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Last night I attended a meeting of the End of the World Club, and by the end – of the meeting, not the world – the conversation had turned uncharacteristically optimistic. Oh, there were the usual prophecies of doom, and it is hoped that the next meeting will be someone talking about what it was like living through the Zimbabwe hyper-inflation. But the second of the two speakers last night was Rory Broomfield, speaking about the Better Off Out campaign, as in: Britain would be better off out of the European Union. That is an argument where at least some headway is now being made. How big the chances are that Britain might either leave or be kicked out of the European Union some time in the next few years, I do not know, but those chances have surely been improving. I can remember when the fantasy that “Europe” was going to cohere into one splendidly perfect union and lead the world was really quite plausible, if you were the sort already inclined to believe such things. EUrope, in those days, was a boat that Britain needed not to miss. Now, EUrope is more like a swamp into which Britain would be unwise to go on immersing itself, and should instead be concentrating on climbing or being spat out of.
Mention was made of shipping containers, i.e. of the story told in this fascinating book. Compared to the arrangements it replaced, containerisation has damn near abolished the cost of transporting stuff by sea, which means that the economic significance of mere geographical proximity has now been, if not abolished, at least radically diminished. Regional trading blocks like EUrope now look like relics from that bygone age when it would take a week to unload a ship, and when Scotch whiskey could not be profitably exported from Scotland because half of it would be stolen by dock labourers.
Containerisation also exaggerates how much business Britain does with Europe, because much of this supposed trade with EUrope is just containers being driven in lorries to and from Rotterdam, and shipped to and from the world. The huge new container port now nearing completion in the Thames Estuary is presumably about to put a demoralising (for a EUrophile) dent in these pseudo-EUropean trade numbers.
Mention was also made of a recently published map (scroll down to Number 29 of these maps). This map shows the economic centre of gravity of the world, at various times in history. A thousand years ago, this notional spot was somewhere near China. And the point strongly made by this map is that this centre of economic gravity is now moving, faster than it has moved ever before in history, from northern Europe (it was in the north Atlantic in 1950), right back to where it came from, leaving Europe behind.
Broomfield talked about how you convince people of such notions. For younger audiences, he said, just moaning on about how terrible EUrope is doesn’t do it. You have to be positive. But the trick, said Broomfield, is to be positive about the world. The important thing is that Britain, and you young guys, should not held back by EUrope from making your way in that big world.
The actual End of the World is not nigh any time soon, but the world is changing.
Here is a short (under four minutes) video, of a designer and exhibition curator Tom Dixon talking about the changes being brought to the world by 3D printing.
Whenever something new comes along, people typically describe it with a noun which says what it is like, but also with an adjective attached to explain how it is different from that. Think “horseless carriage”. (What will “driverless cars” be called twenty years from now?)
So it has been with 3D printing. This is “printing”, sort of, but not printing as we know it.
Listening to Dixon makes me think is that “3D printing” is actually less like printing, and more like blogging. The crucial difference it makes is in enabling people with opinions about how a … 3D thing … should or could be, but who has not been able or who could not be bothered to interest a Big Manufacturer (think Mainstream Media for bloggers) can now just go ahead and make it (just like a blogger publishing his hitherto ignored opinions). And this new-style designer can sell his new design on the internet too, because distribution has also, already, been taken out of the hands of old school Big Distributors (unless you count Amazon and eBay as Big Distributors). Not all such new designers will do as well as they hope, in fact almost all of them will not. But a few will surely succeed spectacularly, and many will presumably be making lives and livings that could not have been made before.
Dixon uses the phrase “taking matters into their own hands”. These words were my first version of the title of this posting.
There is a Samizdata team joke that the difference between American arrogance and British arrogance is the British think they run the world, whereas the Americans think they are the world.
Well just last week I started doing some business with a European bank… a quite mainstream one I might add… and discovered something remarkable. I had to sign a series of statements that I did not do business in the USA, had no assets in the USA and was not a US citizen or resident. Only then would they do business with me. Indeed I had to sign more papers regarding this than any actually pertaining to the business I was doing with them.
And this is why…
The Internal Revenue Service on Monday launched an online registration program for the hundreds of thousands of financial firms around the world that must comply with a U.S. anti-tax evasion law or risk being shut out of financial markets.
Surely a significant European bank must do some business in the USA, I asked. Can the world’s largest economy really be so onerous that you truly want nothing whatsoever to do with it?
Well he was rather guarded and he knew I was a blogger, which I suspect made him a bit uneasy at the prospect of being quoted, which is why I am naming no names. But to paraphrase the reply I coaxed out of him, it was “yes, the USA is simply not worth the trouble and so rather than complying with their endless diktats and the uncertainties of what are increasingly capricious rules… well… there is a whole great big world out there for us to do business with that does not include the United States.”
Yet I suspect the powers-that-be in Washington could not care less and moreover the notion that sophisticated foreign bankers are starting to see American not as the land of opportunity, but as a place to be avoided at all costs, would strike them as preposterous. Indeed had I not had those documents laid in front of me asking me to attest to a complete lack of economic links to the USA or anything associated with the USA that the US state might claim extraterritorial jurisdiction over… well, I would not have believed it myself.
Moreover, after our business had been concluded and he relaxed a bit, the banker in question, who I very much doubt is on any Interpol wanted lists (well I certainly hope not given that he now has some of my money) said he would not even visit the USA or transit a flight through it, due to the US authorities propensity to detain foreign bankers and ask them questions if they even suspect any involvement with US nationals, particularly from ‘non-compliant’ banks such as his.
Am I the only one who is astonished things have come to this? I am suddenly very glad I do not actually live in Arkham, Massachusetts (not sure which is worse, the IRS or the Deep Ones).
Why does the BBC sneer about Britain’s recovery but go crazy if Euroland’s corpse so much as twitches?
– Stephen Glover
In fact I suspect the UK’s “recovery” is as bogus as the Euro-zone’s “recovery” but the approach of the BBC is nevertheless… interesting… in a very predictable sense.
Neill Blomkamp must be living in some parallel universe as he speaks about his new film “Elysium”:
The 33-year-old film-maker, who moved from South Africa to Canada as a teenager, adds that “healthcare, immigration and class” are his targets, and “it’s not really the future I’m talking about”. “It’s not science fiction. This is now. The divide between rich and poor is getting more and more extreme.”
Actually Neill, never in human history has there been a smaller percentage of humanity living one failed harvest away from communal starvation. Is the divide between rich and poor actually increasing and more extreme than, say, in the eighteenth century? Or any time before then actually? In reality never has a larger percentage of humanity been, by any reasonable definition, middle class, than right now.
The fact large areas of poverty exists at all in our technologically advanced age is a dark miracle wrought largely by state imposed impediments to trade, disincentives to employ, insecurity of private property title and many other government policies of the sort Matt Damon (that tireless supporter of state education whose children are in a private school) strongly approves of.
If I had the option of living in a nifty orbital torus filled with fellow capitalists, I would want it to be well defended too, Neill… mostly in order to keep out all the champagne socialists.
Fears over NSA surveillance revelations endanger US cloud computing industry:
American technology businesses fear they could lose between $21.5bn and $35bn in cloud computing contracts worldwide over the next three years, as part of the fallout from the NSA revelations. Some US companies said they have already lost business, while UK rivals said that UK and European businesses are increasingly wary of trusting their data to American organisations, which might have to turn it over secretly to the National Security Agency, its government surveillance organisation.
Of course it is highly unlikely that GCHQ or its French and German counterparts are actually any less intrusive, but that said, I suspect the budget for these organisation would not keep the NSA’s staff in Cheetos and RAM upgrades, so on that basis alone I suppose your data is probably safer anywhere but the USA.
But the perception that the USA is the very worst option in the First World from a security perspective is now going to be very hard to change, whatever the truth of the matter. I did see this coming.
Central banks cannot solve the problems they created any more than an arsonist makes a good firefighter.
– Steve Baker MP remembers the words of Steve Horwitz, to help him explain why he is not impressed by the latest doings of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.
The IEA is not happy either.
“[T]here is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”
– H.L. Mencken
A growing movement in the United States seeks to dramatically increase unemployment by imposing ever higher price floors on salaries. The recent conversion in the US of millions of full time jobs to part time to evade new health insurance requirements for full time employees was apparently an insufficient increase in human misery – the elimination of most entry level work on even a part time basis is now also apparently a goal.
For example, see this New York Times article reporting on a recent on fast food workers strike”one day strike by workers at fast food restaurants.
Now, to be fair, most of the people clamoring for new impositions on employers like health insurance and increased minimum wages are in fact unaware that their efforts will simply throw people out of work rather than helping them. Their goal, and I take them at their word, is to attempt to help the poor, not to destroy all hope they have for the future. The fact that their proposals (and sadly, in many cases, actual laws) do exactly the opposite of what they intend is difficult to convey to them.
This seems to be for two reasons. The first is that they are often completely unacquainted with economic thinking, and are unashamed of it or at least believe this ignorance to be irrelevant as economics is not needed (in their view) to analyze their proposals. Second, and worse, they completely focus on their desires over the likely real world effects of what they propose.
Attempts to point out the actual effects of a proposal (and how they are the opposite of what was intended) are often met with one of two responses, and sadly sometimes both. The first is blind repetition of the original rationale (e.g., “but poor people can’t afford to raise their families on what they earn at a fast food restaurant!”) without any attempt to address the question of whether the proposed remedy will in any way fix the original problem. The second is the demand “well, what would you propose doing?”
(As an aside, I will describe one my more vicious tactics, which I’m mildly ashamed of and invoke only when particularly frustrated by combined cases of “well what do you propose?” and “but there is a problem!”
I sometimes mention that my father has been dead for years and I miss him terribly. When I propose to sacrifice the children of the minimum-wage advocate to Baal to propitiate the god and ensure my father’s resurrection, and mention that, if they don’t like the proposal they should give me an alternative, frequently they decline to offer one. Sadly, they rarely see the parallels to their own suggested fixes for the problems of the poor either.)
The desire to help by destroying extends everywhere these days — one can barely open a newspaper without encountering it. For example, there is now a “labor activist” jihad against unpaid internships, which has, sadly, seen some considerable success in US courts and regulatory agencies.
The result is already predictable. Internships are starting disappear entirely. People clamored for such internships not because they enjoyed working for free but because they desperately wanted to get real-world job experience onto their résumés so they could get a paying job later. Legions of college students, deeply in debt from loans pushed on them by the state and having majored in utterly useless topics like “Communications”, will soon find themselves unable repair the damage their education has done to them even by offering to work for free in exchange for experience, and will be even less employable. Victory for the self-proclaimed “advocates”, misery for the putative objects of their “assistance”.
A sort of minor victory for the market appears to be brewing, however.
It will not, sadly, provide jobs for the poor and unskilled. Jobs can only be provided by an employer who stands to make more by employing an individual than that individual costs to employ, and, in the case of workers at the bottom of the skills ladder, paying an employee less than they cost has been made illegal by the state.
These new developments will, however, at least lower the cost of goods that are sold to everyone, including the poor, and they may keep the economy from contracting under the dead weight of yet more labor regulation.
I am speaking, of course, of automation. More and more companies, faced by the “helpful people destroying others lives” lobby, are figuring out ways to replace their employees with machines.
I opened by mentioning the recent fast food restaurant strikes. Should the various “labor organizers” succeed at increasing the cost of restaurant labor, one result may be that such jobs could vanish altogether. A startup called Momentum Machines is already working on fast food restaurants with completely automated kitchens. They claim that they will be able to produce a better, tastier and more consistent product as well. Whether this particular firm succeeds or not is almost irrelevant — if they do not, the idea is out there, and others will follow in their footsteps.
Similarly, faced with increasing pressure to improve pay and benefits for semi-skilled assembly line workers, Foxconn, the Chinese contract electronics manufacturing giant, has decided to replace almost all of those workers with robots. Whether this was entirely because of the helpful assistance of “activists”, including some who simply made up stories about the company for lack of real problems to discuss, or is simply because the time is ripe, I cannot say. Regardless, Foxconn has already deployed its first 20,000 robots.
I find it hopeful that, even if we cannot prevent the legions of well-meaning destroyers from wreaking additional havoc on the lives of others, we can at least bypass their more egregiously foolish ideas. They may be able to eliminate jobs for millions, but they will not be able to eliminate the industries they target, which will simply operate without human employees.
The first problem I have when I read of ‘austerity’, meaning less state spending… is that the amount the state is spending is not really going down at all, it is just getting moved around a bit.
But there is a second definitional problem I have with this term ‘austerity’ as it is being used.
When I see members of the kleptocratic classes, the receivers of appropriated state largess, describe less public spending as ‘austerity’, I often wonder if such people regard the steadily lessening rates of burglary in the UK as also being a long term trend towards ‘austerity’.
Look at it this way: people are (allegedly) having less of their property appropriated by burglars, which means the burglars have less of your money to spend. So clearly this means society is experiencing ‘austerity’, as you, in your un-burgled household, get to keep more of your own property and spend more of your own money, rather than having it spent by someone else.
So… less people having their stuff taken away from them by the state, and by burglars (but I repeat myself)…. that is ‘austerity’, right?
I see that the Church of England is about to go into the moneylending business. They appear to think that it is easy. If so, they might like to consider this moneylender’s words:
 The Times, 11 July 1913 page 3. Or this one. (I liked the bit about even the Church having to lend out its money.)
The Liberty and Property Defence League also has a few things to say.
QE has had another effect which is rarely quantified. The Newedge study calculates that 47 per cent of all S&P 500 earnings growth since 2009 has been derived from the interest expense savings from declining interest rates, a large chunk of which has been created by the Fed’s interventions. A puncturing of the credit bubble would send the cost of borrowing shooting up, and thus reverse many of these gains.
We have had the tech bubble (partly driven by cheap credit); we had the property bubble (driven by cheap credit), we now see a bond bubble (ditto)…….
Read the whole article. The CityAM piece is not the first to broach the issue, but as an overview, it is very good indeed.
Admit it. You love cheap clothes. And you don’t care about child slave labour…
So sayth Gethin Chamberlain in The Observer.
Well… seeing as he puts it that way… I suppose it would be better if these Third World folks were unemployed (and thereby provide a lower carbon footprint of course, not to mention gainful employ for First World NGOs involved in the Pity & Guilt Industry) and depending for their survival on First World aid money, disbursed via their government. The important thing is that The Islington Set can feel good about increasing the price of clothes for the British lumpenproletariat… and just remember that a lot of those bastards with their false consciousness and lack of class awareness voted for Thatcher back-in-the-day!
Of course much the same was said about The Dark Satanic Mills of the industrial revolution. But just as in India, people moved into the ghastly factories of the Midlands and elsewhere because it was better than the subsistence of grinding rural poverty… and this ultimately led to the technological mass affluence of today that has taken the vast majority of humankind beyond one-failed-harvest-from-starvation.
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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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