Come, muse, and sing of New Malden!

There's a funny Fry and Laurie sketch in which an ordinary suburban father reveals to his ordinary suburban son that the son is, in fact, the Chosen One who must defeat the evil Pewnack the Destroyer with the aid of the multi-bladed knife Berwhale the Avenger. The son, who had always secretly suspected something of the sort, is then persuaded to move to yonder town of Saffron Walden to wait until the fourth moon of Trollack rises above the Cylinder of Eyelass, and in the meantime to take a job in a canning factory. The sketch ends with the father reporting to the mother that their son seems to have swallowed the story - they thought he would never move out.

There is an online contingent who reminds me of the son. Although they are, in reality, the children of ordinary suburban parents, they feel a great and apocalyptic moral crusade upon them: they are chomping at the bit to pick up Berwhale the Avenger and destroy the evil Pewnack (otherwise known as the Selfish Generation of Boomers) which, they feel, is all that stands between them and a promised land of affordable family homes in south east England. 

What we need to do, perhaps using a trick similar to that played by Stephen Fry, is persuade them to move, not to Saffron Walden, but to its even more prosaic rhyme-mate, New Malden.

Let me explain. An MP made an ill-judged attempt at populism the other day, contrasting "your £500,000 house with a drive in Surrey" with Northern terraces. The internet duly resounded to plaintive cries of "where are these £500,000 Surrey houses with driveways?" Well, I thought I'd have a look for them. It turns out that there are in fact quite a few houses with driveways in Surrey which can had for half a mill. Click that link and you'll see that pretty much all of these houses have driveways. Now I'm sure that the picture in everyone's mind prompted by the MP's tweet is more along the lines of an old Georgian rectory in the gin and jaguar belt of Surrey with an in and out driveway rather than a modest 30s semi with off road parking, but the point still stands: these are decent family homes at which you can charge an electric car.

But now let me tell you a bit about New Malden. It's a London suburb: Surrey in address but London zone 4 in public transport terms. It has good trains to Waterloo (about 8 trains an hour at peak times, almost all of them with a 26 minute journey time). There are lots of primary schools and even some grammar schools in the borough (which bears the distinguished title of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames). It's internationally famous for its Korean community, so it's got some diversity and good restaurants too. Wikipedia says that Stormzy lives there, although I feel that may be stretching a point. 

Now, leaving Stormzy aside, I haven't got any great claims to fame for New Malden. If he were real, I doubt Pewnack the Destroyer would be seen dead there. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that Reggie Perrin was eleven minutes late because his train was stuck there once. But it looks like a good place to settle down and bring up children. Parks, playgrounds, a High Street and so on, and all within easy commuting distance of London. That, as I understand the online Chosen Ones, is the promised land.

And here's the thing: you can buy a three bedroom house with a driveway there for half a million pounds. Honestly: the dream of a house with a garage and a garden in London with a decent commute is alive and well, and it lives in New Malden. Here's one that sold earlier this year for £460,000. It's not the world's most beautiful house. But if you wanted 1200 square feet of indoor space and a 55ft garden in zone 4 then it could have been your house, for £460,000. And there are a few more of similar ilk on the market. Again, these are not houses to make you swoon - they are not even the fashionable Victorian terraces I talked about before - but they are homes which will accommodate a young and growing small family. They are probably not unlike the drab homes that the Boomers bought once upon a time and which now make the Chosen Ones green with envy.

So pack up your multi-bladed knives and lie low in New Malden, biding your time until the day of the Great Reckoning. In the meantime, you might end up making a quiet suburb a little more lively - and a hefty profit on your deposit too.

High status beliefs: is Brexit the Britten of politics?

The other day, I tentatively outlined a quantity theory of high status beliefs. Having re-read that sentence, I appreciate that it is rather niche. I'll put the rest below the break.

On Wren-Lewis on cuts

Simon Wren-Lewis has written an interesting blog post essentially in support of the proposition that, as he puts it, “It makes no sense to keep shrinking the state when you don't change what the state does.”  I disagree and hope to show why.

Are the UK's cities poor because they are new?

I apologise for presenting a rather inchoate theory, but I am sure I am onto something. Here goes.

This graph, produced by the ever-interesting Tom Forth, has been doing the rounds. 

I don't know if you can see it properly but I hope you get the idea. London (the upper-most orange bar) is rich, but all of the UK's other cities are relatively poor by European standards: even the likes of Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Bilbao can be found in the mass of blue between London and Manchester (the second orange line). 

You could quibble about the numbers (does Poland do surprising well out of the PPP calculation here?) but I would suggest you don't bother: if you've been there you will know that Paris and London are richer than Valencia or Liverpool. (NB. Forth has taken Dublin out because the numbers are misleading and he later removed Oslo for being non-EU. Really don't worry too much about the details.)

Why should this be? Well, perhaps it's the lack of light rail systems or other 'investment' etc etc etc. I suspect that is the direction Forth would like to go in. But I'm inclined to think there's something more fundamental. 

Here's the list of cities from top to bottom in what I hope is a more legible format:

The point that immediately struck me is that most of the European cities are ones that were successful before the Industrial Revolution, while most of the British ones were not. 

Perhaps you're already persuaded of the point - but perhaps not and need proof. So let's start with France, our sweet enemy and the eternal comparator of England/the UK. The French cities in the list are: Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, Marseille, Bordeaux and, between Leeds and Birmingham, Lille. Here's Wikipedia on Early Modern France: "Paris was one of the most populated cities in Europe (estimated at 400,000 inhabitants in 1550; 650,000 at the end of the 18th century). Other major French cities include Lyon, Rouen, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Marseille." What about Lille and Nice? Well, they weren't French at the time! But they were well-established towns.

Now let's look at the biggest towns in England in the 17th century (so far as we can tell from the hearth tax of 1662):

As Wikipedia points out, "Most notable from a modern viewpoint is the fact that Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield do not make the top thirty, whereas within around 100 years they would become England's largest provincial cities". Indeed, Newcastle and London are the only cities on both the chart at the top of this page and this list of 12 cities, while the overlap in France is plainly much higher.

Here's some corroboration of my theory that British towns are 'newer' than French ones. It comes from a proper academic paper: 

I got that from here, courtesy of Tyler Cowen, who drily comments, "These days, the French model is looking somewhat better, as Toulouse has held its ground more readily than has Liverpool." I'll come back to that comment below, but for the moment let's just note that there is a striking contrast here.

So that's France. Now, let's take the cities in the list from Low Countries: Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam and The Hague. I'm sure you don't need to be told that Amsterdam and Brussels were well-established before the Industrial Revolution, but you might not know that Antwerp was of comparable size to them in the Early Modern period. The Hague became the permanent seat of the States of Holland in 1588, so it was a big deal then. (Note also that these are OECD standard definition 'cities', so not quite what you might expect - "London" includes Sevenoaks, for example, and "Leeds" includes Bradford: "The Hague" includes Delft, to give you some idea of the antiquity of the urban area we are talking about.) I grant you that Rotterdam is a late arrival, interestingly mostly after 1872 (it's more of a post-industrial revolution city), but I would suggest that we see a similar pattern to France: pretty much all the successful cities were successful before the Industrial Revolution.

Now I freely admit that I haven't gone down the whole list, but I don't think I need to: if you simply cast your eye over it you'll see cities as old as Athens and Rome. However, in my ignorance I had a quick look at a few that concerned me.

 

- Milan? Maybe not as old as the likes of Florence or Naples? Ah but did you know that the "The Great Plague of Milan in 1629–31 ... claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 people out of a population of 130,000"? A population of 130,000 in the 1600s! That's twice the size of Norwich at the time. 

- Turin? "From 1563, it was the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, then of the Kingdom of Sardinia ruled by the House of Savoy, and the first capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1865". That's from Wikipedia, which tells me that it had about 90,000 inhabitants in pre-modern times, i.e. 1.5 Norwiches.

- Gothenburg? That's a city which, it turns out, "was founded in 1621 and became the big town in the west. The underlying strategy of the Swedish government was to create a seaport in the western part of the country that could function as an important link between Swedish trade and a global market ... 17th century Gothenburg was an internationally oriented seaport with a lot of foreign people living in the town". (In fact, both Gothenburg and Rotterdam made money from pre-industrial far eastern trade.) Note that Birmingham wasn't even one of the 30 biggest towns in England while Gothenburg was already a cosmopolitan entrepot.

- Stuttgart? Sure, it's a big car-making place now, but it was a big deal before the Thirty Years War, with Dukes of Württemberg, Hapsburgs and so on involved in complicated ways.

Katowice is an industrial revolution town, as is Mannheim-Ludwigshafen (BASF's headquarters), so it's not just the UK that has large new cities. But the UK is surely unusual in the extent to which its largest cities are the product of the Industrial Revolution.

So what do we make of all that? The Brit-booster approach - and, frankly, not a silly one - is to say that the UK has done the amazing job of creating, essentially overnight in European historical terms, metropolises with wealth to rival ancient and historic cities such as Lisbon, Dresden, Bordeaux, Athens and Seville - while sparing its own equivalent cities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, York, Norwich - from the depradations of industrialisation. Good job UK!

There's something to that. Many places that left industrialisation to the new boys are going strong. Here are the 20 least affordable (which I am taking as a proxy for most sought-after) towns in the UK according to the Halifax in 2021.

1. Winchester
2. Oxford
=3. Truro
=3. Bath
5. Chichester
6. Cambridge
7. Brighton and Hove
8. London
=9. St Albans
=9. Chelmsford
11. Salisbury
12. Exeter
13. Leicester
14. Norwich
15. Bristol
=16. Southampton
=16. Canterbury
=16. Gloucester
19. Worcester
20. Cardiff

We see a number of towns famous for Georgian (Brighton, Bath) or older architecture, and several Roman towns on the list (all those "chesters", plus St Albans). There's also a fair degree of overlap with the list of biggest towns in 1662: Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Norwich, Bristol, Salisbury, Exeter, Worcester. By contrast, Bradford, Newcastle, Glasgow and Liverpool all feature in the equivalent "most affordable" list.

To be absolutely blunt, we all know that nice old towns that escaped the Industrial Revolution are lovely places to visit or live. Durham and Stamford are small, pretty and expensive: this house is very lovely, but it's a 6 bedroom terraced house in Stamford, not a mansion in London, and yet it went for £2.8m (actual sale price). This 5 bedroom house in Durham has an asking price of £2.75m. These are big sums (and a bit different from nearby Newcastle or Peterborough).

So far, I've been talking about England in 1662 and comparing it with the UK today. That's not right: what about Scotland? Well, the picture is similar. The Scottish city in the list is Glasgow, another Industrial Revolution boom town, while Edinburgh, the charming combination of old Old Town and Georgian New Town and the biggest town in Scotland in the 1755 census, doesn't make the cut. A quick check on Rightmove says that Edinburgh is at least 50% more expensive than Glasgow. I accept that Glasgow was a well-established town before the Industrial Revolution, like Newcastle in that respect, but I don't think I'm stretching a point in saying that its post-Industrial Revolution history predominates.

Let's assume I'm right. On the Continent, for whatever reason, they have a number of big cities which are the equivalent of what would have happened if York or Norwich had taken Manchester's place in our industrial history, while our cities are Milton Keyneses or Dubais, shiny newbuilds or johnny-come-latelys. So what?

Let's go back to Forth's concern and Cowen's comment. The UK is richer than, say, Poland. So surely it's a bit odd that the UK's big cities are no richer than Poland's? Why should this be? Is there any reason to think that the fact that the UK's cities are "new", while the rest of Europe's are "old" is relevant?

This is a little speculative but I can think of two reasons why it might be relevant.

(1) The UK's cities, except London and Newcastle, are boom towns created for a boom that busted. They are like mining villages after the mine has closed. Why are they there at all? We know why towns that were big before the Industrial Revolution exist: something to do with ports, rivers, (Roman) roads, prevailing winds and all the rest of it. They had a raison d'être before industrialisation and it's not surprising that they still have one. But the UK's new cities? Aren't they just European Detroits? Big congolomerations of built stuff in the wrong place? The big German industrial cities look terribly rich and successful now, but assuming Germany lives to see a post-industrial future, won't the likes of Mannheim-Ludwigshafen have to endure Detroitification as well?

(2) Or try this idea instead. Let's look at where people want to live in a post-industrial age. The capital city of any country always has a pull and it's not surprising that we see many capitals in the list above (e.g. Berlin, which was transformed by the Industrial Revolution). But apart from that people will, surely, tend to choose nice places to live - and a city with a pre-Industrial Revolution history is, other things being equal, just, well, nicer. I am a big fan of Victorian architecture! I've got nothing against the likes of Leeds. But Oxford has some pretty good Victorian architecture - plus some rather older examples too. Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, but I'm surely getting at something. A European city - here or abroad - that consists of a mediaeval or early modern core, surrounded by 19th or 20th century developments, has the edge on one that only has a 19th century core. People go on holiday to Vienna, Amsterdam, Munich, Prague or Barcelona - they will get on a plane and spend hundreds of pounds just to visit one such city. The second cities of the UK simply don't have that appeal. There's a cheese called "Cathedral City" but there's no cheese called "Industrial Conglomeration".

All in all, I strongly suspect that pouring investment into the Industrial Revolution towns of the UK is not going to make the same returns as similar investments in, say, Amsterdam or Munich. Wealthy, successful middle-class people can make money in Amsterdam and Munich, and they want to live there. Their equivalents in the UK either struggle to make big money in cities built around industries that don't exist, or perhaps, if they can make big money, they prefer to live in Stamford or Durham, the Cotswolds or Rye, Royal Leamington Spa or Royal Tunbridge Wells, or ... 

Perhaps that means that there is a fantastic opportunity for the UK? Surely we could just take the likes of Norwich, York, Oxford, Cambridge, Ludlow, Chester, Canterbury etc and turn these fantastically appealing towns into the cores of much larger but nonetheless still appealing cities with Turin/Antwerp/Prague levels of wealth and income? All we need to do is build them out in the same way that Turin etc have been built out. 

Possibly. But that wouldn't be easy. Take York, for example, a town so rich and lovely that, according to The Economist, it seeks to avoid any new developments at all. And who could blame it? It's been a long time since anyone could be confident that major developments on the edge of a cathedral city would result in a more attractive or pleasant town at the end of the process. 

But what's the alternative? As ever with these things, it's a bit of a mix and match. The UK has moved its centres of (non-London) activity around before, from the Suffolk wool towns to northern industrial cities, for example, and no doubt it can do so again. There are geographical constraints on some of the smaller cities that people want to live in (Bristol and Brighton spring to mind), but towns that already have a dense Georgian street pattern can probably grow in numbers, at least to some extent, without growing in physical footprint. Other towns may find developers more sympathetic to their needs than those York has seen recently, and they will be able to grow outwards: Cambridge might be an example. Some big Industrial Revolution cities will find new life in the post-industrial age: Manchester may become a media-and-university powerhouse, for example, and it seems to do well in IT services too. 

But perhaps we also need to appreciate that some cities are just in the wrong place. There's a danger that 'investing' in some towns simply amounts to bribing their inhabitants to stay away from the places where they could be more usefully or happily employed. Are we subsidising the maintenance of industrial revolution heritage theme parks at the expense of a post-industrial future based in places that people really want to live?

And there are positives to people moving on too. In the 14th century, King's Lynn was England's most important port. It's not now. That has left King's Lynn with some lovely things - Hanseatic architecture, the largest chapel of ease in the country - that make it a nicer place than a purely modern town of an equivalent size. Maybe the glories of Bradford Town Hall will one day grace a lovely little village that people who live and work in the thriving hubbub of Hebden Bridge Spaceport visit for a quiet weekend? Is that not at least as enticing a vision as the idea of pouring taxpayers' money into light rail schemes?

Ours is a High and Lonely Destiny: overcoming disingenuous cant from high priest of Effective Altruism

As I have said before, I have a great deal of respect for the ideals of Effective Altruism (EA). But this Twitter thread about EA from Will MacAskill is weak and pathetic.

MacAskill is "known for being a leader, perhaps the intellectual leader, of the effective altruism movement", according to Tyler Cowen. He recently published a book called What We Owe the Future, which you may have seen reviewed or perhaps even read. He's kind of a big deal.

His thread was prompted by the collapse of FTX, the something-to-do-with-crypto-currency set of companies run by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). SBF (reportedly) was a billionaire and (definitely) was a big supporter of EA. FTX's collapse was sudden and there are murky aspects to it: since I couldn't tell you what FTX was meant to do if it was running well, I can't tell you whether SBF was running it badly; no doubt all will become clear in due course.

Anyway, MacAskill appears to consider the possibility that SBF's many generous donations to EA causes were funded by fraud. MacAskill mounts the highest horse available to the EA community and expresses outrage at the very idea of such a thing. He says that he wants to make it "utterly clear" (normal clarity being insufficient) that "if those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community" because "clear-thinking EA should strongly oppose “ends justify the means” reasoning". In a development that surprised me (and I suspect many others), MacAskill tells us that "the EA community has emphasised the importance of ... the respect of common-sense moral constraints", indeed that "we do not see ourselves as above common-sense ethical norms". 

Now it's my turn to be utterly clear: this is disingenuous nonsense. It's cant. Why do I say that? Because the whole idea of EA is to step above common-sense ethical norms.

The starting point for EA is the insight, to adapt Peter Singer's example, that it should not matter whether the child I help, at minimal cost to myself, is the child physically in front of me, drowning in a small pond, who needs me to wade in and ruin a pair of shoes, or the victim of famine on the other side of the world who needs me to donate money equivalent to the cost of a pair of shoes. A dying child is a dying child.

But of course this sort of distinction does matter to common sense morality: one has some kind of responsibility to the people one might see drowning while out on a stroll in the countryside that one does not have to the nameless multitudes overseas. The man who passed by on the other side and left a child to drown would be hated and ostracised by his common-sensical peers, while those of us who spend our money on shoes rather than charitable donations are still considered decent citizens in good standing. That's just how common sense morality works.

The world of EA is full of attempts to cast off the shackles of common sense morality. Take this article (funded by some emanation of FTX, I now see), which links to a piece explaining that it's a good idea for doctors to kill healthy patients to use their organs on others, or this piece, arguing that we should "herbivorize" predators to avoid wild animal suffering. Maybe MacAskill himself is arguing, properly understood, that the comfortably-off are morally obliged to have children? All a little at odds, shall we say, with common sense morality.

Perhaps the most ambitious EA or EA-adjacent thought programmes at the moment are the 'longtermist' ones, i.e., the ones that look ahead to humanity's potential future as a trillion+ numbered species inhabiting alien realms across the observable universe. Common sense morality probably tells us that we shouldn't spend much time worrying about these unborn trillions when there are plenty of problems in the here and now. 

So much the worse for common sense morality, surely? That's what the EA-er should say. But MacAskill doesn't. Instead he weasels his way around the issue with some quotations from his book: he tells us that "naive calculations" that the good will outweigh the harm are "almost never correct", without talking about more sophisticated calculations that are correct; that violating rights is "almost never" the best way to bring about good results (almost?); and that the ends "do not always" justify the means (not always - but sometimes? 5% of the time? 49%?). That kind of hedging might be right, but it doesn't support the absolute prohibitions declaimed in high dudgeon in MacAskill's twitter thread. 

Stop being pathetic, say I. Have the courage of your convictions, MacAskill! Sometimes your moral calculations lead you to endorse actions that common sense regards as anywhere on a spectrum from stupid to evil. Own it! Proclaim it out loud!

There are plenty of decent arguments MacAskill could use. Why should he be the person who says, "well, I understand the arguments for the abolition of slavery but it will almost never be right to disregard property rights?" Disregard away! Can't he say: "if we stuck to common sense morality then a woman's place would still be in the home?" Or: "don't let petty bourgeois common sense morality stop you from considering the big picture." If we don't come to believe that we are wrong about some things that now seem to be common sense then we are not making moral progress.

Let's return to our well-intentioned entrepeneur setting out to save the world. Would it be wrong for him to steal $10 from the petty cash if he knew that that money would save a billion people from devastation and suffering? Of course not! What EA could object? But now we're just haggling over the amounts. If you're consistent about these matters then you have to be open to the possibility that someone can abscond with some crypto currency (whatever that is) and use it to do good - and that he would be justified in doing so. (Since I started to write this, Tyler Cowen and his dark alter ego Tyrone have made similar points.)

I said above that the EA-er "should" say "so much the worse for common sense morality". What kind of a "should" is that? From my point of view - a point of view not terribly far from common sense morality - it's a moral "should": people should be honest. But if you are a utilitarian then honesty is not an absolute value and you can, for example, happily embrace the Noble Lie. The man who says "honesty is the best policy" is not an honest man - a better policy may present itself, and the use of weasel words (e.g., "almost never") designed to ensure popular acceptance may well be such a policy.

Let me instead give MacAskill a prudential reason to embrace honesty here: he might convert people to his cause.

In The Magician's Nephew, my favourite of the Narnia books, two characters tell the eponymous nephew, Digory, that they are not bound by the constraints of common sense morality because "ours is a high and lonely destiny". First, there is Digory's Uncle Andrew:

Then there is Queen Jadis, who at this point has just told Digory how she killed the entire population of her world, save only herself:

Let's return to EA. What could be more fine or noble than to survey the whole world of creation, present and future - the dumb beasts subject to the depradations of predators; the sick, weak and defenceless poor of the wretched corners of the Earth; the uncountable trillions still to come, even unto the farthest stars and most distant galaxies - and then to consider, with that immense burden on one's shoulders and nothing but an Excel workbook before one's eyes, how the resources of mankind, real and crypto alike, should best be allocated among those fathomless chasms of need? Surely there is no higher or more lonely destiny? For the common people - little boys, servants and women - words like "fraud" and "lies" sound very big and scary, but in the immensity of the moral universe they may surely be no more than little bumps in a path that slopes to the highest and most sunlit of uplands.

Or perhaps you prefer William Roper's approach?

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

That's the spirit - don't let the devil hide behind mere man-made "laws" and "rights"!

Uncle Andrew is a weak and silly man, and yet he almost persuades Digory. Jadis is neither weak nor silly: she is magnificent, splendid and terrible, strong in mind and body. If Digory had not been innoculated to the message by having first received it from Uncle Andrew - or perhaps if he were more than merely a little boy - then surely he would have succumbed to the grandeur, breadth and daring of Queen Jadis' ideals. 

I don't think MacAskill is seven feet tall nor, for all that his features have a certain boyish charm, would I call him dazzlingly beautiful. But these are minor matters. Once the right messenger is found, I feel sure that the world will come to see the superiority of the High and Lonely Destiny that MacAskill and the EA community urge upon us. 

Rare photo of Emperor Hirohito signing the Japanese unconditional surrender

I am indebted to Fergus Butler-Gallie for this photograph, which he captions as "the time the leader of WWII Japan and sometime God-Emperor, Hirohito, was loomed over threateningly by Mickey Mouse on a visit to Disneyland". My title is of course completely untrue.

Or is it? Surely there is something of the humiliation of defeat on display here? 

It is not the done thing nowadays, at least not outside China, Korea or Singapore, to dwell on the behaviour of the Japanese during the Second World War; if we were to do so then perhaps we would feel that the humiliation of defeat was only right and fitting. On the other hand, I would not be surprised if there were young Japanese men who have copies of this photograph hanging on their walls, next to photographs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and who daily swear to avenge the indignities visited on their country by the land of Mickey Mouse.

Political betting - thinking aloud

As we all know, I've had some decent wins on political bets and also - see the same link - some very good advice for Liz Truss. I'm sorry to say that Truss has ignored my advice, with consequences that we see on the news every day at the moment. That's a bit of a blow for the country, but can I make up for it by giving some good advice for future betting success? Why, yes I can!

What we are looking for is good value in the market. The kinds of question we should ask ourselves are of the kind "have the bookies miscalculated in any area" or "are they underestimating the chances of certain low-chance outcomes (e.g. the elevation of the likes of Macron or Truss)?" 

I've looked at oddschecker for the latest odds across the various bookies. My full workings are below the break but if you just want the TLDR then my view is that the best value bets right now are (1) Badenoch for next PM, (2) Rayner for PM after the next General Election and (3) 2023 for the date of the next GE. You might also want to think about placing bets on a Lab-SNP coalition or a minority Conservative administration after the next GE.

But please remember that this is meant to be fun: none of these outcomes is at all likely! The point is to force oneself to think dispassionately about the likelihood of various different futures, not to win or lose meaningful amounts of money. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet if you want to win money.

Boosters, Doomsters and all that jazz

The Big Idea in politics currently galvanising our thinking classes is the idea that Britain needs a lot more growth. (Or, at least, that was the Big Idea prior to the mini-budget, but that's a story for another day.) So, for example, you might have seen Sam Bowman distinguishing the Boosters (who believe that the UK's dire economic condition can be remedied) from the Doomsters (who are resigned to decline). Or perhaps you saw Janan Ganesh in the FT telling us that "At each turn, Britain’s economy seems to run into a growth-blocking wall of past-worship". And you will surely have seen The Economist telling us, week after week, that Britain is all gummed up and needs to grow (see, for example, this edition). 

What should we think about all this?

I'll lay my cards on the table. As I said when I wrote about YIMBYs (who are generally the same people as Bowman's Boosters), I'm pretty receptive to the idea that it would be a good thing if Britain were to build more stuff. Equally, given the uphill struggle that YIMBY-Boosters face, I think we can overlook a certain amount of hyperbole in the way they put their case, both as to how bad the UK's situation is and how much better it could get. But - and of course there's a but - I'm far from convinced that the situation is as dire as the Boosters say it is. In fact, it seems to me that the so-called Boosters are the real Doomsters.

Amia Srinivasan's contribution to conservative thought

I ought to give you a couple of warnings about this post: it’s a long one, and it’s about political philosophy. If you’re still interested despite those warnings then please read on below the break.

Liz Truss: yet more betting success, and how she can succeed too

Here we go again: Liz Truss' victory means yet another political betting success for me. Indeed, at 14/1, the Truss Triumph equals what was hitherto my best ever political win, the Macron Massacre.

I'll level with you: Truss was not the only bet I placed last November. Macron was simply someone who seemed wrongly priced to me, but I had a different strategy for the PM. As I said back in January, I was pretty confident that Johnson was not going to be in power for much longer. That meant that his potential successor was probably already identifiable. So I picked the most likely candidates and spread my (modest) stake around such that I was bound to come out ahead if any of them won. The net effect of that as things turned out is that I have had a 7/4 winner (i.e., after taking into account the money I lost on the likes of Sunak and Starmer). But a win is a win.

By way of thanking Ms Truss for her contribution to my retirement fund, here are three (or four) suggested policies for her. They are not 14/1 longshots - although I would recommend that she have a few such policies in her portfolio - but more like 7/4 sensible bets, designed to fit in the Venn diagram intersection of 'popular', 'feasible' and 'beneficial'.

(1) Establish a National Strategic Infrastructure Commission, i.e. an expert-driven, technocratic quango tasked with identifying and procuring strategic civil infrastructure for the UK (or perhaps just England and Wales, assuming Sturgeon would be difficult). I am not in principle a fan of "taking the politics out it": the allocation of limited resources extracted from the public by compulsory taxation and the exercise of compulsory purchase powers - and those are two key aspects of building infrastructure - are inherently political activities, and it is only right that they be subject to democratic oversight. But needs must. For the foreseeable future - the next generation or so - there is no real ideological divide as to what kinds of infrastructure the UK needs, but there are various technocratic decisions that need to be made about the details of where, when and what, and the present combination of judicial review and opportunistic political objection to any particular proposal mean that these decisions don't get taken in a reasonable timeframe. We will need appropriate amounts of energy infrastructure, with an appropriate balance between the 'available but dirty' and the 'unreliable but clean'; we will need reservoirs, flood defences, train lines, roads, tunnels; perhaps we need more airports or seaports; covid surely shows us that we need more vaccine infrastructure; perhaps we need better asteroid defences too - who know? these are all questions for experts. Just as NICE successfully de-politicised NHS drug offerings and Bank of England independence de-politicised interest rate changes, my proposed commission would de-politicise infrastructure. Also, the Commission should be based in Birmingham as that way the London classes will ignore it and it can get on with doing its job.

(2) New colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge - but ones that focus on STEM. This hits a policy sweet spot. It's a good idea: we need to build up our science research and education strength, and how better than by expanding our premier universities? The size of Oxbridge has not really kept pace with the fact that they are now global universities, educating large numbers of foreign students: that's a good thing in itself, but it means that a number of British students who would be suited to and benefit from an Oxbridge education are being edged out at the margin, and the parents of people at the margins of Oxbridge acceptance are the kinds of pointy-elbowed middle class people who have been drifting away from the Conservative Party. STEM subjects tend to favour state school pupils, so there is a social mobility angle that can be played. Moreover, the Conservative Party has been gaining a bit of an anti-elitist, 'had enough of experts' reputation and this would be a good counterbalance. It's an opportunity for good politics too. What should we call the colleges? I'd go with "Elizabeth" (for the Queen) for the Oxford one and "Turing" for the Cambridge one, although some combination of "Nightingale", "Seacole" and "Lovelace" seems inevitable, but the papers will love to talk about it, and people will want to vote for College-y McCollegeface or whatever. And can Labour oppose it? On what basis? Too expensive? Maybe, but it's investing in the future. It'll be funded by government borrowing, of course, but in the form of an exciting new National Savings product: the Science Investment Bond, which will feature in all the best buy tables, and allow people with savings (i.e. pensioners) to gain a competitive rate of interest while investing in their grandchildren's future. Oh and if you want to make everyone's head explode then why not make Boris Johnson the first Warden of the Oxford college? He would actually be quite well-suited to an Oxford Head of House role.

(3) Both of the policy ideas above are long term ones. That's good in itself and also good for the Truss government, which needs to look big, sensible and long-term to distinguish itself from its predecessors: Brexit was not May's fault, and covid was not Johnson's fault, so they each had premierships defined by short-term priorities that were not their own. Truss has the chance to be different and better. But she will need short term policies too, and preferably distinctly Tory ones that Labour has to oppose and look bad for doing so. The economy is tricky and there are no easy answers: I'll leave Truss and Kwarteng to think about energy prices, but the most that can be hoped for is damage control. Immigration and culture war issues are always tempting, but those can be left for the moment. Rather than look opportunistic by raising them now, wait: at some point, someone on the Left is bound to accuse the government of being racist and/or use a racist epithet against the government (in fact the latter has already happened: google "coconut cabinet" for details), and that is only going to help the current Cabinet. That leaves crime. There is a lot of it about, noticeably low level but unpleasant crime in London, and I detect a widespread feeling of Something Must Be Done But Won't Be. The kind of anti-crime measures that people notice and like are ones that involve visible police presence on the streets. That's expensive. But how about trialling giving the power of arrest to Community Support Officers, in certain cases and with certain safeguards? Just a trial - surely it's worth seeing if it can reduce low-level anti-social behaviour? It's the sort of thing that will annoy the right people too. Another anti-crime topic is cameras: there are now lots of cameras around that can play a role in crime prevention and detection, not just CCTV but mobile phones, Ring doorbells and so on. A new Use of Cameras in the Prevention and Detection of Crime Bill that would 'put the anti-crime use of these devices on a sound and modern statutory basis', i.e. making it clear that people can use these things sensibly without infringing the GDPR or privacy laws or whatever, would be popular. It would also have a potential 'benefit of Brexit' angle that could be helpful and, again, it would annoy all the right kind of people from the point of view of a Conservative Party facing a Labour Party headed by a human rights lawyer.

So there you have it. Truss has helped me and I've done my bit to repay the favour. I'll wait to see if she follows my advice before placing my bets for the next General Election. 

Normal People by Sally Rooney - some thoughts

This post is about Sally Rooney's book Normal People and it's in two parts. I'll start with a no-spoiler review, but after the break I will be setting out some longer thoughts arising out the book and in doing so I will give, if not exactly spoilers (it's a will-they, won't-they get together? book), then at least so much of the flavour of the book as might ruin it for people who haven't yet read it. If you haven't read it and think you might want to then please stop at the break.

I came to Normal People with few preconceptions. I have not seen the TV adaptation, for example, and if I read the reviews when it came out then I have forgotten doing so. But I was aware of the book as a cultural event - the kind of thing that features in Books of the Year lists - and there is a vestigial impulse in me to keep abreast of modern literary fiction, a feeling that being oblivious to the latest 'serious' books is akin to being unaware of who the Prime Minister is. Why do I mention this? Because Rooney makes fun of people like me at one point in the book (when a character attends a literary reading) and I feel it only fair to mention that perhaps Rooney is indicating that her book is not aimed at me. But here goes anyway.

My copy of the book is festooned with the kind of excessive praise that appears only on literary fiction that has caught the zeitgeist: The Guardian describes it as a "future classic", for example, while The Times' reviewer apparently "finished the book determined to look at the world differently", whatever that means. It has won more prizes than you did at the end of primary school. Unsurprisingly, it is over-rated and over-hyped: there's no smoke without at least a hint of fire, true, but in my view the book is ultimately a minor one. 

The strengths of the book are twofold. First, its story-telling is well-paced and direct. It proceeds in chronological order from beginning to end, with chapters that have nice clear headings of the kind "Three Months Later (July 2012)", but it does so in an interesting way, with the characters (or a free indirect narrator) going back over episodes and looking at them a little differently from time to time. Nothing tricksy - no radical re-casting of past events of the kind that (for example) Sarah Walters might do - but just a nicely done adding of depth and texture by gently circling back.

The other strength is the descriptions of the characters' thoughts and their appreciation of their relationships with others. Rooney has put a lot of work into this and I thought it 'came off'. 

Any notable reasons why you might want to avoid it? Sadly, yes. 

- It's depressing. The main characters - and most of the minor characters - are depressed and depressing. The world it depicts is atomistic, anomic and sad.

- The dialogue is disappointing. I'll say more about that below.

- No speech marks. It might not bother you, but I didn't like it. I think it's a pointless affectation - like writing a menu in pence - and I don't see why it was done: it's always clear when someone is talking and when they're not if you read to the end of the sentence or paragraph, so why not use the conventional punctuation marks that help us get there more quickly?

Anything else to mention? Well, there is a lot of sex in it. Mostly rather depressing, I thought, although I suppose, as the characters in the book perhaps show us, tastes can vary. At any rate, Rooney was probably right to think that the book is not for me. 

Catching (and resisting) the viral virus

This is one of the most unexpectedly interesting things I have read recently. It's about some of the most successful people in the world of viral videos. Did you ever see that one about a woman spreading a whole load of pasta on a marble countertop? One of theirs.

A couple of thoughts struck me as I was reading the piece. The first is just how entrepreneurial Americans are. Making viral videos is not necessarily a sphere of human activity in which Americans should have great advantages: as the article says, "Viewers from Manhattan to Mumbai should be able to understand every second, when watching on a phone screen without sound." What we are talking about is the little videos that people watch on public transport or (so the article makes clear) while sitting on the loo: simple, often soundless and mostly very silly. The most lucrative videos are the ones that appeal to the most lucrative market (i.e. Americans) but, even so, with a bit of trial and error, surely anyone could find out what kind of silliness Americans like to watch? One might think that the world sees enough American popular culture to have a good guess. And the potential rewards, I should say, are phenomenal: "On a good day, one of these short clips could earn Rothfuss enough to buy a Tesla." That's worth a bit of trying things out. One can imagine a parallel universe in which, say, the French, with their history of mime, make the big bucks. Yet the work ethic and get-and-go of Americans seems to stand them in good stead here, as in so many areas of life.

As it happens, there was a non-American who made it big in this world: a British magician called Julius Dein. He is quoted in the article: “Let me give you my two cents as someone that went to number one in the world. I made a lot of money out of it. I would give every penny back, to reverse everything I did and to not have a single one of these views.” But that striking comment is not followed up. Why, exactly, does he say that? one wants to ask. Instead the article goes back to the main subject, a chap called Rick Lax, and we are with him in his Mercedes as he tells us that "it’s great to have money ... because that’s how society keeps score." Which, perhaps, gives us a hint as to why Dein might have come to a different view of the matter.

Anyway, there's a bit to think about and lots of fun details to enjoy - highly recommended. You can even read it on the loo if you want. And don't forget to share!

The Romance of the Past; or How to be a Happy Conservative

Not that long ago, the ever-entertaining Ben Sixsmith had a piece in The Critic about the various groups that gather under the umbrella of "traditionalists". 

While having some fun along the way (e.g., accurately skewering a certain subculture of online trads whose philosophy appears to consist in "a passionate enthusiasm for uploading photographs of slim young women in regional dresses and arguing about whether civilisation fell in 1789 or before"), he makes the point that if we want to revive a vanished ritual or custom then it is not enough merely to say that it is charming or traditional, rather we must show that it serves some purpose for us now.

This made me think about the various ways of life known to antiquity that have not fallen by the wayside of modernity but survive to this day. My professional life provides various examples. Not only am I a lawyer - a profession long-established by the time of the Romans - but it is not unusual for one of my cases to be readily explicable, both to laymen of today and those of classical times, by telling a story about a Greek merchant who wanted to buy a ship to carry cargoes of oil. Various technical details of the story would seem like science fiction to the ancient Greeks, but they would have no more difficulty in understanding what it is essentially all about than you would have in understanding the frustration of a Flargle-trader from the planet Xargan who wanted to buy an interstellar space cruiser but found out that the hyperdrive wouldn't reach the Gamma Quadrant (allegedly). Indeed, any ancient Greeks listening to my story would not be terribly surprised to hear that the ship in question was designed to fit through the current Suez Canal, which is merely the latest in a series of canals built in the region since the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt.

If you want another example of ways of life that happen today that would be perfectly comprehensible to those in Biblical times then I give you the entertaining recent case of Reeves v Drew, a dispute about a will featuring a number of colourful characters. You might want to read the whole thing, but to whet your appetite I will tell you that it includes passages such as "... [she] suffered an horrific injury during this period by being glassed in a pub by another woman in a random attack but the deceased responded to this by using the memorable but highly disturbing phrase “lay with dogs and you get fleas”" and "There were uncomfortable parts of Bill’s evidence. There were elements of racism and he, like most of the family, has engaged in drug use. He has not been immune from the family’s use of violence ... // I had a largely favourable impression of Bill ..." - you know your family is unusual when Bill is one of the good guys. 

You may well think that these ways of life - shipping goods, litigating, fighting in pubs - range from the merely mundane to the frankly unattractive. But, of course, almost anything that is in constant use today will be mundane and we will be well familiar with its unattractive aspects. The most glamorous film star, lived with day to day, will be a person who smells, moans and irritates. Those regional dresses are often dirty, cold or uncomfortable, or 'teamed with' (as the fashionistas perhaps say) a nice warm cardy and an anorak.

Here I think of John Masefield's poem "Cargoes". You know, the one that starts:

"Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine."

The epitome of the romance of the past! But the shipping lawyer in me has some questions. Have you ever wondered where Ophir is? I looked it up and it's probably east of Suez. So, to get there from Palestine by boat would have required a Red Sea port - or perhaps a Suez Canal of some kind. And if you think about it a little more, when the ship was making the voyage out from Palestine to pick up the cargo of ivory and so on, presumably the captain would not have wanted to make the voyage in ballast, so it would have been worth carrying a low value cargo out there, perhaps even firewood or cheap trays. And when the vessel unloaded the apes and peacocks at the discharge port, there must have been a tally clerk counting the live and dead ones off the boat, and perhaps litigation to follow if the numbers came out wrongly.

You will recall that the poem ends with the "dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack". Disgustingly quotidian, no doubt. But consider this. I was driving through a charming corner of the English countryside yesterday and crossed a railway line belonging to a heritage steam railway, lovingly run by a charity as a tourist attraction. Ah, the romance of steam trains! Surely there is no one who is immune to it. Yet isn't the British coaster with a smoke stack simply a magnificent steam train of the sea? Indeed, isn't it even more romantic, given the addition of the tang of sea-spray, the freedom from rigid train tracks and the danger of drowning to the glories of coal, fire and cast-iron solid British engineering that we love about steam trains?

This, I think, is one reason why conservatives seem to be perpetually disappointed. Either their society has successfully preserved some way of life, and so we all get to see it close-up, warts and all, and of course it's something awful like heavy industry or money-grubbing, or else that way of life has perished and we can see nothing but its glamour and romance, photographed in soft-focus by those who love it. 

There is an alternative. I once read a story set in the future in which aesthetes sigh over the elegance of power station cooling towers, created by a past culture whose glories they cannot reproduce. It will take a bit of effort, but I invite today's conservatives to take the chances that tomorrow's ones will envy us for: why not admire the graceful parabolic curves of cooling towers? Or wonder that the ancient and solemn tradition of consuming alcohol and fighting, one might almost say nobly, with nothing but one's body and the materials readily to hand still endures in these quiescent and risk-averse times? Or, at the very least, I invite you to rejoice that the classical custom of paying people money to argue in court, a strange and time-honoured custom, but one which serves a great deal of purpose (for me at least), is going strong when so many of the other rites and habits of antiquity are lost to us.

On Effective Altruism

Effective Altruism (EA) seems to be in an introspective mood at the moment. Various people are thinking about it at the meta level (as, I am sure members of the EA community would say). Here is my modest contribution to the zeitgeist.

Update on 2022 predictions

As you may or may not remember, on 11 January I posted some predictions for this year:

"(1) Macron will be re-elected President of France.

(2) Boris Johnson will cease to be Prime Minister.

(3) Article 16 of the Brexit Protocol will not be triggered.

(4) No new British political party, whether centrist, Corbynist or other, will get any real traction

(5) The cool new thing in European politics will be pro-natalist policies."

6 months down the line, those predictions are looking pretty decent.

Summer Hours: more on inanimate objects

Summer Hours (L'Heure d'été) is a 2008 film in the well-established genre of 'French film in which nothing happens except people talking, drinking wine and smoking'. It was made by the Musée d'Orsay; it stars Juliette Binoche; it was well-received (94% on Rotten Tomatoes, prizes galore from the English-language media): in short, it is very much that sort of thing. But, for those of you who like that sort of thing (and it seems that I do), this is very much the sort of thing that you will like. (And, no, I don't know why the title of the film became plural on being translated.)

I watched the film the other day. It seemed, at the time, to be a series of inconsequential and slightly oddly chosen episodes. But it lingered in my mind in a way that made me think it warranted a bit of thought. So I thought about it; and I now think it is quite a clever film about our relationships with objects, in particular valuable objects, and that there is good reason why the film shows us what it does. 

When I last wrote about our relationships with inanimate objects, I specifically disclaimed writing about works of art. This is by way of being a companion piece to that piece, as Summer Hours is mostly about works of art. 

Three warnings before I go further:

(1) It's fair to say that what follows is chock-full of spoilers about the film. But then I've already given you the main spoiler: nothing happens. 

(2) The intended audience for this piece is pretty niche: it's people who watched Summer Hours and quite liked it but wondered whether it is really about anything. If that's not you then feel free to read no further (or go and watch the film first).

(3) Like the film, I will muse rather than come to any particular conclusions. 

You have been warned!

What We Learn from the Conservative Case for Abortion

I saw someone on Twitter saying, "Given that most British conservatives, however defined, support the maintenance of an effective abortion on demand regime in this country, it ought to be easier to find someone who'll make the case for that. And, necessarily, against the bodies/cells/whatever being destroyed." But where, the writer went on to ask, do we see that case being made? Not just an anti-anti-abortion case, but a full-throated defence of abortion from a conservative perspective.

That struck me as an interesting observation. What, I wondered, would such a case look like? What could a conservative who accepts the (pretty obviously correct) biological premises of the pro-life case but who nonetheless endorses the continuing legality of the practice say without resorting to mere question-begging libertarianism or disguised left-wing slogans? Purely as an intellectual exercise, I set out to construct that argument - and I was interested in what I found. 

What follows is in two parts. First, I set out what the truly conservative reasons for being pro-choice are, and after that I set out what conservatives can learn from such an argument. TL;DR - being pro-choice is not dissimilar to being a brutal but not wholly unsympathetic US Marine Colonel. 

Money and Freedom

I’m not the first to spot that the world is a funny old place, nor that recent political developments have created strange bedfellows.

Here’s a new example, prompted by this thread about the fundamental importance of the “freedom to transact”, i.e. the freedom to use money. The point the thread makes is that the effective exercise of various freedoms, e.g. to express one’s views or practise one’s religion, will tend to require spending money. If people refuse to take your money – or if the government stops you from being able to use it – then your freedom is infringed. If your cards stop working and your bank account is frozen, whether that’s because a private company doesn’t like your politics or because a government diktat stops you, then you have less freedom. Seems plausible, right?

But if that is right then surely it follows that, in normal circumstances, people who have more money, and can therefore transact more, have more freedom, and there’s something a bit odd about that.

Let’s go back a few years. The standard right-wing position was to be deeply concerned about whether people in a society have freedom, by which they meant freedom properly so-called, i.e., the freedom to associate as they want, say what they want, make the most of their own lives etc etc. If that resulted in some people becoming rich and other people becoming poor then tough, said the right-wing people, so be it.

The left-wing position, by contrast, was to be more concerned about the distribution of resources in society. Left-wing people took the view that if remedying that distribution meant infringing on people’s freedom to make profits or accumulate wealth then, again, tough and so be it. And so the battle lines were drawn up.

The right-wing position in that debate was that money is nothing to do with freedom. Money was understood to be a good thing, but just one of the many assets with which you might try to persuade other free agents in a free society to do things that you wanted them to do. They can refuse your money, just as they can refuse any of your other attempts at persuasion (you could try using your charm or good looks or family connections or ...), and no question of force or lack of freedom would arise. More money means more options, just as being able to run faster means that there are more places you can get to within a given time period, but none of that is anything to do with coercion, none of that is to do with people with guns putting you in prison or the kind of stuff that affects freedom properly so-called, i.e. the stuff that really matters in politics.

Another battleground in the same war used the terminology of human rights. The Left tried to expand the scope of human rights beyond the old-fashioned ones to do with freedom from torture and arbitrary imprisonment, freedom of speech and so on to include newer economic, social and cultural rights. These, the UN tells us, “include the rights to adequate food, to adequate housing, to education, to health, to social security, to take part in cultural life, to water and sanitation, and to work.” The Right pushed back, saying that these rights are nothing to do with freedom, that they are stretching the concept of “human rights” beyond what it will bear: these kinds of “rights” are just demands for the redistribution of assets and nothing to do with the fundamental freedoms that human rights protect.

So that was the old debate: narrow freedom and traditional human rights on the one hand, versus redistribution and expanded “rights” on the other. Nice and clear.

One of the most interesting contributions to that debate came when the socialist philosopher GA Cohen once delivered a paper at All Souls arguing that lack of money really did mean lack of freedom properly so-called, freedom in the sense that the Right would have to accept. I’m not going to go into it now, but you'll get the idea if you think of banknotes as being like little State-endorsed vouchers that permit you to take potatoes from a shop, say, or ride on a train: if you don't have the little vouchers and you try to exercise your 'paper' freedom of movement to wander into the shop and out again with potatoes, or onto the inter-city train, then you will find yourself physically restrained and eventually jailed.  

You can also get some flavour of the idea from the thread that I linked to at the start. That thread was prompted, I think, by the Canadian truck protests, i.e. by a right-wing concern rather than a left-wing one, but the point holds good either way: if you don’t have money (or the ability to use your money) then your freedom to go about your life in the way you wish, including your freedom of movement/expression/religion etc, is severely impaired. Do you really have freedom of movement if you can't afford to get on the train, or if the petrol station won't take your money and refuses you petrol? We might even decide to park the debate about whether it is really ‘freedom’ that you don’t have if you have no (usable) money in your wallet, but we can at least agree that you lack something valuable to do with freedom, or something that gives value to freedom.  

Let’s return to everyday life, where money can be used and bank accounts are not frozen. Having the “freedom to transact” (or, if you prefer, having the wherewithal to make your paper freedoms valuable and usable) will inevitably entail having money. To be someone who values the “freedom to transact” as part of a narrow definition of freedom will, I think, mean being someone who is at least receptive to the idea that living a free life in a modern society requires a certain amount of money. It will mean being someone who is at least willing to entertain the notion of the redistribution of wealth or income, and therefore willing to entertain the entire freedom-infringing state paraphernalia that comes with such redistribution. 

That’s quite a shift in standard right-wing thought. But you’ve probably seen a lot of that kind of thing recently. You’ll have noticed that the thinking Right (and Right-adjacent thought) has become much less sympathetic to untrammelled capitalism over the last few years. I think it’s fair to say that these kinds of consideration, namely an awareness that the operation of private entities in a market economy can have a profound impact on the exercise or value of freedom, are part of the reason why.

But I wouldn’t want to leave this discussion without reminding you of the kinds of argument that caused the thinking Right to try to separate questions of how much money (or other assets) individuals should have from questions about what the State should be doing with its time and powers. To do that, I am going to take you to Scott Alexander’s recent post about “Justice creep”, i.e. the way that apparently everything is about justice nowadays: “Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice”, and so on.

Alexander followed up his post expressing some concerns with this rhetorical development with a compilation of comments he had received. Inspired by one comment in particular, Alexander says this:

“The argument for why poverty is a justice issue goes something like this:

- Some people are suffering terribly

- It’s not their fault, and they’ve done nothing to “deserve to suffer”

- Other people have much more than they need

- This has been brought about through the choices of individuals and governments. Maybe nobody specifically says “I choose for Jeff Bezos to be a billionaire and Somali orphans to starve to death.” But a lot of people keep giving more money to Jeff Bezos and not helping Somali orphans. And governments generally enforce (or at least refuse to intervene against) the economic system that makes this keep happening. And voters keep re-electing the politicians who allow this.

- Therefore, there is injustice.”

He then takes the case of incels. “Not necessarily actually-existing incels”, he hastens to add, “but some hypothetical best-case scenario for the philosophy. Let’s say a guy with a birth defect that makes him horribly deformed, nobody will date him, and this makes him depressed and suicidal.” Think about that disfigured man, replace “poverty” in the argument above with “being highly off-putting to the opposite sex” and, well, you can see how the argument goes.

And that takes us back to our starting point. You will recall that I said above that the traditional right-wing view was that money was just one of many assets that a person might have that can be used to get what he or she wants. As I said, instead of using money, “you could try using your charm or good looks or family connections or ...”: you may find one or more of those stand you in better stead in your search for a mate than money does. 

Or you could think about it this way. Here are some good things in life: a happy lifelong romantic relationship; a full panoply of old-fashioned freedoms/human rights to associate and speak freely; and enough food to live on. What is your rationale for saying that the State has to work hard to give you some of those good things but can leave to it chance as to whether you get others? 

You will recall famous quotations of the likes of “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread” and “In England, justice is open to all—like the Ritz Hotel”. These are the kinds of jibe which, as we saw above, the modern Right is perhaps now willing to concede might have some force: perhaps a certain freedom and wherewithal to contract are a necessary part of freedom. But what about this: “In England, marriage is open to all—like the Ritz Hotel”? Or “The law, in its majestic equality, permits socially able and losers alike to ...”. You get the picture.

I’m sure you agree that this is all crazy and that the distribution of sexual favours is nothing to do with politics. But of course, Amia Srinivasan and many others would disagree: they’d say that it’s a central concern of modern politics.

I think the fear of this kind of craziness was a motivation behind the Right’s desire to draw a firm line in the sand around a narrow definition of “freedom” and to object to the expansion of the sphere of “human rights”. Let’s go back to the UN’s list of expanded rights. This right to “take part in cultural life”: does that mean going to concerts? Going to concerts on dates? And if we can always “take part in cultural life” why we shouldn’t we also be entitled to “take part in non-cultural social life”, in much the same way that freedom to practise a religion means freedom to practise no religion?

All of which, I am afraid, is to take us back to a conclusion rather similar to that I reached in when discussing freedom of speech, namely that it is probably not possible to resolve these kinds of issue solely by reference to principle. Judgment and sound instincts are required instead. Sadly, however, many of the sound instincts that were built up over time, buttressed by perhaps insufficiently thought-through justifications based on liberalism, and deployed without much thought only a few years ago now seem outmoded. It does not seem like a positive development to me, but it is at least very interesting to watch.

Where have all the geniuses gone? Or: what's the real replication crisis?

This chap has asked the eminently sensible question: why have we basically stopped producing geniuses? 

Let's be clear: we are indeed well on the way to having stopped. Which is a bit odd, given quite how many people there are. The world now has billions of well-fed, disease-free, literate people living in sufficient comfort to turn their minds and hands to creating the Big New Thing and yet we're horribly underperforming the fewer and worse-off people of the past. 

Below is the key graph from the link above. It shows the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the 'effective' population (i.e., the total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields).

Perhaps you doubt the methodology. Perhaps you don't find this graph as inuitively convincing as I do. If so, here's another experiment you can try. Take a decade of the 19th century at random and spend just a few of minutes on Wikipedia checking what things of note were created or discovered in those 10 years. 

I took the 1860s and this is what I found:

- The decade saw the publication of Les Misérables, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Das Kapital.
- In art, Monet painted Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Renoir exhibited at the Paris Salon and was painted by Sisley, William Morris set up a wallpaper company, Rossetti was being upset after the death of his wife and Gilbert Scott was hard at work on the Midland Hotel (at St Pancras station) and the Foreign Office, among many other projects.
- In science, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite (patented 1867), James Clerk Maxwell published his equations that quantify the relationship between electricity and magnetism and show that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, Lister developed the antiseptic methods for use in surgery in 1867, introducing carbolic acid as an antiseptic, turning it into the first widely used surgical antiseptic in surgery, and publishing Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, Gregor Mendel formulated his laws of inheritance, the basis for genetics, in a two-part paper written in 1865 and published in 1866, and Dmitri Mendeleev developed the periodic table.
- In music, the decade saw the composition of Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Brahms' Requiem; Verdi's Requiem and Aida were both commissioned; Bruch wrote his violin concerto; Mussorgsky finished Night on Bald Mountain, Lizst wrote a coronation Mass, while Bruckner wrote three Masses and various motets including Locus Iste.

That's just a few minutes looking at Wikipedia. And it tells a story of creativity and advances across the full spectrum of intellectual and creative life that modern times simply cannot replicate. You can quibble all you want - you can doubt the significance of dynamite or the importance of Rossetti - but this is a hefty list: that science from just the years 1865-1867 was awesome - and that was at the same time as the world was creating two of its best ever requiems. Given that we are standing on the shoulders of such giants, we should be doing far, far more than we are. Or even just given the sheer number of human bodies, we should at least be producing 6 times as many ideas as the world of the 1860s: the population of the world in 1870 was in the region of 1.3bn, while its population now is getting close to 8bn. Forget about flying cars: where's my wallpaper with a better design than William Morris can do? Where are my 6 Bruch violin concertos?   

The author of the piece I linked to above, Erik Hoel, suggests that the reason for this catastrophe is the decline of what he calls aristocratic tutoring. (The word "aristocratic" is intended to refer to the kind of private tuition employed by the well-to-do for the general education of their children and to distinguish it from the kind of tutoring used by pushy parents nowadays to get children into competitive schools.)

That's just a very silly theory and we don't need to do more than look at the names in the list of achievements from the 1860s above to see that it's wrong: by and large, these people simply weren't aristocrats or people who had the education of aristocrats. And as for those people who did have the education of aristocrats, Grand Tour and all, what became of them? Not a lot, on the whole.

Sure, there's the odd Tolstoy on the list above, but he's very much the exception: at the same time, in Britain, Dickens (most definitely not an aristocrat raised by a succession of private tutors) was doing the heavy lifting in the big thick novels stakes. Or let's look at the education of George Eliot: "Thanks to her father's important role on the estate, she was allowed access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly aided her self-education and breadth of learning". One can see how that helped her. But we all have the entire internet nowadays! Plus free public libraries! Plus ... I don't need to go on. Imagine what Eliot could have done with the resources available to, say, Zadie Smith today.

Scott Alexander agrees with me (or perhaps vice versa) that aristocratic tutoring is a red herring. But even his analysis is not quite right. He points out that aristocratic tutoring is still very common in the world of musical and chess prodigies and suggest that that is a counter-example to Hoel's thesis. But that fact is not really a counter-example. The standard of performance in classical music and chess today is superb. Musical virtuosity is really quite common: it is not difficult, or at least so it seems to me, to find people alive today who can play the hardest pieces ever written; and it is not really disputed that the best chess players ever are alive right now. I couldn't tell you whether the number of virtuosi or chess grandmasters has tracked or exceeded the growth in the world's population, but it doesn't matter: the fact is that this kind of performance is relatively easily and predictably achieved. We actually have pretty good ways of generating Williams sisters or Polgar sisters, Yuja Wangs and Hilary Hahns. What we can't do is replicate Einsteins, Beethovens or Leonardos. 

It seems to me that there is something about that word "replicate" that is important. We can accurately replicate or reproduce so much nowadays. There is a famous anecdote about Mozart hearing Allegri's Miserere which I won't bother repeating or verifying, but the essence of the story lies in Mozart not being able to record the music. Today, of course, it's available to anyone for free at the touch of a button. Just try to imagine on how few occasions anyone would ever have heard a Beethoven symphony in their life before recording came along: now you are limited only by your amount of free time. Or try to imagine what it was like knowing the Mona Lisa or the Birth of Venus, the Parthenon or the Colosseum, only from a black and white line drawing or perhaps one visit in a lifetime: now we are all familiar with these works even if we never ever actually see them. We live in an age of abundant perfect replication.

And, it seems to me, replication is what we are really good at doing. We produce, again and again, people who perform the great works of the past. We can consistently train people to the highest standards of doing that. And not only in the field of artistic performance. What is the most recent potential successor to Das Kapital? It's Piketty's Capital! Even in political economy, the greatest effort is a self-conscious performance in the shadow of a greater ancestor.

It strikes me as entirely symptomatic of our age that the worry that nags away at so much science - perhaps not a worry so much as an almost existential concern - is what we call the replication crisis. We spend so much of our time living among reproductions of the glories of the past - polishing the glass on the great old paintings and re-staging operas in different clothes, painstakingly teaching millions of children to re-perform the advances of Leibniz and Newton in maths classes and those of Mendel in biology classes - that we throw up our hands in abject horror when we find that some of the latest findings in the cutting edge of science can't be replicated. 

I don't dispute that it's a Bad Thing that lots of science is wrong. But: 'twas ever thus, guys! If you want a replication crisis, try replicating Isaac Newton's cure for the plague: "the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison". The latest scientific thinking has always included wrong ideas - but when we had geniuses to push it forward nonetheless then that wasn't the greatest worry. Even now, when someone comes up with something as good - something as clearly breakthrough-y - as mRNA vaccines then we don't worry about the replication of results. 

Is it possible that trying to replicate findings that various small things make various small differences in diverting attention from finding the big things? I don't know. There are all sorts of reasons why coming up with new ideas is hard. Scott Alexander recites the boring but probably correct ones in his piece, and here are some other interesting ideas.  

But I do know this: failure to replicate what has gone before is not our biggest challenge today. Our problem is not too many mistakes made or too many blind alleys explored. Our problem is not that music is being produced that the public can't understand, or buildings are built that shock or astound us. If we had a mass of brave new theories in physics then we would be seeing an almost equally large mass of brilliant demolitions of their flaws and misconceptions, exposing today's phlogiston and ether - but we aren't. No, our real replication crisis is that the successes of our past are too glibly and slickly replicated, repackaged and reproduced for us to re-consume. 

When recordings and reproductions were almost as good as they are today, they were described as "high fidelity". Perhaps, at least in the intellectual and creative fields, it is time for some promiscuity.