“Progressive Alliance”

I keep hearing about the “Progressive Alliance”, and it never fails to irritate me. In the UK “progressive” is taken to mean “Everyone except the Tories and UKIP¹”. Progressivism is defined (in wikipedia) as:

...a political attitude favouring or advocating changes or reform through governmental action. Progressivism is often viewed in opposition to conservative or reactionary ideologies.

This seems to me a definition sufficiently broad as to be largely useless, Tories could claim the progressive mantle through any legislation they care to enact and liberals could lose it through their opposition to authoritarian measures such as the ID card scheme, and for economic liberalisation.

The problem I’m having here is that Labour only start getting interested in “progressive alliances” when they’ve lost an election, whilst in power they ignore other progressive parties. Labour will only form a “progressive alliance” if they are electorally forced to do so, and otherwise seek Liberal Democrat annihilation.

Since the General Election there’s been a great deal of effort spent by Labour in trying to split the party into Good Liberal Democrats (Social Democrats, who they wish to absorb) and Bad Liberal Democrats (Orange Bookers, who they think the Tories should absorb). The “progressive alliance” is part of this - we should not be playing to this narrative. The truth is that Labour and Tory only get into government when they’ve convinced the electorate that they are close enough to the Liberal Democrat centre ground so as not to be scary.

Ed Miliband can frequently be found “reaching out” to Liberal Democrats but this reaching out is solely about recruitment to the Labour Party and the planned extinction of the Liberal Democrats. I’m a pluralist, as such I value the existence of other political parties – but I see little sign of this respect for the existence of others in the Labour Party.

In opposition their key strategy has been to attack the Liberal Democrats and their policies, rather than the Tories, who they claim lead the Coalition. Labour consistently opposed the passing of the AV referendum bill. Indeed they spent more energy opposing the AV referendum bill than any other government measure². Their campaign for the Yes vote was fatally flawed in that it was largely seen as a platform to attack Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats: every outing of “Labour Yes” involved a ritual statement of how venial the Liberal Democrats were and, if Ed Miliband was involved, a discussion as to why he would not share a platform with Nick Clegg. It looks like Labour are summing themselves up to oppose Lords’ reform as well – both this, and the AV campaign, are “progressive” goals.

There are a number of Liberal Democrats who are keen on the “progressive alliance”, and since I’m an open-minded sort of chap I’m assuming they’re not deranged, but can you tell me – why are you engaged in this? I don’t rule out discussions between our parties but those engaged in such discussion need to be clear what the benefit to us is, because at the moment all we’re getting is another forum in which Labour can abuse us and attempt to divide us³.

Footnotes

1. Technically I should probably put the BNP in here but they’re not a serious political party.
2. At this point Labour normally complain that the bill also contained “gerrymandering” measures regarding the work of the Boundary Commission. However, the current system gives them a 90 seat advantage for parity of votes with the Tories, so it’s substantially “gerrymandered” in Labours favour already. The chances are that boundary fiddling will do little to address this and really the only solution to such problems is to go for some form of proportional representation, neither of the two main parties has the honesty to recognise this.
3. None of this is to say that the Tories are not trying to destroy us as well!

Far, far away

This week I have journeyed into the heart of darkness.

Actually it was my company's IT outsourcing system. I work for a very big company: it has about 150,000 employees spread across the world. I work in north west England amongst other things I look after a little unit which uses a particular piece of bespoke software, the unit involves seven people in an office a couple of hundred metres from where I sit at work. The tale of our new bespoke software is long and tortuous and I won't go into it here but to relate my adventures in getting the test version of the software copied onto the live system today.

The servers on which this software resides are located in North Wales (15 miles away) and a spot down the road about 8 miles away. The outsourcing of our IT services means that the manager for this process is located in the Netherlands, and the person actually doing the process, Supriya, is in India. I can tell she is in India because she has an Indian phone number. Her e-mail signature says her "office base" is in North Wales, it must be a bit inconvenient having your "office base" in North Wales, a location I suspect Supriya has never visited, and a phone in India. Do my company think I am some sort of dribbling BNP little Englander who would dissolve in rage if I thought I was dealing with someone in India? I regularly work with people from China, France and even the US, trying to obfuscate where someone works is frankly patronising and offensive - particularly if you do it so ineptly.

I've spoken to Supriya before - she's a friendly and helpful lass but she doesn't half ask some odd questions: "Could I confirm that Ireland was not going to be impacted by the change I had requested?". "Had I notified NL service mfgpro(users)?" Just to be clear: I have no idea how Ireland might be affected or who the "NL service mfgpro(users)" are, these aren't recognised code words for me. I clearly provided the right answer in these cases because I was informed that both Ireland and the Benelux countries had given their approval. But the fear arises in my mind: I've not cleared things with the Austro-Hungarian Empire - could I have inadvertently started World War III? This is yet to be determined.

The process doesn't go entirely smoothly, largely because Supriya is too polite to tell me that the procedure she'd been asked to carry out throws up some errors. I can't help because I'm not given permissions to see the servers where the software resides, Supriya has a difficult time because she has no absolutely idea what the software does. However, with the help of  James, who wrote the software, based in Manchester but whose boss is in Sunderland we do manage to get everything sorted out by the end of the day (or about 10pm in Supriya's time zone).

This is not an isolated incident: receipts for my travel claims are sent to Iron Mountain (a company just outside Birmingham) where they are converted to electronic form before being sent to Manila (I can't help thinking this may have been due to a misunderstanding involving envelopes) and paid via India. In a fit of tidiness I once decided to get a stash of 6 computers removed from a desk in my office: they'd been left by a sequence of unnamed, and now forgotten contractors. I received endless fractious e-mails from a centre in Bulgaria, belonging to the leasing company, demanding to know who all these computers belonged to, or why I appeared to be in possession of 6 computers.

The old way of doing things involved a prescriptive system of doing stuff where you filled in a form and it went through a process and something got done. But actually it didn't, actually you learnt who was going to do what you wanted, went over for a little chat whereby you found out what incantation you needed to inject into the system in order to get your job squared with the system whilst they got on and did the job. Outsourcing frequently loses this human contact, in fact it purposefully eliminates it.

No Merger!

Once again, rattling around the wires is the idea that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties should merge. The origins of these mutterings are largely Conservative, for example, Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph, or René Kinzett on ThinkPolitics. I’d like to put a Liberal Democrat view as to why this is utterly implausible.

A key motivating factor for this talk is the low performance of the LibDems in opinion polls at the moment. However, there are two issues here:

Firstly, members of both Labour and Conservative parties see polls in a different light to LibDems. In part because the other parties are programmed to believe in a steady pendulum swing which sees power passing to and fro between them with a period of years. Therefore for them regaining power is largely a matter of waiting for the pendulum to swing. The LibDems do not lie on the pendulum swing, they do not have this expectation. Aside from the national coalition during the Second World War, the Liberal forbearers to the current party have not been in office since 1918. You can see this in action in my immediate post-election blog post, which is characterised by gloomy resignation at another disappointing general election. Broadly the reaction of a long term LibDem to a general election is crashing disappointment. So facing so-called “electoral annihilation” at a future general election the LibDem response is “no change there then”.

Secondly, as my previous post alludes: the opinion polls are not a great predictor of electoral success for the LibDems. Just to give an example: in the 1983 election the SDP-Liberal Alliance got 25.4% of the vote and 23 seats, in the 2010 election the LibDems got 23% of the vote and got 57 seats. This is only a very small rise in the % of the vote since the 2005 election (just 1%) and a drop in the number of parliamentary seats (5 seats). If you want to see some more numbers, go have a look at the wikipedia list of UK elections.

At the heart of this believe that there should be a merger seems to be a problem with counting, one alluded to in the title of this blog; it seems to be in the UK that there is a serious problem with counting parties beyond two. It’s seems to go “Labour, Conservative,……… nope can’t cope!”. This is in no doubt partly driven by the first-past-the-past electoral system which encourages the merger of parties into two blocks (know as Duverger’s Law).

It’s also a mistake to see a major schism forming between a party leadership in government and the rank-and-file membership. A naive view is that the leadership have “gone Tory” at the head of what is essentially a left-leaning organisation. However, I understand this more in terms of the way I see the large company I work in operating. At some level within the company there are discussions about the way forward for the company should be, and at points in time a decision is made as to what the way forward actually will be. At this point everybody gets on and does it, at higher levels the company appears unified – the message from senior management is consistent, at my level I have the opportunity to gripe about stuff but ultimately I have to get on and help execute the plan. What we see in government is, I argue the same, LibDem ministers have argued for their beliefs in coming to a plan: where they have prevailed they support the agreed plan but where they don’t agree they still work to enact the agreed plan – sulking, griping and refusing to support where you did not prevail is not an option.

The other thing to consider is how the LibDem party works: even in the event of a proposed merger by the leadership of the party the likely response of the membership would be a resounding “no” and in the LibDems that means something. And just to be clear on my own position: if there was a successful proposal to merge with either the Labour or Tory parties I’d be off to form the Continuity Liberal Democrats – and I wouldn’t be alone! As Simon Cooke (Tory) accurately points out, any LibDem is free to leave the party and join either the Conservatives or Labour, or the Greens (or no party at all). In the deeply untribal view of this Liberal Democrat they should feel free to do so (and positively encouraged if that’s what they want). But don’t expect to see this happen in any great numbers, at the very least Nick Clegg and David Laws have had serious offers from the Tories to join them in the pre-2010 election past but chose to stay in the electoral unsuccessful LibDems. I’ve no doubt that similar applies to offers from Labour during the 1997-2010 governments.

Finally there is a question of political positioning, ideology if you like. It seems to me that the LibDems are precisely where they should be: on the centre ground and they shouldn’t be thinking of moving from there. Labour and Conservatives have come to power when they have decided to be more like us. You can still find our manifesto on the Liberal Democrat website, largely these are the things I still believe in and these are the things I will fight for, of the Labour manifesto I find no sign on their website.

Viva the Continuity Liberal Democrats!

This makes me angry

This makes me angry:

Instead nice, gentle Nick Clegg has secured the position of Britain’s most hated man. He has been burnt in effigy by student rioters. Police have told him that he must no longer cycle to work for fear of physical attack. Excrement has been shoved through the letter box of his Sheffield constituency home, from which his family may now have to move for safety reasons.

Peter Oborne in the Telegraph

I can hear the Labour apologists winding themselves up for response already: "Was his family in residence when the shit was pushed through the letter box? Have you got a crime number for that? It's terrible, but you know he betrayed the people who trusted in him. Moving out of the home is just theatrical." The president of the National Union of Students, Aaron Porter, Labour party member, decries the "betrayal", the breaking of a pledge. Anyone like odds on how likely it was that he voted for the Liberal Democrats? Let's face it: he didn't, he didn't vote for the party that he's excoriating for not implementing the policy he didn't vote for, the only party to oppose tuition fees. All those Labour folk, talking of the "betrayal", they didn't vote against tuition fees either. "Satirical" they say of David Mitchell advocating pissing through Nick Clegg's letterbox , it isn't satirical if someone's actually done it.

As the riots progress an army of armchair revolutionaries bemoan the violence of the police, as buildings are smashed up. "The police should simply keep the protesters moving on, so they don't cause any trouble". "The police are stupid", they say, "I could manage a large crowd of protesters, some intent on violence, much better than them. That's why I'm sitting here tweeting about it." "The police van was bait, because every right-thinking person when they see an unattended police van thinks: "Fuck me, I better smash the crap out of that"."

I used to think it was the Tories who felt power was their divine right but now I know it's Labour. Len McCluskey, leader of Unite, a Labour affiliated union calls for demos to topple the government, speaking approvingly of the poll tax riots. John McDonnell, Labour MP, says:

I know the Daily Mail will report me again as inciting riots yet again. Well, maybe that is what we are doing.

Beaten in an election, they use weasel words to get people out on the street smashing stuff up. "These cuts aren't what people voted for, they voted, but they didn't vote for this. They really meant to vote for Labour, the party who repeatedly reneged on promises to introduce fairer voting. The party who said they were going to reduce the deficit by making cuts, but now only have a blank piece of paper; who can magically make the deficit painlessly go away."

For the first time in 60 years Liberal Democrats are in government, they are in government at a time when the country faces the largest budget deficit it has had in many decades, it is a crap time to be in government. They are taking hard decisions that Labour would not have the guts to take. For some this is a "betrayal", they'll happily contribute to an atmosphere that means a family gets shit pushed through the letterbox of their home, and a columnist in a respected paper can applaud it.

But more than ever before I am proud to say "I agree with Nick".

Poor attendance record in the House of Lords?

I know my readers love a chart, and today I found some data I thought was begging for a good graphing. It’s the attendance figures for the House of Lords found in a report entitled “Members Leaving the House” – found at the bottom of this article. The motivation for the report is to explore the idea of retirement for peers, something some peers are seeking regardless of any other changes taking place. A secondary motivation is that there is wider reform of the House of Lords proposed, and one of the issues is that the new House is envisaged, ultimately to have substantially fewer members – this type of discussion informs how that transition might be achieved.

The report contains a set of tables for the last five years indicating the fraction of sessions which peers attended broken down into groups:

• Attended 75% or more sessions
• 50% to 74%
• 25% to 49%
• 10% to 24%
• Attended at least once but less than 10%
• Zero attendance

This is what the data looks like:

To give some idea of scale: across the period shown here the total number of peers decreased from 777 to 741, the average number of sessions in a year was 140, this latter figure means that a peer attending “less than 10% of sessions” was attending less than twice. It compares with the number of working days in the year of approximately 240 (48*5 day weeks). Nearly 20% of peers attend a session in the House of Lords only once or twice a year.

Being a member of the House of Lords isn’t a proper job, it does not attract a salary, although peers may claim a subsistence and office allowance of up to £26,000 per year. In this sense we should not anticipate the levels of attendance achieved by those working “normally”. Some of the peers will be paid as government or opposition working peers. However, peers do have a direct effect on the laws the country makes and turning up twice a year (which is all 20% of them achieve) does suggest a fairly low degree of interest – if I did something twice a year I wouldn’t even consider it a hobby, I go to the dentist more often!

Why the other ways don’t work

In my last blog post I calculated how to raise money for various things (getting rid of tuition fees, avoiding any benefit reductions and so forth) using income tax; originally the more ranty bit to be found in this post was included, but it was getting a bit long so I separated analysis and rant.

Since the election there’s been a great deal of discussion of cuts, largely this has been framed in terms of a cut to X being apocalyptic where X is some area supported by its interest group. There has been rather less focus on what should happen in place of such cuts, proposing an alternative area for increased cuts has generally been tried: “waste, foreigners in the form of international development, benefit scroungers, Trident“ are ever popular – each of these contributes about £1bn or so per annum in spending – the gap we’re trying to match is about £80bn per annum. There have been some proposals for increased taxes to be paid by “someone else”, an increase in VAT met with considerable opposition (VAT is the third biggest element of tax – the change would raise about £13bn per annum), as was an attempt to cut child benefit for higher rate tax payers, raising about £2.5billion per annum.

The favoured targets for increased taxes are “the rich” and “tax avoidance”. “The rich” are normally defined as “richer than me and the people I know”, which is a poor definition. Tax avoidance, according to an HMRC report under the last government the size of the tax gap – the sum of avoidance (legal) and tax evasion (illegal) was around £40bn per annum. This is disputed with Tax Research UK giving a figure three times larger at £120bn. It’s difficult to see exactly how they manage such a high estimate – it’s seems to be based around the size of the “shadow economy” – things like illegal working. Regardless of this actually collecting the money involved in the tax gap would appear to be difficult: as announced by Danny Alexander there’s a hope that spending £200million per year will result in a tax recovery of £7bn per year. There’s an implicit assumption in tax avoidance that again it’s “the rich” who are responsible but it seem clear from reading the HMRC document that successfully addressing the tax gap would probably impact quite broadly. For example, buying wine in Calais is a tax avoidance; as is paying the builder, decorator and so forth in cash; as is purchasing items in Hong Kong via ebay. The company I work for has changed the way it pays some of my pension contributions to reduce the tax paid – presumably this would count as a tax avoidance too.

Vodafone is in the news at the moment for a £6bn tax avoidance. The £6bn figure is as calculated by Private Eye and is described by HMRC as “an urban myth”; Vodafone appears to have made provision of £2.2bn to address this issue and ultimately paid £1.25bn. It’s worth pointing out that the £6bn figure, accrued over 10 years is typically compared by protestors with a *yearly* benefit cut of £7bn. This sort of presentation leads me to believe that the proposer is somewhere on the innumerate-dishonest scale and discount whatever else they are saying. Taking the Private Eye “high” estimate this is £600million per year, taking the difference between the amount actually paid and the “low” estimate it amounts to £100million per year. Vodafone appears to have paid around £1bn tax on profit in 2009 amounting to a rate of 25% in that year, so it is not true that they pay “no tax”. It’s also worth noting that Vodafone appear to have the legal upper hand in the situation, given a judgement in the European Court of Justice.

At one time Trident or its replacement were cited as a source of ready cash – again the presented cost of up to £100bn is for the entire lifetime of the system of up to fifty years or so i.e. between £1bn and £2bn a year, regardless of this the decision on Trident has been pushed into the future (i.e. beyond the next election). A more likely figure for the Trident replacement is £20bn, or at most £34bn. I’ve said previously that I consider Trident to be Cold War willy-waving but scrapping it is not a big impact – particularly if there is any sort of replacement.

A useful rule of thumb for all these situations seems to be:

1. Check that tax gain and spending are being compared on the same time period.
2. Divide quoted tax gain by at least three since that will get you back to a more generally accepted figure.

The latest wheeze is chasing George Osborne for a £1.6million tax bill. Referring to our list above, (1) is met admirably this bill would be payable once, on the death of his father. Experience suggests the figure of £1.6million is fanciful. David Mitchell puts this so much better than me here in the Observer. It’s not that I am in favour of tax avoidance I just see efforts to address the problem by individual harassment as pointless. What is needed, as Mitchell points out, are changes in the law so that tax avoidance becomes tax evasion and is then illegal. It’s ridiculous to expect people to pay tax that they don’t legally have to – it’s not what the great majority of the population do – why expect companies and the rich to do any different?

I’ve yet to see any figures on the “cut avoidance through growth scheme”, a priori I’m dubious since the ability of government to influence growth seems marginal and any scheme would need to stretch out beyond the 10 years that even Labour were planning to cut the deficit in by which time using my state-of-the-art recession prediction algorithm we will have experienced another recession, and another addition to the deficit.

I’m uncomfortable with the idea that we should demand services (no tuition fees, protected benefits) but rather than seeking a way to contribute to paying for these services personally try to push the payment for them onto a small fraction of the population. If you demand more money for X but don’t expect to pay any more for it then frankly I don’t think you’re committed to the idea.

Children and numbers

One of this mornings news items is on government plans to limit benefit to a family to the average wage, apparently regardless of the size of the family. This seems to be built around the idea that there are families out there with vast numbers of children who are milking the system to the cost of the rest of us. We can check this idea with numbers. The graph below shows the number of claimants broken down by number of children in the household, the final category is for families containing 8 or more children.

The heights of the columns are a lower bound on the fraction of benefit going to each group, an upper bound would be to multiply each column by the number of children but this would be an over-estimate since benefits don’t increase linearly with number of children. There are a little under 1000 families with 8 children or more. 90% of claimant families have less than four children.
These data tell us nothing about the circumstances of each of the families represented which will include the loss of parents, illness, job loss and all the other small disasters which can befall a family.
The data shown here are from Department of Work and Pensions via The Spectator (here).

Regulation and reward

This post is stimulated by an exchange on twitter as to why we are bothered about bankers being paid stacks, whilst seemingly less worried about football players and entertainers being paid similar amounts. This post fails to address that specific question.

Banks are rich because they handle money and take a little charge at each transaction, also they rent out money which attracts few overheads. Footballers and entertainers are rich because wealthy organisations realise that to sell a football team or a film requires a star. Doctors and lawyers are rich because they have rare skills that people are willing to pay well for, the costs of poor legal advice or poor medical advice are loss of wealth or life, respectively, and their lack becomes rapidly obvious.

Pay does not measure a person’s value. Pay measures how much money an employer believes an employee is worth to them, if the employer is also the employee this judgement may be flawed. In some cases this is easy to determine, in other cases it is not. If I look at the company I work in, higher salary goes with greater responsibility for people and greater budgets. In the case of patent attorneys, who are relatively well paid, then it goes with a marketable skill. Scientists doing science are paid acceptably, the company is clear that they are not paid more because there are not local jobs for scientists which pay better.

We’ve recently gone through repeated rounds of “How much are  you paid compared to the Prime Minister”, exclusively directed at other public sector workers. This is ridiculous. It’s usually inaccurate as well: the typical figure quoted for the Prime Ministers salary is £142,500; however he will also receive an MP’s salary of £65,738. In addition to this he has use of an apartment in central London at Number 10 and a country house, Chequers. As Tony Blair has demonstrated, the Prime Minister can also expect substantial financial rewards on leaving the position, through speaking fees, directorships and so forth that are based largely on their position of former prime minister (see here and here). The Prime Minister is also entitled to receive half of his salary as pension after he has left office, although Gordon Brown waived this payment.

People make the money they can under the situations they find themselves. I’m sure we’ll all argue that that’s not we’d do personally but let’s assume that we’re all special. Do you own up if you’re under-charged or you receive more change than you deserve or if the electrician offers you a lower price for cash? Viewed in this light the MP’s expenses scandal is nothing unexceptional. Looking at what they were up to I can easily imagine that we’d find exactly the same distribution of abuses if the expenses scheme where I work were regulated in the same way. A whole bunch of people would claim to the limit in an entirely “legal” way; a few would claim less through incompetence in milking the system and a few would act in ways that were basically fraudulent.

What’s the message of this post?

In terms of regulation: don’t rely on the goodwill of man to obtain a favourable societal outcome. Although that might work for some chunk of the population it won’t for a substantial fraction and so the scheme will fail.

God and the scientist

Recently I observed that Stephen Hawking* had introduced God into his book “The Grand Design” as a way of gaining sales. Last weeks story on Hawking and God irritated me for two reasons. Firstly, the idea that a new idea that Stephen Hawking has introduced in his forthcoming book either proves or disproves the existence of God is fatuous nonsense. Secondly, revealing some intellectual snobbery on my part, this is a popular science book – such an important idea would have been published in peer-reviewed literature first – most likely Nature! On the first point Mary Warnock covers the philosophical side of this well in a short article in The Observer this week, in summary: proof / not proof of the existence of God is a hoary old chestnut.

As an atheist and scientist, I’m quite clear that my demand for evidence for the existence of God is what makes me an atheist. You don’t need evidence if you have faith. Although many scientists are atheists, this is by no means a pre-requisite. Many scientists in the past have been professed strong religious beliefs, no doubt in large part because of the spirit of the time they lived in. It’s only for particular variants of theism and particular topics that the two things are in direct collision: Creationism and the study of evolutionary biology are not happy bedfellows. The degree of cognitive dissonance required to accommodate a religious view of the world and a scientific view is really rather minor. Many scientists in the past have seen their scientific work as revealing the mechanism that God has created.

A further element to this is the degree to which modern cosmology requires a degree of faith. As an experimental soft condensed matter physicist the world of cosmologists is very far away. The things I study are essentially testable in the lab, you can put your hands on them, prod and poke them. Modern cosmology has a large degree of internal logical consistency and mathematical beauty, but it has close to zero contact with observations. At times it feels like any experimental test is wilfully pushed into timescales, or size scales that are simply impossible to observe (and not just impossible in practice, but impossible in principle). This is not to say they are wrong, but simply that their correctness must be taken on faith.

*Pointless name dropping/anecdotage: I had dinner with Stephen Hawking at Gonville and Caius College, he’s not very dynamic.

“Intimidating equations”

Taking lessons from Goldacregate, I’ve removed all the rant and sarcasm from this post.
In this article in today’s Observer, we’re advised that this:
P^A = gU_G + min(k - g, (1 - g)(1 - r))
is an “intimidating" equation”. Only if we’re easily scared! It relates the profit gained from dynamically priced airline tickets to some variables. This equation really is a very straightforward it says:
“profit equals two things multiplied together plus the smallest of two other things”
Using a Greek letter (capital pi) with a superscript following is a bit of showmanship, P would have done perfectly well in this instance. You can read the paper from which it is drawn here. It is written in the style of a paper in pure mathematics, which might explain the intimidation of the journalists in question.
I wrote a little bit about maths a while back: maths is the language of much of the science I do, but its a convenient tool – it’s not an end in itself. The seed of “Goldacregate” was a query by a journalist as to how to read out an equation, the thing is that practitioners rarely speak equations out loud: they scribble them on the nearest available surface (often illegibly, and incorrectly) or fight endless battles with machines to get them into electronic documents. Furthermore there is a long and dishonourable history of public relations companies using essentially meaningless equations to promote products and services.
For non-users of equations they are simply a cloak, a cloud of chaff thrown up to hide the truth beneath. For users, they are a compact and exact way of writing down the truth.
The next time you see an equation, don’t be scared beneath it there is something simple which can be said.
Unexpurgated version: Ah, bless, the economists are playing at being scientists by using an equation and the journalists have got the vapours at the impossible complexity of it all. Nasty equation: please, don’t hurt me.

Journalists unable to cope with the conditional?

A short rant on the newspapers today. Is there something in the style guides that says either something must happen or something is not happening? I take as an example, this piece in the Observer:

In its first few months in government, the coalition has delivered one major housing reform after another – from plans to cut down on "garden-grabbing" to crackdowns on housing benefit and the unexpected announcement by the prime minister that council tenants would no longer be guaranteed a right to lifetime occupancy.

This (emphasised) statement is simply not correct. Or it’s only correct if you believe it’s an accurate reflection of this reply the prime minister made to a question at a PM Direct event:

At the moment we have a system very much where, if you get a council house or an affordable house, it is yours forever and in some cases people actually hand them down to their children. And actually it ought to be about need. Your need has got greater ... and yet there isn't really the opportunity to move."

"There is a question mark about whether, in future, should we be asking, actually, when you are given a council home, is it for a fixed period, because maybe in five or 10 years you will be doing a different job and be better paid and you won't need that home, you will be able to go into the private sector....

"So I think a more flexible system - that not everyone will support and will lead to quite a big argument... looking at a more flexible system, I think makes sense.

I’m a simple scientist not trained in the intricacies of the English language (particularly the apostrophe), but even I can tell the difference between asking a question and making a definite statement of policy. It seems important to me that events should be reported accurately and not simply re-worded to suit your prejudices. The article I quoted here is actually quite good, and interesting, but given this example of a deviation between what was said and what was written, how can I trust the rest of it?

*Preparation for this blog post hindered by @HappyMouffetard’s Tourette’s Syndrome breaking out whenever she hears the voice of David Cameron.

An Englishman's Home is his Castle

Corfe Castle*

Back to rant for the blog post, this time on housing.

A house is like a millstone around your neck, once you're in it the reluctance to do anything that might cause you to move out is massive.

I've been somewhat itinerant since leaving university after my degree, I lived in Durham, in Cambridge and then in Poynton and now in Chester. It goes with the job, I'm sufficiently specialised that I need to travel to find work. For families containing two academics this leads to an even greater "two-body" problem; not every town or village needs a research scientist of my ilk. The downside of this is a degree of rootlessness and a lack of a handy family network. I'm not sure how common this rootlessness is across the population as a whole, it's true for many of the people I know.

It was when I was house hunting in 2000 that I got some hint of the credit crunch, I'd gone off to see the financial advisor upstairs from my estate agent to ask about offset mortgages (having been mildly burnt on payment protection insurance, I was trying to work out the hitch on offset mortgages). We had a bit of a chat; after some reassurance on what I was trying to get he pointed out that I was ultra-cautious and if I wanted he  could get me a x4 joint salary mortgage. I'd done the sums on this, and frankly it was scary but clearly a lot of people were doing this.

People often have a go at estate agents but personally I think it's the other punters that really fuck you up. Estate agents at least have to make some pretence of professionalism whilst the punter is free to do as they see fit and since they're unlikely to have bought and sold more than a couple of houses they can either by malice or ignorance make your life miserable. The bank and the solicitor's ability to find another little fee to slice off you on the way irritated me too. "Searches" caused me particular ire - it's not like they actually went and "searched", they got someone else to do an indexed retrieval, it's not like they went rummaging anywhere for something lost. Searching for documents these days takes bugger all time and effort. It's perhaps for this reason that I thought HIPS were a good idea, because I was pretty unimpressed by the system currently in place.

House price inflation is apparently the only good sort of inflation: no one is pleased if cars, carrots, or computers get more expensive every year but for houses it's different. For those of us on the housing ladder this inflation is no problem, for those not on the ladder it is the sight of the bottom rung being wound up beyond reach. Compared to the 1950's houses are about x4 more expensive in real terms today, they're about twice as expensive in real terms as when we bought our first house, about 12 years ago.

The real point of this post was a mild bit of ranting about care for the elderly and the sale of houses. Houses appear to be sacrosanct, you can be sitting on a house worth half a million pounds but rather than sell that to pay for your care the expectation is that the State should provide. Personally I'm hoping for my parents to piss away the inheritance in their twilight years and leave nothing to me - this includes the house. This attitude to housing and inheritance seems to affect every strata of society:

Owners of country estates apparently expect the public to pick up the cost of maintenance. And in the news this week, council houses - I must admit I didn't realise that council house tenancies were for life and potentially beyond. This strikes me as a nightmare for those responsible for the councils responsible for social housing provision, particularly given the 'right-to-buy' legislation. An obligation to provide housing for all is a good thing, the mechanism that via council houses, housing associations and housing benefit doesn't look like a great way to do it. Actually, housing associations do look like a good idea to me. If you were a company with this obligation you'd want to make bulk arrangements with landlords, and you'd be fantastically nervous about handing over valuable assets for decades. 

The move towards mass ownership of housing is relatively recent - mainly post-war in the UK (see page 12 here), and around Europe home ownership rates are broadly comparable, there are a couple of anomalies. I guess the reason for this is that home ownership fulfils a deep need for security, and literature and recent history reveal plenty of evil landlords.

I suppose the general point I'm making here is that we all want to pass on an inheritance, this is a very natural feeling but the effect of this desire impacts those that are still living and don't benefit from an inheritance. I actually quite like Billy-Gotta-Jobs proposal on taxing all houses as capital gains on death, as a way of cooling house price inflation.

Update: as supergoonybird points out in the comments, BillyGottaJob's proposal is actually for capital gains tax on *all* house sales - not just on death. This is a radical idea - but certainly one that strikes in the right place.

*Corfe castle because it's close to where I was born and lived until I was 18. Image from here.

On choice

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a big fucking television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electric tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage payments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite and higher purchase a wide range of fucking fabrics. Choose D.I.Y. and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting in a large couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows stuffing fucking junk food in your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish fucked-up brats you've sworn to replace yourself. Choose your future, choose life. But why would you want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. - Trainspotting by Irving Welsh (Screenplay by John Hodge)

For the last 20 years or so politicians have been keen on offering us choice, my message is "I don't want choice"!

Choice of schools is something of an academic question for me since I don't have any children but I grew up in rural Dorset and there the offer of choice would have been hollow. There were two primary schools in my village : one Roman Catholic and one Church of England, following that we went to the local "Middle School" one mile away - next nearest offering five miles away, followed by an upper school five miles away and the nearest alternative 10 miles and above away (to be honest I don't even know where the alternative would be)... and this in an area with a rural transport system, not an urban one. A great deal of effort is expended in trying to rank schools, there's evidence showing this process is not very accurate - the vast majority of schools are statistically indistinguishable. And who says schools are so important for education? My educational success is down, in large part, to the support of my parents but no-one seems to mention that. No one wants to say: actually your child's education is very much down to you.

We get choice in medical care these days too but how am I supposed to judge the quality of a doctor or a hospital? Set some bright people a target and they'll do a fine job of hitting it but is the target really representing the thing you want? People are actually quite keen to go to the hospital that's close to them. Do we really expect patients to make an informed choice of which hospital is best for them from a medical point of view. I'm pretty sure I couldn't make an accurate choice of the best hospital for medical care. Best hospital for me is easy: it's the one about half a mile from my house. And what's the message you're sending when you're offering a choice of hospital or doctor and providing data that purports to represent quality?:

"Here's a bunch of hospitals - make sure you chose the best one. Do you feel lucky?"

I'd much rather you made sure that it didn't matter which hospitals I went to.

People don't actually like lots of choice, academic research on jam shows that consumers are more likely to buy jam from a choice of 6 types than from a selection of 24 types, too much choice confuses and causes unhappiness. This chimes with my experience, to a large extent I've given up being a rational economic agent, live's too short to sweat over a choice of 100 different TVs.

This problem of ranking difficult to rank things is quite general, I experience it myself at work in my targets. I've come to the tentative conclusion that for people working in areas without clearly quantifiable outputs (number of strawberries picked, widgets sold, football games won), ranking really amounts to three buckets: sack, ok, promote. Your sack and promote buckets should really be pretty small. Yet we expend great effort on making more precise gradings. More interestingly I remember as I sat through an interminable college meeting discussing with an English fellow the marking of students. Normally for degree courses there's a certain amount of second marking, in physics where there are definite answers second marking works fairly well but for my colleague in English one marker could mark a First and the other a 2.2/3rd, for the same essay!

Don't give me choice, give me uniformity!

Bashing the bishops

I'm sorry, I try really hard to be a quiet little atheist and not cause needless offence, but sometimes the perfect storm hits and I go a bit "Richard Dawkins".

The spark that lit my ire today was on Radio 4's Sunday program. It was the juxtaposition of the reports on further problems the Catholic church was having with covering up child abuse by the priesthood with a complaint that Catholic adoption agencies, unlike any other adoption agency, should be allowed to discriminate against gay couples because they didn't think any gay couple was suitable to look after children.

Can you hear the sound of me bursting a blood vessel here?

This isn't an isolated incident either, also in the news today: a  letter by six bishops to the Daily Telegraph complaining of the treatment of a nurse who was asked to remove her crucifix necklace, or wear it  inside her clothing. The hospital involved has a policy on uniform which excludes the wearing of necklaces, this seems quite reasonable in my view. I don't want anyone's necklace dangling in my wounds, regardless of the form it takes. Now it may be that necklace wound dangling isn't a problem, and the whole policy is pointless. But that isn't the argument that the bishops are making, they're happy with the idea that any random atheist should be prevented from wearing, for example, their bourbon chocolate biscuit necklace but the same rule applied to a Christian is a great offence. It's a dogmatic position too, wearing the necklace inside her clothing (an entirely acceptable solution I would have thought) is not acceptable to the bishops either.

These aren't isolated incidents, there are exceptions in law covering the slaughter of animals for both halal and kosher slaughter. So whilst it's a illegal to slaughter an animal without first rendering it unconscious if you're a Christian or an atheist, as a Jew or a Muslim it becomes legal. What part does the slaughterer's religion play in the cruelty or otherwise to the animal? Also in the news recently were the ceremonial daggers worn by Hindu's. In this instance a child was withdrawn from school for continuing to wear his ceremonial dagger, personally I think banning children from taking knives of any sort into schools is a fairly good idea and once again notice the dogmatism - a compromise solution of a knife welded into it's scabbard was not acceptable.

We have a wide range of laws which restrict our behaviour for one reason or another, some of those laws are good and, no doubt, some of them are bad. My argument is that no behaviour is unacceptable for one person but acceptable for another simply on the grounds of their religion.

Thank you for hearing my rant!

The Green Scientist

This week I'm writing about my attitude to some green issues, and how I think my scientific background informs my approach. The reason I'm doing this is that when discussing green issues, it becomes obvious that I have some very different starting points compared to non-scientists. I can describe my own views, and I believe various of them are shared by other scientists for similar reasons. And it might get a little bit ranty.

First of all, I really like the idea of sustainability: the idea that after our lives we leave the earth in broadly the same state as we found it so that those that follow us have something to live on. I believe we should be trying to preserve our natural environment and the species in them, even the unattractive ones. How we achieve sustainability, and what we actually focus on are the areas of collision.

And so to "Chemicals": "Chemicals" which are always bad and must be excluded from things. From a scientific point of view this is frustrating: all things are chemicals - atoms joined up together. Even if we're slightly more sophisticated and claim that natural chemicals are good, and man-made chemicals are bad, we're still on tricky ground. Anyone for strychnine, belladonna or ricin? Really we can only say "good chemical", "bad chemical" by looking at the chemical in question. There is a Romantic view abroad that nature favours us and wishes to provide us with nice things: this simply isn't true. At best nature is indifferent, and in many cases it is actively out to get us.

There's a biological variant of this stance, in genetically modified organisms (GMO). I think there's real potential for GMO's in sustainable agriculture, but it is excluded for essentially ideological grounds and with ideological fervour. Misplaced genes can certainly be a problem but much more likely when introduced en bloc in introduced organisms (rabbits in Australia, rats in almost any island environment, Himalayan Balsam in UK), and we're surprisingly tolerant of crops that are toxic if prepared inappropriately (potatoes, rhubarb, red kidney beans, cassava). We're in the bizarre situation where one group can complain of the contamination of the genetic purity of their crops by GMO's for which there is no evidence of harm, and no expectation of harm. Where the detection of the contamination takes rather sophisticated scientific techniques. And beyond that even people are getting agitated by the thought of eating cattle fed with GMO's, when we have no way of detecting whether the cattle have eaten the GMO - there is no measurable effect.

The image at the top of this post is another example, I found it buy searching for "belching-pollution" it's the type of image you often see illustrating a story about pollution but those are cooling towers, the stuff coming out of them is water vapour - clouds. Not pollution at all.

The Food Programme on Radio 4 irritates me every week, and I really like my food. A typical script runs roughly like this:

Supermarkets are bad, lets do a taste test. Here's Mrs Miggin's hand-knitted pie, with Mrs Miggins who we've been talking to for the last 10 minutes, here's a supermarket pie, doesn't it look nasty? I don't think I want to eat that. Let's try them both, well Mrs Miggins pie is lovely, but I really didn't like the supermarket pie. The supermarkets are evil. What's that you say? "Mrs Miggins pie costs 5 times as much as the supermarket pie". Well I'm sure that isn't important.

I think I drifted off the point slightly with that last bit of rant, but it reveals something of my character. I'm actually in favour of people that do stuff, rather than the people that stand on the sidelines complaining that they're doing it wrong but don't really proffer a workable solution.

Much of the problem here seems to be an elision over scientific issues and capitalism / globalisation. GMO's largely became "bad" because they were developed by very large corporations for reasons of profit. I don't see large companies as intrinsically malign, I see them responding to a set of circumstances which makes them appear malign. The trick for society is to make an environment that makes companies to act for our collective good because it's in their best interest to do so.

So there you are: I'm a frustrated green, I sign up to the principles but the implementation offends my scientific sensibilities. In a timely fashion, it would appear I'm not alone - see this interview with Stewart Brand in New Scientist.

Thank you for hearing my rant.

A letter to the Institute of Physics

Dear Sir/Madam

As a member of the Institute of Physics I would like to register my extreme displeasure and unhappiness at the IOP submission to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee regarding the leaking of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (reproduced here) . In my view this submission will damage the scientific reputation of the Institute amongst scientists and other learned societies. This submission will prejudice my future confidence in any policy statements that the IOP makes.

My specific complaints of the submission are as follows:

1. Item 2 mis-represents the current scientific practice of sharing of data and methodologies. Currently methodologies are generally shared by publication in scientific journals not by the explicit sharing of computer source code. Raw experimental data from third parties is not routinely shared. To imply that the researchers at CRU are acting out of step with current practice is false. 

2. Item 4 specifically casts doubt on the historical temperature reconstructions based on proxy measures whilst not acknowledging that such reconstructions have been repeated by a range of research groups using a range of methodologies, as described in the IPCC 2007 report.
3. Item 5 accuses the researchers at CRU of "suppression" of the divergence between proxy records and the more recent thermometer based record. This is ridiculous, the CRU has published on this very divergence in Nature.

4. Item 6 makes no recognition of the un-usual circumstances that CRU found themselves in, subjected to a large number of Freedom of Information requests, culminating in the publication of a substantial fraction of their private e-mail correspondence.

The subject of climate science and it's relationship to anthropogenic climate change is an area subject to political interference, in my view the IOP's submission is a political attack on the CRU at East Anglia University dressed in a flimsy scientific cover.

I expect the Institute to fully withdraw this submission to the Science & Technology Committee. I feel that the subsequent explanatory statement by the IOP is insufficient in addressing the shortcomings of the original submission. It also takes no cognisance of the fact the IOP position will be taken publicly to be the sum of all it's published statements, and indeed that this submission will be preferred, over all others, as a presentation of the IOP's policy by those who wish to deny the position on climate science that the IOP claims to hold.

I will be cancelling my direct debit mandate to the IOP now, I may decide to continue with my membership when it comes up for renewal.

yours sincerely,

Dr Ian Hopkinson

8/3/10: update, corrected some typos

The Misanthrope

This is a blog post about other people, and their cow-like impassiveness whilst obstructing the path of the righteous. It's also a chance to be a bit pretentious since I discover that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his play, "No Exit":  that "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or "Hell is other people", and the title of this blog post itself is that of a play by Moliere.

Mrs SomeBeans and I have just returned from holiday, so the focus of today's rant is largely the people we have come across in the process (v. nice holiday, some pictures here). A similar species can be found around most supermarkets, on the streets of Llangollen.

It starts off in the airport, where mysterious large groups of sociable people travel together, weird extended families. Typically you'll first meet an outrider in the queue to check-in (for us this usually happens at about 5am when we are not at the peak of our reasonableness), but then a gathering horde appear who can't join the back of the queue: they have to join in front of you with the outrider. And nothing is simple for them, once at the check-in desk there is a great shuffling of passports and luggage as they casually mention that one member of the group will be along shortly.

Then there's the security control, here my ire is split between authorities and punters. I mean, how the hell am I going to injure anyone with Lipsalve? To credit the cow-people they slowly seem to be coming around to the idea that they have to do a load of weird stuff for the benefit of security theatre. 

Then there are the duty-free shops, I'll ask the rhetorical question "Why, oh why is so much space committed to the sale of duty-free which could so much more usefully be dedicated to something useful like seating?". I know the answer, it's because shops pay rent, punters are just self-loading cargo. It doesn't make me less angry. I spent an hour in Salzburg's post-security hell-hole wondering how best to foment revolution. I considered standing on a bin and urging the crowded mass to invade the duty-free shop and cast the merchandise to the floor, and lie down upon the vacated shelves.

Then you get on the plane, and it seems no one has planned for this eventuality and spends 10 minutes taking things out of their carry-on bag, putting the bag in the overhead locker, sitting down, standing up, taking more things out of the bag and putting some away again, repeat. All the while the cabin crew keep saying "Please get on and sit down so we can take off".

Then you get off the plane and a group of teenagers have made it down the stairs off the plane and just stopped dead at the bottom. This is a recurring theme: there are places to stand, an infinity of them, where you disrupt no one elses business. However, the cow-people seek out those places where they maximally obstruct others, gazing at each other with cow-like eyes, lowing gently.

Next is baggage reclaim. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey here, there's no way that my parents would have let me frolic about the luggage carousels in the airport, as modern children seem to be encouraged (partly because we never flew to go on holiday). There'd definitely be sharp words and clips round ear, but not these days. If it was down to me I'd be equipping luggage carousels with special finger-slicing blades.

Skiing offers special opportunities for standing in the way like a cow-person; ski lifts are natural constrictions: a world of skiers is funnelled into a narrow gap, through electronic barriers to some lifting device. So naturally you'll find half-wits that zoom into the constriction and only then decide that they cannot proceed without friends or family. And you try acting nimbly whilst wearing skis. The people featured here:

... look like they acting purposefully, but they're not - they're dithering.


Naturally, through all of this we never say a word. Except now.

Schrodinger's flippin' cat!

There comes a time in a blogs life when a bit of a rant is called for, here's mine or at least the first one. To be honest it's a fairly discrete, civilised rant - because that's the sort of chap I am. It's about cliches in science.

Quite some years ago, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay entitled "The case of the creeping fox-terrier clone", published in "Bully for Brontosaurus". In it he describes how he was writing a piece on evolution using the time-worn example of the horse, and in particular an animal named hyracotherium also known as eohippus or "The Dawn Horse". The problem for Professor Gould was that he found himself on the point of typing that eohippus was "the size of a fox-terrier", the thing is he had no idea how big a fox-terrier was! That's right, Prof Gould (who I think writes very nicely) was about to commit a cliche to paper, and rather admirably he stopped and had a bit of a think instead. Now the reason he was about to write this was that he'd read it many times before, it's a very standard story in evolution. He wasn't alone, many writers have written how "eohippus was the size of a fox-terrier", and doubtless many of them had no idea how big a fox-terrier was. Many readers have, no doubt, read those words, nodded sagely to themselves and said "All is well, I know that eohippus was the size of a fox-terrier". It's not really the cliche that's the problem, the problem is that we've gone through the motions of communicating an idea, but sort of failed. Just in case it was bothering you, a fox-terrier is about the same size as eohippus, or roughly 40cm at the shoulder ;-)  I reckon that's about the same size as a large lamb.

This isn't an isolated example, science writing (and education) is riddled with cliche, not just cliche in word, but cliche in thought. My own bugbear is Schrödingers cat, of whom surely everyone must have heard. Erwin Schrödinger was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.



 (I have a bit of a weakness for lolcats)

Briefly, Schrödingers "thought experiment" is as follows: take one quantum mechanical system (a radioactively decaying material is common), one cat, one diabolical system to kill the cat based on a random event from the quantum mechanical system and one opaque, cat-proof box. Combine ingredients and wait...now open the box. The argument put is that prior to opening the box the cat is in an uncertain state between dead and alive (which is true of the quantum system, atoms in the radioactive material could be said to be decayed and undecayed simultaneously). 

However, Schrödinger prefaces this thought experiment thusly: "One can even set up quite ridiculous cases." Schrödinger didn't think his cat was genuinely in some weird half-way house between dead and alive he was quite clear that it was very definitely one or the other and the problem was that for systems obeying quantum mechanical rules this wasn't the case. That's the useful point in this thought experiment: "There's something weird that goes on between the quantum and the classical and we don't know what it is". Yet time after time you see this experiment described without the critical proviso. People go away with the false impression that undead cats exist!

oh dear I can feel my self getting a bit incoherent now... special relativity, I've taught special relativity, it's genuinely a marvelous intellectual leap that solved a couple of serious problems in physics. It has some real world applications (understanding my old friend the synchrotron, GPS satellites, lifetimes for relativistic muons in the atmosphere etc). But the text book examples we give to students are rather worn, nope, "worn" is the wrong word. "flippin' ridiculous" gets a bit closer. Here's one:

"You have a 10 meter long ladder, and a 5 meter long shed. How fast must the ladder enter the shed in order for it to appear to fit inside to a stationary observer?"

I can tell you the answer: it's "really fast" - some large fraction of the the speed of light. To put it another way, a ladder travelling at the requiste speed could travel the length of the equator in something under quarter of a second, that's probably a little faster than your reaction time and I'm sure you have an intuitive feel for the length of the equator. My point here is that (1) You're going to struggle to get your ladder going that fast (2) if that ladder's going past you that fast, the absolute last thing on your mind is going to be "ooo...look, the 10m ladder is fitting into the 5m shed". If your shed is in a vacuum then you won't get killed by massive plasma shockwave, but how many sheds have you seen in a vacuum? For part 2 of this experiment one may find some halfwit has placed a concrete block at the back of the shed to check the ladder really is fitting into the shed by bringing the ladder to an instant standstill inside the shed. Once again, when ladder hits concrete whether ladder fits into shed is the least of your worries. Assuming that you were in a vacuum, your ladder/concrete collision is going to release "absolutely loads" of energy - fusion bomb scale. There you go, I've lost it completely now. Special relativity teaching is full of everyday objects (trains and rulers are typical) traveling at implausible speeds, and it really winds me up!

Don't get me started on "Alice and Bob", the quantum cryptographers and if one more string theorist tells me that all the extra dimensions are "curled up very small", there's going to be some hurtin'.

And relax... I feel better now that I've written it down.