How to End this Depression!

Targeting the path of Nominal Gross Domestic Product (NGDP) is probably the most “fashionable” solution proposed for dragging the developed world’s economies out of depression. This post will refer to the UK, but lots more work has been done on the US from this perspective, particularly by Scott Sumner and David Beckworth. Britmouse has blogged about NGDP from a UK perspective.

Real GDP is a proxy for our incomes adjusted for inflation, how well off we are. Nominal GDP is the same but refers to our incomes in cash terms. This nominal measure deviating from trend has been what has driven the wild swings in employment and production the developed world has seen since 2007.

NGDP matters because wages and debt are sticky.

Wages: NGDP can decrease if all other prices decrease with it, the relative prices between them will not change and apart from updating some menus nothing will have really changed. But it is incredibly hard to cut wages, look at the clustering of wage changes around zero in the below graph (via Paul Krugman). This means a decrease in NGDP relative to wages will throw people out of work as employers become unwilling to employ them at the prevailing nominal wage.

Debt: We care about what real resources we can consume but all our contracts are written in nominal terms. If I owe someone £10,000 then at some point I have to hand over some bits of paper, or packages of electrons, to someone for that amount. But, if NGDP grows below trend the total nominal size of the economy will be smaller than expected when I took out the debt, but the size of my debt will not. The real cost of my debt will have increased and this will work to depress the economy because this dynamic will affect a number of people.

If NGDP sinks below trend there are then at least two mechanisms which can act to depress an economy. [1] Has it sunk below trend? Yes it has.

Is off trend NGDP growth associated with weak real GDP growth? Yes it is.

Are changes from trend NGDP correlated with changes in employment? Yes they are.

That might be a little difficult to make out for some. So I zoomed in and inverted the unemployment figures. Are they correlated? Yes, and closely.

Let me tell you a story with a different ending to the one you know. The year 2007 began with NGDP growing to trend, and employment decreasing against the backdrop of international inflationary pressures and financial distress. NGDP reversed course and began to decline during the second quarter of 2007 as did employment, crucially this was before the Lehmann Brother’s bankruptcy and the ohmygodwereallgoingtodie stage of the financial crisis. Unemployment had already increased by nearly 200,000 after NGDP began declining but before the financial crisis began in earnest.

This doesn’t exhonerate any bankers, they put the Bank and Treasury in this position after all. But it does imply different priority for actions. Occupy Threadneedle Street, my friends, not the London Stock Exchange.

Scott Sumner and Ben Bernanke

Looking at the third graph you can see NGDP decline, recovery and stagnation correlating closely with decline, (mild) recovery and stagnation in UK employment. The Bank of England controls the country’s printing presses and hence the nominal economy and responsibility for this depression lies with the Monetary Policy Committee for doing too little to avert it and with the Treasury for doing so little to force them to do more.

In the UK and US the last couple of decades have seen NGDP grow at about 5% a year, and this nominal growth has been split between price increases and economic growth. In 2008 NGDP collapsed and we saw deflation, disinflation, and recession. To date NGDP has not yet recovered to trend, in fact it remains over 10% below trend – and this is our main problem.

Increase NGDP and employment, incomes and taxes would increase, many intractable problems would vanish (though many would not). There are risks and there are methodological problems, but there huge gains for everyone if they right policy is adopted and I want to do my part to try and make sure the right policy is adopted.

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[1] Data from here, I’ve used basic prices to strip out the effect of VAT jumping up and down

Filed under: Economics, Foreign Affairs, History, Politics, Society, Adam Posen, Britmouse, Market Monetarism, Mervyn King, NGDPLT, Scott Sumner, Unemploy, Unemployment

Living on a Dollar a Day Swindon Style.

A friend of mine has started blogging at I’m Goin’ Hungry about her attempt to feed herself on a pound a day for five days.

As part of Living Below the Line, Caroline Napier will be raising money for Christian Aid, but there are loads of other charities and NGOs supporting this campaign (see bel0w).

Caroline won’t be shitting in a mud hole, walking miles for dirty water and will know where her food is coming from. But she will be working in an office while doing this, and nobody in absolute poverty has to put up with that sort of monotony, so we’ll call it a tie with regard to the non-food budget elements of poverty.

I jest, but only because the horror of absolute poverty is so far removed from day to day life. Any steps an individual can take to bring poverty to people’s attention are a step towards eliminating it.

So give her your money, or sign up yourself and follow her blog [rss]. Also, look out for her in Swindon’s local papers and radio.

PS  Owen Barder is good on development, the IMF’s official blog is a bit dry, but covers a lot of ground and the Guardian’s Global Developmetn is a bit more case study orientated but also covers a great deal. All good places to start with some good blogrolls to browse round.

                        

Filed under: Society, Foreign Affairs, Development, Poverty, Dollar a day, Hygiene, Swindon, Caroline Napier

Drought

We’re in one.

Foreigners, welcome to England.

Filed under: Society, Drought, The Weather

Who’s responsible? You fucking are!

I see the press are doing their best to make mass murder look like an even better way of getting publicity than a contract with Saatchi and Saatchi.

Filed under: Politics, Society, The Media

They looked from pig to man and man to pig…

Prime Minister David Cameron has said “gaps” in national security must be plugged but there was “still time” to meet civil liberties concerns.

Sigh.

Time was when governments wanted to take away our freedoms we  would at least get some rhetoric about how dangerous our enemy was, you know, imminent nuclear annihilation by an ideological enemy.

We had to fight the creators of brutal gulags, fight to free people were held in violation of habeas corpus. We had to liberate people from repressive police states where the criminal justice bureaucracy lobbied for more people to be locked up just to keep the money rolling in. The enemy was the snooping Stasi who pretended to need ever more powers. That’s not to mention the prevalence of secret trials and overseas, secret, detention and torture.

Of course, facing all those things we the citizens of the free world needed to take action… so now what do we do?

Filed under: Society, Science, Tories, USSR, Guantanamo, Gulag, Liberal Democracts, Can I call them illiberal autocrats yet?, New Police Powers, Rendition

How eurocentric is Tyler Cowen?

Chris Brunk, an all-too-loyal MR reader, writes to me:

I developed a thought experiment that I wanted to share with you.  I call it “The Grand Gameshow”.

In this thought experiment you are a contestant on a gameshow.  The host of the gameshow (let’s call him Alex) has a notecard that says whether or not god exists and to what extent he is involved in the affairs of mankind.   You start with $1,000,000 that you must allocate across five possible categories:

• Category 1 – Scriptural literalism.  Bet into this category if you believe that one of the religious texts is precisely accurate.
• Category 2 – God is omnipresent.  Bet into this category if you believe that god is everywhere and intimately involved in our lives.
• Category 3 – God as a guide.  Bet into this category if you believe that god is only there for the major turning points in life and/or when we reach out in prayer.
• Category 4 – God as a watchmaker.  Bet into this category if you believe that god set the universe in motion but is no longer around.
• Category 5 – Atheism.  Bet into this category if you believe that god does not exist.

You can distribute the money however you like (e.g. all $1,000,000 in one category or $200,000 in each).  After you’ve allocated your $1,000,000 Alex flips over the notecard and reveals which of the five categories is correct.  You keep any money that you’ve allocated into the correct category.

Some footnotes.  For the purposes of playing this gameshow assume that your financial situation is that of a farmhand in Mexico.  You earn about $4,000 per year and have no substantial savings or degrees.  I classify simulism as being category 4.

I would be very interested to hear how you’d allocate your funds versus say, Russ Roberts or Robin Hanson.

What about Thor? Or Taoism? Or Buddhism? Or multitheism?

Privileging Judeo-Christian traditions just makes you look silly to me. Any teleology makes you look stupid; one which implies that world religions reached some sort of apogee in one particular messianic jewish cult which happened to be adopted by one particular  medium sized, medium-duration empire of premodern Eurasia makes me just plain sad.

Filed under: Blogging, Society

Bastards

Minimum alcohol pricing – bloody arseholes – and I say that in a professional and personal capacity.

The pricing of alcohol at 40p a unit, given modern booze taxes (about £1.90 on a bottle of wine), amounts to a ban on loss leaders. In other words, it solves a coordination problem for supermarkets. This is one reasons Tesco supports minimum pricing; they no longer have to sacrifice margin to attract customers from Sainsbury’s etc.

So, what we have is a transfer of wealth from most people who drink, but especially from heavy and thrifty drinkers, to supermarkets’ bosses and shareholders. Interestingly, given supermarkets’ size and prominence, this means it is a transfer of wealth to people with private pensions which will tend to be at least somewhat invested in supermarket stock.

Three conclusions:

1. This should stunt innovation at the bottom end of the booze market, so never expect to stumble upon a cheap but actually very nice drink again.
2. Setting up a bureaucracy to enforce a minimum price is more costly financially and politically than increasing the price of that floor – so don’t expect the 40p limit to last long. Swedish beer prices here we come.
3. More importantly, distributionally, this cannot but be a transfer from the very poorest people who have no pension to people on middle and higher incomes who do, however pitiful their provision.

Slow hand clap for the Tories – combining socialism for the rich; innovation stunting regulation and the shittiest part of Scandinavia since their post-war embrace of eugenics.

Filed under: Society, 40p, booze, price controls, Scandinavia, Tesco

The NHS: WTF do I say?

This is an example of what I was talking about here. What should I write about the NHS?

At the moment, Tories and Lib Dems have legislated to destroy large, geographically located primary care trusts and to replace them with small, non-geographically based GP consortia. These will register and treat patients but will have the option to have a large degree of administration carried out by private sector contractors. More details are not forthcoming in the maelstrom of amendments the Liberal Democrats are sticking over the Bill.

My priors tell me that:

1. Large bureaucracies are inefficient – this means the NHS is probably fairly inefficient, it being one of the largest bureaucracies in the world.
   1. They are inefficient because hierarchy dull high-powered incentives to hard work – they insulate people from making loads of money from individual effort and reduce the chances of losing your job if you screw up vis a vis self-employment.
   2. They are inefficient because hierarchies aren’t very good at experimenting and dissemination the practices which are subsequently found to be effective. In fact, most efficiency gains come not from reorganising old firms and facilities but from the exit of worse ones and the entry of better ones.

So, reorganising the NHS to make it more markety and more modular and experimenty should appeal to me. But:

1. Large reorganisations are very difficult. So if you want a large reorganisation, 4% annual efficiency savings and to maintain the current level of service you’re probably just mad.
2. The NHS is in fact a fairly efficient bureaucracy with internationally competitive health outcomes.
3. Private sector involvement is all but inevitable given that GPs are not managers or accountants and would rather not be involved in that because it isn’t an ambition they’ve ever had, being GPs and all not administrators. GP Consortia would not be bound geographically so we would then find ourselves only one step from a national two tier (or more) health service. Were top up payments to be made legal some consortia could specialise in treating those with money and others would be left with the rest of us. This is a summary of an argument I first saw put forward by Ben Goldacre. As something of an egalitarian this bothers me.

Finally, there is other things militate against my adoption of Conservative and Liberal Democrat and reforms.

1. They are being run by nincompoops like Andrew Lansley who don’t know quite what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and hence how to explain what they’re doing and why they’re doing it to people who don’t know what they’re doing even if they might potentially be supportive of what they’re doing were what they’re doing to be constructive. [1]

So with respect to yesterday’s post, I still find myself in stage two, struggling to understand what is going on in the world, aware of my own ignorance merely sketching out ideas. I hope that these sketches are illuminating to my readers.

To sum up, my primary worry is that any long term benefits of the reform – assuming it leads to a productivity miracle which is widely shared and not merely a cover for privatisation – is swamped by the short term disruption such as the cost and waste of GPs spending four out of five days setting up Consortia rather than treating patients. In the long run the reforms may destroy the NHS, but it can be rebuilt – in the short run, these reforms are  going to kill people, and those lives cannot later be rebuilt.

_____

[1] Confused? Good. That sentence was an allegory for the confusing nature of the reforms. Don’t say you don’t get more than one level of meaning from this blog.

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Society, Andrew Lansley, Disney, Dunning-Kreuger with learning for Bloggers, GP Consortia, Haskel, Heden, NHS, PCT, Reforms

Plan B on Stereotype Threat

Treat enough people like scum and people will act like scum. Plan B’s new record about last year’s riots is well worth a listen on its merits and as social commentary.

Creating or reinforcing a positive or negative stereotype about someone will cause them to live up or down to that stereotype. Chris points us towards the Oak School experiments that showed pupils arbitrarily deemed to have high IQ subsequently did better at school. Other examples, again cribbed from Chris,  show that American blacks (pdf) or low-caste Indians can be primed to live down to their negative stereotypes.

So in answer to Plan B‘s question: Why do some kids not care if they get criminal records? Why risk an easy life for some new trainers? To a degree, this is because they’ve been told that people just like them don’t care if they get a criminal record and that all they care about is a new pair of trainers (preferable hooky). Constantly demonise the working class as chavs and you will end up with part of the working class acting like demons.

Filed under: Society, Chavs, Music, Owen Jones, Plan B, Rap

Homophobes: From Common Sense to Sophistry

One of the advantages of being a reactionary is being able to resort to “common sense” to defend your positions. A radical proposal, even if it is a good idea – like a Land Value Tax – or supported by tons of empirical evidence – like tackling climate change – can be stymied by appeals to “common sense.”

What you rarely hear are sophisticated arguments attempting to philosophically undermine either position. You don’t hear people claiming often that value is so intrinsically effemerable that no taxation of it is possible, they just moan about old ladies being forced out of their homes because they are asset rich but cash poor. [1] If anything resorting to sophistry is a sign that the reactionary bigots know they’re losing an argument.

And so we turn to Cardinal O’Brien who has recently said that 1) gay marriage is on a par with slavery 2) marriage is an immutable platonic ideal and so timeless and pure it cannot and must not be reformed by governments and that finally 3) defining gay marriage as real marriage would violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No. Really. All of this nonsense was said by a real person.

Controlling what counts as common sense gives you an enormous amount of power to not only silence critics but to determine the overton window within which debate occurs. For a long time homophobes helped define what common sense was, but demographics and logic has shifted common sense and majority opinion in a more liberal or accepting direction. Losing control of common sense is thus a major blow and can only really be dealt with through attempts to recapture it, capitulation, or reaching for resentiment.

O’Brien’s sort of sophistry is introduced as a sort of resentiment, focusing internal fears of losing control onto the misbehaviour of governments, or gays, or society in general. There is no choice here for O’Brien, because the reactionary can no longer appeal to “common sense” because about half of Brits think gay marriage should be fine.

So he cannot recapture it, and neither can he capitulate to it because that would be more or less impossible to reconcile with Catholicism and he knows it. So look out for shifts from “common sense” and empirics to sophistry, because it is a sure sign you’re winning whatever argument you’re having and the other person knows it.

____

[1] Look, you fuck-wits, liquidity transformation is what finance is for. If we implement a Land Value Tax, a bank, building society or whatever will help people turn their illiquid assets into liquid cash, that is one of the core purposes of finance. At the moment releasing equity in a property is quite expensive, but were a million extra customers to appear then the extent of the market would quickly increase entrants and push down costs. I could write the contract myself:

“We will pay your tax for you, but on exit from the property or your death we shall demand payment of amount paid plus seven percent for each year we paid your tax. This can be met out of sale of your property or if possible and if as your last will and testament specifies from the remainder of your estate.”

Anyway, I got sidetracked…back to the top you go.

Filed under: Politics, Society, Cardinal O’Brien, Catholics, Common Sense, Gay marriage, Gays, Sophistry

Bulgaria under the yoke of Communism again

Spiegel: Great Wall this week became the first Chinese automobile manufacturer to open an automobile assembly plant inside the European Union…

…Bulgaria, the EU’s poorest country, is attractive as a labor market because it is an oasis of cheap wages and low taxes. Workers are considered well educated and the country is ideal as the site for a company like Great Wall to launch. Given that wages for factory workers have risen considerably in China in recent years, assembly sites abroad have become increasingly attractive for some manufacturers.

(H/T). Some thoughts:

1. Don’t overweight cheap labour and underweight transport costs and clustering in thinking about global trade.
2. There will be more of this. In the end the country with the most people wins – that means China for a while and India afterwards.
3. There should be less of this, trade barriers mean international investments need to be made that would not were the EU a true open borders free trade area.
4. East Asian labour is remarkably low-skilled and poorly educated despite what positive prejudices  you might hold.
5. Technology is highly mobile and drives convergences in incomes all round the world in interesting ways.
6. The future prosperity do the world depends on the rich world restraining its xenophobic hostility to foreign capital, as much as foreign workers. You boss may one day speak another language and earn much of his money in a foreign currency, that should be fine so long as she still pays your wages.
7. We live in interesting times.

Filed under: Economics, Society, China, Free Trade, India, Investment, Outsourcing, Trade, Tyler Cowen

You can think a foetus is a person and still think abortion is okay

On abortion, no, just no:

On the one side, it’s not a human, just a blob, entirely up to the woman what she wants to do with it.

On the other it’s one of God’s chosen creatures and so deserving of the same protections the rest of us get.

You can think a foetus is a person and that a woman is allowed to abort it.

If a woman’s body is her own – and it is – then even if someone is reliant on her for life she has the right to refuse that support. A foetus’s right to life does not involve the right to use someone else’s body…

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.

So the argument should not be sidetracked by debates on whether a foetus is alive or not. The real crux of the matter is whether a woman’s body is her own or that of society.

You could say that the woman chose to have sex and that implies an obligation to the consequence of that. But that just underlines the real reason most religious people are against abortion; babies are punishment sluts for having sex.

Consider for example, if you really, actually, honestly thought life began at conception then you would be in constant mourning. At least half of all fertilised eggs fail to implant. That means that for every person born at least one has already died, the attrition rate makes abortion seem trivial. There is basically no better way to spend money to save lives than working to improve that statistic. Yet anti-choicers spend money punishing sluts campaigning to lower the termination limit on abortions.

Call it revealed preferences, anti-choicers like punishing women, but not working to improve embryonic implantation rates. Makes you question their motivations, no?

Filed under: Society, A Defense of Abortion, Abortion, Tim Worstall

Cognitive Biases and Workfare

That last post got me thinking about cognitive biases. Being in contact with the unemployed  makes you more miserable than otherwise, but not because it actually increases your chances of unemployment – it isn’t contagious. So people’s change in behaviour or happiness must be a result of new information or old information which they were previously choosing to ignore.

While Chris (and Layard) are correct, workfare or active labour market polices can be good things, the positive effects – lower inflation and higher growth – are diffuse and the negative effects felt by both those in workfare and who meet those in workfare. So it is possible that seeing what unemployment is really like, and the exploitative practices associated with workfare is new information for some people.

Alternatively, people choose to know less about unemployment than they could and unconsciously engage various cognitive biases to effect this. To this extent cognitive biases protect most people from the negative effects of unemployment.

This means that theoretically the left should welcome workfare, for it finally destroys the recent idea, codified by Thomas Friedman, that we need to build our own economy and that we can be in control of Brand Me. Thinking an individual is responsible for their own economy and economic position is fanciful. Just as blaming the unemployed for their plight is a variant of the fundamental attribution error so too is entrepreneurial fetishism. Calculus was invented twice at the same time; someone was going to invent a pretty mp3 player eventually; somebody was going to get social networking right, some ideas are just in the air. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense to handsomely reward entrepreneurs, because it means we get a more pregnant air from which they pluck ideas, but it does mean we shouldn’t attribute too much genius or control to any one person or group.

That is standard fair on the left, waking up the sheeple…

…so it should be some consolation that workfare will work to either let the employed know how horrible being jobless really is, or will breakdown whatever protective cognitive barriers they’ve erected to protect themselves from those grim truths.

Cognitive biases can lead to sloppy policy so inasmuch as they protect individuals by imposing costs on others they are good things to eliminate but it has to be remembered that they do something useful by protecting people from unpleasant truths. So finding policies that break through them will not be unambiguously good but I hope they will eventually be good.

Filed under: Economics, Society, Brand Me, Cognitive Biases, Entrepreneurs, Fundamental Attributation Error, Sheeple, Thomas Friedman, Unemployment, Wellbeing, Workfare

ATOS, Actually TOSsers

This beggars belief…

From the local press, so usual caveats apply, but this story really is astonishing. I’ll quote the important parts below.

Wheelchair users have to climb a flight of chairs to prove they are disabled enough to get benefits at a centre in Croydon.

Although there are lifts in the disability benefits assessment centre, anyone in a wheelchair or who cannot climb stairs is banned from using them due to health and safety requirements.

Anyone who cannot tackle the 42-step staircase is instead forces to make a 14 mile round trip to Balham because the centre in Cherry Orchard Road is not disabled friendly.

The local Tory MP called it “ridiculous” in a letter to Chris Grayling.

This is grist to the mill for those who think that the Tories are 1) evil and 2) not actually any good at running a government any more.

Filed under: Politics, Society, ATOS, Conservatives, Disability, Disabled, Evil, Scum Watch, Tories, Wheelchair

You’re only as wealthy as you feel, but as poor as I say you are

One of the fun things with Libertarians is that they are very fond of dispersed tacit knowledge. I happen to think this is an excellent idea. What we know is limited, but what we all know should be used to the furthest extent. It is why markets are useful, they amass knowledge.

This fine idea, that knowledge is finite and that wisdom is dispersed among many people, often runs up against the ideals of Libertarianism. For example, a great many people feel themselves poor, but compared to most who have ever lived nobody is poor. David Henderson expands:

106 billion humans have been born since Homo sapiens appeared about 50,000 years ago. That means that the richest one percent in history includes 1.06 billion people. There are currently 6.2 billion humans alive, leaving approximately 100 billion who have died. Who among the dead was rich by today’s standards? Not many. Royalty, popes, presidents, dictators, large landholders, and the occasional wealthy industrialist, such as Andrew Carnegie and Leland Stanford, were certainly rich. All told, it is difficult to imagine more than 20 million of these people since ancient Egyptian times. This leaves 1.04 billion wealthy alive today, or 17% of the world’s population.

When discussing something as palpable as poverty this relativism vanishes. Tacit knowledge is useless, wisdom is concentrated. You, me, all of us, are very lucky. We are all very rich people because someone we were once related to once suffered terribly.

Nevermind if one another’s specialist knowledge of suffering says otherwise. Nevermind if some of us feel like we are in poverty compared to all we can observe, a nice academic assures we aren’t in suc ha bad state.

I find this terribly funny. Because it just goes to show that people align their ideology with their prejudices, not vice versa.

(UPDATE 13.46pm 17th October. Just to clear up my meaning a little, I was rambling.)

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Society, David Henderson, Econlog, Hayek, Libertarians, Michael Polanyi, Tacit Knowledge

Alcohol doesn’t turn people into dickheads, dickheads turn to alcohol

I’ve always wondered why some people become such violent sods when drinking. My theory has long been that alcohol just brings out the more “authentic” you. So if you were violent when drunk, you were a violent person and used alcohol as an excuse. If you were promiscuous when drunk, you were a promiscuous person and used alcohol as an excuse.

Kate Fox (author of Watching the English, which should be required reading for everyone) has an interesting piece over at BBC offering a more subtle and more correct reading of why alcohol makes us act as we act.

To put it very simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol… We become more outspoken, more physically demonstrative, more flirtatious, and, given enough provocation, some (young males in particular) become aggressive. Quite specifically, those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol.

Our beliefs about the effects of alcohol act as self-fulfilling prophecies – if you firmly believe and expect that booze will make you aggressive, then it will do exactly that. In fact, you will be able to get roaring drunk on a non-alcoholic placebo.

Filed under: Society, Dickheads, Drinking, Kate Fox, Promiscuity, The English, Violence

David Cameron must, sensibly, occasionally read this blog

David, yesterday.

I once stood before a Conservative conference and said it shouldn’t matter whether commitment was between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, or a man and another man. You applauded me for that. Five years on, we’re consulting on legalising gay marriage.

And to anyone who has reservations, I say: Yes, it’s about equality, but it’s also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other. So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.

Me, last month.

Changing the institution of marriage might have bad effects, but there have been none from the introduction of civil partnerships six years ago, a half-way house towards full gay marriage. This implies that previous scepticism about gay partnerships, and therefore marriage, was undue. If conservatism is about scepticism then its scepticism should now have flipped.

Rather than being sceptical about the damage being done by expanding marriage, conservatives should now be sceptical about the damage being done by treating some citizens as less equal that others. If the costs of introducing gay marriage are low, as has been at least partially proven, then equality before the law should now trump diminished conservative worries about gay marriage.

Filed under: Politics, Society, Civil Partnerships, Conservatism, David Cameron, Gay marriage, I'm Right!, Philosophy

Dear Co-Operative Bank,

UPDATE: They Co-operative sent me a cheque for £50. They are awesome. Mistakes happen, but it is nice when they are dealt with at an adequate pace and when a proposed resolution exceeds your expectations.

You keep me on hold for hours then close the department I’m trying to contact without telling me?

Only when I gave up, phoned back and spoke to a human being did I find out that you’ve sent the people I need to talk to home. And all the while I was being told “you are moving up the queue” and “thank you for your patience.” Did you expect me to stay on the line until Tuesday morning?

You idiots! You fucking useless twats! Don’t you realise everyone can publicise these massive fuckups instantly these days? Buck you your ideas. If anybody is trying to maintain your image then please contact me and help me set up a bank account. It shouldn’t be this fucking complicated.

Yours faithfully,

An angry (ex-?) customer

Filed under: Society

So, no, essentially there is no hard evidence on the relative criminality of Travellers/Gypsies/Pikeys etc.

Now I just want to find out why nobody has bothered.

Filed under: Society, Dale Farm, data, Equality, Gypsies, Pikeys, Planning Laws, prejudice, Travellers

So travellers/gypsy/pikeys are criminals etc. Anybody got any data?

Apparently travellers are criminals, at least that is what I’m told. I’m also aware that prejudice against travellers is pretty much also the only prejudice which it is acceptable (expected?) to hold. I try not to form opinions on things on anecdote, so I’m looking for some data. Can anyone help?

Travellers provide perfect controlled experiments. We can look at year by year crime stats and see if the arrival (or disappearance) of travellers causes a break in trend. If they are more criminally active than average it should show up and it should be easy to detect.

Now there will be confounding factors, for example, people may be more likely to notice and report low level crime if they know travellers are nearby, likewise they may report crimes which did not happen to gain leverage to have the moved on, similarly you would need to control for travellers merely as an increase in population and density, plus you’d need to control for socioeconomic status (ugly phrase) of the travellers. There are doubtless other things I’ve not thought of.

So, has anybody carried out these tests? If so, why don’t we hear about them, if not, why not?

Filed under: Society, Dale Farm, data, Equality, Gypsies, Pikeys, Planning Laws, prejudice, Travellers