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“If the NHS is so wonderful, why do its staff keep threatening to emigrate?” – Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph (£). As an aside, while a lot of media and political commentary these days is about immigration, the emigration of talented people from the UK is likely to be a problem that becomes more significant, with potentially political effects. I am just about old enough to remember the “Brain Drain” that was a Thing in the 70s. January 8th, 2024 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “In recent years, businesses have been shaped by the beguiling mantra of ‘win-win’. When confronted with any difficult choice – sustainability or efficiency? excellence or equity? stakeholders or shareholders? – their chieftains have kidded themselves into thinking that you can have both. Sustainability leads to efficiency in the long term; equity is the best way of securing excellence; pleasing all the stakeholders leads to higher share prices. This will be the year that finally brings an end to the idea that you can have your cake and eat it. Companies will have to make tough decisions that they’ve been putting off as long as possible. Consumers will no longer wear the idea that, say, the green transition is cost free. “Win-win was an affordable luxury in an era of free money and rampant virtue signalling. But higher interest rates will make both companies and consumers more cost conscious. And virtue signalling is far from cost free, as several chief executive officers have discovered. Companies will tell their young recruits to put their noses to the grindstone rather than working from home. The yoga classes and pizza parties will be cancelled. The Business Roundtable will soft pedal the talk of stakeholder capitalism.” – Adrian Wooldridge. He is writing in Bloomberg ($), a business news and information service that at times seems to have bought into sometimes fashionable ideas, but the need to make a profit tends to keep that in check. January 4th, 2024 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I recently read Economics In One Virus, by Ryan Bourne of the CATO Institute in the US, and an excellent account it is. (It was published in 2021.) It is a good overview of how people should think about the economic issues involved in a pandemic. The current farcical “inquiry” into the UK government’s handling of COVID-19 (see my recent posting here) got me thinking about some of the more admirable things I noticed during the nightmare. One of them was the way that the supermarket industry, and associated logistics sector (warehouses, lorry drivers, ports, shipping, stock inventory platforms, etc), worked. Suddenly, everyone became familiar with the term “supply chain”. I recall a few years ago meeting a person who introduced himself as a “supply chain specialist”, and others in the room made rude comments about how “dull” this sounded. (I make a point of avoiding jerks like them, by the way.) Well, his field of expertise came into a very bright spotlight, and to an extent, there it remains. Getting supplies right is about as non-dull as you can imagine. Global capitalism gets a lot of silly criticism, and yet those who presume to champion it often fail to note the triumphs when they occur. They would do well to point out how much better the bottom-up, entrepreneurial, market-based way of doing things is than the top-down, government approach. I recall that when the news first broke of a virus in Wuhan and what to do about it, the conventional (ie, wrong) wisdom seemed to be that we should copy the Chinese in their lockdowns and restrictions, and this was seized upon, it seemed, by those itching for these controls for various other reasons, such as harsh “Green” policy. What got drowned out was the case for how enterprise could provide solutions, from rapid development of ICU unit technology through to better management of supplies, treatments, vaccines, etc. In the months since lockdowns ended, we have forgotten these lessons, and I fear that the wrong ones have been learned. Not enough is being done to point out how inventiveness, enterprise, intelligent risk-taking and experimentation are what’s wanted, not the often oafish fist of the state. December 15th, 2023 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Few phrases are as reliable as ‘my truth’ for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk. Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun. If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths. ‘My truth’ is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the ‘truth’ for a narrow ideological cause.” – Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal ($). He was writing about the views of the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay. As of the time of writing, Gay is still in a job, but for how long? December 12th, 2023 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Never in the history of Britain have politicians so clearly abandoned their own policies and instincts at the behest of the technocrats. This was made plain day after day as the scientists took the airwaves and stood behind podiums, saying nothing different from the politicians who echoed and praised them.” And: “More and more, it looks as if this inquiry, set up by the Blob, staffed and run by the Blob, sees its job as blaming the politicians and excusing the Blob.” – Matt Ridley, Daily Telegraph (£), writing about the farcical covid enquiry in the UK. By the way, I remember watching The Blob, a movie starring a young Steve McQueen, years ago. It was quite scary. Fortunately, McQueen turned to more realistic fare to achieve greatness in films such as The Great Escape, Bullitt, and Papillon. December 11th, 2023 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the face of the endless garbage being churned out in US higher education, and the plight of Jewish students, it is good to know that new structures are taking shape:
This observation comes from John O. Mcginnis, the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University. He concludes:
In my view a broader and deeper problem is the sheer size and scale of higher education that is funded, in whole or in part, by the taxpayer. Yes, it is true that even private universities and colleges have been infected by some of these horrors, but no serious change in my view is likely until the state gets out of higher education. November 30th, 2023 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The story goes that Frank Lloyd Wright was once summoned to testify in a lawsuit. When he took the witness stand, a lawyer asked what his occupation was. He answered, “I am the world’s greatest architect.” Afterwards, his embarrassed wife told him he should be more modest. “You forget,” he replied. “I was under oath.” – Timothy Sandefur, from his article: Frank Lloyd Wright: Rebel Architect. November 24th, 2023 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There is an ironically neocolonial feel to the cultural elites’ absolution of Hamas. It is their indoctrination into the politics of identity that leads them to view Israel as the culpable adult in this relationship and the Palestinians as blameless children. Critical-race-theory narratives about white privilege and brown victimhood have led to a situation where not only are whites demonised as powerful and destructive but also non-white people are patronised to an obscene degree as non-powerful and pathetic. This hollow, pat explanation for every political event has now been cut-and-pasted on to the Middle East (despite the fact that Israel is not a ‘white’ country). The end result? Both Israelis and Palestinians are denuded of their humanity, the former damned as the conscious authors of all ills, the latter reduced to the moral infants of world affairs, whom ‘nobody should blame’ even ‘for the things we do’, in Hamad’s words. The anti-Israel elites take a far more racially paternalistic view of Palestinians than Israel does.” – The relentlessly quotable Brendan O’Neill, at Spiked. Another crushingly good paragraph: “There is a serious danger in the neo-racist absolution of Hamas. It serves as a green light to further terror. For if you are never held to account for what you do, you can do anything you like. Hamas now knows, from the global fallout from its pogrom, that it will always be absolved. That it enjoys a kind of moral impunity among the opinion-formers of the West. That its mass slaughter will be contextualised, explained, forgiven. That even its use of civilian buildings and civilian vehicles to store and transport the machinery of its war crimes will not bother the consciences of those who pose as pro-Palestinian. Our elites have done something even worse than blame Israelis for their own deaths – they have signalled to Hamas that if it were to do the same again, there would be no moral consequences. Its blamelessness would remain intact. The failure of our intellectual elites to condemn the Hamas pogrom is an implicit approval of future pogroms.” Read the whole thing, as the saying goes. By the way, the expression “intellectual elite” deserves to be covered in scare quotes. “Elite” implies quality, but I see little evidence of it. November 7th, 2023 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
“But I must say the general mood of many people my age is an astounded sense that we began in our youth, in the 1960s and ’70s, saying `Don’t trust anyone over 30.’ And now, as we survey the wreckage the woke regime has done to the academy, the arts, the corporate office, we are thinking something that had never crossed our minds. `Don’t trust anyone under 30.'” – Peggy Noonan, WSJ ($). She’s reflecting on the conduct of college students in the wake of the atrocities against Israel. In another passage, she writes that when students in a college were told that what happened on 7 October was a “pogrom”, they didn’t know what the word means. November 3rd, 2023 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is unlikely to be one of those subjects that ought to grab more than fleeting attention, but being a man of the media and with a liking for satire, wit and a good investigative story, like many of my fellow Gen-Xers, I used to read Private Eye. The magazine, founded in the “Satire Boom” period of the 1960s (this is ancient history today), has achieved a few notable scalps over the years. These days, in my view, it is increasingly rather conventional in its hatreds and targets. And its recent front page around the Israel/Hamas conflict seems all of a piece with this mindset. November 2nd, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The kinds of people who are willing to justify, minimize, or deny the slaughter of millions by the likes of Stalin and Mao are unlikely to blanch at Hamas’ much smaller-scale atrocities. If you are willing to embrace the Great Leap Forward, Stalin’s purges, or Lenin’s Red Terror, there is probably no limit to what you will accept, so long as you think it is moving the world in the right direction.” – Ilya Somin, in an article that goes into the details of why so many on the Left have adopted a version of the oldest hatred. October 31st, 2023 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The sudden switch from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood is—we believe—the leading candidate for being the major cause of the international collapse of adolescent mental health.” October 30th, 2023 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
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