The obvious reason is, because it's funny. But more on that in a minute.
For those who've never seen it, Big Bang Theory charts the misadventures of four young blokes, staffers of some American university's science faculty. Leonard is the most obviously normal one; Howard wears unfeasibly tight trousers and imagines himself a Lothario; Raj is the Indian one who is too shy to talk to girls (unless drunk); and Sheldon - but where to start? Sheldon is half-human, half-Klingon, the most brilliant, the most self-centred, the most eccentric, effete, dysfunctional and dislikeable.
Howard lives at home with his Jewish mother; Leonard and Sheldon share a flat. Across the hall lives Penny, the blonde wannabe actress with whom Leonard eventually develops an on-off relationship.
Amongst the many likeable things about BBT is the revelation that Penny, for all her lack of education and brains, is in some respects the most intelligent character on display. Whilst the others try and fail with girls, vie with each other intellectual kudos, argue about Star Trek episodes or merely disparage Howard for only being an engineer (the other three are physicists), Penny calmly gets on with her life, working as a waitress between auditions.
Some specific things: first, it is one of the few American TV programmes where the characters look like ordinary people. Actually, quite weird ordinary people, but you get the picture. Even Penny is more girl-next-door than professional blonde.
Two, whilst mocking its characters' nerdiness and pretensions, BBT allows them dignity and humanity in the same way - go on, laugh - Shakespeare does Falstaff. As well as being laughed at, we love them for being the sources of laughter.
Three, the show offers legitimacy for a sort of masculinity - not often celebrated by Hollywood or TV - that is without a trace of machismo. These men may be weedy and ineffectual, but observe their ardour for women!
But back to funny. There's no surer way to kill humour than to try and pin it down, but here is a typical BBT set-up.
Sheldon, Spock's less empathetic nephew, has made friends with a fellow-scientist, the hatchet-faced Amy. In a bar Amy has seen a hunk with whom she feels a powerful physical chemistry. She thinks if she touched him electricity would flow between them. Determined to strike up a conversation with the hunk, she returns to the bar with Sheldon as chaperone. However it turns out the hunk is a brain-dead goon. Disappointed, Amy leaves. As they walk home, she experimentally takes Sheldon's hand. He recoils: "Amy, what are you doing?" She withdraws her hand. "No, thought not", she says.
Did you laugh? No, thought not. Oh well.
I got into BBT because when my wife's away and domestic standards fall, tea is often eaten in front of the TV instead of at the kitchen table. The children look on in amazement as I laugh uproariously at the antics of Leonard, Sheldon and co. "I know why Dad likes it", said one of them the other day. "It's because he's just like them".
Thursday 17 January 2013
Tuesday 15 January 2013
The EU and the democratic deficit
Poll after poll shows that, after the economy, the subject British voters are most exercised about is immigration. Thankfully Gordon Brown kept us out of the Euro, and so HMG can still pull the economic levers of interest rates, tax and QE without asking Brussels first. But what about border controls?
On 25th April 2005 a Treaty of Accession was signed by EU countries at the Neumuenster Abbey in Luxembourg. It provided that Bulgaria and Romania would join the EU on 1 January 2007. By 2005 New Labour was beginning to realise that its earlier prediction of 20,000 Polish and other East European migrants was way short of the reality (in fact ONS figures show that more than 600,000 were working here in 2012). Alarmed by the prospect of the 2007-accession countries' nationals coming to Britain in large numbers, the Blair government, along with seven other countries, secured an opt-out whereby the right to work would be deferred until 1 January 2014. It seemed a long way off at the time, but in fact it's now next year.
Now obviously if you have 600,000 extra people in your country, that is going to mean extra economic activity: it is idle to pretend there are no advantages at all to immigration. On the other hand, the extra pool of willing labour means that employers don't have to compete for staff by raising wages, thus increasing inequality as the middle-class forge ahead. It also makes it harder for those at the bottom end of society - including a disproportionate percentage of black and asian Britons - to find work . There are consequences for the environment, in terms of housing demand and strain on public services; but I have rehearsed these points many times on this blog.
No, the point of writing this is a larger one about politics generally. If I were a person unhappy at the possibility of several hundred thousand people coming to Britain to compete with me for housing, jobs or services (and if I were a British black or asian person I would be mightily unhappy), how would I express my feelings politically? Unfortunately the issue of who comes to Britain, whether they can work here and what benefits they claim, has like many others been exported to Brussels. We are in the bizarre situation that the issue which concerns voters more than almost any other is no longer something domestic politicians can actually do something about.
Renegotiating treaties, the only option short of outright withdrawal from the EU, is likely to be fractious, divisive and time-consuming. It is very easy to give these powers away, but very very difficult to reclaim them.
If you think we are badly off, spare a thought for the poor Southern European citizen. If you wanted to see interest rates lowered, or a touch of QE to bail out your banks, which political party can offer these things? None of them. Because your country no longer has the power to do any of them. The powers have been given away.
If you wanted a reflationary budget to borrow your way back into growth, no political party could offer that option. That's because countries in receipt of Eurozone largesse have to get their budgets passed by Brussels.
These countries are powerless to pull the levers of their economies because they gave most of the powers to the ECB, either when they joined the Eurozone or when they got into trouble. As a result there is mass unemployment and rioting in the streets.
It's hard to imagine anything more corrosive to the democratic process than the creeping irrelevance which this erosion of power from national governments (and thus their citizens) entails. The damage this powerlessness does to politics, slow and insidious, is playing out across Europe in a big way.
On 25th April 2005 a Treaty of Accession was signed by EU countries at the Neumuenster Abbey in Luxembourg. It provided that Bulgaria and Romania would join the EU on 1 January 2007. By 2005 New Labour was beginning to realise that its earlier prediction of 20,000 Polish and other East European migrants was way short of the reality (in fact ONS figures show that more than 600,000 were working here in 2012). Alarmed by the prospect of the 2007-accession countries' nationals coming to Britain in large numbers, the Blair government, along with seven other countries, secured an opt-out whereby the right to work would be deferred until 1 January 2014. It seemed a long way off at the time, but in fact it's now next year.
Now obviously if you have 600,000 extra people in your country, that is going to mean extra economic activity: it is idle to pretend there are no advantages at all to immigration. On the other hand, the extra pool of willing labour means that employers don't have to compete for staff by raising wages, thus increasing inequality as the middle-class forge ahead. It also makes it harder for those at the bottom end of society - including a disproportionate percentage of black and asian Britons - to find work . There are consequences for the environment, in terms of housing demand and strain on public services; but I have rehearsed these points many times on this blog.
No, the point of writing this is a larger one about politics generally. If I were a person unhappy at the possibility of several hundred thousand people coming to Britain to compete with me for housing, jobs or services (and if I were a British black or asian person I would be mightily unhappy), how would I express my feelings politically? Unfortunately the issue of who comes to Britain, whether they can work here and what benefits they claim, has like many others been exported to Brussels. We are in the bizarre situation that the issue which concerns voters more than almost any other is no longer something domestic politicians can actually do something about.
Renegotiating treaties, the only option short of outright withdrawal from the EU, is likely to be fractious, divisive and time-consuming. It is very easy to give these powers away, but very very difficult to reclaim them.
If you think we are badly off, spare a thought for the poor Southern European citizen. If you wanted to see interest rates lowered, or a touch of QE to bail out your banks, which political party can offer these things? None of them. Because your country no longer has the power to do any of them. The powers have been given away.
If you wanted a reflationary budget to borrow your way back into growth, no political party could offer that option. That's because countries in receipt of Eurozone largesse have to get their budgets passed by Brussels.
These countries are powerless to pull the levers of their economies because they gave most of the powers to the ECB, either when they joined the Eurozone or when they got into trouble. As a result there is mass unemployment and rioting in the streets.
It's hard to imagine anything more corrosive to the democratic process than the creeping irrelevance which this erosion of power from national governments (and thus their citizens) entails. The damage this powerlessness does to politics, slow and insidious, is playing out across Europe in a big way.
Monday 14 January 2013
Richard Williams and the Dinner Ladies
In my piece on the Guardian's Aditya Chakrabortty the other day I wondered aloud why the paper should keep its hapless chief economic leader writer yet get rid of the wonderful Martin Kelner, author of a weekly semi-humorous column on TV sport. After all the Graun's readers couldn't care less about economics, but they do love their darts, in a post-modernist kind of way.
I now learn that another Guardian journo has taken the redundancy cheque and walked, namely Chief Sportswriter Richard Williams. I have mixed feelings about this. Leaving aside the sinking ship aspect of much relating to the Graun these days, Williams was one of its better writers, an intelligent guy in the long tradition of Neville Cardus and Hugh McIlvanney who recognised that sport was something worth taking seriously.
The flip side of this was that Williams was occasionally prone to taking himself too seriously. He once described, without irony, fellow hack Paddy Barclay as a "football critic". You could see in this something of Williams' view of himself: not the E.I.Addio of Private Eye fame, the reporter in the Ford Fiesta with a Yorkie bar and copy of Readers Wives, but an Albert Camus of the terraces, well-thumbed copy of Derrida in one pocket, When Saturday Comes in the other and Stone Roses T-shirt underneath his leather jacket.
There's taking it seriously, and taking it pretentiously. This ghastly tendency to try and think of fancy names for things to try and make them seem more important is not unique to Williams, and is I think one of the curses of modern society. A composer I know of describes on his website a favourite band - The Killers, let's say - as "cultural artists".
No they're not. They're a pop group. Anyway, can anyone think of an artist who isn't cultural in some way? The arts being, well, part of culture generally? No, thought not.
Our local primary school has Lunchtime Co-Ordinators now instead of Dinner Ladies. If he's looking for a job, Richard Williams would feel right at home.
I now learn that another Guardian journo has taken the redundancy cheque and walked, namely Chief Sportswriter Richard Williams. I have mixed feelings about this. Leaving aside the sinking ship aspect of much relating to the Graun these days, Williams was one of its better writers, an intelligent guy in the long tradition of Neville Cardus and Hugh McIlvanney who recognised that sport was something worth taking seriously.
The flip side of this was that Williams was occasionally prone to taking himself too seriously. He once described, without irony, fellow hack Paddy Barclay as a "football critic". You could see in this something of Williams' view of himself: not the E.I.Addio of Private Eye fame, the reporter in the Ford Fiesta with a Yorkie bar and copy of Readers Wives, but an Albert Camus of the terraces, well-thumbed copy of Derrida in one pocket, When Saturday Comes in the other and Stone Roses T-shirt underneath his leather jacket.
There's taking it seriously, and taking it pretentiously. This ghastly tendency to try and think of fancy names for things to try and make them seem more important is not unique to Williams, and is I think one of the curses of modern society. A composer I know of describes on his website a favourite band - The Killers, let's say - as "cultural artists".
No they're not. They're a pop group. Anyway, can anyone think of an artist who isn't cultural in some way? The arts being, well, part of culture generally? No, thought not.
Our local primary school has Lunchtime Co-Ordinators now instead of Dinner Ladies. If he's looking for a job, Richard Williams would feel right at home.
Wednesday 9 January 2013
Aditya Chakrabortty and my own, ahem, beverage report
Aditya Chakrabortty is an old favourite of this blog, a journalist whose outpourings as the Guardian's Chief Economics leader writer have been a regular source of irritation and comedy over the months and, on reflection, years it has been in operation. In so far as I can bear to read his column in G2, it continues to fascinate, appal and amuse in equal measure.
What has Mr Chakrabortty been up to now? Well yesterday he wrote an obituary of the Welfare State as envisaged by Beveridge. "The proximate cause of death was a change in child benefit from being available to all to a means-tested entitlement", he intoned. "That marked the end of one of the last remaining universal benefits, in turn causing a fatal injury to welfare . . . It expired peacefully on Monday 7 January just weeks after marking its 70th birthday". You get the lumberingly humorous picture. Because welfare is apparently only for the needy now, it is dead in the water.
I am sad to report that my family's entitlement to Child Benefit ended on Monday as well. Faced with the information that we would be taxed at 100% on the sum (£150 or so every month for our three children), the neat and tidy thing to do seemed to be to go on to the Government's website and cancel it. Which I did on Friday.
Given that Mr Chakrabortty thinks the loss of Child Benefit for people like me marks the end of the welfare state, he might like to know what my wife and I spent it on.
To be clear, we didn't need the money. Contemplating the vast sums we have forked out endowing our children with i-Pods, i-Phones and finally i-Pads, not to mention expensive and unsuccessful skiing holidays ("There was too much snow", complained one of our daughters), my wife and I decided to spend the Child Benefit, on the whole, on wine. We thought that since we paid tens of thousands of pounds tax every year, we might as well get some pleasure back courtesy of the Government.
To start a wine cellar requires that you buy it faster than you drink it. So in the family cellar there nestle quantities of Wirra Wirra Church Block, Domaine de Mourchon, Auxey-Duresses, Chateau des Carbonnieres, various fruits of the D'Arenburg vineyards in Australia, together with quite a lot of champagne, for which we have a weakness. Sitting somewhere in France there is also quite a lot of Rhone red, mostly from Cairanne, "easily the best of the Southern Rhone villages", according to Hugh Johnson (we prefer the lighter reds to the heavy Bordeaux classics), which will be delivered in due course. 2009 and 2010 were particularly good years, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the Rhones, which will be drinkable fairly soon.
All bought at the Government's expense. Well, actually at the expense of taxpayers everywhere, including my wife and I, if you think about it.
Amazingly this situation, no doubt replicated in well-to-do households up and down the land, is one which Mr Chakrabortty thinks should continue. Moreover, he thinks that because the Government has put a stop to it that means the welfare state is now dead.
Oh my Lord.
A couple of points about Mr Chakrabortty generally. I haven't got it in for him personally. He is not clever enough to do his job well, but the real idiots are the Graun's management team for employing him in the first place. True, he isn't in the same class of duffer as Polly Toynbee, but then she is out on her own, and, to be fair, was probably quite good once. It must hurt Larry Elliott, the Graun's main economics writer, to see Chakrabortty cavorting across the pages of G2 while his own writings are secreted away in the paper's flimsy business section, perused only by economics geeks like me.
The second thing is that cutting Child Benefit for those who can afford to spend it on wine might be better viewed as an economic necessity for a country that is borrowing about £2,000,000,000,000 every week just to stay afloat.
The Welfare State was set up by Beveridge in an entirely different social context. At that time people worked because not do so was to risk social shame and destitution.. The provision of benefits for the jobless changed attitudes to work irrevocably. Admittedly the time to do something about that was during the Gordon Brown boom rather than now, when it is so difficult to find a job, but it's a stable door that desperately needs shutting all the same.
The real threat to welfarism is not its withdrawal from people like me, but rather the changing economic and demographic circumstances which have rendered it unaffordable as presently constituted. To give but one example, the average life expectancy of a man at the time of Beveridge was 48. It has increased by at least thirty years in the intervening period, with the attendant massive consequences for the amounts, still rising, HMG must pay out in pensions. I'm still hoping there'll be a state pension for me when I'm 66, but I'm not banking on it.
(In fact only days after posting this, a White Paper proposed that the years NI contributions we will need to get the state pension should increase from 30 to 35. As someone who has 27 and was nearly there, this was something of a sickener)
It saddens me that the Guardian thought it a good idea to get rid of Martin Kelner, who until very recently wrote an intentionally funny column on Mondays, but not Aditya Chakrabortty, who still writes an unintentionally funny one on Tuesdays. Go figure.
What has Mr Chakrabortty been up to now? Well yesterday he wrote an obituary of the Welfare State as envisaged by Beveridge. "The proximate cause of death was a change in child benefit from being available to all to a means-tested entitlement", he intoned. "That marked the end of one of the last remaining universal benefits, in turn causing a fatal injury to welfare . . . It expired peacefully on Monday 7 January just weeks after marking its 70th birthday". You get the lumberingly humorous picture. Because welfare is apparently only for the needy now, it is dead in the water.
I am sad to report that my family's entitlement to Child Benefit ended on Monday as well. Faced with the information that we would be taxed at 100% on the sum (£150 or so every month for our three children), the neat and tidy thing to do seemed to be to go on to the Government's website and cancel it. Which I did on Friday.
Given that Mr Chakrabortty thinks the loss of Child Benefit for people like me marks the end of the welfare state, he might like to know what my wife and I spent it on.
To be clear, we didn't need the money. Contemplating the vast sums we have forked out endowing our children with i-Pods, i-Phones and finally i-Pads, not to mention expensive and unsuccessful skiing holidays ("There was too much snow", complained one of our daughters), my wife and I decided to spend the Child Benefit, on the whole, on wine. We thought that since we paid tens of thousands of pounds tax every year, we might as well get some pleasure back courtesy of the Government.
To start a wine cellar requires that you buy it faster than you drink it. So in the family cellar there nestle quantities of Wirra Wirra Church Block, Domaine de Mourchon, Auxey-Duresses, Chateau des Carbonnieres, various fruits of the D'Arenburg vineyards in Australia, together with quite a lot of champagne, for which we have a weakness. Sitting somewhere in France there is also quite a lot of Rhone red, mostly from Cairanne, "easily the best of the Southern Rhone villages", according to Hugh Johnson (we prefer the lighter reds to the heavy Bordeaux classics), which will be delivered in due course. 2009 and 2010 were particularly good years, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the Rhones, which will be drinkable fairly soon.
All bought at the Government's expense. Well, actually at the expense of taxpayers everywhere, including my wife and I, if you think about it.
Amazingly this situation, no doubt replicated in well-to-do households up and down the land, is one which Mr Chakrabortty thinks should continue. Moreover, he thinks that because the Government has put a stop to it that means the welfare state is now dead.
Oh my Lord.
A couple of points about Mr Chakrabortty generally. I haven't got it in for him personally. He is not clever enough to do his job well, but the real idiots are the Graun's management team for employing him in the first place. True, he isn't in the same class of duffer as Polly Toynbee, but then she is out on her own, and, to be fair, was probably quite good once. It must hurt Larry Elliott, the Graun's main economics writer, to see Chakrabortty cavorting across the pages of G2 while his own writings are secreted away in the paper's flimsy business section, perused only by economics geeks like me.
The second thing is that cutting Child Benefit for those who can afford to spend it on wine might be better viewed as an economic necessity for a country that is borrowing about £2,000,000,000,000 every week just to stay afloat.
The Welfare State was set up by Beveridge in an entirely different social context. At that time people worked because not do so was to risk social shame and destitution.. The provision of benefits for the jobless changed attitudes to work irrevocably. Admittedly the time to do something about that was during the Gordon Brown boom rather than now, when it is so difficult to find a job, but it's a stable door that desperately needs shutting all the same.
The real threat to welfarism is not its withdrawal from people like me, but rather the changing economic and demographic circumstances which have rendered it unaffordable as presently constituted. To give but one example, the average life expectancy of a man at the time of Beveridge was 48. It has increased by at least thirty years in the intervening period, with the attendant massive consequences for the amounts, still rising, HMG must pay out in pensions. I'm still hoping there'll be a state pension for me when I'm 66, but I'm not banking on it.
(In fact only days after posting this, a White Paper proposed that the years NI contributions we will need to get the state pension should increase from 30 to 35. As someone who has 27 and was nearly there, this was something of a sickener)
It saddens me that the Guardian thought it a good idea to get rid of Martin Kelner, who until very recently wrote an intentionally funny column on Mondays, but not Aditya Chakrabortty, who still writes an unintentionally funny one on Tuesdays. Go figure.
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Not being a composer
When I was thinking of going to music college thirty years ago, someone told me, "If you want to be a composer, try not to compose". If this sounds strange, it was the best piece of advice I received, and I have often wished I could have fulfilled it.
If you can possibly tolerate not composing, I read it as saying, do something else. I was too young and too confident of my own ability to read any serious warning into the nostrum, but I've had plenty of opportunity since to savour its truth.
Writing classical music continues to attract an awful lot of bright and talented people. Despite its loss of cultural prestige, there are still enough names that resonate - your Bachs, Beethovens and so on - across a society now largely dedicated to getting its musical kicks via pop. For the ambitious young musician, probably by some way the most able in his or her immediate sphere, the heady prospect of striding the world like a composing colossus has a tempting appeal.
Unfortunately there are an awful lot of other people tempted as well. If I was the most gifted musician in my primary school, there were others at secondary level; at music college there were two or three other composers in my year; and there will have been other young composers at other colleges and universities around the UK. How many spill out onto the streets each July? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred?
For they and I are not the only people who can do what we do. Far from it. There are thousands of people around the country who can harmonise a Bach chorale, who can write a symphony or a concerto. And how many opportunities are there out there for us? Not very many. Scan the concert programmes of the average professional symphony orchestra - how many pieces do they perform each year, and how many of them are premieres? One or two? Half a dozen? Now consider how many other people are competing with you to get their work put on, and work out the chances of it being your piece brought beautifully to life by professional players. Not great.
Ah, I hear you say, but I'm a better composer than the others. Really? Who says so? I have spent years trying to convince anyone who'll listen that there are no objective ways of judging art, and that, once you can reach a minimum standard of technical competence, it's all a matter of opinion. To paraphrase William Goldman, in classical music No-one Knows Anything. No-one knows whether Pianist A is "better" than Pianist B, and no-one knows whether Composer Y is "better" than Composer Z. If you get your piece put on, it won't be because your piece is better. No-one knows what better is.
No, some other factor will have worked out in your favour. At the most basic level, it might be that the person responsible for the programming liked your piece more than someone else's. Clearly that involves a significant element of luck (as well as the assumption that someone could actually read the scores and hear mentally what the music sounded like, a skill more often claimed than possessed). Other factors may be at work too. I have repeatedly heard variations upon, "Of course you know there's a gay mafia". Sometimes it's a Jewish mafia or an Oxbridge mafia.
A friend who is a virtuoso once said to me, "Of course you know why all these beautiful young men get all the Wigmore Hall gigs?" Since he was born in a country far away on the other side of Europe it would have been ill-mannered of me to point out that one of the variations on the Gay mafia theme is the notion that the English, with a curious inverted snobbery, prefer their musicians to be foreigners.
If I've never personally seen any evidence of any of these prejudices, it's certainly a great help to a composer if your face fits, if you are flavour of the month, if you know the right person, if, better still, you have slept with the right person. It helps too if you're young and good-looking. Why is Eric Whitacre so famous? It can't hurt that he looks like Brad Pitt's brother.
So what happens if your ducks do all line up in a row and it is your piece that gets chosen? How much money are you going to make out of the performance? A few hundred quid if it's on the radio, but no more. What if you've written a Christmas carol? How much in the way of royalties will that get you? In my experience about £0.10 per copy sold. So you won't be running a car on your compositional earnings, let alone the deposit on the freezing garret you'll be writing in.
No, even if you are one of the lucky ones and can run to a dozen or so performances a year, you'll need some other way of making a living. But here comes another complication - most jobs don't leave much time for composition. I wrote an early String Quartet as a toilet cleaner, locking myself in the cleaner's cupboard for hours at a stretch, to the fury of my supervisor. But this was a rare opportunity - most jobs demand too much of you - bought at the price of squalor and tedium. At other times I got up early in the morning and put in two hours composing before going off to work. But this was before children came along, with their night-time demands which made staying awake during the day hard enough as it was without getting up at six just for the sake of it.
I was lucky enough to get married to someone who likes classical music (although not all of mine), and was willing to tolerate my writing it and doing the child care while she got on with her career. But you may not be so fortunate. You might have to go out to work and be the main breadwinner. If you really have a vocation to compose it will drive you crazy. During the brief period I worked as a full-time lawyer, I often went and shut myself in the loo (is a theme emerging here?), sobbing with frustration at wasting my time and talent doing something someone else could probably have done better.
Although I have been much luckier than most, I would have to say that the life of a composer, even a moderately successful one (I do consider myself moderately successful, in the sense that I know others significantly less so) is one in which rejection and even humiliation have to be endured on a monthly if not weekly basis. You are competing with a lot of other people for a tiny amount of work, and mostly you will be losing.
I am not trying to put you off composing (although come to think of it if that reduces the competition it's maybe not such a bad idea). But what may seem like an obvious choice aged twenty has consequences which are as far reaching as those of any decision you will ever make. If you can possibly tolerate not composing, don't do it. Do something else (preferably not a loo cleaner though). You'll be better off and happier.
Like most composers, there have been times when I've wondered whether the game is worth the candle, whether the low self-esteem attendant on being only moderately successful (after all, I know other composers significantly more so) might be dissipated by stopping writing altogether, by reinventing myself as something else. But one's mind works in curious ways. In the last few months some ideas have occurred to me consistent perhaps with being part of another String Quartet. The other day I was finishing some piano practice, and was startled to find my hands wandering over the keys involuntarily, producing some new music which, again, sounded as if it might belong in the same piece. That's the way composition works. You don't choose music. It chooses you.
Sunday 6 January 2013
John Lanchester's elephants
John Lanchester, the Left's go-to guy when it comes to economics, has been writing again in the London Review of Books. Lanchester is an engaging novelist and undoubtedly a well-meaning man, but unfortunately his writings on the dismal science reveal a grasp some way short of competence.
My wife has chucked the LRB into the recycling, so I am going to have to do this from memory.
The thrust of the two pages the editor gives Lanchester are that the economy is not growing, and that therefore George Osborne's policies are not working. Osborne doesn't realise, writes Lanchester, that if you cut public spending then GDP goes down as well, possibly by more than the amount you've actually cut. "This", Lanchester intones, surveying the scene, "is what failure looks like".
Well, not necessarily. Lanchester is guilty of assuming that the success of Osborne's policies should be measured purely in terms of growth. But growth isn't the only criterion. Sure, Osborne would be delighted if the economy were growing. But what he'll be really concerned about is the deficit. As long as he can tell the world the deficit is shrinking in real terms, Osborne will be able to say that he is putting the nation's finances in order. And he'll be right. As long as the gilt markets - who don't have to lend to us, remember - believe in the direction of travel, it will be cheap for Britain to borrow the billions we need every week just to keep going.
To put it the other way round, GDP is not the same as tax revenue. If GDP falls because the government has spent less, that doesn't mean the government doesn't gain. If the tax revenue HMG loses and the extra money it has to pay out in benefits are in combination smaller than the savings from the spending cut, the government wins. That is Osborne's calculation, and that is partly why the deficit is going down. I think Osborne will be quietly pleased with the situation.
Here is a list of other considerations that are strangely absent from Lanchester's article. If you haven't read it, you'll just have to take my word for it.
One, there's no acknowledgement of the headwinds Osborne is facing from a Eurozone economy gripped by an existential crisis.
Two, there's no attempt at suggesting an alternative strategy to Osborne's.
Third, although I think we're entitled to assume that Lanchester thinks there is such a strategy, he shows no sign of understanding that this might just be one of those problems to which there is no solution at all. I think it is not stretching matters to say that no-one really knows what to do now, and that Osborne's way is likely to be as good as any. At least, by enabling us to afford current borrowing, it is enabling us to keep going.
Fourth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the wider context in which the economic crisis is taking place, which is that Western governments and individuals, helped along by the finance industry, borrowed for decades to sustain a lifestyle their income did not justify.
Fifth, there is no acknowledgement that in the long run, states, like individuals, must live within their means. The policies of Balls and Miliband merely pretend that this isn't true, but it is.
Sixth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the consequences of this fact for Western Social Democratic parties. The soft Left is dedicated to the creation of societies with high welfare spending to help those at the bottom end. The events of the last few years demonstrate that this isn't fiscally possible at current levels of general taxation, and may not be politically possible at any level.
Seventh, to look at the biggest picture of all, Lanchester doesn't seem to grasp that, at heart, our problems are a consequence of loss of competitiveness to Far Eastern economies. Until that loss can be restored to some extent, the kind of big state solutions Lanchester favours will never be affordable again in Britain.
If John Lanchester really wants to know what failure looks like, he might want to imagine a room containing these seven rather large elephants.
Does any of this matter? If I still counted myself amongst the denizens of the Centre Left I would be exasperated at the failure of my peers to get to grips with the cause of the UK's problems. I would be appalled by their lazy acceptance of the seductive alternative narrative, one which says it was all the bankers' fault, but never asks what exactly it was the bankers were doing (lending us all money) and why (because otherwise we couldn't afford to live the way we wanted).
It may well be that Labour will win the next election anyway - as long as the Eurozone continues to be a zombie economy it's hard to see the UK's fortunes improving markedly or at all. But if they don't, it'll be because they have failed to put before the public a believable economic case. The task of doing so starts further back, with a clear-headed analysis of how we ended up where we are and what the consequences are for Labour's vision of a good society. That's partly the responsibility of the politicians, but also partly a responsibility of Labour's public intellectuals like Lanchester.
Judging by this article, he still can't see the zoo for the elephants.
My wife has chucked the LRB into the recycling, so I am going to have to do this from memory.
The thrust of the two pages the editor gives Lanchester are that the economy is not growing, and that therefore George Osborne's policies are not working. Osborne doesn't realise, writes Lanchester, that if you cut public spending then GDP goes down as well, possibly by more than the amount you've actually cut. "This", Lanchester intones, surveying the scene, "is what failure looks like".
Well, not necessarily. Lanchester is guilty of assuming that the success of Osborne's policies should be measured purely in terms of growth. But growth isn't the only criterion. Sure, Osborne would be delighted if the economy were growing. But what he'll be really concerned about is the deficit. As long as he can tell the world the deficit is shrinking in real terms, Osborne will be able to say that he is putting the nation's finances in order. And he'll be right. As long as the gilt markets - who don't have to lend to us, remember - believe in the direction of travel, it will be cheap for Britain to borrow the billions we need every week just to keep going.
To put it the other way round, GDP is not the same as tax revenue. If GDP falls because the government has spent less, that doesn't mean the government doesn't gain. If the tax revenue HMG loses and the extra money it has to pay out in benefits are in combination smaller than the savings from the spending cut, the government wins. That is Osborne's calculation, and that is partly why the deficit is going down. I think Osborne will be quietly pleased with the situation.
Here is a list of other considerations that are strangely absent from Lanchester's article. If you haven't read it, you'll just have to take my word for it.
One, there's no acknowledgement of the headwinds Osborne is facing from a Eurozone economy gripped by an existential crisis.
Two, there's no attempt at suggesting an alternative strategy to Osborne's.
Third, although I think we're entitled to assume that Lanchester thinks there is such a strategy, he shows no sign of understanding that this might just be one of those problems to which there is no solution at all. I think it is not stretching matters to say that no-one really knows what to do now, and that Osborne's way is likely to be as good as any. At least, by enabling us to afford current borrowing, it is enabling us to keep going.
Fourth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the wider context in which the economic crisis is taking place, which is that Western governments and individuals, helped along by the finance industry, borrowed for decades to sustain a lifestyle their income did not justify.
Fifth, there is no acknowledgement that in the long run, states, like individuals, must live within their means. The policies of Balls and Miliband merely pretend that this isn't true, but it is.
Sixth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the consequences of this fact for Western Social Democratic parties. The soft Left is dedicated to the creation of societies with high welfare spending to help those at the bottom end. The events of the last few years demonstrate that this isn't fiscally possible at current levels of general taxation, and may not be politically possible at any level.
Seventh, to look at the biggest picture of all, Lanchester doesn't seem to grasp that, at heart, our problems are a consequence of loss of competitiveness to Far Eastern economies. Until that loss can be restored to some extent, the kind of big state solutions Lanchester favours will never be affordable again in Britain.
If John Lanchester really wants to know what failure looks like, he might want to imagine a room containing these seven rather large elephants.
Does any of this matter? If I still counted myself amongst the denizens of the Centre Left I would be exasperated at the failure of my peers to get to grips with the cause of the UK's problems. I would be appalled by their lazy acceptance of the seductive alternative narrative, one which says it was all the bankers' fault, but never asks what exactly it was the bankers were doing (lending us all money) and why (because otherwise we couldn't afford to live the way we wanted).
It may well be that Labour will win the next election anyway - as long as the Eurozone continues to be a zombie economy it's hard to see the UK's fortunes improving markedly or at all. But if they don't, it'll be because they have failed to put before the public a believable economic case. The task of doing so starts further back, with a clear-headed analysis of how we ended up where we are and what the consequences are for Labour's vision of a good society. That's partly the responsibility of the politicians, but also partly a responsibility of Labour's public intellectuals like Lanchester.
Judging by this article, he still can't see the zoo for the elephants.
Friday 4 January 2013
Fiscal cliff? - fiscal kerbstone more like . . .
This morning's Graun reprints a handy guide to the Fiscal Cliff currently going round the City. It takes some numbers from the US financial situation so mind-numbingly large that the intellects of ordinary chaps like me reel at the prospect, and removes eight noughts from the end of each. To illuminating effect.
Here's the relevant bit (just add eight noughts, if your brain is up to it):
"Annual family income - $21,700
Money the family spent - $38,200
New debt on the credit card - $16,500
Outstanding credit card balance - $142,710
Total household budget cuts so far - $38.50"
Yes, you read that right. Thirty eight dollars and fifty cents.
Here's the relevant bit (just add eight noughts, if your brain is up to it):
"Annual family income - $21,700
Money the family spent - $38,200
New debt on the credit card - $16,500
Outstanding credit card balance - $142,710
Total household budget cuts so far - $38.50"
Yes, you read that right. Thirty eight dollars and fifty cents.
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