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Blair and Me

What do I think of the current Blair feeding-frenzy? I admit to being a bit conflicted.

First, chris dillow is right as usual that compared to real questions about policy, all this is relatively insignificant.

Related to that, I think the press just wants him out, because they’re bored and would like to see something happen. I can understand that feeling, indeed I share it, but it can’t be a good reason to change the Prime Minister.

I don’t think we’d get better policies either from Brown or from whoever emerges as anyone-but-Brown.

What is distinctive about Blair is his idealism. This leads him to overambitious social and economic engineering projects, which is bad, but it also causes him to resist (to an extent) the Labour Party’s “core values”, meaning the prioritisation of the interests of public sector workers above everybody else. That is good. Will his successor’s corruption be worse than Blair’s idealism? Hard to say.

Then there is the next election. Will an early change be better or worse for Labour? Will the Tories be any better? Is Cameron lying when he says he is really just like Labour? What pressures will be on Cameron from the rest of his party? What would happen to the Tories if they lost the next election? Would they become better or worse, and in each case would that make them more or less likely to win the election after next, and what effect would that have on a Labour government in the meantime?

When it comes the the question of how to influence such an enormously complex and unpredictable system for the better by throwing a single vote at it, the only possible rational response is to give up and do something useful instead.

Current levels of voter turnout and engagement with politics are inexplicably and frighteningly high.

Fairy Dust

From my comment on Tim Lee’s question about Blair:

Blair’s “third way” is the traditional socialist belief that the economy, the country and the world can be managed and moulded to greater effectiveness, but with the old socialist economics modified by a magic sprinkling of private-sector fairy dust that would prevent repetition of the failures of the old state-run industries.

There is a perfect consistency between the belief that every public service and every industry can be improved by expert target-setting and regulation, and the belief that the Middle East can be made better by expert regime change.

The fairy dust is worth elaborating on. What I am talking about, of course, is PFI – the Private Finance Initiative, the idea that private-sector efficiency can be achieved in public functions by means of contracting with private suppliers to fulfil the functions.

The idea is not totally false. If there genuinely is an already-existing market for a particular service – say rubbish collection – then there is a good chance that the government can do better by entering that market than by organising and employing its own collectors. But it is usually the case that if there is a working market for something, the government should not be doing it at all in the first place, either directly or indirectly. PFI has most often been employed in areas which are in practice pretty much government monopolies. There is no competitive market in running prisons, and not much of one in building hospitals.

The reason I refer to PFI as “fairy dust” is because it is employed without any understanding of what makes the private sector different. The point is not the manner of organisation, but the pattern of incentives. The sales manager of a business unit which sells services to the government under PFI is as much a part of the public sector as any civil servant. His personal success depends on satisfying his government superiors/clients, accounting to them for the services he delivers and the resources he expends. If he satisfies them, he will win more contracts. He is in competition only with his peers – those who are selling the same class of services to government.

Von Mises produced an incredibly precise critique of PFI decades before its introduction to the UK, in his 1944 book Bureaucracy

It is a widespread illusion that the efficiency of government bureaus could be improved by management engineers and their methods of scientific management. However, such plans stem from a radical misconstruction of the objectives of civil government.

Like any kind of engineering, management engineering too is conditioned by the availability of a method of calculation. Such a method exists in profit-seeking business. Here the profit-and-loss statement is supreme. The problem of bureaucratic management is precisely the absence of such a method of calculation.

Education

It is a frustration of mine that whenever I start to talk to anyone about education, the conversation always seems to turn to schools. Schools are pretty much irrelevant to education. Schools are for babysitting, social conditioning and political indoctrination – valuable functions in many cases, of course, but not much to do with education.

Recognition of this fact seems to be beginning to build. See this piece in the Washington Post arguing that Americans, who learn exceptionally little at school, learn well after school. See also The Overselling of Higher Education

I happened to read a novel the other day set in 190x Spain. I didn’t know anything about the period – Spain was a complete blank to me from Napoleon to the Civil War. I happened to spend an hour or two poking about on Wikipedia, and I chatted about it with my wife in the evening. I now know as much about the period as if I had spent half a term on it at age 14. (True, what I “know” is not 100% reliable – but in my experience that is as much the case for secondary school lessons as it is for Wikipedia).

Those immigration estimates

John Kay looks at the spectacular underestimates of immigration from Poland and the other new EU members. The basis of the estimates was research commissioned by the European Commission.

My view is that, while planning and estimating things like this is important for the government to be able to manage the country, they don’t matter because the government shouldn’t be managing the country in the first place. If 15,000 East European immigrants are OK for Britain, why aren’t 600,000? The question isn’t how many we’re going to get, it’s how many we want. The idea that we know just what is going to happen as a result of any policy is a dangerous illusion, and leads to overconfident intervention in things that are not government competencies.

And I really don’t see the problem. There are three reasons for opposing immigration:

1) It’s bad for the economy
2) There isn’t room
3) Our culture will be swamped by foreigners

1) is tosh. The only possible harm would be if they all came and started claiming benefit. This is unlikely – Britain isn’t an attractive place to come because of its benefits, it is attractive because of its jobs. And if it happens it is only necessary to restrict benefits.

2) is also tosh. Our population isn’t growing organically, there’s easily room for twice the current population, and a lot more young working people is just what we need.

3) is not a respectable argument, but I find it hard to honestly assert that it couldn’t conceivably happen. The danger tends to be exaggerated, but it’s not impossible that life in this country could be made much more unpleasant by the presence of a large immigrant community with an incompatible culture. But Poles? If there’s a clash of cultures going on in Britain today or tomorrow (which I don’t think is the case to any serious extent, but am prepared to consider for the sake of argument), then, to put it bluntly, the Poles are on our side.

Terrorism and Piracy

Via Schneier, excellent article in Legal Affairs comparing modern terrorists with pirates. Parallels are strong, complete with states backing pirates for deniable attacks on other states, and pirates seizing land and forming mini-states in wild lands. The emphasis is on the law of the sea as precedent for an international legal framework for dealing with terrorism.

One difference, which is significant to the argument that the threat of terrorism is exaggerated: piracy was essentially for-profit, and therefore sustainable. Terrorism creates occasional opportunities for plunder, but is generally a loss-making activity requiring external funding. Therefore it is less likely to be as widespread and as near-permanent a problem as piracy was (and is).

Where terrorism is profitable, it is in “danger” of decaying into pure gansterism, losing its political side where that is not good for business. I believe that happened to a certain extent in Northern Ireland.

Legal downloading begins

The BBC is reporting that Microsoft’s WMA copy-protection has been cracked, and that a program for removing the protection has been published.

I haven’t seen any details from authoritative technically literate sources yet, but assuming it’s true…

“An analyst” (Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research) said Microsoft was probably working to “close the hole” – but I suspect that might not be possible without breaking many or all WMA players out there – including portable music players that play Microsoft’s files.

If so, then from now on, people who buy WMA-protected music from online stores will be able to actually play it on any music-playing equipment they own. Paid-for downloads will be almost as high quality as illegal downloads.

What I would therefore expect would be an enormous spike in the volume of legal paid-for downloads. I would certainly start buying them myself.

This could be the best thing to happen to the music studios since the invention of the CD.

Immigration and Liberty

Chris Dillow complains that the debate over East European immigration is carried on entirely in terms of the harm or benefit to Britain, and not of the freedom of the immigrants.

I don’t think this criticism is justified. I accept the idea that British government policy should be directed at the welfare of Britons, not of all humanity. This is a basic assumption of the system – it’s why the government is elected specifically by British voters. Benefiting foreigners is, all things being equal, desirable, but it’s a low priority, as indicated by such things as foreign aid.

Further, anything else would be unstable. Imagine for the sake of argument that allowing large numbers of Poles (or Chinese, or whoever) in is extremely detrimental to Britain. If we allow it anyway on the grounds of liberty, Britain would become weaker, poorer, and so on as a result. The benefit to the immigrants themselves would be limited. Therefore I think it is right that we assume that Poles, whyever they are put on Earth, should only be put in Luton that they might enrich the Brits.

To me, though not to most people, these aren’t entirely separate questions. To me, things like liberty and privacy are good because they are generally beneficial, so I am not surprised when principled and pragmatic arguments agree.

Also, the anti-immigrant arguments in this debate are weak enough that I am happy to take them on on their own terms. Half a million Poles sounds like a lot, but I read recently there are almost as many French in Britain. There are better places to be on the dole than Britain – people come to Britain to work. The last round of panic was over the load on local authority services, which doesn’t worry me in the slightest, firstly because they are so close to useless anyway that completely destroying them would constitute trivial harm, and secondly that, since the immigrants are working and paying taxes, there should be no problem once the bureaucracy has got its head round how many people there actually are in each area.

Finally, there is the track record of history. The claim that this wave of immigration is going to destroy society might seem plausible, but they always say that, and they always turn out to be wrong. They made as much fuss about the “Boat People”, and you can hardly say now with a straight face that we couldn’t have taken 10 times as many of them. Ditto Ugandan Asians.

I have the same attitude to Global Warming. People have been saying since the beginning of recorded history that our wealth and greed would cause us to be punished with natural disasters, and they’ve always been wrong so far. Climate simulation might have a bit more going for it than the “Angry God” model but one can say with one’s eyes closed that, as with immigration, whatever rational basis there is for concern is going to get massively exaggerated, because it always does.

Political Survival

By coincidence, just after posting my prevous piece on the importance of considering political survival as a constraint on any government, the EconTalk podcast on The Logic of Political Survival came out. Like others, I found this fascinating, and not satisfied with the 88 minutes of interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, I bought the book, which arrived on Friday.

The book in many ways lives up to its promise, but there are a few annoyances with it. The errors in the English are quite distracting: the first chapter is titled “Reigning in the Prince”. It’s just conceivable that this is some kind of clever pun, but if so it doesn’t quite work – it looks much more like ignorance of what reining in is. The title is taken from the sentence on page 4, “On the basis of our analysis, we propose ways of reigning in not ony Hobbes’s Leviathan, but Machiavelli’s well-advised Prince as well”. That makes perfect sense if it means “reining”, but has a quite different meaning if “reigning” were really intended, as well as sloppy grammar. (That is, it could refer to ways of reigning in the context of Leviathan or The Prince. I think it doesn’t).

The other problem is more general, not specific to this book. As you can see, the book compares the authors’ theories with those of other political scientists, from Hobbes and Machiavelli to the present day. There is a glaring ommission, though: an influential political thinker who produced a large body of work looking at the same questions. I shudder to think of the sarcasm that will come my way when I tell a Marxist about a new theory that governments are necessarily constrained for their survival to act in the interests of a definable powerful subset of the population.

This is not a problem with the theory – while the “Selectorate” is in many instances identical to what some call “The Ruling Class”, in other cases it isn’t, and the reasons for both the similarities and the differences between the two concepts are illuminating. But because of that, I think the comparison would have been worth making by the authors. If the Selectorate is identifiable as a class in the Marxist sense of sharing the same relationship to the means of production, that makes it easy for the leader to produce semi-public goods that benefit the Selectorate at the expense of the rest of the population, and harder to produce goods that benefit the “Winning Coalition” at the expense of the rest of the Selectorate. Conversely, if the Selectorate cuts across classes, then many policy choices would be available to favour one class within the Selectorate at the expense of others. This will have interesting implications on the behaviour of the government within the context of the theory, which in the part I’ve so far read and in the parts I’ve skimmed, don’t seem to be studied.

Of course, there are many avenues for further development opened by the theory, and that is just one, but it is an obvious one that occurs to anyone who has, like me, a passing even if hostile aquaintance with Marxism.

I have a bit of an interest in Catholic theology, on the basis that since this is what the brightest minds half the world could produce spent about a thousand years on, it is likely to have some value, even if it is fundamentally flawed. In the same way, a large proportion of political science in the twentieth century was carried out in a Marxist framework, and while it is no doubt the worse for it, it is a stretch to dismiss it as worthless, less worthy as a point of comparison than Hobbes or Machiavelli, or to examine Lenin and Mao as political practitioners without giving any attention to the theories they expounded before coming to power.

Even if I am wrong about there being useful insights in Marxist theory that are worth looking for, it is also the case that the world today contains a large number of ex-Marxists, ex-Marxist political parties, and even ex-Marxist countries. Is it really the case that they need to forget everything they ever learned about politics? So long as the dogmatic approach is rejected, it would seem more productive to show that modern free political scientists are looking at the same questions as the Marxists in much the same way, and drawing conclusions that in some cases agree and in others disagree with aspects of Marxist political theory.

First Principles

The biggest cost (in the widest sense) of any political system is that which it expends in preventing its overthrow.

Attempting to “design” a political system without paying attention to how it will protect itself is like designing a building without paying attention to how it will stay up – architecture without gravity, castles in the air.

To our current system – the family of political structures labelled “Western Democracy”, the cost is high. It saves costs, compared to traditional autocracy, on direct counter-subversion, but spends instead on bribery and waste to pacify potential opponents. The total cost of government is comparable to, but probably lower than, that of an outright dictatorship.

This is why I am not a revolutionary. I can draw up a political system enormously superior to any currently existing – minimising waste and maximising progress and prosperity for all – but my plans do not include mechanisms for maintaining the system itself. Such mechanisms would have to be improvised – and would in all probability be improvised much as Lenin’s were.

My ideal government being smaller and lighter than Lenin’s, the ad-hoc instruments of “state security” would have an even easier job of coming to dominate the whole.

So here I sit, in the midst of waste and ignorance, attempting to chip away here and there at the very worst of what Western Democracy is producing. It is a depressing vision, as the more succesful our society is, the more waste it can afford, so the cost of politics trends ever upwards. But our lives are improving, and will continue to do so. The brakes on progress are enormously frustrating, but the best we can do is spread the ideas – the key idea that goverment is mainly waste and the less of it the better – to reduce the cost of maintaining the political system.

Another suggestion for building

My last post suggested opening up areas for New Towns in order to provide more housing.

We are in the realm of political compromise here – the ideal would be to deregulate land use more or less entirely.

In the same spirit of compromise, Mischa Balen of the Adam Smith Institute has put forward another possibility – large scale low-density housing, combined with woodland and animal habitat, across the “green belt”. The value in this is that much of the undesirable effect of more housing is specifically an effect of very high-density development, which itself is the result of releasing very small amounts of land for building.

A good idea to throw into the mix (I haven’t read the actual pamphlet yet).