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]
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The taxi drivers’ take on the UK economy You sometimes hear of how London’s taxi drivers like to regale their passengers with their views on matters of public affairs. Maybe it is their self-employed, independent nature that lends itself to a certain feistyness of attitude. I do not always agree with what I hear from taxi drivers but often or not, they have their fingers on the pulse. Well, it turns out that the news service Bloomberg is polling the men and women who drive the London black cabs for their views on the state of the economy. If their views are correct, the UK economy is slowing down.
To hell with the official government statistics. The cabbies have spoken.
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Who Are We? 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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Taxi drivers can be surprisingly good sources of reliable news. One wanna-be Prime Minister of Oz, called Latham, got into a fight with a Taxi driver, which told us a lot about his personality. He lost big at our last Federal Election!
And I remember all those old “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” shows where the chauffeurs were the ones always knowing more about the country than the people they taxied around. Whilst it was a comedy show, it was famous for being close to the truth!!!
The poll was done by another company. Bloomberg just wrote it up.
chip, indeed. My error.
Wisdom of the taxi driver is similar to the conservative yankee wish:
I’d rather be ruled by the first 50 names in the Cambridge, Massachusetts telephone book than by the first 50 names in the Harvard University faculty telephone book.
The other really good technique is to get in a taxi and drive around a bit. Look out of the windows and get an impression of how many shops and restaurants are opening and closing, and how well patronised they appear to be. A lot of bicycle chains and re-entry notices on newly painted business fronts? Take cover.
I wonder if they’d find the economy picking up if they reduced their fares? I have to admit I’ve taken to using minicab firms around town when I’m back over in the UK.
Even short “hops” in black cabs are costing a small fortune, especially on the night tarrif.
As for taxis being expensive, I have a local minicab company that I know to be reliable and to charge reasonable prices, and this is what I use when I need a cab to or from my home and I am paying for it. I only use black cabs when there is no alternative or my employer is paying. I tend to think that my habits are very similar to those of many other Londoners.
As for things being wrong with the British economy, the thing that is worrying me is the inflation. I can feel it in a way I have not felt it for 15 years. Prices always go up and down, but when you have inflation as a monetary phenomenon the prices of things that you buy on a day to day basis go up a few percent, and then a few months later they go up a few percent again, and then a few months later they go up a few percent again. We have this again. This is one more thing that convinces me that public finances are a truly horrendous mess, and that we will only discover how bad they are after there is a change of government and the new government opens the books to demonstrate what a mess it has inherited. (Theoretically we have an independent bank of England which controls inflation, but this can and has been fiddled with. For one thing, the way in which the Bank’s inflation target was defined was recently changed in a way that effectively made the target rate considerably higher. This is the sort of underhand trick this government pulls.
Although I would like to think cabbies are more in touch with the pulse of their city because of their independent and chatty manner, I think it is more likely that they have immediate access to everyday people, and the nature of the relationship is such that the cabbie is encouraged to get their fares to talk about themselves and their daily concerns.