What do I think about fixed term parliaments? Since I’ve been recently considering whether I would prefer to continue with democracy at all, this is a slightly odd question. I think it relates to my previous examination of the length of the term between elections. The advantage to the incumbent of choosing the date is not necessarily a problem, if a balance is needed between stability which increases the time horizon of the government, and the opportunity for change which discourages insurrection. Effectively shortening the campaign is an advantage. If we know now that election will be on particular date in 2008, everyone — government and opposition — will be organising around that date. We’ll have 3-year election campaigns. And I’m coming to the conclusion that politics is bad for government.It could be argued that the mere possibility of an early election caused extra politics in the recent past, but that’s a rare occurence, and likely to become even rarer in future as a result of the points Brown lost over the whole thing.
Also, unlike, for instance, the US federal system, we have a system where the executive requires the support of the legislature. If it no longer has that support, and no other government can get support, we need to have an election. Currently, it is up to the government to resign and call an election when it no longer has support. With fixed term, it would require a formal no confidence vote, and you can get some weird games, such as a government actively seeking passage of a vote of no confidence. Something of the sort happened in Germany a year or two ago if I recall correctly. So, I’m against fixed term parliaments (at least as a single reform in the context of the current UK system).
Category: Main
Anomaly UK blog posts
Tax and Democracy
chris dillow is ready to give up on democracy, based on observations that cutting inheritance tax, paid only by the rich, is more popular electorally than cutting income tax, which is paid by the poor.
I’m not here to cheer for democracy, but his explanation, that the low expectations of the poor lead them to accept being victimised by the tax system, does not seem to me the most likely one.
For me, the key fact is that PAYE income tax is the ultimate stealth tax. If someone pays £100,000 in tax on inheriting a £500,000 house, that is seen as a huge blow, but I have never heard anyone ask what difference it would make to someone on £20,000 a year if they weren’t paying £3,500 of it in income tax (and, while we’re at it, another £1,500 or so in VAT).
Evidence for this is articles like the one I picked on in 2005 , which claimed that transport was the average household’s biggest expense, ignoring the fact that taxation added up to as much as transport, food and housing put together.
Further, it is still widely believed that higher taxes help the poor. Helping the poor by cutting income taxes would generally be looked at as an absurdity. The same goes for inheritance tax, of course, but that is more likely to be seen, probably correctly, as a fringe issue. Therefore cutting inheritance tax wins votes of those who pay it, but does not lose many from the rest.
The fact is that when government took 10-20% of the economy, it could be funded mainly by taxing the rich. As the figure has grown to 40%, the tax burden has fallen far more heavily on the poor, despite the widening of the franchise. To me, the obvious explanation is that government has for a long time been extracting as much or nearly as much from the rich as it practically can. If that is correct, then the only way to achieve genuinely redistributive taxation is to drastically shrink the state.
If I’m right (and I admit I’m asserting a few controversial things here without much in the way of evidence), then the problem isn’t any fundamental conflict between democracy and equality as chris fears, but a single mistaken view which might possibly be reversed.
Help the poor – cut taxes.
"The computer did it"
In The Register, the story of a man who got 7 days because when he signed up for facebook, it sent an invitation to “be his friend” to every facebook member whose email address was in his address book — including his ex-wife, whom he was under a court order not to attempt to contact.
He might of course have been lying, but if not he has been punished for what his computer, and facebook’s computers, did on his behalf.
The point is that the law has to decide how much responsibility a person has for what their computer decides to do.
Up till now, the assumption has been that whatever your computer does, is done at your request, and you are wholly responsible. This despite the fact that that has never been true, and is getting further from the truth every year.
There is no legal tradition to apply here. The nearest analogy to the relationship between a person and his computer is the relationship between a man and his dog.
People have kept dogs for thousands — most likely tens of thousands — of years, so everyone has a rough idea what the deal is. The general legal view is that you have a duty to keep your dog from causing harm under foreseeable circumstances, but there is a distinction between what your dog does and what you do. If your dog attacks a child, you are not guilty of Grievous Bodily Harm, but you might be guilty of keeping a dangerous dog. If your dog craps on the street, that is different than if you crap on the street, but you might still be fined.
If you are found guilty of not properly controlling a dog, you can be banned from keeping one. If your dog causes harm and is considered not to be controllable, the court can order it to be destroyed.
(If you deliberately cause your dog to kill someone, that is still murder of course, but your intention is crucial)
This is the only rational legal framework for crimes committed by a computer without the intention of its owner.
Crime: responsibility of victims
In an insightful piece, “David Copperfield” discusses how much responsibility the victim of a crime has for the crime, in a number of different situations, and to what extent, if any, such responsibility should affect his actions as a police officer.
I discussed this question a couple of years ago:
There is a notion that responsibility can be “shared”, which I think is fundamentally misleading. We each make our decisions in an environment that has been made mainly by other people, but to judge any decision, legally or morally, we have to take that environment as given. Many people might have responsibility for any bad outcome, but they have it separately, they do not share it. We might put ourselves at risk of all sorts of dangers, from other people or from other elements of our environment, and if we are wise we will consider our own responsibility as we do so, but if we are the victim of a criminal, his responsibility is not lessened by our risky behaviour.
In the examples Copperfield gives, there are two general categories of responsibility that some victims have: Either they can fail to take ordinary precautions to avoid or prevent crime (failing to lock doors, leaving property unattended in a public place), or else they can deliberately involve themselves in illegal activity (buying goods that are probably stolen, dealing drugs, responding to 419 communications which are generally invitations to share in a theft or fraud).
My answer to his question is that the responsibility, if any, of the victim should not be a primary consideration for him. The reason is that he is not working on behalf of the victim. He is working on behalf of us all, as we all benefit from the rule of law. His job is not to undo the effects of the crime, which in most cases is impossible, but to bring offenders to justice in order to uphold the rule of law.
So what should be important for him is not the status of the victim, but the status of the offender. It might be the case that a thief who grabs a handbag from a pub table is a lesser offender, and a lower priority, than a thief who breaks into a car. I do not think that a mugger who hangs around in a “bad part of town” is a lower priority than one on the high street. Is a drug dealer who shoots other drug dealers a lower priority than a drug dealer who shoots passers-by? Possibly, but it is very marginal.
Phone Mast information
The people who worry about health effects of RF radiation from mobile telephone masts are superstitious, ignorant luddites. It is vastly implausible that there could be any effects, on top of which repeated studies have failed to find any.
The idea that they are dangerous is stupid, but there are even more stupid ideas around. Among them is the claim by the mobile phone companies and Ofcom that the existence of a tall metal mast, bearing a distinctive antenna and broadcasting a distinctive radio signal, is a trade secret. That claim takes us way beyond tinfoil hat territory and into serious alternate reality.
It is entirely reasonable for Ian Henton and his fellow tinfoil-clad loonies to demand that the location of masts be made a publicly accessible record. “Commercial sensitivity” is frequently used as a cover for political sensitivity, and this is another example.
About this blog
Pressures of work mean that I’m only likely to add pieces at weekends. I’ve always gone more for analysis than instant response, so that shouldn’t matter much.
I rarely actually look at the blog from outside. I just did, and I’ve noticed that blogger has eaten all my paragraphs. I tend to write in the “Edit Html” tab, becaues the WYSIWYG mode used to be rubbish, and I would use the preview view before posting. I’m sure blogger used to put actual paragraph breaks in when you used blank lines in “Edit Html”, and the preview view still shows them, but blogger itself doesn’t. So I’m going to be going back through adding paragraph breaks to older articles. Expect the feed to go haywire.
Note to Google. If the Preview link doesn’t show what the piece is going to look like, it’s useless. Get rid of it.
It’s worse than that! I just wrote this in the “Compose” tab, and it’s still eaten all my paragraph breaks. How am I supposed to write paragraphs?? I’m actually going to go in and add paragraphs manually to the HTML. How crap is that?
I’ve found a setting (under “formatting” on the settings page) which puts the paragraph breaks back. Nevertheless, I consider it broken, because (a) what is the point of having a setting which means the only way of writing paragraphs is to edit the HTML, and (b) why does the setting affect the real blog pages but not the previews in the editor?
Adams on Lomberg
Scott Adams has a very interesting piece on his blog, describing Bjorn Lomberg’s appearance on Bill Maher’s TV show.
The Danish economist’s argument doesn’t fall into the established views about global warming. He wasn’t denying it is happening, or denying humans are a major cause. But he also wasn’t saying we should drive hybrid cars, since he thinks it won’t be enough to help. He thinks we need to make solar (or other alternatives) more economical. That’s the magic bullet. His views don’t map to either popular camp on this issue, and it created a fascinating cognitive dissonance in Bill Maher (a fan of hybrid cars) and his panelists.
Adams went on:
“It looks to me like a classic case of cognitive dissonance . They literally couldn’t recognize that the economist was on their side because he suggested considering both the positive and negative effects of global warming.”
But the economist certainly was not on their side. For Maher and the others, the important thing is that a policy of austerity be introduced, because they consider it morally right. Global Warming is just the excuse. Global Warming is true because it justifies austerity. If Lomberg or anyone disagrees with austerity he is not on their side, whatever he says about the climate. By arguing against austerity, he is removing the reason for Global Warming to be considered true, and therefore he is anti-Global-Warming. Denier! Burn Him!
Adams is imagining a world where observations lead to judgments about facts, which lead to conclusions about policy. That is alien to politicians, and to Maher. For them, policies lead to search for observations which can be connected to possible facts that justify the policy.
I would like to describe myself as in the Adams camp, but in honesty, as I’ve admitted previously, I can’t. The political vision of Gore, Maher and the others is so terrifying to me that it is surely colouring my assessment of the facts concerning climate. All I can do is put up the arguments as I see them, admit my bias, and make sure I don’t hide from evidence that contradicts my position. I’ve yet to see any evidence that I’ve felt I need to hide from.
This is my most detailed piece on climate. This is all of them.
Falkland Island Oil
This Guardian article (via L&P) talks about national claims to mineral rights beyond territorial waters — in particular the UK’s claims around the Falkland Islands and Rockall.
My immediate response was to the claim in the article:
the value of the oil under the sea in the region [of the Falkland Islands] is understood to be immense: seismic tests suggest there could be up to 60m barrels under the ocean floor.
60 million barrels. At $80/barrel, that is worth a bit under 5 billion dollars, or 2.5 billion pounds — less than a third of the cost of the 2012 Olympics, and probably much less than the cost of setting up extraction infrastructure. Either The Guardian has lost a lot of zeros, or the oil in the region is utterly insignificant.Luckily, I didn’t get where I am today by believing everything the Guardian told me. Looking at Wikipedia, it appears the Guardian is confusing millions and billions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Falkland_Islands#Petroleum_exploration_and_reserves It is considered probable that more than 60 billion petroleum barrels (10 km³) have been generated in the North Falkland Basin(I also learned that 60 million barrels is about two weeks’ current production from the North Sea.)
Things to consider:
- There is believed to be significant oil near the Falklands.
- The Guardian doesn’t know millions from billions.
- Liberty and Power can’t see at a glance that 60 million barrels of oil is nothing, despite the fact that the price of a barrel of oil is hardly an obscure piece of knowledge these days.
- I was going to go on about much-maligned Wikipedia being more reliable than the Guardian, but between drafting and posting this, the Guardian has (a) corrected the error and (b) left a note explaining the correction. Perhaps I should say that Wikipedia is more reliable than today’s Guardian, in that today’s Guardian has had little time to be fixed. However, if the fact in question is actually new (as opposed to background, like the 6 million barrels), which is at least suggested by insisting on today’s paper, then we all know Wikipedia is unreliable too. So scrub that one. Full marks to the Guardian for the promptness and manner of the correction.
In the long term, we cannot hold onto valuable mineral reserves in the South Atlantic. Defending them is justifiable, but probably not practical.
The time to negotiate is now. (Well, I’ve been saying this for 10+ years, so the best time has passed, but there is still an opportunity). We want:
- A revenue-sharing agreement for mineral rights for 50 years.
- Rights of the inhabitants guaranteed for 50 years.
- A Northern Ireland style arrangement with oversight by the South American partner.
- Sovereignty to devolve to the South American partner after the 50 years, Hong Kong style.
Argentina is the obvious partner for such a deal, but not the only possible one. Chile is, I believe, the closest mainland. Venezuela has the oil production infrastructure. And if none of them offer anything decent, hey, maybe the US would like a naval base or something. Let the bidding commence.
Carl Hiassen, call your office
Local government attempts to shut down pool club for allowing “lewd conduct”, while the vice-mayor, working at club as a DJ, is photographing said conduct.
h/t to Language. Log for the post title.
ICI: the investment fund
John Kay mourns the decline of ICI, now taken over by Akzo Nobel.
The products, the jobs, and the profits that old ICI used to make are all still going. What has gone — and what Kay is specifically mourning for, is the old ICI management organisation.
The heart of his argument is this:
The board of ICI accepted losses in pharmaceuticals for 20 years, in the conviction that drugs would eventually provide future sales and profits growth. Only after two decades was this belief vindicated through the commercialisation of Black’s discovery. Through his subsequent work for SmithKline, and the influence of his work on Glaxo, Black was the architect of Britain’s broader success in the industry.
Old ICI financed research out of its manufacturing profits. To my young mind, this seems an odd arrangement. Financing new business is the job of financiers, not manufacturers.
Kay picked one example of where the old arrangement worked well, but to me it sounds dreadfully fragile. If development of pharmaceuticals is the responsibility of the paint industry, then a bad couple of years in the paint market would mean no development. If managers of the paint industry feel themselves mainly responsible for development of other industries, they are likely to be less effective managing the paint.
Kay does not seem to be making the argument that investment in future industries is not happening – and indeed it is happening, in Britain, and elsewhere, but the investments are being made by specialist venture capitalists drawing on the broader capital markets, not by managers of other industries having a flutter with their firm’s profits.
There are several reasons why such investment funds (random example from Google) would be expected to do it better — they are specialists, they have wider access to capital. Today we see a great deal of investment into early-stage development of potential future chemistry-related industries.
The only reason why the old ICI model might be better would be if the successful managers in one industry, were, by virtue of their position and proven technical expertise, the best placed to make decisions about investment in future industries. If this were ever the case, it is by now much less so – it has been widely observed that the advance of science and technology has meant that specialisations become ever more narrow.
The story Kay tells of ICI sounds to me not so much a model to be emulated, but the rare exception to the story he has told many times, and more convincingly, of megalomaniac bosses trying to turn their companies into something else. See on Swissair, on HP, on BT — “policy making in business requires more than slogans and visions”. “Dreams are no basis for a sound corporate strategy”. That one dreamer got lucky at ICI in the 1960s does not shake the wisdom in those other columns.