It started as soon as they came into government in July.
“If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.”
This was obviously a rebuttal to the Keynes statement from the 1940s:
“Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”
The list of things “we can’t afford” started to grow, including:
Winter fuel payments for pensioners not on Pensions Credit. This cut the number of pensioners receiving the winter fuel payment from 11.4 million to 1.5 million and will save £1.5bn in the next financial year.
Stopping reforms to social care proposed by Sir Andrew Dilnot. These would have meant making the means test for local authority support more generous and raising the capital limit from £23,500 to £100,000. Estimated saving: £1 billion.
In April, the employer national insurance rates will increase (from a previous decrease we now “cannot afford”). These are forecast to raise between £23.8 billion and £25.7 billion a year, for the five years 2025/26 to 2029/30.
So far, so predictable, based on the we-cannot-afford-it-we-cannot-do-it (WCAIWCDI) philosophy. But then we had a tweak.
In response to criticisms of the decision to approve the construction of a third runway at Heathrow, the UK’s Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds came up with a new formulation:
“We simply cannot afford to say we don’t build reservoirs any more, we don’t build railways, we don’t build runways. That’s not good enough, we will be left behind.”
Burrowing through the double negative we have a complete reversal of WCAIWCDI. Instead we now have we-cannot-afford-to-say-we-don’t-build-X, where X is something they desire to build. WCATSWDBX if someone wanted to reduce it to an acronym. Obviously you would have to be fairly determined to do so.
So we-can’t-afford-it can be used both positively and negatively it seems. We can’t do it if it is bad spending, we can’t afford to say we don’t do it if it’s good spending.
And now we come to defence spending as the US support for Ukraine starts to look highly conditional. We are still not sure whether this is in the WCAIWCDI or the WCATSWDBX camp. On the one hand, the PM has said that we are prepared to send troups to Ukraine, which sounds like WCATSWDBX. On the other hand, recent statements by the defence secretary and the PM also suggest that they are not considering anything beyond an increase in defence spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5%. Which sounds more like WCAWCDI.
Elsewhere there has been optimism amongst some (eg here and here) that the need to increase defence spending will topple the WCAIWCDI regime and allow other spending priorities in too. Others fear that any increases will just lead to further cuts to other public spending.
It’s no way to run a railroad. The government needs to be more Phoebe Buffay and just tell us what they do and don’t want to spend money on instead of telling us that we can’t afford things to avoid the discussion like an overbearing parent. Then we could have a proper family argument about them.
The Charybdis is a swirling water feature in the temperate house at Savill Garden. It was designed by Giles Rayner in 2006. https://funandgames.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Charybdis_Savill-Gardens_9257-2-scaled.jpg
This is a quote attributed to Lenin (courtsey of Branko Milanovic’s X account, where a gentle exchange about whether it was genuine ensued), which seems perfect for the moment we are in.
It was back in 1998 that George Monbiot first pointed out that no sector was as wedded to PFI deals as health. The famous example in Captive State of the Walsgrave hospital in Coventry, knocked down and replaced by a smaller hospital at much greater cost, was just one of many. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the wider lesson from these early examples, borne out by everything we have seen since, is that privatisation, in whatever form (and, after all, what is PFI but the privatisation of a funding source), always solves a smaller problem than the one you have. The history of privatisation in the NHS has been a series of smaller easier problems dealt with in some cases very efficiently by the private sector (although the efficiency only ever seems to increase the profits of the private companies concerned rather than reduce their price). As it has been in transport (with rail franchises yo-yoing in and out of state control whenever the ask becomes too complex for the train operators taking them on), and utilities, mail services, etc etc.
And the size of the problems that the private sector can take on would appear to be getting smaller.
Take insurance. Ann Pettifor highlights this week what Petra Hielkema, chair of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, has to say about the future of the sector in the FT. Apparently he told them that governments and banks will struggle to cope with the soaring costs of natural catastrophes such as floods and wildfires. More households will be unable to insure their homes and the mounting losses from natural disasters could destabilise banks. Two things he said were particularly striking:
“I think it is the biggest risk facing society, frankly” and “Member states — they can’t cope with this.”
This contrast between public and private ownership of problems struck me while I was reading the excellent report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter on climate change: Planetary Solvency. By taking the approach that an insurance company would take in determining its risk appetite and then seeing if its risk exposure matched up to it, it occurred to me that the reason this had never been done before for global climate change was that any insurer would have left such a market years ago on the basis of a brief initial analysis of the problem. Something that a private insurer can always do with any problem.
What if, instead of the NHS being threatened by covert privatisation, the threat is that even the smaller problems private health is currently solving within the system get handed back to the NHS? Because that is the difference. During the pandemic, the threat was that the NHS might not be able to cope with the surge in very ill people and that many would die without care as a result. The reason large parts of NHS operations were repurposed and we were all urged to “flatten the curve” was because, ultimately, there is noone the NHS can hand the responsibility back to and their resources are measured in hours of the right people available to work for them rather than pounds spent and so have a hard physical limit. Although there were significant failures as the Covid Inquiry is currently exploring, the NHS as a whole did not fall over.
However, neither did the US system, because an insurer merely withdraws from a market which might cause it to. It has no responsibility to the system as a whole.
As one MIT researcher responded to being asked about the lessons for the US system of the pandemic:
“The pandemic has revealed the American health care system to be a non-system.”
So it seems to me that arguments about privatisation and nationalisation are a bit beside the point. We have big problems, getting bigger every day, which absolutely have to be solved and limited physical resources with which to do so. Unfortunately His Majesty’s Opposition are still trying to disentangle themselves from the wreckage of Tufton Street’s “thought leadership”, risking a Trumpian climate change denying, health service privatising Reform Party replacing them, and His Majesty’s Government appear to have no idea what they are doing.
So reality does feel pretty radical at the moment. We need to be equally radical in our response to it.
The excellent report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature splits the risk trajectories into four sections: Climate, Nature, Society and Economy. I have focused on the Society one above as, in my view, this is the reason we are interested in all of the other ones. According to the Planetary Solvency report, we are on track for a society in 2050 described as follows:
Nature and climate risk trajectories will drive further biophysical constraints including stresses on water supply, further food supply impacts, heat stress, increased disease vectors, likely to drive migration and conflict. Possible to Likely risk of Severe to Decimation level societal impacts, with increasingly severe direct and indirect consequences of climate and nature risks driving socio-political fragmentation in exposed and vulnerable regions.
So what are we doing about it? Well the United States has just voted in Donald Trump as President. There was a flurry of executive orders issued in his first week (with the appropriate caveats about how many of these might actually be implemented), the climate-related ones of which are neatly summarised here by Bill McKibben:
The attacks on sensible energy policy have been swift and savage. We exited the Paris climate accords, paused IRA spending, halted wind and solar projects, gutted the effort to help us transition to electric vehicles, lifted the pause on new LNG export projects, canceled the Climate Corps just as it was getting off the ground, and closed the various government agencies dedicated to environmental justice. Oh, and we declared an “energy emergency” to make it easier to do all of the above.
Timothy Snyder has written about how to respond to tyranny in your own country. What is happening currently in the United States is threatening tyranny for many (as Robert Reich lists here):
The government now recognizes only two “immutable” genders, male and female. Migrants (now referred to as “aliens”) are being turned away at the border. Immigration agents are freed to target hospitals, schools, and churches in search of people to deport. Diversity efforts in the federal government have been dismantled and employees turned into snitches. Federal money will be barred from paying for many abortions.
The first thing you should do, according to Timothy Snyder, is to not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
And how did we respond to all of this in the UK? Well Keir Starmer was keen to tell The Donald that we were deregulating to boost growth in their first phone call. His reward for this was the story that Trump thought he was doing a good job. Supposedly an endorsement from the “Drill Baby Drill” guy is the proper corrective from being told he should be locked up by the Nazi salute guy.
And then there were the actions on the environment. From the talking out of the Climate and Nature Bill which sought to meet new legally binding targets on climate change and protect nature. To a housing policy which will be both hugely environmentally destructive and fail to make houses more affordable. To announcing the intention to overhaul the planning rules, in the upcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill, to reduce the power of people to object (and, as the Conservatives’ restrictions on protest have not been lifted, subsequently bang them up for years on end if we subsequently demonstrate about it) so that global firms would think that the UK was a “great place to invest” .
And then today we had Rachel Reeves’ big speech. Approval for developing the third runway at Heathrow, as had been extensively trailed, and the creation of “Europe’s Silicon Valley” between Oxford and Cambridge were the main announcements. There was quite a lot of talk about investment in sustainable aviation fuel (which means biofuels, the benefits of which have already been shown to be wiped out by rising demand).
And as for the Silicon Valley idea, I am not sure we want one. First there is the lack of real innovation despite the excellent game they talk. And second, is it going to be the authoritarian nightmare that the Californian one is turning into? The early signs are not good. Just last week Marcus Bokkerink, the Chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), was replaced by Doug Gurr, until recently Jeff Bezos’ head of Amazon UK. So not exactly standing up to Technofeudalism then.
Marcus Bokkerink, the outgoing head of the CMA, was amazing, and he had charge over the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit, the largest, best-staffed technical body of any competition regulator, anywhere in the world. The DMU uses its investigatory powers to dig deep into complex monopolistic businesses like Amazon, and just last year, the DMU was given new enforcement powers that would let it custom-craft regulations to address tech monopolization (again, like Amazon’s).
But it’s even worse. The CMA and DMU are the headwaters of a global system of super-effective Big Tech regulation. The CMA’s deeply investigated reports on tech monopolists are used as the basis for EU regulations and enforcement actions, and these actions are then re-run by other world governments, like South Korea and Japan.
When you see Trump flanked by Bezos and the other Tech Bros at his inauguration, it certainly feels like we are obeying in advance. Rachel Reeves’ speech had an enormous increase in energy demand implicit in pretty much every measure announced, which is expected because, GDP (the thing she is looking to boost) and energy consumption have been in lockstep forever. This is the implication of prioritising GDP growth over everything else.
What were missing were both a compensatory increase in renewable energy capacity and/or a reorganisation of our economy away from energy intensity. The problem for the government is that the latter would not increase GDP, so instead we get into the absurd position of the Business Secretary saying we “cannot afford to not build runways”.
However it seems that when the motivation is big enough (in this case to dispute the assertion that the Russian economy is doing well in wartime despite the official statistics, which the EU really needs to do in order to continue to make the case for sanctions) alternative ways to measure the economy can be found. In section 3.2 we find this:
The general assumption of connecting GDP growth to making people better off is not relevant in this situation, which should be included in any discussion of how the Russian economy is doing.
What is interesting about this analysis is that:
a. It is carried out by the kind of orthodox economists (the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics) who believe GDP would be a good index to use in normal circumstances; and
b. They are saying this even if the GDP figures published by Russia are technically accurate. As they go on to say:
What this analysis suggests is that if we believe in official Russian statistics, then Russia has economic capacity to sustain current policies in the short run, a conclusion shared with many other observers. We also find, though, that beyond the GDP numbers, the redirection into a war economy is already putting pressure on all sectors not directly involved in the war, causing internal macroeconomic imbalances, increasing risks in the financial sector, and eroding export revenues and existing reserves. Short term growth is kept up by a massive fiscal stimulus, but the impact is mitigated by necessary monetary contraction to deal with inflationary pressures, and structural factors (demographics, weak property rights) limiting the possible economic response to the stimulus.
Some of which sound familiar closer to home – “necessary monetary contraction” (things we cannot afford) and “increasing risks in the financial sector” anyone?
We are currently facilitating a world where the only capacity we are increasing is to fly over the climate-ravaged areas of the globe and their fleeing populations. Fly Baby Fly is not going to get us anywhere we want to go.
I went to see A Complete Unknown this weekend. The music was rendered brilliantly, Timothee Chalamet inhabited the character of Dylan compellingly and Edward Norton was astonishing as Pete Seeger. And I felt welling emotion watching it.
I first was really aware of Dylan in the 70s, when I was most intensely interested in music for the first time more generally. However I didn’t really like 70s Dylan. I particularly didn’t like the arrangements on Bob Dylan at Budokan (Live), which seemed to be omnipresent at times. I then got interested again in the 80s when he repelled many of his fans with the religious records and went back to the 60s stuff on the back of that, which resonated with me very deeply. In the 90s and noughties I got interested all over again with Time Out Of Mind and Modern Times. I finally got to see him play in 2010 in Birmingham and, like most people who tried, failed to get tickets to see him last year in Wolverhampton. And that is my history with Bob. However this piece isn’t really about that.
In A Complete Unknown we see Dylan arrive in New York in 1961 at the age of 20 and follow him all the way to the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he went electric for the first time at the age of 24. So these are the doings of a very young man, whom Joan Baez refers to as “kind of an asshole” in the film.
This got me thinking about what I did between the ages of 20 and 24. To quote another Dylan line, I “just kind of wasted my precious time”. I wasted most of it at the University of Oxford. I had spent seven very happy years at a school in Oxford before going there, five of them actually living in the city as a boarder, so my unhappiness was definitely with the people and institutions of the university rather than their location. And I was seen as so much of an asshole myself that I left with no friends from my university days other than people I had known before going there and a group of chemists from a different college who I ended up sharing a house with in my middle year because noone in my own college wanted to.
However unlike Dylan, whose assholery clearly had a purpose and was for him a way of getting his art done in the way he wanted to do it, mine was of a more self-pitying unproductive kind. I hated the structures the very confident people were building around me but followed them anyway, all the way into my first job which was for a company which made ID cards for the Chilean and Syrian regimes. I realise now, thanks to the excellent Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough among many other things I have read since, that I was being prepared for a career of facilitating power and, although I would not have been able to articulate this at the time, I like to think that I resented this on some level even then.
It took me another 20 years to recover from my university education and those structures of power seem more confident than ever. However now I realise how brittle that confidence is and how little we know about the foundations we base it on, I feel much more optimistic about the prospects for challenging it and putting something kinder in its place.
I went for a walk to mull over how to finish this piece earlier and today I got a bit of help. Heading back via the newsagents where I like to monitor the front pages each day, I was just taking in how they all seemed to be celebrating the return of the three Israeli hostages when a man pushed past me and grabbed a Daily Mail from the front of the pile. As he turned back on his way to the till he glared at me and snarled “You’re supposed to buy them you know”, before stomping off.
By the time this gets to some of you via your inboxes Donald Trump will have been sworn in as the 47th President of the United States (POTUS), eight years on from when he became the 45th. The UK will be facilitating him like crazy over the next four years, just like we have facilitated the destruction of Gaza over the last 15 months, all cheered on by most of the media. But we don’t have to buy what they’re selling.
When I started writing this blog in April 2013, one of its main purposes was to highlight how poor we are at forecasting things, and suggest that our decision-making would improve if we acknowledged this fact. The best example I could find at the time to illustrate this point were the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth forecasts over the previous 3 years. They do not appear to have improved much since then.
The reason for all of the hype of course is the totally self-constructed cul-de-sac that the Government has built around its economic policy options. Tiny movements in government debt or CPI or GDP or indeed gilt yields have been given heightened significance by being explicitly tied to how much the Government will allow itself to spend on its various programmes. As stated in the FT:
Only the OBR can accurately predict how much headroom the Treasury has against its fiscal rules, the Treasury insisted on Wednesday. “Anything else is pure speculation,” it added.
I refer back to the aforementioned forecast history of the OBR and ask how we ever got in a situation where their forecasts would determine how the UK government behaved. As the recent essay by Stefan Eich (on Adam Tooze’s Chartbook) points out, Keynes said:
“Our power of prediction is so slight, our knowledge of remote consequences so uncertain that it is seldom wise to sacrifice a present benefit for a doubtful advantage in the future.” It was consequently rarely right to sacrifice the well-being of the present generation for the sake of a supposed millennium in the remote future.
Meanwhile we are now doing precisely this on the basis of OBR forecasts. As Rachel Reeves set out at the start of her chancellorship in July, in a precise inversion of Keynes:
Because if we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.
Unfortunately for the government, while they spend all of their time trying to solve this imaginary problem they have created for themselves, there are actual real problems that do need to be addressed, and which are currently being drowned out by the noise of political commentators with too little of substance to talk about apparently.
So Sir Michael Marmot, author of the landmark Institute of Health Equity reports on health inequalities in 2010 and 2020 and the recent report on the role of the property sector in improving health, referred to the maintenance of the two child benefit cap as “almost a form of eugenics”.
The Trussell Trust reports that:
A record 9.3 million people face hunger and hardship across the UK. This includes 6.3 million adults and 3 million children. This represents one in seven (14.0%) people across the UK, and one in five (20.9%) children. Current levels are more than a third higher than they were 20 years ago, when 6.7 million people faced hunger and hardship.
And a group from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, in partnership with Prof Tim Lenton and his team from the University of Exeter, set out in a report today (Guardian summary here, Planet Critical discussion here) the dangers of the current massive underestimation of climate change risk. As Tim Lenton says:
The choice is simple: continue to be surprised by rapidly escalating and unexpected climate and nature-driven risks, or implement realistic Planetary Solvency risk assessments to build resilience and support ongoing prosperity. We urge policymakers to work with scientists and risk professionals to take this forward before we run the ship of human progress aground on the rocks of poor risk management.
The part which really stood out for me (in such contrast to the equally massively exaggerated risks ascribed to movements in bond markets this week) was on the inadequacy of global risk management practices:
Policymakers often prioritise the economy, with their information flows focused on this. But our dominant economic model doesn’t recognise a dependence on the Earth system, viewing climate and nature risks as externalities.
Climate change risk assessment methodologies understate economic impact, as they often exclude many of the most severe risks that are expected and do not recognise there is a risk of ruin. They are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right.
The degradation of natural assets such as forests and soils, or the acidification and pollution of the ocean, act as a risk multiplier on the impacts of climate change and vice versa. Traditional risk management techniques typically focus on single risks in isolation, missing network effects and interconnections, underestimating cascading, compounding risks.
Current risk management approaches fall short of the RESILIENCE principles detailed in this report for realistic and effective risk management. Consequently, policymaker risk information is likely to significantly understate the potential impact of climate and nature risks, weakening the argument for urgent action.
These limitations mean that policymakers are likely to have accepted much higher levels of risk than is commonly realised.
If policymakers judged these risks on the same calibration scale as they current view the knockabout on financial markets I doubt we would ever hear about the intricacies of the 10 year gilt yield or the decimal places of CPI ever again. Similarly, if the societal impact of prolonged policies targeting the poor was included (perhaps in the form of meaningful measures of poverty based on the work of the Social Metrics Commission), rather than the level of the FTSE 100, we might start to make inroads into the current dire statistics.
We have hard problems to solve which require a serious government prepared to be bold, do big things and take the political risk of doing so (because the political risks are so tiny compared to the actual risks the population face), not one so focused and constrained by minutiae that it defeats itself.
Came across this on YouTube today and it was such a brilliant discussion in the same area as my post from yesterday (which went out before I had seen this), but which went much further in a number of really interesting directions, that I thought many of you would be interested. Look out for a mention early in the video for the late great Iain Banks, science fiction fans!
I thought I would return to a point I raised in my musings on Deadmeat before Christmas, because it has probably got the most reaction from readers of the blog of anything I wrote in 2024. Most of the reaction, it has to be said, was disbelieving. The point in question was this:
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.
Economics by Sloman, Garratt and Guest, which informs the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ core reading for its Business Economics syllabus states (in its 10th edition) that a pure public good is:
A good or service that has the characteristics of being perfectly non-rival and completely non-excludable and, as a result, would not be provided by the free market.
It then goes on to say that:
There is some debate as to whether pure public goods actually exist or whether they are merely a theoretical idea.
This I think brings us back to the extremely artificial regulation I mentioned above, as a lot of the economists who have got their views into this book (the sort that have contributed to the “debate” over whether pure public goods exist) appear to struggle with the idea that markets cannot provide everything better, even if you have to embark on some pretty tortuous contortions to create them.
My conclusion in my previous post was as follows:
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.
However I now realise that this is not quite correct. There is an alternative to public ownership. Not the ridiculous quasi-markets which bedevil our utilities in the UK currently, which I don’t expect to be with us for many more decades, but something else which is alive and well and in the process of taking over capitalism as we know it: private monopoly.
As Yanis Varoufakis says in Technofeudalism about green energy in particular:
Advances in green energy are pushing down fast the costs of green electricity generation. Even though the life cycle of fossil fuels has been extended, ruinously for the planet, cloud-based green energy is growing – and, with it, so is the relative power of cloudalists.
“Cloudalists” are our modern feudal lords. Whereas capitalism was a system in which the most powerful people as owners of capital were able to dictate how and where workers could use their capital to make profit for them, under technofeudalism the money is made as rent.
In the section entitled “The New Enclosures” Varoufakis says:
“In the eighteenth century, it was land that the many were denied access to. In the twenty-first century, it is access to our own identity.” Expanding on this:
Strewn across countless privately owned digital realms, it has many owners, none of whom is us: a private bank owns your ID codes and your entire publishing record. Facebook is intimately familiar with whom – and what – you like. Twitter remembers every little thought that caught your attention, every opinion that you agreed with, that made you furious, that you lingered over idly before scrolling on. Apple and Google know better than you do what you watch, read, buy, whom you meet, when and where. Spotify owns a record of your musical preferences more complete than the one stored in your conscious memory. And behind them all are countless others, invisibly gathering, monitoring , sifting and trading your activity for information about you. With every day that passes, some cloud-based corporation, whose owners you will never care to know, owns another aspect of your identity.
As Cory Doctorow says in his review of Technofeudalism:
Varoufakis points to ways that the cloudalists can cement their gains: for example, “green” energy doesn’t rely on land-leases (like fossil fuels), but it does rely on networked grids and data-protocols that can be loaded up with IP, either or both of which can be turned into chokepoints for feudal rent-extraction.
To make things worse, Varoufakis argues that cloudalists won’t be able to muster the degree of coordination and patience needed to actually resolve the climate emergency – they’ll not only extract rent from every source of renewables, but they’ll also silo them in ways that make them incapable of doing the things we need them to do.
When did we get so complacent about private monopolies? As Cory Doctorow reminds us in The Internet Con, in the 19th century debate in the US Senate about monopolies, Senator John Sherman (of the 1890 Sherman Act) gave the war against monopolies equal importance to the recently won 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.
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 the power of the Varoufakis’ cloudalists vastly exceeds anything Rockefeller (oil), Carnegie (steel), Vanderbilt (railroads and shipping) and, of course, JP Morgan could muster even at the height of their influence.
Which brings me back to my original contention that the energy sector needs to be in public ownership. There may be many other “necessaries of life” which we may also want to consider bringing back into the public realm if their provision is otherwise going to slip beyond our regulatory grasp. Because the alternative is to relinquish any last vestiges of control over how we run our lives to puffed up billionaires. If you object to Elon Musk conducting polls about whether to stage a coup in the UK, then it is probably worth expending some effort on trying to stop someone like him deciding whether you can heat your home, cook a meal or charge your phone.
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.
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.
Last Thursday I ended up on the 18.03 train from Birmingham New Street to Oxford with my daughter. We weren’t meant to be there. We were meant to be on the 8 carriage 17.03, but this, along with all of its seat reservations, was cancelled due to lack of train crew. The 18.03 had 4 carriages, so as we watched it roll into the station, each carriage full all the way down the aisles and also between them and the two of us both with big suitcases on the platform, my heart sank. There was no way we were getting on this train. Sure enough, when the train stopped, none of the queues at any of the doors seemed to be moving. It looked hopeless and the next train, for which there was no guarantee that the same thing wouldn’t happen again, was not for another hour.
Then something unexpected happened: two women who had managed to get on came back for us and engineered our way onto the train.
And so the worst train journey of my life began. I have been on trains all over Europe, including 16 hours travelling from Paris to Pisa with one seat for two people, but this one was in a different category altogether. Because the brilliant wheeze the two women had come up with which had created a space where none should rightly be was to occupy the Pendolino toilets.
There were 7 of us in there in all. The two lovely women, my daughter and I, another woman who I will call Queenie for reasons which will become clearer and two other men who I will call woolly hat and plastic jacket. We took it in turns to try and find a humorous take on our circumstances. The hand dryer’s irregular blowing was a great help here. We couldn’t work out which combination of timers, sensors or general boredom was driving this and the toilet flush for that matter, so that kept the conversation going for a while. But that wasn’t going to get us to Oxford.
There were doubts about whether the train was going to either, as it got more and more delayed. We arrived at the first station (Birmingham International) and the first of the regular pleas from the train guard – imprisoned at the first class end of the train as he was – came across the tannoy. We were apparently focused on the wrong problem, where we should have been focused on his problem, which was that of leaving people on the platforms due to his overloaded train. We needed to all get out of the toilet (actually I don’t think he knew we were in the toilet), off the train and onto the platform, so that more people could not claim against the train company under delay repay. Then we could take our chances trying to get back on board, when not even the toilet was available any more. You can imagine that we were unconvinced about what was in it for us in this scenario. A sense of solidarity and community was starting to build amongst the toiletistas by now.
There was another moment of drama when what sounded like an alarm went off, until I remembered that this was the technological triumph they had trumpeted back in the noughties for Pendolino trains. We were about to experience tilting toilets.
About two thirds of the way there we had another challenge. One man had been bold enough to squeeze his way in amongst the toiletistas and requested to use the facilities we had occupied. He said that his only request was that we all look the other way, and proceeded to keep up a steady stream of quips throughout the visit: “Not sure I can go with 150 people standing behind me”, “This may take a while as I am an older man” etc. He lost some of our sympathy when he announced he was going back to his reserved seat now.
At this point Queenie decided to close the toilet seat and sit on it. From the newly created throne of the toiletistas, she started tweeting “from the throne” which got us through Leamington Spa and Banbury. The only thing that was able to shift Queenie was another woman shuffling in and also asking to use the facilities. She had a whole load of additional demands however. Only women allowed in the toilet area for one. Closing the door was another. So we separated the men from the women, the men shuffled out and the women shuffled in.
By this time the guard had given up completely. He was talking darkly about how “sarky remarks and gestures were not appreciated”. We were losing toiletistas too. The lovely women left at Banbury. Another man arrived, with his mistress I think. He started complaining about property values and school fees and the unreasonableness of his wife in a kind of Hugh Bonneville drone which would have emptied the toilet republic far faster than the guard’s announcements ever could.
But for us the journey was over, finally rolling into Oxford around 7.30. We left the remaining toiletistas, bound for Southampton unfortunately, and headed out into the moonlit dreaming spires.
Crosscountry trains, the train operators responsible for all this are owned by Arriva UK Trains, who are themselves owned by Arriva, which is owned by Deutsche Bahn, the German nationalised railway. Remember this the next time the representative of the train operators tells you that nationalisation is the wrong answer as it is a political rather than a practical solution. Being nationalised from Berlin did not look all that practical from the toilet seat.
