Joe's Extra Bold Blog

Buses v Dogma

2009-06-29T20:51:00.007+01:00

We know that state provision of services is generally inefficient and unresponsive to customers' needs compared to the private sector. So if a service can reasonably be provided by the private sector, then it should be. This is why buses were deregulated in the 1980s and it was a disaster. Unlike, say, water or rail, there was no regulation of fares and these went through the roof, and are still rising year on year above inflation. Instead of profitable routes cross-subsidising unprofitable routes, extra public money had to be found to subsidise these routes. A very few routes enjoy competition, high frequencies and occasional discount fares. But the majority of profitable routes are not worth fighting over, and the customer is treated as a captive cash cow.

So why this discrepancy between theory and practise? Free markets are competitive, but attempts to introduce them so often seem to bring uncompetitive rip-off practises instead. We (rightly) aren't willing to stand the withdrawal of the only mobility option from millions of vulnerable people, so we try markets plus subsidies, which inevitably corrupts the markets. And for this, the publicly owned asset - the right to run buses on profitable routes - was given away for nothing.

Today government wants more people to take the bus instead of driving, and PTEs up and down the country will spend money on better bus stops and better bus lanes, and more subsidies. And up and down the country bus companies say "thanks very much, and by the way we're putting up the fares again, and cutting services", and there isn't a sausage that can be done about this but to offer even more subsidies.

Yes, my local service, the 86 is facing the axe. The government closed our post office earlier this year, many pensioners expected to walk miles uphill to another, or to catch the, er, bus. An angry local has postered the bus stop calling this cut barbaric, quite rightly. So we have a campaign of leaflets, petitions, complaints to the council, the PTE, the MP. The PTE write back offering an hourly daytime-only service, which is pretty miserable. When you can never entirely trust a bus to turn up at all, an hourly service is hardly worth using - with a 15 minute service such unreliability is not such a big deal.

The government has flirted a little with largely unusable powers for PTEs to take on regulation of fares and timetables, so there is some recognition of the problem, but clearly no determination to bring it to a resolution. It's another Labour failure and we know the Tories - the original culprits - will do nothing. And both will probably blame the Lib Dem council. This is a vital issue for millions of people, and for the environment, that we should be taking a strong lead on.

And all parties should learn the lesson that involving the private sector, and giving away public assets to the private sector, is not the same thing as introducting competition and markets; it doesn't bring any of the benefits, and if we're not careful we end up paying way over the odds for inferior services.

AV would be brilliant

2009-06-10T10:44:00.008+01:00

Not so brilliant for the Lib Dems, but good for democracy. Not as good as STV of course, but let's face it, what is?

First Past the Post is the cornerstone of the brokenness of our politics. It has the power to subvert all your campaigning efforts for a good cause, making that cause weaker instead of stronger.

Support the environment? Vote Green where the Lib Dems could win and you do more harm than good.

Support Euro-nihilism? Vote UKIP where the Conservatives could win and you have the opposite effect.

Support socialism? Vote Socialist Labour, where Labour could win, and, well maybe the pattern breaks down there.

Want to stand as an independent? The problem is that whichever party it is you consider least bad, you will take more votes from them than from the others. So unless you can be very confident of winning, you will only make things worse.

AV fixes all this. It lets you stand and campaign for what you believe in without damaging the causes you support. It lets you vote for what you believe in without having to second guess what the result will be and support the lesser evil.

Sure, it's not proportional. That stinks. But proportionality is not the only important feature of an electoral system. If it were we would support list systems rather than STV. And this is the worst time of all to hold a referendum on a proportional system, when the BNP have just won seats.

If Brown and his few friends plump for AV, we will probably get it. We could even have it for the next general election - it is the only reform that won't require years of boundary commission work. And it may be a stepping stone to STV or AV+, but not towards party lists.

If they plump for PR, the whole thing will be quietly dropped, "after considered reflection", the next time Griffin gets some publicity. Or, even worse, we have a referendum on it after weeks of the Tory press giving publicity to the BNP at every opportunity in order to get a "no" vote. It would then be off the agenda for decades. This is the single worst time for a referendum on PR. Give it a few years when a couple more nazi MEPs won't have brought the world to an end.

See also: Anthony Hook, Mark Reckons, Himmelgarten Cafe, Jock Coats, Sunder Katwala, and Duncan Borrowman (already linked)

What you should have voted to keep the BNP out

2009-06-08T02:27:00.004+01:00

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but too many people have been stupidly talking up the BNPs chances to the point of self-fullfilling prophecy - often in a genuine attempt to keep them out, but sometimes to frighten their own disillusioned supporters into turning out. The one thing the BNP had none of the resources to do - a get the vote out operation - was done for them by their opponents.

But what I want to do here is look at who, with the benefit of hindsight, the anti-BNP voter should have voted for. Mostly to shame everybody else who claimed it could only be them.

So in Yorkshire, that is Labour, who could have beaten the BNP to the last seat with an extra 10270 votes. The Greens would have needed 15684, UKIP 26528 and others more.

In the North West, UKIP would have needed only 2448 more votes to beat the BNP, the Greens 4961 more, the Lib Dems 28549 votes, and others more.

In regions where the BNP failed we can see who took the last seat, and see how many votes ahead of the BNP they were.

In East Midlands, this is the Lib Dems 45109 votes to the good of the BNP.

In East of England, this is UKIP, second seat 59947 votes ahead of the BNP.

In London, the Conservatives are 73259 ahead of the BNP with their 3rd seat.

In the North East, the Lib Dems are 50944 ahead of the BNP.

In Scotland, Labour (2nd seat) are 87779.5 ahead of the BNP.

In the South East, the Lib Dems (2nd seat) are 63401 ahead of the BNP.

In the South West, the Conservatives (3rd seat) are 95358 ahead of the BNP.

In Wales, UKIP are 50471 ahead of the BNP.

In the West Midlands, UKIP (2nd seat) are 28268 ahead of the BNP.

What can we learn from this? Mostly that it is guesswork, and you are best off just voting for whoever you actually support. But perhaps these things can be predicted. To vote otherwise just because somebody is only 50,000 ahead of the BNP seems unreasonable. But could the results in Yorkshire and the North West have been predicted and prevented? Not without vastly more accurate polling, region by region, than we had. Who would pay for such polling, and would we trust it? Based on the polling we had, my calculations suggested that the Lib Dems, Labour or the Tories would be the best bet to beat the BNP in the North West, not, as it turned out, UKIP and the Greens.

And the best tactical voting strategy in the world wouldn't compensate for another 0.5% vote going to the fascists.

So maybe instead our non-fascist political class just needs to get out on the streets and argue its corner a bit more. To make a case for liberty, tolerance and human rights. To think twice about adding more layers of distance, obfuscation and technocracy between the people and their public services. Not just to tell people that they don't have to be evil to have a voice and a stake in society, but to make sure that it's true. And when people choose to be evil anyway, to oppose and defy them at every turn.

Greenpartywatch: Greens admit their policies are weak

2009-06-03T18:08:00.002+01:00

Anders Hanson picks up a story in the Times covering some blogging covering the various parties positions on science related policy questions, and generally bemoaning the Greens' medieval denialist attitude to any science that doesn't support their agenda.

Anders quotes Green MSP Patrick Harvey, and it is worth repeating

I recognise that the Green movement has taken some time to develop from a single issue group, and perhaps in some areas we’ve some way to go yet… The best way of supporting our continued development is to subject us to parliamentary scrutiny, so that our policies can be tested alongside the rest.

Oh dear. And Adam Ramsey [Edit: not Adrian Ramsey, a Green PPC in Norwich]

I am an active member of the Green Party, but this policy is frankly moronic. It is not a manifesto commitment, so MEPs elected this year will not be pushing for it. Please consider what Greens parties are going to prioritise rather than some out dated policy the party hasn’t got round to changing.

Oh dear. Make some allowances please, for a movement in its infancy. Except that it isn't. Founded in 1973, with policies of nuclear deterrence, anti-immigration, women should stay at home, etc, etc, it has clearly been a long road to here.

Let's put that aside. Let's regard the Green Party as beginning with that big 15% vote share they got in the European elections of 1989. By then they had more or less the policies they have today. Perhaps they would support some roadbuilding, but not very much. That's 20 years ago. Since then there will have been 40 party conferences, and therefore probably around 80 to 100 major policy papers agreed.

Now the body of "outdated" policy that Ramsey refers to is called the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society and can be found here. This is where those 80 to 100 policy papers will have ended up. How many sections does it have? 37. So each of them has been updated on average 2 to 3 times since the party's coming of age in 1989.

Riiight. And you've still got some way to go. OK. What could possibly be the problem?

Well, I suggest that the problem is a great deal of incoherence at the heart of Green Party thinking. The core value, that economic activity is the cause of all our ills, is not reconciled with the desire for increased public spending on everything. The demand for social justice is not reconciled with their opposition to the economic and technological innovations that have freed or will free millions from serfdom and servitude. Their demand for a whole different kind of economic system is not tempered by any kind of detail on what that system would look like - not least because they can't agree.

Denialism on science, denialism on the benefits of free trade, wishful thinking on energy; they may not understand what is wrong with the world, but at least they have their comfort zones.

Conservatives launch barefacedness commission

2009-05-26T21:00:00.003+01:00

This is from the text of the Conservative leaflet that came through the door of my home in Sheffield today:

Conservatives have launched a Transport Commission for the North of England to find out the transport priorities for South Yorkshire. The Commission was launched by William Hague and will examine how to improve all forms of transport including rail services. Conservatives have announced plans for high-speed rail links between Yorkshire and London taking just over an hour and a half.

What's wrong with this picture?

1. The proposed high speed rail runs from London to Leeds via Manchester, bypassing Sheffield completely. They should not for shame breathe a word of it round here.

2. This will be paid for by cutting to the bone maintenance and upgrades on the rest of the rail network, so we will see a degradation of our rail services.

3. The Midland Main line from Sheffield to London can run trains in 2 hours - the Master Cutler does this. But usually the trains stop everywhere, adding half an hour. Not great, but still not too bad. With upgrading and fewer stops this could be improved further.

The Conservatives have adopted a policy which is bad for Sheffield, and for most of the country, and shown no understanding of our transport situation - the real weaknesses are rail to Leeds and road and rail to Manchester. Trains to Manchester were quicker in the 1920s than they are now.

So they paste South Yorkshire into the text of a policy for Leeds, and hope nobody notices. This comes under the headline Working for you in South Yorkshire. No kidding. I dread to think what will happen when they start working against us, like Tories usually do.

Cameron's shoddy shallow election call

2009-05-19T15:22:00.002+01:00

David Cameron was on radio 4 this morning, demanding a General Election, to sweep out the old, corrupt House of Commons and bring about a fresh start and a new dawn.

What is wrong with this picture? Of course opposition leaders must call for a general election, every day during the lame duck 5th year of a parliament. That's textbook. Of course they must use any issue that comes up to justify this call. That's obvious.

But this particular call is shabby and shameful. Firstly, it tries to identify in the public mind a cross-party scandal with the government. Yet his party is just as guilty. (As is UKIP.)

Second, do we really think the Telegraph is finished with us? Let the bright light of scrutiny shine on every corner of this issue before we jump to conclusions regarding how to deal with it, and who to elect or re-elect.

Third, let's give the parties time to deselect their wrongdoers. It would be absurd to hold an election so quickly that major culprits go unexposed or undeselected, and get to serve (themselves) a whole extra parliament.

There is a public mood that politicians are "all the same", based on a handful of serious concrete cases. Over time, we can but hope a distinction will be drawn between the guilty and the innocent, whatever party each is found in. Is that what Cameron wants to pre-empt?

Put the boot in harder, and aim better

2009-05-16T14:15:00.001+01:00

It is difficult to put the boot in, to demand prosecution of expenses fraudsters, when you are in a grey area vulnerable position yourself, and the whole house is being condemned for the normal use of expenses, as if that were the same kind of thing as fraud. It is bothering me now that the frauds - of whom there have been a handful - are getting lumped together with those who are merely making use of the allowances they have been given as part of their job.

However I am not in a grey place so I can spell it out.

Having an allowance for buying TVs, hiring cleaners, etc, and using it is not fraudulent or corrupt. Asking whether you can buy item X on expenses and doing so if you are told you can, is not fraudulent or corrupt. If the allowances cover moats, swimming pools and chandeliers, then they are stupid, but that does not make using them fraudulent or corrupt. Waiving your expenses is a superogatory act, not a moral duty.

However claiming for a mortgage you have already paid off is fraud. An MP couple claiming 2nd home allowance on both their homes is fraud. "Flipping" to maximise allowance spend is fraud. Telling the tax office something different to the fees office is fraud.

These MPs should be expelled from their parties, deselected, and prosecuted, in no particular order. So far Labour have "suspended" two, and the Tories merely kicked one off the front bench. Luckily no frauds in the Lib Dems, so far.

The rest of them are not frauds. But giving yourself an allowance system more generous than it ought to be is corrupt. So judge them not by what they claim, but whether they voted to reform it or not. Whether they voted for transparency - or for the exemption to the Freedom of Information Act. Large numbers have voted both ways on this, but even those who voted the wrong way, may honestly think the package is not too generous.

People of similar seniority in the private sector are on 6 or 7 figure salaries, with bonuses and expense accounts that will make your eyes water. MPs could vote through the same for themselves, but they don't. Because it would be corrupt.

So this is what I want to see from the party leaders. Rather than being caught between trying to defend what is reasonable and condemn what is wrong, let's throw the handful of fraudsters to the lions, condemn the system, and condemn those who have voted to keep it secret and unreformed. And three cheers to the Telegraph, and the Freedom of Information Act for making reform possible. And shame on Cameron and Brown for ignoring the big money spinner of property speculation on the back of subsidised mortgages.

Labour: where can it go from here?

2009-05-06T10:45:00.003+01:00

Labourology seems to be the rule at the moment. This excellent piece by Alex Wilcock is particularly pointed. "They won’t listen to your complaints. They won’t listen to your concerns. Now they’re telling you to clear off if you don’t agree with everything they ever do." Their sense of frustration is palpable. 12 years of Labour! Surely everything should be all right by now?

Speaking to Labour activists on occasion, what is most remarkable is this disconnect between what they percieve the Labour Party as being about, and what the government does. However much some of them disagree with the government, the Labour Party still has some hidden magical essence that is different. Total cobblers of course. The best way to judge the party is by what it does in government. That is what defines it. The rest is comfort food.

The 50p rate signals the end of the Blair project, which was to get the party to shut up about what it believed in, because that was largely wrong, and adopt a centrist position, or conservative or neo-con as necessary, to be elected and achieve the core agenda of pushing through big public spending, much of which has done some good, albeit inefficiently.

The problem with this was not where the party was moving away from, but where it was moving to. Labour instincts of opposing the bosses and capitalists at every turn had to be suppressed, but there was no real debate of these new centrist/neo-con values. Loyalty matters more than debate anyway. So now the project is ending the unresolved conflict re-emerges: between the moral superiority of socialism and the practical necessity of rejecting socialism. This is a dead debate, but I don't think the Labour Party knows how to have any other. It knows no other values by which it might criticise the rights and wrongs of a policy, but socialist values, and it knows it cannot trust itself to speak these values.

So when a party/government has a culture of a) no debate, or b) if there must be debate, a futile left-right one, it should be no surprise that it cannot listen, that it must become out of touch. Just as the Tories ignored all the sane advice on the mess they were making of railway privatisation, Labour cannot understand the mess of the tax credits system. Political good intentions trump any constructive criticism. And if a policy is wrong because it is illiberal, the same applies. They have put their values away because they are left wing and so can't be trusted.

And this value-free, debate-free politics leads naturally to the cult of managerialism. We know how to run public services, they said. But they didn't. Chris Dillow's book The End of Politics is good on this, where I have dipped into it.

So we have an autocratic value-free government/party incapable of listening, and that is enough - any such party would have to go badly wrong sooner or later. But that's only half the problem. They've also run out of money. In 1999 Gordon Brown was crowing about how he'd fixed the structural budget deficit that the Tories had left. But even before the financial crisis, the golden rule had gone and prudence was dead. Having no money means that New Labour deal - switch off your values and we will give you big public spending - can no longer work. So the party will descend into infighting as both sides renege.

12 years. Where did it all go wrong? The New Labour deal - you can't have socialism, but you can have a bigger state - could only last so long. The working class may have been abandoned, but I don't think the class struggle mentality, or the Hegelian dialectic was. So centrist/neo-con Labour needed enemies and scapegoats as much as Old Labour did. But I suggest most of the problems our society faces are organic, spontaneous, not the result of a clash of interests, and so top-down confrontational answers do not work.

Even a party starting from a good place, which made a virtue of loyalty over debate, would inevitably go wrong over time. Add to that a belief in top-down micromanagement from a position of ignorance; an internal compromise that demands ever-ballooning state spending; adherence to some of the philosophical errors underpinning socialism, if not socialism itself; preference for a value-free attitude to business, rather than admitting your values were wrong; having no regard for liberalism; willingess to go to war on a lie;... etc, etc.

Frankly, it is amazing that things are not already much much worse than they are. Where should Labour go? What should it change? Or is the question: what on earth should it keep the same?

Emote with me!!!

2009-04-28T08:50:00.004+01:00

I've been meaning to say this for a while - since attending the Social Liberal Forum meeting at the last Lib Dem conference. But it ties in nicely with Charlotte's revelation about the nature of the "progressive" and conservative debate, and how each side thinks they are doing what is right.

Speaker after speaker at the social liberal forum said how deeply they cared about the plight of underprivileged people, so much that the mood of the event could be described as a collective subvocal chant of emote with us! Having been a churchgoer (charismatic) in the past, and therefore having done that sort of thing in another context, I am deeply suspicious of it. It doesn't work for me. Yet these are important emotions to have. Empathy for the poor is better than contempt. It is still only a pale caricature of what the left - the Labour movement - was meant to be about, which was working people asserting themselves, not, as it is now, working people being patronised by the middle classes. I would attribute much of the BNP success to the way that where Labour seem to say "We care about you", the BNP say "We care about us."

But back to the Forum. A speaker goes "We care. We care. We care. 50p tax rate!" to a cheer. I can see how that policy absolutely feels right to people, but I am still left wanting the analysis that it would do any good. "It's a symbol" we are told, as if that were a good thing.

But of course it is not just the left that emotes like this. Only when Conservatives do it, it is something way nastier. Europe: boo. Foreigners: boo. Single parents: boo. I remember the Conservative election broadcasts in the 80s pushing the fear button over nuclear disarmament. Fear leads to hate and hate leads to the dark side. Conservative emoting is all dark side of the force stuff.

Charlotte points out that Conservatives believe they are doing the right thing, and I would agree for the most part. But lets not slip into relativism here - just because people disagree over what the right thing is, it doesn't mean there is nothing to be said about it. Charlotte is right that politics would be better if it were more rational, but rationality alone doesn't give us values. Libertarians of the Ayn Rand school like to portray themselves as driven purely by reason, but this is based on sophistry, and Rand had no answer to David Hume's is-ought gap.

I've written before about the 2 or 5 foundations of morality in evolutionary psychology. These 5 instinctive traits do exist in us, and we can apply reason to ask the question: what are the consequences if we reinforce this instinct or suppress that one in the language that we use - the metaphors we choose - the buttons that we push - to explore and advance our political ideas.

So liberalism as I see it involves a recognition that promoting the wrong foundations - the deference to authority for example, or the ingroup (class/race/etc) - has bad consequences, and promoting the right foundations - reciprocity, no harm, etc, has good consequences. This relies on an assessment of the consequences of freedom or tyranny, class war or class peace, etc. Is this or that a consequence that I want? How do I feel about it? It is an emotional question.

Ways to Save the Planet 3

2009-04-13T00:04:00.008+01:00

We've reached the end of the series with two more ideas for fighting global warming.

First up, solar panels on satellites. The idea being that there is twice as much light up there as down here, and, if concentrated by fresnel lenses, many times more. Then the energy would be transmitted back to earth by microwaves, SimCity style.

This episode left many obvious questions unasked and unanswered:

1. How effficient is this microwave transmission of energy? Get twice as much energy from your solar panel, and lose half on the way down, and you haven't gained anything by being in space.

2. How many solar panels could we have on land for the price of putting one in orbit? My guess would be a number in three figures. Maybe less if you have to buy the land, but this world - even much of the West - is hardly short of deserts.

3. Launching objects into space is highly energy intensive, as is any subsequent maintenance. So what is the embedded carbon cost of one of these satellites? Compare this to a similar device, on land, albeit generating half the power, during daylight. It can't be good. How long will it have to last?

Of course you don't get answers to "how long will it last" while the whole project is at a mere proof of concept stage. But it seems to me very hard for these numbers to add up.

Finally we had a design for an active scrubber of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Air blown into the device at one end would flow against a caustic soda solution, reacting with it, removing the carbon dioxide.

True to form, much was made of building the prototype - welding the blades on to the fan, setting the thing up in a football stadium, and staying up all night to see if the numbers - on the stadium scoreboard - indicated success, which they did. Success was defined as extracting more CO₂ than is generated by the energy required to run the thing. A modest goal and clearly not the limit of ambition for efficiency.

What was less clear was how it could possibly be more efficient to extract CO₂ from the air, where it is sparse, rather than from the exhausts of power stations where it is abundant. My understanding of CCS technology, such as it exists, is that it substantially diminishes the fuel efficiency of the plant, because the CCS process takes a lot of energy to run. Extracting CO₂ from a lower concentration in air, the energy cost is surely even bigger.

The other issue ignored by the programme was where we get all this caustic soda (NaOH) from. All the machine is doing is stirring the reagents in this reaction:

CO₂ + NaOH -> NaHCO₃

Now - we are not told - the caustic soda can be reclaimed from the sodium bicarbonate by reacting with lime (CaO).

NaHCO₃ + CaO -> NaOH + CaCO₃

What's that we've got now - CaCO₃ - calcium carbonate (calcite/chalk). OK , the lime can be retrieved from this for reuse and the CO₂ extracted for storage, by heating to 825 degrees C.

CaCO₃ + heat -> CaO + CO₂

Whew. But hang on there's a lot of processing here. A lot of energy, surely, required to heat the calcium carbonate, to compete the cycle. This sort of chemical cycle necessarily requires an energy input, even though the outputs are identical to the inputs. We are just using chemistry to move CO₂ from A to B. And this, presumably, is why CCS has a high energy cost.

Finally, there is the issue of whether and how CO₂ can be safely stored. This being the Discovery channel, the idea they tested was fabricating torpedos out of raw solid CO₂ - dry ice - and dropping them into the ocean where they would embed themselves in the sediment of the ocean floor and stay there for a good long time. In theory. So we have a delivery mechanism that is cool and probably works, but nobody checked whether the CO₂ actually stays put. There wasn't even a picture of the torpedo hitting the ocean floor. It wouldn't be difficult to drop a number of these torpedos, and then to dive down and dig one up every month and see how much it has shrunk. Actually it would be difficult and expensive, but it is the critical question.

And even if it works, this is another energy intensive step in the process. It is the whole process that has to cover its whole footprint, preferably many times over, not just one step or another.

So where does this leave us? From the whole series I quite liked the wave powered pumps - although they may end up doing more for fish stocks than for global warming. But eating more fish may free up land for biofuels or renewables, so that could work. And I liked the cloud albedo management idea. The rest seemed just too weak. They stack up very poorly against existing renewable technologies, transport options, nuclear power, best energy efficiency practise and so on.

Maybe some of these ideas will come good. Further research should be encouraged, but banking on any would be madness. Our policies today should be based on technology that already exists.

Ways to Save the Planet 2 - if it isn't beneath you

2009-03-25T16:20:00.002Z

We've had two more episodes of the series Ways to Save the Planet, that I discussed earlier. And, surprisingly topical for once, the Greens' spring conference has unanimously passed a motion condemning geo-engineering.

For the full text see page 30 of this pdf, but I will bring you some edited highlights.

Ocean-fertilisation poses an unknown but potentially serious threat to marine biodiversity, which plays an essential role in regulating the global carbon cycle, as well as putting fishing communities at risk.

Pity they didn't see episode 1 of Ways to Save the Planet which fertilised the top layer of ocean with deep water nutrients, causing a previously empty bit of ocean to fill with life. Remember that much of the Pacific is desert-like already in its lack of biodiversity. These wave-powered pumps, if they work in earnest, are a means to greatly increase biodiversity. It deserves better than knee-jerk opposition. There's more...

Climate geo-engineering by increasing the earth’s albedo poses a major and unknown new threat to the climate system, to biodiversity and to people.

Er, how do you know the threat is major, if it is also unknown? We have a major and known threat of global warming, and that means - why do I feel like I am talking to a 4 year old here - it would be good to have a controllable system for global cooling.

Sure, the future is unpredictable if we control the amount of cloud cover or its reflectivity to manage the global temperature. But here is the thing. The future is unpredicable full stop. And it is rather more predicatable if we deal with global warming than if we don't.

So, as I was saying, two new episodes. The first was about a design for a tethered high altitude helium balloon wind turbine. Strictly this is renewable energy rather than geo-engineering, but the ends are much the same. They built a scaled down prototype which worked after a fashion. It would take a full size prototype to test whether such a turbine would have the output predicted. If so, 9.5 million of them could generate all the world's electricity. They would need 2500 times the global annual production of helium, which might be an issue.

In the same niche, there's a video on TED, suggesting kites can be used to generate power.

The second new episode was on increasing the reflectivity of clouds - stratocumulus over oceans - by spraying micron-size droplets of sea water at them. As usual there were some problems. First they insisted on unmanned radio-controlled low carbon boats to deploy the equipment, and so went for the somewhat oddball Flettner rotor propulsion system. Plenty to build and test there, and it worked surprisingly well. It's not clear how much power the rotors would need, or where it would come from. There were solar panels on the CGI ships, which wouldn't be much good under cloud - but then if it is cloudy, the ship is already in the right place, right?

There was less success actually making the droplets small enough, but you can't have everything.

But what I thought was most telling about this episode was the objections. At the end of each episode a handful of experts - presumably - in lab coats are asked why the proposal is a bad idea or wouldn't work. Usually, they have given sound objections. 16 trillion lenses in space, are you kidding? But this time, they were stuck. All they had was vague objections to the principle of geo-engineering, much like the stuff from the Greens. But unlike blankets on icecaps, robot ships could be turned off at the first sign of trouble.

Unlike, indeed, a massive tree-planting operation, if that is done for geo-engineering purposes. Come on people, show some sense of perspective. I know you can hug a tree more easily than a robot ship, but that is no guide to how best to save the planet.

Ways to Save the Planet

2009-03-13T00:22:00.002Z

Is there anything we can do to combat global warming other than reduce greenhouse gases? Actions which seek to cool the planet down directly, or sequester carbon from the atmosphere come under the heading geo-engineering. The little bolds and I have been following a series on the Discovery channel on this subject, called Ways to Save the Planet.

There are three basic responses to geo-engineering ideas:

1. Noooooo. Mucking about with the planet got us into this mess.

2. Aaaahhhhh. You see all we need is a little ingenuity, and everything will be back to normal. Global warming will be solved, if it is even happening at all anyway, which I doubt.

3. OK, will that work then?

I am firmly in camp number three. There is no reason in principle to reject geo-engineering. The planet is not God, and if it decides to kill us we are entitled to disagree and fight back. Even if global warming were halted by reduction in greenhouse gas emissions alone, we would probably need geo-engineering technology sooner or later anyway - nature has the power to turn nasty without our help. But any project has some enormous hurdles - that the earth is basically very very big, and any solution has to do an awful lot, and without using monumental amounts of energy.

There have been 4 episodes so far, all, unfortunately a little underwhelming. They follow the usual Discovery channel formula of injecting tension by having some mechanical thing go wrong, or threaten to do so, to dramatic background music and interviews with anxious engineers. Gripping.

And what were the ideas? A wave-powered pump bringing nutrient rich deep ocean water closer to the surface. Dangerous mucking about with the ecosystem? Not really - much of the Pacific is like the Sahara desert. Deep water nutrients would make an oasis - they would create an ecosystem where there is currently next to nothing. Greater plankton growth would mean faster carbon sequestration, and some of this carbon would find its way to the ocean floor for a reasonably long time.

Did it work? Briefly. But despite falling apart after a few hours, the location of the pump a week later was found teeming with life. So it looks like this idea could work. It's not going to do enough to change the nature of the challenge significantly, but can make some difference at a reasonable cost.

Next up covering the icecaps with reflective material to lower the albedo and thereby prevent melting and keep the earth's albedo lower. This one kinda puzzled me a bit. Surely you'll get more albedo bang for your buck covering something that isn't alraedy white. What I remember of the programme was an hour spent struggling with the practicalities of airlifting big rolls of white stuff to the arctic and unrolling it. Would it work? No idea.

Third was scattering the light from the sun with lenses in space. Discovery is in its comfort zone here with high tech lenses, rockets and so on. How many 60cm lenses are we going to need? 16 trillion! That's a whole lotta lenses. Well maybe if we make them 1 micron (0.001mm) thick, they'll be light enough that we can launch lots into space. Cue an hour of testing rockets and guns that might launch squillions of extremely fragile lenses without shaking them to bits. What fun. Did the rocket work? No.

Clearly reducing the amount of light reaching the earth would reduce warming. A big lens in space - what could be simpler. But this idea involves a monumental space programme. How much, if it ever works at all, are 16,000,000,000,000 lenses going to cost to make and launch? Keep thinking, and lets not bank on this one.

Fourth was planting large numbers of trees by dropping seeds from an aircraft. Take a tree seed, in a lump of compost, wrap in a layer of wax, hard enough to break the ground surface, but which shatters on impact so doesn't impede the growth of the tree. Take 1000 of these in a cargo net under a helicopter and drop from a height and speed calculated to give a good spread pattern.

Again this was great fun, because the experiments involved aircraft, and dropping things out of them. The methods were ingenious, but I couldn't help wonder if - given the work that must be put into sourcing the seeds and assembling the wax canisters, and round tripping the helicopter (it would still take hundreds of trips to seed a square kilometre), whether it might not be easier to hire a few people with spades to plant the trees properly.

So we get to the dramatic final test of the idea. Did the seeds bury themselves in the ground at the right depth and the right distance apart from each other? Yes. Did they actually grow? No. Why not? Er, maybe the soil pH was wrong. Sigh. And maybe the guy with the spade would have known that.

Well that's all we've had so far. There's another 4 episodes, to come, and I hope they plan to end on a high note with some more promising ideas. Some geo-engineering ideas can be double-edged. If you lower the earth's temperature by controlling light or albedo, you do nothing for acidification of the oceans. So if it turned out that global warming wasn't a preeminent threat to us after all and was in fact no more serious than ocean acidification, then we may have to modify our strategy with this in mind. Much geo-engineering is diplomatically problematic. Whatever the global effect, there are likely to be local effects, that the locals may not like. Nonetheless, I think a common cause would be good for our diplomatic relations.

Yet I suggest this all has little significance yet for policy. Potential geo-engineering projects are much like potential technologies to save or generate energy. Some will work one day, some won't; we don't know yet which is which. Meanwhile we should apply the technologies and policy options we have. We are hardly at risk of doing more to combat climate change than might later prove to be necessary.

Gaining Faith in Twitter

2009-03-09T12:27:00.002Z

Back from the Lib Dems spring conference in Harrogate, the greatest revelation for me was the use of twitter to comment on live proceedings. The 'back-channel' is the technical term for this kind of electronic muttering at the back of the room instead of paying attention to teacher. It has long been said about conferences that the main point is getting to meet people and talk to them, rather than the official speeches and whatnot. Twitter, it seems, brings some of the benefits of being able to talk, to a medium in which you are expected to sit, listen, and clap politely.

I signed up to Twitter a couple of years but didn't really see the point and didn't use it. And I still don't really - I probably won't use it again until the next conference. But during the debate on faith schools - and is this really yet another Lib Dem first? - I had to do what I could to sway the vote, and I had access probably to a handful of other delegates following the #ldconf tag.

I was energised by supporters of Amendment 3, including Vince Cable and Tim Farron, calling the original motion an attack on faith schools - which it was not - and calling for support for Amendment 3, as a "compromise". In fact the original text was a compromise - it respects parental choice of a faith school, and even allows new faith schools, but it demands of faith schools the same high standards of non-discrimination, tolerance and inclusivity, that are expected of all other taxpayer-funded schools. Extremists on both sides will argue that you can't trust the other lot to run schools at all. But that is prejudice. This position does not prejudge a school by the faith, or not, of its leadership, and is supported by a broad coalition of liberal believers and liberal atheists. This coalition is exactly the kind of initiative that is vital in today's society that is at risk of having walls go up between believers and unbelievers.

Rabbi Jonathon Romain spoke at the fringe meeting in support of this compromise, saying

I want my children to go to a school where they can sit next to a Christian, play football in the break with a Muslim, do homework with a Hindu and walk back with an atheist - interacting with them and them getting to know what a Jewish child is like. Schools should build bridges, not erect barriers.

A Rev Chad of St Chad's (no relation) also spoke at the fringe explaining that he felt the christian ethos was about reaching out to the community, not erecting barriers to keep it out.

It is hard to credit then, the arguments for amendment 3. I suppose if somebody comes to you and says "I represent Jews, or Catholics or Hindus..., and I say this policy is an assault on our faith schools", it is difficult to disagree. But it remains the case that opinion among believers is as divided on these questions as opinion always is, and anyone claiming that a faith speaks with one voice is being a little mischeivous.

Amendment 3, then, sought to maintain selection by faith, that is in Romain's words, to erect barriers not bridges, in part 1, and in part 2, to allow discrimination in employment against senior teachers (eg a head of chemistry) who were of the wrong faith, or who suffered a crisis of faith or the failure of a marriage. Part 1 passed, thanks to the the wrong "assualt on faith schools" hyperbole - that I can't blame delegates for buying in to. Part 2 fell, thank, er, Providence.

Overall I am satisfied with the outcome. I raised this whole issue a year ago on Lib Dem Voice, at a time when many in the party blogosphere were holding pointless and destructive arguments over the existence of God and the merits of religion. And even then I thought the selection by faith issue would be too tough to crack and suggested a compromise on it. It is a shame perhaps that my compromise wasn't put to conference. It allowed selection by faith, but insisted that a declaration of faith be considered sufficient. This addressed the problem of people having to go to church under false pretences, of believers missing out because some cleric or other thinks they don't believe well enough or objects to their lifestyle/social class, etc. It reflects the fact that faith is simply not visible to somebody outside one's own head, and does not justify giving unelected clerics, or anyone else, a gatekeeper role to public services that we have already paid for through taxation.

But the win, as far as I am concerned, is this coalition of liberals. I joined the Lib Dems to make common cause with other liberals, not with (or against) other atheists. The religion and faith schools questions seemed to threaten to divide this party. Blair and Bush might be mocked and condemned for their pro-war faith, but really it doesn't matter. Non-believers can be just as hawkish. What matters is your politics.

I hope you understood all that from my tweets.

Greenpartywatch: GP candidate faces axe for trying to save the planet

2009-02-25T16:53:00.000Z

A storm is brewing in the Green Party over an article by Chris Goodall, their PPC in Oxford West and Abingdon, arguing that nuclear power will be necessary as part of the solution to climate change.

He goes where Mark Lynas and Stephen Tindale have gone before. Many leading environmentalists now take the view that nuclear is just too useful a source of low-carbon energy to do without; that concerns over nuclear waste, while valid environmental concerns, pale into insignificance compared to climate change.

Opponents frame the debate as "nuclear v renewables", but this is just framing. Let's take as read support for renewables and efficiency. Then what? Where is the rest of our energy coming from?

Realistically, what nuclear is up against is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). A good idea, but not yet, and perhaps not ever, a technology ready to be deployed. If you are convinced that CCS will work, then you can probably afford to be anti-nuclear. But why would you be so convinced?

Here is a question I put to Steve Webb MP, in a Lib Dem Voice webchat way back.

Do you agree that we should be looking to make progress on carbon emissions, primarily with techonlogies that exist, such as wind, nuclear, CSP, CHP, rail, and smart meters rather than gambling on technologies that might never exist, such as CCS, much better PV, and particular road transport solutions? Where technologies look promising, but don't yet work, rather than buy inferior versions of them, supporting that inferiority, why don't we offer prizes to companies that bring them to viability?

And he responded

We should certainly use readily available technologies such as CHP and smart meters as far as possible. But Carbon Capture is essential to the planet. China and India are rolling out new unabated coal-fired power stations at an alarming rate. Unless those emissions get captured we are all in trouble. So investing in CCS research has got to be a priority. In terms of prizes for companies that bring forward new ideas, in a world of carbon rationing and carbon markets, there ought to be strong economic 'prizes' for green technology - the key is to remove the barriers which prevent them getting to the commercial viability stage.

The position on nuclear - too little too late - had been given previously.

To support this policy it seems necessary to believe that CCS will actually work, and to be willing to gamble the planet's future on it working. Carbon capture is essential to the planet? Nuclear is too little too late. One could just as well say the opposite. Nuclear is essential to the planet, and CCS is too little too late. The second position has the advantage that nuclear is known to work, and building CCS-ready plant actually means building dirty coal plant.

So we face the same questions the Greens do, and we will continue to debate them, just as the Greens, er, oh...

Mr Goodall’s remarks had left many party members “seriously concerned”, the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, MEP, said last night. “It is of great concern to me that a candidate should be promoting a policy which is at odds with the party manifesto, and I shall be taking that forward,” she said. ... Asked if this would include disciplinary action and possibly even de-selection as a candidate, Ms Lucas would only say: “We will be taking appropriate measures.”

What really bothers me about this - because of course parties should be able to remove candidates who reject their values - is that Goodall's position is being seen by the Green party not as a contribution to the debate on how to save the planet, but as a rejection of the idea that we should be saving the planet - as a rejection of the party's values.

And this way madness lies. If you happen to believe that technology A will do a job better than technology B, for empirical practical reasons, this says nothing about your political values. If, when you explain your reasons, people invoke disciplinary procedures, that does suggest a deliberate attempt to keep heads in the sand and protect sacred cows from any kind of criticism.

But as I have said in the past, it is only by debating these questions openly, by taking evidence on the chin when it hurts, that we stand any chance in the long run of getting the right answers.

Chris Goodall, if you're listening, have a look as well at some of the benefits of trade, enterprise, and science.

Principal Components of Principles

2009-01-22T13:11:00.003Z

Alix and Jennie have resurrected the peculiar fascinating 2005 political compass, the one that suggets some odd-looking criteria for defining left and right.

I come out pretty close to Alix: left on the main axis of internationalism/rehabilitation, and right on the minor axis of free trade and war. I was against the war, so I must be really keen on free trade.

OK the fascinating thing about this survey is these axes were not chosen by the authors, but arose as a statistical outcome of the actual answers actual voters gave to the questions. Let me try to explain this a little bit.

Lets say you have a 1000 responses to a survey of 20 political questions with simple for/against type answers. What the principal components analysis does is find a formula for a number that would let you predict the answers to one survey, given no other information, with the greatest possible accuracy.

And it turns out that this number reflects opinions on hanging/flogging and nationalism. So this is the principal principle axis. What this means is that if you know somebody is, say -4, on this axis, you can predict their answers to the whole survey with, say, 80% accuracy.

Nobody chose hanging/flogging/internationalism - it is just that this formula and this number gives you the best predictive power. Some other formula might reflect different priorities, but only give 75% accuracy.

It gets a bit more complicated with two axes, but the principle (the principle of the principal principle?) remains the same. With a second formula and a second number, you can raise the predictive power to, say, 90%. A number reflecting views on war/free trade does this better than any other.

What does this mean - well it means that the data is telling us that views that belong together on an axis are highly correlated with each other. Supporters of hanging and flogging tend to be nationalist, and supporters of free markets tend to be pro-war. It also tells us how much the parties overlap, and therefore how difficult it is for any party to position itself clearly without alienating a lot of supporters.

OK that's the good and interesting. What's wrong with this picture? Well for starters, there were only 1 or 2 questions on war and 6 on economics. Having 6 similar questions means that those 6 are 30% of the data and will almost certainly be reflected in a principal component. War may have found itself tacked on as a statistical artefact but I suggest there should be 6 questions on war too before we read too much into this correlation.

Similarly there were 6 questions on inter/nationalism - another 30% of the data - and two on crime. So nationalism is going to come out of the analysis, picking up one or two more questions in the same way.

So I think a safer interpretation is that there are two components or groupings by which answers are predictable: 1. nationalism and 2. economics, in a survey where a third of the questions are on nationalism, a third are on economics, and the last third are an assortment of other topics.

Oh. That's not exactly surprising is it? If we had a survey with 6 questions about electoral reform, 6 about income tax and 8 assorted others, I wonder what the two axes would be labelled then?

On libertarianism and public goods

2008-11-11T00:56:00.001Z

I have noticed an article in Tristan Mills' shared links defending libertarianism from the objection that the free market would undersupply public goods.

If that's all Greek to you, some explanation.

Shared links - a bloggers tool for sharing articles read elsewhere that might be interesting. My most recent shared links are listed on the right under the imperative read this too. A bit like libdig for one.

Libertarianism - an ideology that holds that a) property is more important than liberty, and b) that everything the state does is evil. At least those seem to be the priorities. If you are interested in libertarianism, I strongly recommend reading this, detailing one liberterian's escape after seeing the flaws in the ideology. In fact it is a more worthwhile read than the rest of this blog post. You can skip the stuff about the minimum wage. You may ask why I show so much interest in such a fringe ideology: it is partly based on that article that I believe libertarians are usually redeemable. (And while the arguments are specifically about the Ayn Rand flavour of libertarianism, most are applicable to saner flavours.)

Public goods - (wikipedia) goods that we benefit from, like air, science and free software, that we don't use up by enjoying, nor can we be effectively prevented from using.

OK, so what does this article say? There's a certain amount of reference to prior arguments, so pay attention. I should add that the author, ka1igu1a, appears to be one of the better kinds of libertarian, so I may be making some unfair assumptions.

[quoting] Underproduction of public goods is inevitable in the presence of 1) the ability to free-ride (i.e. non-excludable goods) and 2) rational self-interest.[end quote]

Knapp attacked this position by claiming "underproduction" to be subjective measure, a measure typically proclaimed by fiat by the central planner. Holtz's rejoinder to Knapp was that Knapp didn't understand "higher mathematics" and that economists have in their toolbox mathematical measures of optimality, including such measures of Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency.

However, ... In Public Choice theory, the "Redistribution Problem" is recast as "Government Failure." Government Failure more or less holds that public goods will be systematically over-produced. It should be noted that "over-production" violates any algorithmic standard of optimality just as under-production does; and,in fact, the violations can be much worse.

I have used the ellipsis to cut out what is presumably a carefully constructed argument, which I will take for granted. Ka1igu1a's retort boils down to this. Free markets may underproduce public goods (although I'm not necessarily accepting this), but governments overproduce them. This is of course no contradiction. I think it is probably true that markets underproduce public goods and governments overproduce them. This is hardly a compelling argument for the abolition of governments, but it is one for not letting them get too big.

The classic example of a public good supposedly is "national defense." Of course, it's difficult to justify why the US needs to spend roughly a trillion dollars a year on national defense. National Defense is Exhibit A of "government failure." The government failure is not in providing the public good of "defense," but that the overproduction of this public good is orders of magnitude more inefficient than any "market failure" could ever possibly be.

A good example. I agree that the US defence budget is too large. On the other hand I'm not sure that all defence budgets around the world are always too large. There are times, aren't there, when rearmament is a necessary evil? The 30s come to mind.

If you seriously believe that the US military industrial complex, with all it's stockpiles of WMD, is somehow a legitimate consequence of meeting a "public good,"

A US focus is fair enough on a US blog - but how does this argument apply elsewhere in the world?

Holtz seems unaware that human instrumental rationality, point (2), has been debunked by experimental economics, sociology, and game Theory for some time now.

No no no. If the problem is that it is irrational to produce public goods, it misses the point to assert that people aren't particularly rational anyway. Any rationality will lead to underproduction of public goods and any irrationality will lead to, well it could lead to anything, but there is no way you can predict it would lead to a systematic balancing overproduction of public goods. This is a very sloppy argument.

I should point out that Freedom Democrats utilizes Drupal Open Source Software. According to Holtz, I really shouldn't be even posting on this site, because Open Source Software should have long ago been killed by the non-excludable, free-rider problem. Yes, Open Source Software satisfies the definition of a "public good," however no one seriously would even dare to make a Pareto-optimality argument against it's under-production. Holtz's "inevitably argument" is empirically debunked.

If only Holtz had said that no public goods would be freely produced, ka1igu1a would have a point, but he didn't and he doesn't. My guess is that production of more, better open source software would be closer to Pareto optimal. Not that I think the state can do much to help.

OK, so where does this leave us. Public goods will be underproduced by free markets. There is a real dearth, I suspect, of very useful information. Trivial information you can put in a magazine or something and sell, but anything really important people will hear about, and you can't copyright the truth. In some respects governments do OK here - they pay for scientific research for example. But I guess if they did the same with software, it would be a disaster.

But drawing to a conlcusion, there seems to be a desperation among libertarians to come to the right conclusions however sloppy the arguments used to get there. To me this suggests that we are not dealing with the real reasons somebody has for supporting libertarianism. It suggests an approach which claims to know the answer before the question has been asked. This is not principled or rational, but arbitrary and dogmatic.

Tax: Labour to copy the Lib Dems; Tories to lose the plot

2008-11-10T12:26:00.006Z

We hear that Gordon Brown (not Alasdair Darling - what is his job, again?) is thinking about tax cuts as part of a fiscal stimulus package. This is something that the Lib Dems have been advocating for some time, particularly that taxes on people on lower and middle incomes are particularly good candidates for lowering to stimulate the economy. Such people are most likely to spend the extra money, and, if they are homeowners, to keep their homes as a result. This sort of stimulus also has the advantage over extra public spending in that it benefits the private sector directly, not just indirectly. More from Nick Clegg and myself on this here.

Some will doubtless feel offended at Labour stealing our policies, but I rather like it. They are admitting to the world that we were right all along, again, and that if you want the right policies on the economy without months or years of dithering first, then vote Lib Dem.

The Tories on the other hand, well, what can I say.

The Tories unveil their own plans, aimed at dealing specifically with unemployment, on Tuesday.
They say they would fund tax cuts through existing spending and not - as they suspect the government would do - through borrowing.

The Today programme was suggesting this means tax cuts targetted at people "likely to lose their jobs." Huh? What? How can you measure who is likely to lose their jobs, in a systematic enough way to include this concept in tax law? Or perhaps they just mean tax cuts for bankers. That could be it. But incorporating this kind of nebulous concept in tax law is even worse, and will lead to far more pointless complication of the tax system, than even Gordon Brown's insufferable tinkering. Whatever happened to a simpler tax system?

Bizarre as this is however, it is not the worst of it. They would fund these cuts "through existing spending" [cuts], not through borrowing. So this is not going to be a fiscal stimulus at all. The Tory response to the economic climate is to do nothing. Whoopee.

The Nick Clegg interview

2008-11-04T17:40:00.002Z

I've been well scooped on this by Charlotte, but I don't mind at all. Sharp and lithe, she said I was and I still can't decide which is the more gratifying. Charlotte was smoking like a chimney - with carbon capture and storage - throughout on her e-cig, and none of us noticed. Ditto in the cafe afterwards, until she 'fessed up. It looks like technology has thoroughly solved the problem of nuisance smoke. But I digress.

So, given the chance to grill Nick Clegg, what I wanted to do was deal with some of the recent criticism, not all from enemies, that our policy of tax cuts for people on low and middle incomes doesn't stand up to scrutiny so well after the latest phase of the financial crisis - or at least that it is no longer so clear exactly what we are proposing. I was hoping to steer the conversation towards how we might restore the discomfort our policy had been causing the Tories, but it didn't turn out like that.

So here it is, and I'm working more or less from Charlotte's transcript, so thanks for that. Nick is in italics.

If you go back to before the latest tranche of the financial crisis, our policy of tax cuts for the poor was causing all sorts of discomfort for the conservatives and their policy of the cupboard was bare was looking a bit foolish. I don't think that's working quite so well now. A lot of people are saying you can't offer tax cuts to people at the moment, and the osbourne attitude to business appears to be picking up a bit. is that fair? is it harder for us now to capitalise on teh position we had?

I think it's exactly the reverse. The one thing people instinctively know you can't do as you head into a recession is jack taxes up. If you look at the number of now serious commentators in the press, who are now saying that if you want to stimulate growth, which is something you desperately need to do if you're heading into a very serious recession, one of the ways, not the only way, but one of the ways is by cutting taxes. in a way - and this is the crucial caveat - in a way which can stimulate spending. Every economist will tell you that if you provide top down tax cuts to people at the top as the tories have done with their only tax proposal on inheritance tax, it doesn't help the real economy because they just salt away the difference. bottom up tax cuts do, they're socially just, they're clear and so helps stimulate spending on the hight street because people on low incomes can have the money to spend it, so the economic logic has got greater. Meanwhile people like [?] saying that tax cuts are now necessary, that puts us on the right side of the argument.

Look at the Tory position:I think the Tories have backed themselves into a disastrous cul-de-sac. There's no evidence that the Osbourne thing is filtering though. They've plummeted in the polls in terms of economic competence - hardly evidence of a message getting through to the public. What they're doing, which I think is a fascinating but from their point of view a disasterous strategic decision,is they have basically said to themselves, clearly, that their only purpose is to blame it all on Gordon, and that to do that they need to constantly go and on about how's he's spent too much in the past, therefore that allows us no flexibility to do anything now. I think it is a disasterous solution - firstly it's economically illiterate, because they're going on about government debt when the real issue in the British eoncomy is astronically high levels of private debt. I'm not pretending it's easy to make that distinction in public debate, but if you want to get down to the economic fundamentals - and you can argue it's a couple of percentage points to high or too low, but comparitarively speaking it's approximately 40%, it'll probably shoot up to 60% because of the automatic stabilisers and because of the bank bailout thing. Italian debt, if you want an extreme example is above 100%, French and German debt is about 20% higher and it's much, much lower than American debt. It's only, as any columnist will tell you - Government debt is - a compariative science. How are you compared in your Government debt to other government debts is often the crucial thing, because that's what leads to runs on currencies. So I think they're wrong economically, they're picking the wrong target, they're fighting over the wrong bone - government debt. The real problem is private debt. People have got themselves into terrible, terrible trouble. One of the ways you help people get out of debt is putting money back in their pockets.

Why this has been such a strategic disaster, is because their strategy is one of blame and inaction. They have no proactive menu to give the british people. they've got nothing to say on tax cuts, they've got nothing to say on interest rates. They say piffling stuff on small business, council tax - it's all smoke and mirrors and not serious. so i think they've got themselves into serious trouble. They can't do that for the next two years. "It's all your fault and there's nothing we can do" That council of despair is not going to work with the voters.

This is breathtakingly good stuff, and I am somewhat thrown off course by it all. Go back and read it again.

On a specific aspect of this, they're saying you shouldn't loosen fiscal policy at this sort of time...

They're not even saying that! Osbourne's remark was that he accepted borrowing going up.

The Keynesian line is that you do loosen fiscal policy because it keeps things going. I can see why they're trying to [oppose] that [loosening], because they're trying to reclaim a reputation for being sensible on the economy, which they'd lost to Labour.

I'm not sure about the transcript here, but what I am getting at is this. Osborne seems to be saying (I caught the first 5 minutes of one of his recent speeches), that you shouldn't loosen fiscal policy beyond the automatic stabilisers, because this does more harm than good to eventual recovery. So I am looking for our response to this specific point.

My feeling is that Osborne's point is over-simplified. There is a danger that if you expand the state to make up a shortfall in economic activity during a recession, then there will be no slack for the private sector to expand into, and so the recession will grind on. But to say that there should be no intentional expansion of state activity makes sense only if you do - as Osborne seems to - regard all state activity only as a deadweight drain on the productive economy; whereas if the state also has, through infrastructure, education and security for example, a positive effect on the private sector economy, then some expansion here, during a recession, seems much more reasonable.

Of course, as Nick has said, tax cuts for the poor are also an effective fiscal stimulus, and one that boosts the private not the public sector.

Anyway, onwards...

Of course you need to be fiscally responsible. But you do that over the cycle. As we're heading into what might be the worst recession in a generation, it is recipe for masochism and greater recession if you spend all the time fighting over actually miniscule differences in government debt. You've got to get growth going. If you don't, there's no revenue there, [...]. That is a priority now. I think what's interesting about the Tories is that they don't understand the enormity of what we're up against. They certianly don't understand the enormity of the knock to the legitimacy of their own prejudices in favour of deregulated financial services and so on, and the don't undrstand the risks of their 'do nothing' strategy - which is what they are, in effect, advocating.

I change tack at this point

Well, Labour on the other hand have already spent all of our £20 billion, therefore we had a policy that was agreed before the latest crisis. To carry on, seemingly unchanged, seems like we're not accepting what's happened, that in two years we're going to have to start again.

First of all, you don't rewrite every pound and pence of your public spending plans in the middle of a vertical decline in the national econonmy. Clearly That's something you resolve, finally, when you go the country before the general election. Whether you like it or not it's a moving target - it's part of the art of politics. what you can do, and what we're rightly doing, is saying at precisely the time when how you spend pulbic money is more important than ever before, because in addition to value for money, and accountability to the taxpayer, you've also got to work out how the money you spend on behalf of the public is helping to stimulate the economy or not.i think we are quite right in saying that in those circumstances, the arguments we've always levelled against certain forms of public spending, 5 billon on id cards, 13 on nhs it system which doesn't work, 2 billion on a whitehall inspection regieme, 12 billion on a new it survilance scheme, that is not intelligence use of money. we object to those allocations of money on reasons of principle and policy, but they are especially daft at at time when you are hoping public is going to stimulate the economy, and so should be spent in different ways.

I think this is a very important point. Some people who didn't particularly like Make it Happen (pdf), were saying that it should be thrown out as soon as economic circumstances seemed to change. But the same arguments would apply to any spending policy they did like.

And I think this is a good answer to some of the complaints that we are not clear enough. Any package will have to be adjusted to point in the economic cycle we find ourselves in at election time - not the point we find ourselves in today - but that by making our views on fiscal policy clear, we can indicate today what kinds of adjustments those will be in a recession - largely that the spending/tax cut side will be maintained, but that revenue side will not be expected to fully deliver yet.

Nick senses what I have been groping for

There's a slightly wider argument lurking behind your question - is public spending the right way to stimulate the economy? It is one way to stimulate demand, but it's not the only way, and crucially it's a delayed way of doing it. It has a chronology to it. The idea that brown should be become a latter day Anglo-Saxon version of Francois Mitterand , creating huge public projects around the country and this'll put us on the economic straight and narrow is a nonsense. Clearly public spending plays a role, borrowing goes up as the automatic stabilisers kick in, tax revenues go down, benefit payments go up.. i think what we need to do is maintain, as I tried to encapsulate in this week's prime minister's questions, that at precisely the times when millions of British families are tightening their belts, how government spends our money should be subject to even more scrunity than before. They need to be spending it on the right kinds of things. That seems to me more valid now than before.

Oh, so I was just asking the usual Keynsian v Austrian kinda question. Bit of a wasted opportunity perhaps. In the back of my mind there was a particular political angle to this, some way to pin down what the Tories actually stand for on something. Is Osborne a hardline Austrian, and would this be politically damaging? But Nick, in full flow, is a force of nature, and we didn't get there. Perhaps just as well as I was sitting next to a renowned libertarian who is probably sympathetic to the Austrian school.

Jonathan, Charlotte, Alex, Mat and Millennium Dome himself went on to ask their questions. I needed a rest.

Credit crunch: atheism to blame?

2008-10-23T14:12:00.003+01:00

I wouldn't normally bother with the vomitings of Mad Mel Phillips, but this one has been noticed for her quite touching explanation of the current financial turmoil. Touching, that is, in an everything-is-about-my-pet-hates kinda way.

She writes:

I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is ‘militant atheism’ which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda -- and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.

Wow. Clearly, according to Mel, atheism is, more or less, a rejection of all values and virtues. I would defy anybody to see that in the work of, to pluck one out of the air, Robert Ingersoll.

And Mel is wrong about unprecedented levels of violent crime. The past was much much more violent than today. See Pinker (text or video). I'm not sure what she means by the 'moral inversion of victim culture', presumably it is something to do with her desire to blame the victims of any injustices perpetrated by her in-group. The rest of the rant seems to be a complaint that people don't agree with her bile so much any more. Diddums.

Alonzo Fyfe likens this hate-speech against atheists to the hate-speech against Jews that was common in the 1930s, in the wake of another crash.

People seeking political power for themselves named Jews as the culprit, either through the corruption of their influence and their values on (otherwise) 'good' Christians, or as a part of a conspiracy to take over the world – or, at least, the global economy.

That vilification of the Jews had some very ugly consequences.

Today, blaming the Jews for economic bad news is not as popular as it used to be. Consequently, bigots need to find a new target group – one that can be effectively blamed where the people might actually believe the hate-mongering that the writers engage in.

I guess here in the UK we don't get quite as upset as this, but maybe we ought to. There is something compelling in the idea that if you have special access to knowledge of truth, beauty, and goodness, then those who disagree with you are on the side of lies, ugliness and evil. It is not just unthinking bigotry, but something that seeks to make bigotry a virtue, and the virtuous, bigots. Yet, you can find the best and the worst of humanity in virtually every faith-related or other identity group. Liberals included. Remember this if you are tempted. Conservatives and socialists alike seek a tyranny of the good, and differ only in their notions of the good. Liberals recognise that this is an intellectual trap - that we should focus not on the virtue of a would-be tyrant, but on the tyranny.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. Some of Mel's themes are not entirely unfamiliar closer to home. How's this:

Thus the inevitable decline in church attendance and religious belief, indicating the continued secularisation of British society, marches on. Religion, whilst clearly not the panacea for all the world's ills, at least has pretensions to a code by which it's devotees are to live and behave.

or this

such is the emerging animus towards religion, and such is the underlying utilitarianism of our political culture - that any statements about belief that are not utilitarian, including what we believe about right and wrong, are being similarly sidelined. This has brought with it something of a crisis of values inside the forces of liberalism.

These are quotes from Reinventing the State, the chapters by Lynne Featherstone and David Boyle respectively.

Luckily what Lynne and David are doing is arguing an ideological point. Mel, on the other hand attacks an entire faith-identity group (atheists), indifferent to the actual, diverse values and practises of the members of this group. It is easy to miss the distinction. Indeed for writing this post, I went back to Reinventing the State, and failed to find the juicier, more prejudiced quotes I thought I had remembered reading.

There is still a danger - that many will not distinguish between disagreeing with secularists and attacking atheists, just as it is often hard to distinguish between disagreements with islam and attacks on muslims. But we have to live with this danger because the debate must be had.

Mad Mel, meanwhile, isn't interested in the debate. She regards people like myself, much like many regarded the Jews of the 1930s. We have corrupted society, because we apparently have no values. What is to be done about us?

How not to destroy socialism

2008-10-16T22:44:00.008+01:00

Charlotte Gore has kindly offered to destroy socialism for us, explaining that it is wrong for the state to force us to do things that it think are good for us. Who could disagree with that? The question becomes a little muddier when it is not force but taxation, and not what is good for us, but what is good for other people.

When libertarians equate taxation with force, it seems to be because they have a good presumption against the initiation of force, and want to use it again. And they are not their brothers' keepers.

The comments have thrown up something that I tend to take for granted when evaluating or justifying policies.

I asked Charlotte this: Do you object to socialism because it is justified in terms of the greater good? Or do you object to the idea of the greater good, because it is used to justify socialism?

and she replied

I think the point is that you can use 'The Greater Good' as a moral justification to commit almost any act. Socialism - both terrible ends and terrible means - is justified in the same way.

So yes, I am against both the act and the moral justification that 'permits' the act. I am not against things just because they're justified by 'the Greater Good' - I just see it as a warning flag.

Now that you're asking, I think debating with people about whether or not Socialism would serve the Greater Good would, in effect, be to accept the premise of their argument - that the Greater Good can be a legitimate moral justification.

There's something in this I agree with. It is probably true that appeals to the greater good usually merit a reaction of horror.

And yet, I think a liberal society is a good one, in a way that a socialist or conservative society is not. Am I committing the same crime? So I responded along these lines:

I would agree that the "greater good" is a dangerously nebulous concept. So let's forget about the "greater". You are arguing, aren't you, that a smaller state is better than a bigger state? Some people will argue the opposite.

I say "X is good" and you disagree, do you say

"No, X is bad"

"No, 'X is good' is not a legitimate moral justification."

Adding that I find it hard enough to work out sometimes what is good and what is bad, never mind what makes a "legitimate" moral justification.

The trouble for arch libertarians, as I see it is that they are saying that it is wrong to use certain kinds of argument as moral justifications for political action. This is itself a moral claim very much of the kind that it itself condemns.

It seems to me that libertarianism, like Marxism, is full of the kind of implicit moral claims that are also condemned. Respect property. Don't initiate force. Anything the government does is evil. If these are not moral claims, then what are they?

So what alternative do I offer?

It seems to me there are two phases to the evaluation of a policy. 1, a prediction of the policy's effects, and 2, evaluation of those effects according to our values, that is whether it has good consequences.

This does seem inescapably to rely on a notion of the good. Frankly, no other standard makes any sense to me, than that a policy should have good consequences. What else might I possibly want to care about? Good intentions? Purleeeze. The road to hell, etc.

So it is a struggle to understand Charlotte's perspective that certain kinds of argument are dangerous and therfore cannot be used. Of course it is true they are dangerous. Prediction is never perfect (and so policy should be risk-averse) and some people have pretty warped values, and so some very bad policies could seem good after a process of prediction and evaluation.

But what is the alternative? To say that we don't care about the consequences? Yet even libertarians don't fail to claim that the libertarian society will be freer, happier, richer, and better in all sorts of ways. Do they say this just because they think it matters to us, when it really doesn't matter to them?

No. There are bad policies because there are bad predictions and bad evaluations, not because we shouldn't be trying to do either. And it is interesting how a confusion of prediction and evaluation is behind so many bad policies. Socialists are bad at prediction because of Marx. They liked his evaluation - although he couched it, like libertarians do, in apparently amoral rational terms - and so didn't subject his philosophy to the rigour that has blown it away. Greens are trying to reinvent economics - because they don't like the predictions it gives about their well-intentioned policies - by trying to add "moral" values to it, rendering it a hopeless tool of prediction.

We hone our tools for prediction with scientific skepticism, free debate and a respect for evidence over tradition. This is liberal of course, but what really defines the liberal are the values. That you know what is best for you, better than I do, and therefore I should respect your freedom. That I have no way of knowing whether my hopes and dreams are better or more important than yours are, and in this sense we are equal. That despite and because of our differences we have to get along. Liberty, equality and community. Not really fundamental values, but abstractions reflecting as best as possible the diverse inarticulable fundamental values in each of our heads.

Whew.

Ok, a final thought and a slight digression if you have not had enough already. I very much liked oranjepan's comment:

If we stop thinking of liberalism as an ideology and start thinking of it as a tendency which incorporates differing ideologies in different contexts then all the problems and inconsistencies dissolve away into compatibility.

All ideologies are great if you are rich and can control the circumstances in which you apply them, but if you're not rich it's a different matter. If you're not rich ideology becomes a way to explain the world which provides excuses for your lack of material success and prevents you from taking the opportunities to rise out of your situation.

Its much better not to dispute the truth or applicability of any ideology but to dispute the universality of its truths and define the limits of its application.

It provoked the retort

I think what you've said there sums up modern politics - especially our party. A pragmatic, managerial approach to politics

The response is that skepticism with regard to ideologies is pragmatic and therefore unprincipled. (Unprincipled? Is that like lacking an appreciation for the greater good? What a thing to suggest!)

Pragmatism is considering what works - it is calculating the actual effects of a policy. So it is consistent with - indeed essential to - a sound values-based judgement of those effects and therefore of the policy.

But I read in oranjepan's comment skepticism more than pragmatism. Don't get carried away with your ideologies. That is the sort of thing that leads to atrocities.

Greening the sprouts

2008-10-08T18:41:00.000+01:00

Charlotte and Steph have been telling us about the greenness of their school education. Now when I was at school, while I would bore my fellow students and any teachers who would listen, senseless, with the wisdom of EF Schumacher, I certainly never got any encouragement in return. My physics teachers were pro-nuclear of course, although one also signed me up to Amnesty International.

It never occurred to me that we might learn about something quite so intensely political as the environment, at school. Rather, I took it as my mission to bring this wisdom to my peers, along with that of any other hard-left causes I came across as a member of a poor middle class minority in a working class area.

Clearly all that changed, more or less as soon as I left school. I was shocked to see my daughter's Y3 school play about the rainforest, complete with evil loggers, noble savages and talking animals. Not that it was entirely, or even largely, wrong. Simplistic, black and white, saccharine, yes, of course it was all of those, what do you expect. But it seems that environmental values - not just environmental science - is now on the syallabus.

What should we make of this? Despite the special claims of faith schools, all schools are beacons of values, they all teach good behaviour, reponsibility, self-respect and so forth. So it makes sense to add environmental consciousness to the list. Yet there are legitimate political debating points that are necessarily brushed aside by this clarity of moral purpose.

And the more specific we get, the more problematic it becomes. Environmentalism is replete with received wisdom of variable quality, largely defined by the mass media, and therefore not a few contradictions. We wouldn't teach physics from articles in the Sunday papers, so why environmentalism? Surely the question of whether expanding nuclear power is an appropriate response to the threat of global warming, shouldn't be taught. Investigated, yes, debated, yes, but taught?!

Environmentalism also bears some of the scars of its years in the wilderness: a focus on the personal above the political, even when the personal is utterly symbolic; a tendency to blame corporations or profit for everything; a normal human tendency to evaluate evidence on the basis of where it comes from, and whether it fits the answers you are already proposing.

Still, clearly a whole generation of people has decided to teach the next the importance of doing something it wouldn't do itself. The only axe-grinders I remember teaching me were an anarchist, a Conservative and a Christian. Yet unlike those three, we have something nearing a consensus that environmentalism is the way forward. And when did that happen? Somehow, without my noticing, my views went from cranky to mainstream, without changing much.

All we need now is to do something about it. So what could be better than teaching our kids how to save the planet? (Other that doing it ourselves of course) Well how about teaching them how to crtically evaluate evidence and arguments? Include in that examining values and evaluating ethical arguments. Yet how many schools study philosophy and ethics? We need to learn to ask the right questions, not just be given what others think are the right answers.

David Cameron blames spelling reform for social breakdown

2008-10-01T17:25:00.004+01:00

In the context of talking about social breakdown, violence on our streets, and so on, Cameron offered three planks of policy to begin to tackle the problem: Families, Schools and Welfare.

Under schools there was the usual complaint about standards, and then this:

Listen to this. It's the President of the Spelling Society. He said, and I quote, "people should be able to use whichever spelling they prefer."

Isn't that shocking, that the Spelling Society doesn't stand up for correct spelling? Well no. The Spelling Society is a campaign for the simplification of English Spelling. They have slogans like

Why don't

comb
tomb
bomb

rime?

Why do

they
say
weigh

rime?

The point being that illogical spelling makes it harder for children to learn to read, leads to lower educational achievement, and contributes, presumably, in the long run, to, er, social breakdown.

This is not a campaign of trendy educationalists to take over our schools, but a campaign aimed at us, and in particular publishers, to spell words in a sensible way.

You might not agree of course, you might find the ossified spellings of a some particular previous century - I forget which - "quaint". Fine, but by putting that first you are the agent of social breakdown, not its opponent.

Cameron has taken the opposite view - saying that only by failing to reform English spelling are we going to staunch the tide of social breakdown. Or something like that. The full speech is parodied here, at Dave, nice but knave. (Which is me, really. Plug plug)

But perhaps I am reading too much into what Dave said. Perhaps it was just a pathetic retreat into a Tory comfort zone when faced with a difficult problem.

Update: more from Alix

With apologies to William Mcgonagall

2008-09-30T10:12:00.002+01:00

Profuse apologies to the world's best worst poet.

Twas in the year of 2008 in the month of September

Which the bankers of the world will long remember

For they did not act, as one would to a brother

In refusing to extend credit, one to another

For fail it did, the Bradford and Bingley

And we began to fear the banks would not go singlely

And collapse like a great house of cards

Or shatter like a mirror into millions of shards

Citigroup bought out the failing Wachovia

But that was not the last emergency takeover

The Halifax Bank of Scotland it had to be rescued

And the passage of the bailout plan by the US congress badly miscued

The Germans paid 35 billion Euros to Hypos Real Estate

And Glitnir was nationalised by the Icelandic State

Fortis of Benelux met, partially, with the same fate

All with little time for debate

This should never have happened according to some

Taxpayers will be paying for years to come

We must better regulate the banks, if only we are able

And next time we must listen to Vince Cable

Conservatives U turn on decentralisation

2008-09-29T21:31:00.009+01:00

The Tories are calling for a centrally-imposed freeze in council tax, as part of their commitment to localism.

I thought I might refer to their previous announcement on the subject of localism, and found that the page had been removed.

Luckily google cache comes to the rescue

All fine-sounding stuff of the type tories say when they are behind in the polls.

And google gives us the date:

It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 21 Sep 2008 05:51:27 GMT.

That's 8 days ago. This page seems to have been "lost" suspiciously close to the date of the announcement of this new policy.

The old Dave said:

So I hope that in 2008 the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party will join us in putting pressure on the Government to decentralise power, and that together we can create a new progressive alliance to decentralise British politics.

And the Conservatives, Dave, don't forget the Conservatives.

Hat tip: Quaequam blog!

Moral hazard in banking

2008-09-28T14:23:00.004+01:00

Banking as we know it is an industry largely made possible by regulation and deposit protection. There are unregulated savings schemes around, like FairPak, and unregulated borrowing, like from loan sharks. But with or without such protection, there is always a danger in having somebody else look after your money. Bankers and bank shareholders can profit from risk taking, but their losses are limited to their own stakes in the bank. This is moral hazard. The hazard is minimized if shareholders are left with nothing after a bailout, as they should be, but it is still there.

So the regulatory framework we have would seem to reflect the view that the sort of banking industry we have is worth having, that confidence in banks is worth protecting, and that depositors should be largely protected from the bad luck of a bank failure.

Clearly not everybody agrees. Some view banking as parasitical on the real economy, that without debt and credit we would all be better off. Banking, in this view should be essentially nationalised, so that the profits from credit creation goes to the public purse and so that investment favours public goods.

Others argue that the problem here is that the banking system is effectively already too much like a nationalised industry, with private banks merely agents of a state-controlled currency. Thus lighter regulation, private currencies, and banks being allowed to fail, are the answers. If depositors had more cause to care about the soundness of their banks, they would seek out and reward truly sound banks.

Both these camps are cheering the present crisis and pointing out how this proves that they were right all along. And in some small ways they are right.

Banking is parasitical in the sense that it does need to be bailed out from time to time. In the long run, it is therefore a subsidised industry, and seen in this light, public anger at overpaid failing bankers is entirely justified. Insisting that none of the bailout money goes on dividends or bonuses rather misses the point - the bailout money is socialising the loss. The profits mostly occur in another part of the cycle. I would favour an insurance pool paid into by the banks to fund the next bailout whenever that might occur. It would be in the banks interest that this fund is not called upon, and this might hopefully encourage them to engage constructively with regulators to help minimise systemic risks.

The other camp is right that interdependence of the banks and the central banks does give the system the characteristic of a monolithic monpolistic bank to which there is no alternative. Some risks are pooled rather than avoided, so instead of frequent bank failures hurting only a few, we have rare systemic threats that affect us all. But I, for one, would have even less confidence in an unregulated bank or a private currency, and I suspect only the real enthusiasts for those things would disagree. The moral hazard, of being able to profit from risks taken with the money of others, is just as great, or greater, in an unregulated bank as in a regulated one.

It may be dull, and we have overdone it lately, but credit is important. It makes all sorts of choices possible, and only some of them are unwise. And the banking system does a decent job of offering credit, better, certainly, than many state banks around the world have done - they tend to end up bullied by politicians into propping up failing state industries, and failing themselves. Better certainly than loan sharks, who we would be more beholden to if legal credit was greatly restricted. Better than LETS schemes, which are generally failures for reasons too many to go into here. The best alternative is perhaps the Building Society, and yet when many of them converted into banks, it hardly made much difference to their customers, except that they could suddenly get current accounts.

So it is important to maintain a banking system not unlike the one we have. The challenge is to do that while minimising moral hazard and the risks of failure, bailouts, and what amounts in the long run to a public subsidy to overpaid failures. Less regulation won't do this. More regulation won't necessarily do it either, and can increase risks. We need smarter regulation. Perhaps we need to revisit the reserve requirements abolished by Thatcher. But the details of this smarter regulation are beyond my competence.

I have one last possibly unworkable suggestion: that bank bonuses and dividends in future should be staged over, say, 10 years, the balance being held in a fund. If a bank fails, then it has a fund of effectively 5 years worth of bonuses and dividends which can be used to meet its obligations, those responsible for that failure paying a greater price than they would otherwise do. But banks could still pay as much as they like for success. Ideally banks would do this voluntarily, to show that they have the right incentives in place to be more reponsible with other people's money.