Panchromatica

Economics as Religion - revisited

Since my earlier post on this topic I have discovered Steve Kanga's Liberal FAQ, including this one on the 'Austrian School' of economics - (behind the Mises Institute).

Summary

The Austrian School of Economics is a tiny group of libertarians at war with mainstream economics. They reject even the scientific method that mainstream economists use, preferring to use instead a pre-scientific approach that shuns real-world data and is based purely on logical assumptions. But this is the very method that thousands of religions use when they argue their opposing beliefs, and the fact that the world has thousands of religions proves the fallibility of this approach. Academia has generally ignored the Austrian School, and the only reason it continues to exist is because it is financed by wealthy business donors on the far right. The movement does not exist on its own scholarly merits.

I don't entirely accept that the use of logic is a defining factor in religion - the problem for me is that the initial premise always has to be taken on faith. The argument after that can be entirely logical but still lead to a nonsensical conclusion, which is what I assume Steve Kanga means. It's well worth a read. The summary above sort of confirms my gut reaction set out in the earlier post.

Pensions revisited

Via this post on Crooked Timber I found this older post which covers many of the points I made (and more) in my own post here.

The trouble with pension funds is that for too long, they have been treated as if they were benefits provided by a benevolent employer, rather than as a long-dated financial claim. Pension fund claimants have few rights; they have the right that the employer keep sufficient financial asset holdings to reassure an actuary that the claims can be paid, and that these asset holdings be held in a trust legally separate from the company. They have the right to appoint a minority of the trustees of that trust. And that is about it.

This mugs guide to pensions is worth reading too.

[Declaration of interest - I've got mine - in my case following from being made redundant]

Economics as religion

In trying to track down the origin opf the phrase 'private affluence - public squalor', (which turns out to be J K Galbraith) I came across this blog from the Mises Institute.

What struck me most about it as I read the posts, and more particularly the comments, was the evangelical fervour with which the discussion was conducted and sacred texts quoted. It reminded me also of my younger days and the similar fervour of members of the Socialist Labour League, Militant and the SWP.

This seems to be the inevitable outcome of certainty - the more sure you are that you have the answer, the greater the fervour with which you promote it and eventually supress dissent. There are of course honourable exceptions - but not many.

Bizarre #3

New life for main roads

Via the Neigbourhoods blog I found a new website from Transport 2000 called New life for Main Roads

Main roads are often noisy, polluted places, dominated by cars and dangerous for people on foot. But main roads are also the places we use to get to the shops, catch the bus, walk to the local park or visit the doctor. Most people use main roads every day to get to work or to walk to school. We need new life for our main roads! Main roads and high streets should be:

* Easy to cross where you want to cross
* Places for people
* Safe from traffic danger
* Green, clean and attractive

Material is still being added, including in September photographs which can be used to support local action.

I don't know why we make such a mess of our public spaces. Most of Europe seems to do infinitely better than we do. Look at the Project for Public Spaces website for lots of good examples

Ten works of fiction - Part 2

I'm dribbling the other five out over several posts.

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Dicken's own favourite of his novels, the adventures of David remain heart-warming and touching to this day. Full of the best Dickensian characters – Peggoty, Betsy Trotwood, Uriah Heep, I still find myself swept up into their lives every time I read it. I still have my original copy - hardback- purchased in Woolworths when I was about 12 for I think 2/6.

Woolworths at that time carried copies of all the 'classics' - I have three Dickens novels from there, Nicholas Nickleby, Tale of Two Cities as well as David Copperfield, plus Jules Verne, Fenimore Cooper and others.

Would anyone offer Dickens to a 12 year old to read these days?

Bizarre #1

An offer I've managed to refuse...

In hte last 45 minutes or so I've had three emails offering me access to a share of something in the region of $45m - the last of these was only for $15m though so I'm obviously moving down market.

Kamm on Levin

In his post on the death of Bernard Levin, Oliver Kamm makes an interesting point about the attitude of the Left to the arts.

Thirdly, unlike one or two journalists I could name whose half-baked cultural enthusiasms served merely as a cipher for their own political prejudices, Levin had a great knowledge and appreciation of art, music and literature, and was able to communicate those enthusiasms lucidly and expertly. He did so not as a hobby, but as a duty. One of the columns I most prize of his output - it's in one of his collections, and I'll quote from it when I get home - referred to the philistinism of the Greater London Council under the (unelected) leadership of Ken Livingstone in the early 1980s. The GLC Labour group of that time took it into its collective tiny mind to divert public support for the arts away from the supposedly elitist Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank and towards a 'People's Festival' in Hyde Park. Levin was quick to mock the stupidity of this affectation, which reflected more an obscurantist refusal to acknowledge the concept of aesthetic excellence than any genuine left-wing tradition. The socialist convictions of William Morris, Robert Blatchford or, in our own day, Arnold Wesker, inspired their advocates not to decry high art but to attempt to spread appreciation of it more widely. Levin's denunication of the cultural vandalism of an intellectually disreputable part of the Left - the real snobs, for they implicitly assume that Beethoven or Janacek is not for the likes of their own constituents - was always a joy. But more than that, it was an education. His enthusiasms were diverse, and some were perplexingly idiosyncratic - but it was difficult not to get drawn into them as he advanced them in his impeccable prose. He will be much missed.

I've seen this attitude at work myself in all sorts of areas - I recall a discussion at a (Labour controlled) local authority planning committee some years ago, about a small grant to restore a historic building where Garibaldi had stayed. The building was of great architectural value anyway, but the association with Garibaldi added historical and political significance to its restoration.

In the end though the discussion degenerated into one about biscuits, in a perverse display of cultural and political arrogance. The politicians there seemed incapable of understanding that 'ordinary people' had any affection or concern for their own history and projected their own philistinism onto their electorate.

Selfishness

This article from Johann Hari, about speed cameras, points up the stupidity of those who hide behind cries of liberty in defense of their own selfishness.

The Tory Party yesterday accused the government of being "wildly over-zealous" in its pursuit of paedophiles. Its front-bench spokesman, Damien Green, complained about the "cash-guzzling" police efforts to catch child-killers, and said he wanted to protect browsers of internet pornography from being "endlessly monitored" and "made to feel like criminals" by Tony Blair's nanny state. Child molestors are anyway "otherwise law-abiding people" who "do not deserve to be persecuted".

Well, almost. The Tories were in fact speaking about a far bigger killer. Paedophiles slaughter 15 children a year on average. Speeding kills 150. The same people who whip up lynch mobs against suspected sex offenders are doing everything they can to dismantle speed cameras - even though they have been conclusively proven to save far more children's lives than even the most vigilant anti-paedophile unit.

A detailed three-year study of speed cameras recently found that the cameras slash death rates by 40 per cent. Across Britain they prevent 900 deaths and serious injuries every year; it takes paedophiles 60 years to hit that body count.

...

The revolt against speed cameras is a symptom of a much wider trend. As individuals, we now find it very hard to bear a small inconvenience to ourselves in return for a large collective good. We can rant against paedophiles because there is no cost to us, but tackling speeding requires each of us to slow down. Setting out ten minutes earlier for a meeting is a small price to pay to save lives, but we find it increasingly intolerable. We put our individual needs above the collective every time.

There is a similar mindset at work in this post from the Adam Smith Institute about the drink drive laws, and in what was a particularly egregious performance from David Carr of the Libertarian Alliance on the BBC Straw Poll programme recently about obesity.

In both these cases, there was no attempt to consider reality. Carr talked about 'supposedly fattening foods' as if they were some urban myth while Madsen Pirie of the ASI tried to argue that there was 'no evidence that any deaths are caused by drivers with between 50 and 80 milligrams of alcohol in their blood.' I've already posted about Pirie here

Both of these people chose to bury the facts in order to make political points. In the case of the ASI they do it repeatedly. This is if anything worse than selfishness.

[Johann Hari post via Harry's Place]