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]
“The Soviet Union was world-renowned for maths and science instruction but that failed to translate into a strong economy. Similarly, the UK has some of the top universities in the world yet has experienced stagnant growth for the last decade. Prosperity requires creating the right institutional environment for entrepreneurship, not dictating curriculums from the top.”
Matthew Lesh, Director of Public Policy and Communications, at the UK-based Institute of Economic Affairs, the UK think tank. (The quote is from an emailed press release I was sent today.) He responded to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s comments on the case for extending the teaching of maths and how far too many people think it is okay to be poor at the subject. (I used to be poor at maths, but certainly did not wear that as a silly badge of pride.)
Lesh’s point, however, is certainly worth focusing on. Being good at certain subjects and having knowledge about subjects is not the same as having a flourishing economy, particularly if one has oppressively high taxes, heavy regulations, spending on flashy projects such as HS2 that crowd out private investment, etc. At the margins, having a more maths-literate population might have a positive effect if, for example, more people can get their heads around statistics – and how they can be manipulated – and important concepts for business and finance such as compound interest, for example. Of course, in an age when the teaching of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) gets more attention, this all fits.
I do worry that Mr Sunak, in his understandable and laudable desire to encourage teaching and better grasp of such subjects, can come across as assuming that this might be a sort of silver bullet to the UK’s economic woes. As the Lesh comment about Soviet Russia shows, having lots of maths whizzes in a country is no good if the underlying economics is poor. And by the way, a lot of those Russian maths aces, such as those of Jewish descent, emigrated to Israel as soon as they could, which explains, among other things, why Israel has been a STEM and start-up powerhouse.
On a final point, I remember some years ago (I cannot find the link, sorry) watching a televised talk by Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 and Gemini astronaut, given at MIT. He talked about teaching, and about why there needs to be another “E” in the STEM acronym: E for English. There’s no point in having all this knowledge if you are lousy at communicating it. He’s right. An example of how to communicate complex ideas brilliantly and clearly is that of Edward Chancellor in his recent book The Price of Time, where he writes about interest rates, and why manipulation of them is dangerous and a folly that goes back centuries. It is an outstanding case of clear exposition, fascinating facts and an enjoyable tone of voice.
I don’t know where to start. How much will the leaked information help the Russians and harm the Ukrainians? How much of it was not already common knowledge? How did Teixeira come to have access to information that neither his relatively low rank nor his role as an IT person justified him seeing? What about the role of the media? The New York Times tracked the leaker down then told the US government. Very 1950s.
If this were happening in the UK, I would not dare to ask the following for fear of prosecution, but since it is happening in the US and my tiny rivulet of speculation cannot possibly make any difference to the tsunami already crossing the world: which was he, or which was he more, a leaker, a whistleblower, a patsy for someone higher up, a braggart wanting to impress people online, a hero exposing US government lies, a traitor sending Ukrainians and fellow US servicemen to their deaths?
“When was the last time an American president included Ireland in their vocal – and justified – criticism of Europe for slacking on its commitments? The fact is, with so many American voters claiming Irish heritage, Ireland gets a free pass, something it shamelessly exploits.”
I wonder if Ireland’s fairly low-key approach is a hangover from when, during WW2, it was neutral, presumably out of a reflexive hatred for the UK rather than some deep love of the other side. In the case of another country that gets praise here occasionally – Switzerland – it was also neutral, although the Swiss probably, for military reasons, feared with some justification that if it sided with the UK, it would have been rapidly invaded by its German neighbour. These days, the Swiss have imposed sanctions on Russia, along with the UK, EU and the US, so its own neutrality is fading. And Ireland, as an EU member state, has of course imposed the same sanctions, for what that’s worth. It is not a NATO member – something that might come as a surprise to some people.
There’s a wider issue for those of a free market and economics point of view here. Ireland could be accused, perhaps rightly, of being a “free rider” on other countries that are able and willing to spend serious money on defence. This “free rider problem” is a subject that comes up in economics and public policy, and used to justify, for example, compulsory public spending on things such as highways, education and defence because it is uneconomic and inefficient to charge individuals for the benefits of said, and yet there will always be those who benefit but have no incentive for pay up. Is this behaviour by Ireland a “free rider” issue, and if so, what if anything can be done about it?
Separately, Ireland has for a long time had one of the lowest rates of corporate taxation in the world. President Joe Biden, who likes to flaunt his Irish roots (as many US presidents, in their rather tiresome way, do) has been an advocate of a global pact through which major countries adhere to a minimum tax rate of 15 per cent, and who knows, that might go higher. This counts as a tax cartel, and a country such as Ireland (an EU member state, remember) loses out from that, as do other small EU states such as Malta and Luxembourg. Ireland boomed in the late 80s, and through the 90s, in part because of its low-tax charms. These angered the policymakers of Brussels, who perhaps rightly saw this as a challenge to their desire to create a more high-tax/high-spend regime across the EU. So Ireland can at times be annoying for the right reasons.
What this all comes down to is that Ireland has, in different ways, chosen to stand apart. For all that it might be annoying that Ireland doesn’t supposedly do more on defence (it has a big coastline and requires safe shipping lanes), there’s been a sort of independence of mindset about Ireland that I quite like. (And as a coda to all this, lots of Irishmen, during WW2, defied their country and fought during WW2 against the Nazis, to their everlasting honour.)
Here we had a journalist so accustomed to pushing The Narrative that he apparently has no grasp of the facts. More importantly, it showed that despite launching a years-long crusade for social-media censorship, particularly against so-called hate speech, the corporate media are apparently incapable of defining what hate speech is. This of course is because no one can – not objectively, at least. One man’s hate speech is another man’s deeply held conviction. Which is why empowering the state or huge corporations to define and censor hate speech is so incredibly dangerous. These points have apparently never occurred to Clayton, as he bristles at all that ‘slightly’ hateful stuff on his timeline.
The idea that underlies the right-wing campaign for “parents’ rights.
The confusingly written subheading suggests that the idea that children are not property underlies the right-wing campaign for <scarequotes> “parents’ rights” </scarequotes>. In fact, Ms Jones’s article argues that parents are wrong to consider their children to be their property. It is true that some parents do think they own their children in the manner of property, and those parents are wrong to do so. For that I bestow my 0.5 of a “Like”, or would if Twitter let me. On second thoughts, make that a quarter-Like, because although words about the separate individuality and personhood of children flow out of Ms Jones in a flood, she concludes by saying the parents are not responsible for their children because the state is:
Children aren’t private property, then, but a public responsibility. To expand our democratic project to children is to grant them the security the right seeks to deny them: education, health care, shelter, food. A better America begins with the child.
Along the way to giving votes to children and children to the demos, she throws in the first few headlines she got by googling the word “children” as proofiness that Republicans think they own their kids:
Together was formed in response to the catastrophic overreach of government and authorities during the pandemic. The consequences of that episode need no repetition here, but the government’s smearing, censure and censorship of criticism, and the attempts to use psychology (fearmongering – as you have observed well) to assert its agenda was a grotesque departure from the norms of democratic society. Together launched a very successful campaign to reassert democratic control and freedoms, demanding the reinstatement of care workers sacked for their non-compliance with vaccine mandates. And they have since started a campaign to challenge some of the aggressively anti-car policies that local authorities have installed under cover of lockdowns, which will have a detrimental effect on freedoms, incomes, and health, despite seemingly being formulated in the interests of public safety. Climate Debate UK was launched at the end of last year, with the intention of informing debates relating to the Net Zero agenda. And so there was considerable overlap, and a joint project seemed like a good idea. I hope to be working with Together much more in the future.
“Over the next few years, all those heavily subsidised plants in the US, Germany and France are going to come on stream, selling chips into a global market where there are too many of them and prices are tumbling. The losses could be vast. Taxpayer money will have been put to terrible use and, in the UK, Treasury officials will perhaps be quietly breathing a sigh of relief that we were too hopelessly disorganised. There is a lesson to be taken, not least at a time when when `industrial strategies’ are more popular than ever. Just because a product is important it does not mean any particular country has to produce it. And if demand is growing, it is safe to assume private companies will be capable of meeting that need without help from the state. Too often, governments end up subsidising the wrong industries at the wrong time. They have a poor record of picking winners, and should instead set low and fair taxes, lower tariffs, keep competition open, and break up any cartels. Once they have done all that, the market can decide which are the industries of the future.”
My only quibble with the quote from this excellent article is that his support for trust-busting activity needs to be qualified with the point that a lot of anti-monopoly activities by governments are often based on a misunderstanding of competition as a static game, not a dynamic process through time. We see this regularly in the recent wailing about Big Tech. (See an article here.)
Those were reportedly the last words of General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in the American Civil War. (Wikipedia boringly says that he did complete the sentence. Just.)
General Sedgwick was a brave man to stride along the front like that. He sought to encourage his men, some of whom had been seen to flinch as the Confederate bullets landed all around.
I hope our Scottish readers will forgive me if I say that, though all the hearts that beat under Scottish skies are brave, not all of them are quite as brave as General Sedgwick. But some are:
“Deficits are nothing to be afraid of”, writes Jim Byrne for Bylines Scotland. You see, taxes don’t fund spending and a sovereign government can create new money to pay off its debts whenever it likes and so all Scotland needs to do make its deficit disappear is declare independence. This is called “Modern Monetary Theory”. Mr Byrne posts a link to a 14-page Bank of England document that, he says, shows that the Bank agrees with him. Which does make one wonder why the Bank doesn’t just declare “the deficit is nothing to be afraid of, let the rejoicing commence”. Unless it’s a case of “Gary, no”?
On December 3rd 2021, New Zealand spinner Ajaz Patel took all 10 wickets in one innings of a Test Match against India. He was only the third bowler in history to achieve this feat in international cricket.
On April 7th 2023, the Guardian‘s Elle Hunt joined the ranks of great spinners from New Zealand:
New Zealand’s Green party is in highly public turmoil after one politician sent a message seeming to criticise a colleague to a group of their other colleagues, apparently by mistake.
While the Greens’ Chlöe Swarbrick was speaking in the House on Wednesday, her fellow MP Elizabeth Kerekere texted a group of Green politicians and staff: “omg what a crybaby” – seeming to refer to Swarbrick’s failed amendment bill, aiming to reduce harm from alcohol.
After a colleague responded with “I think this is the wrong chat …?” – which ranks alongside “We need to talk” in its ability to instantly strike fear into the heart of its recipient – Kerekere deleted the text, then apologised for the “inappropriate message … which was not meant for this thread”.
The comments show Guardian readers wrestling with the difficult moral dilemmas thrown up by this situation. Swarbrick is female and LGBTQ. Kerekere is female, LGBTQ and Maori, seemingly giving her an unassailable lead. Then again, Swarbrick is vegan and sees a psychologist every week. And as the top comment by JunoNZ reminds us, “Chloe was trying very hard to persuade Parliament to advance a bill that would improve our terrible alcohol laws. These laws have a huge impact, especially on people living in poverty. And that includes some transgender people and their whanau as well as a disproportionate number of Maori and Pacifica, the groups supposedly of concern to EK.”
Bringing in “transgender people and their whanau” was a smart tactical move. Merely to mention transgender people, though a sound enough strategy in debates about the provision of bus shelters or the cost of electricity, would not have been enough to negate Kerekere’s Maori advantage, but, like all the best spin bowling, the sudden and logically unjustified use of the word “whānau” won by sheer audacity.
Specially trained and reliable witnesses would certainly be a help. But, of course, they’re humans and thus fallible and corruptible. (Heinlein, a creature of his times, was a pretty big believer in institutions and professionalism. The past decade has largely served as a refutation of both. And even in his day, the institutions and professions were less trustworthy than we thought; it was just harder to find out when they were lying, sort of a meta-case of what I’m writing about here.)
Technology might help some, as it will probably soon be able to tell if people are lying via brain scans with high reliability. (I doubt it will be able to tell if they’re just wrong, though). And that technology offers its own set of – very troubling — problems that go way beyond this essay.
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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