Rory Sutherland on London

Sutherland is always worth reading. Always. I am sure he is wrong about this and yet I can't see how.

"two married London teachers in their early fifties owned a small house now worth just under £1 million. The husband was originally from East Anglia, and wanted to move back there. His London–born wife refused to leave.

The choice was clear. They could move to a very nice house in Suffolk and continue to teach while having £500,000 in the bank with which to retire early, buy ostrich-skin elbow patches, donate to the Guardian website every day — or whatever it is teachers do with half a million quid. Or they could continue as before.

I don’t know the ‘right’ answer. It’s not for me to judge how much the wife values living in London. But I do know a telling question you could ask them. Can you imagine the same decision happening in reverse?

Imagine a couple of teachers living in a nice house in Norwich who one day win £500,000 on the National Lottery. Is it likely that one of them would say, ‘Oh, thank God for that. We can move to a much shittier house in London and work until retirement age’?"

A short Dominic Cummings Reader, with digressions

Cummings' blog, to which I have linked on a few occasions, is of course the primary source for understanding him. It's not all Bismarck, physicists and abuse of MPs: he compares Jeremy Heywood to Michael Quinlan, he quotes from Citizen Kane, he tells you about Colonel Boyd and the Apollo Program. It's not to be missed.

What you need to understand about Cummings is that, unlike the vast majority of politicians, he is interested in how to make things happen in politics. Do you remember the Blair Government getting all worked up about they pulled levers in Westminster and nothing happened? Cummings' life's work is all about not repeating those mistakes. That is why he cares so little about media/political commentary - all about making oneself look good - and cares much more about data.

So, e.g., "The measures were devised by the prime minister’s senior aides who have spent the summer in their Downing Street bunker war-gaming how to respond to potential parliamentary manoeuvres by MPs determined to block no deal. The rebels, by contrast, spent the August holidays debating whether they would back Ken Clarke as a potential caretaker prime minister in an unlikely government of national unity." Well, quite. (To be fair, they also spent some of it wondering whether Caroline Lucas' fantasy all-female cabinet was sufficiently ethnically diverse.) At a very basic level, what are you trying to achieve and how can you achieve it - and do you have the will and discipline to do what it takes? Remember that it was Parliament, stuffed with Remainers, that voted itself 6 weeks off when it could have been plotting against Leave. Parliament failed, says Vernon Bogdanor. And largely because it did not properly plan.

Another example: I read that “Cummings is trying to goad Grieve and co - he says the more they appear babbling on TV, the stronger the support in focus groups for the prime minister to end the nightmare on October 31”. Absolutely. Dominic Grieve is the Remainer-Remoaner from central casting: "the son of Percy Grieve, QC (the MP for Solihull 1964–83), and of an Anglo-French mother, Evelyn Raymonde Louise Mijouain (d. 1991), maternal granddaughter of Sir George Roberts, 1st and last baronet. He was educated at the Lycée français Charles de Gaulle ..., Colet Court ... and Westminster School. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford .... He was the President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1977 ... Queen's Counsel in 2008". You can't make this stuff up: Evelyn Raymonde Louise Mijouain - descended from a baronet - went to more posh schools than most Leave voters can even name? He is Jacob Rees-Mogg without the charm! He gives TV interviews from his holiday house in France! Just as David Cameron was (rightly, from the point of view of Remain) keen to make Farage the face of Leave, making the face of Remain be a bunch of people like Grieve who get worked up about proroguing Parliament rather than anything of any concrete concern to real people is just what Leave needs.

(To digress for a moment: what was the right response to the famous bus with £350m a week and the NHS on it? As I understand it, the canonical response from Remain is (a) it's not £350m a week, it's really about £250m and (b) even if you were to eliminate the net payments to the EU budget then that money would not be available for the NHS because the overall reduction in the UK's GDP as a result of leaving the EU would result in a reduced tax-take in excess of the savings from the budget contributions. Did you even stay awake to the end of that?

How about this reaction instead:
- this £350m figure is rubbish and they know it
- but this campaign has shown divisions in the country that we in Remain want to deal with
- as we have been telling you, EU membership is really profitable for the country, particularly the City of London
- so, the day after the referendum, there will be an extra £500m a week for the NHS paid for by a new tax on the City - the EU Membership Dividend Tax!
- that money will disappear if we vote to Leave
- and that is real money, not the phantom money that Leave is promising you?

At least it would have been an offer to the voters. Leave had offers and Remain had nothing but threats.)

Anyway, back to Cummings. The people that Cummings reads are interesting, e.g. Slate Star Codex, perhaps the single most consistently interesting thing on the internet. This guy has also spotted that fact: worth a read for someone who understands where Cummings is coming from and yet disagrees with him on his own terms. (But yet he considers small blips in GDP growth to be equivalent to head-on car crashes ...)

Cummings = Varoufakis? There is something to this too.

Details

1. "... nobody believed me whenever I said I was broke. I usually kept this to myself during my time in college, but sometimes, in strange circumstances, it would come up.

Once, I was shamed in front of a crowd for not donating to a society—even when I had donated a different gift just a day ago—and I confided my feelings to a close friend. His response: “What, so you’re upper-middle-class?”

In another instance, I was privately discussing with a professor the pros and cons of a Food Stamp reform proposal. After some analysis, I commented on my own experience with the program. His response was complete shock. “You don’t really mean you were on welfare. You just mean you were supported by your parents, right?”
...
And this is how I ended up offering a sandwich to a man with hundreds of millions in a foreign bank account."

From this often interesting article, which is really about the deplorable lack of noblesse oblige among the modern meritocracy.

2. Also on the meritocracy: 

"At one elite northeastern elementary school, for example, a teacher posted a “problem of the day,” which students had to solve before going home, even though no time was set aside for working on it. The point of the exercise was to train fifth graders to snatch a few extra minutes of work time by multitasking or by sacrificing recess." 

"In 1962, when many elite lawyers earned roughly a third of what they do today, the American Bar Association could confidently declare, “There are … approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year” available to the normal lawyer. In 2000, by contrast, a major law firm pronounced with equal confidence that a quota of 2,400 billable hours, “if properly managed,” was “not unreasonable,” which is a euphemism for “necessary for having a hope of making partner.” Because not all the hours a lawyer works are billable, billing 2,400 hours could easily require working from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. six days a week, every week of the year, without vacation or sick days." From here.

3. If you do very well in the meritocracy then you get to go to this nameless conference.

4. The people who do very well are in the 1%. What a shame Britain is so horrible and unequal, not like Germany, those lovely Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. What's that you say?

Oh. (See here.)

4. But at least we British have a sense of humour. "Once, it would have been absurd to claim that humor was the most prominent British characteristic, as if we archly established the world’s biggest empire, wittily squashed revolutions, and humorously prevailed in two world wars. But ..." "It has often been suggested that the British desire for Brexit has been driven by imperial nostalgia. I think Brexiteers are more nostalgic for its decline — for that little period of history where the establishment was strong enough to maintain order but weak enough to seem essentially comic. A time when Britons were not powerful enough to be imperial but self-assured enough to make fun of others as well as themselves. Looking back to when the market was strong enough to offer people comfort but not pervasive enough to have a stranglehold on life." From here, apropos of John Cleese. Is it fair to say that both Leavers and Remainers are nostalgic for the time when John Cleese was funny?

5. Also on the subject of Britain, The Old Vicarage, Emneth is for sale. You know, where Rev W. Awdry lived. And yes, there are toy trains there.

The world we live in

1. MEPs. You might have missed the fact that the South East of England now has more MEPs called Alexandra Phillips (i.e., 2) than either Labour or Conservative MEPs. One Ms Phillips is a Green and one is in the Brexit Party. Brexit Party MEPs also include Christina Jordan, who "came to the UK from Malaysia in 1985. She completed her nurse training at Winchester General Hospital before working there as a staff nurse" and Henrik Overgaard Neilsen, "a Danish citizen who has lived in the UK for over 20 years with his British wife and two children. He has worked as an NHS dentist, becoming a senior trade union official representing 30,000 UK dentists". I'm not the first to note that the Brexit MEP candidates are a pretty diverse bunch, and here is Lance Forman noting that "Amongst our eight London candidates we have white and black, men and women. // We are three Jews; one person of dual Jewish and Bahá'í faiths; one Hindu; one half-Muslim of Pakistani descent; and two Christians – of African and Northern Irish origin." Before the euro elections, "Of the 17 MEPs of an ethnic minority background, eight [were] from the U.K.", and the Brexit Party became a further major contributor to ethnic diversity in the European Parliament after the elections.

2. On a related theme but on the other side of the world: "What Singaporeans need to understand better is that, under present circumstances, there may be no sweet spot we can occupy that will keep both the Chinese and the Americans simultaneously happy. There is no silver bullet, and it is a fool's errand to look for one. // Neither can we just lie low and hope for the best. You may not look for trouble but trouble may come looking for you. And trouble is all the more likely to seek you out if either side thinks you are, or can be, intimidated. // Our more complex domestic politics is a complication. I see still faint but distinct signs that some section of our population - how large, I do not know - either for transactional economic reasons, or unthinking ethnic sympathies, or sheer chauvinism, is beginning to look at the current US-China tensions through a racial lens. // As US-China competition heats up, this tendency may be accentuated. This is the greatest danger to Singapore in this new phase of US-China competition. It is still at a nascent stage and must be checked, if necessary by the prophylactic exercise of the coercive powers that are the legitimate monopoly of the state, before external and internal forces act and react with each other in a vicious spiral downwards."

3. On a different note: "Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore. ... We could have a Hurricane Katrina five times a week, every week – imagine how much attention that would receive – and it would not offset the number of annual lives saved by the decline in heart disease in the last 50 years."

4. "Hard left protester who screamed ‘Nazi scum’ at Donald Trump supporter as he was covered in milkshake is company boss selling private services to the NHS". That's my entry for most 2019ish headline of 2019 anyway.

5. Leavers in Bristol have found a safe space.

An extraordinary story

It's hard to precis this story, but let's just say it involves a Harvard law professor who meets a woman in a hardware store (in one of the many impossible-to-invent details, the fact that she is wearing a dress is a key part of her allure), becomes involved with her, in a way, and also caught up with her transgender friend - and then it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. It is a cracking story and so much of the delight resides in the details that I shouldn't tell you more.

There is a further irony. At a point when he was feeling more friendly towards his on-off girlfriend's transgender friend, the professor wrote this weirdly odd piece speaking ill of the late Justice Scalia - but accurately describing himself as a naive fool. 

The United Kingdom

Some glimpses of this country.

1. Miners, the aristocracy of the working class. (Also on the subject of the north-east, "Marat was, of course, best known for living in Newcastle, where he wrote an essay on gonorrhoea.")

2. The other aristocracy: an article by James Wood on his old school, Eton. This, I thought, was an unpleasant and meretricious article. Unpleasant in the grating lack of filial piety (which to some extent must reflect badly on the school, I suppose) and otherwise entirely meretricious. It reveals that some boys at Eton come from rich and well-connected families: David Cameron was one. Some of them have double or even triple-barreled surnames! Other boys are less well-off but talented in some other respect: these included Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng. Many of the people involved in the Brexit debate went to Eton (there are King's Scholars on both sides of the debate), as did some other prominent people in the fields of acting and the Church of England. It is possible to maintain friendships across the Brexit debate lines. Boris Johnson has not changed his appearance much since he was a teenager. If any of this surprises you then you have come to the wrong blog. Wood writes that he has tended to avoid the topic of Eton "mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity": well, he has largely avoided the element of boast. Nonetheless, Wood does write very nicely, as he is well aware, and I happily found myself reading the article right to the end, having cheerfully abandoned many others in the LRB.

3. Not long ago, I mentioned that it's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to discussion of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Here is Dawn Foster in the Guardian summing it up: "Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems ...". It really is worth looking out for the references to this little bit of made-for-television spectacle: truly the Great Exhibition of our time. Wherever I go I spot them.

4. A literary map of the UK.

5. A little glimpse into the wonderful world of politics on the Left: it appears that, for so long as the UK remains in the EU, it would be illegal to impose VAT on private school fees. This view seems to be kosher (Art 132.1(i)), so long as private schools fall within the scope of "bodies governed by public law having [education] as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects" (the words after the "or" are crucial here). This might make the vehemence of pro-EU support among the normally affable London professional classes perhaps a little easier to understand. (Of course VAT on female sanitary products is mandatory within the EU until 2022, according to Wikipedia.)

6. London from the Monument. A little different from the view that prevailed when the Monument was first erected.

7. Here is something written by a transwoman who became a Catholic after transitioning: Durham University's Centre for Catholic Studies' "nurturing, dialogical community showed [her] the possibility for reconciliation with the ecclesial tradition that had nourished [her] theological imagination".

Links for fun

1. In 1587, Urbano Monte made the largest known early map of Earth. You can play around with a digital version made into a globe here.

2. A really annoying flight of stairs.

3. Come, Josephine, in my Flying Machine! "You're surprised that, having scored big with one ethnic novelty song, the wily Kraut didn't follow it with "If The Man In The Sun Were A Hun". Instead, over the next three and a half decades, he prospered in just about every genre: Irish songs ("Peg O' My Heart", one of the most beguiling of Tin Pan Alley's shamrock ballads), Irish mother songs ("Ireland Must Be Heaven For My Mother Came From There"), substitute mother songs ("Daddy, You've Been A Mother To Me"), anti-German luff ballads ("Lorraine, My Beautiful Alsace Lorraine"), pro-American luff songs ("Would You Rather Be A General With An Eagle On Your Arm Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?"), songs about pedal extremities ("Your Feet's Too Big"), songs about railroad excursions through mining country ("Phoebe Snow The Anthracite Mama"), and songs of sound general philosophy ("There's A Little Bit Of Bad In Every Good Little Girl")." Mark Steyn - and with observations on Titanic too.

4. A Norwegian woman who runs and jumps like a horse.

5. When Slavoj Žižek wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.

6. "As a gaggle of teenage girls waved their Blue-Shield-advertisement-paddles to cheer on the police, I thought to myself “Yes, this exactly captures the spirit of the original Stonewall rioters”." Scott Alexander on civil religion, specifically American civil religion.

7. Christopher Walken dancing.