We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
Alex Tabarrok over at the Marginal Revolution blog has an interesting item that pushes back against the idea that the items we buy, such as clothes and household appliances such as electric toasters, fridges and vacuum cleaners, don’t last as long and that is something terrible and a fault of modern capitalism, yadda-yadda.
He concludes: “appliance durability hasn’t collapsed—it’s evolved to meet consumer demand. We’re not being ripped off. We are getting better products at better prices. Rising incomes have simply redefined what “better” means.”
One part of it, as Tabarrok said, is that the “Baumol Effect” shows that the cost of repairing stuff rises vs the cost of buying that new toaster, flat-screen TV or whatever. And that seems to make sense. I’ve also noticed with a lot of modern tech, it is less reparable. That is partly, I think, a function of moving to a digital from analogue world. I am just about old enough to remember how to service my first car, including changing the spark plugs on the engine, etc. Nowadays, the chance of maintaining a modern car engine rank alongside how I’d fix the human brain.
The MR post also cites this excellent and detailed Rachel Wharton article in the New York Times’ “Wirecutter” publication, which contests the idea that “planned obsolescence” – some fiendish business tactic – is the cause.
Read the article and you will learn a lot about the market for fridges. You will thank me later.
“If you can’t see it now, you never will. The sight of tens of thousands of people at Glastonbury yesterday joining in a spirited chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ was the sight of us officially becoming a very different country, I fear. One in which anti-Israel hysteria has so flawlessly rehabilitated Jew hatred that it has become unthinking, conformist, almost mundane. Something that Home Counties idiots can jive to before adjusting their hot pants and heading off to catch Charli XCX. Something that is broadcast by the BBC into millions of homes. The banality of the new anti-Semitism.
“Let’s not muck about here. When punk-rap duo Bob Vylan called for the killing of Israeli soldiers yesterday – as they warmed up the crowd at the West Holts Stage for every Israelophobe’s new favourite Irish rap trio, Kneecap – they weren’t opposing war. They were calling for war, and on the one army on Earth charged with protecting Jews from genocide. The army now at war with a jihadist cult that murdered, raped and kidnapped its way through an Israeli festival not unlike Glastonbury on 7 October 2023. The army that almost all Israelis are expected to serve in. Indeed, those making excuses for that sickening call-and-response yesterday hopefully don’t know that Hamas justifies killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that they are basically all tainted by national service. That they are all enemy combatants. Death, death to that IDF?
“Whether we got here by ignorance or conscious hatred is pretty much moot. The end result is British Jews – at Glasto or at home – watching thousands whoop as Jew-killing slogans are recited. Frontman Bobby Vylan also treated the crowd to a deranged rant about the indignities he suffered working for a ‘Zionist’ at a record label, because he had to listen to his boss talk favourably about Israel. I wonder if he knows that the vast majority of British Jews are Zionists. I wonder if he cares.”
Pop concerts seem to prompt exhibitions of behaviour that can put markers in the ground for a culture, or – as we saw in Manchester Arena (UK, 2017), Bataclan and other attacks in Paris (2015) and in Israel on 7 October, 2023 – indicate the level of evil that Islamism represents, and a need to confront it.
What, if anything, should be done about the specifics at Glastonbury? Well, it seems that if there is a law around incitement and it should be enforced consistently, then there are grounds to deal with those principally involved in shouting these chants if they are deemed incitement to engage in violence. I guess if you’re in a band called “Kneecap”, it does rather tilt the scales of justice against you. Just saying.
I cannot be sure, but I’d be interested to know the demographics of the crowd, and what proportion are English and middle class, university educated, etc. I’d say quite a large chunk.
To be clear, there is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about defending the current state of welfare – and incapacity benefits, in particular. As if it needs to be said, people whose disabilities prevent them from working deserve the best possible quality of life. Arguably, the system ought to be far more generous than it already is to those in genuine need.
The trouble is, as finally seems to be dawning on the political class, the soaring number of claimants bears little relationship with the state of the nation’s health. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, about four million 16- to 64-year-olds – that is, one in 10 of the working-age population – now claim some sort of disability benefit, compared with 2.8million in 2019. As explained in the Financial Times, recent rises in disability claims are almost entirely an artefact of the system itself. Policies and incentives are the main driver of rising and falling claims. Allowing claims for mental-health issues, enshrined in the 2014 Care Act, has had arguably the largest impact. Currently, 44 per cent of all claimants cite poor mental health as their primary condition.
To achieve a similar transition today would require us to introduce ways to help people acquire property. Most UK people are much richer than the statistics tell us. That is because they typically do not include the right to free healthcare, to free education for their children, and to the right to receive a state pension upon retirement. These are wealth, but they are not property, in that they cannot be alienated, given away or bequeathed to heirs. They die with the person.
The pathway to a property-owning democracy lies along two parallel routes: access to home ownership and to an investment portfolio. Both of these are property that belongs to the owner, and can be passed on to heirs and successors.
Home ownership can be made more accessible by a massive increase in the supply of housing. This means we have to streamline and liberalize planning laws, particularly in high-demand areas like London and the South East. We must simplify the process for obtaining planning permission and reduce local opposition barriers. The Town and Country Planning Act has passed its sell-by date.
That’s right. In the Guardian. My surprise at the location of the article was equalled by my surprise at the location of its writer: “Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing.” I didn’t know there were independent science writers in Beijing, but I guess there must be for an article on this particular topic written by someone describing themselves as such to appear. Anyway, she writes:
Some scientists assert evidence supporting natural-origins hypotheses with excessive confidence and show little tolerance for dissenting views. They have appeared eager to shut down the debate, repeatedly and since early 2020. For instance, when their work was published in the journal Science in 2022, they proclaimed the case closed and lab-leak theories dead. Even researchers leaning towards natural origins theories, such as the virus ecologist Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountains Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, told me they lamented that some of their colleagues defend their theories “like a religion”.
No one embodies the crisis of trust in science more than Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance. A series of missteps on his part has helped to fuel public distrust. In early 2020, for instance, he organised a statement by dozens of prominent scientists in the Lancet, which strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, without disclosing his nearly two-decade collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conflict of interest.
Similarly, he denies that his own collaboration with the Wuhan lab involved gain-of-function research, even though Shi Zhengli – the Chinese scientist who led the bat-borne coronavirus studies – has openly acknowledged that the lab’s work produced at least one genetically modified virus more virulent than its parental strain. (That work is not directly relevant to the origins of Covid-19.)
The documentary [Christian Frei’s Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance, short title Blame] claims that attacks on EcoHealth Alliance and the spread of lab-leak conspiracy theories have fuelled distrust in science. In reality, it’s the other way round: public distrust in science, fuelled by the unresolved H5N1 gain-of-function controversy and by lack of transparency and humility from scientists such as Daszak, has driven scepticism and increased support for lab-leak theories.
This is not news to anyone who has read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral. Or to anyone who does not entirely get their news from the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, come to think of it. Still, better five years late than never. Why now, I wonder? Did someone at the Scott Trust take Katharine Viner to one side and gently suggest that it would be nice if the customary Guardian delay between “this is an absurd far right conspiracy theory” and “it’s the fault of the far right for talking about it before we did and using up all the available words” was not too far out of line with the nearly four years it took to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and Joe Biden was senile? Or is something big about to break?
Alfred Marshall’s grand vision of economics was that you did the maths to check your logic. Then you translated all of that into English and burnt the maths. Steve Keen won’t do it that way for of course Marshall was a neoclassical and that’s just wrong, see?
Keen did once try to insist that I followed along with one of his papers – he was showing that there are no free markets, there are only oligopolies and therefore everything must be controlled by politics – and was most put out when I said well, yes, that’s mathematically true but useless.
For his contention was that as we’ve never got an infinite number of producers (nor consumers) therefore that model of free markets – which relies upon no individual producer or consumer having pricing power, which in itself implies an infinite number – therefore neoclassical economics was all wet. His maths was fine for that’s all true too. Except for the bit where if we analyse markets which we know are oligopolistic and then see how many producers we need for them not to be then the number seems to be about 5 or 6. True, true, 7 supermarkets doesn’t mean a wholly perfectly free market with profits no higher than the cost of capital but it’s pretty damn close. Close enough for either jazz or the economics of public policy.
The maths is for working through the logic not a replacement for it.
I remember when the main way to answer that question was to watch the News at Ten. More sophisticated people would read newspapers. The limitations of mainstream media are ever more apparent. The internet democratized information, so that should help. There are still various problems, including filtering and resources.
YouTube is probably the most successful solution to the latter problem. It is possible to be a full time YouTuber focusing on a niche topic and earn a living.
The former problem is hard. Search engines have bias; bots abound. I offer here a handful of ways I figure out what is happening.
To answer specifically what is happening, lately I have found the Miltary and History channel useful. In the linked video he explains what is known about the results of the US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, complete with satellite imagery. He has daily updates with information about multiple conflicts with lots of detail. He is analytical and unpolitical.
To answer why it is happening, William Spaniel’s channel looks at events from the perspective of crisis bargaining theory: it is war economics where territory is the currency, hence the refrain that everything is about “lines on maps”. In the linked video he explains why the USA bombed Iranian nuclear facilities when it did, in terms of Israel setting the stage and creating a window of opportunity. More generally, the channel is useful for understanding why fighting is happening instead of negotiating, and how different things will have to look before negotiation is possible.
For a broader perspective of capabilities and defense economics, there is Perun. He explains the principles, brings in real world data and describes the range of possibilities. An unexpected bit of information in the linked video is that Israel would likely run out of ammunition for its iron dome before Iran runs out of cheap, badly aimed ballistic missiles. That is why eliminating launchers is so important to Israel, and it affects how long an air campaign can go on for.
In general, if I really want to understand something, I have found that finding a good specialist YouTuber is one of the better ways to do it. The feedback loop of financial reward and algorithmic feedback seems to work: not universally, but enough that there is a rich vein of good information on any given topic amongst the noise.
For something lighter, I can also recommend Daniel Owen if you are looking to buy a GPU for your computer, and Chris Spargo for dull yet fascinating pop history like the story of nationalised pubs.
“We welcome efforts such as the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires online platforms to counter the spread of illegal content, including disinformation, and lays the groundwork for holding platforms accountable. But much more is needed. For example, the UK’s Online Safety Act could be strengthened by explicitly recognising climate disinformation as a form of harmful content.”
It is remarkable how people who would be ashamed to support a law to “counter the spread of illegal speech” happily praise a law that “counters the spread of illegal content.” The magic of words: just re-label “speech” as “content” – as being inside something – and it can now truly be contained, as in “restrained or controlled”.
The same people regularly proclaim that Europe is a place which has banished censorship of the press. That is almost true, although both the EU and the UK governments are working to restore their old powers. In the meantime they are willing enough to temporarily refrain from censorship of ideas spread by old technology if it gives them cover for censoring ideas spread by new technology.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Emphasis added.
And while I’m emphasising things, let me also emphasise this: the minute I learn that an idea is being censored, I give that idea more credence.
No, that does not mean that I automatically believe any censored idea entirely. (How could I? A million contradictory falsehoods are censored alongside the truth. The problem is that the act of censorship destroys our ability to tell which of them is the truth.) It means that I strain to hear what is being said behind the gag. It means that I start to wonder how real the claimed consensus is, if those who depart from it are silenced. It means that I start to wonder why the proponents of the “accepted” view feel the need to protect it from counter-arguments.
I said in 2012 that my belief in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) was two and a half letters to the left compared to most commenters on this blog. Damn, it should have been one and a half letters to the right. Oh well, you knew what I meant. With regard to CAGW or whatever they are calling it now, whether I phrase it as my belief moving to the left or my disbelief moving to the right, the surest way to make that movement happen is to pass a law defining “climate disinformation as a form of harmful content”. Then I will know that the so-called scientific consensus on climate change is no such thing. If certain hypotheses cannot be discussed, not only is there no scientific consensus, there is no science.
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A related post, but focussing on self-censorship rather than the government censorship that Mayors Khan and Hidalgo favour: “Bubbles, lies and buttered toast.” Any form of censorship is fatal to science.
In Rousseau’s time, the feeding was purely metaphorical. He lived before the Industrial Revolution, and people were still as poor as they had ever been. The literal feeding only began in the 19th century, and what you see is that the more people enjoy the fruits of a capitalist society, the more opportunities they have to engage in criticism. So, capitalism and industrial modernity become a victim of their own success because they breed this class of people who have their material needs met and can spend their lives biting the hand that feeds them. Karl Marx is a great example. He was living off of the handouts that he received from Friedrich Engels which were made possible by Engels’ father’s cotton factory. Capitalism was affording him the freedom and the material prosperity to write screeds against capitalism.
There was a recent study about how the hotspots of degrowth—the philosophy that calls for an end to economic growth and a controlled shrinking of material production—are all in wealthy countries. You don’t hear a lot of degrowth-ism from people in developing countries because they have a more immediate understanding of the benefits of capitalism and industry. But if you’ve been prosperous and well-fed and affluent for a long time, you tend to take those things for granted. If you read the degrowth literature, they seem to have no clue at all about what it means to farm, for example, and be self-sufficient. They romanticize it, and they can afford to romanticize it because nobody is there to tell them what it was like. Even their grandparents never experienced it.
The thesis – that the West gets a lot of stick because people have the freedom to be critical of it – chimes with another, related point: the elite “overproduction” idea. In other words, if you create a lot of people who have the time, money and energy to do things other than earn a living and so on, you are going to get a lot of this sort of reflection and in certain cases, destructive criticism.
This all reminds me of a couple of books that I read many years ago that are still worth a read, and in the case of the Johnson one, marvellous for its colour and detail: Roger Scruton and Fools, Frauds And Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, and Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson. Sadly, both men are no longer with us. I haven’t yet read Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell, but I will get round to it.
What we are living through today, in a phrase, is an unprecedented break in national continuity. As a country we are disconnecting from the old Britain. The Britain of our national story is disappearing, the Britain of the Romans through the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Tudors, Nelson and Wellington, the two world wars and even the Attlee settlement.
Gone is the Britain of Christianity and the Church as a core component of British identity, and moral judgement has become utilitarian, about what is convenient, disconnected from any traditional, let alone transcendental, set of values.
Fast receding is the Britain of real state capacity and national ambition, as we move from Victorian St Pancras to the hole in the ground at Euston, from the first nuclear power station back to the windmill.
Our national character is changing. We are, at last, becoming the “young country”, the country without a past, that Tony Blair wanted.
Personality traits such as patriotism and bravery are viewed as desirable within the military. This often encourages overt masculine behaviour amongst its members, therefore stepping outside the norm and challenging the group is often looked down upon and difficult to do. The task-focused approach can also lead to corners being cut if it is deemed that the ends justify the means, that certain actions or behaviours are tolerated if they achieve the desired result. The danger with this is that such undesirable behaviours, if tolerated for long enough, become the norm and the level of standards gradually erodes… Methods of bonding and creating team cohesiveness within the military often involve pranks and banter, but this isolates those who are different to the norm.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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