A painted clock is right twice a day

I've just stumbled across this classic in The Guardian from 2018:

Thirty years ago, James Hansen* testified to Congress about the dangers of human-caused climate change. In his testimony, Hansen showed the results of his 1988 study using a climate model to project future global warming under three possible scenarios, ranging from ‘business as usual’ heavy pollution in his Scenario A to ‘draconian emissions cuts’ in Scenario C, with a moderate Scenario B in between.

Changes in the human effects that influence Earth’s global energy imbalance (a.k.a. ‘anthropogenic radiative forcings’) have in reality been closest to Hansen’s Scenario B, but about 20–30% weaker thanks to the success of the Montreal Protocol in phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)**.

Hansen’s climate model projected that under Scenario B, global surface air temperatures would warm about 0.84°C between 1988 and 2017. But with a global energy imbalance 20–30% lower, it would have predicted a global surface warming closer to 0.6–0.7°C by this year. The actual 1988–2017 temperature increase was about 0.6°C. Hansen’s 1988 global climate model was almost spot-on.

Classic lack of self-awareness there. The outcome was somewhere vaguely near his mid-estimate, and presumably miles off his lower- and upper-estimates. That's hardly "spot-on", is it?

** The Montreal Protocol was indeed successful in reducing CFC production, hooray. But the pre-existing CFCs are still working their way through the system and are still causing most or all of the current slight warming, reducing the impact of CO2 down to zero.

* James Hansen is the one who came up with the trick of calculating the effective temperature of Earth assuming two-thirds cloud cover, and then contrasting that (low) temperature with with the actual temperature of land/ocean surface (warmer) and ignoring the actual temperature of clouds (colder). See top of third column on page 1 here. He dresses it up in scientific language to cover his traces.

If you include the actual temperature of clouds when calculating the overall actual temperature, it would bring it down to pretty much the same as the effective temperature, i.e. if he had done an honest comparison, like-with-like, he would have had no evidence for a CO2-caused Greenhouse Effect whatsover.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (487)

As we come up to the big part 500 anniversary episode, here is an article which TBH spotted in The Daily Mail.

It is an absolute classic of the Home-Owner-Ist genre and highly recommended reading. See how many lies, contradictions, self-delusions and diagonal comparisons you can spot.

It would take me days to debunk them all, but this diagonal comparison is worth a mention:

Older people who bought houses years ago, and who are living on a small income, could struggle to pay their tax bill and be forced to sell a cherished family home.

And not every owner-occupier in the South has benefited from huge windfall gains. Young people with huge mortgages on recently purchased tiny flats in the capital would be hammered too, with a chilling effect on their aspirations.

Poor Widows in Mansions (low income, massive unearned gain, no mortgage) and recent purchasers (high income, no unearned gain yet, large mortgage) are at absolute opposite ends of the spectrum! If one deserves sympathy, then the other doesn't. Even if you ignore the extremes, how does that translate to sympathy for the vast majority in the middle (medium income, modest unearned gain, small/cheap mortgage)??

As it happens, these problems melt away on closer inspection:

1. Fairer Share said that clearly there would be a 'defer and pay on death' option for the former.

2. For the latter in a "tiny flat in the capital" which cost them (say) £500,000, this tax would be like a small % increase in mortgage interest rates. Instead of paying 0.2% Council Tax each year (£1,000), they'd be paying 0.48% Proportional Property Tax each year (£2,400), which is only £117 a month more (hardly 'hammered') and no worse than a 0.28% increase in mortgage rates, which purchasers should have budgeted for. The government can ease the strain by just dropping interest rates, although the chances are that interest rates have fallen by 0.28% since they took on a mortgage, so they are no worse off than they originally expected.

If they are in a "tiny flat" then no doubt they 'aspire' to 'move up the property ladder' some time in the next ten years, at which stage they will save at least £15,000 SDLT (we don't need to worry about whether SDLT is borne by buyer or seller - when you trade up you are both). So when they achieve their 'aspiration', they will get all their money back and it will make 'moving up the property ladder' a lot cheaper and easier.

BBC is doing it again

From the BBC:

Will food be more expensive after 1 January?

Under WTO rules, supermarkets and other importers would have to pay substantial tariffs on many foods they bring in from the EU. Meat and dairy products face particularly high tariffs, but many other areas including fruit and vegetables would be also affected.

The BBC can't even be bothered to read its own summary of what the WTO is about:

The WTO was established in 1995, when it took over essentially the same functions from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt), which came into force in 1948.

One of the motivations for creating the Gatt was a wish to dismantle the barriers to trade that had been erected between the two world wars. Most economists regard the establishment of these interwar trade barriers as misguided and say they probably aggravated the Great Depression of the 1930s...

A series of eight "rounds" of negotiations under the Gatt led to the progressive reduction in trade tariffs - taxes which are imposed only on imported products.

The minimum - and indeed the recommended - tariff imposed under WTO "rules" is precisely zero. Given how useless the UK government is, they might well impose tariffs on imported food, but this will be entirely self-inflicted. This will be the UK government waging economic warfare against its own people, and if the EU imposes tariffs on imports from businesses in the UK, that is them waging economic warfare against citizens of EU Member States.

Why I love Skeptical Science

Here's their supposed debunk:

Climate Myth: CO2 lags temperature

"An article in Science magazine illustrated that a rise in carbon dioxide did not precede a rise in temperatures, but actually lagged behind temperature rises by 200 to 1000 years. A rise in carbon dioxide levels could not have caused a rise in temperature if it followed the temperature." (Joe Barton, US House of Representatives (Texas) 1985-2019"

What the science says:

CO2 didn't initiate warming from past ice ages but it did amplify the warming. In fact, about 90% of the global warming followed the CO2 increase.

The article is the usual contortions, they discuss cause and effect in a circular sort of fashion, convincing nobody but their Disciples.

But to really shoot themselves in the foot, they include this chart. Click to enlarge:



That shows a clear correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, doesn't it?

Historically, yes. But actually... NO!

Look at the right and left hand scales. In case it's not obvious, I have cut and pasted the chart into Excel, extended the scales, and extended the blue CO2 line to indicate current CO2 levels.

(The current high CO2 levels are almost certainly due to us burning fossil fuels over the last two centuries, so we can rule out current levels as being caused by higher temperatures, whether or not that was true in the past.)

Handily, this extrapolation also rules out CO2 as a cause of higher temperatures, or else current temperatures would (or will) be about 18 degrees hotter than they are now. In which case humanity would (or will be) pretty much buggered and we might as well throw in the towel. Click to enlarge:


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Sometimes I wonder whether Skeptical Science isn't actually a sophisticated Big Oil-funded counter-propaganda exercise?

Taken at face value, Skeptical Science is an endless series of appallingly cack-handed own goals and unforced errors, all in apparent sincerity.

Proper Alarmists would have left off the left hand scale on the first chart and then included a "close up" chart of CO2 vs temperature for the last century as well, which would also show a very close correlation and quite possibly have fooled a lot of people.



You'd have to look closely to spot that in the first chart 80 ppm = 9 degrees (and 0 degrees is set at 260 ppm); and in the second chart 80 ppm = 0.8 degrees (and 0 degrees is set at 340 ppm), i.e. if second chart is correct, temperatures would be about 0.2 degrees warmer than they are now (which I am sure we can cope with).

I thought that the "science was settled"? So can they not tell us whether temperatures will be 18 degrees higher or 0.2 degrees higher? That's out by a factor of a hundred.

Classic Telegraph lies and propaganda

The Telegraph runs with the wildly misleading headline "New council income tax is best way to plug multi-billion pound gap in social care, says IFS". The Telegraph's motto is, of course, anything but Land Value Tax or reforming Council Tax. The linked IFS page says nothing of the sort, it just mentions it as a possibility.

Digging a bit further, IFS' own press release on the topic, from March this year, pokes gentle fun at their own report:

But implementation would mean overcoming some important challenges

A local income tax would raise significantly more in some areas than others. We estimate that revenues per person from a flat-rate tax across all tax bands would be more than six times higher in many richer parts of west London than in areas like Hull and Leicester.

A system to redistribute revenues between councils would be required in order to avoid this translating into huge disparities in funding for local services.

To sum up, it would end up as a 1% increase in the national rate of income tax. So not a 'local income tax'.

Income tax rates that varied across areas would be more complex for employers, taxpayers, and HMRC to deal with. Up-to-date records on where taxpayers live – which, at present, employers and HMRC don’t always have – would be needed.

Anything but a national tax hike would be administratively unworkable, in other words. Whatever the merits of a tax (and this has none), it has to be at least administratively workable. If it isn't, then that's usually a clue that it's a fundamentally terrible idea in the first place.

Other options for tax devolution come with more significant drawbacks though

Local corporation and value added or sales taxes would be much more difficult to administer and comply with. Moreover, differences in tax rates across councils would be more likely to distort taxpayers’ behaviour than they would for income tax.

Stamp duty land tax is much more unequally distributed – varying by a factor of more than twenty between richer parts of West London and places like Hartlepool and Blackpool. It is also a bad tax that should be abolished rather than entrenched via devolution.

Agreed to all that.

Substantial new powers over council tax, such as the ability to carry out local revaluations, could pose problems for the system of redistributing funding between councils...

Agreed. Drum-roll please...

It would be better to revalue and reform council tax at a national level – something which is overdue.

Agreed.
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In other words, The Telegraph is claiming the IFS said pretty much the diametric opposite of what the IFS actually said.

I don't think that the Alarmists believe the horror scenarios

Most people who have jumped on the Alarmist band-wagon are arguing for things that they would have argued for anyway, which have little to do with reducing CO2 emissions, for example Ed Miliband calls for 'wartime' mobilisation to tackle climate crisis. The militant vegans say we should stop eating meat. The NIMBYs say we should stop fracking. The 'climate scientists' are holding out for more government grants. Authors can get on the best-seller lists with titles like Life After Warming. You're not going to sell many books saying that everything will sort itself out just fine. The solar panel people want subsidies for solar panels. Large landowners want subsidies for windmills. Etcetera.

They also jumble in a lot of common sense stuff that has little to do with CO2 levels in the narrow sense, like reducing air pollution in town centres; plastic waste in the oceans; deforestation etc.

Then there are the Useful Idiots who probably do believe it and really enjoy the attention, but that's a group think thing, to paraphrase Harry Enfield, "I am considerably more Alarmist than you." I'm sure it's the same in any sub-culture, be that followers of a particular football club; fans of a particular pop group; racists, vegans, even Georgists. You want to attend every away game and own every replica kit; own every CD and attend every concert; be more racist than the others; wear plastic shoes; decry corporation tax or higher rate income tax (which are largely taxes on 'rents', so fit in with general Georgist principles IMHO).

If any of these Alarmists seriously believed a fraction of their own propaganda, you'd expect them to buy a log cabin in the wilds of Canada or Scandinavia, become self-sufficient and arm themselves with a shotgun. You wouldn't expect them to be buying beach front villas or cheerfully flying from one international climate change conference to another.

And if they don't really believe it, I don't see why I should.

Fun With Numbers

The two articles are unremarkable, given their source. What amused me is that they are one day apart:

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian 25 June 2019:

Out in the real world, only a quarter of voters want a no-deal Brexit. For more than 18 months YouGov founder Peter Kellner has recorded a majority who now think the referendum result was wrong. For a year there has been an eight-point lead for remain, among all polls.

This has become a remain-majority country. This seminal fact – mostly due to Labour voters changing their minds, plus the older, more pro-Brexit voters dying, and the young, more remain, entering the register – is missing from most public discussion.

The Sun, 26 June 2019:

MORE voters want Britain to quit the EU now than at the time of Brexit referendum, a fresh poll has revealed. 57 per cent said they thought we should still leave the EU in some way, three years after Brits originally voted for Brexit in 2016.

43 per cent want Britain to Remain, and 16 per cent wanted a softer Brexit, the YouGov research for The Times showed. Just 13 per cent wanted us to quit the bloc with Theresa May's dead deal, compared to 28 per cent who stressed Britain should leave with no deal at all.

The common ground appears to be that about a quarter support No Deal, so that's probably true. The rest of either article is probably made up.

Private school bullshit

From The Daily Mail (as The Times is behind paywall):

Private schools save the taxpayer billions of pounds every year, their head teachers claimed yesterday.

The schools not only provide a huge financial benefit to the Exchequer but also wider benefits to society, according to analysis from the Independent Schools Council.

The report found that private school fees have doubled over the last 15 years, with the latest annual rise hitting more than 3 per cent.

Fees go up at compound 7% year because they are largely rent, they charge according to what parents are [daft enough to be willing] to pay*. The fees have nothing to do with real costs, if parents' net disposable income goes up by £x,000, then fees go up by £x,000.

But heads said the savings from taking pupils out of the state education system as well as the added benefits of community facilities, jobs created and tax contributions added up to a £20billion boon for the taxpayer, The Times reported.

£20 billion? That's bollocks. There are 615,000 children at private school, the average cost of/amount spent on one child at a state school place is about £6,000 a year, 615,000 x £6,000 = £3.7 billion a year.

Ah...

This was made up of £3.5 billion saved by freeing up state school places...

OK.

... £4.1 billion in tax paid by the schools and their suppliers

How is that relevant? If people weren't doing work for private schools they'd be doing something else, possibly much more useful to the economy, and still paying the same amount of tax.

... and a further £13.7 billion in the value of the work supported by the schools across the economy.

A completely made up figure, in other words.

I wonder why they opened themselves to ridicule like this, had their headline figure been £5 billion a year, that still sounds like a lot of money to Joe Public (although it isn't, in national accounts terms) and I wouldn't have questioned it.

* I am happy to report that my 18 year-old's grammar school has taken the last term's fees, ever, and I have cancelled the direct debit. That's £150,000 I'll never see again. Two more years of my 16 year-old's school gouging me and I'm done with this bullshit, which was all Mrs W's idea, as you can imagine.
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UPDATE re Bayard's comment: "I do know that now they charge what the market will bear so that they can offer bursaries to pupils from a less wealthy background, which they didn't do in my day. If you wanted money off then, you had to win a scholarship. However, I don't suppose all private schools do this."

I'm not sure what the difference between a 'bursary' and 'scholarship' is, but I was clever/lucky enough to get a free place at what was (and possibly still is) a very good grammar school Up North in the late 1970s. It was blindingly obvious to me even at the tender age of ten or eleven that this was not an act of charity or benevolence on their part, they needed ten per cent or so of smart kids from poorer families to bump up their grade averages; thus making the school more marketable to wealthy parents.

So I got the 'free' (and very good education, no complaints there, apart from Mr Illingworth the maths teacher and Mr Dorian the English teacher who were unalloyed cunts, but even they couldn't drag me down from an A at O-level) and the school could bump up their fees a bit; both parties win! I fulfilled my side of the bargain by getting very good O-level results, much better than the average for my year, and then my idiot parents fucked both sides over by taking me out of school at 15 3/4.

Solar System Temperatures - Not

A nice bit of sleight of hand by NASA Science:

This graphic shows the average temperatures of various destinations in our solar system. (Planets not to scale):



In general, the surface temperatures decreases with increasing distance from the sun.

Venus is an exception because its dense atmosphere acts as a greenhouse and heats the surface to above the melting point of lead, about 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius).

Mercury rotates slowly and has a thin atmosphere, and consequently, the night-side temperature can be more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the day-side temperature shown on the diagram. It can be as cold as -290 degrees Fahrenheit (-179 degrees Celsius) on Mercury at night.

The temperature they show on the graphic for Mercury is the day-side peak temperature, the average is 'only' 167C.

Their explanation why Venus is the exception is completely wrong, which they admit in the footnote:

Temperatures for the gas and ice giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) are taken from a level in the atmosphere equal in pressure to sea level on Earth.

The average temperature given for Earth is also at sea-level pressure, so there are two outliers. There is practically no atmosphere on Mercury (it could be correspondingly hotter if it had one), and Venus' surface has atmospheric pressure 90 times that of earth.

And what is the average temperature of Venus' atmosphere fairly high up, where pressure is equal to sea level pressure on Earth..?

About 65-70C of course, which is exactly what you'd expect if you extrapolate from the others.

They also don't make it explicit that the composition of the atmospheres of all these planets are wildly different, which means that it is pretty irrelevant which gases are in them, CO2 (like Venus), N (like Earth), O2, H2O vapour, whatever.

"How embarrassment may be Putin's downfall"

Sven Hughes in City AM, three days ago:

When serving as a British army reservist within Psychological Operations, we used to refer to these subtle divisions as “fissures”.

These fault lines in enemy audiences could be exploited to create great chasms between the authoritarians and the minions that sustained their power. Quite simply, the minions love the sense of associated status they get from being in cahoots with the authoritarian – they don’t like to be laughed at.

The RT interview seemed to reveal this exact fissure – Putin’s arrogance is starting to make even his most loyal supporters feel social embarrassment.

This could be the one silver lining for the west from the Salisbury incident. Information warfare only works when you have the broadcasters and re-broadcasters in place to disseminate your message. One break in the chain, such as a pair of agents becoming an international laughing stock, and the whole propaganda machine quickly suffers a complete malfunction.

An interesting but very bold prediction, I thought.

To my surprise, from the BBC today:

... the cover-up seems to have backfired as badly as the actual operation. Instead of quaking with fright, many Russians are laughing at their spies instead.

"It's not just teasing, it's mockery. I have friends who couldn't believe our lot could be so rotten," Gennady Gudkov admits. "Now they call me, and they believe."

With jokes and memes flooding social media, some commentators suggest a line has been crossed.

"What seemed morally unacceptable before has become the new norm, it's routine," Andrei Kolesnikov wrote on Gazeta.ru, calling the Salisbury suspects' appearance a "clown show" and their story "obvious, evasive lies".

But he sees another new norm in response.

"Society is laughing at the authorities," the journalist wrote. "State propaganda is becoming genuinely comic and that discredits and weakens those in power."

Prolong The Chaos!

Gina Miller has set up a new site called End The Chaos "to give people the facts on Brexit" or some such slogan.

I dutifully watched the first video,which purports to explain WTO Rules. It states that if the UK chooses to trade under WTO rules it will have to impose a standard level of tariffs on imports and it will have equal and opposite tariffs imposed on exports from it.

Which is of course complete nonsense and lies from start to finish.

Fullfact.org explains it correctly. A country which is a member of the WTO can impose whatever import tariffs it likes, (subject to WTO overall upper limits, which the WTO is gradually reducing).

The actual WTO rule is that a WTO member must apply its tariffs equally to imports from all other countries. There's an exception if a country is also in a regional free trade area, in which case a country is allowed two tiers - a lower tier for imports from members of that FTA and a higher tier for imports from outside. (Quite where bilateral free trade agreements fit into this is anybody's guess).

What tariffs other countries or FTAs choose to impose on exports from the UK is entirely up to the other countries or FTAs.

Tesco boss - wrong facts, wrong logic.

Emailed in by Shiney, from the BBC:

The boss of Britain's biggest supermarket has blamed the collapse of some retailers partly on the expense of business rates.

Dave Lewis, Tesco chief executive, said the charges that firms must pay on their buildings played a "large part" in sending some retailers to the wall... He questioned whether raising business rates was resulting in an "uneven playing field" for some firms...

"Are we allowing it to stay competitive, or are we by stealth lowering corporation tax and increasing business rates to a place which is creating an uneven playing field and forcing people to think about how it is they avoid that cost and find other routes to the market?" he asked.

The Tesco boss said business rates was the biggest tax his company paid, adding up to more than £700m a year.

The last claim is a straight lie. To put that figure in context, it is a smidge more than 1% of Tesco's annual turnover of around £60 billion.

If he could be bothered to look at his own company's accounts for the years when VAT was reduced from 17.5% to 15%, then increased to 17.5% and then to 20%, he would know that Tesco bears about two-thirds of the VAT it pays every year.

He knows better than I do how much of Tesco's turnover is VAT-able items (basically anything except basic food), but sure as heck the VAT born by Tesco is several times as much as the £700 million Business Rates it pays.

He's wrong in logic as well.

- For premises which Tesco rents, the Business Rates is just part of the rent bill. As we know, Business Rates are supposed to be a certain percentage of the total rental value, although some individual valuations are miles out, so by definition, the official rent bill is at least twice as much as the Business Rates Tesco pays on its rented premises.

- The Business Rates on the premises Tesco which *thinks* it owns is just rent on that part of the premises which it doesn't own and never owned.

The point is that Business Rates (which have existed for over four centuries - so it's not like businesses are unaware of them) reduce the selling price of commercial premises by an equal and opposite amount, thus saving the purchaser a chunk of change up front. The government claws back the under-value via Business Rates, so the total cost to an owner-occupier is much the same with or without Business Rates.

(Clearly, the downside with Business Rates is that it is calculated on the total rental value including the occupant's own improvements. Which is absolutely no different to normal land law - if a tenant pays for improvements, legally they belong to the landlord and he can increase the rent accordingly, unless the rental agreement says otherwise.)

Hypothecated taxes etc.

1. For an economist, the idea of hypothecating taxes is a bit of a nonsense. Nonetheless, politicians know that earmarking a tax makes it more acceptable to those paying it.

2. I received a classic KLN via Twitter (so classic that even some socialist LVT supporters have advanced it), along the lines of this:

"If you phase out National Insurance and have Land Value Tax instead, how will the government pay for people's unemployment benefit and old age pensions?"

To which the answer is, don't confuse the tax raising side and the spending side. The government can pay pensions and welfare out of borrowing, National Insurance, income tax, Land Value Tax or anything else.

3. We also know that the Home-Owner-Ist majority hate the idea of Land Value Tax. Why should they pay for something they already own, that sort of thing.

4. It is widely believed that it is widely believed the NHS to be some sort of highly prized national treasure (I have no idea how true this is), but we know that it has to be paid for, cost approx £125 bn per year.

5. Sticking with politics, Value Added Tax is imposed on each Member State by the EU. (There is a also widespread misconception among the chronically innumerate that all our VAT receipts are handed over to the EU, but put that to one side). Brexit is our Golden Opportunity to rid ourselves of this troublesome tax, revenues approx. £120 bn per year, economic damage/deadweight costs at least half as much again.

6. With my Georgist propagandist hat, I have merged 1 to 5 into a nice simple policy proposal:

Now that we are leaving the EU, we can scrap the most damaging and regressive tax, Value Added Tax. To make up the shortfall and pay for the NHS, we can have annual "NHS contributions" of 1.8% on the value of each home, which landlords can add to the rent if they so wish. On average and in the longer run, people will get their money back. It's low cost mass insurance - those who seldom need the NHS should be grateful to have their health.

Pensioners, who cost the NHS on average £5,000 a year each, have nothing to complain about, as in most cases their "NHS contributions" will be far less than the corresponding cost of private health insurance/private health treatment. Some people in higher value homes will be paying over the odds, but they are free to trade down to something better value. 

"How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming"

I have stumbled across the Warmenists' equivalent of the the KLN blog.

I read a few just for fun, and the rebuttals of the rebuttals appear as unconvincing and self-referential as ever. I haven't found the catch all diatribe thrown at me on Facebook a couple of days ago, but it's probably in there somewhere for the Warmenists to cut and paste:

I recommend that you give up basing your opinions on this topic from a perusal of propaganda website funded by fossil fuels interests, which assumes the physical chemistry of the global carbon cycle is a hoax and then engages in complex subterfuge to keep scientifically illiterate suckers conned and supportive of the carbon profits agenda, and pick up a climate physics textbook or take a physics MOOC instead.

Repeating those memes like those of the Wattsupwiththat black propaganda site generates embarassment in the eyes of your friends, and harms their perception of your capacity for astute judgement."

That saves them the bother of addressing my actual point, I suppose.

Epic neo-liberal propaganda fail.

From the BBC:

Could giving property rights to the world's poor unlock trillions?

They are not talking about 'property' in the legal sense, they are using it as shorthand for 'land'.

And no, all that would happen - as the article makes clear - is that banks will tap in to the rental value of land via loans. That's one of the reasons why the Homeys hate council housing - the banks can't earn anything from it.

In 1970s China, for example, where the Maoists weren't the rebels but the government, the very idea that anyone could own anything was seditious, bourgeois thinking. Farmers on collective farms were told by Communist Party officials that they didn't own a thing. Everything belonged to the collective...

This approach worked terribly: if you don't own anything, why bother to look after it... collective ownership of land left farmers in desperate, gnawing poverty.

So, in Xiaogang in 1978, a group of farmers secretly met and agreed a daring plan. Instead of farming as a collective, they would informally divide up the land, and each keep whatever surplus they produced after meeting collective quotas. It was a treasonous agreement in Communist eyes: discovery risked execution.

In fact, they were found out thanks to their conspicuous success: their farms produced more in one year than in the previous five years combined...

The experience in China shows that even informal property rights can be incredibly powerful. If you know your neighbours respect your boundaries, you can feel confident investing time in weeding your vegetable plot, or building a house.

Bullshit. This has bugger all to do with land ownership, it has to do with ownership of the food produced (the results of their initiative and work done, thus truly 'private property').

It is basic human nature. It's like piecework. If you pay an individual $x for each unit he or she produces, most will try and produce more units. In that case, neither the raw materials nor the finished product is ever the property of the workers, but they are paid for the labour element they add (their 'private property').Take a large group of people and tell them they get paid the same, regardless of how many or few the group produces, the ultimate outcome is that little or nothing is produced.

Clearly, with farming, you need some security of tenure (be that long leasehold or freehold) because it is a long term thing, which is why arable farm tenancies tend to be very long. Conversely, sheep farmers are happy to rent pastures very short term, because it's just naturally growing grass. Actually being able to sell the land (i.e. use it as collateral) is irrelevant; or else there would be no tenant farmers.

But in one critical way, it doesn't help me that my neighbours agree that I own my house. If I want a loan - to improve my house, or build a business - lenders need collateral.

Ah right, so the first thing you do if you want to start a business is buy some land, to be able to borrow against it? This is madness. What about the majority of people who don't own land? In real life, you build up a business or find some other way of earning enough money to buy land, just like any other consumption good.

Tenants are quite happy to pay for improvements if they know they have a secure/long term tenancy, I've seen it plenty of times (in Germany or people in social housing). In the UK however, no residential tenant in his right mind will pay for improvement because a
a) he could be kicked out within six months and
b) the improvements automatically belong to the building i.e. the landlord, so
c) the landlord can increase your rent to make you pay for the improvements you made yourself.

And land or buildings make particularly good collateral because they tend to increase in value, and it's hard to hide them from creditors. But the lender needs to be confident it could take the house away from me if I don't repay the loan. So, I need to prove that the house really is mine. That requires an invisible web of information that the legal system and the banking system can use.

For Hernando de Soto, this invisible web is the difference between my house being an asset - something useful that I own - and being capital - an asset recognised by the financial system... 

But how do assets become capital? How does the invisible web get woven? It needs a government. Enforcing property rights is one of the few things pretty much everyone on the political spectrum agrees a government should do, except perhaps the Maoists.

Here we get to the neo-liberal nub of the matter, dressing up land as 'capital'.

De Soto couldn't actually give a shit about third world farmers, he's a shill for the banks (which is why the Cato Institute give him such a glowing write-up). Loans and interest can only be repaid out of the future income/profit from that land anyway.

Farmers can afford to buy most of the stuff they need every year out of their savings from the previous year (by definition) and if they need something bigger, like a tractor, there is such a thing as hire purchase.

Borrowing any more than that, purely backed by the value of land is a recipe for disaster for any kind of economy, agricultural or developed capitalist.

He also inadvertently makes the Georgist point that 'land ownership' and 'government' are more or less synonymous. It is only governments who can really say who owns land (until and unless they are overthrown or the country is invaded).

Utter, utter twats.

Read it and weep

From The Daily Mail:

Last orders for the traditional boozer? A third of British pubs have now closed since the 1970s thanks to rising business rates and beer taxes...

Yes, it is very sad, but it was the smoking ban wot dunnit, as a pub landlord tries to explain in the comments (and is roundly shouted down).

It's not the beer duty (42p per pint) it is the VAT - one-sixth of the average price of pint £3.60 is 60p. That's more than the beer duty FFS. If a pint of canned in the supermarket costs £1, the beer duty is also 42p but the VAT is only 17p. That's what makes the difference.

It's not the business rates either, here's some total fuckwittery from The Daily Star:

A massive 19% rise in business rates is set to hit 17,000 pubs across the UK – forcing them to whack a 5p price rise on each beer.

A pub can't pass on a property tax or rent anyway but what are the numbers..?

From The British Beer & Pub Association:

Pubs and bars pay 2.8 per cent of total business rates, yet account for just 0.5 per cent of total business turnover.

OK, that means about £800 million in Business Rates each year. But what's their total turnover..? The Morning Advertiser says it's £22 billion.

So the 0.5% is complete shite, multiply £22 billion by 200 and that means UK "total business turnover" is £4.4 trillion, two or three times total GDP.

Divide £800 million rates by £22 billion turnover, that's 3.6% of turnover, about 13p per pint. A quarter of the VAT and one third of the beer duty. Pretty much naff all in other words.

If Rates bills increase by 19% (no reason to assume this is true, but let's run with it), that means 2.5p more per pint, not 5p. But nice try.

As ever, you wonder, are these people corrupt or stupid? At least Tim Martin bangs on about VAT and troubles himself less with beer duty and Business Rates.

"Pay outpaces house prices in many areas". Or not, as the case may be

From the BBC:

More than half of Britain has seen wages rise faster than house prices in the last 10 years, research by a mortgage lender has suggested...

"While some northern cities, such as Manchester, are less affordable than they were in 2007, in much of the north of England, Scotland and Wales, the gap between earnings and house prices is around a third of the average for London..."

In Scotland, wages rose faster - with the current house price five times the size of typical average earnings in Scotland, compared with 6.2 times in 2007. The same was true in Wales where the ratio has changed from 6.9 times earnings in 2007 to 5.7 times now.

This looks like good news for most of the country if you look at it this way round. Actually it's nothing of the sort.

You have to understand the Law(s) of Rent. The amount that people are prepared to pay in rent is their net wages minus the basic cost of living. The basic cost of living is the same everywhere in the country, but (average) wages differ markedly. The amount people are prepared to pay in mortgage repayments is broadly similar to local rents; you just multiply the rent by thirty-two (the inverse of just under 3% interest rates).

Let's take a baseline of net wages = £20,000, basic cost of living = £15,000, so rent is £5,000. Houses cost 32 x £5,000 = £160,000 = a price-earnings ratio of 8, which the article says is typical for England.

In London (upper extreme) average net wages are £35,000, living costs are the same so rent is £20,000. Times that by 32, houses cost £640,000, a ratio of 18 (like it says in the article).

That's why Scotland and Wales are more 'affordable'. Stick net wages of £17,800 for Scotland into the formula and hey presto, the ratio comes out at 5.0.

Further, the main reason why Scotland and Wales have become more 'affordable' since 2007 is because the basic cost of living has increased faster than net wages in those areas, so the amount going to rent has also fallen, ditto house prices and hence the ratio. That's not good news, it's bad news (especially for landlords, but that's another topic).

Idiotic attention seeking of the week

From The Evening Standard:

With London’s population set to explode over the next decade, the Evening Standard and agri-science firm Syngenta are investigating the potential impact — and how innovation in farming could help reduce it.

Extra farmland more than one and a half times the size of London will have to be cultivated to grow the food needed for the capital’s booming population by 2031, according to new analysis... On current trends, over the next quarter of a century an area of fields three times the size of Camden will have to be cultivated with wheat. Land the size of Lewisham will be required for the extra potatoes consumed by Londoners, the research reveals.

Gary Mills-Thomas, Syngenta’s UK and Ireland head, said: “We are extremely excited about this unique opportunity to raise awareness on the facts and figures behind food production and the vital role played by modern farming in ensuring the required food supplies in our societies. Also this event is giving us the opportunity to listen and take on board the opinions and concerns of the general public on these matters.

“At Syngenta we believe that an open and constructive relationship with society will strengthen our commitment to continuously invest in research and innovation in order to provide farmers with advanced solutions for a sustainable quality food production.”

The argument was challenged by Peter Melchett, policy director at the Soil Association, who said: “What Syngenta fails to mention is that we are required by UK law to cut greenhouse emissions from food and farming by 80 per cent by 2050. Scientists agree that the only way we can achieve this, and feed everyone a healthy diet by 2050, is to adopt agro-ecological farming systems such as organic, review diets, and do without most or all manufactured fertilisers."

Do either of them really expect anybody to take them seriously?

It is people how eat food, and they eat much the same amount of food wherever they live. If more people live in London then there will be fewer people living elsewhere, total amount of food consumed unchanged, it is a complete non-problem.

So Syngenta are just lobbying for permission to peddle their wares, as is the Soil Association, who appear to want to impose a system which will produce less food. Hooray for looking after the environment and so on, but if their way really were more productive, then farmers would be doing it anyway.

Nobody move or the fry-up gets it!

The Guardian makes itself look stupid.

Not sure even George Osborne's Evening Standard would stoop that low.

Nobody move or the cancer patients get it!

From the front page of today's Evening Standard:

Theresa May today faced a Tory rebellion and a stark warning that “thousands” of cancer patients face delays to their treatment as a direct result of Britain’s decision to quit the European nuclear body Euratom.

The agency, which governs the movement of radioactive material around Europe, is not formally part of the EU but is under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice — leading to the Government’s decision to pull out as part of the Brexit process.