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“Two decades of the precautionary principle as the key policy tool for managing uncertainties has neutered risk management capacities by offering, as the only approach, the systematic removal of any exposure to any hazard. As the risk-averse precautionary mindset cements itself, more and more of us have become passive docilians waiting to be nannied.” – David Zaruk, writing in an online science website which I hadn’t come across before until a commentator on this blog flagged it. Thanks! March 24th, 2020 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ross Clark, Spectator (behind paywall). A couple more:
The more I read, the more it seems to me that randomised testing, as Clark writes, is crucial, not least in reducing hysteria and the effects that hysteria is having, and will continue to have, on our society and business. The costs, in terms of stress, the destruction of businesses and so much effort, needs to be weighed. I have come across a few comments on social media, of the passive/aggressive sort, that “it is so amusing to see all these experts all over social media on epidemics” – the implication being that the mass public should shut up, “stay in your lane” and let the men/women in white coats take charge. The problem with this however is what happens if the experts disagree, or if their policy advice causes so much damage, including to the liberties and welfare of the citizenry, that a democratically elected politician has to make a judgement call? We don’t, rightly, outsource vast coercive powers to everyone who claims to be an expert on something. That’s not how it is supposed to work. March 23rd, 2020 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is probably one of the few places in the internet, never mind the regular media, where people can get to debate the wonders of socialised medicine without being under the burden of proving that they are not evil. In the UK, we have had since the late 1940s a healthcare system that dominates the field, with a relatively small private sector. The National Health Service, funded from tax and run as a monopoly, with politicians and civil servants allocating resources, was modeled, as so many post-war institutions were, on the idea of state central planning. The narrative of the time was that planning was the way to go, unlike all that messy, chaotic “laissez faire” that had been associated, however wrongly, with the Great Depression and so on. (Here is a good paper on the NHS by the Institute of Economic Affairs.) I can also recommend this book, by James Bartholomew on the many problems with the UK welfare state. The NHS, like many of the other socialised medical systems in much of the developed world, faces the monstrous coronavirus. And so much of the current policy approach – the UK is going into more of a lockdown as of this weekend – is designed, so it is said, to flatten the potential surge of infections and deaths, so that the NHS and other systems don’t collapse. The cost/benefit calculation is being made that it is better to smash the world economy, to force millions into idleness, possibly for months, and tide them over with cash payments funded from vast amounts of debt, than it is to allow the NHS/other to be forced into a nightmare of running out of resources. In some ways I can see the merits of preventing a horrendous surge in deaths; I also think that saving the NHS and other models of healthcare is a sort of virility test of today’s Welfare States. Nothing can be done to admit they have limits, even if that means economic damage on a major scale. That cost/benefit calculation may look just about defensible now, but what about in two months’ time, particularly if there is no real sign of a deceleration in the virus, but if the struggle to buy even basic household necessities leaves a lot of people in real hardship? I assume that farmers and others in the food production business are not being told to stay at home, but such is the level of madness about this situation that I wonder. I’d like to know how locking people in their homes for months is going to be enforced. There are also health considerations to be taken into account by such a lock-down, particularly if it goes on for months on end. Humanity is not designed for prison, and those of us in relatively free societies (“relatively” being the operative word) will move from being restless to downright homicidal of this goes on into the summer and beyond. There aren’t enough police to keep everyone cooped up in their homes. Those bastards in the Chinese Communist Party have a lot to answer for. And yes, COVID-19 began there, and it shows how derelict some of our media/political class has become that is frowned upon to point that out. (The anger is rising, and will have major consequences for our geopolitics.) It would be rather ironic to think that something unleashed by a Communist state, whether by accident or whatever, has put such pressure on Welfare State societies in the West. Final point: I was due to give a talk tonight at Brian Micklethwait’s place about the recent calls for anti-trust assaults on the Big Techs such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, and I was going to look at parallels with the campaign to break up J D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil more than a century ago. One thing you can say about Rockefeller, was that as well as being a brilliant businessman, and philanthropist in the area of healthcare, among others, he also understood the importance of integrated supply chains in commerce. He’d have looked at our current predicament with interest. March 20th, 2020 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few years ago I remember the arrival of a sort of clock that measured the terrifying rise of the UK’s public debt, a pile that has got much heavier and scarier as a result of the splurge of spending enacted by the new UK finance minister last week. The idea of some dial on the dashboard of our lives, so to speak, which rises constantly, or maybe eventually slows and reverts, is an interesting one. In the media, some newspapers seem to have these daily counts of the number of people dying of coronavirus. On some of the TV channels there is a scrolling feed at the bottom of the screen (I saw this on Sky News, which is arguably even worse than the BBC these days) do this. It was rather like the tickers for the level of the S&P 500 or the latest cricket scores from Lords. A writer on Linkedin, whom I quote from here but I won’t name as I am not sure I have permission, has written this, and I do sort of sympathise:
Of course the State should not in any way ban or try and interfere with such reporting, whether it is crass, hysterical, or sober. At least in the West the media is covering this outbreak heavily, whereas in China, as appears to be the case, people who blew the whistle on what was going on have been punished or just disappeared. March 17th, 2020 | 71 comments - (Comments are closed)
With the virus encouraging more people and businesses to develop online, remote working models, it is going to put a premium on things like high-speed, reliable internet, video, two-way video, etc. And paradoxically, that means digital viruses are even more a threat (and often come from the same places as the biological ones, such as China). So I expect that spending on cyber-security, as well as developing more resilient business models (diversified supply chains, closer-to-home manufacturing of essentials such as medicines), and leaner, more scalable medical services, will increase. That should happen as a free market response, rather than because the State wills it. This virus will be used to bash free trade, encourage protectionism, and so on. But the verities about the division of labour and comparative advantage remain. Complete self-sufficiency cannot be squared with a high standard of living; autarky means a cramped, sclerotic world. There is a reason that the 1970s sitcom, The Good Life, was indeed a comedy because it took the piss out of the idea of freeing oneself of a complex division of labour. It brings enormous costs. Protectionism, like its twin, anti-trust, are often the playthings of sore losers in business, and hit the consumer or smaller-scale entrepreneur. We should not lose sight of the enormous gains made since the end of the Berlin Wall and wider expansion of trade. The current disruption should encourage a more clear-eyed understanding of the risks of doing business with dictatorships and closed societies such as China, and a need to find alternatives where possible. Wholesale theft of intellectual property can no longer be tolerated as easily as in the past. How to deal with that remains a difficult question. On the need to avoid undue risk, it is worth pondering the following: According to the US broadcaster Tucker Carlson, 95 per cent of generic drugs used in the US are imported from China, although I am not sure what he uses as a data source for this. Most good investors understand the need for good portfolio diversification, so the same surely will apply to supply chains after this virus episode. The developments might also encourage, or they should, a more self-reliance culture (people should learn first aid, store more non-perishable foods at home and other necessities), and in countries where people have not become too sheeplike, encourage a more robust approach to self-defence and respect for property. Imagine what happens if looting breaks out in certain situations. Another takeway: this horrible episode has put certain rather silly (at least they are to me) concerns into perspective: PC pronouns for certain genders, “woke” remakes of action films like the much-delayed Bond film, “cancel culture”, etc. It might even remind people that screaming that the world is coming to an end unless we switch off industrial civilisation RIGHT NOW is so silly, and so monstrous, that it blunts the public to legitimate worries out there. Greta needs to put a sock in it, and go back to school and hit the books. And the man formerly known as Prince Harry simply must, for our sanity, fuck off. March 12th, 2020 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
OK, did anyone notice International Women’s Day? Get any emails? Read any stories about issues that concern women around the world, ranging from employment law through to their treatment in certain parts of the world? Well I did, but I was struck by how low-temperature it all was. The press releases that I received had a sort of “they are just phoning it in” quality. Because whatever else one can say about this event, in recent years it appeared to loom quite large in my life in the media/wealth management world. There is usually lots of commentary about “pay gaps” (a fertile area for the misleading use of data, not to mention a lot of questionable assumptions). Not so much this year. It all felt a bit, well, lame. And it is not just because of COVID-19, although that obviously is a part of it. Certain harsh facts of reality have broken through our “woke” obsessions. (The virus appears to hit men harder than women, which violates a prime directive of modern feminism, that no evidence should be provided that suggests men and women are different other than in strict issues around making babies, unless the difference is to show that men are more “toxic”, reckless, etc.) The day – 8 March – was also a Sunday, so a curiously odd day for such an event when a working day might make more sense (well, Sunday is a working day in Muslim nations, but not in the West for most people). I don’t know whether there is just plain exhaustion out there about the endless claims that men wield all the power, have the best jobs, are “toxic”, that films, music, TV, the sale of services, etc, are all about men, and that this all needs to change. The truth in fact is that in much of the West, this process of complaining about men has gone on so long that fatigue is setting in when the rhetoric does not quite stack up against reality. According to consultancy and research firm Frost and Sullivan, women owners will account for 40 per cent of all registered businesses worldwide this year. In my financial services industry, they account for an increasingly important client base in terms of assets under management. This is particularly the case in regions such as Asia. To take a more philosophical turn here, those of us on the classical liberal/libertarian end of the spectrum should remind folk that our starting point is that life isn’t a zero-sum game. If women succeed more in business or in sports, it is not at the expense of men, nor should it be. Also, if the percentage share of women in occupation/area A is greater than, or less than, that of men as a share of the total population, that is not ipso facto proof that something terrible has happened, and that this must be corrected. For it ignores how entirely free acts at the individual level can have an impact that might appear “disproportionate” at the macro one. At no stage was deliberate worsening/bettering of group intended, because this was not done with reference to a group outcome in the first place. What the “proportionate share” egalitarians would demand is that none of us should interact with another person unless we have gone through some sort of meta-choice process of sifting through a pre-approved “menu”, whether it is hiring an employee, checking out a date on a dating app, etc. For example, how many people should a guy choose from before making a “fair” choice of a woman to go out with and who should set this sample? If he chooses, to stick with the dating example, to say he does not want to date single mothers or those who paint their hair green, or who are clinically obese, or rail-thin, or whatever, who is to say that he should not? And if the man in question decides to stop using such apps, do the old-fashioned thing instead and meet women in bars or social events, who on earth is in a position to screen that? I think a failure to understand things like this is behind bad ideas such as the State seeking to mandate how many women/others should sit on company boards, regardless of how that effectively violates freedom of firms to hire and invite whom they want. Even if adverts for certain jobs forbid certain likes and dislikes being expressed, as anyone knows preferences can and are still expressed in who gets a job. It is very hard to control this; the best “solution” to this issue is to have as competitive a labour market as possible: capitalism is the best solvent of irrational dislikes/likes of people, because it is a cost. Back to more current matters, it does appear that for all the supposed march of identity politics, some countries are, much to the dislike of some, resistant if the quality of candidates is poor. Consider the US. The country in November faces a choice between the incumbent, whom we are told is a moron, Orange Man Bad. And yet the ladies haven’t made much of a dent. The best that the Democrats can come up with at this point are two ageing male Lefties, one of whom is a largely – as far as I know – unrepentant Communist and fan of Fidel Castro, and the other a creep with allegedly wandering hands who might have early-stage dementia. The women on the Democratic race, such as Elizabeth Warren (who absurdly played a native American Indian identity card, and got hammered for it), and Kamala Harris, fell by the wayside as their flaws became all too evident. (OK, Tulsi Gabbard is just about hanging on, but not for long. None of them, to be blunt about it, is a Maggie.) IWD has caused people from different parts of the ideological spectrum, by the way, to claim that this or that group/viewpoint they dislike has “hijacked” it. Take this example from Progress, the UK magazine, in 2016, and more recently, from the Daily Telegraph. Of course, if you want to wind certain people up, as I do in my less mature moments, one way to say that we should mark IWD is to salute the rise of UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, even if you aren’t that sold on her points-based approach to immigration. Triggered! March 10th, 2020 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Every generation goes through tremors when something new arrives. Elvis’s hips. Pinball. TV. Rock ’n’ roll. Videogames. For the most part, everyone turned out OK. Sure, we’ve all gone down the rabbit hole of hyperlinks and insect-fighting videos. So what? We’re bored. – Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal (behind paywall). He’s criticising what he sees as “hysteria” in the attacks on social media, putting them in the same bracket as alarms over things like heavy metal music and its effects on young people, and so on. February 24th, 2020 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
The virus outbreak in China and the clampdown on travel and other activity by a Communist country is inevitably going to cause some political commentary about the implications, and it already has. One comment I am bracing for is how this proves how dangerous globalisation can be because of extended supply chains, long-haul flights, etc. In fact I expect some on the Green, anti-trade side might make such points. What the episode shows is that all advanced societies need “firebreaks” that can be imposed – hopefully by public consent for a limited period – (I mentioned firebreaks in my previous item about the Australian bushfires). There may also be lessons to come out about local food and hygiene, as well as what is done to immunise young children and so forth. This echoes what I wrote the other day about how forest fires in Australia got more deadly because the “immunity” of the forests was undermined by neglecting to do controlled burns and thin out dead trees. But it is wrong in a broader sense to say that viruses are a point against greater human interaction via trade in general. One might as well draw the conclusion that we should all live in sealed boxes. When the Black Death raged, it killed a huge number in relative terms of the population in affected areas, and other plagues in early history have been as deadly, and yet most people at the time did not travel far from home. Some did of course, and human cities were dirty and unsanitary. But overall, the world of the 14th Century wasn’t as globalised in terms of human interaction as it is now. Let’s not forget that trade also increases options when a population is hit by a local disaster. Take the case of food supply if the local produce goes wrong. Lack of imported food access was fatal for Ireland in the 1840s because Corn Laws hampered imports of wheat into the country. It is true that people who even friendly to the free market economy and global trade use words such as “contagion” to describe how an issue in country X can affect a nation Y, and so on. (Some have even claimed that Chinese savings “surpluses” helped cause the 2008 financial crisis by funding the US housing binge. And writers such as James Rickards have even attempted to defend protectionism and capital controls on the same basis that one might defend a fire safety door.) There are also implications for the effectiveness or otherwise of “transnational” organisations (aka “tranzis”), as this article at Pajamas Media states. China is still a deeply oppressive place in many ways, and the disaster today is grim, and worrying. But bear in mind dear reader how far that nation has come since Mao, one of the greatest mass murderers in recorded history, has gone. The virus breaking out is horrible, but far less horrible than anything that bastard brought about. China is now much richer, and has the resources to tackle this plague. I wish them well. January 28th, 2020 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
The recent massive Australian bushfires have provoked a lot of controversy, with some people claiming that this is largely driven by Man-made global warming, and others pointing to how other factors (not necessarily to the exclusion of such warming) were to blame, including changes to how forests/habitats are managed. For example, I have seen it stated that bans on “controlled burns” and clearances of woodland in the early growing seasons, are a big factor in causing this disaster. I sense from watching reports in parts of the mainstream media that commentaries on controls on forest clearance, controlled burns and so on have tended to be few and far between. I suspect that the topic isn’t popular in those places pushing the “Man is destroying Mother Earth with C02” narrative, because it gets in the way. But surely it seems to me that such a viewpoint is counterproductive: the general public understands that firebreaks, clearances and selective thinning of woodland, etc, are part of a solution. (A firebreak is like a bulkhead in a ship.) And let’s not forget that some species of plant only germinate after a fire. Fire, in fact, is a part of agriculture. For centuries, farmers have burned certain waste vegetation, which is often good for the soil in releasing certain nutrients. A few years ago in the UK, farmers burned straw after harvest. This practice was banned in the UK in the early 90s largely because a few idiot farmers did not make wide firebreaks around their fields and in some cases, burned when there was a wind. The ash and the smoke upset people and scared a few. But one of the benefits of stubble burning was that it created a clean seed bed for crops, and farmers did not have to spend so much money and fuel cultivating the soil (which is good for the environment) or on herbicides and other chemicals (ditto). So, controlled burns are and should be a perfectly normal part of intelligent curation of habitats and farmland, when done in a sensible way. The US-based Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC, has a good overview on this topic. It is surely better to let things burn in a controlled way, rather than allow a whole coastal region of a continent such as Australia go up in a fireball, destroying hundreds of millions of animals and killing people. But such is the grip of this focus on the mono-causal explanation of the fires (blaming it on climate change) that little will be done, I fear. And in a way one of the things I detest most about the age in which we live is how fashionable opinion fastens itself on a simple, but often unattainable goal – eliminating all fossil fuels and hoping this achieves a result in a few thousand years – rather than taking more practical and verifiable steps to handle a situation, such as managing forests more intelligently. There is this toxic mix of virtue-signalling, State regulation bossiness and pettiness, coupled with hostility towards private sector solutions and property rights (such as allowing owners of land to cut trees and thin out brush). The result is catastrophe. We saw the same sort of toxic brew around the financial crisis of 2008. Remember the old “too big to fail” problem? The problem of limited liability-owned banks not feeling the risk of going bust by imprudent lending? The moral hazard effects of taxpayer bailouts, deposit insurance and central bankers as lenders of last resort? State support for sub-prime lending? There is a sort of rough analogy between a policy mix that does not allow forests to be thinned and occasionally burned in limited ways, and a banking system where a bank is never allowed to fail for the assets to be reallocated to more sensible uses. (The book Alchemists of Loss is a good summary of what went wrong inside banks and because of public policy.) But with nature, so with finance. One needs to have “dead wood”, such as unprofitable lines of lending, to go out of business and for the distressed assets to be bought and restructured, much as an overgrown forest needs to be thinned out and for some areas to be cut back from time to time. This is about resilience or what Nicholas Taleb means by the term “anti-fragile”: without allowing things to die and be cut out and for a certain amount of disorder and turbulence, you end up creating something that will eventually go up in a firebomb, whether it be Australian landscapes or modern economies. January 23rd, 2020 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
So writes Rod Dreher, piling on about Harry and Meghan (formerly of the UK Royal Family, so it appears at the time of writing). So much has been written and said that it is difficult to add much further. It is, however, interesting to note that one development in parts of the Web is how Harry is being used by “manosphere” commentators as an example of how not to behave and of the sort of mistakes men can make in selecting long-term relationships. There is, to give one case, a chap called Richard Cooper, based in Canada (I bet the Canadian taxpayers are delighted about having to look after Harry and Meghan’s security), and he has a site called Entrepreneurs in Cars. Another commentator who writes books about “red pill awareness” for men when it comes to women is Rollo Tomassi (this is his pen-name, and he’s a fan of the film LA Confidential, which is where the name comes from). Some of these men appear to be fans of evolutionary psychology, and make a big deal about the concept of hypergamy (the idea that women in their younger adult years look for “Alpha” males to have lots of hot sex with and switch to more tame “Beta” males as they reach the stage when they want to have babies, but still at times crave for the Alpha male, which is why they can quickly ditch a husband when they get bored, and are protected more than before by Western divorce laws, which tend to favour women in things such as custody of kids. As with all such notions, these are generalisations, and there are plainly exceptions). The take-away from all this is that Harry is very much now a Beta, having been a bit more of an Alpha male during his Army, helicopter-flying, dancing naked in Vegas, days. And as he becomes more Beta, and goes along with his wife’s social justice warrior views, and all the rest of this stuff, he loses his sense of self and assertiveness. Such men can lash out, or become addicted to various substances, or worse. What interests me about the H&M case isn’t so much what it says about the pros and cons of a constitutional monarchy in this age (I am a supporter in the very limited sense), but more about what it says about the state of our culture. And as we classical liberals/libertarians need to remember, political ideas don’t operate in a vacuum. A culture that puts a premium on victimhood, that makes excuses, etc, is toxic for liberty and autonomy. In a different context, the desire of this young couple for “financial independence” would be congruent with a libertarian outlook if they weren’t also desiring to make use of an institution like the Royal family. I actually feel some sympathy for Harry, in particular. He had no choice to be born a royal, and I for one don’t criticise him for wanting to get out of the limelight, so long as he does not try to play both sides of this situation. One thing that strikes me is that Harry doesn’t seem, as far as I can see, to have any close male buddies that he can hang out with, for example. He has a brother (from whom he appears to be distant these days), but where are the mates, the guys he can fish with, drink beer with, play sports with and so on? Every man, no matter how happily married, needs to have such a network of pals. One thing I pride myself on is that I haven’t allowed my circle of friends to collapse after getting hitched. Social media is not a substitute. In Harry’s case, he was in the Army, and he went through the banter, teasing and discomforts of being a soldier. I cannot help but think that things went downhill for him when he left the Army. Anyway, I promise not to write about this couple again. January 14th, 2020 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen. Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” Sir Roger Scruton, academic, writer and supporter of East European dissidents, died yesterday after a short illness. I knew he was getting on in years but his death nevertheless came as a shock to me. I did not agree with all of his views, but I did on most of them, and he was one of those men I regard as a defender of liberty and of civilisation in its fullest sense. I met him when I was only 22, having recently graduated from my college. I had contributed a couple of small items towards the Salisbury Review journal that he edited, and was invited to a wonderfully posh and fun black-tie dinner at Hatfield House, ancestral home of the Salisbury dynasty, and joined by such luminaries as the journalist T E Utley, and Enoch Powell. I remember – this being 1988 – that Powell spoke with his customary intensity about Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges Group speech of that time, and remembered thinking that this issue over Europe would dominate much of our politics. I wasn’t wrong. When you are a young graduate, making your way in the world and trying to get the advice of clever people, it makes a lot of difference when the folk you meet and admire turn out to be great as people. Roger Scruton was one of them – I remember his wit, kindness and helpful advice. The same applied around the same time when I met two outstanding thinkers: Anthony Flew, and David Friedman (son of Milton Friedman). A few years later I met P J O’Rourke, who was hilarious and full of encouragement towards me as I told him I was a trainee journalist. I had the same experience when I met Auberon Waugh once. It really matters that people whom you meet like this give the time and trouble to talk to young people, and I try and remember that when, now that I am in my greying middle age, that youngsters whom I come up against ask me about what I do. Scruton was a model of the good and considerate teacher. It has been remarked elsewhere that Scruton was more admired abroad than he was in the UK, and that applies of course to the UK’s education establishment, much of which is dominated by the Left. His book, Thinkers of The New Left, is one of his most brilliant, and dissected the likes of Foucault, Derrrida, Heidegger and Althusser – a veritable gallery of knaves and fools. Their defenders weren’t happy, and Scruton’s chances of academic grandeur suffered. He taught in the US, wrote more books and ran a farm. In middle age, he took up horse riding and hunting with hounds with a zeal of a convert. In some ways he was a bit of a paradox: the grammar school boy with a bit of a rebellious streak, except that for him, being a true rebel meant being conservative rather than a socialist. It is a quality I share in some ways, as do many of those who write for this blog. I think that history will be kind to him: his focus on issues such as understanding the importance of beauty in human life, for example, will last a bit longer than some present obsessions, including, I hope, the intellectual cul-de-sac of “woke” politics. (Here is an obituary in the National Review, from the US.) All that remains is for me to express my condolences to his family and many friends. In particularly, I think of those people in Eastern Europe he helped, at some risk to himself, during the years ahead of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unlike some academics, he was also a man of action and he was brave as a lion. RIP, Sir Roger. January 13th, 2020 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ricky Gervais’s opening comments at the Golden Globes in Hollywood (I assume he is not doing them ever again) are rightly being lauded around the non-PC parts of the internet/media world for telling much of Hollywood how totally, eye-wateringly awful it is. Seems a tad harsh, though – he’s a bit like the guy who comes to a party, takes a lot of the decent wine, insults the guests and then leaves. Seems a tad boorish. But maybe I am being squeamish and boorishness in these times may be necessary. I get the impression that a high-water mark of PCness, or “wokeness”, to coin a term, may have been reached. Maybe even last December’s crushing of Mr Corbyn’s UK Labour Party was an indicator. (For anyone living on a remote desert island in recent years, here is a definition of “woke”.) So what is the context here and how do we end with a situation where a movie industry reaches the point where a British entertainer hammers practitioners in this way? One sign of what is going wrong is how famous franchises are “rebooted” – James Bond is getting older and being replaced, at least in terms of the person with the iconic 007 number, by a black woman who has his serial number (possibly); Terminator, Star Wars, Dr Who….the list of increasingly “woke” productions goes on. The accountants aren’t happy as far as viewing figures and box office takings are concerned, it seems. Of course, as we have seen on discussions on this blog before, some business tycoons might be willing to see some of their revenues decline if it means winning a longer term war to change the “culture”, but shareholders’ patience has its limits. If Proctor and Gamble takes a hit by insulting men as toxic, well, even the most PC chief executives will be booted out eventually. But for the penny to drop, so to speak, it appears necessary for unvarnished truths to be dished out, and quite possibly, Gervais is ultimately doing the sector a favour, even if swearing at guests is a bit, well, off. I do think that the very fact that someone such as Ricky Gervais can stand up in front of Hollywood luvvies and more or less telll them they are a bunch of narcissistic, ignorant twats is quite something and suggests we have reached a sort of tipping point. It even got mentioned on the BBC this morning. OK, I hear you cry, is Gervais’s intervention necessary? If “woke” films lose money and Netflix/other hoover up the market, that is capitalism in action in its most brutal and bracing way. That of course is all true. And there have been and will be films made that upset fans and conventional wisdom, whether from a traditional conservative or socially radical point of view. So long as it is a free market, that’s fine. (But when the State intrudes with subsidies, this becomes a big problem.) But the benefit at times of having someone such as Gervais drop some bombs on an awards ceremony is that paradoxically, he highlights the place of awards events in business sectors. Industry awards ceremonies are marketing exercises, and there is, as with all types of business, a law of diminishing returns if there are lots of them: the more awards there are, the less each one matters over time. The decisions about who gets what gong and for what are subject to lots of political eye-gouging. A lot is at stake in terms of PR, contracts and connections. And in a slightly less venal way, awards are a chance for people to meet old friends, make some new contacts and have a glass or two in convivial surroundings (and there’s nothing wrong about that, by the way). However, for all their annoying qualities and diminishing returns, awards events can also be a chance for an industry that is a bit under the cosh to put its best faces forward, to plead a case, to show it still counts. There are awards events for every sector under the sun, from architecture to IT. Funnily enough some of the smarter Hollywood people (yes, they exist) probably know they have a problem with how the sector has been going, and Gervais touched on some of them: competition from new media; stale franchises and lack of originality, and yes, a liberal-left culture that alienates a large number of potential customers. The industry is vulnerable if actors and actresses lecture people about their carbon footprints or about sex, and then fly on private jets and hang out with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. So awards ceremonies, even when someone like Gervais is nasty to the guests, have their uses, sometimes if only to tell a sector that it has a dose of the flu and needs to get better. They might even encourage change if the reaction is serious enough. In my own industry of financial media, we have awards ceremonies too, and it is often quite a tricky point to know what sort of man or woman to nominate as the sort of warm-up act. A few years ago I went to a black tie gala evening run by an investment industry body. The bloke doing the warm-up gags was a hard-left socialist by the name of Frankie Boyle. It was like inviting Lenin to talk to the Institute of Directors. Boyle was disgusting and unpleasant, and people walked out. The Golden Globe audience, methinks, got off quite lightly. Do read the Gervais speech. It is glorious. I do think, reconsidering my article from a day ago, that Gervais was pretty out of order swearing at the crowd, and part of me wishes that he hadn’t done that, and that we could have a Hollywood that was classy and elegant. But rather as with Donald Trump, a vulgar, rough and no-nonsense person is necessary to burn down what exists before the rebuilding can take place. Or to use an expression from the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, we need creative destruction. January 6th, 2020 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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