The good citizens among us have felt this sense of injustice; if you never felt it then you have been incredibly lucky, or perhaps you are just thick skinned about these things, or maybe you are one of life’s corner cutters, not an easy target. For example, you get a fine and points on your driving license for driving 1 mile per hour over a speed limit, but some reckless driver you have met never drove under a speed limit in their life and boasts they have a clean license. Or, perhaps you always declare all your income and pay your tax on time, but are chased relentlessly for a trivial amount missed by accident, when someone you know does not declare huge amounts they earn, because they got paid in cash. Or, perhaps you are a father from a failed marriage and you pay your child maintenance dutifully, but when you are a little stretched through no fault of your own, you get no latitude; but you know another father who skips most of his payments and always gets away with it.
The problem is target based metrics used to measure success that don’t value the difficulty of the job or its wider impact. It is difficult to ensure value is placed on these two features throughout society, but government has the opportunity to lead by ensuring they are used in the public sector. If they added these two criteria to any metric used to measure public sector performance, I think this would go some considerable way to making many of us feel happier with our society.
August 11, 2009
May 2, 2008
Easy Target
October 31, 2007
October 24, 2007
Unpaid police
Why should the ISPs have to take on an unpaid policing role? It is for government to arrange policing. Laws exist on copyright and patent, but they are not effectively policed by the public sector. I think the ISPs should be paid for checking and again for each infringement they find. Lawyers are also required to act as unpaid police. They must apply money laundering checks to their clients.
The UK government is increasingly making business carry the costs of policing laws. This effectively makes services and products more expensive and is yet another stealth tax. It also makes those products and services less affordable to the lower income members of society and so discriminates against them. However, in principle I like the shift of policing to the private sector, as they will doubtless do a better job of it than the public sector. So to make it work well and discriminate less against the economically poorer members of society, there need to be incentives to catch law breakers. The current approach is to penalise the unpaid enforcer for any failure. If there is some benefit to this kind of work then it should be reflected in compensation for doing it. Payment is also likely to encourage a better enforcement process. The well known carrot and stick approach!
Ultimately we must decide if policing laws should be funded by public taxation or fees applied to those who seek the protection afforded by them. Clearly some enforcement is for the good of us all, where some is only for the good of a few. I would suggest for example that enforcement of fraud laws be publically funded, where copyright of music be privately funded. The latter need not be mandatory, but non-payment = no protection.
Credit Crunch 2
Sadly, I believe that this recession probably has not reached its nadir. I know much evidence suggests it has, but fundamental problems remain that are being masked by the concerted action of governments in the most developed economies i.e. America, UK + Europe, and Japan. Even if recovery is now certain, crunch 2 is already set in motion.
Broadly, the problem was a collapse in confidence in the viability of high debt to income and income to savings ratios in the most developed economies. This was expressed as reduced confidence in the ability of debtors to service their loans. That problem was precipitated by a collapse in confidence in house prices as they reached unsustainable multiples of income in America and later the UK, and then other parts of Europe. That house price situation was mainly enabled by over generous lending criteria and stable low interest rates over a protracted period. At an anthropic level, irrational optimism and competitiveness are the underlying drivers of these problems. At a policy level, governments failed to take into account those human traits to exercise sensible control. At a factual level, it is obvious that no country or individual can continue to increase its debt to income ratio indefinitely, nor should have a high income to savings ratio. However, that is what governments continue to do and allow. Probably most politicians lack sufficient expertise to see and avoid the probelms. Those few that do just hope is to have their moment of glory and money, but be gone when the account has to be settled. This indicates another deep problem, that a system of government by politics is flawed at the most basic level. Government should be run by experts, not by power obsessed self-serving administrators.
Take a look at the video on this useful blog post to see a wise economist explain the debt problem in more detail, as not just a confidence problem, but also an absolute problem. Australian economist Steve Keen explains the problem, and that more trouble is to come.
The Times tell us of Ann Pettifor who also forecast the credit crunch, and also thinks the debt mountain has more trouble in store for us.
So why is the credit crunch yet to revisit us? We need to look at the main tactics being deployed to fix the crisis in confidence; they are low interest rates, public sector spending exceeding revenue, increasing the money supply, deferral of foreclosure on debtors, and direct incentives to spend. The most significant of these is ‘public sector spending exceeding revenue’. This is effectively shifting the balance of the problem from the private sector more to the public sector in the belief that confidence in a larger debtor will be higher. That is a reasonable assumption, but debts must be serviced even by government, and that is funded by taxation, which must then increase in the future. The notion is that as private sector spending slows, public sector spending is increased to help maintain business until private spending recovers. Governments have failed by overusing that tactic, so it needs cautious use. The tactic of ‘reducing interest rates’ is not safe. As we look back at the original problem, sustained low interest rates fuelled the unfounded early confidence that helped lead to high debt to income and income to savings ratios. In addition, low interest rates create compelling disincentives for savings, and low savings levels are part of the root causes of the problem. Further, the increasing retired population partly lives off the interest from its savings, so they will take a less active part in a spending lead recovery and at the margins will be looking for help. The tactic of ‘increasing the money supply’ enables more public sector capital expenditure in the short term, but also increases inflation in the midterm, which erodes the value of savings as welll as debt, further exaggerating the problems of savers stuck on low interest rates. If the problems are not rectified quickly, the tactic of ‘deferral of foreclosure on debtors’ only delays inevitable for many, and buries the remainder in long term debt. Providing ‘direct incentives to spend’ is another disincentive to save and head toward debt, so a lot of this kind of stimulus can also be a bad thing.
In conclusion, I think the wise among us know that moderation in everything is best. We have experienced a period of excess growth and are seeking to diffuse the inevitable correction and return to another period of unsustainable growth with some very strong policies over a short period. It is possible that one strong imbalance can correct another, but the stronger and faster the measures the more tortuous it is to achieve good balance again. I have low confidence that the failed institutions that enabled the problem forged in our human failings have the vision to correct it. I have even less confidence that a system of power obsessed self-serving administrators will ever be effective as government. I expect that even if this situation is rectified in the near term, unless sober experts are appointed to form governments that crunch 2 will one day visit us. On the bigger picture of how we conduct ourselves, perhaps we should question the race back to a hedonistic consumption based life style.