Change is for the better, except when it makes things worse. Blogger recently forced me to migrate this blog from the old platform to New Blogger. The most obvious “improvement” is that all the permalinks for the posts written since I moved are broken if you use Firefox, as I know many of you do. As a result, Firefox users are currently unable to leave comments here; not a major problem I’m sure, but a pain in the arse all the same.
So. For the time being, if you want to leave a comment, either use Internet Explorer or in Firefox, click on the permalink, add “.html” after the URL in the address field and hit “go”, and you should end up at the right place. I think. Failing that, send me an email.
I’ll update you when I have resolved the problem by whatever means necessary.
I haven’t written about Iraq in a while; I think I’ve pretty much said all I want to say on the subject, and anyway events have moved on. We can still argue about whether or not the war was right or wrong, but that seems secondary these days to what we should actually do now. To surge or not to surge? I just don’t know the answer to that question, and although I weakly favour the former I think the question is best left to military strategists.
Anyway, despite all that, I did somehow manage to watch more of Question Time last night than I’d intended. It was an Iraq special, and it was annoying. Depending on your viewpoint certain bits would no doubt stand out as being more annoying than others, but for me the performance of John Bolton deserves comment. The Bush administration’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and a staunch supporter of the Iraq war, he spent the majority of the programme despairing of other people; he was by turns astonished, depressed, or plain old disturbed that there appeared to be a large number of people out there who disagreed with him. This suggested a life so sheltered as to make him wholly unsuited for – but probably representative of – high office. But it was when summing up, when reflecting on the lessons of the Iraq war in general and the policy of pre-emption in particular, that he came up with this peerless gem.
You have to take action against these threats before they become real. It’s no solace to the victims that you can retaliate after. There’s no consequence that can bring back the people who have been killed by these weapons of mass destruction, or the consequence of what happens living under the threat of their use by people like Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad of Iran, Kim Jong Il of North Korea.
Well said, Sir! How ridiculous it is to expect us to just sit around waiting in case some dictator perhaps invades a neighbour, to idly daydream while he may sponsor havoc abroad, to patiently ignore that fact that he might be planning an attack and that innocent people could be killed. No thank you! Much better to remove such uncertainties, to ensure that people are killed, and to guarantee there are is a war, but a war fought on our terms, at a time of our choosing, to at least make sure that the first wave of people killed are either citizens of other nations or merely our own armed forces (that is their job); so we can be certain that those initial victims are at least blown to smithereens by our own sweet bombs of liberty. That’s the way.
By the by, I believe that if you lost 5 inches off the top of John Bolton’s heid it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
There are a few memes doing the rounds at the moment. This one, via Bloggerheads, suggests republishing the post you wrote 4 years ago when the Iraq war started; or at least the post written nearest to that date. So here is my effort.
Welcome Welcome to my Blog. Who knows where we will go from here. It may be funny, it may be serious, it may by entirely devoted to football. It may never get much further than this welcome message. Watch this space and find out.
And believe you me, no one is more surprised than me that here I am still plugging away at this thing, albeit only every so often, when I can be bothered. Unfortunately, as the beady-eyed amongst you may have noticed, that post, while being the first I wrote after the invasion, is clearly also the first one I ever wrote, and is only 2½ years old. On the day war was declared I was busy getting gradually more and more drunk at my sister-in-law’s wedding, and still a good 17 months off starting this blog. For this reason, I am disqualified from taking part in this meme; well that and the fact I haven’t been tagged in the first place.
Nothing new there; I never am, like the last person to be picked for games (who, incidentally, also tended to be me). The other meme I haven’t been volunteered for is that of the “thinking blogger”, or if you will, Thogger. So I am indebted to sbalb for showing the way forward, for declaring that you needn’t be tagged to take up a meme, and that in doing so you can actually subvert and perhaps even gum-up the whole system. Inspired stuff indeed. Sadly, as even sbalb hasn’t tagged me for the Thogger meme, I just don’t feel comfortable in participating in that one either. Rules is rules, after all.
Mmm, I really don’t know where I’m going with this post. I’ve got a horrible feeling that this is just another excuse to write a post with a title that combines a pun with a song, my weapons of choice. To make matters worse, without going to Google, I bet I am far from the first person to have thought “I Meme Mine” was clever and unique and titled a post accordingly. Mind you, it could be worse; I’ll wager “Meme Myself And I” is even more ubiquitous. You know, what with De La Soul being more popular than The Beatles and all.
I’ve said before that I think Harry Hill’s TV Burp is just about the only thing worth watching on ITV these days. Do you watch it? Only wondering, you see, because it seems that the advertising agencies of the nation can’t think anyone does. Over the weekend the ad-break for TV Burp consisted entirely of promotions for other ITV programmes; plenty of Dancing On Ice and Jane Austen, even Elton John’s Birthday Party FFS, but nothing about soap powder or even tea bags. I find it bizarre; when even the lamest programme at any hour on Ftn seems able to fill its breaks with proper adverts I can’t figure out why the best programme on the most popular commercial channel can’t pay its way. Whether it is down to ITV, the advertising agencies, or the lumpen skulls of the great British public I cannot tell.
Presumably Harry Hill has hitherto been subsidised by other areas of ITV’s programming, such as the profits from ITV Play; in which case I think I have found the only reason to lament the station’s demise following the recent scandals over faked phone-ins on TV. If the removal of the channel does coincide with TV Burp’s demise then I may have to rethink my attitude to crap like The Mint.
It is a strange business this whole palaver over the phone-in competitions. I don’t actually see much of a problem with the ITV Play / Quiz Call type of phone-in; calling in for such shows seems such a transparent waste of money that with perhaps a tweak or two I don’t see why they can’t continue to offer a service to those people with more money than sense who really should know better but apparently don’t. On the other hand the Richard & Judy / Saturday Kitchen type incidents, where people were asked to phone in for quizzes they had no chance of winning, is a different matter altogether; words fail, although a word called “fraud” will probably do.
The Blue Peter incident, I think, is especially telling. In that instance, when faced with a technical fault on the competition’s phone lines, the producer continued to allow calls to be accepted and charged for and roped in a child who was on a studio visit to pretend to phone in and so “win” the prize, maintaining the appearance of a genuine phone-in. Astonishing behaviour indeed; you or I, if put in the producer’s shoes, would no doubt just apologise for the fault and cancel the phone-in. That the real life TV producers didn’t do this, and that they seemingly didn’t consider there to be anything wrong and/or illegal in taking the action they took, I think shows how so much of television is artifice in the first place; that producers and programme makers so routinely twist and bend the dull truth into a convenient and palatable reality that it didn’t occur to them that they were overstepping the line on this occasion.
But I think the real shocker here is that this is not the first of Blue Peter’s deceptions. On a news story last week it was revealed that in the ‘sixties the original pet dog Petra died after a few days and was secretly replaced with another puppy without informing the viewers. This came as a body blow to me. I remember that when Petra (or should that be the replacement Petra) died Blue Peter informed viewers that they could send off for a free colour photograph of the dog, and for some reason my parents insisted I write in. Eventually we received our photo, only it was in black and white, not colour, and with a note attached apologising and explaining that they had run out of colour prints. Run out? How odd it seems in this day and age; when digital photos can be printed on demand it sounds a poor excuse to say you just “ran out” of colour photos. But even at the time; what happened to the original colour negative? Did someone stand on it? Did they just print a load off and chuck the negative in the bin? Surely they could have gone down to SupaSnaps and got a few more printed off, even in the ‘seventies? But apparently not.
Anyway, I can now clearly see that the upshot of the whole tawdry affair is that I ended up with a substandard photo of an impostor I didn’t even care for in the first place. I liked Shep.
I had been wondering, you see, how little seems to annoy economists more than when boneheaded thickos like me refuse to unreservedly accept that the minimum wage is a bad policy that costs jobs. Why can’t the public get it into their daft heads and just accept that the policy is flawed because real economists instinctively oppose it?
This assumption, of economists’ antagonism towards the minimum wage, took a bit of a hit when over 650 of them – including some prominent names – signed this declaration that argued in favour of just such a policy in the US, stating that “a modest increase in the minimum wage would improve the well-being of low-wage workers and would not have the adverse effects that critics have claimed” and that “the weight of the evidence suggests that modest increases in the minimum wage have had very little or no effect on employment”. So much then for the economists’ consensus.
Of course, this was still mocked by opponents of the minimum wage. Café Hayek inducted all those who had signed the declaration into their “Hall of Shame”, stated that the signatories must “believe that demand curves are vertical”, and asked, “how can you sign your name to something like that and call yourself an economist?” That, I guess, is how you maintain a consensus; by cutting adrift and blanking out those who disagree with you.
Now it is a good line of Café Hayek’s, saying that these rogue economists believing in a vertical demand curve, but I think you can get too hung up on such details. I remember being told about the unemployment effects that can be caused by the minimum wage when I studied for my degree, and it certainly makes sense. If memory serves, the diagram explaining it goes something like this.
And before the minimum wage was introduced in the UK I myself cautioned against it, flaunting the meagre economics knowledge I had gained from my shiny new BSc on the subject (many years ago; now my 2:2 looks old, tired and tarnished, and I don’t know where you can buy Duraglit these days).
But surely you don’t need knowledge of economics to see the harm that a minimum wage can do? You can forget curves and their angles; at its heart the idea is simple. An increase in the minimum wage means an increase in costs for any business that employs people on the minimum wage. Businesses have to deal with that. They may absorb it from their profits; they may pass the increased costs onto their customers in the form of higher prices; but some may seek to cut costs as a consequence of the increase in their wage bill, and one way to cut costs is to lay off staff (or reduce their hours). In addition, for some firms an increase in the minimum wage, and so costs, may be the difference between just staying in business and going bust. True, such companies are likely to be in a pretty precarious financial position as it is, and just as likely to go bump with the next strong gust of wind; but still and all, the inevitable consequence of a minimum wage is that some people may lose their jobs.
But why single out the minimum wage for such criticism? If you want to rail against the minimum wage, why not rail against anything that imposes costs on companies? Health and safety laws for example, not just the frivolous kind that make the front page of the Daily Mail, but any such intervention that puts helmets on builders’ heads or prevents lorry drivers from mimicking a single-crewed Le Mans race while on the road? Or interests rates? Perhaps we should never raise interest rates because that too can cause problems for business and increase their costs? We should never raise interest rates, for whatever reasons. Or increase taxes under any circumstances whatsoever. I don’t know what we should do when commodity prices rise, but we had better think of something soon.
Of course we can’t do much about the price of commodities on a global market, so business will just have to deal with that. And taxes, and H&S laws? Well again, they are clearly needed at some level, so we must grin and bear them too. Interest rates? Well, obviously, they may have to rise at times, for the greater good, to control inflation or whatnot, as long as they are raised at a careful and sensible level, as long as we don’t go mad and quadruple them overnight. But can’t the same apply to the minimum wage, if it is introduced or raised at a sensible rate? I see loads of adverts in shops and pubs near where I live advertising for staff at the minimum wage, not a penny more. They don’t seem to be looking at redundancies, quite the opposite, and God knows what they would be offering if they weren’t forced to pay more. Can’t the minimum wage be seen in the same light as health and safety, tax and interests rate rises, as something that may need to be done to protect certain parts of our society even if it can also have some negative effects?
Great if you are the one getting the pay rise, it could be said, not so great if you are the unfortunate one losing your job in society’s reshuffle as it digests the increase in labour costs. And it is true, for every action there can be an equal and opposite reaction, and unintended consequences too. But for me, I would take this criticism of the minimum wage more seriously if those making this point and shedding tears for the losers from a minimum wage didn’t tend to find their tears drying up when discussing the jobs similarly lost through offshoreing and globalisation, through industry consolidation and productivity drives, or any other form of profit chasing that can cause job losses. If you think a policy is justified then you think it is justified, in spite of the negatives consequences (just as long as those negatives don’t outweight the positives).
But need there be job losses because of a rise in the minimum wage? Not if you think that the demand for labour is vertical, ha ha. Unfortunately for Café Hayek, their opponents who signed that statement in favour of a minimum wage rise don’t believe this either. They clearly state that a rise in the wage will have “very little or no effect on unemployment”; so they accept the possibility of job losses. Even then, though, I have to ask; how do you view economic models? Are they precise, are they definite, are demand curves perfect sloping lines you can fix a point upon to show the impact of policy decisions? I’m not an economist so I wouldn’t really know, but I say not.
Take the Laffer curve, the theory that states that a cut in the tax rate can lead to an increase in taxation revenue. It is often denounced as a “back of the envelope” theory that cannot be proven, but really it is an accurate truism. At a 0% tax rate there is clearly no tax revenue, while at a 100% tax rate there is still no revenue because everyone will bugger off to a more benevolent country with a generous 99% tax rate. Between these two zeros there must be some sort of curve of tax revenue that rises then falls as the tax rate increases. If you are the right side of the apex of the curve then in theory you can cut tax and still see an increase in revenue. This is no good for policy making – no one knows how the curve is drawn, or where we are upon it – but as an insight into how things work I think it is useful.
And I think the same holds true for demand curves. Of course they slope down, and that is good to know. More people will want to employ me if I say I will work for £1 an hour than if I want £100 an hour. An employer who may be happy to employ me for £1 may tell me where to go if I demand £5.52. So the minimum wage is bad and causes unemployment, no?
But what of the demand curve for Rolls Royce cars? Is that vertical? No, it too clearly slopes down. Demand for a Rolls Royce at £15bn a car? Nil. For £15? Loads. But; taking the current price of a Rolls Royce (which I confess I just don’t know, I’m really not in the market for one), would demand fall if the price rose by 1p – a “modest increase”, as the signatories of the pro- minimum wage statement ask for? No it wouldn’t. What about £1. Clearly not. £100? Unlikely. £1000? I still doubt buyers of new Rolls Royce’s would even blink at such a price rise. £10,000? Now you’re talking, probably. A £10,000 increase in the price of a Roller would hit demand for the vehicle, so the demand curve for the things does slope downwards, it isn’t vertical; but that doesn’t mean that any price rise will cause a reduction in demand. Actually, I don’t know why I picked such a strange example. What about something simpler, more down to earth like a Mars bar. Will demand for them fall if the price rises by 1 or 2p? Will it balls, but economic theory suggests it will. In short, theory suggests that as price rises, demand falls; in practice, price often can rise with nish effect on demand, especially if such a rise is in line with inflation. I think the demand curve, like the Laffer curve, should be viewed as a general illustration of how economics works rather than as a precise analytical tool, or a blunt ideological instrument of scientific fact.
So we’re agreed are we; that a minimum wage needn’t be opposed in principle, it can be accepted as a necessary tool in the policy makers’ toolbox even if, like other elements of policy it can have some undesirable effects, and it may not even cause these side effects anyway? Good. But in reality, is it the best way to help the poor and the low-paid? Ah, well, that is a different question altogether.
The Obscurer 