis Enrique and I’m a Tax Avoider

Guest Post by Luis Enrique.

About 5 years ago I moved out of the flat I half-owned, and sublet it while I attended university in another city. I made sure to sell my share in the flat before a three-year deadline after which I would have been liable for capital gains tax. I did this to avoid paying tax [1]. Feel free to call me a looting scumbag.

Corporations cannot avoid choosing how they classify their sales and costs, how they price internal transactions and so on. It is inevitable that they will make choices that minimise their tax liabilities within the boundaries set by current laws, just like me timing the sale of my flat. It’s crazy to expect otherwise and some would argue anything else would be a dereliction of duty to shareholders.

This, incidentally, is why many tax experts believe that tax allowances to encourage certain activities usually aren’t worthwhile. If, for example, you decide to give a tax break for investment in R&D, corporations are going to classify as much of their costs as possible as investment R&D, with the result that the quantity of foregone tax is usually much greater than estimates of pre-tax-break R&D spending would have led you to expect, and the cost-benefit picture doesn’t look good (‘cost’ being foregone tax, ‘benefit’ being the increase in genuine R&D activity).

However, we all know that tax avoidance can take more extreme forms than merely thinking “hey, I can probably get away with classifying this cost as an R&D investment and claiming a tax rebate on it”, and involve hiring expensive lawyers and accountants to devise clever wheezes to exploit loopholes in the law [2], sometimes making use of tax havens. Clearly there is no hard and fast dividing line between acceptable tax minimization within the law, and activity of this sort [3].

I am perfectly happy with creative lawyer-devised tax-dodging wheezes being regarded with moral opprobrium, and I’d like to see the legal system and tax collectors coming down on it like a ton of bricks when they have a good case the law is being bent out of shape. And obviously we want vigilant legislators shutting down tax law loopholes and tax havens. I’m all for aggressive policing of corporate tax dodging shenanigans – ideally we would have a situation in which corporations look at the cost/benefit of such behaviour and decide not to bother.

What I cannot understand is the popular view, on the left, that all varieties of tax avoidance are the moral equivalent of theft [4]. I do not believe I stole money from the tax payer when I sold my flat before the capital gains liability deadline. I don’t believe companies claiming R&D tax allowance are either.

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Filed under: Economics, Politics, Society

Another day, another post from people who care about poor people lamenting the fact that poor people are getting richer

IPPR‘s report is significantly less provocative than the post promoting it on Liberal Conspiracy, but I still don’t like the framing. The IPPR argue that challenges from BRIC nations mean that Britain faces some sort of new and particularly challenging economic policy dilemma. [1] Britain’s problems are well documented:

1. Low and skewed business investment
2. Weak skills base
3. Less innovation and lower productivity
4. Limited presence in emerging markets

There is a long and ignoble tradition in British politics of despairing as our trading partners overtake us in terms of income or technological prowess. The above bullet points from IPPR would need address even without the BRIC economies growing. But, in fact, some of those will be mitigated by the growing wealth of our trading partners.

1) At the end of the nineteenth century the UK was the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. However, Britain was being overtaken in terms of living standards and productivity by both the United States and Germany.

There were a number of reasons for this. One often overlooked reason for this was that Britain had a lot of accumulated capital in various industries and it just didn’t make sense to ditch it and replace it with shiny new machines from Germany and America. However, the main reason Britain fell behind was technological.

The chemical industry needed vast economies of scale to run successfully, both because it was capital intensive and because the processes were easily scalable so there were massive returns to scale. Germany cartelised this industry creating huge unwieldy firms, but their unwieldyness was offset by their scale efficiencies. Britain’s market was too competitive so no one firm could reach the necessary scales of production or produce high enough profits to take the lead in R&D.

The other leading sector was mass production, especially in cars. The US led in this industry for a couple of reasons. The most pertinent reason being the scale of the American market, which was larger and more homogenous than any other in the world. The technology fit the surrounding market. Nothing like River Rouge would have been economically viable in Britain. No economic policy could have made it so.

 So one lesson we have to learn is that sometimes certain countries will see productivity booms which others won’t. Creating cartels is often not a good idea so British competitive capitalism was a sensible bet ex ante. Likewise, the US had the scale to be the first mass-market, maybe only India and China have the scale to be the first hyper-market. We shouldn’t sweat smallish differences in economic performance, they are inevitable and efforts to “correct” them may only be counter productive.

Adopting anti-competitive practices in the 1940s-70s meant that terrible managers could run companies badly without being forced to stop. The cartelisation strategy which worked so well for Germany decidedly didn’t when adopted under different circumstances. More competition helped restore the British industry to ruder health.

2) A significantly less rosy picture I have for Britain’s NEETS and unskilled. Those jobs will come back. As BRIC countries become wealthier it will make less sense for low productivity jobs to be located far away, there,  from the market for their goods, here. So having an unevenly skilled population in the UK won’t matter, because as poor countries get rich, rich countries will get poor jobs. Not nice, but it mitigates against the worries that we will have an economy of unqualified do-nothings and latte-sipping computer coders.

3) Luckily I have nice news on productivity. A lot of productivity gains, especially in IT has goes unrecorded. The story goes like this. Purchasing a lot of IT supplies, programmes and paraphernalia is expensive, but it is investment and should pay off.

Another thing which is expensive is reorganising firms to take full advantage of potentials for improvements from using your IT investment better. The hiring and firing, the organisation flow diagrams, the endless, endless meetings! Those all go down as consumed resources, not investment. However, they are investment, subsequent IT upgrades will be easy to adopt and new technology will fit into the reworked organisation. This means complimentary investment which accompanies IT projects is often systematically understated.

This is especially true in services where a lot of value is added by the organisation working efficiently. Britain is a very service orientated economy so the good news is our lack of investment has been understated by more than other countries. I would personally like us to move away from finance, but I have to say we have invested in this sector more than official figures suggest.

4) Britain does have limited presence in emerging markets but that is a long-term problem which will affect us immediately only if our trading partners over on the other side of the channel implode. I don’t have the data to hand, so treat this graph from John Ross as illustrative only.

Even developed economies growing slowly add a lot of value. Look at Canada’s 30 million people add nearly as much extra as Russia’s 130 million. In absolute terms Canada is beating on Russia too. Not working in emerging markets is not a huge problem yet. Working there is dangerous, the rewards are uncertain, they culture is alien, the risks are high, and the rewards are not necessarily significantly larger than those available in developed, wealthy, safe countries.

So long as British firms get a toe hold in emerging markets they will do fine, being first mover in economies as fractious and turbulent as those in the developing world is not always an advantage. Benign neglect may well be the best policy towards encouraging firms to expand overseas for the time being.

…

Sorry this is all a bit of a ramble, but I hope my point is clear. What happens elsewhere in the world matters for all sorts of things, but it probably doesn’t matter ex ante for what good economic policy will be. We might wish in 30 years we had nationalised all Broadband suppliers and heavily subsidised super-duper broadband across the land because it would have produced an unbeknownst productivity miracle. But that doesn’t mean we should do it.

____

[1] More worthwhile they also point to the disruptive impact that the internet is having in all sectors, but I have nothing to add to what is discussed in their report other than “innovation and experimentation is important so lower barriers to entry where lots of innovation and experimentation is important.”

Filed under: Politics

Feigning Outrage and winning the Feminist argument

George Osborne didn’t even seem particularly perturbed by the fact that he broke the law in failing to carry out a gender impact assessment of the spending budget.

No Shit! I don’t think it is a useful tactic to pretend to be outraged by the fact that George Osborne didn’t think to assess the gendered impact of his budget.

Most modern philosophy and statecraft is entirely gender blind. Or rather, it is as it has always been with “and we’ll treat women fairly too” added on. Justice, Gender, and the Family (H/T) outlines that much of the canon of western liberal thinking has developed in a world which was deeply unequal with respect to gender and that is inherent in much of it. Women have been excluded from centuries of thinking and discussion on what liberty and freedom mean, as Yglesias argues, adding “and we’ll treat women fairly” doesn’t really cut it.

So when George Osborne releases a budget and ignores whether one gender is to be worse hit than another feigning outrage is a stupid thing to do.

Public Sector workers tend to be female, single parents tend to be women, etc. that means that reducing the size of the Public Sector and reducing benefits and so on will impact women harder than men. However, that isn’t necessarily because George Osborne doesn’t like women.

These cuts are going to impact women more harshly not just because of the structure of the cuts because of the structure of society.

You are more likely to be a women if you are a teacher or working in many of the “caring” professions. You are more likely to be a women if you are a single parent. You are going to be stuck with the child rearing if you are a woman for a number of reasons, and that will lead, at work, to a less senior position and a more vulnerable labour market position (you’ll be more expendable if you’re on the eve of maternity leave or have spent 5 years raising kids rather than raising up the greasy pole).

Making sure that policy takes account of gender is a good idea. However it is not necessarily an obviously good idea, people remain to be convinced that each policy needs to be examined from the position of gender equality. While feminists may see the need to discuss public service cuts from the point of view of the gendered division of labour within the family, this doesn’t sound terribly relevant when discussing a budget.

Righteous indignation and high-faluting, self-felating comparisons with Suffragettes are not helpful when trying to convince people that feminism has relevance to most aspects of their lives or politics.

Filed under: Blogging, Politics, Society

Gaddafi on his way out

I’m pretty sceptical of every “liberal” intervention, especially ones intended to topple long standing incumbents who are holding together fractious countries in the most volatile region of the earth. However, colour me optimistic about tonight’s events.

Gaddafi appears to be on his last legs as rebels advance on Tripoli. Saif Gaddafi has been detained according to Reuters and the ICC seem keen to try Gaddafi senior (if he’s not found swinging – a la Mussolini – from a lamppost).

If NATO’s airstrikes have played a role in mitigating the carnage and helping force Gaddafi out I will revise my views somewhat. Rather than assume all interventions are onanistic consumption for powerful people, I may begin to think these interventions may occasionally serve some useful purpose.

However, it is early days yet, so while my will is optimistic, my intellect says “revolt in the middle east? Why, what could there possibly be to worry about.”

Filed under: Foreign Affairs

This is probably the least/most harrowing paragraph in this article

As I leave Uganda, there’s a detail of a story that I can’t forget. Before receiving help from the RLP, one man went to see his local doctor. He told him he had been raped four times, that he was injured and depressed and his wife had threatened to leave him. The doctor gave him a Panadol.

The rape of men.

Filed under: Politics

If poor people own a TV, they are still poor

The propensity to own a radio or a television, a widespread form of entertainment for American households, varies considerably across low-income countries. For example, among rural households living under $1 per day, ownership of a radio is 11 percent in the Udaipur survey, almost 60 percent in Nicaragua and Guatemala, and above 70 percent in South Africa and Peru. Similarly, no one owns a television in Udaipur, but in Guatemala nearly a quarter of households do, and in Nicaragua, the percentage is closer to a half.

Hat tip occasional contributor Luis Enrique, more nuggets in the article linked above.

Filed under: Economics, Foreign Affairs, History, Politics

If Poor People Make Bad Decisions, They Are Still Poor

I received a fair amount of blow back for suggesting that even rioters with Blackberrys can be poor. The usual suspects at Liberal Conspiracy also waded in. Most of the comments ignored my main point. Owning something that sounds expensive but is in fact relatively cheap does not mean you are not poor.

It is very difficult to talk about poverty without talking about relative poverty. Absolute poverty is defined at around $1-2 a day. That translates at around £1 a day for food, water, shelter, clothing etc., which is pretty meagre. Most beggars on your average British street could raise that from the pity or generosity of a passer-by. Absolute poverty in an international sense does not, in fact almost can not, exist in this country.

Recalibrating an absolute poverty line which makes sense for the UK is a difficult job, the £50 a week you receive as a Job Seekers Allowance might work. You would certainly feel in poverty if that is all you had to live on, but it would place you well above a couple of billion people worldwide, some of whom would probably resent being called poor. Except to an almost impossibly cosmopolitan libertarian, a single global poverty standard doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t pass the sniff test.

So relative poverty seems like a sensible way to push forward with understanding poverty within a country, even if the current definition sounds too generous to some. An income below 40% 60% (update, see comments) of the median wage is deemed poverty in the UK, perhaps 30% of 20% would be more accurate. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggest a minimum income standard of 53% of the median, by my calculations. But whatever standard we settle on we need an additional proviso.

Poor people will occasionally make bad decision, but this doesn’t mean they stop being poor.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but perhaps one of the reasons someone is poor is because they have made bad decisions in the past. It is well documented that the poor around the world often throw parties when they should be saving towards old age, spend “too much” on weddings, they enter lotteries with negative expected payouts. Poverty is horrible and making bad long-term decisions for short-term relief is a signal of being in poverty, not of escaping it. Being human shouldn’t debar you from that most human of conditions, poverty.

Laban was the only one to really say something useful. He informed me that because he is not well off he runs an old Nokia on a £5 a month contract, and good on him too, I love my old Nokia. Sardonically Laban then recommends that “[p]erhaps we have to recalibrate our definitions of poverty to ensure that those who can afford a Blackberry qualify.” *Slow Hand Claps*

That is just the point I was making, we don’t need to recalibrate our definitions of poverty, Blackberrys are relatively easy to afford. Where I grew up the difference between a poverty-busting £10.50 Blackberry inclusive contract from Carphone Warehouse and Laban’s staid, parsimonious £5 a month is about 1 1/4 return trips by bus into town. Now maybe I should be taking 5 extra trips every 4 months into town to job hunt if I am poor, but that sets up a very thin paper wall between being poor and not being poor. Once again it doesn’t pass the sniff test.

No discussion of this can conclude without reference to Adam Smith, so I’ll let him conclude:

“A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.”

A Blackberry is not necessary of life, nor is it necessarily shameful to be seen without one. But some form of telephone is, especially for the temporary, transitory work of many of those seeking to escape poverty. Spending not £5 but £10.50 a month might not be the best option, but it is a small, permissible, slip at worst. I hold pretty much everything I’ve written in this post and the last on poverty to be self-evident once you’ve spent more than 10 minutes thinking about it, what am I missing?

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Society

Interesting sentences

You are more likely to meet a cow in the Creuse than another human being. This corner of the Massif Central was home to a quarter of a million people in the 19th century; now that number has halved. Fifty years ago the French government got so worried it tried to repopulate the area with children from the Indian Ocean island or Réunion. Many of the so-called “orphans” later turned out to have families back home.

Sadly the rest of the article on the Busseau Viaduct is not online, nor the excellent photograph.

Filed under: Blogging

Riots, Recessions and Fear

It is funny (read: not funny) that the global economy is cooling down just as parts of England are boiling over. As Chris remarks “social orders are more brittle than we like to think.” It doesn’t appear to take much to dip fragile recoveries back into recession, or at least financial panic. It doesn’t appear much incentive is needed to engage in looting, just an expectation you will get away with it. So it seems to make sense to infer that policy can’t actually do much to improve things.

But, Chris and I disagree on how much macroeconomics can really do to improve circumstances. In the long run it is the supply side of the economy – the capital, land, labour and innovations – which drive how well off we are. There is always unemployment and fear for one’s job or firm, likewise there is always theft and violence. But as I’ve argued, getting macro wrong has terrible short-run highly unequal effects. Similarly, getting policing wrong may have led to an extra couple  of nights of rioting. Little in the grand scheme of things, but important to those involved.

Getting macro policy right could make me $100,000 better off over my lifetime. A one percentage increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a 6-7% decrease in initial wages for someone like me, who graduated at the trough of the Little Depression. The effects are persistent, with long-term indirect effects including “poor job match, lower prestige placements, and fewer opportunities for training and promotion.” This dispersion of suffering has the effect of causing people to fear and worry about it, and this effect has consequences.

The rioting, as David Allen Green argues, was both sporadic and did not touch most of the communities of the UK. It is likely, I agree, that in terms of national crime figures, the riots may not even show up. However, many people spent nights afraid on their streets, afraid in their homes because London burned and shops were raided.

But for most people their day to day lives were not effected. If you didn’t watch the news most people wouldn’t have noticed the riots, many people are not in fact doing any worse personally than if we had not had a recession and an anemic recovery. However, they feel like they might have done. I think this is the most worrying thing about the short run things we can influence, like macroeconomics or policing. They set the current conditions in which policy for the future is set.

The long run consequences of the Little Depression are nowhere near those of the Great Depression, and are unlikely to be so. But people with dangerous views are not so dangerous when life is generally benign, when things it becomes more likely their dangerousness will inflict itself on others. Bad short run outcomes can lead to bad long run outcomes.

For example, look at the United States economy. It badly needs more demand. Congressional Republicans have made the possibility of a default on the US’s debt a real, if unlikely possibility, despite this the US can still borrow incredibly cheaply because growth prospects for the US are so poor. The US badly needs more demand to recover and the Federal Reserve can provide that. However, some members of the Fed refuse to believe they can offer more help. Kocherlakota is one, he presents himself as a Inflation Hawk, keen to defend the little guy from the dangerous threat of inflation.

But, he is in fact an in fact an Inflation Cuckoo, he doesn’t understand how to do his job, he has snuck into a nest of monetary policy experts, but definitely doesn’t belong there. Normally this would not matter, the Fed would err slightly from time to time under his influence, but not so much as to crush an economy. Today his dissent is helping put the United States, and much of the world, halfway towards a lost decade in a way that wouldn’t be possible if macro had been done in the first place. That’s why I’ve stopped saying Great Recession and started saying Little Depression.

Likewise, the petition which calls for rioters to “loose [sic] their benefits forever” is a consequence of getting policing wrong and giving the impression that a third day of rioting wouldn’t be met with a robust enough police response. Once the police were out in force the rioters backed out because they thought they’d be caught.

Now there is little chance of this becoming law. It is frowned upon to change the law after an act to make punishment harsher. It sets up the odd position of rapists being able to claim post-prison benefits when someone who stole a mountain bike will not. It also would need the creation of a large, cumbersome bureaucracy to monitor benefit claims at a time when Government expenditures are being squeezed. But the urge to respond with more authoritarianism will be hard to resist.

The fear of short run failures creates an awful atmosphere in which to focus on achieving long run success. Short run policy may have only weak to no direct effect on long run economic and social trends, but its indirect effects may be far more important.

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Society

Tariq Jahan

Filed under: Politics, Society

Riot of a Time (via Bad Conscience)

Very quick thoughts on the recent riots. 1. Clearly it is true that poverty, alienation, deepdisgruntlement with the police and lack of opportunity are important background facts that any serious attempt at understanding will have to take into account. 2. But these alone cannot explain what was clearly, in many cases, opportunistic theft and glee in destruction. 3. So where do we go from there? 4. I take these to be true and important components … Read More

via Bad Conscience

Filed under: Politics

A modest proposal, we, the people, want our laws written by those who cannot spell

DELETED POST. Probably still in google’s cache and my subscribers RSS feed, if you’re interested.

I compared the responses to England’s Riots to the responses to Norway’s tragedy and I regret it. Norway’s tragedy should in no way ever be used to make fun of morons. I also think discussing anything that Norwegian arsehole did should be kept to a minimum. Sorry for any hurt, or insensitivity.

However, I still think that the petition to remove benefits from rioters is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever come across. It be difficult to implement, expensive to monitor, likely to back fire and based on the somewhat erroneous assumption that those who were rioting were claiming benefits. But there’s no reason to bring murdered children into this.

Filed under: Politics, Society

#UKRiots and #LondonRiots: First as tragedy, then as farce…

More here.

Filed under: Blogging

Even Rioters with Blackberrys can be Poor

Many of this week’s riots have been organised by Blackberry’s Blackberry Messaging Service (BBM). This allows for anonymised, tough to trace messages to be sent for free. It seems this service has been used to coordinate and direct the mayhem that has seen London’s worst violence in decades. A lot of people seem to think that this means that arguments that the rioters are driven in part by poverty to be silly.

“How can you be poor when you own a Blackberry?!” they cry.

I’m not sure why I’m saying “they”, I mean boring, conceited right-wingers, of course. The main point I want to make here is that manufactured goods are incredibly cheap but lots of other things you need to not be poor are not, but I’ll come to that later.

The auxiliary point I will address first is that Blackberrys are actually quite cheap as a phone. Not only because of the availability of long term contracts, £15.50 a month from Tesco, or from £10.50 from Carphone Warehouse but also because Blackberry Messenger is a great service. This service is quicker and easier than texting and is completely free to boot. Chris Bertram‘s niece is a convert, as am I.

It is not as good as texting because you need to coordinate with your friends to all have the same phone, but it is pretty good considering it is free to use. So that people without much money opt for a cheaper but slightly inferior service (BBM) should not be taken as evidence that they have loads of money (unless you are a boring, conceited right winger, of course).

The main point I want to address is that being able to afford impressive consumer goods does not mean you are not poor. The main thing that capitalism is really good at is improving the productivity of manufactured goods. Even very, very poor people can afford technology that was recently considered futuristic. Just look at the explosive expansion of mobile phone usage in Ghana and Kenya, for example, these people I would still not call “rich” in any useful sense of the word.

However, while productivity has increased across the board it has done so noticeably less for other things the poor purchase. This (US-centric) diagram from the Centre for American Progress illustrates this point nicely.

People can afford fantastically advanced consumer goods because productivity advances very quickly in this sector. Other sectors important to the poor do not see such fast growth. In Hackney some one bedroom flats sell for £300,000, now people may live nearby with flashy phones, but how many Blackberry contracts would it take to afford that flat? Well, at £10.50 a month it would take over 2000 years. That may not be poverty to starve you, but it is certainly poverty to disenchant you – and it is that sort of poverty which we need to talk about.

In addition to this, there appears to be a poverty of ambition in these riots. This is displayed most obviously in the way many rioters willingly show their face despite the chance they will be recognised. More subtly though these rioters appear to be looting the same consumer electronics which are so bloody easy to afford in the first place.

Perhaps I should add a caveat at the end here, something along the lines of “I am in no way condoning the rioting, I condemn it utterly, I am only trying to understand what is going on.” But that would only be necessary to boring, conceited right-wingers, of course.

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Society

Speculation Time: I think there is a D-Notice in place for all riots in London

News seems quite quiet out of London Boroughs, but not from other places. Sensibly it seems news agencies have been asked to keep schtum, which will probably go some way to keeping tonight quieter than either Saturday or Monday. No evidence, just a hunch.

Making the police presence sound intimidatingly large, publicising the thoroughness with which riots will be met tonight and keeping very, very quiet any successful rioting sounds like an excellent way to intimidate people off the streets, which may be exactly what we need.

UPDATE: Nah, changed my mind. I think it is actually just relatively still in London tonight, especially compared to the other parts of the UK.

 

Filed under: Society, The Media

Fear versus Consent #LondonRiots

These are some short thoughts on the last few days rioting. All is preliminary, I have no partisan points to score tonight. Partly because nothing is more annoying than the assorted commentariat realising that these riots reinforce exactly what they thought in the first place. Partly because Bethnal Green Road is twenty meters from my front door and I’m a little scared someone will smash in my lounge window as I write this. I feel like Laurie Penny.

Policing tends to work through consent. You do as the police ask because it is usually wise to. You don’t break laws because it is rarely a good idea to break laws. You consent to be policed. It seems that a sizeable minority don’t consent to be policed, until now they have allowed themselves to be policed because they feared the consequences of not.

Where you consent to be policed there are multiple equilibria, from petty law breaking like shoplifting to rioting against police brutality. You break the law despite fearing the police and the consequences. This can be down to desperation or frustration, but you remain committed to the idea of a police force enforcing the law, even if you hope they don’t catch you.

But, when people only accept policing because they fear otherwise there are only two equilibria. The first is peace, you don’t break the law because you fear what will happen if you do. The second is war, once you have broken the law and have gotten away with it then there is nothing left to restrain you. You break the law because you no longer fear the law.

The character of the rioting reinforces my point. People aren’t scared of being caught, many are not even covering their faces. People aren’t making a political point, they are looting and destroying because consumer electronics are nice to own and destroying with gay abandon can be a lot of fun when you don’t think you’ll have to face the consequences.

I hope I am wrong, because if I am not then it seems a restrained police presence and operation will not be enough to return those that don’t consent to be policed to their original equilibria. We will continue to see mayhem on our streets and other crime will remain elevated long after these riots have fizzled out. The only thing that will restore the old peaceful equilibria is an operation to scare the kids who are rioting into submission. Only after that can people be convinced that they should stop being scared and start consenting to be policed.

If I’m right, which I hope I am not, then London and the rest of the UK may have passed a dangerous threshold from which they is no easy way back.

Filed under: Society