Video slot: India's economic miracle

What is the most effective way to help poor countries develop and become less poor? Free markets. There are never specific guarantees, of course, but generally a country has potential entrepreneurs and investors who, short of economic liberalisation, remain untapped. When the country is opened up, some will fail while others succeed, naturally, but that's got to be better than all of them failing.

This video from reason.tv features Shikha Dalmia, joint winner (with Daniel Hannan) of this year's Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism, explaining how economic liberalisation has done for India in merely a decade or so what half a century of Fabianism failed to achieve.

Prohibition isn't working

So writes Tim Black in spiked.

In August last year, Julian Critchley, the former director of the Cabinet Office’s anti-drugs unit, called, incredibly, for the legalisation of drugs. ‘I think what was truly depressing about my time in UKADCU’, he leaked, ‘was that the overwhelming majority of professionals I met, including those from the police, the health service, the government and voluntary sectors held the same view: the illegality of drugs causes far more problems for society and the individual than it solves.’ With anti-drugs unit directors like this, who needs scotch-egg-munching Legalise Dope lobbyists? (src)

Quite. There are three sets of harms associated with drugs abuse: the user, the user's immediate social circle, and wider society.

The user suffers harms as a result of the drugs themselves, but also as a result of drugs 'cut' with toxic substances, poor needle practice, and uncontrolled usage conditions. Legalisation cannot deal with the harm intrinsic to the drug itself, but if drugs are legalised, proper regulation can mitigate the other problems.

The user's immediate social circle suffers the distress of seeing someone's life wrecked by drugs abuse. Again, there is a certain amount of this that the law cannot deal with, but some of the distress stems from the potential for criminal charges, some of it stems from secondary problems which arise as a result of users' unregulated environment (such as infections derived from poor needle practices), and some of it would be improved by better rehab opportunities, which a rounded drugs policy would aim to provide.

Society at large suffers harm in terms of burdens on social and health services, as well as the problems associated with gangs, dealers, and the crime committed by users in search of a fix. Again, there is a core which legalisation cannot tackle, but it will do a lot to undermine gangs' revenue streams, push dealers out of business, and by reducing the price of drugs it will also reduce the amount of drugs-related property crime.

At present, drugs policy amounts to variations on prohibition, with drugs categorised as Banned, Very Banned and Extremely Banned. That's just a way for politicians to send signals, and science can be of no help in that kind of decisions. However, regulation will bring the science into its own as a real aid to policy-makers' decisions: take rehabilitation, education and quality assessment to name but three.

Again, lest anyone think I'm pitching to become a pot-head myself, let me quote Black towards the end of his piece:

Calling for the legalisation of drugs should not be confused with celebrating them.

I come here not to praise drugs, but to bury prohibition, for the course is obvious: legalise and regulate drugs. It's the best way to keep everyone safe.

Will Cameron's referendum lock properly?

The Treaty of Lisbon, essentially a republication of the mooted treaty establishing a constitution for the European Union (src), has now passed its final hurdle in the Czech Republic and has therefore been ratified by all the nation states of the Union. The UK politics have been focussed on the fact that the three major parties all promised a referendum on the constitutional treaty but the government, helped by the Lib Dems, rejected calls for a popular vote on the Lisbon Treaty, apparently on the basis that it doesn't have the word 'Constitution' in the title any more.

J. C. M. Dave wanted a referendum on the Treaty, but that's obviously not a reasonable position to hold any more. His response to the new state of affairs emerged blinking into the sunlight yesterday, and one of its chief planks is that we shall henceforth have a 'referendum lock' on any future treaties (src). The EU-phobic factions' retort has been that the Lisbon Treaty is 'self-amending', and consequently any promise of a 'referendum lock' is pointless. This, if true, would be very important because J. C. M. Dave's position on this would be vacuous; but let me give cause to doubt whether this is an accurate representation of the actualité.

It certainly is true that the Lisbon Treaty contains clauses providing for its own amendment (Art. 1, Para. 56, pdf). I am guessing that, given Lisbon is a treaty amending previous treaties, this must be a novelty. However, the Treaty is not simplistically self-amending. It contains three procedures to be followed in order to carry out those amendments: one original and two simplified.

The weakest simplified revision procedure requires certain things to be done: with regard to national governments, the requirement is that each national parliament agree to the proposed amendment. However, such an amendment may only be used to remove national vetoes, or to speed up the legislative process: essentially, it's something of a technical matter about how decisions are made. There's no way it can be used to extend the EU's 'competences'; the most that can be done is removing the British veto, and our parliament, as every other, has the right to veto the removal of our veto.

The original revision procedure is the way that competences can be extended, and these must be passed in each member state 'in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements.'

So the referendum promise is not meaningless, so long as the bill is drafted with a clause which asserts that for the purposes of Art. 1, Para. 56 of the Treaty of Lisbon, the bill is a 'constitutional requirement'. It's not a capitulation: in fact, it's a way for the Conservatives to use Lisbon's own provisions to entrench (so far as that is possible in British law) the principle that the public has a say on major EU treaty changes. It's clever Euroscepticism, rather than the knuckle-dragging sort found among the older Tory guard.

Scam alert

Recently, I've been seeing adverts claiming to offer tooth whitening procedures for under five dollars. I don't care about blinding people with the brightness of my dental enamel, but in case you're different, let me warn you that these are fraudulent. If you click through on the advert, the large-text claim is that this procedure costs less than five dollars; the small print is that you are signing up to hundreds of dollars in extra payments.

KingMcKong, a respected Motley Fool (UK) poster, tells his story:

[Ill and confined to the house, and] idly perusing a few websites I was faced with a ‘tooth whitening’ miracle cure, risk-free trial.

It was cheap and it is featured at the top of the Google sponsored links, which I assumed they filter fairly carefully.

So, without a morsel of fear (as the old rhyme has it) I clicked onto the website and followed the instructions to receive my $1.95 trial pack (including discount code reduction – you see how smart I am even when feeling at death’s door!).

I entered my credit card details, completed the delivery details and hey presto! – I was stuffed!

The $1.95 had turned into $11.90, because it’s a delivery to UK (even though they knew this because I had to enter the address before pressing confirm, and the postage total had remained at zero).

In addition I have now made a commitment it seems to pay $87.62 plus an ongoing monthly direct debit on my credit card, unless I return the first pack within 14 days at my own expense. (link)

My advice? Fret less about how you look. ;-)

UK wins coveted "Worst in show" award

Here's a chart from an OECD report published in September, showing the relative sizes of the national deficits recorded by various governments around the world.
(Thanks to Burning Our Money and Alex Massie.)

Of all the countries the OECD surveyed with regard to deficit spending, we came absolute, tip-top bottom: highest deficit spending of the lot. And let me remind you: the US left recession at the end of October [1]. Japan left recession in August. France left recession in August. Germany left recession in August. Canada stayed out of recession longer than anyone else and exited in July. South Korea has avoided recession altogether.

The UK, on the other hand, is still in recession, at least by the numbers. The direction of travel indicates that the next set of figures will probably show us to be out of recession: nearly six months after the first countries started growing again. Naturally, one can find examples against the trend up and down the list, but that trend is clear: greater deficits mean recessions which last longer, end later and do more damage.

So let the left point to tame macroeconomists like Krugman and Blanchflower as their 'evidence' that high deficit spending is good for economies. We can look instead at the real-world evidence of economic policies in action, and we see that higher deficits do not do better for economies than lower ones. If you've bought the myth, propounded by left-wing economists and propagated by the BBC and the Guardian, that deficit spending is going to get us out of the recession quicker, look around you: it hasn't. It doesn't. It can't.

[1] When I say 'left recession at the end of October', I mean that the figures were released then. These economies necessarily left recession a few months earlier than the figures showing that this had happened.

Democratic drugs policy

The sacking of Professor David Nutt (news) over government drugs policy is an interesting little one, for it reveals unspoken assumptions about the nature and benefits of democratic government. Those who most strongly opposed the sacking of Prof. Nutt did so because, in their view, his advice ought to form the basis of government policy, and it is madness to go against a scientist's advice.

As a theoretical physicist [1], it might be expected for me to back a scientist against the politicians, but I'm with Prof. Sir David King, who was quoted in September's PhysicsWorld as saying that scientists had to be 'prepared to be hard-nosed' if they were going to give scientific advice, and accept that government ministers do not always do what their scientific advisors think they ought to. That is not to say that they should be pig-headed and ignore the advice: but they may not always act along its lines. Politicians ought to be making their decisions on the basis of all the available evidence, of which the science is a part.

So I'm against this idea of government by experts. It is fundamentally un-democratic to charge unelected, unaccountable scientific advisors with making government policy. We cannot be absolutist and make science the only criterion for policy. However, that does not mean I fully take the government's side, either. (And as for Chris Grayling, I reject the man and all his works.) It is fairly clear that the politicians have been criticising Prof. Nutt for making scientifically-justified, true statements. That is madness. They should acknowledge where the science lies, and then say that other factors (e.g., the Daily Mail) have made them act differently.

But actually, my view is even more hard-line than that. If government by experts is fundamentally un-democratic, then government by ministers is still not particularly democratic. Sure, they are accountable to the public — well, to their constituencies, which is a better mandate than the scientists have — but the best way to 'take a vote' on cannabis is surely not to ask how many people want it banned, but rather to let people choose to use or not as they see fit. [2] Is not the most democratic way to treat drugs policy to let people make their own minds up?

[1] In a mathematics department. This makes my credentials conveniently slippery. Mostly, I'm a mathematician, but on this one, I'm quite definitely a theoretical physicist.
[2] At this point, it's probably worth remarking that I have never used, nor do I intend to use, cannabis.

Everyone's a critic!

Textual criticism is a set of clever tools we can use to think about how a text has developed over time. It's not an exact science, of course, but it gives some ideas as to how we have received texts in the form in which we have them. Christians use its tools in studying documents from church history (e.g.), and it's even got its uses when it comes to understanding the Bible. After all, the Bible is literature which has been written down and passed around by people, as well as being inspired by God. However, I do think that textual criticism does have its own temptations, insufferable arrogance being one of them.

Here's a textual puzzle by way of illustration: David and Goliath. Look at the following passages. (Both quotations are from the ESV.)

Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, “Send me David your son, who is with the sheep.” … And David came to Saul and entered his service. And Saul loved him greatly, and he became his armour-bearer. (1 Sam. 16:18–21)

Saul said to him, “Whose son are you, young man?” And David answered, “I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite.” (1 Sam. 17:58)

Saul is introduced to David in regard to the harp-playing, but then asks again after he has killed Goliath. If you look at the two chapters in more detail, you can see a few more instances of repeated information: David's provenance and brothers are introduced twice, for example.

The text critics have an easy way to solve this, of course. Take Tov's Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible (p. 336). Having proposed a (fairly typical) interweaving of two different traditions as the explanation for various features of the text including the points I have just raised, he writes,

The editor of M T S V — who joined version II to version I — apparently with the intention of preserving a parallel ancient story, failed to take into consideration the contradictions that were caused by the combination of the two stories. (src)

However, I fear that Tov is expressing rather too much confidence in his own abilities, and rather to little in those of his subject. For the sake of argument, let's agree to Tov's idea of interwoven traditions [1] and say that the redactor of Samuel (let me make this person male, because it's almost certainly accurate) was taking two previous traditions and using both for the basis of his text. Then clearly he thought that they worked well together and made a coherent story which was worth telling. Remember that on this assumption, he didn't just sit them next to each other; he actively moved bits of the narrative around because he thought it a worthwhile exercise from the point of view of his readers.

Then along comes one such reader, telling him he got it all wrong and missed a glaring 'contradiction' in the text. That sounds fairly unlikely to me: if it is as bad as all that, wouldn't he also have spotted and corrected it, or if not him then some scribe later on?

(I suppose at this point, I ought to suggest that this section of Textual criticism was in fact written by at least two different authors, let's call them T and ur-Tov. The person who put it together [let's call them Tov] clearly didn't think through the contradictions produced by combining T and ur-Tov in this way.)

It seems to me that Tov is presuming to tell the redactor how he should have written his text. I'd prefer it if textual criticism contained enough humility to recognise that generally, redactors get it right, and to proceed on the basis that even when we can't see it, they knew what they were doing. It'd only be charitable, especially given that the tools of text criticism are dangerous and liable to rebound at any time.

None of that explains what that first scribe who wrote Samuel was thinking, of course. And I'd like to know, because it's puzzling me greatly! But it's got to be a first, tiny step towards explaining it if we recognise that he was, in fact, thinking.

[1] Interwoven textual traditions is the standard text-critical way to answer these questions. It forms the basis of an entire theory of how we got the Pentateuch. I'm not saying it's always wrong, but it does seem to be somewhat over-used.

Well, well

Amid all the kerfuffle about women shortlists and so on, here's an interesting little nugget, from the BBC in 2005:

More than two thirds more ethnic minority candidates stood in the 2005 election than in 2001. Of the 110 candidates 41 were Conservatives, 40 Lib Dems and 29 Labour. (src)

Given that the UK ethnic minorities account for 8% or so of the population in the last census (2001; src), it seems that at the national level, ethnic minorities are involving themselves in politics almost as much as the majority population: 8% of 650 MPs is 52, so about 40 candidates isn't bad going. It also seems that the Tories and Lib Dems are noticeably better than Labour at involving candidates from an ethnic minority background. It's nice rhetoric for the left to accuse the Tories of being prejudiced, but it seems that stubborn facts point, if anything, the other way.