Cartoons – We Know Zero

Time to leave Flatland?

26. September 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons, Economics, Media & Politics, Professions, Science Fiction

*Source: https://pluspng.com/img-png/mixed-economy-png–901.png*

Just type “mixed economy graphic” into Google and you will get a lot of diagrams like this one – note that they normally have to pick out the United States for special mention. Notice the big gap between those countries – North Korea, Cuba, China and Russia – and us. It is a political statement masquerading as an economic one.

This same line is used to describe our political options. The Political Compass added an authoritarian/libertarian axis in their 2024 election manifesto analysis but the line from left to right (described as the economic scale) is still there:

*Source: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2024*

So here we are on our political and economic spectrum, where tiny movements between the very clustered Reform, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat positions fill our newspapers and social media comment. The Greens and, presumably if it ever gets off the ground, Your Party are seen as so far away from the cluster that they often get left out of our political discourse. It is an incredibly narrow perspective and we wonder why we are stuck on so many major societal problems.

This is where we have ended up following the “slow singularity” of the Industrial Revolution I talked about in my last post. Our politics coalesced into one gymnasts’ beam, supported by the hastily constructed Late Modern English fashioned for this purpose in the 1800s, along which we have all been dancing ever since, between the market information processors at the “right” end and the bureacratic information processors at the “left” end.

So what does it mean for this arrangement if we suddenly introduce another axis of information processing, ie the large language AI models. I am imagining something like this:

What will this mean for how countries see their economic organisation? What will it mean for our politics?

In 1884, the English theologian, Anglican priest and schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott published a satirical science fiction novella called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Abbott’s satire was about the rigidity of Victorian society, depicted as a two-dimensional world inhabited by geometric figures: women are line segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides. We are told the story from the viewpoint of a square, which denotes a gentleman or professional. In this world three-dimensional shapes are clearly incomprehensible, with every attempt to introduce new ideas from this extra dimension considered dangerous. Flatland is not prepared to receive “revelations from another world”, as it describes anything existing in the third dimension, which is invisible to them.

The book was not particularly well received and fell into obscurity until it was embraced by mathematicians and physicists in the early 20th century as the concept of spacetime was being developed by Poincaré, Einstein and Minkowski amongst others. And what now looks like a prophetic analysis of the limitations of the gymnasts’ beam economic and political model of the slow singularity has continued to not catch on at all.

However, much as with Brewster’s Millions, the incidence of film adaptations of Flatland give some indication of when it has come back as an idea to some extent. This tells us that it wasn’t until 1965 until someone thought it was a good idea to make a movie of Flatland and then noone else attempted it until an Italian stop-motion film in 1982. There were then two attempts in 2007, which I can’t help but think of as a comment on the developing financial crisis at the time, and a sequel based on Bolland : een roman van gekromde ruimten en uitdijend heelal (which translates as: Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe), a 1957 sequel to Flatland in Dutch (which didn’t get translated into English until 1965 when the first animated film came out) by Dionys Burger, in 2012.

So here we are, with a new approach to processing information and language to sit alongside the established processors of the last 200 years or more. Will it perhaps finally be time to abandon Flatland? And if we do, will it solve any of our problems or just create new ones?

The Early Career Professional and the Reverse Centaur

07. August 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Professions, Science Fiction

In a previous post, I mentioned the “diamond model” that accountancy firms are reportedly starting to talk about. The impact so far looks pretty devastating for graduates seeking work:

And then by industry:

Meanwhile, Microsoft have recently produced a report into the occupational implications of generative AI and their top 40 vulnerable roles looks like this (look at where data scientist, mathematician and management analyst sit – all noticeably more replaceable by AI than model which caused all the headlines when Vogue did it last week):

So this looks like a process well underway rather than a theoretical one for the future. But I want to imagine a few years ahead. Imagine that this process has continued to gut what we now regard as entry level jobs and that the warning of Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, that half of “administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30” could be gone in 5 years, has come to pass. What then?

Well this is where it gets interesting (for some excellent speculative fiction about this, the short story Human Resources and novel Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky will certainly give you something to think about), because there will still be a much smaller number of jobs in these roles. They will be very competitive. Perhaps we will see FBI kind of recruitment processes becoming more common for the rarified few, probably administered by the increasingly capable systems I discuss below. They will be paid a lot more. However, as Cory Doctorow describes here, the misery of being the human in the loop for an AI system designed to produce output where errors are hard to spot and therefore to stop (Doctorow calls them, “reverse centaurs”, ie humans have become the horse part) includes being the ready made scapegoat (or “moral crumple zone” or “accountability sink“) for when they are inevitably used to overreach what they are programmed for and produce something terrible. The AI system is no longer working for you as some “second brain”. You are working for it, but no company is going to blame the very expensive AI system that they have invested in when there is a convenient and easily-replaceable (remember how hard these jobs will be to get) human candidate to take the fall. And it will be assumed that people will still do these jobs, reasoning that it is the only route to highly paid and more secure jobs later, or that they will be able to retire at 40, as the aspiring Masters of the Universe (the phrase coined by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities) in the City of London have been telling themselves since the 1980s, only this time surrounded by robot valets no doubt.

But a model where all the gains go to people from one, older, generation at the expense of another, younger, generation depends on there being reasonable future prospects for that younger generation or some other means of coercing them.

In their book, The Future of the Professions, Daniel and Richard Susskind talk about the grand bargain. It is a form of contract, but, as they admit:

The grand bargain has never formally been reduced to writing and signed, its terms have never been unambiguously and exhaustively articulated, and noone has actually consented expressly to the full set of rights and obligations that it seems to lay down.

Atul Gawande memorably expressed the grand bargain for the medical profession (in Better) as follows:

The public has granted us extraordinary and exclusive dispensation to administer drugs to people, even to the point of unconsciousness, to cut them open, to do what would otherwise be considered assault, because we do so on their behalf – to save their lives and provide them comfort.

The Susskinds questioned (in 2015) whether this grand bargain could survive a future of “increasingly capable systems” and suggested a future when all 7 of the following models were in use:

The traditional model, ie the grand bargain as it works now. Human professionals providing their services face-to-face on a time-cost basis.
The networked experts model. Specialists work together via online networks. BetterDoctor would be an example of this.
The para-professional model. The para-professional has had less training than the traditional professional but is equipped by their training and support systems to deliver work independently within agreed limits. The medical profession’s battle with this model has recently given rise to the Leng Review.
The knowledge engineering model. A system is made available to users, including a database of specialist knowledge and the modelling of specialist expertise based on experience in a form that makes it accessible to users. Think tax return preparation software or medical self-diagnosis online tools.
The communities of experience model, eg Wikipedia.
The embedded knowledge model. Practical expertise built into systems or physical objects, eg intelligent buildings which have sensors and systems that test and regulate the internal environment of a building.
The machine-generated model. Here practical expertise is originated by machines rather than by people. This book was written in 2015 so the authors did not know about large language models then, but these would be an obvious example.

What all of these alternative models had in common of course was the potential to no longer need the future traditional model professional.

There is another contract which has never been written down: that between the young and the old in society. Companies are jumping the gun on how the grand bargain is likely to be re-framed and adopting systems before all of the evidence is in. As Doctorow said in March (ostensibly about Musk’s DOGE when it was in full firing mode):

AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can’t do your job

What strikes me is that the boss in question is generally at least 55. As one consultancy has noted:

Notably, the youngest Baby Boomers turned 60 in 2024—the average age of senior leadership in the UK, particularly for non-executive directors. Executive board directors tend to be slightly younger, averaging around 55.

Assume there was some kind of written contract between young and old that gave the older generation the responsibility to be custodian of all of the benefits of living in a civilised society while they were in positions of power so that life was at least as good for the younger generation when they succeeded them.

Every time a Baby Boomer argues that the state pension age increases because “we” cannot afford it, he or she is arguing both for the worker who will then be paying for his or her pension to continue to do so and that they should accept a delay in when they will get their quid pro quo, with no risk that the changes will be applied to the Boomer as all changes are flagged many years in advance. That contract would clearly be in breach. Every Boomer graduate from more than 35 years ago who argues for the cost of student loans to increase when they never paid for theirs would break such a contract. Every Boomer homeowner who argues against any measure which might moderate the house price inflation which they benefit from in increased equity would break such a contract. And of course any such contract worth its name would require strenuous efforts to limit climate change.

And a Boomer who removes a graduate job to temporarily support their share price (so-called rightsizing) in favour of a necessarily not-yet-fully-tested (by which I mean more than testing the software but also all of the complicated network of relationships required to make any business operate successfully) system then the impact of that temporary inflation of the share price on executive bonuses is being valued much more highly than both the future of the business and of the generation that will be needed to run it.

This is not embracing the future so much as selling a futures contract before setting fire to the actual future. And that is not a contract so much as an abusive relationship between the generations.

Humpty Dumpty and the Terrorism Act

07. July 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Cartoons, Legal, Media & Politics

*Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871.*

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

This is the country we are now living in. Because 4 members of a group sprayed red paint on some aircraft and caused some damaged using crowbars at an Oxfordshire base, as part of a series of protests designed to end international support for Israel’s war in Gaza for which they have all been arrested and charged, the whole organisation has been “proscribed” following a vote of 385 votes to 26 in the House of Commons and the order subsequently signed by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, putting it on a par with organisations like ISIS (a full list of the 81 organisations proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000 and the 14 Northern Ireland organisations proscribed under previous legislation can be found here).

Proscription makes it a criminal offence to:

belong, or profess to belong, to a proscribed organisation in the UK or overseas (section 11 of the act)
invite support for a proscribed organisation (the support invited need not be material support, such as the provision of money or other property, and can also include moral support or approval) (section 12(1))
express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation (section 12(1A)) – this one was added by the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.
arrange, manage or assist in arranging or managing a meeting in the knowledge that the meeting is to support or further the activities of a proscribed organisation, or is to be addressed by a person who belongs or professes to belong to a proscribed organisation (section 12(2)); or to address a meeting if the purpose of the address is to encourage support for, or further the activities of, a proscribed organisation (section 12(3))
wear clothing or carry or display articles in public in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that the individual is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation (section 13)
publish an image of an item of clothing or other article, such as a flag or logo, in the same circumstances (section 13(1A)) this one was also added by the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.

References are to sections of the Terrorism Act 2000.

In order to be proscribed, the Terrorism Act states that an organisation must have:

committed or participated in acts of terrorism;
prepared for terrorism;
promoted or encouraged terrorism (including the unlawful glorification of terrorism); or
be otherwise concerned in terrorism.

And terrorism is defined as:

the use or threat of action which: involves serious violence against a person; involves serious damage to property; endangers a person’s life (other than that of the person committing the act); creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or section of the public or is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

The use or threat of such action must be designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and must be undertaken for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

As a consequence, 29 people were arrested under terrorism legislation for protesting about the proscription, including an 83 year old retired priest, arrested after appearing to be in possession of a placard. I assume it was the one shown here.

The organisation’s website now displays the following message:

Co-founder of Palestine Action Huda Ammori is seeking to bring a legal challenge against the Home Office with a hearing for permission to bring a judicial review set to take place during the week of 21 July. Meanwhile a new group has suddenly appeared, armed with a fresh supply of red paint and targetting Time Logistics (which they say supplied one of Israel’s biggest weapons companies) lorries near Birmingham.

And the name of the new group? Yvette Cooper.

Happy New Year!

03. January 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons, Economics, Professions, Risk, Science Fiction

Happy new year to everyone who reads this blog! I am planning for there to be quite a lot more activity here in 2025, moving from an average of one article a month to at least weekly. There should be more cartoons too – Pinhead and Spikes even made it to our Christmas cake this year.

There is a lot I want to write about this year. Expect some or all of the following themes in the next few months (in no particular order):

Some examples using Steve Keen’s Ravel software to demonstrate how Government debt is not the constraint they think it is.
Extending Naomi Alderman’s argument in The Future that we could get rid of the Tech Bros and not miss them, effectively upending Ayn Rand’s ideas in Atlas Shrugged. They are not key workers.
Keynes’ argument that, with the future so uncertain, we should not sacrifice people in the present to our models of it.
Spiegelhalter on the four types of luck, which cuts away at the meritocracy argument for distributing wealth.
How the professions have become a way of solidifying and enabling the massively uneven distribution we see. Have they outgrown their usefulness in their current form, just like the guilds did?
How the choice for providing public goods appears to boil down to public ownership or private monopoly – with accompanying Technofeudalism replacing capitalism. Why are we so much more relaxed about private monopolies than we were 100 years ago, when it accelerates inequalities so much?
The relationship between worldbuilding in science fiction and people living in their own models in the policy making world. Great example of this just this morning in the FT.

So plenty to do. If this sounds interesting to you, please stick with the blog, which will not be going to Substack and will not be charging a subscription. If it sounds really interesting to you, tell a friend! Will be in touch again soon.

Deadmeat was overshot

18. December 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Climate Change, Economics, Regulation, Science Fiction

Picture of Pinhead character wearing a Deadpool type mask made out of one of his ties

Imagine a super-hero who could not be killed. No I don’t mean Deadpool. A more apt name for our super-hero would be Deadmeat. Deadmeat is empirically dead, but, rather like the Monty Python parrot, is being energetically kept alive by the pretence of its continued existence amongst all of those around it. So much so that it becomes impolite to expose the pretence and point out that Deadmeat is in fact dead. If you really push, and someone likes you enough to want to give you an explanation, you will have a hand put on your shoulder and be led away to a corner to have the pretence explained to you. What that explanation turns out to be is something like this. Deadmeat is of course the Paris climate agreement from 2015 which committed 193 countries plus the EU to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, and to keep them “well below” 2.0C above those recorded in pre-industrial times.

Deadmeat, it turns out, wasn’t shot. Deadmeat was overshot. Under overshoot, we bring the terrible thing back under control after it has done the damage and hope we can fix the damage at a later date. It’s a bit like the belief in cryopreservation or uploading our brains into cyberspace in the hope that we can have our bodies fixed with future medicine or be provided with artificial bodies. It means relying on science fiction to save us.

Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have considered this approach and how we got here in their latest book Overshoot. For me there are two big ideas in this book, although the account of how things definitively got away from us immediately post pandemic and exactly how that played out is mesmerising too. I thoroughly recommend a read.

The first big idea is the problem with the justification for overshoot in the first place, which is that at some point in the future we will be so much richer and more technologically advanced that it will be much easier to bring carbon dioxide levels down to sustainable levels than to try and stay within sustainable levels now. In what they call “The Contradiction of the Last Moment” Malm and Carton show how an intense fresh round of fossil fuel investment is almost certain to occur close to a temperature deadline (ie fossil fuel companies rushing to build more infrastructure while it is still allowed), whether it is 1.5 or 2 degrees or something higher. Then, as they put it “the interest in missing it will be overwhelmingly strong”. If an investment is 40 or 50 years old, then it might not be so disastrous to have it retired, but if a fossil fuel company has invested billions in the last few years in it? They will fight tooth and nail to keep it open and producing. And by prolonging the time until the retirement of fossil fuel infrastructure, the capital which has used the time to entrench its position and now owns a thousand new plants rather than a few hundred will be in a much stronger position to dictate policy. The longer we leave it, they argue, the harder it will become to retire fossil fuels, not easier.

The second big idea explains why, despite the enormous price collapse of solar power in particular, there is no Big Solar to compete with Big Oil. As they put it “there was no Microsoft or Apple or Facebook. More broadly, there was no Boulton & Watt of the flow, no Edison Machine Works, no Ford factories, no ascendant clusters of capital accumulation riding this wave.” The only remotely comparable company would be Tesla, but they produced cars. Why is this?

Malm and Carton talk about “the scissor”, the difference between the stock of the fossil fuel industry and the flow of renewable power. Fossil fuel’s “highly rivalrous goods: the consumption of one barrel of oil or one wagon-load of coal means that no one can ever consume it again. Every piece of fossil fuel burns once and once only. But supplies of sunlight and wind are in no way affected by any one consumer’s use.”

And this is the key I think. What economists call “public goods”, goods which are non-rivalrous (ie your use of the sun’s energy does not stop somebody else’s unless you put them in the shade) and non-excludable (ie you cannot easily stop someone else from using it, in this case by sticking a solar panel on their roof), are very difficult if not impossible to make a profit from. Private markets will therefore not provide these goods, possibly at all without extremely artificial regulation (something we have probably had enough of with our utilities in the UK) and certainly not in the quantity that will be required.

In Postcapitalism, Paul Mason discussed the options when the price mechanism disappears and additional units of output cannot be charged for. As he put it:

Technologically, we are headed for zero-price goods, unmeasurable work, an exponential takeoff in productivity and the extensive automation of physical processes. Socially, we are trapped in a world of monopolies, inefficiency, the ruins of a finance-dominated free market and a proliferation of “bullshit jobs”.

This also ties in with my own experience and others I have spoken to over the years about how hard it is to invest outside of fossil fuels and make a return.

Therefore if the private sector will not provide public goods and renewable power is predominantly a public good, then it follows that renewable power needs to be in public ownership. And if the climate crisis requires all power to be renewable and zero carbon, which it does, then it also follows that the entire power sector ultimately needs to be in public ownership too.

And then the motivation for overshoot becomes clear and how high the stakes are: not just the proceeds of the sale from one dead parrot as it turns out, but the future of private power generation. My fear is that the Deadmeat franchise may end up having as many sequels as Godzilla (38 and counting). With the potential to do rather more damage in the process.

Joe Sacco – The War on Gaza

20. September 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons

Joe Sacco has been chronicling the moral issue of our age in a series of very powerful cartoons. If you have not come across these already there is a link to them here.

The Cartoon Gallery is now live!

19. August 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons

I thought it was about time I collected together some of my cartoons from the last 11 years in one place, so have created a page for them which you can see here. Not sure if I am getting any better as the years go by, but rest assured that I have no intention of stopping any time soon!

Changing my social infrastructure

04. June 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Professions

Posted on LinkedIn on 4 June 2024

This is just a quick personal note to explain the imminent end of my LinkedIn account.

LinkedIn became an important tool for me in 2014 when I became a Lecturer at the University of Leicester and Programme Director for the BSc Mathematics and Actuarial Science there: to connect with potential students and guests to the university, to link up with former students, to publicise the activities of the Leicester Actuarial Science Society and to facilitate a professional network which would be useful to our current and former students. I also posted a few articles here along the way. However I will be leaving the University of Leicester on 30 June and moving to retired status with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries soon afterwards. Therefore the description I have given myself here (Actuary, Lecturer and Writer at the University of Leicester) will at that point become almost entirely untrue! It therefore seems like an appropriate time to wind up my account here.

According to the latest analytics, I have around 1,400 connections on LinkedIn. Thank you to everyone who has connected with me over the years, particularly if we worked together in some capacity. I have managed to work with some wonderful people over the last 10 years. A particularly big thank you to all of the students who have made the job so enjoyable during that time.

Of those 1,400 connections, over 400 of you list the University of Leicester in your profiles. If you are a current or former student, or indeed anyone who needs to be in contact with a member of the Leicester actuarial team and are currently only connected to me, you should ensure that you are connected to at least one of the following excellent colleagues of mine: Leena Sodha, Paul King or Nigel Sell. You should, in addition, as a current Leicester student, join the LinkedIn group Leicester Actuarial Science Society. If you are a former Leicester student, the group you want is Leicester Actuarial Science Society – Alumni.

I will continue to be in various actuarial WhatsApp groups for the time being and on X (@weknow0). And, if you like any part of what I write, you can always subscribe (for free!) at weknow0.co.uk. For those of you who still want to keep in touch with me by email once I have left here and my Leicester email address has been discontinued, and we have not already shared alternative contact details, please send me a message on LinkedIn (or weknow0.co.uk) and I will be in touch.

With my best wishes for the future to you all.

Water water everywhere

11. April 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Economics, Regulation

The Telegraph thinks the shareholders are to blame. The Guardian has the Australian investment bank Macquarie in its sights. Martin Bradley’s (the European Head of Infrastructure at Macquarie Asset Management) attempts in Infrastructure Investor at justifying their actions only seem to be making things worse. The FT is using it as an excuse to have a go at the Capital Asset Pricing Model. Count Binface has included in his manifesto for the London Mayoral election a requirement for the company’s management to “take a dip in the Thames, to see how they like it”.

I am talking of course about Thames Water, which really does appear to be everywhere at the moment. But how did we get here?

The management of water works by private companies was originally a legacy of the Victorians – most of the water supply and all waste water services moved into local government control from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Control then passed from 165 different water supply bodies to 10 regional water authorities in 1974 before these were sold back to private companies in 1989.

Water is obviously a resource vital to all of us, as well as being what economists call a natural monopoly. There have been debates for quite some time now about renationalising the water industry – some arguing that it is too expensive and that a Welsh Water not-for-profit model is the answer, others saying that water, electricity and Royal Mail together would cost less than £50 billion to nationalise and would pay for themselves within 7 years if investors were just repaid what they had invested in the businesses, others saying that water is a failed business and could be acquired without compensation for shareholders as happened with Northern Rock.

What none of these appear to be arguing is that private monopolies should not exist as a reason for renationalising water. We have become so used to monopoly or oligopoly profits in everything from utilities to transport to mobile phones to supermarkets, that we sometimes forget that it has not always been like this.

This point was made to me powerfully in Cory Doctorow’s excellent The Internet Con – How to Seize the Means of Computation. The 19th century debate in the US Senate about monopolies was impassioned. Senator John Sherman of the 1890 Sherman Act effectively put the war against monopolies on an equivalent footing with the War of Independence from the British Crown:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

It’s stirring stuff. The “harmful dominance” theory of antitrust (ie the idea that companies which dominate an industry are potentially harmful just because they are dominant, before they even start to abuse their dominant positions) led to the dismantling of several “empires”, including that of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company in the early 20th century.

But then enter Robert Bork. Famous amongst other things for having an extremely dull taste in video rentals, Bork was Solicitor General of the US between 1973 and 1977, under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Acting US Attorney General from 1982 to 1988 under President Reagan. Bork developed what he called a “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust. This allowed mergers and monopolies to proceed provided prices were lowered and/or quality improved, or even if they weren’t as long as some “exogenous factors” could be blamed for the price hikes or reduction in quality.

Sound familiar? It should, as we all still live in Bork’s world. For example, the microeconomics part of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ Business Economics syllabus relating to imperfect markets reads as follows:

Note the focus on the different ways firms supposedly maximise profits (this approach is fairly thoroughly debunked by Steve Keen here) rather than on the market power they wield. The part which should include the regulation of monopolies reads as follows:

Note the lowering of expectations in 3.1.6: “Why government intervention might not improve market outcomes in practice even if the existence of ‘market failures’ suggest they can in theory”. However the real limitations are laid bare in 3.2. The main targets of “competition policy” in the text book (Economics by Sloman et al) you are pointed to by the core reading turn out to be what are referred to as “exclusionary abuses”, ie where businesses actively prevent effective competition from actual or potential competitors. As the preamble on competition policy in Sloman says:

Competition policy could ban various structures. For example, there could be restrictions on mergers leading to market share of more than a certain amount. (This is the harmful dominant approach, about which no more is said) Most countries, however, focus on whether the practices of particular monopolists or oligopolists are anti-competitive. Some practices may be made illegal, such as price fixing by oligopolists; others may be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Such an approach does not presume that the existence of power is against the public interest, but rather that certain uses of that power may be.

So, in other words, we will leave monopolistic businesses with the power and attempt to detect abuses of that power on a case-by case basis via overworked and under-resourced regulators. Sherman could have never cut Standard Oil down to size with this approach.

Yanis Varoufakis’ contention, in Technofeudalism, is that capitalism now only operates within the framework provided by the most extreme monopolists of Big Tech, with most of us either “cloud proles” (ie wage slaves working for Big Tech under feudal conditions) or “cloud serfs” (ie the rest of us working for Big Tech for free by creating content and sharing our data on their platforms). Big Tech’s size massively increased as a result of the bank bail out of 2008 and additional money pumped through them and the corporations working for them coupled with austerity for everyone else, which was therefore almost totally financialised – leading to the “everything rally” for asset owners.

As Varoufakis says:

When an activist state makes fabulously wealthier the same bankers whose quasi-criminal activities brought misery to the majority, while they are punished with self-defeating austerity, two new calamities beckon: poisoned politics and permanent stagnation.

Again, sound familiar?

It is not too late to push back against the monopolies which control our lives. Doctorow’s big idea in The Internet Con is interoperability, the ability of new technologies to plug into Big Tech’s services, systems and platforms, which Big Tech tends to resist with all of the power at its disposal. He makes a convincing case for how this simple change could reduce the size of Big Tech companies quickly and bring them within the scope of democratic control once more.

And for those businesses which need to be at monopoly scale to work at all? Water, for instance. That sounds like an unanswerable case for nationalisation to me. Perhaps assuming that dominant private companies are bound to be harmful needs to come back into fashion.

I don’t know what I don’t know

22. January 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Legal, Regulation

A member splatted against the relentless forehead of a streamlined, efficient, simplified and clarified IFoA

So the proposals which I wrote about last month have been reconsidered by the newly elected Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) Council on 15 October, where they agreed some tweaks to the original proposals as follows:

Council devised and ultimately voted for revised measures based on the member feedback it had received on the previously approved reforms. You told us that you wanted the new President and Council (2023-2024) to reconsider the reforms and we agreed this at our meeting on 1 September 2023. You told us that you wanted better communication and more engagement and we have embarked on one of the biggest member engagement exercises in our history which will continue next year into the role of Council. You told us that you were uncomfortable with the idea that actuaries would be in the minority on the board. We have responded by changing the makeup of the new IFoA Board so that it will continue to have a majority of actuaries. You told us that you wanted safeguards to ensure the IFoA Board could be held to account and that a “bad board” could not self-perpetuate. We have responded by ensuring that appointments of members and independents to the IFoA Board will need to be ratified by Council on first appointment and every 3 years for the remainder of their term.

So am I happy now? The answer is no in some respects and I don’t know in others. No I am not happy that a member vote still seems to be proposed for 2026, giving this proposal the inside track to becoming the final permanent governance structure by only asking for a vote after most of us will have become quite hazy about what went before it.

I don’t know because we are still not going to be given sight of any part of the DAC Beachcroft report to which these proposals are supposed to be a response. We are therefore being asked to completely trust the description of what was in it by the very people trying to sell us their proposals. That is a big ask in my view.

However it is also difficult to raise any formal objections to the proposed amendment to Regulations 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12 and 13 in this state of enforced ignorance. I will therefore be raising the concerns I have set out here by contacting the Corporate Secretary at the IFoA. If you feel that you can go further and formally object on the basis of what you have or have not been told, then those objections should be raised by 30 January to be considered.

Perhaps I am making too much of what I don’t know, but I was struck by the references here to any future consultation being confined to the role of Council, with the rest of the governance structure seemingly regarded as done and dusted. Also if you watch to the end of the little video there, you are confronted with this message:

Is our ability to continue to self-regulate at all really under threat? I would have expected to be told rather more about why this is before being asked for my views in a member organisation such as the IFoA.

I accept that many of the IFoA’s functions may need a more streamlined system to run them effectively. There are many different alternative structures which we could consider to achieve this. But these proposals are about changing the very nature of the IFoA and that requires full disclosure to members about why we are doing this and a chance to vote before we do so in my view. More than a tweak, in other words.

We Know Zero