Dalai Oliver

What with the ongoing eurozone crisis, G8 summits and NATO confabs, politicians from around the world continue to dominate the headlines – but things don’t seem to be getting any better. Amid all that hot air, though, were a couple of nice pearls of wisdom in the past week. Both suggested salvation from beyond the world of politics.

At a press conference on the occasion of his receipt of the Templeton prize, the Dalai Lama blamed last summer’s riots on young people “being brought up to believe that life was just easy. Life is not easy. If you take for granted that life will be easy, then anger develops, frustration and riots.”

Indeed. Politicians spend a lot of time promising to make life easy, alleviate risk and absolve individuals from the consequences of their behaviour.

Meanwhile, in a BBC interview prompted by the government’s scrapping of nutritional regulations for school lunches, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver said “I’ve given up on politics. My focus for the next 15 years is business and people. That is where the hope is. Governments are too short term. They’re too transient…They really don’t understand. There’s a political agenda but when you make these changes there’s very physical things that happen that they know nothing about which is very dangerous.”

Indeed, again. Jamie will probably be more successful spreading the gospel of healthy eating as a businessman than as a lobbyist.

Both express a sentiment reflected in the UK’s recent local elections when just less than a third of the electorate bothered to vote. That was the real news in the election – the vast majority of the population recognize that the government is just irrelevant to most of their needs and aspirations.

Whatever politicians may say and promise, life is not easy and they’re unreliable partners.

Why I don't worry about Facebook using my data

David Henderson makes the crucial point about privacy concerns about Facebook versus government agencies:

[Blog commenter] figleaf is right that FB is contemptuous of privacy. I'm not sure that the U.S. Census Bureau is less contemptuous. Its handing over Census data to the Secret Service so the federal government could round up Japanese Americans and imprison them was pretty contemptuous of privacy, to put it mildly.

But let's grant, for the sake of this discussion, that FB is quite contemptuous of privacy and that the Census Bureau is less so. Here's the difference. Every single person who signs up with Facebook does so voluntarily. If FB had committed to guarding your privacy, then it would be breeching a contract by doing so. But I've never seen FB make that commitment.

The U.S. Census Bureau, by contrast, uses the threat of force to get its information. That's a pretty big difference. It's not one that I would expect, say, the New York Times, to point out. But it is a distinction that I would have expected from someone who calls himself a bleeding heart libertarian.

This is why I don't care very much about sites like Facebook collecting my data, but care very much about the government doing so, and can't stand the privacy brigade's calls for the government to regulate how websites use your data.

The double irony is that, as Henderson notes, governments (even democratic ones) have a terrible track-record of abusing their people the more they know about them. Whether by incompetence (government agencies reported 445 data losses between 2007-2010, compared to 288 in the private sector) or malice (Henderson's internment example), the government is the last organization I want to know about me.

When you sign up to Facebook, the burden is on you as an adult to check the terms of use if you're concerned about privacy issues. If you don't bother to read them, you value your time more than your privacy. Facebook doesn't sign a contract with you when you sign up — you're on the site at its pleasure, and if you don't like that, don't sign up. When it comes to private contracts between consenting adults, ignorance and laziness are no excuse.

This should be straightforward enough, but it hasn't stopped the snowball of government moves to regulate major web firms like Facebook and Google. There's this idea that people have a "right" to use social networking websites, so the government is entitled to impose certain standards on them. That mindset implies that the people at Facebook and Google are obliged to get up and work for you and that, if you don't like the terms they offer in exchange for you using their website, you have the right to appeal to state coercion to get your way. That socialist mindset should be long dead.

Unlike government, which is fundamentally coercive, nobody sticks a gun to your head and forces you to sign up. Unless people want to go down the path of seeing others as slaves to be pushed around by the government, they need to accept that contracts and mutual exchange are what should govern conduct between adults, not state diktat.

Let's sell the BBC: if the Chinese can do it so can we!

China continually surprises: it's ever so slightly odd to find yourself outflanked on the free market, capitalist, side by the remnants of a communist state. But that's what has just happened in China and it gives us the example of what we should do with the BBC. Sell it.

For that is exactly what the Chinese are doing, selling off chunks of the State broadcasters:

China's People.cn Co Ltd finished 74 percent higher on its first day of trading in Shanghai after a $219 million IPO as investors flocked to the state-backed news portal

And:

Beijing has actively encouraged its state-owned news media organizations to list in the domestic market in order to secure capital to improve services and extend Beijing's control in the free-wheeling Internet sector.

Xinhuanet, the Internet portal of state news agency Xinhua, is also set to raise 1 billion yuan in Shanghai,

The joy is that of course we'll be able to get the happy approval of all of the usual lefty media luvvies for this. You don't have to go far these days to hear someone praising the way that the Chinese state directs investment, manages the economy, builds infrastructure and so on.

So, we should be able to get over the cries of horror when we suggest flogging of the BBC simply by pointintg out that this is what the Chinese are doing and doesn't that make it wonderful?

And I have to admit, I'd be very tempted to buy it myself. Just think of the joy that can be had in slashing the bureaucracy, putting the self-appointed defenders of the 90% on the wages of the 90% and, joy of joys, rejecting licence fee funding by taking advertising! So, so many media types to affront and so, so little time alas.....

Individuals matter

Allister Heath’s ‘Editor’s Letter’ in City AM is one of my daily must-reads. Even if you can’t pick up a copy of City AM in the morning, you can catch up on Allister’s latest thoughts here.

He’s been on top form this week. Yesterday’s piece on inflation was excellent, but the pièce de résistance was Tuesday’s letter – ‘UK is wrong to have turned its back on individual freedom’. This is, quite simply, one of the best things I’ve read in a newspaper for a very long time:

Our country is dominated by busybodies and collectivists who believe that they and the state have the right and duty to tell us all what to do, to spend our money for us and to control what we can eat, drink, trade or say. It’s all gone too far. Individual freedom and its twin sister personal responsibility are the cornerstones of successful Western, liberal capitalist societies; yet these are being relentlessly undermined…

So this is my plea: let’s put the emphasis back on the individual. Let’s stop trying to ban everything. Let’s stop describing a tax cut as a “cost” to the government or – even worse – as morally identical to public spending. Let’s stop assuming adults should no longer have the right to eat fast food, or smoke, or drink, or paint their walls bright green, or build a conservatory in their back garden, or whatever it is they wish to do with their own bodies and with their own private property. Let’s once again speak up for the rights of consenting adults to choose how to live their own lives, even if we disapprove. Let’s allow people to hold, discuss or display their beliefs freely, especially if we disagree.

Here at the Adam Smith Institute, we couldn’t agree more.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the future

Jeff Tucker, writing from his new home at Laissez Faire Books, extolls the virtues of technology and the future:

True confession: I was once among the late adopters. I freely put down the techno enthusiasts. I wrote a highly negative review of Virginia Postrel’s provocative book The Future and Its Enemies, which turns out to have seen what I did not see. After the digital revolution advanced more and more, I began to notice something. By being a late adopter, I gained no advantage whatsoever. All it meant was that I paid a high price in the form of foregone opportunities. If something is highly useful tomorrow, chances are that it is highly useful today, too. It took me a long time to learn this lesson. . . .

In World War II, we saw technology used for mass murder and ghastly accomplishment of human evil as never before seen in history. Then we went through almost 50 years in which the world was frozen in fear of the uses of technology. It wasn’t called the Cold War for nothing. When it finally ended, the world opened up and we could turn our energies again toward technology that serves, rather than kills, people.

The real “peace dividend” you hold in your hand. It’s your smartphone. It’s your e-reader. It’s the movies you stream, the music you have discovered, the books you can read, the new friends you have, the amazing explosion of global prosperity that has visited us over the last 10 years. This is technology in the service of the welfare of humanity.

In conclusion, no, we are not oppressed by technology. We can embrace it or not. When we do, we find that it brightens both the big picture and our own individual lives. It is not to bemoan, ever. The state of nature is nothing we should ever be tempted to long for. We are all very fortunate to be alive in our times. My suggestion: Try becoming an early adopter and see how your life improves.

Hear, hear. Matt Ridley had a similarly optimistic post today, called "17 reasons to be cheerful".

I'm still a little pessimistic, though. Even if it isn't outright war, things like email surveillance, phony "anti-terror" erosions of our civil liberties and the medicalization of alcohol and tobacco make me worry. For all the quality of life improvements that technology brings, states can still wipe away everything we have at the push of a button.

Private libraries in practice

Yesterday's "pastygate" was a fun moment in England's usually-dreary political scene. Everybody was knowingly parodying themselves in "outrage" at the government removing the VAT exemption from Cornish pasties and sausage rolls — The Telegraph even set up a rolling live-blog. It was a rare display of fun self-awareness by the Westminster set. 

It reminded me of another silly story that took place around this time last year, with admittedly less self-awareness: the kerfuffle over "library privatizations". Some local councils, making spending cuts to adjust to cuts in their central government funding, decided that libraries were high up on the list of things to forgo. (This may have been politically driven, because it was mostly Labour councils shutting libraries down.) The media narrative ended up portraying this as a central government cut to libraries directly, so the whole story came to embody the supposed pain of austerity.

Eamonn Butler wrote a blogpost arguing that closing libraries was not just necessary but also desireable, which provoked an angry storm on Twitter among followers of John Prescott. Funnily enough, it became our most popular blogpost ever, with around 30,000 direct hits to it alone, and counting. Now, on the terrific Atlantic Cities blog, I read about a case of privately-run public libraries working quite well in practice:

Even the councilman who opposed the move, Bob Kellar, says he hasn't heard any complaints since the new system opened in July. "I have visited the library a couple of times and walked around. I was very impressed with what I've seen," he says. "I really haven't felt that there has been any push-back."

Indeed, it sounds like there's not much to complain about. Hours have increased. The library is now open on Sundays. There are 77 new computers, a new book collection dedicated to homeschooling parents and more children's programs. Santa Clarita is even installing a fancy laptop dispenser, where patrons can swipe their card to check out a laptop to use anywhere in the system. Visits are up; a new facility is in the works.

This is different to privatized libraries, because the city is still paying. But it's an interesting step, and one that library-lovers should pay attention to. The savings from outsourcing the running of these libraries have been significant (in the region of 20-25%) and it looks like, if anything, quality has improved.

It's not ideal: the public shouldn't be paying for libraries, which should be funded by charities or subscriptions. But it's a start.

Against the workforce reflecting the demography of the market

I was really rather shocked to see this statement for it's such an inversion of the truth.

It is beyond question that every industry should be aiming for a workforce that is inclusive, non-discriminatory and accurately reflects the demographics of its market. As many companies are quick to acknowledge, this doesn't just make moral sense, it makes business sense.

It's an entire mockery of the most basic economic explanation of how wealth is created. Which is, as Our Adam pointed out, through the division and specialisation of labour and the trade in the resultant production. The implication of this is that far from our wanting the workforce of any particular industry to reflect the demographics of its market we want said workforce to be entirely different from the customers.

The point is most obvious at the extremes: we don't get babies to make nappies nor the crippled elderly install chairlifts. And it would be a very odd prostitute indeed who reflected the gender characteristics of her customer base (his, perhaps, her, no).

But when we abandon such extremes we're still in fact trying to do precisely the opposite of making the workforce the same as or reflect the characteristics of the customer base. Bakers employ people who both can and are willing to bake bread: bread is purchased from bakers by those who either cannot or do not wish to bake bread. And I'm certainly entirely happy that those who make airplanes are not as cackhanded as I am.

So it isn't just that we shouldn't worry about the demographics of the workforce, something that the impersonal activities of the market allow us to ignore. It's that the very functioning of the market, the very division and specialisation of labour that brings the market into existence as a means of distributing production, insists that far from wanting the workforce to be the same as the customers we're actually insisting that they must be different.

It's entirely true that certain forms of difference are not important: skin colour never, genitalia in only very specific circumstances and so on. But the idea that the workforce must reflect the customers is simply arrant, absolute, nonsense. For the entire point of the whole enterprise is that the skills, needs and desires of the two groups are different.

Privatise the Olympics

I became a fully conscious taxpayer a couple of years before Montreal hosted the 1976 Olympic games. Those games are probably best remembered as the ones that started the modern era of over-blown, over-budget and financially disastrous Olympic games. With notable exceptions of the games in Los Angeles and Atlanta, all of them have been vanity sinkholes for taxpayer cash. For Montreal taxpayers, the last bond was finally paid off in 2006.

As London’s moment approaches, yet another report suggests they’ll be over budget, perhaps as high as £11 billion compared with the official budget of £9.3 billion. Security costs in particular are running way ahead of forecast. It doesn’t really matter what the actual number is or why – everybody knew it was going to happen because that’s the norm for these games.

And this is really no surprise because nobody actually “owns” the games. The International Olympic Committee oversees them but doesn’t fund them. Its 15 committee members of the great and the good include six princes and sheikhs and many former athletes who have glided up the ranks of assorted sporting federations. One member has a diploma in Gender and Development, a diploma in Gender Responsive Project Implementation and a certificate in Training of Gender Trainers. Another has been a big shot in the Jordanian air force. Only a couple have any extensive experience in the upper reaches of business.

The IOC’s job is to con governments into thinking that hosting and, most importantly, paying for the games is a good idea. At that chore, they’re hugely successful given the frantic bidding for the alleged privilege of hosting the games. Emerging market governments use them to promote their emergence. Mature economies tout them as a rejuvenation or a boost to sports participation.

Rejuvenation was key to London’s bid – developing the city’s decaying east end. Never mind that developments in the Docklands had already started that process decades earlier and that the sheer pressure from housing demand in London has seen a relentless gentrification of the area. If the government really wanted bang for the buck on this front, a few years suspension of business rates or bargain council taxes would have been far more effective.

But, no, politicians get caught up in the IOC’s magic spell and most of them know they won’t be around when the bills come due, some six years after they “win” the games.

So how about just privatising the whole Olympic racket by making the IOC responsible for funding them? Bar the odd tax break here and there for facilities, this concept works fine for football, rugby, cricket, motor-sport, tennis, golf and many others. A really smart IOC would create a permanent site for the games, perhaps in the land of their origin Greece which could use the business without the drain on taxpayers.

Sadly, though, there’s nobody to privatise the IOC as long as there’s willing governments to stump up the cash. These have included despotic regimes like China and Cuba and arrivistes like Brazil and Turkey. But they have also included bids from governments with much clearer responsibilities to their taxpayers. For the 2012 games, final candidates besides the UK included Germany, France, Spain and the US  - all of whom  should have known better (and must be mightily relieved now that they “lost”). Radical reform of the Olympic games will be a slow process but would be speeded along if taxpayers just said no. 

Government should butt out of marriage and churches

UK Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone want to legalise gay marriage. Fine by me: I don't see why gay couples should not be able to sign up for the same obligations, rights and benefits that heterosexual couples observe and enjoy.

She also wants gay couples to be allowed to marry in church, like heterosexual ones. Again, I have no problem with that, if the church is willing to do it.

The Church of England, typically, is divided on the issue. As the Established Church, they do pretty well out of their cosy relationship with the state, not the least of which is that two dozen of their senior executives, the bishops, sit by right in the House of Lords. So when ministers tell them to do cartwheels the Church of England normally swallow their principles, hitch up their cassocks and cartwheel.

The trouble is that some time ago, the state muscled in on marriage. Churches had been doing their own thing for millennia, but when the state started taxing rich folks and paying benefits to poor ones, it had to find some way of defining families so that it could establish the tax base and the appropriate unit to which benefits should be paid (two can live as cheaply as one, and all that). So they nationalised the whole business, and shoehorned everyone into a single set of regulations, as governments do.

But should we be so shoehorned? Maybe one of the reasons why the one-size-fits-all state-produced marriage contract has declined so much is that people today are more individual, and want to fashion their own ways of living, rather than have a standard, off-the-peg package of obligations forced on them. And so they should. People should be able to draw up their own lifetime contracts, accepting some bits of the present marriage contract, rejecting others and adding different ones of their own if they choose. Certainly, the state might insist on some minimum elements if people want to be taxed, and draw benefits, as a family. But apart from that, it should keep its nose out.

Likewise, Ms Featherstone should keep her nose out of what the churches choose to do. They too may have their own minimum standards for marriage, which couples have to sign up to before they can expect to be married on the premises. Fine. Churches are private clubs, let them get on with it. Personally, I would be campaigning for them to accept gay couples, but I wouldn't force church officials to betray their consciences. These are deeply held ethical positions. Churches have been thinking about the morality of lifetime partnerships a good deal longer than Ms Featherstone has.

I do wish politicians would buzz off and leave us all to our private sphere, allowing us to wallow in our own eccentric diversity rather than forcing us into tidy moulds. At this, rate, they will be demanding that the churches should not discriminate on the grounds of religion, and should accept other faiths into membership. I don't know what Cardinal O'Brien is going to make of it when he has to hand out wine and wafers to his first Satanist.

Correction: An earlier version of this post claimed that the government planned to force churches to perform gay wedding ceremonies. This is untrue. The post has been corrected.

I'm excited about Raspberry Pi

Today sees the launch of the Raspberry Pi, a fully-functional computer the size of a credit card selling for about £22. It’s a brilliantly stripped-down device, with a mobile phone charger power socket, a modest (but functional) amount of memory, a few USB ports and a video output that works with most televisions. It comes bundled with Linux and some software that teaches you the basics of computer programming.

It’s an exciting product. Funded entirely by the project’s developers on a non-profit basis, it’s being aimed at schoolchildren, and the first 10,000 built will be shipping to schools. It’ll be great to see how that goes. I don’t know if learning computer programming in school is going to make many students love it – it’s hard to find good IT teachers and, in my experience, having something forced on you at school is a recipe for hating it. But even still, lots of kids will be able to teach themselves on these, either at home or outside normal class time, and that’s great.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the real benefit of the Raspberry Pi device, though, is the rest of the world. Once production of the Raspberry Pi ramps up to meet demand for it, millions of people will suddenly be within reach of owning a computer, instead of having to rely on internet cafes. That means they can spend much more time on them, learning exactly the sort of computer skills that are easily sold across the internet. Adding wifi to the device through a standard wifi dongle  would mean that businesses could sell wifi access in poor neighbourhoods.

The tragedy of the modern age is how much talent is being wasted in subsistence farming work, with little access to the benefits of the ongoing technological revolution. People across Africa have used cheap mobile phones to develop sophisticated banking and credit systems that have helped to spur investment and remittance transfers from relatives in rich countries. The Raspberry Pi may just be a way of unlocking some of that human capital and unleashing a second, human revolution.