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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Madsen Pirie’s new book, Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute was launched earlier this evening in the crypt of St John’s, Smith Square. Here is what it says in the book’s first chapter, entitled “Shaping an institute” (pp. 3-4):
There was an institute in London which drew heavily on Smith’s ideas, and those of the free-market economists who had followed in his wake. This was the Institute of Economic Affairs (lEA), founded by Sir Antony Fisher twenty years earlier, and which had published a steady stream of monographs analyzing the deficiencies of central direction, state planning and economic intervention. They were intellectually rigorous, and had made their way into the literature of economics libraries, albeit in a separate corner, almost fenced off from the mainstream.
But we wanted something more. It was all very well to win theoretical arguments, but nothing seemed to happen afterwards. Governments continued on their unruly ways, while academics devised new follies to set up on the wreckage of the old ones. We wanted to change reality; to have an impact on what actually happened. We wanted to make policy.
Adam Smith might have been one strong influence on our thinking, but there were others. One was James Buchanan, the Nobel Laureate who, with Gordon Tullock, James Niskanen and others, developed what came to be known as Public Choice Theory. In essence ‘it took the ideas of economics into the domain of politics and administration. Instead of ‘treating politicians and civil servants as selfless seekers after public good, the theory treated them as if they were ordinary economic participants, out to maximize their own advantage, just like other people. it proved a very fertile theory tor explaining what would otherwise have been incomprehensible outcomes. It also fitted in with the rather less than respectful way that we ourselves regarded politicians.
Public Choice told us how minority interest groups could hijack the political agenda to have advantages created for themselves. It explained how politicians respond to pressure from vociferous and self-interested groups, but not from a public at large which might be largely unconscious of the effect policy made upon it. Public Choice Theory was basically a critique, but we began to wonder if there could be a creative counterpart to it. Just as Public Choice Theory told us why certain policies were doomed to political failure, however economically sound they might be, could it not be used to create policies that would not be subject to these limitations? Could new free-market strategies be crafted that flowed with political reality by building in the support of the interest groups which might otherwise derail them?
This was powerful stuff. …
Indeed it was. As soon as I’ve read the rest of this book, I’ll tell you what I think of it.
Meanwhile, here is a picture I took at the launch, of the author hard at work signing copies.
Not surprisingly, the ASI blog already has a posting up on the subject.
Last night I went to the cinema, which I rarely do nowadays, and judging by the size of the audience for the movie that I and my friend saw, not many other people go to the cinema these days either. The place, in the heart of the London West End, was damn near deserted, apart from us and about three other people. Actually, though, the problem was probably the movie we were seeing, as I will now explain.
The movie we saw was Margin Call. Here is a short Rolling Stone review of it, which strikes me as pretty much on the money.
Okay: SPOILER ALERT. Stop reading this very soon if you don’t want the broad outlines of the plot handed to you on a plate.
When I started watching it, I knew nothing about Margin Call other than that a friend of the friend I was with had said it was the best current financial crisis movie he knew of. This makes sense. Margin Call is very much a trader’s eye view of the moment when the first of the waste matter started to move seriously towards the fan, around 2008. And, remarkable to relate, it actually shows “capitalism” (the quotes being because we all here know how government-intervened-in all these sorts of market have been) in a by no means wholly bad light. I am not a bit surprised now to have learned, the morning after, that this movie was written and directed by an ex-trader, a certain J. C. Chandor.
Plot approaching. Final warning. → Continue reading: What capitalism does when the music stops
Whatever the tax rate, there will be some businesses that will fail, but that would survive if the tax rate was slightly lower. Football clubs are no exception. Rangers has gone into administration because it can not pay its tax bill.
Mr Clark said: “HMRC have been working closely with the club in recent months to achieve a solution to the club’s difficulties. However, this has not been possible due to ongoing losses and increased tax liabilities that cannot be sustained.”
On the radio I heard all this explained, and the member of the public interviewed for opinion blamed it on the high wages of the footballers. Sometimes people can not see what is right in front of their faces. I imagine this will be blamed on everything but excessive taxation. In any case, Tim Worstall explains that footballers’ wages are high because clubs can charge high admissions prices, not the other way around.
What is the difference between a landed family’s trust fund and a dole recipient’s benefits? I’ll tell you:
One of them is an income derived from a piece of territorial property, assigned by accident of birth, originally acquired by forcefully expropriating the previous owners but now generally regarded as legitimate and which is only paid by people who choose to occupy the estate in question instead of living somewhere else…
…and the other one is a landed family’s trust fund.
– Typographically challenged commenter ‘fjfjfj’
Let me see
An officer has been scheduled to visit to find out if TV is being watched or recorded illegally. The Officer may visit your property at any day of the week, morning or evening
And he may stand outside and knock at your door like any other member of the public. You are perfectly free to then let him in, not let him in, stand there and stare at him oddly for a time whilst making clucking noises, or suggest he undertake in biologically impossible sexual acts. Entirely your call.
We can apply to court for a search warrant to gain access to your property
Yes, you can, just as you can jump off a cliff, flap your arms, and see if you can fly. The fact that (after I have lived at this address for two and a half years) you are still addressing me as “Legal Occupier” does tend to suggest to me that I should perhaps not quake in my boots too much. Magistrates are not, as I understand it, generally terribly impressed when people apply for warrants to enter the premises of unknown people who are not known to be breaking the law in any way. Or even known people who are not known to be breaking the law in any way, for that matter. Oddly enough, I get letters from Sky from time to time suggesting that I might want to pay them money in return for television services, also. Since soon after I arrived here, they have been addressed to “Dr Michael Jennings”, suggesting that it is not actually very hard to find out who lives here. Although they have not actually been any more successful in getting me to pay them money then the TV licensing people have, they have at least been polite, and haven’t threatened me with anything. It is almost as if they think I have a choice.
An officer can take your statement under caution, in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 or Scottish Criminal Law
Anything you say to the Officer may be used as evidence in court
Best not to say anything then, hey?
You risk a fine of up to £1,000, in addition to legal costs
This is why, if they do actually obtain evidence that you are watching television without a licence, possibly because your naive flatmate or one of your children let the nice man into your flat when you were not there, you should offer to pay for a television licence at once. The TV licence men get paid a commission when you do this, so it is usually not too much trouble to get them to agree to it. (Agreeing to pay it retrospectively is much better than being taken to court. This is another reason why the only people actually taken to court tend to be penniless single mothers). However, it’s generally better to teach your flatmates and children to never let vampires, politicians, people from television licensing, or census enumerators into your home under any circumstances, and make it understood that they will be punished harshly if they do.
A reminder of the law
Oooh. Bold writing.
It is illegal to watch or record television programmes as they are being shown on TV without a TV Licence – no matter what device you do.
Let us know if you don’t need one at www.tvlicensing.co.uk/noTV or by calling 0300 7906097. We
may visit to confirm this.
And if they do, you are once again free to let them in, not let them in, stand there and stare oddly for a time while making clucking noises, or suggest they undertake in biologically impossible sexual acts. Once again, I wish them well in obtaining a warrant to enter your premises to verify that you are not doing anything illegal, given that there is no evidence that you are other than your claim that you aren’t. TV licensing are actually well known for paying no attention to people who tell them they do not have a TV – everyone does, after all. Let’s see if we can instead persuade your children to let us into your home so that we can prove that you are lying.
Slightly more seriously, the rhythm of these missives from TV licensing can be predicted. They start out polite, and they gradually gain more red highlighting, and become steadily more threatening. Then, after a cycle of about six, they go back to polite, and work their way up again. Only once did a man from TV licensing actually make a visit. On this occasion, there was a knock on the door of my flat at about 9am one morning. A stern voice asked “Can I have a word with you?” in a semi-threatening tone. I asked who he was. He answered “TV licensing”. I explained politely that while the stairway and corridors of the block of flats in which I live are shared by the various tenants of the building, they are not a public place, and that he was therefore trespassing, and that if he wished to talk to me he should go downstairs, shut the door to the building behind him, ring my bell, and talk to me on the intercom. I don’t know how he had got in – perhaps he had rung the bell of one of the other tenants and claimed to be the postman. Or perhaps he had been let in by the naive flatmate or one of the small children of one of the other tenants.
In any event, I spoke no more and returned to my kitchen to finish preparing my breakfast. He spoke no more to me, either. Several minutes later, a piece of paper quite similar to the one scanned above came through the mail slot in the door of my flat, explaining that someone from television licensing had called but that I had been out, that if I was watching television without a licence I was BREAKING THE LAW, and that another visit would be scheduled soon.
That was about two years ago.
“Each example of information technology starts out with early-adoption versions that do not work very well and that are unaffordable except by the elite. Subsequently the technology works a bit better and becomes merely expensive. Then it works quite well and becomes inexpensive. Finally it works extremely well and is almost free. The cell phone, for example, is somewhere between the last two stages. Consider that a decade ago if a character in a movie took out a portable telephone, this was an indication that this person must be very wealthy, powerful, or both. Yet there are societies around the world in which the majority of the population were farming with their hands two decades ago and now have thriving information-based economies with widespread use of cell phones (for example, Asian societies, including rural areas of China).”
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, page 469.
I like this point about agriculture at the end. A few years ago, my father, a retired farmer, showed me a satellite photograph that had been taken of our family farm, and provided by his agronomist consultant, showing which parts of a field needed more fertiliser, had better soil conditions and drainage, and so on. In two generations, the Suffolk farm had gone from a process where it took the whole of late July to late September, with 20 people, to get in the harvest, to just two guys using a massive John Deere combine harvester, some big trucks to carry the grain, and a state-of-the-art grain store with drying, filtering and cleaning equipment. And we just take it for granted that this level of technological change has happened, and is possible. So we should perhaps not be so despondent about the future.
There are all kinds of useful links on the Web to such satellite links of farmland, as well as other categories for business and scientific use. Here is the ResMap site, for instance. The Economist has a short item on the agricultural uses of space technology.
“As someone known for writing defenses of chain stores and explaining Plano, Texas, to puzzled pundits, I agree that way too many smart people, particularly on the coasts, are quick to condemn middle-American culture without understanding why people value one or another aspect of it. But they were even worse in 1963.”
– Virginia Postrel, writing a review of Charles Murray’s latest book. In a nutshell, she skewers his central thesis that America is so much more fractured than in the past. That rather depends on what the chronological starting point is.
Murray is most famous, or depending on your point of view, infamous, for his role as co-author of The Bell Curve. More recently, I waded through his tome, Human Accomplishment, which uses various metrics to measure the fecundity of Western civilisation in particular. He’s certainly not afraid of the gods of political correctness.
I was struck by this graphic, produced by the money printers at the Bank of England and reproduced in the Telegraph:
We are told (not least by the Bank of England) that deflation is the greatest threat to our well-being. But look at the Nineteenth Century. There’s no end of deflation there. And yet in this time they managed to build almost all of Britain’s railways (including three routes from London to Manchester), the Great Eastern, Crystal Palace, most of London, bring clean water and sewerage to the cities, introduce street lighting, make huge advances in science and medicine. and establish just about all the industries (coal, shipbuilding, steel etc) whose loss is so lamented, especially by people on the left.
OK, so I suspect a lot of those industries would have closed anyway but I fail to see how anyone could look at this graph and honestly claim that deflation was something to fear.
PS I now notice that the BoE does indeed talk about “Years of Deflation” between 1921 and 1931 and my understanding is that it was a pretty grim time. I would be interested to know if there’s a response to the implied claim that deflation is or was a bad thing.
From a Cricinfo piece by George Dobell, about the one day cricket international between Afghanistan and Pakistan, played in the United Arab Emirates yesterday:
A spokesman for the Taliban contacted the Afghanistan Cricket Board on the morning of the game to wish the team well and assure them they would be remembered in their prayers.
Pakistan won at a canter, but the Afghans did not disgrace themselves, in their first ODI against a top ranked, Full Member, test playing nation.
Afghan minister of finance Dr Omar Zakhilwal:
“The event appears to have united the entire country. … There is nothing that can touch cricket in popularity or as a force for good in Afghanistan. There is absolutely nothing else that mobilises our society in the same way. Not politics, political events or reconstruction.”
Cricket, says Dobell, is booming in Afghanistan:
Not only is the international team now full time, but there are league teams in 28 of the 34 provinces …
However, Dobell goes on to report that:
… the sport will be made compulsory as part of the school curriculum.
And you get the definite feeling that Dobell thinks that’s good. I am a rabid cricket fan, but I say that nothing puts many people off a sport more completely than being made to play it against their will. For sport, read: anything.
I remember school contemporaries who would have preferred being in the Taliban to playing bloody cricket.
“The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code – but their children believe it for entirely different reasons.”
“They believe it,” the Constable said, “because they have been indoctrinated to believe it.”
“Yes. Some of them never challenge it – they grow up to be smallminded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel – as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw.”
“Which path do you intend to take, Nell?” said the Constable, sounding very interested. “Conformity or rebellion?”
“Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded – they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.”
– Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age (his best book, in my opinion).
Someone who well deserves to be high up on the climate usual-suspects list is Bill McGuire, who is Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College, London. He’s giving a lecture at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, on 21 February. The blurb for this on the RI website reads as follows:
Tuesday 21 February 2012
7.00pm to 8.30pm – Good availability
Lecturers: Prof Bill McGuire
Twenty thousand years ago our planet was an icehouse. Temperatures were down six degrees; ice sheets kilometres thick buried much of Europe and North America and sea levels were 130m lower. The following 15 millennia saw an astonishing transformation as our planet metamorphosed into the temperate world upon which our civilisation has grown and thrived.
One of the most dynamic periods in Earth history saw rocketing temperatures melt the great ice sheets like butter on a hot summer’s day; feeding torrents of freshwater into ocean basins that rapidly filled to present levels. The removal of the enormous weight of ice at high latitudes caused the crust to bounce back triggering earthquakes in Europe and North America and provoking an unprecedented volcanic outburst in Iceland. A giant submarine landslide off the coast of Norway sent a tsunami crashing onto the Scottish coast while around the margins of the continents the massive load exerted on the crust by soaring sea levels encouraged a widespread seismic and volcanic rejoinder.
In many ways, this post-glacial world mirrors that projected to arise as a consequence of unmitigated climate change driven by human activities. Already there are signs that the effects of climbing global temperatures are causing the sleeping giant to stir once again. Could it be that we are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one?
In this talk, Bill McGuire argues that climate change is once more setting the scene for the giant to reawaken, and we can already see the signs.
Tickets: £10 standard, £7 concessions and £5 Members
Make a night of it! Come for a cocktail or something delicious, modern and British to eat in the bar. The bar and café at the Ri has the perfect atmosphere for a night out.
…Seeing this prompted me to send an email to Prof. McGuire:
Dear Professor McGuire
My eye was caught by the description of your forthcoming lecture at the RI on the 21st. It sounds fascinating: I hope I can get there.
But I think somebody at the RI has let you down. According to the blurb at http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayContent&id=00000005647:
>> Twenty thousand years ago our planet was an icehouse. Temperatures were down six degrees; ice sheets kilometres thick buried much of Europe and North America and sea levels were 130m lower. The following 15 millennia saw an astonishing transformation …
– and then:
>> In many ways, this post-glacial world mirrors that projected to arise as a consequence of unmitigated climate change driven by human activities. Already there are signs that the effects of climbing global temperatures are causing the sleeping giant to stir once again. Could it be that we are on track to bequeath to our children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a more geologically fractious one?
I assume some air-headed press officer at the RI thought it would be a good marketing ploy to bracket a serious scientific account of the effects of a sea rise of the order of 100 metres with the effects of the rise projected by the IPCC for the lifetimes of our grandchildren.
Makes those Daily Mail climate-change deniers look sober by comparison!
I know it might be hard for you to inject some sanity at this late stage, but can you do anything to get the RI Web page corrected?
Best,
Chris Cooper
______________________________
Chris Cooper
Science writer and editor
[… & full contact details]
______________________________
I suppose this could be classified as a troll, if person-to-person emails can be trolls. Certainly, it was meant to be provocative. And it was a tiny bit deceptive in that I was pretending to believe that BM wasn’t personally responsible for his own publicity, whereas I don’t doubt for a moment that he drafted it himself, judging by his past output (for example, “ ‘Tiny’ climate changes may trigger quakes“.)
But one man’s troll is another man’s well-aimed rapier thrust – and I had one, small, precisely defined target for my challenge: “bracketing a serious scientific account of the effects of a sea rise of the order of 100 metres with the effects of the rise projected by the IPCC for the lifetimes of our grandchildren.”
Anyway, Prof. McGuire didn’t rise to the bait, and didn’t reply. His self-publicizing climate-alarmist hype on the RI site is unchanged. I don’t know whether I can bear to be at the event.
‘“Quantitative Easing is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich,” he says, “It floods banks with money, which they use to pay themselves bonuses. The banks have money, and assets, so they can borrow easily. The poor guy, who is unemployed and can’t borrow, is not going to benefit from it.” The QE process pushes asset prices up, he says, which is great for those who own stocks, shares and expensive houses. “But the state is subsidising the rich. It is the top 1 per cent who benefit from Quantitative Easing, not the 99 per cent.”’
– Nassim Taleb, quoted on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog.
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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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