How to tackle the disaster of too much measurement

It is now thirteen years since I confronted a prominent member of Tony Blair's cabinet at a reception about time banks.  When he asked me what I was writing next, I told him I was writing about our over-reliance on numbers.

He looked at me with incomprehension.  "But what else can we do?" he said.

At the time, I thought this just meant that - after 10,000 new central government targets promulgated in the previous four years - I had hit on something important.  I still think I had.  But the question keeps coming back to me.

We know that our increasing reduction of almost everything to numbers, often in the guise of 'evidence' (which it usually isn't), is undermining our ability to control the world around us.  It is hollowing out our knowledge just as it is hollowing out our institutions.  It makes us believe that these human structures are giant, humming machines which can be programmed and left to run our lives, when this is the great utilitarian fantasy that still grips us.

Worst of all, it is beginning to hollow out our language.  When once we knew that a concept like wealth or health were multi-dimensional, whereas the numbers are busily reducing them to pale shadows - meaningless, one-dimensional ghosts of their former selves.

I did write the book.  It was called The Tyranny of Numbers (or The Sum of Our Discontent in the USA), but I have puzzled over the question ever since - what do you do instead?

If you abandon the numbers, then the media will impose them on you.  It is difficult.

But I'm glad to reveal that I now have a very effective ally in this struggle.  The Italian/South African political scientist Lorenzo Fioramonti launched his book How Numbers Rule the World in London yesterday evening.  It is a highly readable challenge to the hegemony of numbers - and it takes the argument further.

Because, as Lorenzo says, that humming machine has now meshed itself into the economic system, with devastating and still uncounted consequences.

So I asked him what we can do about it. He said it is all about reclaiming the idea of governance - realising we can't let these giant number-driven machines take over.  We have to put in the time, very locally, to run them ourselves.

"This is why the public sphere is so important.  All those soft elements of social life, from mutual respect to solidarity, which systematically escape our obsession with measurement, are ultimately much more important than what is integrated into the numerical models driving contemporary governance... Numbers will not save us.  We will need to do it ourselves."

Lorenzo comes at this from a different direction to me.  We do need numbers to check our impressions, to take us by surprise.  But we also need to retain our intuition to check the numbers, if we don't want to sink into a mechanical half-life.

When we believe the league tables and never meet the headteacher - or believe the graphs without asking the people who are being measured - we chip away at the foundations of what makes us human.

But it's difficult.  I remember the chief executive of a well-known charity told me he had repeated the Scottish proverb that I ended my book with ("You don't make sheep any fatter by weighing them") during his annual grant negotiations with the Home Office.

He told me he watched the look of rage and incomprehension spreading over the face of the civil servant in front of him.

That was a decade ago.  I'm not sure that things are any better yet.

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The squeezed middle is now everywhere

I am happy for my old publishers Constable and Robinson that they have agreed to sell themselves to Little, Brown, part of the vast Hachette empire.

Yes, I'm happy.  But put on my other glasses and I can't help seeing another example of the notorious Squeezed Middle emerging.

The news that Quercus is also looking for a buyer, and dark rumours of other difficulties, just go to prove the point.  We don't really need the emergence of Penguin Random House to realise something scary is going on.

These publishing houses retain their old identities.  Constable is even keeping its old offices.  But do we really believe it will be good for publishing, free speech, literature and culture to peer into the not too distant future and see - well, how can I put it...

HarperRandomPenguin Hachette PLC?

Of course, this isn't the fault of the individual publishers, who are responding to over-concentration in the distribution market.

When the competition authorities so forgot themselves as to allow Waterstone's to snap up Ottakar's, and when we shortly afterwards lost their other competitors, they ushered in a period when there were only four ways of buying books.

There is the struggling Waterstone's and the increasingly healthy cadre of local bookshops, but between them they hardly dent the other two ways - the discounted shelves of the supermarkets, which remove the profitable titles which used to support a diverse publishing industry, and the fiercely monopolistic Amazon.

The lesson here is that competition is important, but it has to be defended everywhere.  We need competition authorities which can tell the difference between an innovative new distribution system and an emerging monopoly.

If they don't then the emerging monopolies will be too entrenched to challenge, and we won't be able to read anything challenging to spur us to liberate ourselves.

There is one other important point.  The Squeezed Middle is a phenomenon everywhere.  To be independent, in any industry, you increasingly have to operate on the margins.  In every sector, and in every sector of the population, the middle is disappearing - to be replaced by a tiny and unassailable elite and a vast sprawling, struggling proletariat.

It isn't just publishing, it is all of us.  To find out more, see my book Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis.

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Getting the middle classes to read about themselves - £3 off

My friend and colleague Mark Pack should have been chosen as Lib Dem blogger of the year last year. His posts are always intelligent, always thoughtful and always informed and his Lib Dem Newswire service is a major breakthrough.

And I speak as a Luddite who was editor of Liberal Democrat News in the days when it was produced with copious use of the fax machine.

I even turned on the PM programme yesterday to hear him interviewed about the niceties of blogging about potholes. The world is clearly changing.

I say this partly because it is true, and partly because Mark has written a very kind review of my new book Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis in the latest edition of Lib Dem Newswire. He says this:

"He effortlessly throws numerous provocative points at the reader, so silkily that it is easy to miss how controversial they are.”
I hope he meant this as a compliment. I certainly take it as such. But best of all, he has organised a special £3-off offer on the book.

You need to call 08445 768 122 before the end of the month, quote the code BrokeBoyle (an unfortunate new word, but let’s leave that on one side) – and you can buy the book for £5.99.

I hope the book’s thesis – the possible demise of the middle classes and what can be done about it – will indeed prove controversial. So much so, that I hope readers of this blog write in and remonstrate with me about it...

Don't wait around for the hidden hand - it's you...

I heard a fascinating radio debate on the BBC just before Christmas in the programme The History of Britain in Numbers.  It was between two writers – the green campaigner Andrew Simms and the science journalist Matt Ridley.

Before I go further, I should reveal that Andrew is a friend and his book Cancel the Apocalypse is published in a cheap paperback format this week. He is also right.

But the title of the book gives away why this debate was interesting. Neither Simms nor Ridley could be described as a conventional catastrophist. On the face of it, both believe that human ingenuity will respond and find solutions.

Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist who was also chair of the ill-fated Northern Rock.  This is what he said about the catastrophists:

"But, surely, after many centuries of the pessimists being proved wrong, again and again, we would learn to take their prognostications with a grain of salt. True, we have encountered disasters and tragedies. But the promised Armageddons, the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to life as we know it have consistently failed to materialise. Even the climate threats are now fading."

Ridley is also well-known as the scourge of disaster theories. He lists the disasters predicted which never happened, the unnecessary fear conjured by horrific predictions which never come to pass. But he doesn’t spell out the conclusions to be drawn from that.

So let's spell them out now.  Why don’t most disasters happen? The answer as Matt Ridley implies, or seems to imply, is that the market sorts it all out – provides the necessary technology and behaviour change.  Either that, or there are never any real threats.

Either way, his solution appears to be to do nothing.

But the implication that nobody ever does anything is wrong. The reason that most disasters don’t happen is not because no disaster can happen. It is that people take evasive action – they take precautions. They do something about it before zero-hour. They use their imagination and intelligence.  They steer out of danger.  They defend the nation against dictators.  They salt the roads.

There is a whole set of similar explanations provided by those on the market fundamentalism end of the argument. Why don’t disasters strike? Because people take evasive action.

Why does the environment improve when people’s living standards improve? It doesn’t just happen magically. It improves because people have the economic power to fight for it.

So Ridley needs to look at the underlying causality. The hidden hand of the market is not some alchemical force – it is driven by people, enabled or inspired to act. It is about what they do.  Because, when all is said and done, all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Rational optimists are like an oblivious aristocrat waking up after a storm.  “I told you the tower wouldn’t blow down,” he says, apparently oblivious that his servants have been taking precautions to shore it up.

So don’t believe this stuff about disasters never happening. It isn’t automatic. People get off their bottoms and do something to prevent them; they don’t wait around for the hidden hand.  Everything else is Panglossian.

The real gagging is political self-censorship

I don't often get abused online, but I've been thinking about something hurled at me on Facebook last week about my defence of the Lobbying Bill.  It has made me wonder why I find myself on the opposite side to people who I've got a great deal of time for - and whose judgement I trust (yes, I know, don't tell me - because I got it wrong?).

It is always disturbing when both sides think the other position is dishonest, but don't let's go there again.

Not just that, but I've also been wondering also why some issues get covered by the BBC and mainstream politicians and others don't.

The Lobbying Bill is the exception which proves the rule.  The Labour Party have been dragged into the controversy, and dragged rather reluctantly by 38 Degrees.  Perhaps it isn't surprising that this was reluctant since the Bill builds on the regulations set out by the original law passed by Labour in 2000, and keeps the basic pattern intact.

But otherwise, the political news management by Labour and the Conservatives is pretty powerful.  They keep the set of issues narrow and unimportant, and what is debated on the BBC seems to follow the same pattern.

Then the pollsters come and ask people what issues they believe are the most important, and they dutifully reflect what they have heard.

This is the great weakness of the UK parliamentary system.  It means the really important issues are often ignored, because there is no party advantage, because both parties are equally to blame, or because the opposition finds some aspect of it embarrassing.

Or because something far less important happens to obsess backbenchers.  The fox-hunting bill was debated for hundreds of hours in the run-up to the Iraq War, which meant that the war was never properly debated as it should have been.

I wondered in the last few days why something like the radioactivity leak scare at the Sellafield plant got so little coverage this weekend.  Labour hasn't got anything to say on nuclear energy so the leak is downplayed in the news, though the political implications if it was a leak would have been huge.

In other words, UK politics exists with herds of elephants in the room which nobody wants to discuss.

Which brings me to the US-EU trade negotiations.  They are happening in secret, and the potential consequences are enormous, yet they are barely reported at all.  Here is why they should be:

1.  The Investor State Disputes Settlement aspects of the treaty will allow investors to take legal action, through secret panels outside national judicial systems, which will potentially remove democratic control over environment regulations - for phasing out nuclear power or passing anti-smoking legislation, for example.  It will allow corporates to become the new Luddites, clinging to old patterns and technologies when they are no longer wanted, and give them absolute power over democracies to do so.

2.  If national health services are not explicitly excluded, it would allow foreign corporations to break into services where voters have decided against outsourcing.  I have no problem with private operators running some services, as long as they are held to account by voters - but I don't want our services chopped up and sold off to the lowest bidders by some external regulation.  Yet that seems to be what is on the agenda.

3.  It will extend the very same competition regulations which have rendered the EU single market so unpopular and bureaucratic, so beneficial for the biggest corporates and so expensive for the smallest.

And yet despite this continuing negotiation to hand over democratic sovereignty, there is virtually no discussion, except an occasional dutiful and very dull mention on the BBC.  Meanwhile, strangely for an issue around national sovereignty, UKIP sits on the fence.

If campaigners are really worrying about 'gagging;', perhaps they should think about how we gag ourselves so effectively in UK political debate.  And even without a Gagging Bill...

Ever more dependent on the property bubble

I met up with a banker friend and relative of mine last Friday.  I take him seriously because, back in 2007, he was suggesting that he and I write a book together on the coming collapse of the global banking system.  I didn't - but it did.

This is what he said last week.  If you put bankers in a room trading bonds, and pay them bonuses to encourage them, they will carry on doing it until everything explodes.

This is horribly true.  It is one of the side-effects of bonuses of all kinds, and targets too.  They encourage people to leave their brains and consciences elsewhere.

The tragedy is that, five years on - and despite all the debate, heart-searching and tentative reforms - I am far from sure that the system is any more secure than it was before.

It is more secure against precisely the failures we had then.  Nobody is going to explode the world with subprime mortgage bonds.  But, as we know, history rarely repeats itself precisely.

This is important now and especially for the coalition.  On the face of it, the economy is racing ahead, the jobless totals are falling like a stone, Ed Balls is falling into line on the deficit.  But could the whole thing unravel again, just as before - but this time far more destructively?

We still have those trading floors full of traders lobotomised by bonuses.

We still have banks which are, terrifyingly, too big to fail.

But most of all, we still have a financial system that remains destructively geared to a continuing property bubble.

There are three elements to this, and we need to think about this in the UK particularly, because we are more enslaved to rising property values than almost anywhere else.  Here they are:

1.  Interest rates rise. Last week, unemployment dipped worryingly close to the level where the Bank of England said they would raise interest rates.  They have spun that one differently now, but sometime - probably within the next twelve months - interest rates are going to rise to a more normal level again.  That will mean a huge rise in government debt repayments, but - most important - it will be catastrophic for everyone who bought homes in the last five years in the way they seem to be encouraged to do: with interest rates right up against what they can afford.  It seems likely that property prices will then begin to slide as repossessions begin.

2.  The mortgage market.  When that happens, you have to ask what will happen to all those bonds backed by UK mortgages.  See for example the 2012 story about JP Morgan Chase, which has bet themselves on the safety of UK property prices - and, at that stage, owned 45 per cent of all the UK mortgage-backed bonds which had been put on the market in the previous two and a half years.  By 2012, their CIO outfit owned $100bn of mortgage-backed bonds of the kind that caused all the trouble last time.  They did so on the grounds that UK property was safer than US property...

3.  The money supply.  Politicians are a conservative lot in the UK, and they don't know much about where money comes from.  They rarely understand that about 60 per cent of the money in circulation was created in the form of mortgages (we hardly create any of our money the old-fashioned way any more, as non-interest bearing notes and coins).  If mortgages slow down, so does the money supply.  If the property market shifts on its axis, then the money supply suddenly dries up,

The terrible irony of this is that, despite that, we desperately need property to get less expensive - slowly.

Otherwise there is no way our children will be able to afford homes, or rent them, without selling their souls to financial services for a quarter of a century's indentured servitude.  More on that in my book Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis.

But two interim conclusions.

First, it is ridiculous that the financial system relies on these profitable peculiarities.  We badly need to modernise it, and to give it a fundamental re-think - if we don't want to repeat 2008 every generation or so, and probably more often.  The Australian government has launched a timid inquiry into the financial system, and we need to do the same - with a bit more oompf.

Second, the irony is that the wave of financial regulation in recent years has not tackled the underlying fissures (the ridiculously complicated capital requirements for banks, for example) - but has still managed to apply onerous new requirements to hamstring the small banks, which we rely on to do the basic work of deposit taking and loans.  See fascinating article by former US regulator here.

We have, in short, been going in precisely the wrong direction - undermining the most effective and useful banks but leaving the dodgy causes of the last crisis untouched.

Columbus' lessons for the Somerset Levels

Nearly seven years ago, while I was writing Toward the Setting Sun – a look at the links and rivalry between Columbus, Cabot and Vespucci – I went to Palos de la Frontera, from where Columbus set sail in 1492.

You can stand on the dockside, as he did, but the ocean is now completely out of sight.  It is smallholdings, strawberry farms and scrubby farmland as far as the eye can see.  In the far distance, on a clear day, you can just see the glimmering of the Guadalquivir estuary in the distance.

It is a measure of just how far the water has receded over the past five centuries or so, right across Europe.  Partly because of drainage, partly because of industrialisation, partly because of greater extraction.

I thought about that today when I saw the pasting the Environment Agency was getting because of the flood water in Somerset.

They may be to blame for not dredging the rivers enough, though there are clear disadvantages of doing so.  I don’t know.  I’m not a water engineer.

But what we can say is that it is possible to discern the drift of the politics of climate change, as the water levels rise and the wind and extreme weather begins to take shape.  The first people we will blame, after the transport companies – who will have taken no precautions, as usual – will be the Environment Agency.

If it is their fault at all, then they will share it with the politicians who failed to take evasive action when it was clear what direction the climate was taking, but that is kind of by the way.

The main point I want to make is about history.  We know the shape of our rivers and coasts in previous centuries, and there is no reason why – however much money the Environment Agency might throw at flood prevention – those patterns should not return.

As I say, Columbus sailed from a dock where the sea has entirely disappeared.  The Saxons used to sail ships all the way up the Thames to Oxford.  And the Somerset levels were under water until a few centuries ago – they were drained over a millennium, and it appears they are returning to their previous shape.

Joseph of Arimathea may not have arrived in Glastonbury by ship, as legend suggests, but many other people did.

Similar examples are all over the country.  The beach where William the Conqueror landed and ate the sand is now an inland car park, some miles from the sea.

We may just have to put up with the return of medieval rivers, with flood plains which are used for floods not for building houses on.  Even the crustiest sceptic about the climate change narrative agrees that the temperature is rising. 

There are times when we need to take Carl Jung’s old advice, that we must tackle the things we can change, not waste our energy on the things we can’t, and somehow generate the wisdom to know the difference.  This may be one of those times.