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Video of a Stephen Davies talk to the Essex University Liberty League about the history of the British libertarian movement

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:03:04 +0000

Today I received one of those collective emails with a big list of recipients at the top. It was from Tim Evans to the Essex University Liberty League, and copied to the rest of us, suggesting all the copyees as potential speakers to the Essex University Liberty League. I was pleased to be even suggested, because I was a very happy student at Essex University in the early 1970s. Fingers crossed, hint hint.

But much more importantly, following a little googling for the Essex University Liberty League, I found my way to this, which I had not noticed before and which is a video of a talk given by the noted libertarian historian Stephen Davies to … the Essex University Liberty League. Having both hugely enjoyed and been hugely impressed by the talk that Stephen Davies gave to the Liberty League Freedom Forum in London just under a fortnight ago, on the subject of healthcare, I cranked up this video about the history of British libertarianism and had a listen.

Brilliant. The time, nearly fifty minutes of it, just flew by. Davies really is a master communicating a large body of ideas and information, seemingly with effortless ease, in what is (given the sheer volume of all those ideas and all that information) an amazingly short period of time, although in other hands the same chunk of time would feel like an eternity.

Thank goodness cheap videoing arrived in time for Davies to be extensively captured on it, for two reasons. First, it would be very hard to take notes that would do justice to a Stephen Davies talk, and it would be impossible to remember it all. There is, every time, just too much good stuff there. You want to be able to hear it all again, with a pause button available. Second, I get the distinct impression that Davies knows a great deal more about the present and the past of the world, and of the people trying to make the world more liberty-loving, than he has so far managed to get down on paper. Indeed, I sense that Davies’s recent IEA job, stimulating Britain’s student libertarian network, is a calculated trade-off on his part, between one important job, namely that, and the other important thing that Davies ought to be doing, namely writing down many more of his brilliant thoughts and discoveries and opinions and historical wisdoms than he has so far managed to write down.

Although, now would be a good time to flag up a piece Davies wrote for the Libertarian Alliance entitled Libertarian Feminism in Britain, 1860-1910, which is about the kind of thing his talk is about. The point being that most feminists then were libertarians, in contrast to the collectivists that most feminists are now. So, Davies has written some of his wisdoms down, just not as much as he might have.

However, meanwhile, and as a natural consequence of all the student networking that he has lately been doing, Davies does often give a talk, and sometimes someone records it. Like I say, thank goodness for video. And congratulations to whoever did video this particular Davies talk to the Essex University libertarians. Richard Carey, who did the short blog posting where I found the video, does not say who did this. Presumably an Essex libertarian. As I say, kudos to whoever it was.

Sadly, the Stephen Davies talk to LLFF2013 about healthcare was not videoed.

The Liberty League Freedom Forum 2013 and the rapidly growing strength of the UK’s pro-liberty student network

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 22:10:56 +0000

Just about now, I had hoped to be writing in some detail about some of the many interesting things said at the Liberty League Freedom Forum 2013, which happened last weekend. I still hope to. Meanwhile, I have already done a quick posting at my personal blog, with lots of photos, about how good, in general, this event was. And here is another posting about LLFF2013 to say, again, that it was very good.

As I said at my own blog, the best thing about this gathering, excellent though the line-up of speakers was, was the audience that it succeeded in attracting. This audience was big, around two hundred strong. It was mostly young, mostly students. And it was very smart. As you will observe if you take a look at my crowd shots, most of the audience, besides being young, was male. But not all of it was. And the young males looked like they are the types to be going places in the future.

A good way to get across the quality of this whole event is to quote from the comment that Michael Jennings added to what I put at my blog, in connection with the two talks that Randy Barnett gave:

I overheard Randy Barnett talking to an American colleague in the gap between his two talks on Sunday. Essentially, he was saying that the audience of his first talk had been fantastic, and it was great to have a question and answer session full of such smart comments and questions.

Indeed.

At the obvious risk of insulting others who contributed importantly, I singled out for particular praise for their organisational efforts: the IEA’s Stephen Davies and Christiana Hambro, and the Liberty League’s own Anton Howes, not just for their work on this LLFF but for previous iterations of it, in London and elsewhere in the UK. Time was when there was a sprinkling of libertarians and free marketeers in London, but when similarly inclined people outside London hardly knew of each other’s existence. People like Davies, Hambro and Howes, and others of course, are now changing all that. There is now a big and growing pro-liberty network among Britain’s student population, with pro-liberty student groups getting started in university after university. When I spoke with Davies about all this, his main worry seemed to be in finding places to fit everyone in. The answer seemed to be: smaller events, but more of them, in more places. Sounds good. Sounds very good.

I have long had the impression that the organisation which has lead the way in earlier years in building a pro-liberty student network in the UK was the Adam Smith Institute, as I mentioned towards the end of this earlier posting here, about the history of the ASI so far. Now, under Mark Littlewood‘s leadership, the IEA is piling in also. In general, the amount of inter-organisational co-operation that you now see going on (it always has gone on but now especially), between the various UK pro-liberty groups and think tanks, is most admirable.

If I have got it a bit wrong concerning who exactly deserves a pat on the back for all this pro-liberty activity, well, that is but a symptom of the fact that, as has been said before, it is amazing what you can accomplish in life if you do not care who gets the credit.

Reminders

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:29:57 +0000

The latest wave of communicational cleverness has made face-to-face meetings to spread good ideas both easier to organise, and more necessary to organise. Easier, obviously. More necessary because it now takes much clever thinking and cooperative enterprise to get good ideas heard and acted upon in this new media hubbub, just as it used to when the media were dominated by a few megaliths.

There was, I now realise, a joyous interlude when good ideas had the run of the blogosphere and those who might have been using the blogosphere to spread bad ideas instead mostly just waited for the good ideas to go away. But now the bad ideas are back with a vengeance, never having gone away – just having been temporarily heckled a bit, and now different skills and energies are needed to get the good stuff said and done, and in much the same considerable quantities as two decades ago.

There are now so many meetings, just in London, of the kind I am inclined to be attending, that I myself have taken to sending out reminders when my own last-Friday-of-the-month meetings are imminent, and I greatly appreciate it when others do the same. Nobody has yet complained to me about my reminders. Several have said thanks. (My speaker this month, by the way, will be Samizdata’s own Rob Fisher, who will talk about the impact that open source software is having on the world.)

So it was that I was very glad to receive this, this morning:

Liberty League Freedom Forum 2013 is this weekend!

The conference is just a day away, and we have well over 200 people signed up. LLFF will be the largest gathering of classical liberal and libertarian students and young people in the UK, and the second largest this side of the Atlantic!

If you haven’t seen it already, make sure to check out the Full Conference Pack, with timetable, maps, session descriptions, travel directions and more, here.

More here, and what I earlier said about this event here: here.

Another meeting I will soon be attending is this evening, organised by Libertarian Home at the Rose and Crown in Southwark, and addressed by our own Adriana Lukas. Details here. Get there at between 7pm and 8pm (which is when the talk starts).

Reminding people about your meeting involves the same kind of humility that is involved in repeating good ideas. People don’t necessarily hear things the first time you say them, and if they do they often forget them, especially when they now have so many other things to be attending to. And even when they have told you that they will definitely be attending your meeting, your meeting is not likely to be the biggest thing in their lives, and they are entirely liable to forget all about it until several days later. Unless they get a reminder.

Read the whole thing – while you can

Guy Herbert (London) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 16:58:30 +0000

Nick Cohen is that rare and admirable thing, a genuinely liberal left-winger. Here he is in full flow today in The Observer:

We are in the middle of a liberal berserker, one of those demented moments when “progressives” run riot and smash the liberties they are meant to defend. Inspired by Lord Justice Leveson, they are prepared in Parliament tomorrow to sacrifice freedom of speech, freedom of the press and fair trials. They are prepared to allow every oppressive dictatorship on the planet to say: “We’re only following the British example” when outsiders and their own wretched citizens protest.

A rant worth reading. Do.

Something that Mr Cohen doesn’t cover is that, we too, appear about to be regulated. Parliament is not just abridging the freedom of the press, but of the web too. As Guido Fawkes explains regulation looks likely to cover not just Fleet Street (if that were not bad enough), but:

“relevant publisher” means a person (other than a broadcaster) who publishes in the United Kingdom: (a) a newspaper or magazine containing news-related material, or (b) a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper or magazine)

(My emphasis.) That means ALL the blogging commentariat there, almost all charities and campaigning organisations of every political stripe who publish news comment or press releases or highlight particular stories on their websites, and maybe your personal site, too.

Once you’ve read what Messrs Cohen and Staines have to say, you might feel like commenting on the news yourself. If you live in Britain an email to your MP, especially if he or she is a Labour or LibDem MP, might be worth the effort. You can write to them – including the ones who will only take a fax – easily from the site of the same name: writetothem.com Do so before they vote on the proposals.

Have the argument anyway – and keep on having it

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 13:03:28 +0000

Buried in among the comments on this SQOTD is a disagreement between Jaded Voluntaryist and Rob Fisher.

Jaded Voluntaryist:

There are certain positions that it is unwise to try and debate rationally – specifically because they are not rationally held positions. … nothing you say is really likely to change the minds of such people.

Rob Fisher:

But have the debate anyway. Those who overhear it might then be prevented from joining the wrong cause.

I agree with Rob Fisher entirely. Jaded Voluntaryist says, and then repeats, that the people (“such people”) you argue with are beyond argument, which may be so. (Alternatively, they may just not want to argue with someone who keeps telling them they are being irrational.) But JV seems to me to ignore the point about those onlookers. Onlookers, particularly the silent ones, are what propaganda is all about.

Closely related to the point about arguing with those whom it is impossible to argue with, so to speak, is the virtue of repetition. Keep on having the arguments.

Repetition is actually humility. Repetition is recognising that what you say won’t reach the whole world, the very first time you say it. If others won’t repeat it for you (which is actually what reaching the world consists of), then if you think it deserves to reach at least a bit more of the world than it did first time around, you will have to repeat it yourself.

In the comments on this excellent posting at Counting Cats (a posting which restates some ancient truths about incentives but puts them in an academic rather than an “economic” context – highly recommended), you will observe commenters, many of their names being familiar from here, repeating to one another (as is entirely appropriate) many of the above truths about the need to keep on arguing. Are they talking only to themselves, echoing in their own echo chamber? No. One hitherto silent reader joins in, to say:

Keep it up guys, well done. … Every little anecdote helps.

Indeed.

I and many others have said all this many times before, which is because it deserves to be said again and again.

Spreading ideas effectively

Johnathan Pearce (London) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:35:15 +0000

Suppose a well-off libertarian compiles a list of a hundred books that do a good job of promoting libertarian ideas and are not currently available online, goes to the publishers and offers to buy the online rights. Most books, including most books about ideas, do not make all that much money, so my guess is that a publisher should be willing to sell the online rights for ten thousand dollars, perhaps less. A few will be books that were or are best sellers, and their rights might be expensive—but those are books that most curious readers can probably find in the local library, so although webbing them would be useful, it would not be as useful as webbing less successful books. Cross them off the list and replace them with a few less expensive ones. Total cost a million dollars.

The project also requires a libertarian lawyer willing to volunteer his time to negotiate the purchases and a libertarian web designer willing to web the books, perhaps with the assistance of a few more libertarians willing to scan them. Libertarian lawyers and libertarian web designers exist—I’ve even gotten offers from some of the latter to redesign my somewhat out of date web site for free. And putting a hundred such books on the web should significantly increase both the number of people who become convinced by libertarian arguments and the quality of the arguments of those already convinced.

- David Friedman.

Well, I have a pretty big book collections these days, although not as colossal as that of Brian Micklethwait of this blog, or the late Chris Tame (he had the sort of private library that was mind-blowing, and that was just the science fiction bit).

I’d be interested to know if such an idea could be made to work. If one of the main ideas is reaching out to students – who are short of money and for whom book purchases are a big cost – anything that can help things along is a good idea. (The comment thread on Friedman’s post is worth reading also.)

What the Adam Smith Institute did

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 23:44:04 +0000

Successful people are often born into a world that is not, so to speak, theirs. The world in which they get dealt their first cards is what it is and where it is, but their real world, the world they were meant for, is something and somewhere else. They are born the son of a coal miner or of a provincial shopkeeper, yet their natural place in the world is to be a classical musician or a weather forecaster in a big city or a diplomat or a music hall comedian or a technology billionaire. The mega-successes are those who know, early, not so much what they want or want to do, as where they need to be – where, for them, the action is – and who shift heaven and earth to get to that sweet spot in the world just as soon as possible, often taking truly hair-raising risks to get there. They identify where they want to be, calculate the price of getting there, and pay that price. And then, having got to where they need to be, they are happy! The inconveniences and disappointments – even the humiliations – that they then encounter do not depress them, because everything that happens, however bad, is evidence that they are exactly where they want to be and where they should be.

In the early pages of Think Tank, subtitled “The Story of the Adam Smith Institute”, we are told exactly such a story, of a group of young pro-free-market guns knowing where they need to be, and doing whatever they have to do to get to that exact place, namely within ten minutes walk of the House of Commons, in the centre of London. They juggle finances, scrounge furniture off aunts in faraway places, put money down on a London office lease well before they know how they are going to meet the payments, buy and sell cottages in Scotland, earn extra money by teaching, and generally bet their farms on their new farm being just what they want. (By the way if you want a shorter review of this book than this posting is, try the three short reviews at the other end of the above link. All three are very positive, but also very informative.)

To help me think about this posting, I asked a respected friend what he thought of the Adam Smith Institute. I expected some sort of rumination on what they had achieved and what they might yet achieve, on what they have got right and what wrong. Instead my friend simply said that he liked Madsen Pirie. This is a significant fact about the ASI, I think. Simply, they are nice people, fun and interesting to be with. Following Madsen Pirie’s lead, they exude a gleeful camaraderie that my friend and I, and surely many others of a like mind, find very appealing. Madsen Pirie’s Think Tank radiates a similarly good humoured and companionable atmosphere. When reading it, I kept hearing that Madsen Pirie voice, with its big grin and its self-mockingly over-precise diction.

Cards on the table. I liked and admired this book a lot, just as I have long liked and admired its author. I was given a free copy of it by its author, who had very good reason to hope that I would say nice things about it, and I will. I recommend this book as an entertaining and informative way to acquaint yourself with the Adam Smith Institute and with those who founded and still lead it.

The early pages in this book, the ones with the early financial juggling and the furniture scrounging, concern the only period in its history when I myself did not know of the ASI’s existence. Everything else in the book concerns activities that I already, very approximately speaking, know a bit about. The fact that I particularly enjoyed these early pages suggests to me that someone who only recently became aware of the ASI might enjoy this book even more than I did, which was a lot. If you have only recently arrived on the libertarian-stroke-pro-free-market scene, and the only thing you know about the Adam Smith Institute is that they are there, alive and kicking, blogging and publishing, arranging public meetings and not so public meetings, generally advancing the libertarian economic and political agenda wherever they can, in London and everywhere else on earth that beckons, and that everyone else you admire thinks they’re terrific people, then this could be just the book for you. It will tell you how they got where they are, and what they did for the next three decades. And it does this in the style of a man who is not, as he freely admits, always accomplishing all that he wants to accomplish, but who is nevertheless engaged in the exact struggle that he wants to be in, and who is therefore fundamentally happy. The style is long on entertaining and often quite self-critical anecdotage, less burdened with much in the way of earnest tactical or strategic theorising.

This may actually make this book rather more useful to researchers than a different book, shorter on anecdote but longer on abstract theorising, might have been. People wanting to learn about Think Tanks can and will surely want to do their own theorising. What they need is lots of vivid little cock-ups-and-all vignettes of what actually happened over the years to an actual Think Tank, and a pretty significant one at that. This book will be read by people way beyond the ASI’s mere fan base.

The ASI was inspired by, among other things, that other famously pro-free-market acronym, the IEA, aka Institute of Economic Affairs. I recall a time not that long ago when hardly an introduction to a new IEA publication seemed to go by without reference being made to the wise advice that Anthony Fisher got from Friedrich Hayek about concentrating on ideas rather than mere policies. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the ASI was always, from the moment it pitched its tents in central London in the late 1970s, different. The ASI wanted, and still wants, more immediate political and policy impact. Its focus is on what can be said right now, derived from the fundamental ideas but translated into the language of here and now, that might move and shake the world’s movers and shakers in the desired direction, and hence also excite the next generation of free marketeers. When you attend some ASI event, what your ear tends to get bent by is not the distant past but the immediate future. What Madsen Pirie talks about is not what he did ten or twenty years ago, but what he is doing now and hopes to do even more of in the next few days and weeks. When I met up with Pirie a few months back, he told me that he just wanted to do … more. Of everything. Next year. So, a book of autobiographical history by him is something of a change of his regular tone. And because I am not used to hearing him reminisce at length, I found this all the more welcome.

Telephones seem to loom rather large in this story, both as things that an ambitious Think Tank has to have in abundance, and as things that the government, in former times, use to screw up (pp. 13-14):

We needed a telephone and a photo-copier. We were told by the Post Office, which ran the state monopoly telephone service, that there was a fourteen-month wait to have a line and phone installed. We somehow bargained them into doing it within six weeks by pointing out that our predecessors in the building had used a switchboard with four separate telephone numbers, one for each of the companies that had used the place, and all we wanted to do was to re-activate one line. Until the GPO engineers came, we had to conduct all the new Institute’s business from the public call box on the corner, and we ensured we kept a ready supply of
coins for the purpose.

The Post Office would not let us buy a phone; we had to rent one from them. This was their standard practice. The instrument they graciously allowed us to rent was a black, Bakelite instrument with a rotary dial, designed in the 1930s. For this magnificent piece of equipment we had to pay a quarterly rental of £14.65, or just under £60 a year. We overcame the problem by rewiring the place ourselves with extensions, and buying US phones on our visits there, complete with conversion sockets. This was contrary to all the Post Office rules, but it worked. And it meant that we were among the first in Britain to use such gadgets as recall dialling, wireless remotes and one-button dialling of our most-used numbers.

Others were messing with the phones in other ways (pp. 8-9):

One of our friends, telephoning family in South Africa, was surprised when a telephone engineer entered the conversation to say that because the call did not sound urgent, he was disconnecting it. The union had ‘blacked’ non-urgent calls to South Africa, and its members monitored private calls to enforce it.

Pirie continues:

More sinisterly, there were trade unionists and intellectuals who would rather have seen Britain as part of communist Eastern Europe rather than Western Europe, and there was genuine doubt at the time as to whether they might succeed. Both Stuart and I wished to keep our lifeline to the US. We said that if American helicopters came in to rescue their people ahead of the collapse, we wanted to be on them. We were joking, but only just.

I remember that atmosphere well.

With hindsight, which always makes things so much easier to understand, I think we can say that the ASI’s activities were intended to provide statists with a dignified retreat, in the form of regulated capitalism rather than full state ownership and state control. The ASI attitude, as I remember it, was that it was okay to have a bunch of new regulations (and more portentously, new regulators), provided you got firms into private hands, or got the state doing something more like business, or competing, or in general doing anything in a more genuinely market-like way. In due course, the regulated businesses would agitate against these regulations, or would at least be amenable to the regulations being done away with, and fully fledged freedom would reign. Or at least might.

But since that time, the regulations have multiplied. Regulations were at first a retreat from full-blooded government ownership and control, but they also served as a means of for the government to reassert control, of everything. A while ago now, I did a flurry of postings about health and safety signs. That was only a rather thin wedge during the times described in this book. It has got a lot thicker in the years since the 1980s and 1990s, when the ASI had its first and so far only period of substantial policy influence.

I do recall one ASI initiative that struck me as odd even at the time, namely the so-called Citizen’s Charter, which seemed like a mere announcement, by the government, that everyone should have the right to demand that the government will do a good job, will do everything that it promises to do, etc. But only those who believe such things to be routinely possible would want to make that a right. In other words, I recall thinking something like this:

Public services can be made to copy some of the practices of private businesses, but only for a time. Without the pressures and incentives that lead private firms to behave as they do, the very different pressures that work on the public sector will reassert themselves.

However, those words appear in this book, on page 203, following an admission that maybe the Citizen’s Charter was asking a bit much.

Tax Freedom Day, on the other hand was and is a notion that most free marketeers can enthusiastically get behind. The chapter about that begins thus:

The ASI did not invent Tax Freedom Day.

Which is typical of this generous book, full of acknowledgements to allies and collaborators, full of credit being shared around rather than irritatingly monopolised. Sadly Tax Freedom Day 2013 is still many months in the future. (Imagine living in a world in which TFD2013 had already been and gone!)

And however much things may now still be regulated, and more regulated by the year, at least our telephones are better. I am even now pondering the purchase of a new smart phone, of a sort massively more powerful than my first desktop computer, and about half a ton more portable. I wonder what the state of Britain’s phones might now be, if some evil fairy waved a magic wand and retro-abolished the ASI. Maybe not now that different, but this is a risk I wouldn’t want to take.

I was particularly interested in what might be thought of as some of the big omissions in this book, namely the lack of much discussion of Big Issues, like Europe, the Environment, and more recently the Financial Crisis. Instead of such discussions, we are told about such things as how Sir James Goldsmith wrote out cheques. (Quickly – p. 50.) Or about an amazing function at Number 10 Downing Street. (Complicated, by Neil Hamilton being involved, just when the press were baying for his blood in the matter of cash for questions, and by Downing Street being preoccupied by some Euro-crisis – pp. 199-20. But the ASI people had a good time.)

It’s not that the ASI never has anything to say about Big Issues. But I think the point here is that the ASI is not in the business of bundling issues together and having a great big set-piece battle about them, all our guys against all their guys. For a movement that is not strong on sheer weight of numbers, this was, they reasoned, a losing strategy. What the ASI did was unbundle Big Issues into lots of much smaller issues, with the result that people who might have been antagonised by a big battle approach, instead become quiet supporters of this or that incremental measure, often against their ideological instincts. I recall many times being told by Madsen, and his fellow Two-Man-Teamer Eamonn Butler, that the ASI often used to get at least as much mileage out of so-called Wets as they did out of Thatcherite true believers. John Major is not now held in very high esteem by free marketeers, but the ASI always had a very good relationship with him and his government. The ASI was always searching for policies that would work, not just in their results, but politically, in the sense of being enactable in the first place. And the same goes for politicians like John Major.

When the ASI got started, its aim was to change the climate of opinion within which British policy was made, but I sensed while reading this book that their focus may have changed, as a consequence of what, looking back now, they can say they did and did not achieve.

I remember someone saying to Chris Tame and me, back in the 1980s, that what we Alternative Bookshop libertarians were doing (and by the way that little enterprise also gets a mention in this book – p. 39) was using students to get to the Conservative Party. We replied that we were using the Conservative Party to get to students. Spreading the ideas was what mattered to us, not playing party politics.

Something a bit similar now seems to me to apply to the ASI. Originally, they were aiming to change the thinking of about 650 key political movers and shakers (see p. 32), and as a result British economic policy, and to some extent, especially in the short run, this is what they accomplished. They communed with academics and students because academics and students could help them get to those 650 key people, by writing stuff and by doing stints in the ASI office, and by then keeping in touch as supporters during their subsequent careers. But more and more, I suspect that the long-term impact of the Adam Smith Institute will be seen as them having taken the libertarian agenda and bounced it off, so to speak, those movers and shakers, using them as an amplifier and glamoriser of the basic message. During the 1980s and 1990s, those movers and shakers seemed to be paying quite a bit of attention to at any rate the economic aspects of the libertarian agenda, but now these people are back to their bad old tricks and habits, themselves apparently quite unmoved and unshaken.

Yet throughout this time, the ASI has probably done more to spread libertarian and free market ideas among students than anyone else, and I don’t just mean among students in Britain. By connecting the freedom message to the world of politics, and I do mean the world, they have kept the basic message interesting, fresh, newsworthy, relevant. This in its turn caused students to try to get their heads around the fundamental ideas, often with the help of the many books published by or in collaboration with the ASI, not a few of them written about these ideas by Madsen Pirie and Eamonn Butler. Many a curious teenager must have started this kind of intellectual journey by hearing about “privatisation” on or in the news, and wondering what that was about. Is that even possible? And if possible, is it really desirable? Would not unleashing the free market bring chaos and disaster? And if not, what do I say to people who think it would? They looked for answers, not least from the ASI whose politicking first got their attention, and they found them.

In answer to the charge that the ASI has had, looking back on it, rather little effect on Britain, I would respond by pointing out that their impact has absolutely not been confined to Britain. Their effect on Eastern Europe, to name a particularly important case, has been just as profound, and for the time being anyway, part of one of the world’s great economic success stories. Remember when doom-mongers prophesied doom for Eastern Europe?

The education gene is deeply embedded into the ASI. It is telling that a lot of the ASI leaders’ early income came from part-time teaching jobs of various kinds. Equally tellingly, Madsen Pirie now has a continuing connection with Pembroke College, Cambridge. I have not myself attended many of the big ASI student jamborees, but I have actually addressed one such gathering. It was one hell of a crowd to be talking to, let me tell you. The number of such students who have been thus addressed over the years, by the great and the good, and me, must now add up to a huge number.

I also had the feeling, while reading this book, that Madsen Pirie was mentally organising himself, prior to the next and more active phase in the ongoing struggle, and the next few chapters in the ASI story. I have called this posting “What the Adam Smith Institute did” because that implies a later posting, to be done about a decade hence, entitled “What that Adam Smith Institute did next”. Definitely something, is my bet.

I attended the launch of this book on February 15th, and would love to be able to say that I was as quick off the mark in writing this posting about it as that suggests. Sadly, the February 15th in question was in 2012, but at least I did some kind of posting about that event, right after it happened. As for this, about the book itself, well, better very late than never, or so I hope.

That Madsen Pirie himself is still, as of now, pushing this book suggests that I may yet be contributing something to its still-in-progress sales campaign. As I say, I hope so.

Liberty League Freedom Forum 2013 – April 5th-7th

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 11:59:54 +0000

Yes, the Liberty League Freedom Forum 2013 is coming to London soon, and yesterday I booked my place at it. This cost me twenty five quid plus a small booking fee, and that price includes meals, so this would be quite a bargain even if all that the product consisted of was the meals. And if you are one of those peculiar people who does not live in London or nearby, and you take the “with accommodation” option, that will cost you a further … ten quid! For two nights of “hostel” accommodation. What that means I am not sure, but if a roof is involved it is also quite a bargain.

Common courtesy, however, demands that if one takes one of these amazingly enticing deals, as I just have, that one will also pay at least some attention to the events during the day, in between the eating and the hostelling.

So it helps that there is an impressive array of speakers. There are names that are familiar to me, like: Baker, Bowman, Davies, Dowd, Singleton, Wellings, to name but a few of the ones I know well. And there are others I hardly know at all, which you also want when you attend something like this, like Abebe Gellaw, exiled Ethiopian journalist and activist, and Wolf von Laer, Chairman of European Students for Liberty. And there are in-between people, whom I approximately know or know of, but would love to get to know better. Here is the full list of speakers and subjects. (Well, fuller, see below.)

The talk I am most looking forward to is the one by libertarian historian Steve Davies, entitled: “Health Costs: Always Up?” Good question. And given what a great speaker Davies always is, great answers are bound to be supplied.

Recommended. Given the prices being asked, I would recommend that you consider, soon, if you would like to go, and if you decide that you would, to book soon also.

Plus, I just re-read the email I got from Liberty League yesterday, which got me thinking about this event, and it started like this:

The UK’s biggest pro-liberty conference is only a few weeks away. We have even more speakers now confirmed, with legal expert Professor Randy Barnett on libertarian law, Professor Terence Kealey on the “Innovation versus Leviathan” panel, Peter Botting leading the public speaking workshop, Dr Tim Evans on anarcho-capitalism, Linda Whetstone on liberty movements around the world, along with the Institute of Economic Affairs’ Mark Littlewood, and author JP Floru.

They’ll have to talk fast.

A short video about the Alpha Graphs

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:20:14 +0000

A few months ago I gave a talk to Libertarian Home, of the sort that happen regularly at the Rose and Crown in Southwark. (They have a speakerless social at the same venue which I intend to be at, tomorrow.) My talk was … well, to put it kindly, it was somewhat less than the sum of its parts. It had its moments, but it didn’t add up. Worse, the more I struggled to pull it together, the longer it went on and the more incoherent it got.

But something good may yet have emerged from this muddle, because Libertarian Home’s Simon Gibbs and I recently agreed that it might make sense to rescue (i.e. for Simon Gibbs to rescue) one of the somewhat better bits of this talk and make it into a video short. Simon has now done this, with added graphics.

The subject is something I have already blogged about here, namely the tendency of statist measures to start out quite good, only later going wrong and then ever more wrong, and on the other hand the tendency of a truly free market, when a particular bit of it starts, to be a mess, and only somewhat later to start getting seriously good and in the long run superb. Two intersecting graphs, in other words, one going up and then down and down, and the other going down and then up and up.

My first label for this phenomenon involved hockey sticks, but when it comes to graphs the hockey stick is well and truly taken, and now I’m calling my graphs “alpha” graphs, because that’s how they look when put together.

Alas, even this bit of my talk could have been a whole lot more eloquent. For starters, I should have waved my arms around in a way that fitted how the graphs would look to the audience. As it was, I got them the wrong way around, sideways I mean, and hence somewhat clashing with what Simon does with them in his superimposed graphics. Nevertheless, the basic idea survives, I think, and is usefully provocative of further thought, as Simon demonstrates with his own further thoughts.

My own main further thought about the Alpha Graphs (here’s hoping those capitals catch on) is that the Adam Smith Institute should be mentioned in connection with them. One of the ASI’s basic tactical insights from way back is that there are indeed often many advantages to be gained and gamed by politically well-connected individuals or organisations or companies, from statist policies rather than free market policies, but that with a bit of cunning these tendencies can be countered, for instance by making the arrival of a competitive market very much to the advantage of a few big early participants, or with right-to-buy, right-to-sell arrangements with regard to such things as public housing that goes back into the market. It’s a matter of how you sell the new market, and to whom. Instead of just using Public Choice Theory (the Alpha Graphs being a tiny part of all that) to excuse libertarian policy failure; use it to point you in better (because more politically effective) policy directions.

That isn’t the complete answer to the problems described by the Alpha Graphs, but it is certainly a part of it.

The other thing I want to repeat in this posting is that I think that short videos are an excellent way to go, when it comes to spreading libertarian ideas, provided only that you know how to produce them adequately. (The technique has recently been used with great effectiveness by the Adam Smith Institute’s own Madsen Pirie to explicate basic economics.) I hope Simon Gibbs produces many more such video quickies in the next few years, and helps and encourages others to do the same, both in the form of excerpts from other bigger performances (by no means only from performances that he himself has recorded), and in the form of original creations of his own. Such a program could be a great developer of future libertarian star performers, as well as a chance for older libertarians like me to add their pennyworths.

Sam Bowman’s talk last Friday: Thinking about what had been too big to think about

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:39:13 +0000

Arranging a meeting and chairing the Q&A of it is hard to combine with actually listening to all that gets said. So when it comes to what I personally learned from Sam Bowman’s excellent talk at my home (already plugged here) last Friday, and from the various reactions to it from the rest of us, it’s a case of me picking out verbal cherries, rather than me now being able to describe the entire fruit bowl. Mostly what I want to say is what an excellent restart Sam Bowman gave to Brian’s Fridays 2.0.

Bowman’s starting point was the difference between, in Donald Rumsfeld’s famed phraseology, “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”, on the one hand the things you know you don’t know and quite consciously and deliberately choose to remain ignorant of, and on the other hand the things you don’t even know are out there to be known about.

I know that I don’t know how to sort my computer out when it malfunctions worse than trivially, but I have many friends more computer-savvy than I am. So for me, computer expertise is a known unknown. I am neglecting it, but do so “rationally”. I am approximately aware of what I am neglecting, and of the approximate costs attached to such neglect.

But what of unknown unknowns? As Sam Bowman so wisely said, those are harder to describe! If you could think of an example of an unknown unknown, then it wouldn’t be unknown, would it? The point being that unknown unknowns only reveal themselves in the form of surprises, “surprise” being a word that Bowman returned to quite a few times.

The case for a free society is not that we know exactly how it will be wonderful, but rather that it allows an infinity of different bets to be placed on where it is and where it’s headed and where it should be headed. Some of these bets will be right, a few very much so, although as much by luck as by judgement. In a centrally governed society, where one particular viewpoint is given the force of law, that one dominant judgement is almost certain to be wrong.

You can talk about “unknown unknowns” in retrospect, though, once they have finally made themselves known. Sam concentrated in particular on the now widely known, but a few years back not at all widely known, privileged legal position of those three now famous “ratings agencies”, S&P and … er … the other two. (He did of course say, but I wasn’t taking notes.) Also not at all widely understood were the Basel Accords (Sam rather charmingly called them what to my ear sounded more like the “Basil” Accords), which, in effect, positively demanded that banks to buy lots of “investments” of the sort then assumed prudent but subsequently revealed to be the opposite. The financial crash happened as a result of central bankers all scrupulously, in the name of “prudence” (remember her?), doing exactly as they were told to do and as they assumed they ought to do. This was a crash caused not by the neglect of duty, but by the misunderstanding of what duty really demanded. The bankers were not evil and greedy. They were misinformed. As is further illustrated by their own personal investment decisions, which were much the same as the investment decisions they made on behalf of others.

Others present may want to correct and fill out the above description of what Bowman said, Bowman himself in particular. I do not now plan to record my evenings for posterity, and this one wasn’t. I’d welcome comments about the wisdom of that decision. On the one hand, recoding would be a nice service for those who can’t attend. On the other, I want speakers to feel that here is a chance to explore, in a friendly setting, ideas they may not yet be completely on top of. I particularly like asking people to talk about things that they hadn’t perhaps realised were worth talking about, or people who have not themselves done much public speaking and maybe didn’t know they had it in them (in among other more practised and confident speakers). Recording equipment might get in the way of all that. There is, after all, nothing to stop someone else recording them talking about what they said at my place.

The reaction to Bowman’s talk can be summarised as: well, maybe, maybe not. The feeling of the room was that some people had given at least some thought to the possibility of looming financial disaster. Advice had been given to the higher-ups that was based on all kinds of assumptions holding true: provided this or that, then all will be well. The higher-ups tended to hear only the “all will be well” bit, while neglecting the earlier stuff about the assumptions being made. But the people who had given the advice certainly remembered the earlier bits. But what could they do, once those assumptions started to look seriously dodgy? The advisers were not themselves higher-ups.

For me the phrase of the night was “Too big to think about”, see my title above. Like many a memorable phrase, this one is adapted from another common phrase that has been doing the rounds: “Too big to fail”. Too big to fail refers to the dilemma of top decision makers when the proverbial waste matter had already hit the fan. “Too big to think about” refers to the problem of the uneasy lower-downers, the advisers, the quants and the specialists, the ones who did have very bad feelings, beforehand. Too big to think about referred to those for whom the unknown unknowns that eventually clobbered the higher-ups were actually, somewhat, known about beforehand. Various people in the room last Friday “actually heard people say” that if such-and-such does turn out as feared, then we’re all so f***ed there’s nothing that we, and certainly not that I, can do about it. We (I) will have far bigger problems than are covered by my little remit. So, we (I) just have to hope that all will be well, because if it isn’t, that’s … too big to think about!

Which leads inevitably on to the question of how much it was merely pure ignorance that was in play here, and to what extent moral turpitude was involved. How “pure”, that is to say, was the ignorance? There is, after all, a particular sort of immorality that consists of refusing to face unwelcome truths and to think about them in any detail. (Someone mentioned “unopened envelopes” at this point in the discussion.) The consensus of the evening, at any rate from where I stood (which tells you something of how crowded the room was), was that Bowman was making an illuminating extreme point, so to speak, but that the truth was somewhat more muddy and more morally complicated.

What was it about these financial institutions that made them vulnerable to such fingers-crossed, hope-for-the-best, ignore-the-worst, group-think? Mention was made of how a much more widely known-about-in-advance and much criticised set of rules, involving government guarantees of bank deposits, caused banks to be all about crazy risks and not at all about their own prudence, truly understood. That made particular sense to me.

I expected Sam’s talk to be good, and it was. But the quality of the Q&A struck me as being of a particularly high quality last Friday, with quite a few of those present having personal experience of the financial discussions and dilemmas being alluded to. Which is a further reason to maybe not freeze the speakers thoughts electronically. What if, in the light of what he hears from the floor, he ends up thinking slightly differently about his subject than he did when actually speaking?

What I particularly liked about the evening, aside from the quality of the speaker and the quality of the audience that the speaker attracted, was that, instead of assuming total stupidity or total villainy on the part of people from whom we hope and continue to hope for different and better thoughts and decisions, we were all, thanks to Sam Bowman’s eloquent lead, making a serious attempt to get inside the heads of these various decision-makers and their advisers. Arguing works far better if you seriously try to understand where other people are coming from and how they see the world, rather than just making insulting assumptions about their motives and thought processes. Us libertarians (in particular me libertarian) getting better at arguing is (for me) what these evenings are all about.

A libertarian meeting at my home on the last Friday of this month

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:48:36 +0000

From about 1990 until about 2005, I held speaker meetings at my home in London SW1, on the last Friday of each month. I began them because I was a libertarian and we wanted such meetings, and because, having acquired a settled home, I could. And I ended them because their main purpose for me had been to stir up writing for the Libertarian Alliance, which by 2005 I was no longer doing. When the internet arrived as a mass experience, available to anyone with a computer, a telephone line and a few quid a month to spare, around the year 2000, I ceased being an editor of paper writings for an organised group, and became instead a citizen of the blogosphere. Most especially, I became a regular contributor to Samizdata. Suddenly, the blogosphere was where the action was, where the big opportunity was, and it supplied more than enough food for thought and for writing.

But now, my Last Friday of the Month meetings are to resume. Partly, I have discovered that their incidental benefits to me personally were more real than I had realised. Basically, I felt that, very gradually, I was losing touch with people who were in that vital social hinterland between friends and strangers.

But there is also a more public – altruistic, you might say – reason for me to crank these meetings up again. In retrospect, I think we can now see that the arrival of blogging was a most unusual time for us libertarians. Libertarian notions had spread rapidly during the years just before the internet and then blogging arrived among us. But because the number of libertarian enthusiasts involved was small compared to the population at large, these ideas had found few outlets in the late twentieth century mass media, which meant that we libertarians reacted to blogging like drowning sailors encountering a lifeboat. Meanwhile, our statist adversaries, many of them comfortably ensconced in what were clearly now the old school media, could at first only grumble about how their seemingly God-given intellectual hegemony had been so insolently challenged. At first, these hegemons behaved as if enough bitching by them about the new media, in the printed pages and on the TV chat and comedy shows of the old media, would send us amateur upstarts back to the oblivion from which we had so rudely emerged. When that didn’t work, they tried linkless fulminating in their, at first, very clumsily electrified newspapers. Only when it became clear even to them that the “new media”, and the new voices enabled by them, were here to stay, that anyone could say to anyone whatever anyone wanted to say, did at least some of the old school journos and organs start seriously adapting.

And now, they have adapted. Oh, not all of them. All technological transformations involve losers who slink away into self-imposed retirement. But enough regular media folk have now embraced the new internetted world, a process reinforced by the latest generation of social media activity – Facebook, Twitter and so on – which many old school media folks have used with enthusiasm to leapfrog back into the game.

The result of all this is a media landscape which, although infinitely more varied at its edges and in its details, is now in many ways nearer, in its intellectual content and overall political mix, to what it was at the end of the twentieth century. Having so recently being an exuberant, joyous end-run, blogging for us libertarians has now become something of a struggle. Libertarian group blogging has risen in relative importance during the last few years – see Libertarian Home, Counting Cats, and, in contrast, quite a number of individual libertarian blogs which have now become more or less completely silent. Samizdata has acquired more contributors recently, who used to blog individually. Perry de Havilland has said, when Samizdata began and ever since, that blogging wouldn’t always be easy, that individual bloggers would inevitably go quiet from time to time, and that this is why we need group blogs. Group blogging was big when blogging started, because most potential bloggers took a while to master the technicalities of how to do it. Now group blogging is important because content has become harder to keep churning out, given our somewhat lowered morale.

There is also the fact that the political world has become a different and grimmer place since 2005, as the financial and monetary policy chickens described by this man – regularly linked to from here, from the moment he published this book – have started seriously coming home to roost.

In this new new world, so to speak, face-to-face meetings among libertarians, which to me had felt rather superfluous a few short years ago, now feel very necessary, again. Serious thought is necessary, again. It’s as if much of the libertarian thinking we did in the years before the internet arrived has now been used up.

Whether the above paragraphs really say much about the world that “we” (often a dodgy word to me when I see others using it) live in, beyond how I have felt and now feel about that world, I do not know. But whether for purely personal or for more “objective” reasons, I now feel the need to resume my meetings. By chance, I found myself organising a sort of dry run revived Brian’s Friday, last summer, which went well and felt good.

Accordingly, on January 25th (attenders should arrive at my home between 7pm and 8pm), Brian’s Fridays will resume.

My first speaker will be Sam Bowman, a man who will be well known to many Samizdata readers, on account of his contributions to the Adam Smith Institute blog. And it seems that I am not the only one to reckon him to be a significant person.

Concerning what he has in mind to speak about Bowman recently emailed me thus:

The topic I want to discuss is, basically, why the idea of ‘unknown unknowns’ (aka radical ignorance, as opposed to ‘known unknowns’ of rational ignorance) explains failures of planning and ‘problem-solving’ social democracy better than incentives ideas that we typically use. I use the financial crisis as an example, where the dominant ‘too big to fail’ incentives-based narrative doesn’t hold up under scrutiny (such as an examination of bankers’ personal investments), but the ‘unknown unknowns’ narrative, applied both to bankers and to regulators, does. The upshot is that a reformulation of libertarianism along more purely ignorance-centric lines might be a good thing.

Which is a perfect topic to relaunch my meetings with.

Further speakers have already been pencilled in, and others are even now being negotiated with. I intend my speakers to be a mixture of people I already know well (such as my London-based Samizdata contributor friends) and people I do not now know so well but whom I and my guests will enjoy getting to know or to know better.

If you would like to learn more about this January 25 meeting, and/or to be kept informed about subsequent Last Friday of the Month meetings, please get in touch with me, e.g. by going to my personal blog and clicking where it says “Contact”.

A rather fine tie – and a question

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:51:09 +0000

Well, things seem a bit quiet around here today, so here is something I photoed earlier:

I encountered the tie at an IEA event about road pricing. The tie proclaims the fact of and the principles espoused by the Mont Pelerin Society. It was being worn by Dr Eamonn Butler, Director and co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute, and, among many other distinguished things, the author of many fine books explicating and popularising the ideas of freedom and of the free market.

One thing puzzles me, though, and my limited googling abilities were unable to solve the puzzle for me. What was so special about the year 1824? That’s an Italian flag, right? So what happened in Italy that the Mont Pelerin Society regards as so worthy of commendation?

I would have asked Eamonn Butler, but my camera has better eyesight than me, and I only saw the 1824 references when I got home.