Boris Johnson, IQ and meritocracy

Admirers of the floppy-haired neo-Wodehousian Mayor of London like to point beyond his foibles (the womanising and the gaffes) and cry, "But Boris is really intelligent!".  Personally I rather doubt this.  I once bought a book of his journalism at an airport bookstall, and over the following couple of hours it prompted many a Paxmanian "Oh come on!"  Ignoring the possibility that it's me that's not very intelligent, Boris is in hot-water again because of a speech he gave last week, and it's time to spring to his defence.

A report in the Guardian today describes Johnson as suggesting that "some people cannot do well in life because of their low IQ".  Is that what he said?  Here's the relevant passage.

"No one can ignore the harshness of that (free market) competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.

Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2% have an IQ above 130.  The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.

And for one reason or another - boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent of boardroom inhabitants - the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever.  I stress: I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.  But we cannot ignore this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes brings . . . "

It's worth noting that Johnson describes free market competition as "harsh", that it inevitably "accentuates" inequality, and that IQ tests might be of dubious value.  He also suggests IQ score does not equate to "spiritual worth".  None of these nuances are present in the reporting of his speech, which has been of the "Boris causes controversy by saying that thick people have no chance in life" variety.

(Actually what this means in practice is that journalists read his speech, tried to think of someone who might be offended, rang them up, read the passage over the phone and wrote down their response. Hey presto a controversy is born.)

Let's start with the facts.  Some people have high IQs.  Some people don't.  IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests are meant to measure intelligence, although it has often been pointed out that by the time children are old enough to take them, the overlay of family background and conditioning distorts the results.  IQ tests moreover only measure a certain kind of intelligence (essentially ratiocination) whereas other kinds abound. These points and others are made in a kind of Festschrift on the Guardian letters page this morning, where a lot of people who probably haven't read Boris's speech express how outrageous they found it.

No matter how many kinds of intelligence there are, home environment must have some part to play in their development; but so also must genetics. Let's not argue about the proportions please. Let's just agree that genetics has a significant part to play.  Let us also assume that while there are other forms of intelligence (emotional, hand/eye, fine motor for example) the one Boris was talking about is the one which can recognise patterns, think abstractly and process information.  Does possession of these abilities make it more or less likely for someone to prosper by comparison with a person who lacks them? I think the only answer one can give to this is yes.

So is Boris right when he says IQ is "relevant to a conversation about equality"?  Again, I think the answer's yes; but it's where the argument goes next that's really interesting.

Social reformers have tended to argue in favour of a meritocracy, which is to say that people should be allowed to rise up according to their abilities irrespective of their social class.  Now consider where this leads when you hitch the idea to the genetic wagon.

Able people tend to marry other able people, and have children who are, because of the inheritability of characteristics, rather like them.  Even if the parents were working class to start with, their children tend not to be. In time these children will grow up and will tend to marry other able middle class people.  According to this model, if you have something resembling a meritocracy for a century or so, the middle classes will tend to be more intelligent than the working classes.

I realise this will be a horrifying idea for many of the bien-pensants, who thought Boris was bad enough. But how could it be otherwise? If ratiocinating intelligence leads to social advancement, and if it is to a significant extent heritable, in time meritocracy is bound to lead to a stratified society with an underclass in which low intelligence is significantly over-represented.

Meritocracy, which looks such a good idea in principle, turns out in practice to lead to something out of a sci-fi novel.

The alternative, of course, is a society is rigidly stratified by social class, in which intelligent people are kept firmly in their place. This looks just as unattractive.

I don't of course have any answers to this. Like Boris, I think a society with total equality is impossible and undesirable. The centrifuge of capitalism, for all its faults, has made people materially better off to an extent that the Communists of the 1930s would have found it impossible to imagine. Even the most down-trodden of peasants in rural China prefer to work in the Apple factory than break their backs tilling the paddy fields. And capitalism has also proved to be an economic principle surprisingly consistent with the idea of self-determination and freedom, at least compared with the alternatives. But it's not pretty, it fetishes consumption and some people do much better out of it than others.

Interestingly, although Boris acknowledges the inequality that the economic centrifuge imposes, the last time I saw a survey on this it suggested that inequality was decreasing under the Tories - this is because the asinine way sociologists use to measure it depends on the median income, and if the median income falls so does inequality.  I have railed about this fruitlessly several times on this site.

I find critics of Johnson's speech both baffling and, yes, contemptible.  A great deal that's wrong about Britain today stems from our reluctance to face facts.  Everybody in the reality-based community knows that some people are brighter than others, and the bright people tend to do better in life.  Johnson's critics are in denial. Why?  Partly because they think it diminishes the less able to point out that such people exist (actually Johnson went out of his way to stress their "spiritual worth"), partly because they hate the idea of pre-determination which genetic inheritance rather ominously suggests, and partly because they belong to a political credo which still thinks that everyone must get a prize.

They are missing a trick.  If the kind of inherited inequality Johnson is talking about means anything, it is that some people are never going to be doctors, bankers or lawyers no matter hard they try.  As Johnson wrote, "we cannot ignore this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes brings . . . "  That looks to me like an argument for a more compassionate society rather than the reverse.

PS The day after I posted this, Nicholas Watt, the Guardian's political correspondent, wrote of Johnson that "the London Mayor mocked people with low IQs".  This is so far from the truth that I am tempted to give up reading the paper altogether.

Alex Salmond and the Groat redux

I have to confess that I haven't read the SNP's blueprint for an independent Scotland released today, but I have followed its press coverage (which puts me in the same position of most of the media, who haven't read it either but who have read what their colleagues have had to say about it).

There are two things which are immediately striking.  The first is that the attractive, solvent and fair country which Alex Salmond promises is not his to grant.  Which is to say, an independent Scotland will presumably have elections with changes of government from time to time, and the Labour party north of the border will have an agenda different from his.

The second is that Salmond is no nearer fixing the currency problem than he was five years ago.  Reading the Torygraph's online discussion boards (neither more nor less barking than the Graun's, which alas no longer allows me to post), I was astonished to find that almost none of the Nationalist posters understood the difficulties adoption of sterling posed for Scotland.  These are, in no particular order, that Scotland would have no central bank and no lender of last resort, that the Scottish economy would not be taken to account by the Bank of England in setting rates, and that its ability to borrow on the money markets (like rUK Scotland will not be breaking even any time soon) would be constrained, possibly by Westminster (which might make borrowing controls contingent on using sterling).

The question I could not get any Nationalist to answer this morning was, "Why would Scotland be better off swapping a system in which it has a modicum of influence over monetary decisions in favour of one in which it has none whatsoever?"

Here's another one: Why has Alex Salmond abandoned the Euro as currency of choice, presumably on the basis that a currency union without political integration eats its weaker members alive (see Spain, Ireland and Portugal for details), in favour of another currency union without politcal integration?

The situation would actually be worse for Scotland than it is for the PIIGS - at least the ECB is supposed to take into account what it is happening in the peripheral Eurozone countries, which is more than the BoE would be doing post-Independence.  You can see how this would play out immediately - a recovering rUK would probably need a higher base rate than Scotland, and if so Scotland would immediately have interest rates that were too high, and which had the effect of strangling its economy.

The only Yes-voting poster I could find who understood these problems favoured a short period of sterling usage followed by the setting up of Scotland's own currency.  There are obvious difficulties with this, but at least it has the merit of allowing monetary decisions to be made in Scotland rather than in Threadneedle Street in the City of London.

That most posters didn't understand the problem is rather depressing, and raises the unattractive prospect that the Yes vote could win without its supporters really understanding what they were getting into.

Electorate has no grasp of economics.  Who knew?

Petroc Trelawney and the Bridcut amnesia

A strange case of amnesia seems to attend people reading John Bridcut's book Britten's Children.   Petroc Trelawney is one of several who don't seem to have been paying attention.  Otherwise he wouldn't have written the following in the Torygraph: "Yes, Britten found working with young people exciting and inspiring – but that was as far as it went. In current times, it’s reassuring that we can listen to Britten comfortable in the knowledge that he is unlikely to be the subject of a posthumous tabloid exposé".

Actually Bridcut's book sets out in some detail the curious case of the chorister Harry Morris. In 1937 Britten, then 24, took Morris, aged 13, on holiday to Crantock in Cornwall with his family. Britten had bought Morris new pyjamas. Whilst there an incident occurred; Morris returned to London and a stand-up row took place between Britten and his elder brother; they were estranged for a time afterwards. Bridcut writes (p.52) that later in life Morris said he had been alarmed "by what he understood as a sexual approach from Britten in his bedroom. He said he screamed and hit Britten with a chair. This brought Beth (Britten's sister) rushing into the room, who, he said, shouted at her brother. She and Ben left, and Beth locked the door. Harry got dressed, packed his bags, and sat waiting for the morning. Without speaking, Beth took him to the station, and dispatched him to London. When he reached home, he told his mother what had happened, but she told him off and refused to believe his story. He never told his father." Morris died in 2002. Bridcut notes (p.46) that "as an old man he had revisited Crantock, and the experience had made him feel ill".

With all the participants dead, it is impossible to be specific about what happened between Britten and Morris. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that this was an incident where Britten's interest in young (and therefore vulnerable) boys crossed the line. It may be the only time Britten did so; it may not be. In either event, Bridcut's general conclusion about Britten's conduct and proclivities - that he was blameless - is somewhat undermined.

Britten's admirers are prone, like Trelawney , to drawing a veil over the less pleasant side of his personality. Extraordinarily, Bridcut himself is just as guilty as Trelawney. A couple of years ago he wrote to the Guardian defending Britten on the paedophilia charge. "There was no suggestion of impropriety", he wrote. Had he forgotten about Harry Morris? Had he not read his own book?

Actually there is a clue to Bridcut's approach in its title - Britten's Children. It should have been called Britten's Boys. There are no girls in it.

As a fellow toiler in the field I admire Britten's talent. He could do anything he chose and do it brilliantly. But like all composers he was limited by the constraints of his personality and preoccupations, which in Britten's case were focused on the corruption of innocence (my suspicion is that Britten knew about this corruption from both sides - corrupter and corrupted). But this is a narrow theme and Britten mined it to the point of tedium.

In any case musical history is littered with examples of the prodigiously talented who are now forgotten. Talent is not everything. Hector Berlioz, a far far greater composer than Britten, has been described as a "genius without talent". If this is slightly unfair to Berlioz on the talent front, it well makes the point that genius and talent are separable.

(It's also worth pointing out that for all his genius, Berlioz never succeeded in co-opting the French musical establishment - when he finally got a job at the Paris Conservatoire it was as assistant librarian - whereas Britten was a master at rising up the greasy pole and discarding those who were no longer any use to him.  I genuinely think this does account for at least some of his pre-eminence today. There is a deeply unpleasant vignette in Britten's letters where he and Lennox Berkeley are recorded as spending an evening sniggering over Vaughan Williams' scores, laughing at the "mistakes" in the orchestration; this the same RVW who interceded on Britten's behalf when the LSO were ridiculing Our Hunting Fathers, the composer's first major orchestral work.)

Ultimately what makes music last is the quality of the invention, and it is on this front that Britten, for me, falls down. I have seen most of his operas and conducted some of his music but I can't remember a note of any of them. Perhaps a few bits of the Four Sea Interludes. People will be whistling and playing John Williams in a hundred years; I'm not sure about Britten.

And I have to correct Petroc Trelawney about the popularity of his work. I went to see Midsummer Night's Dream recently - it left me cold, although that's not the point: the point is that the theatre was half empty. Doesn't Trelawney know that these shows are put on not because the public wants them, but because the world of state-subsidised arts administration has decided the public should have them?  It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.

Lastly, Britten is often accused of scuttling off to America in 1939. To be fair, the evidence suggests that he and Pears didn't go because of impending war (although of course everyone knew it was coming). But I have always thought the War Requiem (one of his best works) both telling and evasive in its choice of poetry: much easier, after all, to make the pacifist case in the context of the 1914-18 war than the one which had just finished.  If I could have asked Britten one question today it would have been this: "If more people had been pacifists and we had lost the war, how long do you think it would have been before the fascist regime had allowed gay marriage?" I hope the irony that this reform was enacted by the kind of conservatives that Britten savaged in Peter Grimes would not have been lost on him. 

Yesterday I had the good fortune to conduct the D Minor Piano Concerto by Brahms in a stunning performance by the Indian pianist Julian Clef, aka Julian Pulimagath.  Now Britten despised Brahms, saying that he played some through once a year to remind himself how bad it was.  And yet the Brahms D Minor has a degree of pathos, dignity, tenderness, determination and finally warmth which I find conspicuously lacking in Britten's music.  The sad thing is not that Britten couldn't have done all that if he'd wanted to.  It's that he didn't want to.

Ken Livingstone and the tax gap

These are strange days indeed.  Before the weekend the Torygraph reported Ken Livingstone as criticising Gordon Brown for "borrowing £20 billion a year at the height of the boom in the first decade of this century in order to avoid having to increase taxes, because he wanted to increase public spending".  Speaking at a "Labour Assembly Against Austerity" Mr Livingstone described this as "an act of cowardice".

Before one raises a hallelujah for the sinner that repenteth and so on, it's worth pointing out a) that Livingstone blames the Tories too for excessive borrowing, b) that he would like Labour to put up taxes to fill the gap and c) his figures are wrong - actually during the height of the boom Brown borrowed about £40 billion (plus or minus a few billion) for five successive years.

I realise that this is a old tune now, but it's one I never mind playing: the new Keynesians who wanted Osborne to reflate the economy by increasing borrowing (before Osborne proved them wrong) are merely Keynesians-lite - they were silent when Brown passed up the opportunity to swallow the hard part of the great man's prescription - run a surplus during the good times. I don't remember Owen Jones and his ilk shouting for higher taxes or lower public spending then.

When the Blair government briefly balanced the books at the beginning of the first term it was because Labour had pledged to stick to Tory spending plans in an effort to avoid a repeat of the "Labour's tax bombshell" headlines said to have done for John Smith in 1992.  Otherwise Brown defiantly ran a counter-cyclical deficit, promising that he had done away with Tory boom and bust.

Nevertheless I think Livingstone's outburst is good news, because it may be a sign of increasing focus on the issue that matters, namely, what sort of public services can we afford with the tax take which the public is willing to bear?  He is also correct that borrowing to consume is inherently dubious because it is living today off our children's future income.

There is a delusion on the Left to the effect that Britain's fiscal gap can be closed solely by taxing the rich more.  They're wrong.  Firstly, there aren't enough rich people.  Secondly, when you put marginal tax rates up the rich call their accountants, arrange their affairs differently or go elsewhere.  As it happens the richest 1% in the UK currently pay nearly 30% of all income tax; in the late 70's when marginal rates were nearer 90% the figure was about 11%.

Livingstone is right that we can have whatever public services we want, but the reality is that it isn't just the rich who will have to pay more tax, but the rest of us as well.

RIP John Tavener

Desperately sad to hear last night of the death of John Tavener.  It must be awful for his wife and family.  He was only 69.

I wrote a few months ago about my four years of lessons with John, and you can read the post here if you're interested.  He was a nice man and a thoroughly distinctive and utterly fearless composer working in a time of conformism masquerading as radicalism.

So now the tributes will come flooding in.  I heard one of them last night, an interview with ex-Radio 3 controller Nicholas Kenyon on Front Row.  Kenyon said that in the 1980s Tavener had been an unfashionable composer, and that it was heartening to see his reputation growing again.  When I heard Kenyon say this I did wonder, Unfashionable with whom?

Tavener's relationship with the BBC was an uneasy one.  I remember seeing him literally shaking with anger at a rebuff that one of his favourite sopranos had received.  He had overcome the Corporation's reservations about this girl, and persuaded them to allow her to broadcast one of his pieces, but afterwards a producer had written to her to point out that this occasion was a one-off, and that as far as he was concerned she still had not passed her BBC audition.

Tavener was white with anger.  I can't remember exactly what he said, but it contained words like "petty", "mean" and "vindictive".  And then he said - and I do remember this clearly - "They hate me.  They hate me because I'm popular".  This while pacing up and down his living room in Wembley Park.  "But because I'm popular, they can't ignore me".

The question of what music was for was one we discussed many many times.  It was easy for composers like Bach or Haydn who worked for patrons, the church and the aristocracy respectively, but afterwards more difficult.  He was sure though that music had to communicate with an audience, and that if it didn't there was probably something wrong with it.  At the time - the mid 1980s - this was not a widely held view in the British musical establishment, and it's probably fair to say that an artificial reverence for the recondite and intimidating still lurks in mouldy corners.

Personally I am not a great fan of Tavener's music.  As I've written here many times before, it's about the invention, stupid - you either like it or you don't.  And I don't, or not that much.  I like his attitude to the world and his humility (although like a lot of humble people, John defended his humility with a certain amount of ferocity) more than I like the music which those attitudes inspired.  But undoubtedly he was a wildly, extravagantly ambitious composer who wrote music a lot of people loved.  That is a very rare thing now, and I'm not sure there's another living British composer who inspires such affection.

The last time I saw Tavener was from row J at the Bridgewater Hall last July.  My wife told me to go and say hello, and I wish now I had overcome my scruples.  I know he would have been absolutely charming and it would have been good to have said - however unwittingly - goodbye.

Ha-Joon Chang, Ed Miliband and the energy companies

Ha-Joon Chang will be familiar to some readers as author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism.  Today he is on the Graun's op-ed pages supporting Ed Miliband's idea of getting companies to pay their staff more.  Chang's thesis is that companies could afford to pay their staff higher wages, but choose not to.  "Many companies do in fact have significant influence over what they charge . . . it may be (they have market power) because they face little competition, like the railway companies . . . So at least companies with market power are perfectly capable of paying their workers more by charging customers more, if they so wanted - except that they don't".

Let's examine what might happen if a company facing "little competition" decided to put its prices up to pay its workers more.  I happen to know a bit about this because I am trying to get a new landline put in at the moment, and there is only one provider of landlines, BT (anti-plug for BT - they have been totally rubbish).

If BT put its prices up the cost will, as Chang says, be passed on to consumers.  So ordinary people who have a landline will be made poorer merely to pay BT staff more. Moreover, some people who don't like BT's price increase might decide to get rid of a landline altogether and rely on a cable connection or mobile phone instead.  BT's market share would decline, as would its profits. As its business shrank it would lay off workers.

As I wrote yesterday this looks suspiciously like a Tory policy, taking money from the many to give to the few. Yet it was Ed Miliband's idea, and Mr Chang, who teaches economics at Cambridge, supports it.  The expression "ivory tower" springs to mind.

In the face of such madness it is reassuring to turn to the Torygraph, which has enough fruitcakes of its own, but also the reassuringly sensible Jeremy Warner, who writes today that our problems are "not going to be solved by Labour's economically illiterate mix of price controls on energy and tax incentives to create higher wages.  This will only succeed in raising unemployment . . . In truth there are no easy fixes for falling real incomes, since the underlying cause is endemically poor productivity . . . You cannot spend what you don't earn unless you borrow the difference".

Amen.

One last point about Ha-Joon Chang. I can think of a number of companies which face "little competition" and which could pay their workers more by raising prices. The big six energy companies for example. I wonder what Ed Miliband would think of that?

Suzanne Moore, Russell Brand - high expectations

A spirited defence of Russell Brand comes from Suzanne Moore, deploring "the ranks of the professionally sensible" who have attacked him.  It's a novelty to find oneself bracketed, however unwittingly, as professionally sensible, but there we are.

Writing in the Graun, Moore thinks that Brand "nicely highlights the narrowness of our present political discourse . . . that discourse needs busting open . . . all the retorts amount to a defence of parliamentary democracy, a political process that many are clearly alienated from (sic) . . . those who accuse Brand of naivety are themselves naive about what voting achieves . . . Brand hits home because politics as it is enacted is dull and conformist . . . This system is so dead and closed that there feels little choice . . . In reality people are falling away from political parties. Brand's idealism is in part a response to this. . . He is right on many counts and while we are far from revolution we have a younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them.  

Some points in no particular order:

Parliamentary democracy has got flaws, but, as Churchill said, the alternatives are worse. Brand, as he readily admits, doesn't have a programme; but if he did, how would he go about implementing it?

Since parliamentary democracy is apparently deplored, I could only imagine this would be by violence.

Actually such an attempt would fail, partly because the machinery of the state would be exercised to suppress it, and partly because it wouldn't command majority support; but I hope it's enough for me destroy Brand's credibility to point out that violence would be the only plausible means. After all, he doesn't intend to do it via the ballot box.

Surely Suzanne Moore, writing for the benevolent falafel-chewing gluten-free Guardian, couldn't be endorsing violence, could she?

Secondly, the Anonymous protestors, with their sweat-shop made face masks, may be right about some things, but they don't represent anyone but themselves. Brand and his new friends may rail against Parliament, but the truth is that even tired old Parliament has more democratic legitimacy than they do.

Thirdly, if there feels little choice in our parliamentary democracy it's because, essentially, the big intellectual arguments have long ago been won and lost.  There is a general consensus in Britain that people want a sort of social democratic capitalism, in which the market's dynamism is harnessed and tamed to provide economic freedom but also an adequate safety net for the poor.

This sort of model has been discredited by events of the last five years, partly because the capitalism which made a few people rich by providing debt to the rest of us collapsed in a heap; and partly because its collapse revealed that the welfare system paid for with the fruits of that debt wasn't affordable. But most people believe and hope it can still be made to work, and this is where British politics is now - arguing about the details. It might change, but the views of Brand and Moore are still in a tiny minority.

Lastly, the "younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them" is almost worth a blog in itself, but I think Moore's analysis is partly right. It's quite possible that the rising generation might be the first in a long time to end up being poorer than their parents.  I say might because when I look back at my own childhood I remember wooden toys, an orange in your stocking at Christmas, holidays in rainy Scotland, and not daring to ask if I could share a room when my girlfriend came to stay; whereas even the least fortunate of my children's contemporaries have had computer games and phones that would have made us gasp, cheap holidays in the sun, endless restaurant meals and no-questions-asked room-sharing when significant others come round. Living standards have gone up dramatically in the last forty years.

Ah, say Moore and her ilk, but what about jobs? What about getting on the housing ladder?

Boring I know, but unemployment was much higher during the Thatcher years, and as for the housing ladder, most people didn't ever think they would ever own their own property anyway; ironically it was Mrs Thatcher who put the notion into the public's mind. I didn't own a house until I was thirty six.  It was the first time since leaving home that I had gone upstairs to bed, because I hadn't lived anywhere with two floors.

Actually, although loan-to-value levels are high, the proportion of mortgage payments to average earnings is very low by historical standards because interest rates are so low.  People can't get on the housing ladder not because prices are too high but because, post-credit crunch, mortgage companies are demanding a sizeable deposit which they don't have. None of us is used to saving, and that's because we got used to a period in the nineties and twenty-hundreds when credit was easy to get: if you wanted something, you just went to the bank and the money was handed over.

This is where I agree with Moore.  The younger generation has high expectations and no means to meet them.  If they had a little more curiosity about the last hundred years of British history (and there are after all quite a lot of people available to ask about it) they would see that they are in fact incredibly fortunate - they have grown up in a time of enormous personal liberty, freedom from strife, unparalelled life expectancy and material affluence.  It's a crisis of expectation.  But not any other kind of crisis.