We Know Zero

Getting serious about politics

16. January 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Climate Change, Economics, Regulation, Risk

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.

Fast forward to 2025 and apparently we have a crisis. Rachel Reeves has been forced to defend her budget following rises in 10 year gilt yields to levels not seen since the financial crisis and the Prime Minister has been forced to say that she will stay in post for the rest of Parliament. Everyone has piled in, from the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. So is there in fact a crisis? Well no, not really. As an opinion piece in the FT has pointed out, the drivers of the latest rate rise are not really UK-specific at all. Another piece in the FT puts the gilt yield “crisis” into yet further perspective. Finally, there is the comparison with the US gilt market, which moved above its 2008 level in 2022.

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.

Elon Musk’s move into politics: Yanis Varoufakis and Cory Doctorow on Fighting Billionaire Control

10. January 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics, Regulation, Science Fiction

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!

Where there is no profit

09. January 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Climate Change, Economics

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!

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.”

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.

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.

18.03 to Oxford

25. November 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham

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.

Chartered Actuary: a message to students

13. November 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Professions, Regulation

I last talked about Chartered Actuary status here two years ago when the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) set out how they had decided to introduce it. I focused then on what we needed to do to make this a change worth making: like offering roles for actuaries on completion of core practice modules; not necessarily insisting on further actuarial specialisation as a requirement for senior roles within firms; getting comfortable with a much wider range of specialisms amongst those we consider to be actuaries. Some were already doing this then, but most of us have still not travelled very far in this direction. And I note that the Route to Becoming An Actuary still features a diagram where an IFoA Associate is shown as a milestone on the way to the final destination of becoming a Fellow.

But the fact is that Chartered Actuary status has finally been launched this week. I am a retired actuary now but I have claimed chartered status nevertheless because it is a designation I very much think needs to be supported. However ultimately the success of it will not depend on employers or even the profession itself, and certainly not on retired old duffers like me. It will depend on students now and in the future. Therefore, in the unlikely event that any actuarial students are reading my blog, I am addressing this piece directly to you.

Whether you are a student who, like most actuarial students, started work with no or perhaps just one or two exam exemptions, or a graduate from an actuarial science undergraduate programme with most or all of the core practice exemptions, this means that the barriers to you starting to take your actuarial career off in the direction you want it to go in and think the world needs just got a bit easier to jump. If you are a graduate from some actuarial MSc programmes or even possibly a single qualification like the MMath in Mathematics and Actuarial Science at the University of Leicester (last plug for my former employer, I promise), you may be able to claim Chartered Actuary Associate status already.

Using it may not necessarily be so easy, particularly in the early years. Some employers may be resistant to the new designation. But if you are planning to join the profession to make a positive difference in the world, and that is in my view the best reason to do so, then you are going to have to shake a few things up along the way.

Perhaps there is a type of actuarial business you think the world is crying out for but it doesn’t know it yet because it doesn’t exist. Start one.

Perhaps there is an obvious skill set to run alongside your actuarial one which most actuaries haven’t realised would turbo-charge the effectiveness of both. Acquire it.

Perhaps your company has a client who noone has taken the time to put themselves in their shoes and communicate in a way they will properly understand and value. Be that person.

Or perhaps there are existing businesses who are struggling to manage their way in changing markets and need someone who can make sense of the data which is telling them this. Be that person.

Whatever you decide to do, do it with a chartered actuary designation, whether associate or fellow, as a badge that you are prepared to look beyond traditional ways of doing things and, where the historical way of doing things is obviously no longer working or could clearly be massively improved, do the hard work of rethinking things from first principles if necessary. If you do it right, this can be seen as a badge for actuaries who are both rigorous and flexible in their thinking. If that happens, the chartered actuary designation will flourish and it will also be of maximum benefit to you too.

So now it is up to you what becomes of Chartered Actuary status. I am really looking forward to watching what you do with it!

The Day After The Night Before

06. November 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

I have been reading many accounts of what happened last night. Richard Murphy was clear what he thought:

I reserve the right to change my mind on this and to revisit the issue, but my immediate feeling is that there is one point of common ground between those who have voted for Trump and those who read this blog, and that is that they have rejected neoliberalism.

Biden’s economic boost after Covid was not felt by most Americans. The growth went to the already rich.

Most Americans do not want to preserve an economic system that very clearly does not reward them and has no intention of doing so.

Many Americans already feel alienated within their own country.

The Biden support for Netanyahu’s tyranny in Gaza made many feel that the Democrats had already embraced fascism, so what would the difference be if they did so with Trump?

And, I have no doubt many Americans have good reason to fear the consequences of neoliberalism that it pretends do not exist, but which are readily apparent, from massively divided societies to fears of climate change, to constant reminders of inequality, to the loss of hope and the denial of opportunity as a consequence of ever-growing divides in a society when neoliberal politicians long ago ceased to tell the truth. In that situation, Trump might look mad and a terrible choice, except for the fact that neoliberalism and its perpetuation look to be even worse because there is a guarantee of failure to come in it, whereas Trump only offered the possibility of something that might be terrible.

David Allen Green, on his Empty City blog, recalled the essay written by Neil Postman’s son, Marc, at the time of Trump’s first election victory, about his father’s prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death. This postulated that we have been too worried that our future might resemble 1984 while a future strongly resembling Brave New World took shape instead. In it he quoted his father:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

Meanwhile Jason Hickel’s analysis on X ended with a call for action:

The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned.

Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even basic steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee – things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future.

Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment. At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development.

The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of “mistake” but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital.

And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism. They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time – this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don’t really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative.

So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of “converting” the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

This was taken up in turn by Roger Hallam (who co-founded Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, the cooperative federation organisation Radical Routes and the political party Burning Pink, and who is currently, ridiculously, imprisoned for 5 years) with a suggested plan. As he says:

Progressives and the Left fail repeatedly because they are wedded to an Enlightenment secular religion that assumes people respond to ideas over emotions and ideology over connection. They’re embarrassingly mistaken. Fascist men, for instance, often abandon their views after forming personal relationships—such as getting a girlfriend. There are countless stories of individuals entering far-right spaces, listening, building personal connections, and subsequently helping others to leave those spaces. During the recent English riots a group of Muslims, faced with an angry crowd outside their mosque, offered food and listened to people’s concerns. Conversations ensued, tensions eased, and constructive dialogue began.

You can sign up to join this social movement here.

This in turn chimes with what George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison (and Lucas Sabean in the film) are saying in their new book The Invisible Doctrine, where they talk about a politics of belonging as what is needed to replace neoliberalism.

And just to cap it all off, the book I have been reading for the last 2 weeks (the excellent The History of Ideas by David Runciman, also available as a podcast here) arrived at the final chapter on Judith Shklar this morning and was suddenly discussing Trump:

Trump is a cruel politician. Cruelty is one of his calling cards. He can be cruel in how he treats the people around him and he’s often cruel in how he goes after his critics, mocking them and seeking out their vulnerabilities. He goes for the weak spots of his opponents and he takes no prisoners. To be in Trump’s orbit is to be vulnerable to degradation and humiliation. But Trump is not a hypocrite. Indeed, that is one of his great sources of appeal as a democratic politician – he is as he seems. He appears to be willing to be as unpleasant in public as he is in private. All the accounts I’ve read of how he treats the people who have worked for him – in the West Wing, in his businesses, even the members of his family – are reminiscent of how he treats his political opponents: bullying, mockery, rule by fear. Trump is himself all the way through – cruel all the way through – which makes him consistent. The opposite of hypocrisy, on some measures anyway, is sincerity. There is a case for saying that Trump, though he is an inveterate liar, is also a sincere politician. He is sincere about being a liar, he doesn’t try to hide it or to dissemble his true character. There is a brazenness to it.

Our pervasive intolerance of hypocrisy is one of the things that allowed Donald Trump to wind up as President of the United States.

This came out earlier this year, so is referring to the 2016 election, but it still rings true for me. We spend a lot of our social media activity and journalism on trying to expose and then punish public figures for hypocrisy. We don’t expend nearly as much effort worrying about cruelty. Judith Shklar thought this was a mistake and I agree with her. Of course we need to set up our institutions to be honest and not hypocritical but people will always have things about themselves that they do not want the rest of us to know about. And, hard-wired as we are to obsess about finding out such secrets, we often lose focus on what is more damaging to our society. I will finish with one last Trumpian extract from The History of Ideas:

The emergence of an unauthorised recording of a talk she [Hillary Clinton] gave to a Wall Street bank dogged her campaign – it apparently gave the lie to her public protestations of being tough on financial fat cats. Worse, she seemed to know it was damaging – why else go to such lengths to cover it up? It did her far more damage than the emergence of a tape in which Trump talked in demeaning, sexualised terms about women (“Grab ’em by the pussy”), because in Trump’s case it was what you’d expect him to say.

Our relationships with each other and how we behave within them are, I believe, the most important things in most of our lives, not the finer details of the political ideologies we favour. I fear that Trumpism is growing in the UK too and we need to keep our current closeness (what Roger Hallam refers to as our “proximity”) to each other and indeed build on it if we are going to repel it and build something better in its place.

Carolian Radicals

20. October 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Economics, Regulation

The Stonebreaker is an 1857 oil-on-canvas painting by Henry Wallis. It depicts a manual labourer who appears to be asleep, worn out by his work, but may have been worked to death as
his body is so still that a stoat has climbed onto his right foot — *The Stone Breaker, 1857 Artist: Henry Wallis. Creative Commons 0 – Public Domain. Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CC0*

The Europe of the 1830s and 1840s was a place of extreme political ferment which led to long-term changes to the way in which all Europeans, including the ones across the English Channel, saw themselves. According to Christopher Clark’s excellent Revolutionary Spring – Fighting for a New World 1848-1849: “parallel political tumults broke out across the entire continent, from Switzerland and Portugal to Wallachia and Moldavia, from Norway, Denmark and Sweden to Palermo and the Ionian Islands. This was the only truly European revolution that there had ever been.”

However you wouldn’t know it from the current Radical Victorians exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. This explores three generations of progressive British artists working between 1840 and 1910: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle; the second wave of Pre-Raphaelite artists who gathered around Rossetti from the late 1850s, including William Morris and Birmingham-born Edward Burne-Jones; and a third generation of designers and makers associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, working from the turn of the century to just before the First World War.

It’s a very good exhibition, but the only painting I could find in it which referred to the economic crises of the 1840s and 50s at all was the one above, of a stone breaker worked to death. There was also the famous one of a couple emigrating to Australia (shown below) which may be a response to domestic economic circumstances although, based on a self portrait of Madox Brown as it is, it may just as well be a response to the lack of art appreciation in the UK:

*The Last of England, 1852-1855 Artist: Ford Madox Brown Creative Commons 0 – Public Domain. Optional attribution: Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CC0*

But that is it! Despite the Victorian Radicals’ believing that art and creativity could change the world and be a real force for good in society, their gaze rarely moved from “realistic” depictions of their friends posing in rustic or suburban landscapes at a time of massive social upheaval.

At the time Britain was rather smug about having avoided revolution, but the evidence suggests that it could have easily been very different were it not for the measures taken by Robert Peel’s Government: the reintroduction of income tax on upper middle class incomes in 1842; the Bank Charter Act of 1844 which suppressed financial speculation by restricting the right to issue bank notes to the Bank of England only and creating a maximum ratio between notes issued and the Bank’s gold reserves; and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 which considerably weakened the landlords’ grain monopoly and allowed for grain imports which did reduce prices but fundamentally changed the structure of the UK economy. This was explosive stuff which brought down Peel’s government and split the Conservative Party.

Policing in the UK was also very muscular. 15,000 Chartist activists were arrested in 1843 and a meeting of 150,000 Chartists at Kennington Common in 1848 was met by 4,000 police, 12,000 troops and 85,000 special constables (volunteers with clubs, including the future Emperor Napoleon III who was in exile from France at the time). There were so many transportations to the colonies that there were mass protests in Australia and the Cape. There were riots in Jamaica and British Guyana when sugar tariffs were dropped to reduce prices back in the UK and when, rather than burdening British taxpayers further, taxes were applied in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), a protest movement numbering 60,000 was created.

In June 2024, Michael Marmot and Jessica Allen published A programme for greater health equity for the next UK government. In it they say the following:

Much of what went wrong with respect to the social determinants of health equity in the period after 2010 comes under the rubric of austerity, imposed by a Conservative Party led coalition Government. In the 2020 Marmot Review, we reported that in 2010 public sector expenditure had been 42% of GDP. Over the next decade, public sector expenditure went down year on year. By the end of the decade, public sector expenditure had become 35% of GDP. An annual reduction of 7% is enormous. In 2023, total UK GDP was £2·687 trillion. 7 7% of that is £188 billion. At today’s prices, annual public sector expenditure in 2019 was £188 billion less than it was in 2010. It is then not a surprise that relative child poverty went up— the steepest rise among 39 OECD countries; 8 absolute measures of destitution increased; welfare payments apart from pensions did not keep pace with inflation; spending on education per pupil went down; the housing shortage became more marked and homelessness and rough sleeping increased; and increases in health-care expenditure fell sharply compared with historic trends. Alongside these major changes, came the slowest improvement in life expectancy in the UK during the decade after 2010, of any rich country except Iceland and the USA.

We have a new Government, 100 days in, in our new Carolian era. What will future generations say about who this government answered to? Will it turn out to have been our modern stone breakers, working themselves into sickness and early death below the radar of a modern media at least as divorced from the concerns of ordinary people as the Victorian Radicals were? Or will their hard decisions turn out to necessitate other priorities? Time will tell.

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.