We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I was quite interested to read this article in The Times which suggested that the peak output of crude oil production would quite possibly be driven by the limits of consumer demand for the stuff, rather then the constraints of supply of oil. This idea, put forward by BP’s chief economist, Paul Davies, was that consumer demand would weaken, due to economic factors and also political factors as Western societies increasingly demand ‘cleaner’ energy solutions for their cars.
With car makers introducing alternative energy vehicles and these likely to be widespread by the end of the decade, it is quite understandable where Paul Davies is coming from. And given that the decline in existing oilfield production is less then had been thought, it is possible that supplies could continue to increase to meet the rising demand from the newly booming economies of India and China.
With alternative energy cars still very much at the prototype stage, it is unlikely that the current demand-driven spike in oil prices will slacken in the short to medium term. But I was curious to read the opinion of Times correspondent Carl Mortished. He suggested that to reach a peak in production would require global regulation, taxation, and other notions beloved of journalists. It seems to me that the reason why oil production is continuing to climb is the very global nature of the commodity; there is no government able to regulate it, and even the producer’s cartel OPEC is not very successful. It is, rather, the demands of the free market that drive the oil industry, just as it is the demands of the free market that drive auto makers to devise alternatives to gasoline powered cars.
A wonderful snippet from a BBC radio reporter (Ed Stourton) in Afghanistan for the Today programme: A new bus-stop has been built in Lashikar Gah as part of the ‘reconstruction’ effort.
The report does not say whether it is a replacement for a pre-war bus-stop. Somehow I doubt it. It is very well-equipped, having its own mosque and a pharmacy, as waiting times “can be rather long”.
An odd approach. In most of the world a bus-stop is a place where buses happen to stop. Of course bus-stops, like ports and railway stations all round the world provide opportunities for traders, places of worship, bars and cafes and so forth, but they seldom have them built in. Bus companies and their passengers are primarily interested in selling and buying travel. The pause at the roadside to move from foot to wheel, wheel to foot, refuel, refresh, is just procedural necessity.
Even in the first world, where there are some fabulous bus stations and garages, mostly this is an utilitarian afterthought, contingently well-designed. Everywhere (I thought) the buses are the transport network, not the stops. You have a shed for the buses at the end of the route, and signs to show where the buses are supposed to stop. Many places they do without the shed, not least because the buses are always on the move maximising their passenger-, luggage- and livestock- miles.
But a government bus-stop is built to different, higher, standards. A throwaway line at the end of the report reveals just how long those waiting times are: “There are no buses yet.”
Writing in Forbes, Alexander Tabarrok has written a cheerful essay on the long term outlook for world economic growth.
New ideas mean more growth, and even small changes in economic growth rates produce large economic and social benefits. At current income levels, with an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 3% per year, America’s real per capita gross domestic product would exceed $1 million per year in just over 100 years, more than 22 times higher than it is today. Growth like that could solve many problems.
It is good to see a whole-hearted, open and positive outlook for humanity. Much of the media’s reportage accentuates the negative, as bad news always sells. Even here at Samizdata.net, we spend much of our time chronicling the follies and evils of governments and handing out (well deserved) brickbats. But there is also plenty of reason to be cheerful too.
I would just add one caveat to Professor Tabarrok’s optimism. Long term economic growth requires a stable framework of liberty, peace and a consistently applied rule of law. The trend of events by governments in the last decade have not been positive on these metrics, and governments who think that they can erode the rights and liberties of their citizens without it having an economic impact in the long term are kidding themselves.
This item in the FT reminds us that the spirit of enterprise has not reached all pockets of British society:
More than half a million young Britons are officially too sick to work and claiming incapacity benefits, a higher tally than the number claiming unemployment benefit, according to figures obtained by the Financial Times.
The word I think the FT is looking for but reluctant to use, I think, is “lazy”.
The figure, which includes more than 300,000 young people claiming for “mental and behavioural disorders”, shows continuing high levels of worklessness among the young, in spite of 10 years of steady economic growth and a concerted attempt to move people off welfare and into work.
I will not dismiss problems of mental health – this is a serious subject, but 300,000?
This does rather throw the issue of economic immigration – and indeed, emigration – into sharper relief. If a significant chunk of the potential working population is mentally not the full set of cards, or lazy, no wonder it is proving easy for motiviated, not-ill foreigners to enter the UK job market. Contrary to the Rod Liddles of this world, I dread to think what would have happened to the British economy had it not been for the influx of immigrants over the past decade or so.
Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, has a pretty good item over at Bloomberg about the good economic developments over the past 12 months, which inevitably get overlooked with so much understandable focus on the sub-prime mortgage snafu and the associated mega-buck losses sustained by some of the world’s top financial institutions, such as Citi and Merrill. But much of the economic news is good; when I punch some numbers on my Bloomberg machine, I am reminded that a goodly number of African stock markets are up strongly this year – that nicely upsets the usual cliches of Africa as a story of unmitigated woe, not that there are not serious problems there of course. China’s stock market looks like a bubble but the growth of the economy is real enough, whatever one thinks of government statistics; one of the best performing stock markets of 2007 has been Germany’s, up more than 20% this year, despite the high exchange rate of the euro. France may be starting to turn a corner, despite my doubts on how far Sarkozy will go in liberalising that country’s economy. A weak dollar should boost American exports and hence help the US economy close its trade deficit. Most Latin American economies are on an upward curve and Venezuela’s Chavez received an admirable rebuff in his attempt to seize permanent power late in the year. (Quick question: what are readers’ bets for most promising economy in 2008?). Russia is problematic: its status as an energy exporter means it is enjoying a bonanza of revenues, but this needs to be matched the emergence of a large, broad middle class able to sustain the sort of entrepreneurial economy for the long term; India is a bright spot; most of central Europe, Scandanavia is in decent shape. Italy is a permanent car accident and a possible quitter of the euro, but Italy seems to have incredible powers of survival.
All of these developments should be borne in mind when you look at how Britain’s economy has performed. On one level, the figures are poor: we have UK public deficits despite years of economic growth; tax burdens are rising and productivity is not what it could be; but from my admittedly biased vantage point in central London, I do not see a country in crisis (what I do see is a statist political culture in decline or at best, paralysis, which is not quite the same thing); the inventiveness and entrepreneurial gusto in this country is impressive, although one worries about the impact of an exodus of bright talents to foreign, sunnier climes. All in all though, I think it quite wrong to end 2007 on a whiny note, so I will not. As far as the cause of liberty is concerned, there is all to play for; the ID card venture is not a done deal and the Big Brother state received a mighty poke in the eye this year with the fiasco of the lost data on 25m people. I get more and more sense from the media that Britons are losing patience with this state of affairs. Let’s hope so.
Wishing my fellow contributors and our readers a very happy, prosperous and healthy 2008.
An issue rumbling away in the business sections for the past few months, and likely to rumble on in the New Year, are the activities of what are called “sovereign wealth funds,” enormous funds, usually accumulated from government oil revenues and run by countries such as Norway. They are now major buyers of assets such as chunks of shares of banks like Citi, the US bank that has taken massive write-downs connected to the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. The question that comes up, especially when these funds are run by Middle Eastern governments or the Chinese, is whether their control of large parts of western firms poses some sort of “problem”. At this stage, I do not see it being a problem. As Sylvia Pfeiffer points out, these funds ultimately want what any intelligent investor wants: maximumum possible returns. I suppose that conspiracy theorists might wonder whether the Chinese, say, will deliberately run their acquisitions into the ground as part of some grand dastardly Blofeld-like plan to take over the world, but this strikes me as a bit unlikely. Perhaps more significant are issues such as protection of intellectual property rights and whether the companies that get taken over are as open about their accounts and profits as before. But again, it strikes me that as long as these new funds do not breach any regular laws against fraud or force, I do not see their activities as a problem.
The truth is, emerging economies in Asia, coupled with the petro-dollar wealth of the MidEast, parts of Asia, Russia and even Africa, is giving these funds a degree of market muscle that has taken some investment observers by surprise, but it should not do so. We are living through a major period of change in the economic clout of non-western states. We might as well learn to profit from it.
My knowledge of such things is close to absolute zero, but is not this, linked to by Instapundit (where more links and updates are even now accumulating) today, rather exciting?
Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.
Damn right. It seems to me that if that caught on, the rules of energy would be changed for ever. Traditionally, energy has been a huge, heavily politicised industry. If only for that reason, politicians everywhere will fight this like cornered rats.
The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology uses reservoirs of liquid lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The Lithium-6 reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that fits into the reactor core. The whole whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, about half the cost of grid energy.
I have always found the Samizdata commentariat to be at their best when educating the rest of us about high tech issues like this one. Is this plausible? Is it safe? Will it be that cheap? Is today really April 1st and not December 20th at all?
Toshiba expects to install the first reactor in Japan in 2008 and to begin marketing the new system in Europe and America in 2009.
Bring it on. Never have I felt as optimistic about the future of nuclear power as I do right now, for this development turns nuclear power from a clunky, expensive mega-muddle that is totally dependent upon politics, to something that is small, simple, cheap and dependent only on the good sense of some people. Not everyone has to like this, and many will be flinging faeces in all directions about it. But not everyone has to. All it needs is a few countries, and a few people in those countries, to say yes.
How about this as a way to sell it? If you oppose it, you are in favour of Islamist terrorism. That should loosen things up a bit. An Instapundit emailer says that this technology is old news, updated. So, it’s been around all along, has it? Do you get the feeling that some kind of political switch has been thrown? Rather than fighting like cornered rats, perhaps the politicians of the West who really matter are now willing to relax some of their their control over power supplies, if that’s what it takes to separate those pesky Muslims from their oil money.
Magna Carta: yours for $21,321,000 (£10.6M);
Tales of Beedle the Bard: £1,950,000 ($4M)
Of course tha latter may be a more useful guide to one’s liberties in New Britain ™
I recently finished reading Jonathan Knee’s book, The Accidental Investment Banker, chronicling the period of 1994-2003 during which time our slightly jaundiced writer was working for two of the leading practitioners of mega-mergers and initial public offerings (IPOs), Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. As someone who has worked on the fringes of this world here in London, I could relate to quite a lot of Knee’s account. At the heart of it is his argument that investment banks have gone from being supposedly impartial providers of advice for long-term clients to mercenary hired guns willing to pump up any stock, sell any junk bond, to the highest bidder. He wishes to see investment banking give up this sordid activity and resemble the ideals (please try not to laugh) of the legal and medical professions.
This is all written with passion and a lot of detail; if you want to know how Philip Purcell, the former head honcho of Morgan Stanley, plotted to remove rivals or vice-versa, or how investment banks can be open to conflicts of interest, this is the book for you. But at the end of this volume I had no real clear answer to the question as to why a self-declared liberal (in the American usage) like Knee soiled himself working for these ghastly banks doing their ghastly IPOs and mergers at all (sorry for my sarcasm). Or maybe those mega-buck salaries eased the pain a bit (now you are being very sarcastic, Ed). Frankly, to be rude, Knee comes across as a bit of a prig; also, I find his naivete about the world of modern finance frankly a bit hard to take. Banks want to make money and this should hardly be a shocker; if you expect Olympian standards of objectivity from an analyst about a stock that the same bank might be underwriting in an IPO, you should not be investing at all and make sure to get a second or third opinion first. And yes, while there was a lot of hubris in the 1990s IT boom, remember that without the entrepreneurial gusto that that “bubble” made possible, I would not now be typing these words on a laptop and putting them onto a blog. It would not have harmed Knee to have mentioned that point. One might as well write about the supposed evils of the 1840s railway boom in Britain while overlooking that it did, after all, make possible loads of fanstastic railways.
In fact, although there are delusional dreamers, shysters and dullards in any walk of life, I tend to find that investment bankers or hedge fund managers or private equity partners tend to be pretty straight folk on the whole; personally, I find such people to be more honest, hard-working and clever than politicians, although just as prone to the error of sometimes believing their own propoganda. I don’t think any of the people that Knee writes about could be as guilty of financial crookedness as the Britsh government has been over its shamefully under-priced bid for the London Olympic Games, for example, which have turned into the mother of all money pits. And Gordon Brown’s handling of public accounts while he was Chancellor, putting PFI projects’ liabilities off balance sheet, would have landed him in disgrace, as happened to Stan O’Neill, former head of Merrill Lynch, who was kicked out after his firm suffered massive write-downs over the US sub-prime mortgages fiasco. When things go wrong in investment banks, people get fired; in politics, they get another cabinet post.
To be fair to Knee, he does not offer any concrete solutions to the ills he claims have gripped investment banks and he also expresses doubt about the need for yet more regulation; in fact, he even concedes that the legislative reaction to the implosion of the 1990s stock bubble and various accounting frauds have arguably made the job of investment banking even worse in ways that are unlikely to benefit clients. On the other hand, he is far too gentle on Eliot Spitzer, who’s bout of lawsuits against financial players, while not without some justification, went too far and have played a part in damaging New York as a competitve place to do business, to the benefit of London.
The European Union has its uses. While rootling around for stuff to link to from CNE Competition, I came across this:
Left-wing Labour MPs are girding themselves for a rebellion over a European Union plan which they say could spell the end of the National Health Service.
When left wing Labour MPs rebel, I at least hope for possible goodness.
The European Commission will publish its health directive next week and it is meant to make it easier for people to travel to get specific medical treatment in another EU country.
Ah, the age-old dilemma of the EUrosceptic. What do you think if the EU imposes something sensible?
British diplomats say that this is NOT the same as making sure that if you fall sick in Slovakia or have an accident in Austria you can get treatment straight away.
When British diplomats say that something is NOT something else, it means that they have been told to say that by their political masters and that the small print of their argument will be about a very small difference. The feathers on the other something will definitely NOT be the exact same colour, but the other something will otherwise waddle and quack in an identical fashion to the original something, and will in fact be just another duck. For “NOT”, read ” “, in other words.
It is what some people call “health tourism” and both critics and fans say it will allow people to shop around for health care.
Sounds great. So what if it is just a plan to sell Eurostar tickets; I still like it.
In the end, there is nothing like people preferring something else to whatever bogus nirvana is being peddled by the bogus nirvana peddlers. The one argument against the much vaunted Soviet Communist nirvana that the vaunters could never wriggle free from was the fact – for fact it was – that this was a nirvana that millions wanted to escape from, through minefields if need be, and with only the clothes they were wearing at the time of their escape if that was all they could take with them. A similar process is now under way with Britain’s similarly vaunted NHS, the best healthcare system in the world except for all the others.
Amazon has just been ordered by the French state to stop delivering books for free, and in general to refrain from charging too little for books. This is just wrong, says Instapundit.
With questions like this, I come over all Paul Coulam. I start not with what might or might not seem nice, but with libertarian dogma.
Amazon owns some books. They should be allowed sell them to you for any price they like, and subject to any conditions they like. They should be allowed to offer to deliver them any way they like, for any price they like. And if you are interested, you should be allowed to say … yes! Or: no. It really should be that simple. If you have to die your hair blue before they will sell books to you, well that would be a strange business model to follow, but: the books belong to them and they should be allowed to part with them, or not, on any basis they like.
However, the principle that if you own something you should be allowed to sell it on any basis you like would also allow certain other arrangements to pertain. → Continue reading: The state should not control prices but property owners should be allowed to control their own prices any way they like
The Stockholm Network people are trying as hard as they can to parlay their Golden Umbrella Awards into something truly significant. So they were pleased when Perry de Havilland did a piece here about the awards dinner last week, and even more pleased when Instapundit linked to that posting. And they were also delighted by this Wall Street Journal piece by John Fund. With awards ceremonies, what matters is not so much the dishing out of the awards as the matter of whether anyone else cares, or can be persuaded to care. This event was good. But it is the response to the event that will surely mean that the corresponding jamboree next year will be better.
Fund, who presented one of the awards, to a Bulgarian by the name of Dimitar Chobanov, begins his piece thus:
The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and other free-market Washington think tanks are known to many Americans. What isn’t generally understood is that there has been an explosion of free-market think tanks around the world that are increasingly challenging the conventional view that government is the solution to society’s problems.
Like Perry, I was part of the throng, and in a piece I did about these awards for another European think tank last week, I made the same point about free market think tank expansion. Whereas Fund sees these enterprises spreading beyond the USA, I see them spreading beyond Western Europe, but however you slice this story, free market think tanks are spreading.
In among being impressed by all this, I took photos. Usually, when I take photos at pro-free-market events, my only questions are: How many women are here and how nice do they look? But the photography I did at the Golden Umbrellas focussed more on what was being officially talked about. Those ladies I did snap were snapped because they were on the stage, like Mistress of Ceremonies Karen Horn, Janet Daley and Cécile Philippe. There were plenty of other fine looking women present that night, but I concentrated my picture-taking on the people who were giving and receiving awards. And as well as photographing them, I listened to what they were actually saying. Which you can also do by going here.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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