We Know Zero

Day 1 of the UCU Strike and it feels like a class war entirely manufactured by the Government

01. February 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Legal, Regulation

Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers were on strike today. I was one of them. Meanwhile the Bill above is making its way through Parliament – it was voted through earlier this week by all but one of the Conservative MPs, but is currently getting rather more scrutiny and push back in the House of Lords.

It seems likely that there will be legal challenges to some elements of the Bill and that some of them will be successful. The Labour Party have promised to reverse it if they win the next election.

I spent my first strike day ever (yes, I know, I am just a political union member and a mere picket tourist – all of these criticisms are entirely justified) by attending a meeting of the Leicester Actuarial Science Society with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) President Matt Saker. It was a very well attended event and there were a lot of questions for Matt. These ranged from the IFoA strategy in Africa, to mutual recognition agreements with the Institute of Actuaries in India to the pros and cons of the recent vote to create a Chartered Actuary status for associates and fellows to the future relationship of the profession to AI applications, reflecting the global nature and broad range of interests of the student audience. I felt very much like I was witnessing the next generation of actuaries getting stuck into the issues that would be important to them through their careers, and it was inspiring to see.

Back to the strike. I differ from many of the strikers interviewed in that, in my view, I was not doing anything particularly altruistic by striking. I was standing up for my own pay and conditions. Which, it seems to me, everyone should be able to do in a free society. Years of anti union legislation, uberization and the growth of sectors with weak unions has made us used to having to negotiate for ourselves individually or in small groups against much more powerful employers. The fall in real pay over the last 12 years indicate that this has not really worked for us and perhaps a new era of collective bargaining is now necessary.

Meanwhile the Government thinks that it is a better idea to muzzle unions and repress future strike action than to deal with any of the grievances of the workers they represent. They think this is a better idea than to build anything, invest in anything, or do anything positive at all. You have to ask who such a move, temporary and largely struck down as illegal as it is likely to be, is designed to impress: future party donors perhaps?

The next generation I saw today did not strike me as one which will have much patience for such manufactured class wars and the governments which manufacture them.

It is my hope and, after today, my belief that they will think we have more important things to be doing.

Trade unionism: my part in its downfall (with apologies to Spike Milligan)

13. January 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics, Legal, Regulation

Source: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy *Trade Union Membership, UK 1995-2021: Statistical Bulletin*, 25 May 2022

It all began for me on 23 September 1985, the first day in my first graduate role as a management trainee at the home counties factory of a security printing firm. From the beginning I was left in no doubt by my new employers that the fairly powerful print unions at the time (SOGAT and the NGA) were the biggest impediment to the captains of industry within the firm from running the business successfully. Occasionally I was allowed into management meetings, where all of the things we could do if it wasn’t for the unions were discussed endlessly.

During my time in this first role, the printing industry changed dramatically: the typesetting was computerised, massively reducing the number employed virtually overnight and Rupert Murdoch set up his non-unionised newspaper factories at Wapping. There had already been three pieces of trade union legislation in the 1980s by the time I started work, the latest being the Trade Union Act of 1984, which required secret ballots for union elections and strikes rather than the show of hands which had been possible up until then. The Miners Strike had also only just ended in March 1985, which had a devastating impact on the trade unions more generally.

Further legislation now quickly followed:

the Public Order Act 1986 (which introduced new offences related to picketing, and increased police powers over protests involving groups of 20 people or more);
the Wages Act 1986 (which reduced many of the restrictions on employers fining and deducting money from employees’ pay, removed statutory holiday entitlement and reduced state funding for redundancies);
the Employment Act 1988 (which gave workers the right to not join a union, and trade union members the right to challenge strike ballots);
the Employment Act 1989 (which restricted trade union officials’ time off for duties and abolished government support for redundancy payments);
the Employment Act 1990 (which finally removed the closed shop – ie a workplace where union membership was compulsory – and secondary action protection);
the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, which consolidated the legislation of the 80s and 90s, while clarifying that the right to take strike action was protected when it was “in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute”; and
the Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act 1993 (which gave trade unions a duty to inform employers of upcoming strikes).

This would appear to have given my first employers everything they could have wanted in terms of containing union power but, after some retrenchment in the 1990s owing to the incoming Labour Government taking the UK back into the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty (which we had originally opted out of in 1992) in 1997, there was further legislation in the form of the Trade Union Act of 2016, which, amongst other measures:

introduced a new requirement of 50% of union members to vote in a ballot for strike action;
required that workers in important services (health, school education, fire, transport, nuclear decommissioning and border security) must gain at least 40% support of those entitled to vote in a workplace for a strike to be legal;
required two weeks’ notice of industrial action to be given to an employer (the employer can agree to one week);
limited the right to take industrial action after a strike ballot to six months, or nine months if the employer agrees.

Over the period since 1985, wealth inequality, which had been steadily reducing since at least the end of World War I stalled and has been generally on a slightly increasing trend since:

Source: Resolution Foundation *The UK’s Wealth Distribution*, December 2020

And the position with respect to income inequality is even worse, with the UK having the 9th worst income inequality of the 38 countries in the OECD:

Source: *Income inequality in the UK*, House of Commons Library, 30 November 2021

However, perhaps this was a price worth paying, if the forces of creativity and entrepreneurship had at last been allowed full rein, freed from the stifling dead hand of union power? Unfortunately not (TFP stands for total factor productivity in the graph below):

Source: *The UK Productivity “Puzzle” in an International Comparative Perspective*, Fernald and Inklaar, April 2022

So whatever, the continuing problems of UK PLC, it does not look like union power was ever really one of the major ones. Undeterred, the Government is proposing further restrictions on trade unions and their members, including enforcing minimum service levels during strike action for ambulance staff, firefighters and railway workers and requiring some employees to work during a strike under threat of being sacked if they refuse.

The TUC has made a submission to the International Labour Organisation of the United Nations over what it sees as breaches of Conventions 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise) and 98 (Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining). As David Allen Green has blogged:

But regardless of your view on the ultimate rights and wrongs of strikes by public sector and other public service workers, there is something fundamentally objectionable in the current government’s proposals to compel certain “key” workers to attend work when they otherwise would be entitled to strike….Simply prohibiting other key workers from being able to strike, without sufficient alternative entitlements and arrangements to balance this loss of a right, is misconceived and illiberal.

It is an authoritarian gesture, rather than a solution to a problem.

Roy Lilley (at the Institute of Health and Social Care Management) in a postscript to a recent blog, focused on what a strategic failure the proposals represent within the NHS industrial dispute:

HMG plans, to ban strike action by some public workers is a further example of ‘push-back’ management. Push the disputes into the courts instead of dealing with the root-cause of strike action, improve industrial relations and representation.

So what has my part been in the downfall of trade unionism to date? In my first job, other than an abortive attempt to develop a new shift pattern(!) for the security guards in the factory, I had few skirmishes with union leaders compared to those with my management colleagues. In the finance sector, where I spent most of the middle 20 years of my working life, I rarely came across any staff representation at all. As a school teacher I joined the ATL rather than the NUT (they have since merged to form the National Education Union) due to its reputation for being determinedly non-militant. And, in my current role, I rather flounced out of the UCU over a difference of opinion over the pensions dispute raging at the time.

So I have not been a very good supporter of trade unionism over the years. However it now seems clear to me that the industrial austerity (ie the crushing of labour power within the economy, further discussed here) described above during my lifetime has been a political rather than an economic project all along. None of the economic justifications given for it since the 1980s have been borne out and the unopposed rugby of industrial management we have increasingly witnessed since has resulted, in my view, in poorer outcomes than if the 99% had been consulted regularly.

I sense that the current Government will only be satisfied when trade union membership levels fall to zero. So if, like me, you don’t want that to happen, the time to push back against running the economy at all times exclusively in the interests of the owners of capital is now.

I have rejoined the UCU.

Work hard, live hard, save hard?

07. January 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, Economics

Photo from the Climate Strike and march in Pittsburgh on 9/24/21. Link from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/9602574@N02/51512352257/. Photo taken by Mark Dixon(https://www.flickr.com/people/9602574@N02). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Mark Blyth wrote a great book about how it was a dangerous idea; Simon Wren Lewis described it as a con; Stephanie Kelton defined it as the “deliberate infliction of harm upon society in the presence of alternatives”; Frances Coppola wrote about its terrible price; Steve Keen described it as naive; Mariana Mazzucato, Robert Skidelsky, Ann Pettifor, David Blanchflower and others wrote in the New Statesman on why the UK should not impose it in response to higher debt following the pandemic; and Richard Murphy gave the possible reasons for imposing it as “ignorance, dogmatism and spite”.

What are all of these economists talking about? Austerity. And nearly all of the criticism thrown at this “dangerous” idea is that it does not work economically (ie it will not bring down government debt levels or boost economic growth, the usual justifications given for pursuing it): a criticism for which there is a large and ever growing data set in support.

Now there are any number of Four Yorkshiremen out there to say that this thing we’re calling austerity is luxury and that we are all snowflakes to complain about it, so let’s be clear about what is meant here. Clara Mattei, in her excellent new book The Capital Order, describes the three forms of austerity policies: fiscal, monetary and industrial, usually used in combination. Fiscal austerity (reducing public spending, particularly on health, education and benefits and increasing the burden of taxation) and monetary austerity (reductions in the money supply and increases in interest rates) are familiar to most of us and normally the only elements of austerity discussed in the media. To these Mattei adds the idea of industrial austerity, which includes (often described as supply side policies, with the connotation of getting the economy fit to compete in world markets) policies aimed at reducing the negotiating power of workers, from anti-union legislation, to reductions in unemployment benefits, minimum wage levels and wage levels and job security within the public sector.

The contention of The Capital Order is that the reason that austerity has been used again and again in the last 100 years, despite repeatedly failing to achieve the economic goals used to justify it, is that its goals have not been economic but political. The political goal of austerity policies is to defend capitalism whenever events make it seem likely that people will look for alternatives (think World War I or the socialism following World War II or the 2008 crash, or now, the pandemic). Whenever government intervention in the economy has been needed on a sufficient scale to demonstrate that economies can strike a different balance between capital accumulation and labour power, austerity has been brought out immediately afterwards to put labour power back in its box, by making nearly everyone too poor, too busy and too regulated to be able to protest about it.

If this premise is accepted, and I think Mattei makes a convincing case in her analysis of post-World War I austerity policies in Italy and the UK, then the implications are profound. Rather than repeated wrong-headed economic policies by people who do not understand economics, we would instead have deliberate political policies by people who completely understand what they are trying to achieve by them.

The other part of the strategy, via the first international financial conferences in Brussels and then Genoa, in 1920 and 1922 respectively, was to establish an international consensus for policies where “individuals had to work harder, consume less, expect less from the government as a social actor, and renounce any from of labour action that would impede the flow of production.” Lord Chalmers, former permanent secretary at the UK Treasury, summarised this approach as: “work hard, live hard, save hard”. The aim was to return to a pre World War I economic orthodoxy and therefore remove what would be very painful economic measures for most people from the political sphere and into the sphere of “economic science”.

A quotation from the League of Nations in 1920 sums up the how important it was that such a consensus be achieved, to make it extremely difficult for any country to stand against it:

This principle must be clearly brought home to the peoples of all countries; for it will be impossible otherwise to arouse them from a dream of false hopes and illusions to the recognition of hard facts.

These “hard facts” then become the justification for sticking with economic policies, however discredited they might be economically, and buttress them: against alternative economic views (the effective shutdown of the New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) unit of the OECD being the most recent high profile example) and against popular pressure to change course (eg through such measures as central bank independence from government control over monetary austerity or proposed legislation to limit the scope of political protest).

And of course this effective outlawing of alternative schools of economic thought has other implications too. For example, as Steve Keen has shown, the potential impact of climate change in economic models to date has been disastrously underestimated, allowing fossil fuel lobbyists to delay climate action as a result.

We have all three types of austerity in play at the moment in the UK: monetary, fiscal and industrial. We can either believe that this is designed to force our compliance with the mantra to “work hard, live hard, save hard” even if we do not want to, or that it is for the economic reasons given. The former option requires us to believe that the elites in nearly every government in the world are committed to defending capitalism at all costs and that, if we want to contest this, we will have the political battle of our lives on our hands with the odds steadily more stacked against us with every new piece of legislation passed; the latter requires us to believe that our governments are economically ignorant, dogmatic and spiteful. All our current problems and our solutions to them: from the economic crisis, to the ecological crisis and the increasing political crises globally (what Adam Tooze calls the polycrisis) – depend on what we decide to believe.

Hypocrite!

14. December 2022 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change

I am installing a gas boiler.

“What’s that?” some of you may say. After all I have certainly banged on about climate change quite a bit in the past. Some of you might assume that “Swampy Dave”, as my wife sometimes refers to me in conversation, would be installing a heat pump or solar panels or wind turbines or perhaps all three. Am I not a total hypocrite?

To which the answer is yes. I am a total hypocrite. And I must say the episode has left me chastened and a little bit reluctant to discuss it. It is, as Stephen Fry describes it very well here, one of the strongest reasons that people amongst the 1% like myself do not campaign more about the climate emergency.

But I have begun to think that this is all a massive piece of self-indulgence on my part (and of course, by making it all about me, it is). So, instead, I have decided to make it all about me, by talking you through the Gas Decision or GD for short, because it has certainly clarified for me why we are not transitioning from fossil fuels more quickly.

Our gas boiler has been on the blink for a bit, but coaxed along by our local gas engineer who, I think out of concern for minimising costs to us, was reluctant to suggest any major action if it could be delayed. Then it started to leak water, slowly at first, and then faster, before giving up the ghost altogether in early November. I had during the boiler’s demise had one or two conversations about what we might replace it with. Raising the idea of heat pumps got me puffed out cheeks and rolling of eyes and the opinion that it was very complicated.

I looked online. There is a page called “Find a heat pump installer” on the gov.uk website, with long lists which you can search by distance from your postcode. I chose a couple of nearish ones and contacted them. No response. I then tried Octopus (our supplier, OVO, were not offering heat pump installation), who said they were run off their feet trying to install heat pumps and had a 6 month waiting list. However they did have a referral system, where you could enter your details and installers on their list would contact you.

I tried this and got a couple of calls. Neither local. We chose one who sounded particularly helpful on the phone and made an appointment for their sales person to come round. They were very persuasive, and we subsequently arranged to have the energy performance survey necessary to proceed. This established that about half of our radiators would need replacing, but that our piping was fine. We had had quite a bit of discussion about where the heat pump should go, and were thinking possibly between the first floor windows so that it wouldn’t be humming (or whatever noise heat pumps make) whenever we went out in the garden. We even had the National Grid come round to check that our connection could cope with the additional electricity demand (they had assumed at first that this was for an electric vehicle charging point, as this is apparently the most common reason for calling them round).

The cost of installation, even with the £5,000 Government grant, is at least £5,000 more than a gas boiler. We had been told that we would save money on energy once it was installed, but the savings turned out not to be significant (if there were any at all) once the full calculations had been done. The reason for this is how much more you pay for each kWh of electricity compared to gas. OVO currently charge us 9.83p per kWh for gas (with a standing charge of 27.12p per day) and 32.11p per kWh for electricity (with a standing charge of 46.8p per day). So, despite the heat pump being massively more efficient than the gas boiler alternative, it would really have to be going it some to overturn these price differences.

But, at that stage, we were still prepared to go ahead with the installation (I refer you to the “Swampy” comments above), we just needed to speak to some previous customers to reassure ourselves about their overall experience, perhaps see (and hear) it in situ, etc. And then it unfortunately started to unravel. Despite describing themselves as the number one heat pump installer in the UK, the company we had engaged were unable to provide us with anyone in or near Birmingham willing to tell us about their experiences (they eventually produced one name, but we couldn’t get a reply from them). So we started looking at the reviews on Trustpilot, etc, which were decidedly mixed and talked a lot about poor after sales service, and which seemed to be very dependent on the particular engineer doing the work. And the ones for the heat pump they were planning to install were full of stories involving the installers and the manufacturer pointing the finger at each other when things went wrong. Suddenly it seemed like too big a risk to take.

Meanwhile, the unseasonably warm autumn had slid into a very seasonably freezing December and we needed to get working radiators again. And so we decided we didn’t have time to go out to the heat pump market again, with more surveys etc, and plumped for a replacement gas boiler for our existing system. I am not particularly proud of the decision, and perhaps we were just unlucky with our experience, but it does seem to me that we are not making it easy for people to choose heat pumps in the UK currently. This appears to be borne out by the Department for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy’s UK Energy in Brief 2022 report (p13), which shows that, of the 19.4% of energy supplied from low carbon sources in 2021, only 0.7% was from heat pumps. As Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, has tweeted recently: “THE MOST IMPORTANT THING is to make electricity cheaper than gas for consumers. It should be a key objective for Treasury’s tax policies and BEIS energy market reforms. It will transform the economics of low-carbon heat.” I certainly think it would have transformed our decision.

And today is the day! The weather outside is frightful (it hit minus 6 as the installation vans arrived and needed the doors thrown open to let in all the gear), but our new piece of fossil fuel infrastructure is being installed as I type. I will at least be a warm hypocrite.

Cop out

28. October 2022 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons, Climate Change, Economics

The Congress of Berlin: Disraeli as a tooth-drawer, assisted by Queen Victoria, operates on Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire, surrounded by political figures from France, Germany etc. Coloured lithograph by J.J. van Brederode after Jan Steen, 1878. (Steen, Jan, 1626-1679 Reference: 778482i)

If you think COP27 is just a virtue-signalling tree-hugging “gathering of people in Egypt” then Rishi Sunak’s decision not to attend it will make a lot of sense as he tries to grapple with his domestic economic agenda ahead of the autumn statement next month. The Treasury has said that the aim of the statement will be to “to put public spending on a sustainable footing, get debt falling and restore stability.” If you remember, the cause of the “instability” was the foreign exchange and gilt markets, and the lack of confidence in the UK’s economic management internationally. One of the causes of the problems with the UK’s economic management was a failure to think internationally.

COP27 is, in reality, an important international economic conference. This conference is going to be focused on, amongst other things, food security, water security and investing in the future of energy. The support with energy bills is, of course, a major element in the debt levels Sunak is worrying about and, as the cost of living crisis worsens (exacerbated by the Monetary Policy Committee’s expected further increase in interest rates on 3 November), food security is going to rapidly move up his agenda in the coming months. The only difference between the most important concerns of the autumn statement and COP27 are therefore timeframes. COP27 is about medium to long-term thinking. Sunak has indicated, by not attending, that he is only concerned with short-term thinking.

Then there is the agenda around providing a just transition to a net-zero world (ie not skewed in favour of the already wealthy countries) and the sustainability of communities made vulnerable by climate change. This is where the conference starts to resemble other famous international conferences of the past which made the reputations of British statesmen. The illustration above is from the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when the then Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, “acquired” Cyprus in a great powers carve up of the globe. In 1944, towards the end of the second world war, John Maynard Keynes famously sparred with Harry Dexter White from the US Treasury at Bretton Woods as the post-war economic consensus was thrashed out at an international economic conference. They matter.

Of course we don’t carve up the globe any more, you may think, but yes we do. As George Monbiot has pointed out in his excellent Regenesis, the ghost acres (ie the the area, outside their own land, that farms need to operate) of UK agriculture can be as much as 2-3 times as many as the acres we farm domestically. A WWF report from 2020 suggested that the UK’s overseas land footprint has increased by 15% on average compared to their 2011-15 analysis. Between 2016 and 2018, an area equivalent to 88% of the total UK land area was required to supply the UK’s demand for just seven agricultural and forest commodities – beef and leather, cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber, soy, and timber. Every time we insist on domestic economic growth as a non-negotiable element of our economic policy, we are effectively exercising a land grab in the global south to achieve it. If Sunak was interested in establishing himself as an international statesman, he would be at COP27.

And finally, of course, there is the terrible human rights record of the Egyptian state, which needs to be called out and challenged to avoid COP27 being just a public relations victory for the military regime led by General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.

But Sunak has turned his back on all of that, so that he can spend a bit more time with the spreadsheets and economic forecasts in his bunker in Downing Street. It suggests a small-minded, short-term thinker, lacking in vision and ambition. Copping out should not be an option for any Prime Minister, even during a crisis.

1976 and all that

25. October 2022 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics

Three months ago, there was a lot of talk about 1976. My favourite tweet from the July heatwave was this one:

By contrast, 1976 seems to have disappeared from my Twitter feed altogether now, which is a shame because it was a time when a very different type of UK Government was trying to deal with some very familiar issues.

For instance:

Worries about the exchange rate. This is what effectively precipitated the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis, with the pound having fallen from the $1.77 level which the Bank of England had been defending with interest rates and reserve purchases ($400 million in September alone) between July and September 1976 to $1.63, with predictions of $1.50 being possible (although $1.63 turned out to be the low point).
Worries about the current account deficit, ie the fall of exports relative to imports. Import deposits, where importers needed to put up cash in advance, were being proposed as a possible measure, finally averted as part of the IMF deal.
Worries about deficits – cutting the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement or PSBR (what is now called the Public Sector Net Cash Requirement or, more commonly, just the budget deficit) by £1 billion pa was the UK Government’s negotiating position, although less than the IMF wanted.
Worries about fuel poverty – cabinet papers from Barbara Castle as the Secretary of State for Social Services in 1975 and 1976 focus on this a lot, with detailed discussion papers about the options for helping different sections of the population. This was also when the first winter fuel allowance was proposed.
Cost of living crisis – there were also cabinet papers concerning how to operate price restraint schemes in the wake of a white paper from 1975 called The Attack on Inflation, which involved agreements industry by industry on price increase limits with the CBI, the Retail Consortium and the unions, including specific limits for each of the nationalised industries.

According to Goodbye Great Britain, by Kathleen Burk and Alex Cairncross, published in 1992 about the 1976 IMF crisis, the IMF were partly being used by the US Treasury and other bodies connected with the US administration to force a change in UK economic policy in a way that they would not be able to do directly. There were concerns in the US that the UK would turn its back on the IMF, introduce foreign exchange controls, freeze convertibility, perhaps even default on its loans. Indeed Brent Scowcroft, the US President’s National Security Advisor at the time, said that:

I spent more time on this matter during those weeks than anything else. It was considered by us to be the greatest single threat to the Western world.

That was not the only reason for the IMF to negotiate hard. The 1968 Basle Arrangement on funding sterling balances following the sterling devaluation in 1967 was felt by many countries to have been unduly preferential to the UK compared to how other countries had been treated. The IMF itself was therefore also under scrutiny.

So this was the background to a crisis which seems to have been less about the money (the endorsement of the IMF for its economic policies was more important to the UK for calming the currency markets than the loan according to some accounts, whereas the Under-Secretary for Monetary Affairs at the US Treasury, Edwin Yeo, said that they had “put up the money [for the IMF loan] ‘for the bait’ – ie to hook the UK economy into IMF control when it had to be repaid.”) than about who ran the economy. Andrew Graham, a member of the Prime Minister’s (then Harold Wilson) Policy Unit in 1974 and 1975, remembered the fear of union strength amongst some during that period, with Labour people in Whitehall and Westminster asking each other which side of the barricades they would join – the miners’ or the army’s.

Certainly a year after the agreement the economic crisis seemed to be over. The pound was rising again (it eventually reached $2.40 by October 1980) and reserves increased rapidly. Denis Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, claimed that, if the forecasts he had received had been more accurate, the UK would never have had to go to the IMF, although I do wonder whether another reason would have been found given the concerns of the US Treasury in particular.

However the solution to the economic crisis created a political crisis. In March 1977, the loss of support amongst Labour backbenchers following the Public Expenditure White Paper of 1976 led to an agreement with the Liberal Party (the Lib-Lab Pact) to keep the Government in power and, according to Burk and Cairncross, “one incomes policy too many” led to the Winter of Discontent in the winter of 1978-9, when more than 2,000 workers went on strike in the Liverpool and Merseyside area – rubbish was left uncollected, hospital services were reduced, and bodies went unburied. This was what led to Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 and Conservative Government’s and Oppositions and their supporters have continued to refer to this ever since as the consequences of Labour economic policy, rather than the IMF crisis itself.

Yet it was the IMF crisis which seems to have been more formative for Labour. Jim Callaghan made a speech in September 1976, in the middle of the crisis, in which he said the following:

For too long, perhaps ever since the war, we postponed facing up to fundamental changes in our society and in our economy. That is what I mean when I say we have been living on borrowed time…We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that insofar as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.

This statement seems to me to underpin every similar Labour Party statement since, from Liam Byrne’s “I’m afraid there is no money” to Keir Starmer’s recent promise that “there will be no magic money tree economics with us”. It is as if the Labour Party has never stopped trying to prove its credentials to some imaginary IMF mission ever since. The ghosts of 1976 remain with us.

Democratising the Lathe

21. October 2022 · Write a comment · Categories: Cartoons, Economics, Regulation, Science Fiction

I have been thinking a lot about Ursula K Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven over the last few weeks, a book I would highly recommend at any time but particularly at the moment. It is the story of a man, George Orr, who can change reality by dreaming. An ability that terrifies him. He is caught taking unprescribed drugs to try and prevent himself dreaming and as a result is sent for a “voluntary therapeutic treatment” with Dr William Haber, a dream specialist. Haber has built a machine called the Augmentor to make it easier for his patients to have dreams directed by him. He starts to work with Orr, becoming increasingly impatient with Orr’s version of the directions Haber is giving to his dreaming in the machine, until eventually Haber dispenses with Orr and connects himself to the machine instead.

Every time reality is changed it is as if it has always been changed. The changes become increasingly dramatic and disruptive until a peak of general insanity now referred to by all as The Break:

All over the world the various gods were being requested, more or less politely, for an explanation of what had occurred between 6.25 and 7.08 pm Pacific Standard Time.

But what the book really focuses on are George’s desperate attempts to live in this increasingly unhinged reality, as the only person (apart from Haber) aware of the abrupt changes swinging it around, and to hang onto the one person, Heather Lelache (or Andrews in the final version of reality they arrive at), he has ever loved.

One of the sentences on the last page (when he finds out that she has married) has stayed with me in particular:

He stood and endured reality.

However hilarious some of the moments of the last few days have been (and let us not forget some of the highlights here, here and here), we are all going to have to endure some significantly altered reality over the coming years as a result, from the moron risk premium to the cost of living crisis slowly rippling through all aspects of life, at a time when we already have a climate emergency and other planet-wide issues we need to be dealing with. There are many arguments to be had about the best way to tackle all of these problems, and I intend to throw myself fully into those arguments.

However, I would propose that we have to prioritise ensuring that, as a society, we never ever again let the lone mad scientist or economist or politician or former talk show host or indeed anyone else, whoever or however charismatic they are, take over sole control of the machine.

I think we need to do three things to achieve this, before we start to argue over policy:

Adopt proportional representation in parliamentary elections. We have got to broaden the support for whoever is in power, rather than stick with the current system which focuses on a tiny number of people in marginal constituencies and ignores pretty much everyone else. Make Votes Matter have agreed a cross-party document (which I have signed) called the Good Systems Agreement. This sets out the options on voting systems to replace first past the post and the best way of getting there. More about what is wrong with our current system (from the Electoral Reform Society) can be found here. Never again should there be a small cabal of people (like this weekend) deciding on who runs the country – with a steadily shrinking selectorate as their ability to achieve consensus on anything dwindles with every successive decision. We no longer have a system in the UK that can make important decisions and the answer is not more technocracy (leaving it to the so-called clever people, however foolish they may be) or plutocracy (leaving it to the rich), it is more democracy, ie including all of us in the decisions we will have to live with.

Reform media ownership and promote plurality in support of a more democratic and accountable media system. The Media Reform Coalition has produced a manifesto for a people’s media which I support: it includes proposals for an Independent Media Commons – with participatory newsrooms, community radio stations, digital innovators and cultural producers, supported by democratically-controlled public resources to tell the stories of all the UK’s communities. This will allow a much greater range of ideas to be presented to the public and discussed than the current Overton window (see below) and greatly improve our national debate about the things that matter.

Reform election finance. Recommendations for doing this were provided in the July 2021 report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, with 47 recommendations following a comparison of political and electoral finance regulation in 12 countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the USA), the majority of which are around reforms to campaign practices, meeting emerging threats around the source of donations, delivering greater transparency and enhancing compliance with election finance law.

We have big problems to solve in the UK and we need everyone to be able to contribute if we are going to solve them. However currently:

Our votes are counted in a way which effectively wastes most of them;
The information we receive about politics is fed to us through a very partial sieve controlled by a small unrepresentative group of people whose vested interests effectively define our Overton Window; and
Influence and access to power often appear to go to the highest bidder rather than the best ideas.

All of this needs to change whoever is Prime Minister in the coming weeks, months and years.

Chartered Actuary: I am still very confident that this is a good idea

07. September 2022 · 6 comments · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Regulation, Risk

I originally talked about Chartered Actuary status (here, with the cartoon above) when the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) first proposed the idea and set up a consultation in 2018. I said then that sometimes an idea comes along that seems so obviously good that you wonder why it hasn’t been done a long time ago.

Four years on from the retreat from the proposal following the slenderest of straw polls offering some challenge, and it remains a good idea. There are still relatively few full actuarial roles available for associates and many firms still assuming a default career path of continuing to fellowship.

There are some differences this time however:

There will be two chartered actuary designations: Chartered Actuary (Fellow) and Chartered Actuary (Associate), with the hope that the FIAs who were most concerned with maintaining their distance from AIAs last time will now support the proposal. The original proposal suggested Chartered Actuary (CAct) would be a single distinct qualification, a required qualification point for all student actuaries to reach before going any further and globally recognised as the generalist actuarial qualification from the IFoA. This approach has been abandoned, with no requirement to complete the core curriculum before tackling specialist modules. It will be interesting to see whether Chartered Actuary (Associate) will be seen as a destination in its own right, or just a change of letters. This will depend on all of us within the profession (see below).
The environment we are operating in has certainly changed, with the replacement of our regulator, the FRC, by the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority (ARGA). One of the concerns that the IFoA were looking to address in 2018 was that another, much larger, profession, could pose an existential threat. If actuaries have a unique skill set, which is likely to be lost to a wide range of businesses and other sectors if it is unable to meet the demand for those skills due to a simple lack of numbers, then the need to take any perceived barrier to practise away from our emerging young professionals is clear. The move from FRC to ARGA does not remove this threat and there also remains in the regulatory proposals to date the threat of differential regulation, where actuaries are regulated more heavily than other professionals doing similar work could price us out of markets where we have value to add. The profession therefore needs to grow to increase our voice and influence over the future regulation of the profession.
We have acknowledged the impact of the Great Risk Transfer within the finance sector, but in my view the impacts more generally of the increased individual risks and uncertainties millions of the UK population face as energy, food and housing costs escalate need to be faced up to by our profession. For that we need to continue to be a destination of choice for a growing number of your people with a widening range of backgrounds and experiences.

So what do we need to do to make this a change worth making? We need to start behaving like a generalist actuarial qualification is what we want, and offering roles for actuaries on completion of core practice modules in future. It will mean not necessarily insisting on further actuarial specialisation as a requirement for senior roles within our firms. It will mean getting comfortable with a much wider range of specialisms amongst those we consider to be actuaries. Some are already doing this, but most of us need to go much further. A good place to start might be the IFoA’s own website, where 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.

Do cuttlefish dream of the passive electroreception of sharks?

02. September 2022 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Cartoons, Climate Change, Economics

“Tom-and-Jerry-tom-and-jerry-81353_800_600” by momokacma is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

We do it all the time. We assume that the animals around us experience the world as we do, with our obsession with the visual sense. We are used to anthropomorphising animals in our cartoons, but it goes much further than that: for instance if, like a dog, your sensory world or Umwelt is primarily based on smell rather than sight, then that daily walk you take with your dog has very different highlights and notable features (amazingly the slits on the side of a dog’s nostrils allow it to smell on out-breaths as well as in-breaths). We have sayings based on these anthropomorphisms: for example, the “unconcerned” frog in the water as it is heated to boiling (cited by Emily Maitlis in her recent speech in Edinburgh) may not be unconcerned at all, merely showing its distress by filling the air with smells like peanut butter, cashew nuts or curry rather than via the reactions we would expect from a human.

Our vision is not even all that extraordinary compared to some other animals. Mantis shrimps have more classes of photoreceptors covering the ultraviolet spectrum than we have in total. They are the only animals who can detect circular polarization, where the plane in which the light is polarized also rotates. However they are much worse than us at telling our visual range of colours apart and may not even have a conception of colour as we know it at all. We don’t know.

We are not even sure how many senses there are. Aristotle said there were five (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch), but missed our senses of proprioception (ie awareness of your own body) and equilibrioception (ie sense of balance). There are also animals who have a secondary system for detecting odours, or who detect the body heat of their prey via their brain’s visual centre or have sensors which both detect electric fields and pressure. How should we categorise these and does a clear division between senses make any sense? We don’t know.

Elephants can hear each other several miles apart just after sunset, but we don’t know what they are listening for. Beaked whales have a range of crests, ridges and bumps on their skulls which are not outwardly visible other than via the echolocation they use, but we don’t know why.

And finally, for now, the cuttlefish of the title. When cuttlefish sense sharks, who have passive electroreception (ie the ability to detect electric fields in other animals), they stop moving, hold their breath and cover their gill cavities to reduce the voltage of their electric fields by up to 90%. I could go on, but all of this and so much more is contained in Ed Yong’s masterful An Immense World, which I could not recommend more highly, not only for the content but also for the wonderful joyful writing throughout (AC/DC’s Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution even gets a mention!).

The recurring theme for me is how much we still don’t know about all of these animals, and the amazing new discoveries which are being made every year. Every animal perceives a different world from the one we think we are living in, many of these perceptions currently (and in some cases perhaps permanently) impossible for us to understand. It takes an extraordinary level of anthropomorphic arrogance for us to convert all of those strange and wonderful lives into the concept of natural capital.

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ Biodiversity and Natural Capital Working Party defined natural capital in their paper from April 2021 (which acknowledges the concerns I am raising here and those raised by others) as follows:

The concept of ‘natural capital’ therefore aims to recognise nature as an asset and aims to ensure that
the goods and services offered by nature become a part of decision making by governments,
businesses, and individuals regarding resource allocation, growth and development.

The Dasgupta Review has gone further, focusing on the economics of diversity. As it acknowledges:

The Review has developed the economics of biodiversity by viewing Nature in anthropocentric
terms. That is an altogether narrow viewpoint, but it has a justification. If, as we have shown in
Part I, Nature should be protected and promoted even when valued solely for its uses to us, we
would have even stronger reasons to protect and promote it if we were to acknowledge that it
has intrinsic value.

I strongly disagree. As George Monbiot pointed out several years ago, markets change the meaning of the things we discuss, replacing moral obligations with commercial relationships. The latest article in The Actuary magazine on natural capital discusses ecosystem collapse in its final paragraph in terms of how it would “negatively impact GDP” and “economic value”.

Once the diversity of nature can be reduced to a monetary amount or metric value, it can obviously be modelled much more easily but, as we have seen again and again within the finance sector and elsewhere, that is at the expense of consideration of any other aspect of our relationship with it.

Perhaps cuttlefish do dream of the passive electroreception of sharks. If they only knew what we were up to, they might instead have nightmares about their balance sheet entries in our spreadsheets.

Terraforming in reverse

23. August 2022 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, Science Fiction

Side by side images en:User:Ittiz created to show what Mars might look like at various stages while being terraformed in vertical alignment. The horizontal alignment is here: en:Image:MarsTransition.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:MarsTransitionV.jpg&oldid=11571800. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Terraforming was a concept I first remember coming across in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan in 1982 when “The Genesis Device”, and its effect on a dead planet, was described as “matter is reorganised with life-generating results”. The astronomer Carl Sagan had previously proposed the planetary engineering of Venus in 1961 and Mars in 1973. Martyn J. Fogg subsequently started publishing articles on terraforming in 1985 before publishing Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments in 1995. Fogg defined planetary engineering as using technology to change the global properties of a planet (he called this geoengineering if Earth was the planet in question). Terraforming he defined as planetary engineering which was specifically directed at enhancing the capacity of a planet to support life as we know it.

There are still advocates of terraforming as a project that humans should be actively working towards. Others suggest, that unless Earth is going to be unavoidably uninhabitable, it is likely to be our best bet as a future home for all but a relatively tiny number (Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora is the most memorable advocate for this position in my view, which takes us on a gruelling exploration of a terraforming expedition over several generations which then allows us to view Earth afresh with alien eyes).

What is clear is that we are not currently terraforming Earth in Fogg’s sense, as most of our planetary engineering (what we call the global economy) appears to be specifically directed at reducing the capacity of Earth to support life as we know it. We are terraforming in reverse.

Terraforming is an example of an idea you might get to as a result of very long-term thinking (there is a nice article about this in Vox, with views from Roman Kznaric, Nick Beckstead, Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill included) – I tend towards the Kznaric view that we cannot predict the knock-on effects of technological shifts in 200 or 300 years, but we know we’ll still need to breathe air and drink water, so working to prevent climate change and pandemics is very likely to be really good for us today, the near future and the long-run future too.

The danger of discussion of the very long-term is that it can create the idea that nothing we do over the next few years matters. However as we have pushed up to and beyond planetary capacity in so many areas now and have developed a global economy with planetary engineering capabilities of unprecedented power, this is no longer true if it ever was. What seems obvious to me is that we mustn’t make decisions now which lock in damage to planetary life-supporting capacity for generations to come, such as the “carbon bombs” described by George Monbiot here.

Terraforming in reverse is not the direction to choose, whichever generation we belong to.