Is marriage a good thing or not? Sir Paul Coleridge, described by the Torygraph as "a senior High Court Judge", apparently thinks so, for he has waded into the debate with some pithy remarks after his Think Tank, the Marriage Foundation, published a report showing that children of unmarried parents were twice as likely to suffer family break up as those whose parents were married.
I didn't know judges were allowed to have Think Tanks, which just goes to show you learn something new every day, even if it isn't anything terribly interesting.
I'm sympathetically inclined to Mr Justice Coleridge's view, but the trouble with "research" like this is that it fails to take into account that people who get married are self-selecting: that's to say, the kind of people who make such a public commitment are precisely the kind of people who are likely to stick with it when the gloss wears off. Of course their children are less likely to suffer family break up.
Sir Paul is clearly aware of the controversy his remarks might stir up, for he insisted that he was not intending to "preach morality".
"If your relationship is not stable enough to cope with children", he wrote, "you should not have them". Well maybe, but the trouble is people's relationships tend to come under most strain after the children have come along. If the state really wanted to minimise family break up it would discourage couples unlikely to stick together from having children in the first place.
How could it do this? By restricting child-related benefits to married couples. Young men are pretty stupid and irresponsible, but young women aren't. "I'm not having your baby", would be the cry, "until you marry me". Watch the birth rate plummet.
But of course this won't happen. For one, the piteous plight of single unmarried mothers would soon be winging its way to a TV screen near you. Cathy Come Home Redux. In the face of such emotionalism the right of young men to father a child and then slope off without a backward glance or social censure will always be placed ahead of the desirability that children should have both parents in attendance. When some children suffer conspicuous poverty, a policy which nevertheless beggars many more emotionally will always be preferred.
"You have no right to have children", said Mr Justice Coleridge, "you only have responsibilities if you have them".
Not a widespread view in Britain now.
Monday 9 December 2013
Thursday 5 December 2013
George Osborne's Autumn statement - squaring the fiscal circle
Amidst the kerfuffle surrounding the Chancellor's Autumn statement, it might be a good moment to take the political temperature.
George Osborne has been attacked by Labour for the last three and half years on the basis that his economic recipe wouldn't work. It now looks as if they were wrong. Plan A has got Britain back into growth. Of course Ed Balls would say that it would have happened quicker if we'd done what Labour wanted, but that would have involved higher borrowing and higher interest rates. The deficit, which has stalled at about £120 billion, might well have increased, sending out a disastrous signal to the debt markets, from whom we must borrow about £2.5 billion every week.
In middle-age my political sympathies tend to lie with the parties that have had the most credible economic plan, because it's only when you have an economy which works that you can afford the kind of public services most people would like to see. In all my adult life I can't remember a single Labour policy devoted to balancing the books, and, looking back, I'm amazed to find that I voted for them so many times.
In the months leading up to the 97 election Labour promised to stick to Tory spending plans for a couple of years in order to head off a repeat of the "Labour's tax bombshell" headlines said to have done for John Smith in 92, but since it was explicitly a Tory policy that was being copied, I don't think this counts. Actually it's adoption led to a brief period - the last such - when Britain ran a surplus.
I think Osborne, like him or loathe him, has followed the least bad course of action open to him - none of them were good - and stuck to his guns despite overwhelming public, political and media hostility. He deserves his political reward. We don't hear too much about Plan B nowadays. Of course we are having the wrong kind of recovery, whipped up out of QE and the housing market, but it is better than none, and when you consider that the EU, one of our principal export markets, is flat on its back, we should be grateful for what we've got.
But about Osborne's political reward. There isn't much of it. Ed Balls has given up telling the Chancellor he was doing the wrong thing and avoided the temptation to claim that growth would have happened sooner on his watch, seeing more fertile ground in the protest that, for most people, living standards are falling, growth notwithstanding. Labour's lead in the polls is modest but shows no sign of going away.
On several grounds this is an infantile objection. In the first place, an economy only a few months out of recession is not going to be uprooting many trees. In the second, wages have been stagnant at best (adjusted for inflation) for some years, and it didn't just start when the Coalition got into office. Thirdly, there are assumptions in Balls' criticism which are totally unwarranted, namely that we are entitled to eternally rising living standards - we aren't - and that there is some magic button Osborne could press if he chose which could restore them - there isn't.
As I've argued on here before, in the last half century we exported our manufacturing capacity and tried to fill the income gap with borrowing (that's what the bankers were doing before it all went wrong - finding more and more ingenious ways of lending us money). The only way of returning to widespread employment is by restoring some lost competitiveness. Lower wages is one way of achieving that. Labour is so far from understanding this that it recently suggested that companies with "market power" should charge consumers more in order to raise wages for their staff.
Companies like, er, the big six energy companies? They certainly have plenty of market power.
One of George Osborne's announcements today was of future increases in the pension age. This is one way of lowering the benefit cost of an ageing population. It sounds and is harsh, but bear in mind that at the time the welfare state was set up, life expectancy for working men was about 48.
Another way of making sure the UK will be able to pay its pensioners in future is by a dramatic increase in immigration. But the UK is already one of the most crowded countries in the world (the South East of England would I think be third, behind Hong Kong and Bangladesh), housing is increasingly unaffordable, building land scarce and expensive, and immigration very unpopular with most people. Moreover immigrants themselves become old in time, and a future plan which proposes more of them to solve our budgetary problems looks increasingly like a demographic Ponzi scheme.
All of this - a senescent population, an overspending government, falling wages and a housing shortage looks to me like one of those situations which can't go on forever and which must therefore stop. Judging by Labour's lead in the opinion polls an awful lot of people don't see it this way.
There seems to me a divide between those who view this particular circle as one that can't be squared, and those who think an incoming Labour government can restore the natural pre-2008 order of things. But an incoming Labour government will, in 2015, face exactly the same problems the Coalition currently faces, and will I think swiftly discover that taxing the rich a bit more won't darn the hole in the fiscal sock.
The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the post-war welfarist society those of us of a certain age have grown up with cannot go on as it is. Pension age is merely a harbinger. From welfare benefits and care for the elderly to taxation and retirement, things are going to change whether we like it or not. I don't personally think it will be pretty.
George Osborne has been attacked by Labour for the last three and half years on the basis that his economic recipe wouldn't work. It now looks as if they were wrong. Plan A has got Britain back into growth. Of course Ed Balls would say that it would have happened quicker if we'd done what Labour wanted, but that would have involved higher borrowing and higher interest rates. The deficit, which has stalled at about £120 billion, might well have increased, sending out a disastrous signal to the debt markets, from whom we must borrow about £2.5 billion every week.
In middle-age my political sympathies tend to lie with the parties that have had the most credible economic plan, because it's only when you have an economy which works that you can afford the kind of public services most people would like to see. In all my adult life I can't remember a single Labour policy devoted to balancing the books, and, looking back, I'm amazed to find that I voted for them so many times.
In the months leading up to the 97 election Labour promised to stick to Tory spending plans for a couple of years in order to head off a repeat of the "Labour's tax bombshell" headlines said to have done for John Smith in 92, but since it was explicitly a Tory policy that was being copied, I don't think this counts. Actually it's adoption led to a brief period - the last such - when Britain ran a surplus.
I think Osborne, like him or loathe him, has followed the least bad course of action open to him - none of them were good - and stuck to his guns despite overwhelming public, political and media hostility. He deserves his political reward. We don't hear too much about Plan B nowadays. Of course we are having the wrong kind of recovery, whipped up out of QE and the housing market, but it is better than none, and when you consider that the EU, one of our principal export markets, is flat on its back, we should be grateful for what we've got.
But about Osborne's political reward. There isn't much of it. Ed Balls has given up telling the Chancellor he was doing the wrong thing and avoided the temptation to claim that growth would have happened sooner on his watch, seeing more fertile ground in the protest that, for most people, living standards are falling, growth notwithstanding. Labour's lead in the polls is modest but shows no sign of going away.
On several grounds this is an infantile objection. In the first place, an economy only a few months out of recession is not going to be uprooting many trees. In the second, wages have been stagnant at best (adjusted for inflation) for some years, and it didn't just start when the Coalition got into office. Thirdly, there are assumptions in Balls' criticism which are totally unwarranted, namely that we are entitled to eternally rising living standards - we aren't - and that there is some magic button Osborne could press if he chose which could restore them - there isn't.
As I've argued on here before, in the last half century we exported our manufacturing capacity and tried to fill the income gap with borrowing (that's what the bankers were doing before it all went wrong - finding more and more ingenious ways of lending us money). The only way of returning to widespread employment is by restoring some lost competitiveness. Lower wages is one way of achieving that. Labour is so far from understanding this that it recently suggested that companies with "market power" should charge consumers more in order to raise wages for their staff.
Companies like, er, the big six energy companies? They certainly have plenty of market power.
One of George Osborne's announcements today was of future increases in the pension age. This is one way of lowering the benefit cost of an ageing population. It sounds and is harsh, but bear in mind that at the time the welfare state was set up, life expectancy for working men was about 48.
Another way of making sure the UK will be able to pay its pensioners in future is by a dramatic increase in immigration. But the UK is already one of the most crowded countries in the world (the South East of England would I think be third, behind Hong Kong and Bangladesh), housing is increasingly unaffordable, building land scarce and expensive, and immigration very unpopular with most people. Moreover immigrants themselves become old in time, and a future plan which proposes more of them to solve our budgetary problems looks increasingly like a demographic Ponzi scheme.
All of this - a senescent population, an overspending government, falling wages and a housing shortage looks to me like one of those situations which can't go on forever and which must therefore stop. Judging by Labour's lead in the opinion polls an awful lot of people don't see it this way.
There seems to me a divide between those who view this particular circle as one that can't be squared, and those who think an incoming Labour government can restore the natural pre-2008 order of things. But an incoming Labour government will, in 2015, face exactly the same problems the Coalition currently faces, and will I think swiftly discover that taxing the rich a bit more won't darn the hole in the fiscal sock.
The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the post-war welfarist society those of us of a certain age have grown up with cannot go on as it is. Pension age is merely a harbinger. From welfare benefits and care for the elderly to taxation and retirement, things are going to change whether we like it or not. I don't personally think it will be pretty.
Monday 2 December 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday 26 November 2013
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?
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?
Sunday 24 November 2013
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.
Monday 18 November 2013
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.
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.
Wednesday 13 November 2013
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.
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.
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