Month: April 2007

From Jeff Randall in the Telegraph, a piece on the carnage of DIY over the Easter weekend.

The curse of DIY is inflicted on us by two policies: income tax and trade credential regulation.

The income tax is obvious: There is a job in my house that will take a skilled person an hour. I have two choices: I can do it myself, or I can work for money with which to pay someone else to do it.

Assume I get paid the same as a skilled tradesman. I have to work for an hour to pay for an hour of his time. Then I work for another 40 minutes to pay his income tax. Then I work for another 17.5 minutes to pay the VAT. Then I work another 78 minutes to pay my income tax. In the end I have worked three and a quarter hours to get an hour of someone else’s time. The temptation to think I can do it myself in less time than that is very strong.

The credentials are the other problem. The costs of getting a professional are inflated by rationing the supply.

It can be argued that the regulations are necessary to protect from under-skilled practitioners. But that assumes that the result of banning the less qualified provider will be that a more qualified one is used. The facts of DIY show the fallacy of this – if I can’t hire a cheap workman, I’ll probably have a go myself, with worse consequences.

It is like the ever-increasing monitoring of the quality of parents. I have seen at quite close hand the struggles of the underqualified single parent attempting to keep her child out of the clutches of the state. The process could possibly be justified if the end result was giving the child a better home, but in reality the only alternatives are the foster system or a children’s home. The most stringent sane criterion for judging the adequacy of a parent is whether she is doing a better job than the children’s home would, and the most stringent sane criterion for judging whether a workman should be allowed to do a job is whether he would do a better job than his potential customer.

I watched 300 last week, and it was a pretty good film of the sort I wouldn’t normally bother to review here.

I am, however, somewhat struck by the massive point-missing that has gone on. Many have complained that the film appears to be crude political propaganda, although there is some dispute as to who is being supported and who attacked.

How many of these people actually stayed to the end? The film is indeed crude propaganda, as we see at the end the narrator of the whole movie, the David Wenham character, standing in front of an army doing the St Crispin bit, presumably at the battle of Platea.

All the things that have been attacked make perfect sense in that context. The characters banging on and on about freedom while their many slaves never appear in shot, the domestic political rivals of the narrator being represented as hideous subhumans, the improbable monstrous character of the Persians (and for that matter the wolf) — the film was not the battle of Thermopylae, it was a pep-talk for Platea.

I haven’t read the graphic novel, and indeed have only the slightest aquaintance with them (Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns is I think the only one I’ve ever bought), but that kind of perspective-choice is one of the things I think they can do well.

The imagination of another’s perspective seems to be something in very short supply. Witness as just one example the Telegraph editorial yesterday accusing Iran of “meddling in Iraq” — it takes an amazing lack of imagination not to see how ludicrous that sounds.

It is reasonably obvious that the biggest factor affecting the quality of a school is not the building, the management, the teaching staff, or the level of funding, but the intake. By that I do not merely mean that pupils who go in better come out better, but that a pupil entering a school with a good intake will come out better than the same pupil would entering a school with a bad intake.

While this is widely recognised for schools, I think it applies also, and possibly just as much, to other public services. The difference between a good train service and a bad train service is, to a significant degree, down to the passengers. The biggest reason for a person to prefer to drive a car, rather than take a train, is to avoid the other people who would be on the train. Indeed, the point is so strong in transport that we do not consider as “public transport” a service which does not force us into proximity with other users, i.e. taxis, which operate on exactly the same basis as any other form of public transport.

There are two kinds of public/private distinction: there is the distinction between state-provided and privately-provided services, and the distinction between publicly-consumed and privately-consumed services. They line up sufficiently to cause confusion, because publicly-consumed services are not excludable and are therefore “public goods” generally considered better provided by government. Public/private provision is a more definite yes/no question, albeit with hybrids funded by subsidy plus usage fees, while public/private consumption is a continuum – a medical operation is a private good, but control of infectious disease is somewhere in the middle.

It is with this assumption that I look at Tyler Cowen’s controversial assertion that, as an effect of differences in structure, Western European governments provide public services better than the US government can. To the degree that this is true, I think the cause is more to do with the different attitudes of Europeans and Americans to public services than to different structures of government organisation. As the Economist blogger illustrates, even a straightforward benefits system will be much more effective in a public-oriented society like Denmark than in the USA.

In Britain, we seem to have the worst of both worlds: something approaching a European-sized state sector with very American public attitudes to the services it provides, and I think that more than anything explains the current state of our public services. It was not always that way — some years ago I mentioned in a discussion of mobile phone tariffs that, where evening calls were free, some customers were using their mobile phones as baby monitors, by making a call from one handset in one room to another and leaving the call open all night. To me that was reasonable and unsurprising, but my older friend found it hard to believe that people would abuse a limited public resource that way, just because they weren’t being charged. Publicly consumed services work much better with that older generation’s attitudes than with those of my generation.