Lady Thatcher

I was on the street yesterday to see Baroness Thatcher’s funeral procession go by. She was only a politician, but respect is important, ritual is important, and getting in the way of the left imposing their own narrative is satisfying.
 As for her real legacy, it can be confusing. On one hand, many have pointed out that Thatcher’s achievement is that the controversial positions she introduced are now completely mainstream across the political spectrum. In terms of the broad political positions on the role of the state in the economy, Ed Miliband is to the right of Thatcher.
I read that, and nod sagely.
At the same time, a few others are pointing out that she never really made a difference. The state is bigger now than it was in 1979, and controls more of the economy. The leftist singularity grows closer. The social conservatism she occasionally made small efforts towards has been steamrollered over.
I read that, and nod sagely.
What were the achievements of Thatcher as Prime Minister? She broke the power of the Unions, replaced a largely state-run economy with free enterprise and competition, opened up international trade and reduced taxation.
It looks now as if all those things would have happened anyway. They happened across the world, enacted by right-wing parties and left-wing parties. The main cause was the decline of the economic importance of mass manufacturing. When the economy depended on factories, mines and the like, with armies of semi-skilled workers, the unions had substantial real power, and running the economy effectively consisted in large part in managing those armies of workers. The wartime economies morphed easily into command economies, all across Europe.
In the 1970s, automation gradually ate away at the “armies of workers” model. Economic success came less from better handling of a mass workforce and more from the innovations of the highly-skilled and from better management of capital. However, the political institutions did not reflect reality — the unions had real power, high top tax rates were an impediment to getting the best out of the most skilled, and tariffs were an obstacle to employing capital effectively. This state of affairs existed through the 1970s, causing the economic devastation that Thatcher is now credited with “saving” us from.
Across Europe, the cost overhang of the industry which was no longer productive but survived because of its political power became prohibitive, and resulted in a political conflict. Thatcher did not start the conflict; it had been going on for a decade under both Labour and Conservative governments. She won it, as Wilson, Heath and Callaghan had tried to do unsuccessfully. To the extent that she deserves credit for it, it is not for taking on the miners, steelworkers, etc., but for winning. But it is not clear that any of the alternative politicians that might have held the office of Prime Minister for the early eighties would necessarily have failed.
(In the USA, the greater efficiency of industry meant the erosion of manufacturing happened a bit later, and the much weaker political power of the manufacturing unions meant that happened much more gradually, rather than being a catastrophic event as it was in Britain.)
The need to develop new industries to replace the mass manufacturing required the deregulation and tax reform that happened in the 1980s. In the old economy, the expertise and capital to build industry could most easily be assembled by governments. For the new economy, they just couldn’t and governments had to compete to bring high-skilled people and capital to their territory.
So what look like the massive, enduring achievements of Thatcherism were really just the spirit of the times. There were other achievements though. Argentina might have been allowed to take over the Falklands with only a little fuss. While I think the defence of sovereignty was justified and right, I can’t honestly say it makes a big difference to me, now. The sale of council houses was a policy that need not have happened. I’m not sure whether that was a good thing or not — if the state is going to house the poor, it could be argued that owning and managing the housing is a more sensible approach than the current Housing Benefit mess, though there are arguments on both sides.
The centralisation of power away from the already quite weak local government bodies also seems to have been a global phenomenon. It was possibly an inevitable effect of the breakdown of the postwar consensus, under which it didn’t matter which party controlled a council because they all did the same thing anyway.
Finally, we have the end of the Cold War. The strong support for Reagan may have enabled him to push the USSR over the edge faster than otherwise, but I think it was doomed anyway.
 So the real enduring achievements of Thatcher are much smaller than generally supposed by supporters and enemies. Her undoubted strength of conviction may have caused the inevitable to have happened a couple of years sooner than would otherwise have been the case. This might have given Britain a better economic position relative to other countries, due to a head start. On the other hand, the conflicts that happened might have been less violent and destructive if they had been left a bit longer.
What is striking, particularly in comparison with the last ten years, is how competent the Thatcher government was. After all, if the things that governments do are more or less out of the control of particular politicians, all they actually control is whether the things are done well or badly, and, when set against Brown or Cameron, Thatcher and her government did a lot of new, difficult things with surprisingly few missteps.

Introduction to the Neoreaction

Generally, when I’m asked to explain “What is a neoreactionary?” (perhaps using alternative terms such as nu-reaction or the Dark Enlightenment), my response is to point elsewhere, at Moldbug or at Nick Land, or even at Scott Alexander’s outsider’s view.

However, good sources though they are, they’re not always appropriate. They’re all extremely verbose. Moldbug and Alexander are really writing for very politically aware progressives, and Land is even more abstruse. Moldbug is the Jeremy Clarkson of political philosophy: while I find his style of presentation highly enjoyable, there’s no doubt that many others find it unbearable.

So maybe we need a more concise introduction.

The Concise Introduction

For five hundred years, there have been attempt to reorder human society on the basis that hereditary privilege, and many other kinds of inequality between humans, are unjust. Reformers have attempted to alter systems of government and other institutions of society with the goal of reducing or eliminating these injustices.

These reformers have consistently underestimated the difficulty of getting people to cooperate in a society. The intellectual techniques of science and engineering that produced miracles in terms of manipulating the natural world, have, time after time, failed catastrophically to improve the lives of humans through changing government and society.

There are a number of reasons for this: For one thing, humans are much more complex than any of the parts and tools with which engineers have made machines. They will not fit in where they are put. Attempts to persuade or compel them to fit into the machine have to be built into the machine themselves, and end up changing the functioning of the machine so much that it no longer achieves its intended goal.

Most importantly, humans have evolved to compete for influence and power, by violence and by deceit. Any reform which attempts to limit or remove the power of the holders of power creates a competition for that power, which will lead to spectacular efforts by everybody else to win it. The innovations that will be produced by such high-stakes competition are impossible to predict or plan for.

Meanwhile, developments in technology have improved people’s lives so much that the calamitous decline in quality of government has been disguised. All mainstream political factions are intellectual descendants of the original reformers, and none have any interest in fairly comparing present-day government with traditional government. Those that are called “conservatives” are only reformers who oppose the most recently enacted or proposed reforms: none of them question the principle or the intellectual basis of progressivism.

Most neoreactionary writing consists of detailed criticism of particular progressive reforms, with particular emphasis on the flaws in one specific idea — democracy.

Ultimately, however, if after all these centuries of trying to improve society based on abstract ideas of justice have only made life worse than it would have been under pre-Enlightenment social systems, the time has come to simply give up the whole project and revert to traditional forms whose basis we might not be able to establish rationally, but which have the evidence of history to support them.

Neoreaction for Reactionaries

Some of the inquiries I spoke of at the beginning have come from old-fashioned reactionaries. The short answer for them is that it doesn’t matter. Neoreaction is not a new, better form of reaction that you should be upgrading to — rather, you’ve found a short-cut past what for us has generally been a long and laborious journey, one that has mostly passed through libertarianism or other forms of liberalism. A lot of our discussion will seem wrong-headed to you, and your theology is mostly irrelevant to us, but when the subject is more immediately practical, we are likely to be closer together.

My moral approach

Eric Raymond writes a very good post on Natural Rights and morality. The general approach he takes is the same as mine: utilitarianism sounds alright, but actually predicting the consequences of particular actions at particular moments is so damned hard that the only sensible way to do it is to get to a set of rules that seem to produce mainly good outcomes, and then treat them as if they were moral absolutes. Deep down, I know they’re not moral absolutes, but, as in other fields, a convenient assumption is the only way to make the problem tractable.

Like Raymond, I followed those principles to a libertarian conclusion. Well, to be completely honest, it’s more that I used those principles to justify the “natural rights” that I’d previously considered naively to be self-evident.

It’s still a big step. If you start from moral laws, you can always predict roughly where you’re going to end up. Using a consequentialist framework, even one moderated through a rules-system, there’s always a chance that you may change your mind about what set of proposed “moral absolutes” actually work best. That’s what happened to me.

I was particularly struck by a phenomenon where the more deeply and carefully I attacked a question rationally, the more my best answer resembled some traditional, non-rationalist, formulation. That led me to suspect that where my reasoning did not reach a traditionalist conclusion, I just wasn’t reasoning far enough.

That’s not particularly surprising. Ideas evolve. Richard Dawkins made a big deal of the fact that evolutionary success for an idea isn’t the same thing as success for the people who believe the ideas, and while that is a fair point in itself, I do not recall, at least from his writings back in the 80’s which I read avidly, him drawing a parallel with the well-known conclusion, made here by Matt Ridley via Brian Micklethwait, that in the very long run parasites do better by being less harmful to their hosts. By that principle, new religions (parasitic memeplexes) should be treated with fear and suspicion, while old ones are relatively trustworthy. Hmmm.

There are whole other layers to moral philosophy than this one of “selecting” rules. On one hand, utilitarianism is a slippery and problematic thing in the first place, and on the other side, moral rules, whether absolute laws or fake-absolute heuristics, have to be social to be meaningful, so the question of how they become socialised and accepted cannot be completely disentangled from what they should be. I am satisfied with my way of dealing with both these issues, but at the end of the day, I’m not that keen to write about it. When I think I’ve done moral philosophy well, I end up with something close to common sense. When I do it less well, I end up with things catastrophically worse than common sense. I therefore am inclined to rate common sense above philosophy when it comes to morality.

Binary Decisions

Bryan Caplan makes a post (h/t @S8mB) defending anarcho-capitalism from the criticism that private security companies would end up fighting it out until there is a winner which can rule.

The essence is that a norm would become established that such an ambition would just be insane. He makes a comparison with parliamentary democracy, where losing parties peacefully relinquish power, because nobody doubts that that is what they are supposed to do.

I think his argument is invalid, and that is based on a fundamental difference between the positions of the outvoted democrat and the security company.

The difference is that the democrat has a binary choice. He either accepts the result of the election, publicly, in which case he must step down, or he rejects it, in which case he is making it clear he is breaching the established expectations.

Private security companies in the Rothbardian sense are not forced into the same “in or out” dilemma. If one wants to protect a piece of property for one client while another wants to protect the same piece of property for another, there are infinite gradations of conflict they can resort to. The lower levels are deniable (“accidents” for example), middling levels can be justified as peaceful bargaining — “sanctions” of various kinds, and the highest levels of conflict, while still consistent with a dispute over a particular legal question, are indistinguishable from a war of conquest. The ability to vary the level of conflict in small steps allows the kind of norms that apply to democracy to be eroded or made irrelevant.

Aristocracy

Further to my previous post on how I can call myself a reactionary while supporting the dangerous new-fangled innovation of absolute monarchy, let’s look at feudalism.

There have been various forms of aristocracy. When I started to advocate monarchy as a practical from of formalism, “Degenerate Formalism”, I saw no reason to include aristocracy. The monarch should have complete sovereignty, so there is no reason to privilege some subjects over others.

I was setting myself primarily against the feudalist position of Nick Szabo, who makes a case for the medieval structure of “interlocking property rights”

Once I tried to describe a future monarchical regime in detail, I found myself edging back towards an aristocracy, though not in a full-blown medieval form.

Unsurprisingly, given the emphasis of my blog over the last year, the key issue is loyalty.

The medieval noble vassal was supposed to be loyal to his lord. However, the practical implications of this loyalty were limited by transport and communication capabilities. From year to year, he had full authority over his demesne. The major requirements on him were to provide resources to the King when he turned up, to provide armed force when required, and to withold support from the King’s enemies. Beyond that, he wasn’t required to follow the King’s policies, because the King didn’t have any policies for him to follow — he was too far away.

Once the King could be in regular contact by mail or by regular visitors, the situation changed. With regular and reliable information from provinces, the King would inevitably form a view of how they should be managed in detail. This caused conflict with local nobles who had had virtually complete autonomy for centuries. Even if the King recognised a noble’s claim to that autonomy as an established right, the fact of his defying the King’s wishes weakened the relationship betwen them.

If we were to return to a medieval technology level, feudalism could work well. Otherwise, we are forced to this contradiction of the baron professing loyalty to his sovereign while claiming the right to obstruct his policy. That is what I see no point in.

However, I do see a need for the monarch to have a class of subjects from whom he expects positive loyalty, but who do not have independent partial sovereignty. Their position represents not a right to any political power, but rather an eligibility for political power. This is the arrangement I put forward in “Kingdom 2037”. Born aristocrats would be expected (but not required) to move in the direction of royal service, and their behaviour and associations from an early age would be judged with that in mind. If you spend your first twenty years cultivating an image of being loyal and conscientious, you are likely to end up somewhat loyal and conscientious. If you grow up in an elite community, and are stupid, reckless, or crooked, the elite community is going to know. As in elitist societies like today’s Hollywood, noble birth wouldn’t get you into the government, but it would get you looked at.

Such a system might also produce pressure towards mediocrity and excessive conformism. That is why a wise king will build a court mainly from the aristocracy, but including some others. The vital point is that the values of the ruling institutions will be maintained, and the outsiders coming in will acculturate to them, rather than replacing the culture with their own.

What are the drawbacks of this arrangement? There chief danger seems to be that the aristocratic class forms a power block in its own right. If set in competition with the King himself, it would inevitably become rapacious, in the way that a secure ruler is not, because resources plundered from the population would enable it to strengthen its position versus the crown. There is considerable precedent for aristocracies behaving in that way.

My feeling is that the problem is fundamentally one of feudal aristocracies, and there is no reason why a post-feudal monarch would want to tolerate it. That possibly means that, while having something like an aristocracy is useful, it should be symbolically distinct from the old aristocracy which continues to exist in present-day constitutional monarchies. Possibly it should not exist formally at first. The useful features are that the King appoints those he knows and trusts, and that senior Royal appointees are given some kind of permanent status that ties their long-term interest to the regime.

One-line summary: Aristocrats are not better than everybody else, but we can have a better idea of how good they are than we can of everybody else.

Recap of the fall of Monarchism

Hertzlinger points out, accurately, that absolute monarchy is a recent innovation. He also calls it “regrettable”. In a comment, I put forward the “history of liberalism in a nutshell”. It’s nothing I haven’t put here before, but it’s been spread over posts on a lot of different subjects, so I’m pasting my comment here (with minor editing) as a post:

Absolute monarchy was an innovation made possible by new technologies of transport and communication. When subordinates could not be supervised because of the difficulty of travel, it made sense to give them a large degree of independence, and ensure that they, like the Monarch himself, had permanent power and therefore a long-term view.  When the Monarch became able to supervise subordinates closely, it made more sense for him to delegate to temporary appointees instead.

Monarchy died out because the enlightenment political philosophy, along with the propaganda pumped out by the English Whigs, became so intellectually dominant that even the monarchs believed it. By the end of the 18th Century, European monarchs were deliberately acting like democratic leaders, which hastened their end.

As Moldbug put it the other day, while technological competence is certainly an indicator of a successful civilization, it is also a lagging indicator. The story of the growth of demotism as I see it goes like this:

  1. As above, technology (roads, literacy) improves, very gradually over hundreds of years, to the point where a King can actually control his realm and his armed forces without delegating permanent power to feudal vassals.
  2. This creates a stable economic basis which produces an enormous boom of technological development and prosperity.
    1. Scientific discoveries undermine the religious world-view which is the traditional justification of the political regime.
    2. At the same time, many small landowners obtain, as a result of the economic boom, a degree of wealth previously associated with actual political power in the form of major feudal rights. They saw political power as a necessary accompaniment to their wealth.
  4. Those two developments led to the overthrow of the absolute monarchy that had triggered them, and to the first liberal regimes.
  5. The intellectual, technological and economic boom continued. It was erroneously seen as the result of the liberal political order, rather than of the absolutist political order that had initially caused it.

Payday Lending and the Justice System

The Office of Fair Trading has identified poor practice by payday lenders. It seems they “fail to work out whether people can pay” the loans they make to them, and therefore people unwisely take on loans they cannot pay back.

The theory, presumably, is that even though the customers know they will have to pay substantial fees and interest some weeks in the future, they still sign up, because they think the future problems won’t be as bad as the current problems which are solved by getting the money up front. The OFT is claiming that it is irresponsible to put people in that position.

They may well have a point. Many people do seem to dismiss from consideration adverse consequences that are a long way off: even if they are told that a debt will double in size over six months if they don’t pay it back promptly, they either don’t care, or assume something will come up, or assume they can somehow get away without paying.

But if the Office of Fair Trading takes this view, which I think is a reasonable one, I wonder what they think about the way the criminal justice system works in this country?

Let’s say you feel a taxi-driver has disrespected you in some way. Beating him unconscious might be one way to resolve the situation. However, if you do that, you could be tried and sentenced to some kind of punishment.

Given the OFT’s assessment of the capabilities of Wonga’s clientèle to judge whether they should take on a debt payable in a month or so, how much difference does it make whether you are sentenced for GBH next week or in twelve months’ time?  If the prospect of having to pay £2,000 in a year isn’t putting people off borrowing £250 for a new phone today, is it going to put them off grabbing the same phone off a passer-by?

I found the taxi-driver story because it got slightly more reporting than usual, the culprit being a player on the local football team. I don’t think a new signing to Luton Town is actually a celebrity in any way that would have made his treatment different, but I needed the extra reporting, because when the local press report convictions and sentences, they don’t generally say when the offence was committed. And while the papers do contain a handful of reports of crimes committed, I have not been able to match up any crime reports with any court reports, outside of major crimes like murders. It’s the treatment of the routine minor violent crimes that I am interested in.

Levenson

My twitter stream tells me that three hundred odd years of a free press are at an end, that blogs like this one are going to be regulated by the government.

It might even be true. The establishment is quite capable of riding a popular wave and then doing something completely unrelated when they actually get around to acting. After the Dunblane massacre, the government banned crossbows. After the World Trade Centre bombing, the government passed a law giving itself the power to seize the assets of Icelandic banks. It is perfectly plausible that the government would respond to the News of the World accessing Milly Dowler’s voicemail by silencing bloggers.

On the other hand, the cross-party negotiations that produced the agreement yesterday appear to be the usual symbolic battle about nothing at all, this time in the form of a pointless distinction between “statutory” and “non-statutory” regulatory frameworks. Some some of the commentary takes that argument seriously, making me doubt whether the commentators concerned are actually paying attention.

I don’t know. I’m perfectly fine with not knowing. If this new thing really is going to restrict my blogging, I’ll find out soon enough. The only case in which I would need to know now would be if I could actually do something useful about it. It is that illusion that causes all the ignorant flapping speculation about something that will be perfectly obvious within a few months.

In any case I can’t get too worked up because, while I believe that basic freedom of communication is an important freedom which governments should respect if they want the society and economy to function smoothly, I don’t believe in the “political right” of free speech as a way of opposing the government. I don’t believe in any political rights, and if the government tries to shut me up, it is making my own argument for me.

Effectively, my ignorance is doubled. As well as not knowing whether the government is or isn’t going to seriously clamp down on the press and/or blogs, I do not know, in the full context, whether that would be a bad thing or a good thing. I might be fairly sure that, other things being equal, it would be a bad thing, but other things are not equal. The end of press freedom might cause a major reactionary swing, which might hasten the downfall of the democratic regime and the restoration of Royalism, which might be a good thing. It might cause a major liberal swing, which might preserve the democratic regime longer than otherwise, which might cause a better successor regime to replace it than would otherwise be the case, which might be a good thing. Not only can I not judge how likely these outcomes are, I can’t imagine the depth and breadth of knowledge that would make it possible to judge how likely those outcomes are. It’s preposterous for me to sit here and claim to know whether this is good or bad.

Finally, of course, and looking only at the short term effects that it is actually possible to estimate, the government is far too incompetent to actually be able to suppress opposition media. Not only that, Western governments have gone to great lengths to provide mechanisms for dissidents in non-democratic countries to publish electronically without effective control. Either we can use those, or the non-democratic governments themselves will provide a mirror-image in order to show up the incoherence of the West. Imagine the UK trying to lean on China to shut down websites used by British dissidents — they would laugh their arses off.

The real suppression we face is by society refusing employment or otherwise acting informally against those who hold unfashionable opinion. That is the reason I write anonymously. But that exists already, and we are coping with that — I don’t think the law will produce nearly as much oppression as exists already in the form of unwritten liberal blasphemy law.

Rationality and Prejudice

Last year, Aretae wrote an interesting post and I commented.  I’ve been meaning to drag that comment into a post here, but didn’t get round to it.

Aretae’s post was interesting — I’m tempted to paste it all here, but that’s a bit off, so you should read it there.  The part that inspired me is this:

There is massive pre-rational discrimination that occurs at a subconscious level in many people, that is visible in interacting with them, which comprises the reality of a lot of discrimination claims that are reflexively dismissed by a lot of observationally biased folks on the right.  

Aretae’s main point is that this is independent of, and so not in contradiction with, HBD. But that’s not the interesting aspect for me.

For me, the implications of that one factual assertion were the important thing. The relevant bit of my comment in reply to it was this:

Sure, the first thing that follows from it is: “this applies to me. If I take conscious steps to overrule this pre-rational subconscious discrimination, then I will perceive the world more accurately, and will be able to draw better conclusions.”
That’s a good start. But what about everybody else? I do not by any means share your extreme anti-authoritarianism, but the power to dictate how other people see each other is not something I expect to have, want to have, or want anybody else to have, either. So this “pre-rational subconscious discrimination” can be taken to be a fact of life going forward for all mixed societies.
And what follows from that?  Bluntly, that, when the chips are down, I want to be surrounded by people who have a positive pre-rational subconscious reaction towards me, not a negative one. Further, I can assume other people think the same way, and will rationally act accordingly, wanting power for their in-group.
To the degree that I live in a society that is stable, peaceful, and populated by the unusually rational — that is, to the degree that the chips stay up — these considerations hold minor importance. If those conditions weaken, or look like they might weaken in the future, the considerations grow in importance.

What finally triggered me this evening to dig up the link and paste it here was Scott Alexander’s Thrive/Survive Theory. He writes… well, he writes a lot, and Isegoria has already summarized it:

My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.
[…]
I propose that the best way for leftists to get themselves in a rightist frame of mind is to imagine there is a zombie apocalypse tomorrow.

There’s a lot more. This isn’t a response to Scott Alexander’s post — I haven’t really begun to think about that, but there’s a clear need before I start to show the degree to which I’m already looking at things the same way.

(Somehow, my argument now makes me think of this. But I stand by it anyway.)

The End of Rail

This year there were more large increases in the cost of rail tickets.

I was largely uninterested, though by no means disinterested, in the subject. Passenger rail travel is just inherently enormously expensive. The government taxes road travel heavily through road fund duty and fuel taxes, and at the same time subsidises rail travel heavily, and the net result is that for most journeys, rail is not an option, and for most of those that rail travel is available, it is about three times the cost of road travel. If you take the true cost, without the effect of the taxes and subsidies, rail transport is probably about ten times as expensive as road transport.

Privatisation was an obvious response to this long-standing situation, but the improvements were small, and the cost differential has only increased over time.

I’ve never clearly understood where the huge costs of rail come from. There are several sources I can think of, but whether some of them are insignificant, or if one of them dominates all the others, I’m not sure.

One obvious contributor is the safety standard that rail is held to. Rail travel is about a hundred times safer than road travel, and that is achieved through massive expenditure on signalling, inspections, pre-emptive maintenance and staff to supervise.

A second factor is evolution. Cars are sold in their millions, and the industry is subject to constant, intensive competition and improvements. Trains, by comparison, are rarely-produced items. The result is that trains evolve relatively slowly: a ten-year-old train and a thirty-year-old train are barely distinguishable, while cars of similar vintages are very obviously distinct. The manufacturing process is affected as well as the finished product.

The third is the lack of flexibility which defines rail travel. A road vehicle can go anywhere provided the ground is hard and flat. A train can only go where the network has been built for it. We do talk about a “road network” in the same sense as a rail network, but the concepts are not equivalent for that reason. A motorway might be planned and engineered to just the same degree as a railway line1, but the defining feature of road travel is not the motorway, but the driveway — the thing that allows anyone to join the road network at almost any point. That makes the road system an open network, while the rail system is a closed network, and the differences between road and rail are mostly the differences between open and closed systems. (That also covers the evolution factor above: vehicles for the rail network are selected by the network operator; vehicles for the road network are selected by the network users).

If road travel is so far superior to rail travel, why am I paying £4000 a year to sit on the train and write this?  One reason is of course the subsidies — but the commuter routes into London aren’t directly subsidised; they run at a profit (though they gain from the subsidised local routes that feed into them). The fact remains that  for the one case of bringing a very large number of people to the same place at the same time, rail still has benefits. It has the advantages of a closed system as well as the disadvantages.

I am on a packed 12-coach train currently at St Pancras station. About a thousand people will get off within the next mile. Eight minutes ahead is another train, and eight minutes behind, yet another.

The chaotic open system of road cannot achieve the same peak efficiency in terms of use of space and labour, just as TCP/IP cannot achieve the same peak efficiency as a circuit-switched connection. That peak efficiency gap is very visible, whereas the very large cost gap the other way at lower levels of utilisation is not so visible. These packed carriages will spend most of the rest of the day empty or near empty, trundling around the network with almost the same cost in fuel and supervision. An unused car has significant storage costs, but because the costs are concentrated on the vehicle rather than the network, the overall cost is much more sensitive to levels of usage.

The other reason for taking a train rather than a car is that I would have to actually drive a car, whereas I can sit in a train and blog.

The crucial fact for the future is that the two decisive advantages that rail has, in a limited set of cases, over road — better peak space-efficiency and better labour-efficiency in the form of driving — are both on the decline because of the technology being applied to road. Self-driving cars are twenty years off at most, and I would expect nearer ten. That allows vehicles to travel faster and closer together, since human reaction times are taken out of the process of maintaining separation. I will be able to read, blog or watch television in a car as I do on the train. Parking costs will reduce because the vehicles will be able to disperse themselves until needed, instead of all having to compete for scarce parking space at the highest-density destinations.

That’s another way in which the rail/road comparison resembles the closed/open network comparison. Rail’s advantage is that it takes away the need for intelligence in the vehicles; road is best placed to take advantage of putting more intelligence in the vehicles. As intelligence becomes cheap, road could even exceed rail’s peak efficiency, by being more adaptive and responsive to conditions — using alternative routes or schedules. Rail’s throughput is limited by the flow of people through the chokepoints at stations more than by the capacity of the rails themselves.

Those changes take away any reason for passenger rail to continue to exist. (It’s possible that rail vehicles are more suited to very heavy loads, and so will remain useful for rail freight. I doubt it, but I don’t know enough to be sure).

Any forward-looking, integrated transport policy today will be oriented towards phasing out rail and preparing for self-driving cars.

Whether the Luton Guided Busway meets those criteria is anyone’s guess. It’s not out of the question.

 1. It probably isn’t, but let’s pretend it is.