Does the Racist van save money?

I know I’m a little late to talk about the #racistvan but I think there’s an interesting angle that has not yet been covered. According to the Home Office the #racistvan is a pilot for a project which if successful could be rolled out across the country. Now suppose we took them at their word and asked what are the measures of success (as Zoe Williams tried and failed toget an answer on). The quotes and statement circulating is that if the policy saved money it should be rolled out nationally. Now assuming that’s their goal it’s worth looking at the figures that they are using. According to the statement the pilot cost £10,000. They state that if it succeeded in getting a single person to voluntarily go home then it will have saved money because voluntary deportations cost on average £739 whereas forced deportations cost £15,000 on average. Aside from wanting to look at these figures in more detail (deportation costs aren’t my area) there are a couple of problems with this calculation.

Firstly as has been pointed out by the Lib Dems this scheme has gotten a massive amount of free publicity and so will therefore more likely get attract more of a response than it would otherwise have gotten. Whilst this is a fair point, it’s difficult to control for (possibly those evaluating it could look at the number of contacts made before it hit national news) and it’s a bit of a moot point as it’s already had the press so that’s part of its effect. You would, however, be able to say is that the effect will not increase proportionately if the scheme is rolled out nationwide. But all of this is unimportant if it really is the case that a single person voluntary returning through the scheme makes it value for money.

It doesn’t take much thought to realise that this isn’t the case. The implicit assumption in the Home Office’s statement is that each person who chooses to voluntary return because of this scheme would have otherwise been a forced deportation. Obviously this is not the case. It’s quite possible that many of those who have responded and are voluntarily returning would have done so otherwise. For these people it’s possible the government has either gained no saving or made a net loss. It would generate a loss where a person would have otherwise voluntarily returned home without government assistant and all the government has done is alerted them that they could get some help with that.

There is a further possibility that the scheme can generate a further net loss. This is the case where a person who would have otherwise stayed in the UK and not have been forcibly deported. What we know about illegal immigrants in this country suggests that the majority of them do not end up being forcibly deported. Although reports that 1 in 100 illegalimmigrants are deported are almost definitely an understatement there seems to be no good data suggesting that the majority or anywhere near that level are forciblydeported. Forced deportations are rare and occur half as often as voluntary deportations. Therefore it would be reasonable to assume that the vast majority of those who are voluntarily returned through this scheme who wouldn’t otherwise have forcibly removed. This means that for each person deported a reasonable assumption would be that a loss is generated.

I’d be interested to read a government evaluation of the racist vans to see how they can try and justify it on other basis. But as far as I can tell as a cost saving exercise it really doesn’t work.  

Immigration, religion and the liberal dilemma

I’m quite a fan of John Rawls and I think of a lot of what he wrote was completely spot on even if it is challenging to live up to. One of the things he wrote about was the way in which political conversations should take place in a liberal society. Although people can have a variety of beliefs and inner viewpoints, the political discussion has to be conducted in terms everyone can understand and could possibly come to accept. Whilst I can deal with quite a few issues in this way, some I struggle to articulate an argument which isn’t ridden with my Christian values.

The key example for me right now is immigration and more generally the treatment of foreign citizens. As a Christian the value issues are pretty straightforward. Jesus said there are two great commandments; Love God and Love your neighbour. When Jesus is asked who is my neighbour his response is to tell the story of the Good Samaritan. The answer given in that story is that your neighbour is the Samaritan who in that context is thought to be the foreigner and an enemy. To me the story and Jesus’ point is clear, our neighbour is not defined by our nation or heritage but by our shared humanity. This puts the immigration debate and questions of asylum in sharp relief. Morally it is not justifiable to give preferential treatment to those born in our country to those in need born in another. Every Asylum seeker is my neighbour, even Abu Qatada is my neighbour. As a Christian this is the goal I believe all policy should work towards and have in mind. That’s why I was fully in sympathy with SarahTeather in the Beckly lecture earlier this week when she asked for the Churches to talk more about immigration and then on Saturdaywhen she spoke out against the current immigration debate.

But the problem is how to express this in moral and political principles that are not explicitly Christian. I tend to favour using the Human Rights narrative that we have inalienable rights and currently these are being violated. But that argument doesn’t seem to gain much traction with most of the public and is hard to justify using non Christian statements. There’s no easy answer to why we have these inalienable rights and why human dignity should be protected. Another argument I quite like is the drowning childthought experiment from Peter Singer. But lots of people aren't persuaded by that. At the same time thought experiment isn’t easily amenable to being used in political debate. The issue of our obligations to those born far away isn’t easily argued from the liberal viewpoint and plenty of people seem happy to argue for an extraordinary priority to be given to those closer to us. I can’t find that morally justifiable but I can’t find a political response either. 

Privilege and representation

Privilege is a topic I have great difficulty with. In many cases I can see the arguments of both sides and I can’t quite find a practical way forward. By practical, I mean something that I can put into practice in my life and in my action. The questions I ask in this blog are not rhetorical. I want answers to them so if you have more of an opinion let me know. I am one of the more privileged people out there, and that puts me in a difficult position when talking about this stuff. But that is part of the point I want to address, so let me have at it and if my privilege is blinding me then let me know.

What matters: who we are or what we say?
This isn’t an example of me being discriminated against but it got me thinking. A few years ago I went with my family to a taping of Any Questions and I submitted a question. My question was chosen as one of 9 potential questions that could have been asked on the show but it was not picked. Instead, all of the selected questions were from people who appeared to be over the age of 50 (as did most of the audience apart from me).

After the show my mother complained to the producer that my question should have been selected to improve the representativeness of the show and of Radio 4 generally. I disagreed with my mother: I thought that if my question should be selected it should be because of the merit of my question rather than who I was. Representation only mattered if I was going to say something different to anyone else (my question was a politicsy question that any age group could have written).

Was I right? I’m not sure. Partly representation matters to show that the group doesn’t just care about its own issues. My question could have shown that young people are just as much politics nerds as old people.

Declaring privilege
But youth is one of the less difficult areas as stigma associated with it is minor and it can’t be hidden. A far more complicated area is mental health. Personally I’ve had relatively good mental health and so am speaking here from a position of privilege. Elsewhere a brilliant blog post by Glosswitch was written on the subject of mental health and privilege (but it’s sadly now been deleted). The writer raises their personal dislike of declaring privilege, or lack of it, because they do not wish to be defined by their issues and their past. I completely agree that no one should be forced to declare their own history in order to make a more meaningful contribution to a debate. But by explaining my own privilege am I inadvertently outing others by their absence of such a declaration (especially in certain areas of debate where this kind of declaration is expected)? Should I therefore stop?

Nothing about us without us
In campaigning circles it is generally agreed that campaigns should include in a meaningful way those who the campaign concerns. From what I’ve seen, the reality of making this work is rather difficult. Unless the group or organisation already contains someone from that group it can be quite expensive to do this properly. For this reason I’ve seen groups not challenge an apparent injustice because they have no representation in that area and don’t feel they therefore have the capacity to speak about it. This troubles me, as an ideal we should include but surely we should do our best if we can’t?

A cheap and convenient way of doing this can be including already existing qualitative research into a campaign so that the people from that group’s voices are included but I’m not sure this sufficient. Is picking and choosing a small portion of a group’s thoughts enough to count as representing them? There are very few good examples that I’ve seen of a group effectively campaigning whilst also being good at including. It often seems to be the case that by putting more resources towards one a group becomes worse at the other. Some of the most effective campaigns are the least inclusive.

Are you better at representing us by being like us?
To what extent parliament or politics in general is representative is seen as a very important issue. Polls in parliament have indicated that politicians are representative of the general population in terms of mental health. Possibly partly due to its hidden nature, many people have been elected who either have had mental health issues in the past or currently do so. However the number who speak up for mental health services is far lower. Are politicians with a history of good mental health but who campaign for better mental health services better representing their constituents with mental health issues? It seems that both are important.

Bill Clinton has been called the first black president but that did not diminish the importance of Barack Obama’s election. But what if you have to choose between the two? If someone who represents a group runs against someone who campaigns for that group’s interest? What if Colin Powell had run against Hillary Clinton in 2008?

There is a hidden worry under this: what if you can only fight an issue if you understand it, and can only truly understand it if you have experienced it? But this is counter balanced by another problem: being from that group might blind you to that group’s experience. Thatcher partly thought that feminism was no longer needed because she was PM - and if she as a woman could do it, then there couldn’t have been much of a problem.

As might be obvious from what I’ve written, I tend to think that the issue matters more than person. However, I am worried that in thinking this I’m blinded to parts of these issues by my own privilege. Like I said above I’m not happy with any of my answers and I consider these questions still very open and unanswered. I don’t however think they are unanswerable, so I’d like to discuss them some more.   

UAV, Drones, video games and “Playstation warfare”

I recently wrote a blog about how a video game I had played made me consider the choices made by UAV* pilots however this reflected a problem I have with campaigns around UAV usage. Many campaign groups which have attacked the usage of UAV have suggested that UAV make warfare like playing a video game. Whilst I’ll argue till the cows come home that video games can create compelling emotionally connecting experiences I will say that from what I know about piloting a UAV, it is less like a video game than other forms of warfare.

Whilst working for the Methodist Church I had the opportunity to take minutes whilst experts on the Morality of UAVs helped create a report on the morality of UAV use. There were some very interesting debates around the use of UAVs and I highly recommend reading the report. Something that I found very interesting was some of the arguments on ways in which UAVs could be more ethical than other forms of warfare. The arguments against how UAVs are currently used I wholeheartedly agree with and think that groups should be campaigning against extra judicial killing. My problem is with the idea that UAVs are simply bad and that they resemble playing a game.

A massive portion of what UAV operators spend their time doing is simply watching suspects. They establish what military jargon calls a “pattern of life” but essentially means following a person constantly for days on end to find out where they go and what they do with their lives. If a decision is then made that the person should be killed the UAV operator continues watching afterwards. In order to confirm the kill a UAV operator watches as weeping relatives dig through the rubble to find bodies. The psychological costs of being a UAV pilot are only just being recognised. Unlike other military operations, UAV operators return to civilian life at the end of the day. After spending the day watching someone in Pakistan going to the market, they may go into a supermarket on the way home to pick up some milk.

In this way UAVs are completely unlike video games and for that matter unlike high altitude bombers. Neither of these involve observing the banalities of a person’s life. Violent video games spend seconds dealing with the lives of people on the screens, high altitude bombers see the targets house for less than that. UAV operators may be more distant physically from their victims but they get to know them far better than anyone else does. To simplify the job of UAV pilot to playing a video game undermines the emotional and psychological scars that it can cause them.

If you read descriptions of life as a UAV pilot there are some superficial similarities with playing video games. Whilst both involve operating a computer in a dark room there is a crucial difference, the person playing the video games knows nothing that is going on is real. A UAV pilot knows that the person who they see playing with their kids is real and they know that when they have to kill them. Although (as far as I know) there has not been a publicly released systematic study into the prevalence of PTSD amongst UAV pilots there are several accounts out there. One study of 900 drone operators found high levels of stress in 46% of those surveyed.  Video games don’t bring this kind of stress. UAV operators have an incredibly difficult job and it should not be minimised and belittled by talk of PlayStation warfare.

*I use the term UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) rather than the military preferred RPAS (Remotely Piloted Air System) because it’s better known but doesn't have the same connotations as the colloquial Drones

Payment by results: Doesn't get the results

Upfront, I should say that the debate about whether or not something should be run by a private company or charity rather than the government is not something that I find inherently interesting. I believe that neither are the golden bullet that their supporters claim they are. More important than who runs a service are questions of how that service is resourced, how it’s run and how it’s evaluated. Last week Chris Grayling made amonumentally stupid comment in the House of Commons: “The last Government was obsessed with pilots. Sometimes you just have to believe in something and do it.” This was in reference to his idea that the probation service should be privatised. Now at the moment I have no idea whether or not this is a good idea but a pilot* would be a good way of finding out. Mr Grayling is calling for policy by ideology rather than policy by evidence. Whilst there is a necessary place for ideology in government throwing out evidence is not the smartest idea. But I’ve discussed that before so today instead I’m going to look at why payment by results isn’t a magical cure-all.

To find an example of payment by results being a comprehensive failure you have to look no further than the last project Mr Grayling was in charge of, the Work Programme.  The Work Programme paid providers for every unemployed person that they got back into work for six months. Of course the contracts for these schemes were not that simple because for making privatisation work the devil is in the detail. A recent evaluation of the work programme showed its most glaring flaw. The government was paying out millions of pounds and were seeing fewer people go back to work than if there had been no program at all. As flaws go, that one’s a big one. However, concentrating on the big failure masks the little failures that still have a lot to teach us.

Firstly, the Work Programme nurtured fraud on a large scale. A4E, one of the private organisations that received some of the large contracts from the Work Programme, was found to have been committing fraud in several of its services and to have had a culture which fostered fraud. It was caught not because of government checks but because of a whistleblower. If a scheme pays by results then it encourages behaviour which will fulfil the checks, rather than necessarily getting the results. Fraud is more likely to happen when you incentivise it. There’s an interesting discussion on whether bonuses incentivise risky behaviour and whether that was partly responsible for the economic crisis. Payment by results may create a similar culture and need strong checking systems to make sure the results are ones worth paying for.   

Those who were given priority in the work programme were not those that needed the most help butinstead those most likely to get a job. As many of these were already perfectly capable of getting a job the work programme took up their time from when they could have been seeking a job and then got paid for “helping” them despite them already being job ready. This artificially buoyed the performance of work programme contractors.

The Work Programme also ended up damaging some of the most effective service providers. Although I’ve not seen the evidence for it, many in the sector believed that small charitable organisations were the most efficient at helping those with multiple problems return to the job market. Additionally one of the stated aims of the Work Programme was for more people to be helped by these small highly effective organisations and for their funding to increase. However by many accounts the opposite has happened. Due to the nature of the contracting process many of these organisations saw a dramatic decrease in funding and have been forced to close. This was not due to them being ineffective but rather because they had a lack of referrals.

For the power of the market to have full effect there needs to be true competition, innovation and failure. A recent talk I went to featured John Kay from the FT talking about what makes capitalism great. He used the example of the computing industry. No single company had the all the successful ideas which ended up transforming the sector and placing a computer in every home. Many of those that had successful ideas still went bust as they failed to come up with the next idea. Public service markets don’t work this way though. Provision comes from one of a handful of very large companies, G4S, A4E, Serco etc. Government contracts work against small organisations that would encourage innovation and against these big companies failing if they can’t be the most efficient providers.       

Small companies are not the answer by themselves either though. The problem with using small companies in payment by results schemes can be seen in TV license enforcement. In TV license enforcement companies are paid for every household they find illegally using a TV without a license. As anyone who has had contact with these deeply unpleasant companies (or done any research on it) will know the sector is rife with abuse, houses are illegally searched, people are pressured into signing forms admitting wrongdoing when they have done and people are frequently mislead as to their actual legal rights and duties. When misconduct is found and punished rather than it being stamped out many of these small companies dissolve and return to the same practices as a new company with almost the exact same people.

The point I want to make is not that payment by results is a bad idea but rather that it is very difficult to get right. To neglect to do a pilot and get as much information as possible to help design the best scheme that you can is a moronic show of arrogance.

*Just to be clear that this is not a partisan idea, a pilot of this very idea was set up by Grayling’s predecessor Kenneth Clarke.   

Femininity, complementarianism and exclusion

Femnism and liberalism
I’ve been struggling with how to write on this topic for a few reasons but a few things recently have made me want to tackle the difficult topic of female equality.  I have reservations about writing this because I don’t want to accidentally tell women about feminism. But it’s an interesting political discussion and if equality is a central part of your political program then you have to look at what that equality is and how equality of rights pans out. I believe that my feminism (and I do consider myself a feminist) is an extension of my liberalism. One fundamental element of this liberalism is that your fate should not be determined by the circumstances of your birth. For me the circumstances of your birth include your gender and your society’s stereotypes of how that gender should act.  

Separate but equal
If you’ve been following the debate within the Christian churches around gay marriage and about women bishops then you may have heard an argument that criticises this liberal position. The counter argument criticises the liberal position for not allowing for individual differences. Users of this argument say that rather than wanting equality for men and women liberals want something impossible, liberals want them to be the same.  Instead we should accept that women and men are inherently different and play different roles. For this reason women should not be bishops because being a bishop involves playing a male role and so only men should be eligible. Similarly, gay relationships cannot work because a well functioning relationship requires complimentary female and male roles⁺. (I’m not trying to construct a straw man here and this is the best I can synthesise the argument, please get in touch if you feel I’ve misrepresented it). This isn’t a new argument and I’ve heard it used before by an Iranian classmate who explained why rules keeping women in the home, raising the family didn’t make them unequal. I’ve heard people who think of themselves as feminists espouse this argument. They say don’t think women should be treated worse than men just not the same.

Different roles
There is something to the argument. There are separate roles in life that are equally valid. It’s not worse to chose to stay at home to raise a family than to work in a career. Often a different kind of person is needed to be a pioneering leader than a caring supporter*.  Me and other liberals don’t think that all people are the same and should be treated the same. People are wonderfully different. My problem isn’t that gender is unrelated to these roles. It might be the case that one gender is more prone to one role than the other (although I have doubts its anywhere near as strong a correlation as some suggest). The problem is where people seek to forbid people on the basis of gender. There is at least one woman in the world who more easily fulfils the worker role rather than the stay at home role.  Why should that one person who doesn’t fit into that traditional role for their gender be banned from fulfilling the role they are better suited to? It seems that violates their rights according to any basic liberal conception. A women who isprevented from preaching is having her right to freedom of religion denied. One person having their rights breached is too much.  Furthermore it is even more important when considering people who don’t identify with either gender. They could play any of the roles described above and gendering them excludes un-gendered people from all.

Dealing with individual differences
In practicalities in everyday life this may get more than a little complicated. If one gender is more inclined to a role than another, then you may well have the case quite legitimately that a job has far more men in than women or the other way round.  That would be fine, but telling that situation apart from one where women are discriminated against because of their gender would be quite difficult to do. Usually it seems to me to be a case of the latter rather than the former.

Not talking about gender roles
 This leads to my final point that talking about these roles in gendered terms is because of what’s been discussed above, inherently problematic. Saying that something is feminine inherently implies that something is for women or that something is masculine implies it’s for men.  Attempts to rehabilitate femininity by some feminists have not helped with this. The problem is not as a Foucaltian would see it, that masculinity has been empowered by robbing femininity. The problem is using these terms at all. Men don’t need to “redefine masculinity” instead we need to stop using gendered terms altogether because they are by their very nature exclusionary.

⁺The rest of the post is mainly about different gender roles in the context of employment, it’s not about the roles that exist within a relationship although some principles apply (e.g. If it works for one couple then why should it be banned?)

*I find the argument that women shouldn’t be bishops slightly hilarious because the traditional female stereotype is them as caring motherly figures and a bishop is supposed to be a pastoral role.

Smart cards and food stamps

Ian Duncan Smith is according to a Daily Telegraph report looking at giving 120,000 families their benefits through smart cards. Never mind that the 120,000 is a zombie number with no relation to what is being talked about, this is just a bad idea. No matter how priority items are defined this is a bad idea. I’m going to just address two reasons why this is such a bad idea.

Firstly it means that all of those who have their benefits administered through this scheme will be labelled as benefit claimants whenever they shop. This stigmatises the card’s users even though they have done nothing wrong (again look at how the troubled families’ statistic was created). There’s been a strong suspicion that violence against disabled people is rising because they are viewed as undeserving benefit claimants. How do you think people will react when they see people using cards that don’t just label people as benefit claimants but specifically as what the government has defined as the worst of the worst of benefit claimants? If you look at how the troubled families are selected mental illness plays a large part in the selection criteria. I didn’t think it was possible but somehow the government have actually managed to increase the stigmatisation of those with mental illnesses. Even if they do manage to come up a better way of selecting these “troubled families” it will almost certainly still be about the characteristics of one family member but end up stigmatising the whole family.  

Secondly they are trying to create a system that can’t be bartered with and that is doomed to failure. You can’t resell the cards like you can sell food stamps, however you can still sell on the food. But realistically it’s not food that will be the flaw of the system. It will be electronics. If electronics are included then they are incredibly easy to sell on with very little value lost. If they are not then the families involved are effectively excluded from a large part of modern life. A mobile phone is almost essential for someone seeking a job. It’s just not possible to be searching for a job whilst sitting at home by the phone (especially if you can’t buy a computer).

It took me less than ten minutes to think of these really simple problems with the scheme. I guarantee you there are more. But even beyond these practical problems it is an immoral policy. These families would be stripped of their liberty because of their poverty and that is abhorrent. 

When is a curve just a scribble on graph paper?

A theoretical curve
The theory of the Laffer curve is extremely simple. When you set taxes at 0% of earnings you will take in £0 and when you set taxes at 100% you will take in £0 because no one will work if they get none of the proceeds, and in between these two a curve will exist with the optimal tax rate for gaining the optimal amount of revenue. This seems to be a pretty solid theory but it presents no information on what the curve would actually look like.

The Laffer curve and psychology
A lot of the conversation around the Laffer effect centres on whether or not people would bother to put in extra effort for minimal returns. If that were the case then the Laffer curve could look identical for benefit withdrawl rates as for tax rates. I’ve yet to encounter a country which has their tax and benefit systems that closely aligned. In this country it would mean a marginal tax rate of 65 to 95%, making out of work benefits at destitution levels, drastically increasing levels of in work support benefits or some large shift in-between. This would also put the curve into the realms of sociology and psychology, potentially being able to test the rate at which humans are willing to except returns for their effort. But this curve may be different for different people depending on their current level of happiness or income. However, even if we were able to determine a universal “psychological Laffer curve” it would not be adequate to address taxation policy. The options for people (especially high earners) are not to either do the activity or not but also where to do the activity or what to make that activity look like for tax purposes.

The tax rate and the shape of a society
Extra considerations beyond motivational psychology mean how effective a certain tax rate is depends heavily on the conditions of a society and how it compares to other societies. If a person is working in a country solely because of that country’s tax rate then the Laffer curve for that country would peak far earlier. If the Cayman Islands had a 40% tax rate they would see a huge drop in their tax revenues. There are other considerations aside from the tax rate which causes people to choose to work there. A business needs infrastructure in order to deliver products or services and it needs people to buy these products and services. The debate around tax rates often assumes that what makes a good economy is low tax rates when this only the case it offers limited infrastructure, a limited market and a permissive view to tax avoidance. This means that if we want to find the optimal Laffer tax rate for our country we would have to compare it to other comparable society’s in terms of their existing infrastructure, tax laws and market.  The same is obviously true across time as well. You will get more tax revenue from a lower tax rate in an economic boom than you will from a higher tax rate in a recession because the economy is smaller before tax rate has been taken into consideration.

A dearth of evidence
All the points above should be reasons to take all existing evidence on the shape of a Laffer curve with a massive grain of salt. Of the research that does exist a large amount either fails to take into account the differences between societies or measures an incredibly short period which doesn’t take into account simple factors such as deferred earnings. It is blatantly obvious that if you can afford to choose when to claim your earnings and to pay your taxes (and rich people can) then you will choose to pay less taxes. This does not mean that you would have moved your earnings to another tax jurisdiction if the option to pay less in the current jurisdiction was not available or that you would have chosen not to do that work at all. There also has, as far as I’m aware, not been any research on the effects of anti tax avoidance legislation on Laffer curves.

The HMRC scribble and the 50p tax rateJust when you think that the Laffer Curve can’t get any further from being good evidence based policy, it gets worse. In the last budget the government scrapped the 50p rate of tax for people in the top income bracket. Part of the HMRC document used to justify that change uses a Laffer Curve.  You now might be asking yourself which of the dodgy bits of evidence did they use to justify their particular Laffer curve? The answer is none. Their graph does not actually have a single data point on it. The only justification for the information in the graph is that the government believes that a 45p tax rate is optimum. That would be a legitimate statement if that was all they had said, but it wasn’t. They tried to pretend that their best guess shot in the dark was based on theory and evidence by invoking the “Laffer curve” and creating a graph. You cannot have a competent debate about what is best for the economy if you lie about what you are doing or pretend there is evidence where there is not.  

Taxation really isn’t theft

The basics of property rights
In recent discussions around tax justice some right wing groups like the Institute of Economic Affairs have argued that it is morally wrong to tax people. They say that the taxation is akin to theft. The argument that taxation is theft comes from the idea that “I own my property and the government has no right to take it from me”. This needs a very strong idea of property rights and that is really hard to justify. If you look through the history of political thought two big arguments from two big philosophers define the debate on property rights, David Hume and John Locke. Subsequent thought has built on them and combined their views but understanding both helps understand the debate.

Government necessitates property rights
Hume’s justification for property rights is that the only type of government that people will accept is one that protects property rights. In his story of how and why government forms property rights play a crucial part for Hume. For Hume it’s a matter of Human psychology that people are not going to submit to a government which is going to take away their property therefore governments must grant and respect property rights. But the important thing to note about this account is that it’s descriptive not moral. People are selfish and so will not want government which conflicts with their self interest. This does not mean that people have a moral right to property simply that they expect property rights from government. One of Hume’s most well known ideas is that we cannot derive morality from facts about the world. Whether or not you agree with Hume it is very clear from reading him that he doesn’t think that these facts about government bring about any moral obligations. You cannot argue that taxation is theft from this point of view because you are talking about a morality which this view doesn’t even acknowledge exiting. The only arguments on taxation and property rights that this view allows is the question of how high a level of taxation will people tolerate.

Property rights come as a result of our labour
Locke’s justification of property rights is one of the most enduring and popular despite its religious roots. It’s more complicated than Hume’s and has far greater range of interpretation but most people agree on the core elements. When we work the land we infuse it with our own labour and we then develop rights to that now developed land because our labour is a part of it.  This works for Locke because the land is owned by God and God desires that we develop the earth. There are two restrictions to this ability to acquire land that arise from our duty to God. We aren't allowed to acquire so much land that it goes to waste and we must leave enough land for others to be able to get what they need. Locke believed that the invention of money circumvented these two restrictions. Money means that we can sell any fruit of the land that we ourselves don’t need and that others do not need to own property in order to get what they need. Instead people can be paid for work and buy what they need. If this actually worked then there would be unlimited strong property rights. But it doesn't. Whilst it is the case that people cannot find work, aren't paid well enough or cannot work then all property holders who have more than they need have no property rights to that extra property. 

More modern takes on Locke
Locke’s justification may seem a little outdated with its emphasis on working the land and God granting property rihgts but the idea that our work means we own what we make is intuitive and some have tried to salvage it. The most appealing to me of the attempts to modernise it are ones that focus communal responsibility. These accounts replace God with the community and say the obligations retained are to the community rather than God because land is communal. The most flawed attempts are those by philosophers like Robert Nozick who try to simply remove God from the equation. They deny that there are any obligations to others and simply claim that by working you have made something and that thing is purely yours. Nozick is one of the founder members of the taxation is theft club. But the problem with this point of view is they fail to deal with the other ingredient that is combined with your own labour. Creativity does not create property ex nihilo. There is always something which is combined with creativity to create property. In Locke’s story there is land, in modern life there is infrastructure that allows businesses to develop. Whether you say it is Government, God or the community something has a claim to that which was used to develop the property along with the persons own creativity and labour.

This is exactly what President Obama was talking about when he said “you didn’t build that”. It should be immediately obvious the stupidity of the republican response “we built this” when they handed out Lego bricks to attendees of their conference asking them to build things out of Lego. Obviously you made the building butsomeone else made the Lego. Another party (government, God or community) invested something into your property and therefore they also have a right to whatever you produce. Taxation isn’t theft in as much as it is simply the other party claiming the proceeds from their investment.

Poverty is about money, to say otherwise is perverse

Ian Duncan Smith is speaking again today about how poverty should be defined using terms other than money. Future measures of “poverty” that could be measured include family breakdown, drug addiction and worklessness. Whilst these are all bad things, they are each distinctly different from poverty. Only 37% of children in poverty are in single parent families and only a tiny proportion of those in poverty suffer from drug or alcohol addiction. This is well documented stuff.

If you measure family breakdown then a large proportion of what you will find will be family breakdown that occurs in rich households. Similarly drug or alcohol addiction isn’t limited to poor people. If the government aims to fight poverty by fighting relationship breakdown and addiction then that is a valid strategy. These things do have a negative effect on people in poverty (as I said earlier they are bad things). But if they are successful then you will eventually see the regular rate of poverty (measured by income) fall as these people come out of poverty. If however you measure poverty by looking at family structure and addiction as well as introducing policies to fight them then your results will look better than reality for people in poverty.

Government schemes tend to be more effective at helping already better off people.  A King’s Fund report looking at unhealthy behaviours showed Labour’s public health measures were successful at reducing unhealthy behaviours but this was mainly within already well off families. Part of what justified spending money on public health initiatives is because poor health is a much bigger problem for people in poverty. If the government puts money into fighting family breakdown it’s reasonable to believe that the main beneficiaries will be well off families. If the rate of family breakdown is part of measuring poverty then that measurement of poverty would fall without anyone actually in poverty being affected. This is a much better example of a perverse effect than the one cited by IDS.

Problems with measuring worklessness aside, unemployment is already measured and is a politically important number by itself with or without being taken as part of the definition of poverty. The majority of children in poverty have at least one parent working. But that’s not the crux of the issue. The crux of the issue is that if you are employed and live a perfectly healthy lifestyle but simply can’t afford to pay your everyday living cost then the government do not have a policy to help you. The government’s social justice strategy is devoid of anything that would help people who have a job that doesn’t pay them enough to get by. This could be because they don’t actually believe them to be poor but if that is the case then the government should just say so. It would be interesting to see how low a standard of living they would set as acceptable because as I’ve discussed before most would define the current as below acceptable.

Motherhood and apple pie: Politicians and Values

Selecting for values

I talked in the last post about how one of the functions of politicians is to act for proxies of us in parliament and we partially select them to make the right decision and judge them on perceived competence. However not all issues are right and wrong and competence isn’t the only the criteria we use to select politicians. The other criteria we use to select politicians is values. We want politicians to support projects which are in accordance with our values and not support projects which are in violation of our values. We are not aware of every current policy or every potential future policy responding to situations that arise but we hope that a politician with the right values will support the right policy. 

There seems to be two main ways that politicians show they share our values. First they highlight which policies they support and explain how this shows they have value X or Y. Second just go straight ahead and tell us what their values are either by saying “I love motherhood and apple pie” or by making judgements on cases “Bob is wrong to steal all the apple pie in the world”.

Values that don’t need selecting for
The odd thing is that most of the time when talking about values politicians talk about values that pretty much everyone has. Everyone thinks that hard work is a good thing. Everyone thinks that the neediest people in society should be helped. Everyone likes families. There is not a rogue politician out there who is trying to outlaw families. Nor is there a politician that thinks poor disabled people should be crapped on.  Politicians and campaigners talk about these values in order to make you think that their opponent does not value this thing. But as soon as you think about this for more than a second and realise that everyone in politics is a human being it is clear that this isn’t the case.

Right wingers don’t want to hurt disabled people. They genuinely think that removing state support in certain cases will help people help themselves. Left wingers don’t think that unemployed people should sit around living off the dole. They genuinely think that removing state support will make people less likely to get a job. Both have arguments to support their case. These issues actually boil down to competency and not values. But more often than not they politicians use them as evidence of their values.

Prioritising values
Aside from a few outliers politicians actually share most of their values. Where they differ is that they value one thing more than another. Whilst everyone likes motherhood and apple pie but not everyone wants to sell their mother for an apple pie. For example it could be argued that they value families more than hard work in their support for a redistributive system that takes money from earners (who work hard) and giving it to families. But no one does say this instead left wingers describe it as them supporting families (and implying or directly saying that right wingers don’t like families). Right wingers describe the same policy as not supporting hard work.

Value questions in politics are all about tradeoffs otherwise they are not value questions but instead competency questions. The two types of questions should be discussed differently. Questions of competence should be answered in a debate on evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Questions of values should be about tradeoffs. They obviously overlap often but the distinction is still important.  

Too often questions which are simply ones of competence are portrayed as ones of values. Other politicians are accused of not valuing the right things when in fact they are simply not achieving what they aimed to achieve. This happens to all governments, policies do not always achieve what they aimed to achieve. Often it is simply a politician being making an incompetent decision and not realising rather than being evil.  Political debate would be so much better off if we realised that rather than continuing the values confusion.

We don’t care but that’s ok: referendums, valence issues and democracy

Philosophical context

Classical political philosophy sets out three types of government, Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy. Monarchy is a government of one person, Aristocracy is a government of less than half of the population and Democracy is a government of more than half of the population. By viewing politics using these terms there are currently no democratic nations (as far as I’m aware). In the UK we have a government of at most a few thousand (Members of the Commons, Members of the Lords, Local authority councillors and judges) or a lower estimate of 22 (Cabinet Ministers) with a total population of around 62 million. We are therefore a semi elected aristocracy (with us electing Local Councillors and Members of the Commons). This system of Government is what caused the political philosopher JJ Rousseau to remark “The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.”

To the modern speaker it sounds appalling that we should be ruled by an aristocracy but that is partly because of how we use the term in modern English and how we use the term democracy. A democracy according to the classical definition would have more than the half the population making the everyday decisions of government not just electing people to make those decisions. This kind of government is actually now more practically possible than it has ever been in the past with smart phones potentially allowing people to make decisions and receive information anywhere at any time. There are two good reasons why a pure democracy is worse system of government than a semi elected aristocracy. Firstly most people don’t know enough to make most decisions but secondly and more importantly most people don’t care.

Most people don’t care about most government decisions
When I say that most people don’t care about government decisions I don’t mean that they don’t care about the outcome. I mean they don’t care about the decision itself. When choosing how much private companies should be allowed to operate NHS services the most popular answer amongst the general public is essentially "I don’t mind as long as the NHS is still good". For most people many of the major issues of politics are valence issues. I believe that people when asked questions on politics are more likely to say they care than they actually do because we view not caring as a negative social trait. Even if this isn’t the case many solid polls show that the most popular opinion (if not the majority opinion) is "whatever works”. It is more important that the government makes the right decision than whatever the decision they take actually is. People want low unemployment more than they care about whether we should cut the deficit or not.

This isn’t a bad thing. Even for a political obsessive like myself there are whole departments of government (DEFRA for one) where I have no opinion on what they should do, just that they should make the right decisions whatever they are. They are important decisions that matter a large amount to interested parties and probably eventually have an effect on my life but that does not mean that I will have an opinion. I care that they get it right and I will support whoever to the best of my knowledge I believe will get it right. Essentially this is one of the main reasons that we elect politicians, to have an opinion on these subjects and to make sure the right decision is made.

If we don’t know and we don’t care when should we get a say
With the justification for the political system outlined above there remains the question of when if ever should we have a referendum. I would say that it is fairly obvious that we shouldn't have a referendum on valence issues because most people don’t care and it makes little sense for them to have a say in them. So the first requirement of a referendum should be that it is something which the general public is interested in and not something that the public are simply interested in it being done right (economic policy would be the perfect example of this). I would contend that voting systems and constitutional structure fit within this bracket. I’ve not seen a poll on this but I am fairly confident that people would be of the opinion that we should have a fair voting system, rather than being of the opinion that we should have first past the post or the alternative vote. Similarly people   want an efficient and accountable local government more than they care if they have an elected mayor or not. The fact that this has been ignored in recent referendums explains the extremely low turnout where they were the only votes happening on those occasions and drastically decreases the importance of the results. I believe that a referendum on reforming the House of Lords would see similar results. There is simply not a good case to make on having a referendum on any of these issues. On the other hand an issue like whether or not to have a death penalty seems to be a good issue to have a referendum upon if the general public are divided over it because it is clearly not a valence issue.

The issue of the European Union is a far less open and shut case. Far more people seem to have an opinion on our relationship with Europe and the “I don’t care as long as it is done right” option though still significant is less dominant. However it is not ideally suited for a referendum. There are many different answers to what we would like our relationship with Europe to be, many of which cannot be achieved simply by changing our countries policy. This means any question that would be difficult to draw up and many of the answers it gives could only have a guiding effect on policy. It is also not a great issue for a referendum because it is very complex. It would be very difficult to ensure that the entire electorate was sufficiently educated about the costs and benefits of the issue. However this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a reason to give control of this decision to elected representatives.  These representatives have to be educated on the issue and in theory if that is possible then it should be possible to educate the general public. In practice I think many MPs are just as ill informed about Europe as a general member of the public.

I think it’s important to look at our general structure of politics before making any decisions about whether or not to hold a referendum and look beyond manifesto commitments or the size of the change to why we elect politicians in the first place.  Just because an issue is important or big does not mean it’s a good issue to have a referendum over. The economy is extremely important but it would be a terrible idea to have a referendum over economic policy.

How do you measure success: reported well being, poverty and GDP

The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project was a scheme piloted across the country with a randomised controlled trial. The scheme essentially gave people advice and support for gaining work and advancing further within that work as well as providing bonuses for getting work, staying in work or advancing further in work. The results from the pilot have been very positive especially among certain groups. It increased earnings even after the scheme was finished. However new research (unfortunately not published yet) has suggested that whilst income increased reported wellbeing decreased. Before seeing this new research I had supported the implementation of the ERA into policy because of its wonderful support in evidence. I hate to be the person that supports evidence based policy but then objects to a bit of evidence that disagrees with a policy they like but I think there is something to be said here. The fact the policy intervention decreased reported well being doesn’t necessarily mean it shouldn’t be implemented. This is something worth looking at beyond just the ERA and fits into the wider GDPvs well being debate. I believe that as things currently stand there are good reasons to argue for reported well being not being the final arbiter of policy. Some of these arguments are applicable to the ERA but some are not due to the fact that there it causes only a small increase in earnings and a very small decrease in reported well being.

Reported well being is not a perfect measure of utility. You might have noticed that I keep saying reported well being instead of simply well being. This is because that’s exactly what it is. It is based on a series of questions asking a person how they feel now and about the future. This method of assessing well being has some support as being an effective measure and is relatively stable. However it doesn’t necessarily represent the overall happiness of the person surveyed. By tweaking the questions slightly you can massively change the results. Whilst there has been some settling on reliable questions to ask this weakness to fiddling provides a hint of the soft nature of the results. As obvious as it sounds it’s worth saying that there is no way of going into someone’s brain and finding out how happy they are. When compared to the study of how having more or less money effects people’s lives this measure looks very weak.

There on the other hand several morally relevant things which we know are strongly linked to a lack of money. We know poverty causes a lower life expectancy, fewer life chances, less life stability and many other things. As far as I have seen the links with reported wellbeing and these things have not been shown to be as strong or as well supported with evidence. It seems reasonable that we should increase want to increase these positive effect even if it does create a decrease in well being. One does not simply overrule the other but there is good reason to say that a small decrease in well being is worth it if there is an increase in these other positive effects. This could be rendered pointless if further research into wellbeing showed a stronger link with life expectancy etc but for now it’s still a point worth considering.

If an intervention is cost saving, like the ERA is in certain groups, then reported wellbeing of those directly effect is not the only relevant wellbeing. The ERA was shown to save the government money because of reduced benefit spending compared to the costs of the program. This means that this money could have been spent on other goods or services (e.g. raising other benefits). Therefore any loss of wellbeing resulting from this intervention would need to be offset against the potential for it to be raised elsewhere. When looking at how to make savings in government a program like this should be obviously preferred over a simple spending cut elsewhere.

How poor is poor: relative poverty and minimum income standards

There is a persistent problem in addressing poverty in developed country. People often cannot agree on where we should draw the line between poverty and an acceptable standard of living. This is one of the core issues behind discussions of redefining poverty, benefit levels and work incentives.  Everyone agrees that people in destitution are in poverty and, asylum seekers aside, our benefit system mostly prevents that. However once we go beyond destitution there can be massive amounts of disagreement about who is experiencing “actual poverty” and consequently who must be helped. Some people view destitution as synonymous with poverty whilst others would say that those who do not have an acceptable standard of living are in poverty.

The Labour government in 2010 introduced the Child Poverty Act which included three definitions of poverty: those who have less than 60% of the median net household income this year, those who have less than 60% of the median household income of a fixed base year, and those who experience material deprivation. These definitions suggest many of the people on the benefits system in poverty, especially those who do not work. This definition flies directly in the face of stories repeatedly reported in large swathes of the mainstream media that benefit claimants have a comparatively high standard of living. It also contradicts many people’s personal experience who report to have lived on lower amounts than the official poverty figures without feeling deprived instead feeling that they “managed to get by”. Whilst some of this reporting can be explained by a time lag (many of those reporting will be looking at the current poverty line and comparing it with earnings which their family had in an earlier period) and rising cost of living, this comment shouldn’t be simply dismissed. If people feel that the level of poverty defined by the government and charities is above what they consider poverty then it may diminish support for action to fight poverty.

This has lead to a large amount of criticism of the relative definition of poverty (60% of the median). The suggestion is that this measures inequality rather than poverty itself. Whilst some of this criticism comes from a misunderstanding of averages confusing the median with the mean, there is a certain amount of truth to this. For example poverty officially fell in the year 2010/11 and this is partly explained by the fact that the median household income fell. This produces the jarring fact that poverty fell whilst standard of living for all involved decreased.  In response the government have proposed to redefine how we measure poverty but none of the measures they have mentioned are decent measures of poverty (I may explain why in another post but it’s too long for this one).

Another approach would be to look at what a person would need and working out the level of income needed to achieve that. This is the approach taken by the JRF in their Minimum Income Standard research which they have just updated today. Their research is based upon focus groups of the wider public looking at what is needed to have an acceptable standard of living. You can see how the budget works out here. As you can see from this it advocates a larger budget than the relative poverty line and a lot more than the level of benefits. It doesn’t measure the bread line as much as it measures the bread, butter and jam line. But looking through the research you can see that by cutting down different budget elements you decrease the overall amount but also gradually decrease the standard of living. It’s also important to remember if you remove elements such as the amount spent on household goods then when these items break (as they do) a family may have to take out a high interest loan to replace or repair them which greatly damages their budgeting.

A breadline isn’t easy to spot from the JRF research. Whilst it’s a great piece of research it doesn’t provide a simple answer to the welfare policy problem (nor does it intend to).  If the benefits system were to provide a standard of living equal to the minimum income standard it would be far more expensive than it currently is. This is the case even if the aim was only to support those on full time minimum wage to that standard. But it does show that what we call poverty at the moment is well below an acceptable standard of living when people are asked to define one. 

Previous work

Until last Friday I worked for the Joint Public Issues Team of the Methodist Church and whilst there I wrote a  series of blog post about public policy. I enjoyed it so much that I started this blog to continue writing on the same kind of issues now in a personal capacity. Here are some links to previous blogs I wrote whilst I was there:

A blog on Universal Credit and the Government's Digital First approach (24/10/11).

A blog on Disabled Living Allowance reform (11/1/12).

A blog the Daily Mail's reporting of material deprivation across Europe (9/2/12).

A blog on Workfare and work experience (24/2/12/).

A blog on worklessness, unemployment, the use of language and disability (26/3/12).

A blog on low turnout at local elections (4/5/12).

Two blogs on David Cameron's proposed changes to the welfare system. One focusing on the propsal to remove housing benefit from those under 25 (26/6/12). One looking at the issue of perverse incentives in the welfare system (27/6/12).

I hope to improve upon what I've written so far and will probably continue to discuss similar topics. However, I will no longer have someone proof reading my work so there may be more grammatical errors from here on out.