Are Our Maps Upside Down?

I was watching a generic History of Britain - Viking Era documentary recently and one of the throw away lines was that the Norman Invasion changed Britain's orientation from North towards Scandinavia to South towards France.

For various strategic reasons the orientation has stayed that way for a very long time. But Britain, and more so in the best parts (i.e. the stabby northern parts from whence I hail), is not really like France and Spain towards which it is pointed on most maps. Britain is a lot more like the Netherlands (the last successful invader I guess) Germany (the last successful dynastic transplant) and Scandinavia.  

And if you turn the map upside down, the fit seems much more natural, with France and pensioner depository Spain much further away than as are consciously considered. 

I am not suggesting that a guerrilla army be formed to storm every school and turn around maps (hmmm, or am I?). But it is an interesting thought as to how something mundane and arbitrary can shape our perception of the world.

Dude, we've spent it.

The Guardian runs the following twattish article:

Last Wednesday, every single Norwegian became a millionaire – without having to lift a lillefinger. They owe the windfall to their coastline, and a huge dollop of good sense. Since 1990, Norway has been squirreling away its cash from North Sea oil and gas into a rainy-day fund.

... converted into pounds, the 5.11 trillion krone becomes a mere £100,000 for every man, woman and child... We pumped hundreds of billions out of the water off the coast of Scotland. Only unlike the Norwegians, we've got almost nothing to show for it.

Yes, we've seen this sort of drivel in The Daily Mail and at ConHome plenty of times, the only variant is the next bit:

Our oil cash was magicked into tax cuts for the well-off, then micturated against the walls of a thousand pricey car dealerships and estate agents.

How the oil money was allegedly spent seems to depend entirely on the prejudices of whoever is writing the twattish article. The Mail and ConHome would say "We wasted it on welfare payments to scroungers", UKIP would say "We wasted it on payments to the EU", the Islamists would say "We wasted it on wars of aggression against our peace-loving Brothers in the Middle East", the BNP would say "We wasted it on aid payment to nig nogs" etc etc.

Even worse is the SNP who say that "Westminster stole our oil money", well fact is, the extra Barnett money the Scots get back from Westminster has been broadly equal to the North Sea oil tax revenues and it all nets off.

(I might as well point out that the £5 billion of North Sea oil money we've spent was at least publicly collected and pales into insignificance compared to the amount of taxpayers' money wasted by selling off council houses at undervalue and then having to pay Housing Benefit instead, we're talking tens of billions, maybe as much as a hundred billion, pissed up the wall right there.)

Boring, boring, boring:

Politics aside, the salient points here these:

a) There are only 5.1 million Norwegians. Pro rata for the UK population, our fund would have been £8,000 each.

b) That money has been building up over forty years, so divide £8,000 by forty, the UK has been spending £200 more per person per year, that's your £8,000 gone.

c) Both Labour and Tory governments have appalling records on public spending, that £200 is only about 2% of the total amount they spend per person each year anyway, i.e. the square root of f- all.

d) There's not much point whining about a non-existent £0.5 billion oil fund when the UK has run up a national debt of £1,000 billion (or whatever the horrifying figure is). In relative terms, it's the square root of your answer from c). Maybe our national debt is £0.5 billion lower than it otherwise would have been, who knows?

Reader's Letter Of The Week

From The Evening Standard (Monday 9 September, page 53):

In his rush to warn us of the "danger of the debate about Britain's place in Europe... being hijacked by extremes", Lord Wolfson neglects the possibility of remaining in the Single Market via membership of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).

This so-called "Norway option" would protect our competitiveness, exports and jobs. Contrary to assertions made elsewhere, it would give us a considerable degree of control over the formulation of trading regulations, despite losing our vote in the EU Council.

In relations between EFTA and the EU, the are multiple opportunities for consultation and negotiation on new rules. As one Norwegian politician recently told me, the politics is done long before a vote is taken.

Most SIngle Market measures are in any case approved by Council without a vote (on the so-called A-List) while Britain within the EU is easily overruled under the Qualified Majority System (QMV).

Outside the EU, Britain can enjoy the fruits of globalisation, not least among them the fact that an increasing number of trading regulations are made at a global level, and handed down to the EU for implementation.

Ironically, Norway is fully represented on these bodies, with influence equal to that of the EU, alongside which it sits. Britain's voice, as one of 28 countries represented by the EU which negotiates a "common position" is often drowned.

Richard North, EU Referendum blog.

Mr North knows what he is talking about.

To cut a long story short, let us assume that free trade is A Good Thing (I accept that there are those who think it is A Bad Thing). If the EU were a Single Market but every other country ran a protectionist system, then as far as free trade is concerned, we'd clearly be Better Off In.

But the world is now divided up into ever-larger free trade blocs, like EU/EFTA, NAFTA, Mercosur, ASEAN/AFTA, COMESA, and they are all under the WTO/GATT umbrella and are merrily signing free trade agreements with each other. And the EU itself has plenty of free trade/preferential agreements surrounding countries.

To give an example, the UK itself has always been a mini-free trade area, so let's assume Scotland vote for independence and Westminster says "Right, in that case we are going to put limits or tariffs on trade between Scotland and the rest of the UK, ha ha, that's you buggered", then all Scotland has to do is join the next larger bloc (let's say the EU or EFTA) and it is still better off.

So all a country leaving the EU has to do is to join whichever is the next larger bloc, let's say EFTA, and if EFTA won't have you, then you are still in the WTO/GATT system, and if they won't have you as a full member, then it can't be too difficult to haggle a free-trade agreement with them on a unilateral basis, which then applies to all countries who are members etc.

"Norway goat cheese fire closes tunnel"

From the BBC, although worthy of The Daily Mash:

About 27 tonnes of caramelised brown goat cheese - a delicacy known as Brunost - caught light as it was being driven through the Brattli Tunnel at Tysfjord, northern Norway, last week.

The fire raged for five days and smouldering toxic gases were slowing the recovery operation, officials said. The tunnel - which is said to be badly damaged - is likely to remain closed for several weeks, they added.

"We can't go in until it's safe," geologist Viggo Aronsen told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. Police officer Viggo Berg said the high concentration of fat and sugar in the cheese made it burn "almost like petrol if it gets hot enough".

The lorry driver had noticed the fire in his trailer and abandoned it about 300m (1,000ft) from the southern entrance. No-one was hurt.

Kjell Bjoern Vinje, of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, said it was the first time he could remember cheese catching fire on Norwegian roads.

"I didn't know that brown cheese burns so well," he said.

All I can say is "God appetitt!"

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (243)

Kj reminds us that we get the same crap in Norway:

In the proposed state budget for 2013, the government wants to increase the tax on secondary residences. In the assessment of the wealth tax (top rate 1.1 %) secondary residential and commercial property has been valued lower than other investments. For the 2013 budget, Government is proposing to increase the assessment from 40 to 50% of market value.

Peter Batta, President of the National Homeowners' Association, said the proposal to increase the assesment value is an anti-social proposal as far as tenants are concerned. "If the government increases the assessed values of secondary residences from 40 to 50 percent, the effect will be to increase taxes for those who have extra housing for rent. At the same time, the consequence is that the profitability of letting will fall and many will sell their rental property (1)" Batta said in a statement.

The National Homeowners' Association estimates that more than five percent of the housing market is secondary residences and that between 20,000 and 30,000 units of rental housing will disappear (2) from the rental market as a result of the tax increase in the state budget.

"In addition, tenants will be left with higher rents, since all costs over time will be passed on to the tenant (3). In other words, a very anti-social proposal for anyone who is in the rental market," says Peter Batta.

Classic KLN!

(1) and (3) cancel each other out: if they can pass on the costs under (3), then profitability would be the same as now. But no, according to (1) profitability will fall, and under (2) 20,000 to 30,000 units of rental housing will not be sold but will just disappear!

Presumably they would be put on the market, but the effects of the release of 20,000 to 30,000 units is not something that benefits the paying members of the NHA, even though it will benefit future homeowners, which can't be a good thing can it?

Also worthy of note: a 10% increase in the assessed value a £150K apartment means a £165 increase in taxes, hardly anything in the greater scheme of things.

"Norwegian driver eaten by vultures after hitting bear after skidding on frogs while trying to avoid moose"

From the BBC:

The implausible series of accidents took place on Wednesday night on a rural road 225km (140 miles) north of Oslo, in Hedmark county.

While the passenger escaped uninjured, a search party was tracking the vultures after finding traces of blood, local wildlife official Svein Erik Bjorke told the Reuters news agency.

Norway is home to around 10,000,000 frogs, 100,000 moose, 150 brown bears and a few vultures.

The driver, Anders Artig, spotted the moose around midnight near Hanestad village and tried to steer around the animal. Unfortunately, he hit a group of migrating pool frogs causing the car to skid out of control when a bear suddenly ran into his path. The bear was catapulted through the windscreen, killing Mr Artig instantly.

"The driver had lost a bit of speed as he tried to avoid the moose before skidding through the frogs and then hitting the bear," Mr Bjorke told Reuters. "We are currently tracking the vultures in order to try and recover as much of Mr Artig's remains as possible. I guess we can tear up his organ donor card though."

The driver's car sustained some damage in the accident. The moose and a few dozen pool frogs managed to flee the scene unharmed.

"Building houses with guaranteed losses"

Kj has emailed in a summary of an article from the Norwegian FT, illustrating how deep seated Home-Owner-Ism is over there:

If there is no appreciation for the house you build, it can be a very poor investment economically, similarly if the new home you build simply costs more than it is possible to sell it for.

This is the case for many Norwegian builders outside pressure areas. Except in Oslo, the cost of building a house is much the same, writes Financial Times Norway. In Oslo, prices for existing homes were, on average, 90 percent of the price of similar new homes, compared to 80 percent along the oil belt in the West counties and Akershus.

But in half of the counties, homeowners, according to Financial Times Norway, must expect that well over 30 percent of the value is blown away in the second the key is in the door at the newly built home, a home from that moment suddenly has become a used home. In the counties of Nord-Trøndelag and Hedmark, existing homes are going for less than 60 percent of new homes.
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UPDATE. Here's the chart of Norwegian house prices since 1992:

Norwegian gun nut infuriated by mediocre caricature

One for Kj

It appears that the hard pressed, hard working, squeezed middle over in Norway are busily scrimping and saving to build up private wealth to provide themselves with something to fall back on in retirement and something to leave to their children etc etc:

Norway is moving closer to a housing bubble as the central bank’s strategy of cutting interest rates to weaken the krone spurs credit growth and bloats property values.

A day after Norway’s financial regulator said the biggest domestic threat to the economy comes from an overheated property market as borrowers bet rates will stay low, Norges Bank Governor Oeystein Olsen on March 14 demonstrated he won’t allow further krone gains by cutting the bank’s main interest rate a quarter of a percentage point to 1.5 percent.

The country may already be in a housing bubble, according to Robert Shiller, the co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller (SPCS20) home- price index who predicted the U.S. subprime mortgage crash. Policy makers should “start worrying now,” Shiller said in an interview in Copenhagen in January. Norway’s Financial Supervisory Authority this week told banks to build up their capital buffers to prepare for increased losses as low central bank rates continue to fuel credit-market imbalances...

The irony is that much of Norway's national wealth was built up by a very Georgist approach to collecting that self-same national wealth via the tax system (or not allowing national wealth to be dissipated and privatised or sold off to banks). Their entire sovereign wealth fund is merely all the taxes collected from oil extraction in their half of the North Sea (the bit which the UK generously/foolishly allowed them to call their own) and this is a large part (not being in the EU must have helped) of what has put them in such an enviable fiscal position:

The economy of the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter has steered clear of Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. The government has no net debt and the biggest budget surplus of any AAA-rated nation, thanks to a $600 billion sovereign-wealth fund. Unemployment fell to 2.7 percent in February, Europe’s lowest rate, the government said on March 1. Norway, like Switzerland, isn’t a member of the European Union.

Do they not get it that land rents and resource rents are much the same thing? If they'd taxed land rents rather than incomes, that sovereign wealth fund might be twice as big and their economy would be in an even better shape. Taxing land rents acts like a much higher interest rate on land purchases alone, but affects nothing else, so even if they left their central bank rate at zero per cent all that extra liquidity would go into the real economy and not a speculative bubble.

As to dampening the value of your currency, that's easy, you just keep printing it and buying up other currencies until the exchange rate position reverses, and then you convert back into your own currency again, booking a handsome profit in the process.

Ah well.

OECD, IMF on top form

From International Business Journal:

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released a report on Tuesday calling on Germany to raise its property taxes dramatically and reduce taxes on labor. The group, whose membership is made up of 34 of the world's leading market economies, also made similar recommendations for Denmark, Norway and the UK over the past month.

For Germany, the organization recommended tripling its property taxes, while reducing its wage taxes and social security contributions, which currently make up 64 percent of total tax revenue, compared with the OECD average of 52 percent, according to the German language Immobilien Zeitung. Property taxes, meanwhile, amount to only 1 percent of total revenue collected, against an OECD average of 3 percent*. The group also called on Germany to reform its assessment mechanisms, as many properties are valued far below their true market worth...

The International Monetary Fund also made a similar recommendation to Norway this month...

The OECD has been a strong proponent recently of land value taxes, which date back to Adam Smith but were most vigorously promoted by 19th century economist Henry George. He promoted a land value tax—which is assessed on the unimproved value of underlying land, not penalizing intensive development like many property taxes today—as a replacement for all tariffs and levies, however the OECD has settled on a more moderate position, instead advocating a shift in emphasis away from other taxes and towards the land value tax.

Land value taxes can be tricky because of practical difficulties in estimating a plot's value, especially if it is a unique piece of land, or if land parcels like it do not change hands very often. Newer computer-assisted methods of land appraisal have made this job easier, though, and many countries around the world have adopted the tax.

The responses..?

The two groups' advice, however, was rebuffed by Norway's minister of finance, Sigbjorn Johnsen, who said at the press conference on Wednesday: "I have no plans to increase housing taxes."**

Denmark was subject to the same advice last month, with the Nordic Labour Journal reporting that the OECD advised the country to cut income taxes and increase property taxes. The Danish government plans to incorporate some of the OECD's recommendations into its 2012 tax reform, but a property tax hike will not be on the table. As the NLJ writes, "[t]his is because property taxes were ring-fenced in the coalition agreement covering this parliamentary term."

* In the UK, we have a quasi-Land Value Tax on commercial land and buildings (called 'Business Rates') which alone raises over 4% of total government revenues; we also have Council Tax on residential land and buildings, which is a mixture or Poll Tax and a modest property value tax, which raises another 3.5%.

** That'll be no surprise to Kj, I guess.

Copycat killing?

From the BBC:

A polar bear has mauled a 17-year-old British boy to death in the Arctic and left four other UK tourists badly hurt. A party of 80 mainly 16 to 23-year-olds were on a trip with the British Schools Exploring Society near a glacier on the remote Norwegian island of Svalbard...

I wonder whether politicians and journalists will describe this as the action of a mentally disturbed right-wing extremist.

UPDATE; Chuckles refers us to this article, adding "Pierre Gosselin notes an interesting legal wrinkle. Don't let the cows twig on to this one." Actually, AFAIAA, if you were to shoot a cow in England, that counts as damage to the farmer's property so unless you did in self-defence, you would be in (very mild) trouble.

Fun Online Polls: Boring news and The Saturdays

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

I'm now tired of the endless coverage of...

Murdoch phone-hacking - 112 votes
Amy Winehouse dying at 27 - 92 votes
'Tory cuts' - 82 votes
Murderous Norwegian nutcase - 59 votes
US Federal debt-limit - 32 votes
Greek default - 26 votes
More please! I can't get enough of this stuff! - 14 votes
Other, please specify - 12 votes [Curmudgeon and Bastard Panda suggested the 2012 Olympics, which was a good shout]

Number of votes cast = 154, so only the top three items beat the 50% threshold. I'm surprised that more people weren't bored silly with the US Federal debt limit doolally, given the whole thing was politicial posturing from start to finish, although I admit to being surprised that they wrapped it up 36 hours before the self-imposed and completely meaningless deadline; I had expected them to leave it until 36 minutes before the deadline.
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I let last week's Fun Online Poll run on far too long, so this week's is a quickie: "Who is your favourite out of The Saturdays?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Inspire mass murderers? Who, me?

More Monday Moose Madness

From The Guardian:

Last seen several thousand years ago loping through the ancient forests and glens of Scotland, two moose have arrived at a remote reserve in the Highlands as part of plans to reintroduce wild animals now extinct in the UK.

The male and female moose are part of ambitious and controversial proposals by a millionaire landowner to recreate an ancient mountain habitat, complete with wolves, lynx and brown bears roaming freely within a vast fenced-off wildlife reserve north of Inverness.

It has of course never, ever happened that a moose, wolf, lynx or brown bear has jumped or climbed over a fence, or somehow pushed through a break in one.

From Next Nature:

Hans Jørgen Olsen, a 12-year-old Norwegian boy, saved himself and his sister from a moose attack using skills he picked up playing the online role playing game World of Warcraft...

When the moose attacked them, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was ‘taunt’ and provoke the animal so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety... Once Hans was a target, he remembered another skill he had picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ – he feigned death.

The moose lost interest in the inanimate boy and wandered off into the woods. When he was safely alone Hans ran back home to share his tale of video game-inspired survival.

Well, even assuming there's a single word of truth in all that, he could have saved himself a lot of faff by telling his sister to play dead and running off himself.

Spotter's badge, both articles: Derek.

"UK concern over EU plan for new migrant benefit rights"

This particular downside of EU membership, i.e. that Johnny Foreigner is entitled to turn up in the UK demand a council house and sign on the dole, has been a latent problem for a decade (and I've been mumbling about it ever since I did EU law on my LLB course), but is now coming to the fore. Heck knows why the EU want to extend this to EEA members like Iceland and Norway (who are not in the EU).

As regular readers may know, I am thoroughly in favour of 'Universal Benefits', but one caveat has always been that it's for UK-resident British Citizens only; Johnny Foreigner is only entitled once he has lived here legally and supported himself financial for five or ten years [or whatever] and has qualified for a British passport under the usual rules.

How to deal with British citizens who live abroad, especially with regard to old age pensions, is a thorny - but separate - issue.

Swedish people not totally stupid: shock

There's evidence, and then there's evidence. From a CiF article supporting a Swedish law that makes it illegal to pay for sex (but appears to make it legal to receive money for sex):

The evaluation concludes that, since the law came in to force in 1999, the number of women involved in street prostitution has halved, whereas neighbouring countries such as Denmark and Norway have seen a sharp rise; that there is no evidence of an increase in off-street prostitution; and that, despite a significant increase in prostitution in the neighbouring countries during the past 10 years, there is no evidence of a similar increase in Sweden*...

The law has strong public support among the public in Sweden, has led to a significant positive change in attitudes, and acts as a deterrent for potential buyers. A 2008 study found that only 8% of Swedish men had paid for sex, compared with 13.6% before the law came into force**.

* What is not stated is how many of the additional prostitutes working in neighbouring countries are actually from Sweden.

** It is not stated how the study arrived at this conclusion. Did they perhaps ask a sample of Swedish men?