Today in Newspeak

Reading the New Statesman correspondence section (yes, I know…), I came across a letter referring to a leader that had apparently stated that the UK needed an extra one million houses over the next five years is the level to meet present needs. The letter proceeds to explain via a small calculation that the figure is actually four millions over ten years. So far, so good (or not - I really have no idea about the actual figures, the calculation is worded in a way that might suggest that there is some confusion between yearly need and backlog, and I don’t know the source of the numbers used), I don’t mean to dispute the need for extra housing in the UK.

But the reader, after apparently making a call for a strong building program (this is about meeting present “needs”, not fanciful wishes), then adds:

“A damaged economy cannot afford to allocate such a large share of limited resources to housebuilding.”

This left me nonplussed on several levels.

Out and out competition may not be the best management technique...

Via Paul Krugman, via David Atkins, an article about how managing the Sears Group by turning it into small entities that compete against each other is driving it into the ground.

Well, the fantasies about free markets will always remain a wonder. But it's even weirder to think of that as a management technique. I mean, even if you believe that you are in the pure situation where free markets give the optimum social utility (I know, those conditions are never met. But you could believe that you are in a situation that is not far enough from the pure model that the outcome stands -and for some values of "social utility", such situations probably exist), that would not mean that the situation is optimal for the individual actors.

But, surprise, surprise, when you are a company, you are not society as a whole.

It's not the main reason why it fails abysmally of course. I'm just nonplussed because even if you accept all the religion around competition, it should still not make it a sensible management strategy. Especially in retail.

Untangling the covert lobbyists

George Monbiot again, who had previously written in detail about "think tanks", and now comes up with an edifying case.

Think tanks are anything but. I mean, they (most of them at any rate) don't do much thinking -except in terms of thinking about rhetoric. Most of the conclusions are decided in advance, to be creatively justified.
Surprise surprise, even though they do their utmost never to make their funding public, determined investigations will eventually highlight funding by the very groups that the preconceived conclusions would benefit the most.
In essence, they are Public Relations companies. But they are not forced to divulge their clients, and are given much too strong an access to the media, which makes them far more dangerous.

It's high time that they be forced to disclose their sources of funding -and even that would not be sufficient regulation of the sector.
As for me, I'm happy to disclose: so far, no funding ;-)

The Wrong State

George Monbiot has an article you should read.

It is a wonder (OK, maybe I'm using the word rhetorically) that, over the past three decades and a bit, the same political movements that have demanded that governments should get their hands out of the economy (where their involvement is crucial and can be beneficial) have been so sanguine at seeing them obtain increasing powers over their constituents, including their private lives' (where they really have no business interfering) with a total lack of accountability.

That is another way in which this is, in Monbiot's appropriate title, the wrong state. Wrong in what it does, but also in the way that, while abdicating its responsibilities where it should be the main actor, it is grabbing power where it should be absent.

Greg Mankiw at it again...

Greg Mankiw came up with a defense of the top 1% (note: I provide the link because that's the done thing. I don't actually recommend that you follow it...). Many people, such as Dean Baker, Harold Pollack, Paul Krugman and even The Economist take this apart (and this time I do recommend you follow the links), take this apart.

And yet, they are being much too kind.

Greg Mankiw has written an Economics textbook that is very well regarded, and is still the leader in the undergraduate universities market in the US (although Paul Krugman's seemed to be catching up fast). Because of that, a lot of people will like him or, at any rate, not want to appear to have too bad a word for him. Yet there is a point where this becomes enforced blindness.

A telling chart

I tend to recommend that people read what Paul Krugman posts in any case, and indeed I link to his blog, but I thought I'd highlight a graph he published recently there.



And with this incredible record (I do mean incredible. It defies belief), the powers that be keep insisting that we must do more of what they have been demanding for the past, well, 5 years.

The euro will bury us all.

Asymmetric outrage

We live in London, and since yesterday (that would be the 23d of May2013 as I type), there has been little talk but of the recent murder of a soldier in Woolwhich, by two people (OK, they are technically merely suspects at this time but stayed on the scene explaining why they had done it, don’t deny it at all, and have been videotaped. Let’s assume that they did do it).

There has been a lot of comments, too, as is always the case in those internet days. Much of it, alas, on the lines of the scandal that “such people” (clearly meaning Muslims, brown or black, or any combination of those) were in Britain, that they should all be instantly deported.

Maybe mainstream media is no longer able to moderate its own forums (but then what about disabling comments?), though that is an abdication of responsibility. What was in the reports themselves was a deluge of claims that the deceased was an absolute hero (indeed he was sporting a jumper calling for “support for heroes”), and about the savagery of the attacks.