INDIA IPPON DESU
Sunday, September 29, 2024
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Don't get into a Box by Amit Verma
Two whole weeks have passed since my last newsletter post, which is unlike the pace I’ve tried to set this year of multiple posts a week. It’s been crazy busy. Last week, I recorded five episodes of Everything is Everything with my co-host Ajay Shah. This week, I recorded three episodes of The Seen and the Unseen. I was jumping from panic prep to panic prep.
In this post, I want to share with you a discussion Ajay and I had about the direction of our show. It stemmed from a disagreement about what the show should be — but we resolved it, and he was enthusiastic when I said I wanted to share our thought process here. We want you inside our black box.
But first, I want to talk about something that has become foundational to my thinking, and was germane to our disagreement. I believe that creators should never put themselves in a box — we have endless possibilities open to us, and we should remain open to them.
I spoke about this a bit in my intro to Seen/Unseen episode 372 with Manjula Padmanabhan — but let me elaborate here anyway.
Evil Box 1: The Box of Expectation
The first way we can box ourselves in is by shaping ourselves through the expectations of others. (The Looking-Glass Self is one good frame to use while thinking about this.) What happens sometimes is that we get an early success with something we do. The validation is so sweet that we continue doing more and more of that. Without our realising it, it becomes a trap.
For example, a band could have an early hit with an early song or album. They are then expected to perform it at every concert. They are expected to create more music like it. Your fans see you as one thing. Staying that one thing can bring you continued success. But what if your tastes and influences are growing, and you want to evolve as an artist?
Must you spend a lifetime performing covers of your old hits and pretending to be an earlier version of yourself?
Trying to break out of a box is dangerous. Consider Bob Dylan — to many, he is known for his early hits like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'". They were written and released when he was in an early folk-inspired phase, and they were acoustic. Shortly after these recordings, he decided to turn electric, and the outrage was immediate. He had broken out of his box — and thank goodness for us he did. “Like a Rolling Stone” and a lifetime of masterpieces emerged from his decision.
The Beatles made a similar turn when they stopped performing live and changed their musical direction. It is a long and winding road from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Or consider the journey Mark Lanegan made from “Halo of Ashes” to “I'm Not the Loving Kind.” (I love both songs!) In fact, before we move on to my next point, check out this song!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqhJYScDw9k
The Pinkness of Jaipur
In 1876, Jaipur was painted pink to welcome the arrival of Prince Albert to the city. (Don’t ask me why; it just was!) Since then, it became known as ‘The Pink City.’ And this became a self-fulfilling title. People came to Jaipur expecting Pinkness, and more and more buildings, especially in the touristy part of the city, were painted pink.
I sometimes think about how this is a great metaphor for the box of expectations. (I spoke about it at length in this episode.) The branding of Jaipur — and its self-image, if cities can be said to have a self-image — led to path-dependence. Pinkness was normalised and became the norm — and even a rebellion against it could not escape it, because rebellions are defined by what they’re a rebellion against.
Similarly, if a young teenage girl in a conservative family is told that girls should smile more, will that forced smiling become part of her pinkness? If a teenage boy is praised for doing something macho, will toxic masculinity become his pinkness? If a particular view you express on social media gets you validation from a particular tribe, will you sacrifice nuance for the further approval of that tribe? Will dogmatic thinking become your pinkness?
Do you have a pinkness? You contain multitudes. Are some of them suppressed because you’ve put yourself in a box?
Evil Box 2: The Box of Form
The other box to beware of is the box of form. There are two aspects to this.
One, we grow up with notions of how there is a heirarchy of artistic expressions, and some forms are higher than the other. When I grew up, I believed that a book was the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, and I haven’t arrived until I write one. Today I know that with exploding possibilities, many other forms have equal value. Newsletters and blog posts create a flow of content that may be more valuable than a stock of content like a book. Even a longform podcast like Seen/Unseen can be a more effective means of intellectual enquiry than a book.
If you’re a creative person, you’re creative in any context. Don’t restrict yourself to one.
Two, there are forms within the arts that are restrictive by definition. For example, how many musicians have railed against the convention of the three-minute pop song or the 40-minute album? How many writers have looked at the 800-word limit of newspaper op-eds and thought, ‘But I have more (or less) to say’? How many filmmakers have lamented that they can either make a short film or a feature film, but nothing in between?
All those restrictions came about because of physical restrictions of the past that no longer exist. (For example, the convention for how long an album should be came about because of how much audio an LP could hold.) But today, we have the means of production in our hand, technology has removed these restrcitions, and we no longer have to stick to these ossified forms. We don’t realise this often enough. A songwriter’s brain may reflexively fit itself to a three-minute groove — but you don’t need to do that!
So avoid imprisoning yourself into any of these boxes. The world is full of possibilities. Sit back and think about them!
Is Everything Everything?
And now, as promised, I come to Everything is Everything. When I first thought of the show, I conceptualised it as Ajay and me just sitting and talking about whatever we felt like, whatever was on our minds, and applying different frames to it. Thus the title.
Once we got going, though, two things happened. One, we typically shoot five episodes at a go, so the possibility of being topical gets reduced. Two, because of the pressure of finding things to talk about for five episodes, we have often taken the easy option of picking something one of us knows a lot about. Ajay’s led episodes on subjects he knows deeply like UNIX, Ukraine, Oppenheimer, finance, Bruce Springsteen, the military, family firms and hiking. I’ve led episodes on pet themes like poker, productivity, cricket, statism, public choice theory, great liberal thinkers and agriculture.
The original idea of the show, however, was not for each episode to be an authoritative deep dive. It was for us to have casual conversations about whatever was on our mind, topical or otherwise. We’ve done a few episodes like this, of which the one on Declutter is a favourite of mine. We took up a subject none of us had thought about deeply, and riffed. I think it was a lovely conversation. We also did some storytelling episodes, all of which I love! Just imagination, creativity, thinking aloud. Check them out: Seven Stories That Should Be Films. The Reformers. Five Epic Stories That Must Be Films.
I made the following argument to Ajay: We should do more episodes that are freewheeling conversations. Every episode does not have to be an authoritative deep dive on something we have thought about for years. We will run out of that anyway. Fans of the show like the chemistry, the occasional collision of our different points of view, and most of all, they just like hanging with us.
Ajay had two counters to this. One, he felt uncomfortable talking about something he does not know inside-out. He is sick of so-called experts mouthing off on subjects outside their range of expertise. He doesn’t want to do that.
My response to that was that we don’t have to sound authoritative on subjects we don’t know well. We share our thought processes, our instincts and opinions, our journeys towards understanding something. We stay authentic, even in our uncertainties. No one is going to mistake that for the last word on the subject, and regular viewers will account for our inclinations and biases.
Ajay’s second counter was on the seemingly narrow subject of episode titles. When a viewer sees a title like ‘The Beauty of Finance’, she knows exacly what the episode is about. Not so when you see a title like ‘Halfway From Coal, Halfway to Diamond.’ Is that less of a reason to click?
I had two responses to this. One, regular viewers will hopefully binge everything anyway, and the subject is less important than the different frames we bring to whatever we talk about. Two, we had agreed to just be authentic to ourselves and not worry about what people want. Thinking too hard about the title is thinking too hard about the viewer. We should just focus on the kind of work we wanted to do.
We’ve already done many episodes of both kinds, and will continue doing so. But I think I got Ajay to agree to loosen up. (Or rather, we did, as the rest of the team, Nomsita and Vaishnav, also wanted a looser Ajay!) The next five episodes you will see (eps 40 to 44) were shot after our discussion.
Let me know in the comments here what you think of our discussion!
Meanwhile, here’s our latest episode, released yesterday but recorded in February, which is more the freewheeling kind.
In this post, I want to share with you a discussion Ajay and I had about the direction of our show. It stemmed from a disagreement about what the show should be — but we resolved it, and he was enthusiastic when I said I wanted to share our thought process here. We want you inside our black box.
But first, I want to talk about something that has become foundational to my thinking, and was germane to our disagreement. I believe that creators should never put themselves in a box — we have endless possibilities open to us, and we should remain open to them.
I spoke about this a bit in my intro to Seen/Unseen episode 372 with Manjula Padmanabhan — but let me elaborate here anyway.
Evil Box 1: The Box of Expectation
The first way we can box ourselves in is by shaping ourselves through the expectations of others. (The Looking-Glass Self is one good frame to use while thinking about this.) What happens sometimes is that we get an early success with something we do. The validation is so sweet that we continue doing more and more of that. Without our realising it, it becomes a trap.
For example, a band could have an early hit with an early song or album. They are then expected to perform it at every concert. They are expected to create more music like it. Your fans see you as one thing. Staying that one thing can bring you continued success. But what if your tastes and influences are growing, and you want to evolve as an artist?
Must you spend a lifetime performing covers of your old hits and pretending to be an earlier version of yourself?
Trying to break out of a box is dangerous. Consider Bob Dylan — to many, he is known for his early hits like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'". They were written and released when he was in an early folk-inspired phase, and they were acoustic. Shortly after these recordings, he decided to turn electric, and the outrage was immediate. He had broken out of his box — and thank goodness for us he did. “Like a Rolling Stone” and a lifetime of masterpieces emerged from his decision.
The Beatles made a similar turn when they stopped performing live and changed their musical direction. It is a long and winding road from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Or consider the journey Mark Lanegan made from “Halo of Ashes” to “I'm Not the Loving Kind.” (I love both songs!) In fact, before we move on to my next point, check out this song!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqhJYScDw9k
The Pinkness of Jaipur
In 1876, Jaipur was painted pink to welcome the arrival of Prince Albert to the city. (Don’t ask me why; it just was!) Since then, it became known as ‘The Pink City.’ And this became a self-fulfilling title. People came to Jaipur expecting Pinkness, and more and more buildings, especially in the touristy part of the city, were painted pink.
I sometimes think about how this is a great metaphor for the box of expectations. (I spoke about it at length in this episode.) The branding of Jaipur — and its self-image, if cities can be said to have a self-image — led to path-dependence. Pinkness was normalised and became the norm — and even a rebellion against it could not escape it, because rebellions are defined by what they’re a rebellion against.
Similarly, if a young teenage girl in a conservative family is told that girls should smile more, will that forced smiling become part of her pinkness? If a teenage boy is praised for doing something macho, will toxic masculinity become his pinkness? If a particular view you express on social media gets you validation from a particular tribe, will you sacrifice nuance for the further approval of that tribe? Will dogmatic thinking become your pinkness?
Do you have a pinkness? You contain multitudes. Are some of them suppressed because you’ve put yourself in a box?
Evil Box 2: The Box of Form
The other box to beware of is the box of form. There are two aspects to this.
One, we grow up with notions of how there is a heirarchy of artistic expressions, and some forms are higher than the other. When I grew up, I believed that a book was the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, and I haven’t arrived until I write one. Today I know that with exploding possibilities, many other forms have equal value. Newsletters and blog posts create a flow of content that may be more valuable than a stock of content like a book. Even a longform podcast like Seen/Unseen can be a more effective means of intellectual enquiry than a book.
If you’re a creative person, you’re creative in any context. Don’t restrict yourself to one.
Two, there are forms within the arts that are restrictive by definition. For example, how many musicians have railed against the convention of the three-minute pop song or the 40-minute album? How many writers have looked at the 800-word limit of newspaper op-eds and thought, ‘But I have more (or less) to say’? How many filmmakers have lamented that they can either make a short film or a feature film, but nothing in between?
All those restrictions came about because of physical restrictions of the past that no longer exist. (For example, the convention for how long an album should be came about because of how much audio an LP could hold.) But today, we have the means of production in our hand, technology has removed these restrcitions, and we no longer have to stick to these ossified forms. We don’t realise this often enough. A songwriter’s brain may reflexively fit itself to a three-minute groove — but you don’t need to do that!
So avoid imprisoning yourself into any of these boxes. The world is full of possibilities. Sit back and think about them!
Is Everything Everything?
And now, as promised, I come to Everything is Everything. When I first thought of the show, I conceptualised it as Ajay and me just sitting and talking about whatever we felt like, whatever was on our minds, and applying different frames to it. Thus the title.
Once we got going, though, two things happened. One, we typically shoot five episodes at a go, so the possibility of being topical gets reduced. Two, because of the pressure of finding things to talk about for five episodes, we have often taken the easy option of picking something one of us knows a lot about. Ajay’s led episodes on subjects he knows deeply like UNIX, Ukraine, Oppenheimer, finance, Bruce Springsteen, the military, family firms and hiking. I’ve led episodes on pet themes like poker, productivity, cricket, statism, public choice theory, great liberal thinkers and agriculture.
The original idea of the show, however, was not for each episode to be an authoritative deep dive. It was for us to have casual conversations about whatever was on our mind, topical or otherwise. We’ve done a few episodes like this, of which the one on Declutter is a favourite of mine. We took up a subject none of us had thought about deeply, and riffed. I think it was a lovely conversation. We also did some storytelling episodes, all of which I love! Just imagination, creativity, thinking aloud. Check them out: Seven Stories That Should Be Films. The Reformers. Five Epic Stories That Must Be Films.
I made the following argument to Ajay: We should do more episodes that are freewheeling conversations. Every episode does not have to be an authoritative deep dive on something we have thought about for years. We will run out of that anyway. Fans of the show like the chemistry, the occasional collision of our different points of view, and most of all, they just like hanging with us.
Ajay had two counters to this. One, he felt uncomfortable talking about something he does not know inside-out. He is sick of so-called experts mouthing off on subjects outside their range of expertise. He doesn’t want to do that.
My response to that was that we don’t have to sound authoritative on subjects we don’t know well. We share our thought processes, our instincts and opinions, our journeys towards understanding something. We stay authentic, even in our uncertainties. No one is going to mistake that for the last word on the subject, and regular viewers will account for our inclinations and biases.
Ajay’s second counter was on the seemingly narrow subject of episode titles. When a viewer sees a title like ‘The Beauty of Finance’, she knows exacly what the episode is about. Not so when you see a title like ‘Halfway From Coal, Halfway to Diamond.’ Is that less of a reason to click?
I had two responses to this. One, regular viewers will hopefully binge everything anyway, and the subject is less important than the different frames we bring to whatever we talk about. Two, we had agreed to just be authentic to ourselves and not worry about what people want. Thinking too hard about the title is thinking too hard about the viewer. We should just focus on the kind of work we wanted to do.
We’ve already done many episodes of both kinds, and will continue doing so. But I think I got Ajay to agree to loosen up. (Or rather, we did, as the rest of the team, Nomsita and Vaishnav, also wanted a looser Ajay!) The next five episodes you will see (eps 40 to 44) were shot after our discussion.
Let me know in the comments here what you think of our discussion!
Meanwhile, here’s our latest episode, released yesterday but recorded in February, which is more the freewheeling kind.
Friday, September 27, 2024
Bad service is a sign of a better world
I’ve been hearing more grumbling about bad service in restaurants than usual, bundled with a growing nostalgia for when service was “better”. This could, of course, be simply a sign that my cohort and I continue to rise in age, but let’s put aside healthy skepticism for a moment and accept this observation at face value. What if service in restaurants, hospitality, etc is, in fact, lower in quality than it was one or two decades ago? I would like to suggest that this is a good sign of improving times.
In 1930, 1 in 20 households had servants in their home. “If the poorest households are excluded from the statistics, the percentage of homes with servants increases dramatically, as indicated by 1930–1931 studies of urban, college-educated homemakers, or middle-class families, from 20 to 25 percent of which had a servant” (Palmer 2010). By 1950 these numbers were cut in half and they’ve plummeted since. Imagine a elderly couple who had raised children with full-time, possibly live-in, servants have since grown to watch their children marry and have children of their own. They go out to enjoy a family meal in 1975, doting over their grandchildren while oh-so-subtly critiquing the parenting technique of their sons- and daughter-in-laws. When you see them in your mind’s eye, are they happy with the restaurant’s service? Is there anything a server or manager can do that can possibily compete with the level of service they enjoyed in their parenting and prime earning years?
I suspect that you are envisioning something similar to myself: a Karen, indefatiguable in her complaining, a gray-haired husband encouraged to leave an outrageously low tip. They enjoyed service at the level of employer and boarder, in a social construct that we would today frame as a remnant of an outdated class system. You may be annoyed that no one has refilled your water glass in 10 minutes, that the menu is a QR code, that you are expected to exceed 20% in your tip. Your disappointment, however, is positively quaint when compared to the dropoff relative to what a significant portion of the population was wholly accustomed to even 2 generations ago.
These entitled complainers that you absolutely cannot empathize with? The mechanism behind their comtemptible behavior is the same that leads you to tip 18% before leaving the Cheesecake Factory in a huff. The world has moved on, gotten better, and brought Baumol’s inescapable cost disease with it. The time and attention of humans is more expensive than ever. The pandemic brought with it a shock to the hospitality labor market that is still rippling today. A lot of people learned about the market value of their labor and those that got out first have reported that life is often better on the other side, that the pay was better than expected and their work involved immeasurably fewer misogynistic sad dads and spiraling white wine Karens. Wages have of course adjusted, but so has employment. I don’t have the data in front me, but anecdotally I’m seeing fewer hosts and table bussers, more tops per server, more lunch shifts stretched across an assistant manager and server duo. That means less service on average with a higher variance in quality.
Which is fantastic. The world is getter better and people’s time and energy are more valuable for it. Should restaurants find that the balance of profit margins increases faster with quality of food rather than service, all the better. Temporary parasocial relationships are right up there with big houses and fast cars for me: overrated traps that siphon away household resources from the things that actually matter. The ribeye served with a smile over clean linen is fine, but it’s got nothing on tacos uncermoniously dropped on a plastic table you can afford to share with someone you love.
In 1930, 1 in 20 households had servants in their home. “If the poorest households are excluded from the statistics, the percentage of homes with servants increases dramatically, as indicated by 1930–1931 studies of urban, college-educated homemakers, or middle-class families, from 20 to 25 percent of which had a servant” (Palmer 2010). By 1950 these numbers were cut in half and they’ve plummeted since. Imagine a elderly couple who had raised children with full-time, possibly live-in, servants have since grown to watch their children marry and have children of their own. They go out to enjoy a family meal in 1975, doting over their grandchildren while oh-so-subtly critiquing the parenting technique of their sons- and daughter-in-laws. When you see them in your mind’s eye, are they happy with the restaurant’s service? Is there anything a server or manager can do that can possibily compete with the level of service they enjoyed in their parenting and prime earning years?
I suspect that you are envisioning something similar to myself: a Karen, indefatiguable in her complaining, a gray-haired husband encouraged to leave an outrageously low tip. They enjoyed service at the level of employer and boarder, in a social construct that we would today frame as a remnant of an outdated class system. You may be annoyed that no one has refilled your water glass in 10 minutes, that the menu is a QR code, that you are expected to exceed 20% in your tip. Your disappointment, however, is positively quaint when compared to the dropoff relative to what a significant portion of the population was wholly accustomed to even 2 generations ago.
These entitled complainers that you absolutely cannot empathize with? The mechanism behind their comtemptible behavior is the same that leads you to tip 18% before leaving the Cheesecake Factory in a huff. The world has moved on, gotten better, and brought Baumol’s inescapable cost disease with it. The time and attention of humans is more expensive than ever. The pandemic brought with it a shock to the hospitality labor market that is still rippling today. A lot of people learned about the market value of their labor and those that got out first have reported that life is often better on the other side, that the pay was better than expected and their work involved immeasurably fewer misogynistic sad dads and spiraling white wine Karens. Wages have of course adjusted, but so has employment. I don’t have the data in front me, but anecdotally I’m seeing fewer hosts and table bussers, more tops per server, more lunch shifts stretched across an assistant manager and server duo. That means less service on average with a higher variance in quality.
Which is fantastic. The world is getter better and people’s time and energy are more valuable for it. Should restaurants find that the balance of profit margins increases faster with quality of food rather than service, all the better. Temporary parasocial relationships are right up there with big houses and fast cars for me: overrated traps that siphon away household resources from the things that actually matter. The ribeye served with a smile over clean linen is fine, but it’s got nothing on tacos uncermoniously dropped on a plastic table you can afford to share with someone you love.
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Why Britain has stagnated
Foundations
Why Britain has stagnated
Setting the scene
Here are some facts to set the scene about the state of the British economy.
Between 2004 and 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the industrial price of energy tripled in nominal terms, or doubled relative to consumer prices. With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families
. Per capita electricity generation in the UK is just two thirds of what it is in France (4,800 kilowatt-hours per year in Britain versus 7,300 kilowatt-hours per year in France) and barely over a third of what it is in the United States (12,672 kilowatt-hours per year). We are closer to developing countries like Brazil and South Africa in terms of per capita electricity output than we are to Germany, China, Japan, Sweden, or Canada.
Britain’s last nuclear power plant was built between 1987 and 1995. Its next one, Hinkley Point C, is between four and six times more costly per megawatt of capacity than South Korean nuclear power plants, and four times as expensive as those that South Korea’s KEPCO has agreed to build in Czechia.
Tram projects in Britain are two and a half times more expensive than French projects on a per mile basis. In the last 25 years, France has built 21 tramways in different cities, including cities with populations of just 150,000, equivalent to Lincoln or Carlisle. The UK has still not managed to build a tramway in Leeds, the largest city in Europe without mass transit, with a population of nearly 800,000.
At £396 million, each mile of HS2 will cost more than four times more than each mile of the Naples to Bari high speed line. It will be more than eight times more expensive per mile than France’s high speed link between Tours and Bordeaux.
Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992. Since then, Britain’s population has grown by 10 million.
Despite huge and rising demand, Heathrow annual flight numbers have been almost completely flat since 2000. Annual passenger numbers have risen by 10 million because planes have become larger, but this still compares poorly to the 22 million added at Amsterdam’s Schiphol and the 15 million added at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle. The right to take off and land at Heathrow once per week is worth tens of millions of pounds.
The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
These are not just disconnected observations. They highlight the most important economic fact about modern Britain: that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues.
Everyone reading this will already be aware of the country’s present economic sclerosis. Real wage growth has been flat for 16 years. Average weekly wages are only 0.8 percent higher today than their previous peak in 2008. Annual real wages are 6.9 percent lower for the median full-time worker today than they were in 2008. This essay argues that Britain’s economy has stagnated for a fundamentally simple reason: because it has banned the investment in housing, transport and energy that it most vitally needs. Britain has denied its economy the foundations it needs to grow on.
From 2010 to the summer of 2024, Britain was run by Conservative-led or Conservative Governments. The Conservatives are the traditional party of business, and in the 1930s and 1980s they pushed through reform programmes that successfully renewed Britain’s economy. Virtually any Conservative minister from the past fourteen years would speak warmly about that heritage if asked, and would express the hope of being its inheritor. And yet, with honourable exceptions, the governments of the last fourteen years failed in this vocation. Failing systems remained unreformed, continuing to stifle Britain’s prosperity. Today Britain is ruled by a Labour Government that recognises this failure to build, and which has articulated high ambitions for changing this. But it remains doubtful that they will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were.
Constitutionally, British governments have immense power. How has a series of governments with both the will and the means to deliver systemic reform failed to do so? How can it be that the overwhelming experience reported by former ministers and advisors is one of disempowerment – of a ‘blob’ operating beyond their control, of pulling levers and nothing happening, of a vast dysfunctional machine slowly disintegrating on autopilot?
We believe that Britain’s political elites have failed because they do not understand the problems they are facing. No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken. Like the elites of Austria-Hungary, Qing Dynasty China, or the Polish Commonwealth, they tinker ineffectually, mesmerised by the uncomprehended disaster rising up before them.
If any government, Conservative or Labour, wishes to use its powers to improve the country, it needs to understand which of Britain’s institutions have failed, and why they have done so. Only then can they begin to develop a systematic programme of reform that will restore Britain’s economy to strength and its society to vitality. The alternative is continued drift, relative decline, political disenchantment, and a nation unable to meet the great challenges of our time. This essay is a first attempt at offering such a diagnosis.
Falling behind
Britain is a country of immense achievement. For most of modern history, its people were the richest, healthiest and best educated in the world. Its housing stock and its infrastructure was far more advanced than those of any of its rivals. It led the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Its institutions were almost uniquely liberal. Though British history contains its share of missteps and tragedies, there is probably nowhere else on earth that matches its achievements since the mid-eighteenth century, relative to its size and resource endowments.
Many of these underlying strengths remain. The British people value debate and heterodoxy. They respect science, law and institutions. In hours of crisis, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they display unity and good sense. However inefficient and dysfunctional they may be, British institutions are strikingly incorruptible. One of the scandals of the decade is the alleged embezzlement of a campervan, an offence that would surely bring a contemptuous smile to the lips of a Putin or a Berlusconi.
Despite these strengths, Britain is falling behind the developed world in economic dynamism. It led the world in the nineteenth century, and then Europe during the first half of the twentieth, but it lost its leadership after the Second World War. Since 2008, it has been clearly underperforming most of the developed world, even some of its more heavily taxed and regulated continental neighbours.
Most popular explanations for this are misguided. The Labour manifesto blamed slow British growth on a lack of ‘strategy’ from the Government, by which it means not enough targeted investment winner picking, and too much inequality. Some economists say that the UK’s economic model of private capital ownership is flawed, and that limits on state capital expenditure are the fundamental problem. They also point to more state spending as the solution, but ignore that this investment would face the same barriers and high costs that existing infrastructure projects face, and that deters private investment.
Others believe that our ageing society means permanently lower growth and higher taxes. Dietrich Vollrath’s book Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success says that slower growth is an inevitable part of becoming services-driven (and of birth rates declining). Another school of thought sees Britain’s 2010s performance as ‘one thing after another’, with a slow recovery from the financial crisis followed by Brexit, followed by Covid.
But all of these explanations take the biggest obstacles to growth for granted. Our economy isn’t growing for the same reason that no more planes take off or land at Heathrow today than did twenty years ago: at some point it becomes impossible to grow when investment is banned.
Over the past two decades, Britain’s economy has needed a huge quantity of new housing, transport infrastructure and energy supply. Its postwar institutions have manifestly failed to deliver these. Britain is now a place in which it is far too hard to build houses and infrastructure, and where energy is too expensive. This has meant that our most productive industries have been starved of the resources, investment and talent – the economic foundations – that they need to grow.
The UK faces other challenges besides these. Our healthcare and higher education systems are so broken that politicians elected on a clear mandate to cut migration instead let it rise to unprecedented levels to keep them afloat. Crime, though it has been falling for years, is substantially higher than it was in pre-Second World War Britain, despite a far older population. It is also significantly higher than in many other European countries including the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, and Italy. Childcare is so expensive that many families have fewer children, and later in life, than they would like. Our tax system is riddled with distortions and perverse incentives. There is no consensus about what our higher education system is supposed to do, who should benefit from it, and who should pay. And our political institutions are sclerotic: at best, many are unable to perform their most basic functions; at worst, they are a huge barrier to innovation and effective governance.
But these other challenges do not explain why a huge economic gap opened up between us and other leading economies, since problems in immigration, crime, childcare, tax, and political institutions are also found in exactly the countries that have pulled away from Britain economically since 2008. Nor can austerity or the hangover from the financial crisis explain Britain’s malaise. The financial crisis was at least as turbulent in the United States as here. And austerity was at least as tough across Europe, which also had to fend with the euro crisis.
The Office for Budget Responsibility’s estimate of the impact of Brexit says that it will knock four percent off long-run UK productivity. This would be very painful, but still only a small fraction of the growth we have missed over the past fifteen years. (It also does not factor in the positive effect of avoiding destructive regulations like the EU Artificial Intelligence Act and Digital Markets Act.)
Britain’s startling underperformance more recently is explained by the more basic factors this document focuses on: preventing investment into housing, infrastructure, and energy supply.
Prosperity is intrinsically important. It gives people security and dignity, leisure and comfort, opportunity and economic freedom. It gives us freedom to pursue our other national goals: caring for older and less fortunate members of society, upholding a law-governed international order, preserving and enhancing our landscapes and townscapes, and leading the way in world-changing scientific research.
But there is even more at stake here than that. We noted above the enduring strengths of the British social settlement – responsibility, autonomy, love of debate, respect for the individual. Economic failure saps confidence in these things. It begets dependency, resentment, defeatism, division and bitterness. It turns win-win relationships into zero-sum ones, where someone else must fail for you to succeed. Economic reform is not only the key to prosperity: it is the key to preserving and amplifying what is valuable about our society itself.
A short history of British productivity
Britain’s biggest problem is its low productivity – that is, the value of the goods and services people produce per hour they work. Before the pandemic Americans were 34 percent richer than us in terms of GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power, and 17 percent more productive per hour. (Purchasing power parity, or PPP, attempts to account for differences in purchasing power between countries, rather than just using exchange rates). The gap has only widened since then: productivity growth between 2019 and 2023 was 7.6 percent in the United States, and 1.5 percent in Britain. This is not a general Western European problem either: the French and Germans are 15 percent and 18 percent more productive than us respectively.
Historically, this is exceptional. For most of modern history, Britain has been more productive than its peers, and when it has started to fall behind, it has successfully reformed itself to regain its advantage. Between the mid-eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century, Britain was the world’s leading economy. Though it was overtaken by the United States by the beginning of the twentieth century, it remained Europe's leading economy until the early 1950s, with the continent’s highest productivity and living standards, and its most advanced innovating firms.
Output per capita, current prices, 1947-1980. Britain entered the postwar era with a huge advantage over Europe, which it rapidly lost, falling behind both France and Germany Privatisation, tax cuts, and the curbing of union power fixed important swathes of the UK economy. Crucially, they tackled chronic underinvestment in sectors that had been neglected under state ownership. Political incentives under state ownership encouraged underfunding – and where the Treasury did put money in, it tended to go on operational expenditures (e.g., unionised workers’ wages rather than capital investments). This problem has immediately reemerged as the Department for Transport has begun to nationalise various franchises (which it promises to do to all of them).
Between 1980 and 2008 Britain returned to its position as one of Europe’s most successful large economies. For the most part, Tony Blair’s governments were able to sustain these advances. In 2005 Britain’s GDP per capita was just 2.8 percent behind Germany’s, in purchasing power parity terms, and fully 20 percent higher in US dollar terms, according to the World Bank. Penn World Tables, the other major source, have the UK overtaking Germany on GDP per capita in the mid-2000s.
Britain’s relative success during this period is clearest when compared to other major economies. The chart below shows GDP per capita in France, Germany, Italy and the UK as a percentage of US GDP per capita. It shows Britain, after decades of relative stagnation, beginning to converge on the United States and overtake the other European countries from the early 1980s. Britain’s change of fortunes under Thatcher, and continued improvement under Blair, is clear.
But crucial parts of the economy were still left unfixed – notably land-use planning policy, which Thatcher’s Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley had tried and failed to reform, and which Tony Blair’s government was unable to make a dent in either.
This left Britain with latent weaknesses that have become hugely problematic over the last quarter of a century. Since the 1990s, Britain has experienced rapid population growth, after decades of demographic stability, and big shifts in prosperity from some parts of the country to others. The decision to transition away from fossil fuels has created the need for huge quantities of new energy infrastructure, recently exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, but by no means beginning then. Across the developed world, great metropolitan agglomerations have become even more economically important. London has been among the biggest winners from this trend, in spite of the obstacles in its way.
What Britain needed in the last 25 years above all was a huge amount of building – of homes, energy supply, and transport infrastructure. Without it, Britain has fallen behind, weighed down by a development system that worked badly even in the 1950s and 60s, and that is positively disastrous today.
That gap continues to grow. Between 2010 and 2019, worker productivity grew by eight percent in the United States, 9.6 percent in France and just 5.8 percent in Britain. And those countries’ growth rates pale in comparison to that of Poland, which has grown its productivity by 29.7 percent between 2010 and 2019, and on current trends will overtake Britain by the end of this decade.
To put the shortfall since 2008 into perspective, if Britain had grown in line with its trend between 1979 and 2008, it would be 24.8 percent more productive today. Assuming we continued working the same hours annually, that would mean a GDP per capita of £41,800 instead of £33,500, making the typical family about £8,700 better off before taxes and transfers. Tax revenues would be £1,282 billion instead of £1,027 billion, assuming tax rates are held constant. That would mean that, instead of a deficit of £85 billion, on current spending we would have a surplus of £170 billion, meaning that taxes could be much lower, and public services could be better funded.
Though these figures may seem improbably high, they are not out of line with the world’s richest economies, and there is no reason Britain should not aim to sit among them as it once did. This essay argues that Britain can do so by adopting a programme of reform similar in its scale of ambition to that of the programme of liberalisation in the 1980s. Where earlier reforms were focused on cutting taxes, curbing the power of the trade unions, and privatising state-run industries, this time we must focus on making it easier to invest in homes, labs, railways, roads, bridges, interconnectors, and nuclear reactors.
The importance of strong foundations
Why is France so rich?
France is notoriously heavily regulated and dominated by labour unions. In 2023, the country was brought to a standstill by strikes against proposals to raise the age of retirement from 62 to 64. French workers have been known to strike by kidnapping their chief executives – a practice that the public there reportedly supports – and strikes are so common that French unions have designed special barbecues that fit in tram tracks so they can grill sausages while they march.
France is notoriously heavily taxed. Factoring in employer-side taxes in addition to those the employee actually sees, a French company would have to spend €137,822 on wages and employer-side taxes for a worker to earn a nominal salary of €100,000, from which they would take home €61,041. For a British worker to take home the same amount after tax (£52,715, equivalent to €61,041), a British employer would only have to spend €97,765.33 (£84,435.6) on wages and employer-side taxes.
And yet, despite these high taxes, onerous regulations, and powerful unions, French workers are significantly more productive than British ones – closer to Americans than to us. France’s GDP per capita is only about the same as the UK’s because French workers take more time off on holiday and work shorter hours.
What can explain France’s prosperity in spite of its high taxes and high business regulations? France can afford such a large, interventionist state because it does a good job building the things that Britain blocks: housing, infrastructure and energy supply.
Housing supply is vastly freer in France. Overall, it now has about seven million more homes than Britain (37 million versus 30 million), with the same number of people. Those homes are newer, and are more concentrated in the places people want to live: its prosperous cities and holiday regions. The overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent. France has allowed its other great cities to grow and flourish too, whereas Britain has systematically constrained and undermined them for seven decades.
Why Britain has stagnated
Setting the scene
Here are some facts to set the scene about the state of the British economy.
Between 2004 and 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the industrial price of energy tripled in nominal terms, or doubled relative to consumer prices. With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families
. Per capita electricity generation in the UK is just two thirds of what it is in France (4,800 kilowatt-hours per year in Britain versus 7,300 kilowatt-hours per year in France) and barely over a third of what it is in the United States (12,672 kilowatt-hours per year). We are closer to developing countries like Brazil and South Africa in terms of per capita electricity output than we are to Germany, China, Japan, Sweden, or Canada.
Britain’s last nuclear power plant was built between 1987 and 1995. Its next one, Hinkley Point C, is between four and six times more costly per megawatt of capacity than South Korean nuclear power plants, and four times as expensive as those that South Korea’s KEPCO has agreed to build in Czechia.
Tram projects in Britain are two and a half times more expensive than French projects on a per mile basis. In the last 25 years, France has built 21 tramways in different cities, including cities with populations of just 150,000, equivalent to Lincoln or Carlisle. The UK has still not managed to build a tramway in Leeds, the largest city in Europe without mass transit, with a population of nearly 800,000.
At £396 million, each mile of HS2 will cost more than four times more than each mile of the Naples to Bari high speed line. It will be more than eight times more expensive per mile than France’s high speed link between Tours and Bordeaux.
Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992. Since then, Britain’s population has grown by 10 million.
Despite huge and rising demand, Heathrow annual flight numbers have been almost completely flat since 2000. Annual passenger numbers have risen by 10 million because planes have become larger, but this still compares poorly to the 22 million added at Amsterdam’s Schiphol and the 15 million added at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle. The right to take off and land at Heathrow once per week is worth tens of millions of pounds.
The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
These are not just disconnected observations. They highlight the most important economic fact about modern Britain: that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues.
Everyone reading this will already be aware of the country’s present economic sclerosis. Real wage growth has been flat for 16 years. Average weekly wages are only 0.8 percent higher today than their previous peak in 2008. Annual real wages are 6.9 percent lower for the median full-time worker today than they were in 2008. This essay argues that Britain’s economy has stagnated for a fundamentally simple reason: because it has banned the investment in housing, transport and energy that it most vitally needs. Britain has denied its economy the foundations it needs to grow on.
From 2010 to the summer of 2024, Britain was run by Conservative-led or Conservative Governments. The Conservatives are the traditional party of business, and in the 1930s and 1980s they pushed through reform programmes that successfully renewed Britain’s economy. Virtually any Conservative minister from the past fourteen years would speak warmly about that heritage if asked, and would express the hope of being its inheritor. And yet, with honourable exceptions, the governments of the last fourteen years failed in this vocation. Failing systems remained unreformed, continuing to stifle Britain’s prosperity. Today Britain is ruled by a Labour Government that recognises this failure to build, and which has articulated high ambitions for changing this. But it remains doubtful that they will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were.
Constitutionally, British governments have immense power. How has a series of governments with both the will and the means to deliver systemic reform failed to do so? How can it be that the overwhelming experience reported by former ministers and advisors is one of disempowerment – of a ‘blob’ operating beyond their control, of pulling levers and nothing happening, of a vast dysfunctional machine slowly disintegrating on autopilot?
We believe that Britain’s political elites have failed because they do not understand the problems they are facing. No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken. Like the elites of Austria-Hungary, Qing Dynasty China, or the Polish Commonwealth, they tinker ineffectually, mesmerised by the uncomprehended disaster rising up before them.
If any government, Conservative or Labour, wishes to use its powers to improve the country, it needs to understand which of Britain’s institutions have failed, and why they have done so. Only then can they begin to develop a systematic programme of reform that will restore Britain’s economy to strength and its society to vitality. The alternative is continued drift, relative decline, political disenchantment, and a nation unable to meet the great challenges of our time. This essay is a first attempt at offering such a diagnosis.
Falling behind
Britain is a country of immense achievement. For most of modern history, its people were the richest, healthiest and best educated in the world. Its housing stock and its infrastructure was far more advanced than those of any of its rivals. It led the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Its institutions were almost uniquely liberal. Though British history contains its share of missteps and tragedies, there is probably nowhere else on earth that matches its achievements since the mid-eighteenth century, relative to its size and resource endowments.
Many of these underlying strengths remain. The British people value debate and heterodoxy. They respect science, law and institutions. In hours of crisis, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they display unity and good sense. However inefficient and dysfunctional they may be, British institutions are strikingly incorruptible. One of the scandals of the decade is the alleged embezzlement of a campervan, an offence that would surely bring a contemptuous smile to the lips of a Putin or a Berlusconi.
Despite these strengths, Britain is falling behind the developed world in economic dynamism. It led the world in the nineteenth century, and then Europe during the first half of the twentieth, but it lost its leadership after the Second World War. Since 2008, it has been clearly underperforming most of the developed world, even some of its more heavily taxed and regulated continental neighbours.
Most popular explanations for this are misguided. The Labour manifesto blamed slow British growth on a lack of ‘strategy’ from the Government, by which it means not enough targeted investment winner picking, and too much inequality. Some economists say that the UK’s economic model of private capital ownership is flawed, and that limits on state capital expenditure are the fundamental problem. They also point to more state spending as the solution, but ignore that this investment would face the same barriers and high costs that existing infrastructure projects face, and that deters private investment.
Others believe that our ageing society means permanently lower growth and higher taxes. Dietrich Vollrath’s book Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success says that slower growth is an inevitable part of becoming services-driven (and of birth rates declining). Another school of thought sees Britain’s 2010s performance as ‘one thing after another’, with a slow recovery from the financial crisis followed by Brexit, followed by Covid.
But all of these explanations take the biggest obstacles to growth for granted. Our economy isn’t growing for the same reason that no more planes take off or land at Heathrow today than did twenty years ago: at some point it becomes impossible to grow when investment is banned.
Over the past two decades, Britain’s economy has needed a huge quantity of new housing, transport infrastructure and energy supply. Its postwar institutions have manifestly failed to deliver these. Britain is now a place in which it is far too hard to build houses and infrastructure, and where energy is too expensive. This has meant that our most productive industries have been starved of the resources, investment and talent – the economic foundations – that they need to grow.
The UK faces other challenges besides these. Our healthcare and higher education systems are so broken that politicians elected on a clear mandate to cut migration instead let it rise to unprecedented levels to keep them afloat. Crime, though it has been falling for years, is substantially higher than it was in pre-Second World War Britain, despite a far older population. It is also significantly higher than in many other European countries including the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, and Italy. Childcare is so expensive that many families have fewer children, and later in life, than they would like. Our tax system is riddled with distortions and perverse incentives. There is no consensus about what our higher education system is supposed to do, who should benefit from it, and who should pay. And our political institutions are sclerotic: at best, many are unable to perform their most basic functions; at worst, they are a huge barrier to innovation and effective governance.
But these other challenges do not explain why a huge economic gap opened up between us and other leading economies, since problems in immigration, crime, childcare, tax, and political institutions are also found in exactly the countries that have pulled away from Britain economically since 2008. Nor can austerity or the hangover from the financial crisis explain Britain’s malaise. The financial crisis was at least as turbulent in the United States as here. And austerity was at least as tough across Europe, which also had to fend with the euro crisis.
The Office for Budget Responsibility’s estimate of the impact of Brexit says that it will knock four percent off long-run UK productivity. This would be very painful, but still only a small fraction of the growth we have missed over the past fifteen years. (It also does not factor in the positive effect of avoiding destructive regulations like the EU Artificial Intelligence Act and Digital Markets Act.)
Britain’s startling underperformance more recently is explained by the more basic factors this document focuses on: preventing investment into housing, infrastructure, and energy supply.
Prosperity is intrinsically important. It gives people security and dignity, leisure and comfort, opportunity and economic freedom. It gives us freedom to pursue our other national goals: caring for older and less fortunate members of society, upholding a law-governed international order, preserving and enhancing our landscapes and townscapes, and leading the way in world-changing scientific research.
But there is even more at stake here than that. We noted above the enduring strengths of the British social settlement – responsibility, autonomy, love of debate, respect for the individual. Economic failure saps confidence in these things. It begets dependency, resentment, defeatism, division and bitterness. It turns win-win relationships into zero-sum ones, where someone else must fail for you to succeed. Economic reform is not only the key to prosperity: it is the key to preserving and amplifying what is valuable about our society itself.
A short history of British productivity
Britain’s biggest problem is its low productivity – that is, the value of the goods and services people produce per hour they work. Before the pandemic Americans were 34 percent richer than us in terms of GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power, and 17 percent more productive per hour. (Purchasing power parity, or PPP, attempts to account for differences in purchasing power between countries, rather than just using exchange rates). The gap has only widened since then: productivity growth between 2019 and 2023 was 7.6 percent in the United States, and 1.5 percent in Britain. This is not a general Western European problem either: the French and Germans are 15 percent and 18 percent more productive than us respectively.
Historically, this is exceptional. For most of modern history, Britain has been more productive than its peers, and when it has started to fall behind, it has successfully reformed itself to regain its advantage. Between the mid-eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century, Britain was the world’s leading economy. Though it was overtaken by the United States by the beginning of the twentieth century, it remained Europe's leading economy until the early 1950s, with the continent’s highest productivity and living standards, and its most advanced innovating firms.
Output per capita, current prices, 1947-1980. Britain entered the postwar era with a huge advantage over Europe, which it rapidly lost, falling behind both France and Germany Privatisation, tax cuts, and the curbing of union power fixed important swathes of the UK economy. Crucially, they tackled chronic underinvestment in sectors that had been neglected under state ownership. Political incentives under state ownership encouraged underfunding – and where the Treasury did put money in, it tended to go on operational expenditures (e.g., unionised workers’ wages rather than capital investments). This problem has immediately reemerged as the Department for Transport has begun to nationalise various franchises (which it promises to do to all of them).
Between 1980 and 2008 Britain returned to its position as one of Europe’s most successful large economies. For the most part, Tony Blair’s governments were able to sustain these advances. In 2005 Britain’s GDP per capita was just 2.8 percent behind Germany’s, in purchasing power parity terms, and fully 20 percent higher in US dollar terms, according to the World Bank. Penn World Tables, the other major source, have the UK overtaking Germany on GDP per capita in the mid-2000s.
Britain’s relative success during this period is clearest when compared to other major economies. The chart below shows GDP per capita in France, Germany, Italy and the UK as a percentage of US GDP per capita. It shows Britain, after decades of relative stagnation, beginning to converge on the United States and overtake the other European countries from the early 1980s. Britain’s change of fortunes under Thatcher, and continued improvement under Blair, is clear.
But crucial parts of the economy were still left unfixed – notably land-use planning policy, which Thatcher’s Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley had tried and failed to reform, and which Tony Blair’s government was unable to make a dent in either.
This left Britain with latent weaknesses that have become hugely problematic over the last quarter of a century. Since the 1990s, Britain has experienced rapid population growth, after decades of demographic stability, and big shifts in prosperity from some parts of the country to others. The decision to transition away from fossil fuels has created the need for huge quantities of new energy infrastructure, recently exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, but by no means beginning then. Across the developed world, great metropolitan agglomerations have become even more economically important. London has been among the biggest winners from this trend, in spite of the obstacles in its way.
What Britain needed in the last 25 years above all was a huge amount of building – of homes, energy supply, and transport infrastructure. Without it, Britain has fallen behind, weighed down by a development system that worked badly even in the 1950s and 60s, and that is positively disastrous today.
That gap continues to grow. Between 2010 and 2019, worker productivity grew by eight percent in the United States, 9.6 percent in France and just 5.8 percent in Britain. And those countries’ growth rates pale in comparison to that of Poland, which has grown its productivity by 29.7 percent between 2010 and 2019, and on current trends will overtake Britain by the end of this decade.
To put the shortfall since 2008 into perspective, if Britain had grown in line with its trend between 1979 and 2008, it would be 24.8 percent more productive today. Assuming we continued working the same hours annually, that would mean a GDP per capita of £41,800 instead of £33,500, making the typical family about £8,700 better off before taxes and transfers. Tax revenues would be £1,282 billion instead of £1,027 billion, assuming tax rates are held constant. That would mean that, instead of a deficit of £85 billion, on current spending we would have a surplus of £170 billion, meaning that taxes could be much lower, and public services could be better funded.
Though these figures may seem improbably high, they are not out of line with the world’s richest economies, and there is no reason Britain should not aim to sit among them as it once did. This essay argues that Britain can do so by adopting a programme of reform similar in its scale of ambition to that of the programme of liberalisation in the 1980s. Where earlier reforms were focused on cutting taxes, curbing the power of the trade unions, and privatising state-run industries, this time we must focus on making it easier to invest in homes, labs, railways, roads, bridges, interconnectors, and nuclear reactors.
The importance of strong foundations
Why is France so rich?
France is notoriously heavily regulated and dominated by labour unions. In 2023, the country was brought to a standstill by strikes against proposals to raise the age of retirement from 62 to 64. French workers have been known to strike by kidnapping their chief executives – a practice that the public there reportedly supports – and strikes are so common that French unions have designed special barbecues that fit in tram tracks so they can grill sausages while they march.
France is notoriously heavily taxed. Factoring in employer-side taxes in addition to those the employee actually sees, a French company would have to spend €137,822 on wages and employer-side taxes for a worker to earn a nominal salary of €100,000, from which they would take home €61,041. For a British worker to take home the same amount after tax (£52,715, equivalent to €61,041), a British employer would only have to spend €97,765.33 (£84,435.6) on wages and employer-side taxes.
And yet, despite these high taxes, onerous regulations, and powerful unions, French workers are significantly more productive than British ones – closer to Americans than to us. France’s GDP per capita is only about the same as the UK’s because French workers take more time off on holiday and work shorter hours.
What can explain France’s prosperity in spite of its high taxes and high business regulations? France can afford such a large, interventionist state because it does a good job building the things that Britain blocks: housing, infrastructure and energy supply.
Housing supply is vastly freer in France. Overall, it now has about seven million more homes than Britain (37 million versus 30 million), with the same number of people. Those homes are newer, and are more concentrated in the places people want to live: its prosperous cities and holiday regions. The overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent. France has allowed its other great cities to grow and flourish too, whereas Britain has systematically constrained and undermined them for seven decades.
Facts about Britain
Between 2004 and 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the industrial price of energy tripled in nominal terms, or doubled relative to consumer prices.
With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
Per capita electricity generation in the UK is just two thirds of what it is in France (4,800 kilowatt-hours per year in Britain versus 7,300 kilowatt-hours per year in France) and barely over a third of what it is in the United States (12,672 kilowatt-hours per year). We are closer to developing countries like Brazil and South Africa in terms of per capita electricity output than we are to Germany, China, Japan, Sweden, or Canada.
Britain’s last nuclear power plant was built between 1987 and 1995. Its next one, Hinkley Point C, is between four and six times more costly per megawatt of capacity than South Korean nuclear power plants, and four times as expensive as those that South Korea’s KEPCO has agreed to build in Czechia.
Tram projects in Britain are two and a half times more expensive than French projects on a per mile basis. In the last 25 years, France has built 21 tramways in different cities, including cities with populations of just 150,000, equivalent to Lincoln or Carlisle. The UK has still not managed to build a tramway in Leeds, the largest city in Europe without mass transit, with a population of nearly 800,000.
At £396 million, each mile of HS2 will cost more than four times more than each mile of the Naples to Bari high speed line. It will be more than eight times more expensive per mile than France’s high speed link between Tours and Bordeaux.
Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992. Since then, Britain’s population has grown by 10 million.
Despite huge and rising demand, Heathrow annual flight numbers have been almost completely flat since 2000. Annual passenger numbers have risen by 10 million because planes have become larger, but this still compares poorly to the 22 million added at Amsterdam’s Schiphol and the 15 million added at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle. The right to take off and land at Heathrow once per week is worth tens of millions of pounds.
The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
From Tyler Cowen - Marginal Revolution Blog
With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
Per capita electricity generation in the UK is just two thirds of what it is in France (4,800 kilowatt-hours per year in Britain versus 7,300 kilowatt-hours per year in France) and barely over a third of what it is in the United States (12,672 kilowatt-hours per year). We are closer to developing countries like Brazil and South Africa in terms of per capita electricity output than we are to Germany, China, Japan, Sweden, or Canada.
Britain’s last nuclear power plant was built between 1987 and 1995. Its next one, Hinkley Point C, is between four and six times more costly per megawatt of capacity than South Korean nuclear power plants, and four times as expensive as those that South Korea’s KEPCO has agreed to build in Czechia.
Tram projects in Britain are two and a half times more expensive than French projects on a per mile basis. In the last 25 years, France has built 21 tramways in different cities, including cities with populations of just 150,000, equivalent to Lincoln or Carlisle. The UK has still not managed to build a tramway in Leeds, the largest city in Europe without mass transit, with a population of nearly 800,000.
At £396 million, each mile of HS2 will cost more than four times more than each mile of the Naples to Bari high speed line. It will be more than eight times more expensive per mile than France’s high speed link between Tours and Bordeaux.
Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992. Since then, Britain’s population has grown by 10 million.
Despite huge and rising demand, Heathrow annual flight numbers have been almost completely flat since 2000. Annual passenger numbers have risen by 10 million because planes have become larger, but this still compares poorly to the 22 million added at Amsterdam’s Schiphol and the 15 million added at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle. The right to take off and land at Heathrow once per week is worth tens of millions of pounds.
The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
From Tyler Cowen - Marginal Revolution Blog
Saturday, September 07, 2024
Refillable Planet
Humanity has a fertility problem. Birth rates are near or below replacement in all but the world’s poorest countries – and falling rapidly. Without a change in projected population trajectory (or AI timelines), humanity could have less than a century of current-level innovation left, forever
What can we do? In the short term, countries will try to encourage immigration – see Japan’s recent liberalisation of immigration rules. But, fertility is falling everywhere. We might then try relying on the traditional driver of population growth over the past century, namely the lower mortality rates from economic growth and medical advancements. However, the gains from this approach have been exhausted. People rarely die before reaching the age at which they would have stopped having children.1
So, we’re left with trying to encourage more births, or removing barriers that exist currently. More people are good. Not only are they capable of leading happy lives (a philosophical position), but they have ideas, and innovate. However, it is not immediately clear if we, like good economists, should subsidise this positive externality. This is because, bar some sophisticated (and politically difficult) targeting, we’ll have to subsidise all births, including those that would’ve happened anyway.
In this post, we show that under the median estimated elasticity the socially optimal fertility rate is 2.4 in the US, well above today’s 1.7, given that the US should place a value of 14.28x GDP per additional birth ($1.17mn per birth). Furthermore, to achieve this, the US should be willing to spend the equivalent of 3.8% of its GDP ($290K per birth) per birth. For context, the existing child tax credit is worth $2000/year, or $26K present value. We’d like to stress that these figures are highly uncertain, because of both the varying welfare gain from more births, and also varying estimates of how effective subsidising births are. Even still, in the main case, the US government should seriously consider greatly increasing its child tax credits, and explore more creative and ambitious solutions to address this looming demographic crisis.
How much should we be willing to pay for an additional birth?
There are probably four reasons why you should care about increasing fertility rates: public goods (the fixed cost for public goods are spread across more productive people), externalities from research (more people, more ideas!), life cycle effects (the young can help the old) and altruism (we care about the happiness of future generations).
Firstly, more people, more ideas. Ideas have been the driver of economic growth, and people are the driver of ideas. And ideas are ‘non-rival’ - if we invent a better way to grow wheat, it doesn’t matter whether the technique is used by 100 people, or a million. To figure out how valuable these new people and their ideas are, we work out the value of the worlds where they did and did not exist. There are a couple of considerations we need to make these calculations. However, the quality and quantity of ideas (as measured by their economic contribution) does not increase in direct proportion to the number of people. They suffer from diminishing returns which means we should multiply each additional person’s output by 0.75. Because we’re only concerned with the US, using the contributions of scientists to published research as a proxy for total contribution to scientific output, the US accounts for only 26% of global science output.2 We must also remember that the new births are children, and so we should apply a discount factor of 0.82.3 The Economist, arguing against the subsidies we model, noted that only 8% of children of parents without college education will get a college degree, compared to 62% of all parents. However, even if we fully account for this, this still yields a $1.03m (around 12.67xGDP/capita) willingness to pay for any given birth from just their research contributions.4
Now we also should add the additional benefit from spreading the fixed cost for public goods, eg. on defence or public debt, across more people. Such public goods are “non-rival”, which means that they don’t get worse for existing users if more people use them. As a result, if we increase births, we increase the number of people who can pay for them, and hence reduce costs for existing users. For the US, we model just the military and public debt, subtracting climate change. The US devotes 3.4% GDP to the military and has debt worth 122% of GDP. And, how about increasing birth’s effects on climate change? Well, though the aggregate costs of climate change increase faster than the population, it’s not by much, with an elasticity of 1.18.5 When we consider this with a 3.5% discount rate the present value decarbonisation expenses are equivalent to 23% GDP for purposes here, overall resulting in the 1.96xGDP gains from the other public good effects, which we also discount by 0.82.
Next, higher fertility means younger people. In the medium term, this results in higher taxes per capita. Unfortunately, we don’t have good figures of the marginal government spending over a lifetime by age. Both caring for the elderly and educating children are expensive - so we don’t know what the net effect will be, because the elderly are much more expensive per person, but their costs are also far in the future. We’ll leave this out of our calculations for now.
Finally, we’ll briefly consider the “full altruism” case, ie. one where we also value the raw happiness enjoyed by these new people. A life is worth much more than a total lifetime income.6 We get this from considering the statistical value of life, currently $13m, which is much higher than expected lifetime income. This yields a 164x GDP in the US. We don’t include this number for our baseline estimates – whether or not to do so philosophically controversial - but do present results if this utilised.
One billion Americans
We conclude that the US government should be willing to pay up to $290,000, overall, to each parent who gives birth. This is a result of our model that shows that any new child born, that wouldn’t otherwise have been born without the subsidy, has a $1.03mn value to the US. In practice, suggestions for additional child tax credits from across the aisle should be implemented, and perhaps even greatly increased.
Because there is a huge range of elasticity estimates in the literature, there is only so much confidence we can ascribe to any policy implications. Existing interventions aren’t well studied. And we’re interested in the best interventions, not the average ones. Society should invest more resources in studying fertility interventions worldwide, and coming up with new ones: subsidising fertility treatment, reforming child care regulation, changing cultural norms.
For this post, though, in many senses, we’ve modelled the worst case. That these subsidies are non-targeted, while in practice, we can do much better. That more young people won’t improve the demographic structure of the economy, while in practice, it will. That society doesn’t account for the happiness of the new children themselves, while in practice, we do.
Humanity has a fertility problem. But it’s a solvable one.
What can we do? In the short term, countries will try to encourage immigration – see Japan’s recent liberalisation of immigration rules. But, fertility is falling everywhere. We might then try relying on the traditional driver of population growth over the past century, namely the lower mortality rates from economic growth and medical advancements. However, the gains from this approach have been exhausted. People rarely die before reaching the age at which they would have stopped having children.1
So, we’re left with trying to encourage more births, or removing barriers that exist currently. More people are good. Not only are they capable of leading happy lives (a philosophical position), but they have ideas, and innovate. However, it is not immediately clear if we, like good economists, should subsidise this positive externality. This is because, bar some sophisticated (and politically difficult) targeting, we’ll have to subsidise all births, including those that would’ve happened anyway.
In this post, we show that under the median estimated elasticity the socially optimal fertility rate is 2.4 in the US, well above today’s 1.7, given that the US should place a value of 14.28x GDP per additional birth ($1.17mn per birth). Furthermore, to achieve this, the US should be willing to spend the equivalent of 3.8% of its GDP ($290K per birth) per birth. For context, the existing child tax credit is worth $2000/year, or $26K present value. We’d like to stress that these figures are highly uncertain, because of both the varying welfare gain from more births, and also varying estimates of how effective subsidising births are. Even still, in the main case, the US government should seriously consider greatly increasing its child tax credits, and explore more creative and ambitious solutions to address this looming demographic crisis.
How much should we be willing to pay for an additional birth?
There are probably four reasons why you should care about increasing fertility rates: public goods (the fixed cost for public goods are spread across more productive people), externalities from research (more people, more ideas!), life cycle effects (the young can help the old) and altruism (we care about the happiness of future generations).
Firstly, more people, more ideas. Ideas have been the driver of economic growth, and people are the driver of ideas. And ideas are ‘non-rival’ - if we invent a better way to grow wheat, it doesn’t matter whether the technique is used by 100 people, or a million. To figure out how valuable these new people and their ideas are, we work out the value of the worlds where they did and did not exist. There are a couple of considerations we need to make these calculations. However, the quality and quantity of ideas (as measured by their economic contribution) does not increase in direct proportion to the number of people. They suffer from diminishing returns which means we should multiply each additional person’s output by 0.75. Because we’re only concerned with the US, using the contributions of scientists to published research as a proxy for total contribution to scientific output, the US accounts for only 26% of global science output.2 We must also remember that the new births are children, and so we should apply a discount factor of 0.82.3 The Economist, arguing against the subsidies we model, noted that only 8% of children of parents without college education will get a college degree, compared to 62% of all parents. However, even if we fully account for this, this still yields a $1.03m (around 12.67xGDP/capita) willingness to pay for any given birth from just their research contributions.4
Now we also should add the additional benefit from spreading the fixed cost for public goods, eg. on defence or public debt, across more people. Such public goods are “non-rival”, which means that they don’t get worse for existing users if more people use them. As a result, if we increase births, we increase the number of people who can pay for them, and hence reduce costs for existing users. For the US, we model just the military and public debt, subtracting climate change. The US devotes 3.4% GDP to the military and has debt worth 122% of GDP. And, how about increasing birth’s effects on climate change? Well, though the aggregate costs of climate change increase faster than the population, it’s not by much, with an elasticity of 1.18.5 When we consider this with a 3.5% discount rate the present value decarbonisation expenses are equivalent to 23% GDP for purposes here, overall resulting in the 1.96xGDP gains from the other public good effects, which we also discount by 0.82.
Next, higher fertility means younger people. In the medium term, this results in higher taxes per capita. Unfortunately, we don’t have good figures of the marginal government spending over a lifetime by age. Both caring for the elderly and educating children are expensive - so we don’t know what the net effect will be, because the elderly are much more expensive per person, but their costs are also far in the future. We’ll leave this out of our calculations for now.
Finally, we’ll briefly consider the “full altruism” case, ie. one where we also value the raw happiness enjoyed by these new people. A life is worth much more than a total lifetime income.6 We get this from considering the statistical value of life, currently $13m, which is much higher than expected lifetime income. This yields a 164x GDP in the US. We don’t include this number for our baseline estimates – whether or not to do so philosophically controversial - but do present results if this utilised.
One billion Americans
We conclude that the US government should be willing to pay up to $290,000, overall, to each parent who gives birth. This is a result of our model that shows that any new child born, that wouldn’t otherwise have been born without the subsidy, has a $1.03mn value to the US. In practice, suggestions for additional child tax credits from across the aisle should be implemented, and perhaps even greatly increased.
Because there is a huge range of elasticity estimates in the literature, there is only so much confidence we can ascribe to any policy implications. Existing interventions aren’t well studied. And we’re interested in the best interventions, not the average ones. Society should invest more resources in studying fertility interventions worldwide, and coming up with new ones: subsidising fertility treatment, reforming child care regulation, changing cultural norms.
For this post, though, in many senses, we’ve modelled the worst case. That these subsidies are non-targeted, while in practice, we can do much better. That more young people won’t improve the demographic structure of the economy, while in practice, it will. That society doesn’t account for the happiness of the new children themselves, while in practice, we do.
Humanity has a fertility problem. But it’s a solvable one.
Friday, September 06, 2024
Wednesday, September 04, 2024
Party in the USA
Party in the U-S-A
In April, some frat boys from the University of North Carolina protected the American flag from anti-Israel protesters. On Labor Day, they got their reward: a $500,000 party.
By Olivia Reingold
September 4, 2024
Do you still love America?”
Hundreds of fraternity brothers, Jewish college students, and their dates respond to the question, posed by country musician John Rich, by howling with delight into the night sky. Two girls, both in white dresses and cowboy boots, clink their vapes together, as if to say cheers. Others cup their hands around their mouths to chant: “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Of course they love America! These are the boys from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who were hailed as patriots last April when they defended the American flag from a crowd of jeering anti-Israel protesters. Just as their peers were descending deeper into madness, setting up encampments on college campuses nationwide, these Vineyard Vines–clad students stood up for normalcy when they rushed to protect Old Glory. After their image went viral, John Noonan, a former adviser to then–presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, established a GoFundMe in their honor. The purpose? “Throw these frats the party they deserve.”
Thousands answered the call, and half a million dollars later, voilà —Flagstock 2024, as organizers called the event, was born.
And so it was that at 2:30 p.m. on Labor Day, dozens of journalists from around the country poured in looking for a show. They placed us in a press pen (thankfully, I escaped) and told us to wait. So we did. There were maybe thirty porta potties, enough chicken wings to feed an army, and security was flown in from New York. It was obvious that the organizations were expecting a “rager” (Noonan’s word) of mammoth proportions.
I assumed I just had to sit back, and the frat bros would come. But it was more a trickle that never really picked up beyond that. Of the 7,000 tickets that were distributed to the university’s Greek chapters, the campus ROTC program, and local veterans, fewer than a thousand people showed up.
It didn’t take long to figure out why. The gestalt of the party was conservative—although, c’mon, protecting the flag shouldn’t be a conservative gesture!—which caused many students to stay away.
Yik Yak, an anonymous message board popular among college students, was covered in messages telling students to stay home. “Don’t go to flagstock,” one person wrote in a note that soared to the top of the message board. “It’s all very loudly in support of conservative causes.”
In the beer line, Lance Adkins, a recent graduate who said he had helped guard the American flag for hours on that fateful day, told me he couldn’t convince any of his friends to tag along.
“It’s definitely a political move,” he said of their decision to skip Flagstock. “They think it’s a Republican event, and they just didn’t want to go because of that.”
When I found Dan Crenshaw, the Republican congressman from Texas, viewing the concert from the VIP section and wearing a skintight shirt, I asked him how he explained the low turnout.
“Organizers did everything they could to make it not political,” he said. “It’s too bad because it’s just the flag—it’s not about politics.” On the other hand, once former president Donald Trump decided to make a campaign ad to honor the flag protectors, it’s hard to say that it completely avoided politics.
To some of the attending Jewish students, the flag wasn’t the only point of Flagstock 2024. Since October 7, the anti-Israel movement has taken an increasingly anti-American, and even anti-Western, stance. Flag burning has become a common phenomenon; it was recently spotted at a protest outside of the Israeli consulate during the Democratic National Convention. At Flagstock 2024, the American flag and Israel were intertwined, at least to some.
One such man was Benaya Cherlow, an IDF veteran who recently fought for 120 days in Gaza. He told me that he emerged from Hamas’s tunnels last April only to receive a text with an image of the UNC fraternity brothers protecting the American and Israeli flags. He took it as a clear endorsement of his cause.
“When we saw these guys, we understood that we’re fighting not only for Israel but also for America,” he said, and added that he immediately showed the image to his fellow soldiers for “encouragement and power.”
Seated near the buffet of chicken wings, provided by—duh—Hooters, Cherlow, a dual American-Israeli citizen, said many Israelis assume they’ve “lost America.”
“Then when you show them this picture of young students who aren’t afraid, standing for hours in the rain, holding the American and Israeli flags, you understand that it’s not the end. We didn’t lose America. They didn’t give up on us.”
Cherlow, 28, said friends of friends connected him to the organizers of Monday’s event, who then put him in touch with some of the fraternity brothers in the image now seen around the world. That’s why, he told me, he drove nearly five hours from D.C., along with four other Israelis, to reach tonight’s event, to meet the students who first came across his phone screen in Gaza.
I asked him what it was like meeting them for the first time.
“You know, when you come home from Gaza, and you don’t see your family for a long time, you don’t speak—you hug,” he said. “That’s what we did with the students. We just hugged.”
Looking around, it was easy to forget that these were some of the smartest kids in America. The vibe was somewhere between a Trump rally and county fair. Among a sea of girls in push-up bras and guys in MAGA hats, a 21-year-old named Alana Goldman told me, “I came even though I was like, ‘I probably disagree with most people here on everything politically.’ ”
Then she smiled. “But it looked like it was going to be a fun party. So I figured, why wouldn’t I go?”
It’s a good question—why wouldn’t a college student attend a party with free beer, Hooters girls, chicken wings, and live music? Once the sun set, and the various flags attendees draped around their necks—American, Israeli, American-Israeli—had fallen off, the party became just that: a party.
By 9:30 p.m., at which point most other press was escorted off the premises (sorry, New York Times!), the frat came out of the frat bros. None of the other journalists were there to deliver this scoop: The attendees got properly wasted. Up in the VIP section set aside specifically for the flag protectors, a growing number of young men hobbled all over the place, tripping on the muddy ground.
One student in pastel shorts placed his arm around his stumbling friend, laughing as he told onlookers, “Nothing to see here.”
Nearby, a girl tried to show two friends how to smoke a cigar. “Honey, you have to inhale harder,” she told a girl with a middle part and a nose ring.
When the fireworks began shooting off—the big finale of the night—a few were so drunk they couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from. When one saw the explosions in the sky, he high-fived his friend.
“Nice!” he yelled.
It was good to know that somewhere back on campus, some of the kids they protested against—the ones who had ripped down the flag in the first place—were probably getting drunk, too.
In April, some frat boys from the University of North Carolina protected the American flag from anti-Israel protesters. On Labor Day, they got their reward: a $500,000 party.
By Olivia Reingold
September 4, 2024
Do you still love America?”
Hundreds of fraternity brothers, Jewish college students, and their dates respond to the question, posed by country musician John Rich, by howling with delight into the night sky. Two girls, both in white dresses and cowboy boots, clink their vapes together, as if to say cheers. Others cup their hands around their mouths to chant: “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Of course they love America! These are the boys from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who were hailed as patriots last April when they defended the American flag from a crowd of jeering anti-Israel protesters. Just as their peers were descending deeper into madness, setting up encampments on college campuses nationwide, these Vineyard Vines–clad students stood up for normalcy when they rushed to protect Old Glory. After their image went viral, John Noonan, a former adviser to then–presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, established a GoFundMe in their honor. The purpose? “Throw these frats the party they deserve.”
Thousands answered the call, and half a million dollars later, voilà —Flagstock 2024, as organizers called the event, was born.
And so it was that at 2:30 p.m. on Labor Day, dozens of journalists from around the country poured in looking for a show. They placed us in a press pen (thankfully, I escaped) and told us to wait. So we did. There were maybe thirty porta potties, enough chicken wings to feed an army, and security was flown in from New York. It was obvious that the organizations were expecting a “rager” (Noonan’s word) of mammoth proportions.
I assumed I just had to sit back, and the frat bros would come. But it was more a trickle that never really picked up beyond that. Of the 7,000 tickets that were distributed to the university’s Greek chapters, the campus ROTC program, and local veterans, fewer than a thousand people showed up.
It didn’t take long to figure out why. The gestalt of the party was conservative—although, c’mon, protecting the flag shouldn’t be a conservative gesture!—which caused many students to stay away.
Yik Yak, an anonymous message board popular among college students, was covered in messages telling students to stay home. “Don’t go to flagstock,” one person wrote in a note that soared to the top of the message board. “It’s all very loudly in support of conservative causes.”
In the beer line, Lance Adkins, a recent graduate who said he had helped guard the American flag for hours on that fateful day, told me he couldn’t convince any of his friends to tag along.
“It’s definitely a political move,” he said of their decision to skip Flagstock. “They think it’s a Republican event, and they just didn’t want to go because of that.”
When I found Dan Crenshaw, the Republican congressman from Texas, viewing the concert from the VIP section and wearing a skintight shirt, I asked him how he explained the low turnout.
“Organizers did everything they could to make it not political,” he said. “It’s too bad because it’s just the flag—it’s not about politics.” On the other hand, once former president Donald Trump decided to make a campaign ad to honor the flag protectors, it’s hard to say that it completely avoided politics.
To some of the attending Jewish students, the flag wasn’t the only point of Flagstock 2024. Since October 7, the anti-Israel movement has taken an increasingly anti-American, and even anti-Western, stance. Flag burning has become a common phenomenon; it was recently spotted at a protest outside of the Israeli consulate during the Democratic National Convention. At Flagstock 2024, the American flag and Israel were intertwined, at least to some.
One such man was Benaya Cherlow, an IDF veteran who recently fought for 120 days in Gaza. He told me that he emerged from Hamas’s tunnels last April only to receive a text with an image of the UNC fraternity brothers protecting the American and Israeli flags. He took it as a clear endorsement of his cause.
“When we saw these guys, we understood that we’re fighting not only for Israel but also for America,” he said, and added that he immediately showed the image to his fellow soldiers for “encouragement and power.”
Seated near the buffet of chicken wings, provided by—duh—Hooters, Cherlow, a dual American-Israeli citizen, said many Israelis assume they’ve “lost America.”
“Then when you show them this picture of young students who aren’t afraid, standing for hours in the rain, holding the American and Israeli flags, you understand that it’s not the end. We didn’t lose America. They didn’t give up on us.”
Cherlow, 28, said friends of friends connected him to the organizers of Monday’s event, who then put him in touch with some of the fraternity brothers in the image now seen around the world. That’s why, he told me, he drove nearly five hours from D.C., along with four other Israelis, to reach tonight’s event, to meet the students who first came across his phone screen in Gaza.
I asked him what it was like meeting them for the first time.
“You know, when you come home from Gaza, and you don’t see your family for a long time, you don’t speak—you hug,” he said. “That’s what we did with the students. We just hugged.”
Looking around, it was easy to forget that these were some of the smartest kids in America. The vibe was somewhere between a Trump rally and county fair. Among a sea of girls in push-up bras and guys in MAGA hats, a 21-year-old named Alana Goldman told me, “I came even though I was like, ‘I probably disagree with most people here on everything politically.’ ”
Then she smiled. “But it looked like it was going to be a fun party. So I figured, why wouldn’t I go?”
It’s a good question—why wouldn’t a college student attend a party with free beer, Hooters girls, chicken wings, and live music? Once the sun set, and the various flags attendees draped around their necks—American, Israeli, American-Israeli—had fallen off, the party became just that: a party.
By 9:30 p.m., at which point most other press was escorted off the premises (sorry, New York Times!), the frat came out of the frat bros. None of the other journalists were there to deliver this scoop: The attendees got properly wasted. Up in the VIP section set aside specifically for the flag protectors, a growing number of young men hobbled all over the place, tripping on the muddy ground.
One student in pastel shorts placed his arm around his stumbling friend, laughing as he told onlookers, “Nothing to see here.”
Nearby, a girl tried to show two friends how to smoke a cigar. “Honey, you have to inhale harder,” she told a girl with a middle part and a nose ring.
When the fireworks began shooting off—the big finale of the night—a few were so drunk they couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from. When one saw the explosions in the sky, he high-fived his friend.
“Nice!” he yelled.
It was good to know that somewhere back on campus, some of the kids they protested against—the ones who had ripped down the flag in the first place—were probably getting drunk, too.
Tuesday, September 03, 2024
In Japan, People don't know how to resign
Workers in Japan can’t quit their jobs. They hire resignation experts to help
By Samra Zulfaqar, Nodoka Katsura and Rinka Tonsho, CNN
Pedestrians including office employees walk along a street in Tokyo's Kasumigaseki area at lunchtime on April 1, 2021.
Tokyo CNN — Yuki Watanabe used to spend 12 hours every day toiling away in the office. And that’s considered a short day.
A typical 9-to-9 workday is the bare minimum. “The latest I would leave [the office] would be 11 p.m.,” said the 24-year-old, who used to work for some of Japan’s largest telecoms and e-payment companies.
So intense were the demands that Watanabe - who used an alias to speak to CNN, for fear of jeopardizing future job prospects - began to develop health problems. She had “shaky legs and stomach issues.”
She knew she had to quit, but there was one thing in the way: Japan’s notoriously top-down work culture.
Asking to leave work on time or taking some time off can be tricky enough. Even trickier is tendering a resignation, which can be seen as the ultimate form of disrespect in the world’s fourth-biggest economy, where workers traditionally stick with one employer for decades, if not for a lifetime.
In the most extreme cases, grumpy bosses rip up resignation letters and harass employees to force them to stay.
Watanabe was unhappy at her previous job, saying her former supervisor often ignored her, making her feel bad. But she didn’t dare resign.
“I didn’t want my ex-employer to deny my resignation and keep me working for longer,” she told CNN during a recent interview.
But she found a way to end the impasse. She turned to Momuri, a resignation agency that helps timid employees leave their intimidating bosses.
For the price of a fancy dinner, many Japanese workers hire these proxy firms to help them resign stress-free.
The industry existed before Covid. But its popularity grew after the pandemic, after years of working from home pushed even some of Japan’s most loyal workers to reflect upon their careers, according to human resources experts.
There is no official count on the number of resignation agencies that have sprung up across the country, but those running them can testify to the surge in demand.
‘I can’t do this anymore’ Shiori Kawamata, operations manager of Momuri, said that in the past year alone they received up to 11,000 enquiries from clients.
Located in Minato, one of Tokyo’s busiest business districts, the firm launched in 2022 with a name that seeks to resonate with their helpless clientele – “Momuri” means “I can’t do this anymore” in Japanese.
At a cost of 22,000 yen (about $150) – or 12,000 yen for those who work part time – it pledges to help employees tender their resignations, negotiate with their companies and provide recommendations for lawyers if legal disputes arise.
“Some people come to us after having their resignation letter ripped three times and employers not letting them quit even when they kneel down to the ground to bow,” she said, in another illustration of the deferential workplace culture embedded in Japan
Pedestrians including office employees cross a street in Tokyo's Shimbashi area at lunchtime on April 1, 2021. Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images “We sometimes get calls from people crying, asking us if they can quit their job based on XYZ. We tell them that it is okay, and that quitting their job is a labor right,” Kawamata added.
Some workers complain that bosses harass them if they try to resign, she said, including stopping by their apartments to ring their doorbell repeatedly, refusing to leave.
For another quitter, what would have been a straightforward business took a bizarre turn. The person was dragged to a temple in Kyoto by their boss. “[The worker] was told to go to Onmyoji temple because ‘they were cursed,’” she said.
Kawamata said people who reach out often work for small to medium-sized businesses, with those in the food industry most vulnerable, followed by healthcare and welfare.
Death by overwork
Japan has long had an overwork culture. Employees across various sectors report punishing hours, high pressure from supervisors and deference to the company. These employers are widely known as “black firms.”
Human resources professor Hiroshi Ono, from Hitotsubashi University Business School in Tokyo, said the situation had become so pressing that the government had begun publishing a list of unethical employers to hamper their ability to hire, and warn job seekers of the dangers of working for them.
“There are some issues with… black firms, where working conditions are so bad, there’s no psychological safety, and some employees might feel threatened,” he said.
More than 370 companies have been blacklisted by labor bureaus across the country since the list was published in 2017.
The stress has proven fatal for decades, as exemplified by a phenomenon called “karoshi,” or “death by overwork.”
According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 54 people died from work-induced brain and heart conditions and were granted compensation in 2022, which is actually a major decline from the 160 recorded two decades ago.
But the number of people filing claims over mental stress at work is on the rise, shooting up to 2,683 from 341 over the same period of time.
A 31-year-old political reporter from national broadcaster NHK died in 2017 after suffering heart failure caused by spending long hours on the job. She worked 159 hours of overtime in the month before her death.
Five years later, a 26-year-old doctor from a hospital in Kobe died by suicide after working more than 200 hours of overtime in a single month.
Hisakazu Kato, an economics professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, said the country has labor laws in place to protect workers and make sure they are free to resign.
“But sometimes the atmosphere in the workplace makes it difficult to say so,” he said.
Changing youth work culture So why did these resignation agents only emerge in recent years? That, experts say, is down to young people’s changing approach to work.
“When one party is unhappy, you could end up in a divorce. But like a divorce, nobody is 100% faultless, right?” Ono, from Hitotsubashi University, said.
As the country grapples with a labor shortage fueled by a rapidly aging population and declining birth rates, young people now have more say in the market than their predecessors.
Many of them no longer subscribe to older generations’ thinking that one should do whatever they are told regardless of the job’s nature, Ono said, adding that when there is a mismatch of expectation, they won’t hesitate to quit.
But that doesn’t mean they want to march into their boss’s office and quit in a blaze of glory – preferring to let a third party handle it.
[Image: People commuting to work in the morning walk down a street in Tokyo on February 15, 2024.]
People commuting to work in the morning walk down a street in Tokyo on February 15, 2024. Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images “I think that younger people these days are more non-confrontational,” the expert said, noting that many have been deprived of social interactions at work due to Covid. As a result, young workers prefer to quit without having direct contact with their bosses.
But Ono suggested that it’s always good to have a discussion and not to burn bridges with employers, so he would recommend against accessing such services.
Kawamata, from Momuri, somewhat agreed.
“We honestly think that our resignation agency service should disappear from society and we hope for that. We think it’s best if people can tell their bosses themselves, but hearing the horror stories of our clients, I don’t think that our business will disappear anytime soon,” she said.
For now, Momuri offers a 50% discount for those who seek their service to resign the second time.
Chris Lau contributed to this report
By Samra Zulfaqar, Nodoka Katsura and Rinka Tonsho, CNN
Pedestrians including office employees walk along a street in Tokyo's Kasumigaseki area at lunchtime on April 1, 2021.
Tokyo CNN — Yuki Watanabe used to spend 12 hours every day toiling away in the office. And that’s considered a short day.
A typical 9-to-9 workday is the bare minimum. “The latest I would leave [the office] would be 11 p.m.,” said the 24-year-old, who used to work for some of Japan’s largest telecoms and e-payment companies.
So intense were the demands that Watanabe - who used an alias to speak to CNN, for fear of jeopardizing future job prospects - began to develop health problems. She had “shaky legs and stomach issues.”
She knew she had to quit, but there was one thing in the way: Japan’s notoriously top-down work culture.
Asking to leave work on time or taking some time off can be tricky enough. Even trickier is tendering a resignation, which can be seen as the ultimate form of disrespect in the world’s fourth-biggest economy, where workers traditionally stick with one employer for decades, if not for a lifetime.
In the most extreme cases, grumpy bosses rip up resignation letters and harass employees to force them to stay.
Watanabe was unhappy at her previous job, saying her former supervisor often ignored her, making her feel bad. But she didn’t dare resign.
“I didn’t want my ex-employer to deny my resignation and keep me working for longer,” she told CNN during a recent interview.
But she found a way to end the impasse. She turned to Momuri, a resignation agency that helps timid employees leave their intimidating bosses.
For the price of a fancy dinner, many Japanese workers hire these proxy firms to help them resign stress-free.
The industry existed before Covid. But its popularity grew after the pandemic, after years of working from home pushed even some of Japan’s most loyal workers to reflect upon their careers, according to human resources experts.
There is no official count on the number of resignation agencies that have sprung up across the country, but those running them can testify to the surge in demand.
‘I can’t do this anymore’ Shiori Kawamata, operations manager of Momuri, said that in the past year alone they received up to 11,000 enquiries from clients.
Located in Minato, one of Tokyo’s busiest business districts, the firm launched in 2022 with a name that seeks to resonate with their helpless clientele – “Momuri” means “I can’t do this anymore” in Japanese.
At a cost of 22,000 yen (about $150) – or 12,000 yen for those who work part time – it pledges to help employees tender their resignations, negotiate with their companies and provide recommendations for lawyers if legal disputes arise.
“Some people come to us after having their resignation letter ripped three times and employers not letting them quit even when they kneel down to the ground to bow,” she said, in another illustration of the deferential workplace culture embedded in Japan
Pedestrians including office employees cross a street in Tokyo's Shimbashi area at lunchtime on April 1, 2021. Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images “We sometimes get calls from people crying, asking us if they can quit their job based on XYZ. We tell them that it is okay, and that quitting their job is a labor right,” Kawamata added.
Some workers complain that bosses harass them if they try to resign, she said, including stopping by their apartments to ring their doorbell repeatedly, refusing to leave.
For another quitter, what would have been a straightforward business took a bizarre turn. The person was dragged to a temple in Kyoto by their boss. “[The worker] was told to go to Onmyoji temple because ‘they were cursed,’” she said.
Kawamata said people who reach out often work for small to medium-sized businesses, with those in the food industry most vulnerable, followed by healthcare and welfare.
Death by overwork
Japan has long had an overwork culture. Employees across various sectors report punishing hours, high pressure from supervisors and deference to the company. These employers are widely known as “black firms.”
Human resources professor Hiroshi Ono, from Hitotsubashi University Business School in Tokyo, said the situation had become so pressing that the government had begun publishing a list of unethical employers to hamper their ability to hire, and warn job seekers of the dangers of working for them.
“There are some issues with… black firms, where working conditions are so bad, there’s no psychological safety, and some employees might feel threatened,” he said.
More than 370 companies have been blacklisted by labor bureaus across the country since the list was published in 2017.
The stress has proven fatal for decades, as exemplified by a phenomenon called “karoshi,” or “death by overwork.”
According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 54 people died from work-induced brain and heart conditions and were granted compensation in 2022, which is actually a major decline from the 160 recorded two decades ago.
But the number of people filing claims over mental stress at work is on the rise, shooting up to 2,683 from 341 over the same period of time.
A 31-year-old political reporter from national broadcaster NHK died in 2017 after suffering heart failure caused by spending long hours on the job. She worked 159 hours of overtime in the month before her death.
Five years later, a 26-year-old doctor from a hospital in Kobe died by suicide after working more than 200 hours of overtime in a single month.
Hisakazu Kato, an economics professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, said the country has labor laws in place to protect workers and make sure they are free to resign.
“But sometimes the atmosphere in the workplace makes it difficult to say so,” he said.
Changing youth work culture So why did these resignation agents only emerge in recent years? That, experts say, is down to young people’s changing approach to work.
“When one party is unhappy, you could end up in a divorce. But like a divorce, nobody is 100% faultless, right?” Ono, from Hitotsubashi University, said.
As the country grapples with a labor shortage fueled by a rapidly aging population and declining birth rates, young people now have more say in the market than their predecessors.
Many of them no longer subscribe to older generations’ thinking that one should do whatever they are told regardless of the job’s nature, Ono said, adding that when there is a mismatch of expectation, they won’t hesitate to quit.
But that doesn’t mean they want to march into their boss’s office and quit in a blaze of glory – preferring to let a third party handle it.
[Image: People commuting to work in the morning walk down a street in Tokyo on February 15, 2024.]
People commuting to work in the morning walk down a street in Tokyo on February 15, 2024. Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images “I think that younger people these days are more non-confrontational,” the expert said, noting that many have been deprived of social interactions at work due to Covid. As a result, young workers prefer to quit without having direct contact with their bosses.
But Ono suggested that it’s always good to have a discussion and not to burn bridges with employers, so he would recommend against accessing such services.
Kawamata, from Momuri, somewhat agreed.
“We honestly think that our resignation agency service should disappear from society and we hope for that. We think it’s best if people can tell their bosses themselves, but hearing the horror stories of our clients, I don’t think that our business will disappear anytime soon,” she said.
For now, Momuri offers a 50% discount for those who seek their service to resign the second time.
Chris Lau contributed to this report
A Revolution begins in Austin Texas
By Pano Kanelos
Good morning. It is a sincere pleasure and profound honor to welcome you to the inaugural Convocation of the University of Austin.
We often hear of occasions referred to as historic. Usually this is a sort of feeling or sense that a particular moment or event is elevated or heightened, that something noteworthy or novel is occurring—a new this, a first that. This to me seems a rather tepid use of the term historic.
What is truly historic is that which sends the trajectory of history, and lives lived within the stream of history, shooting in a direction other than that toward which they were tending. History is not a story unfolding; it is an epic being written. And its authors are those bold enough to exercise their agency in the pursuit of higher things.
As I look across this room, I do not see students or faculty or staff or loved ones. I see a room filled with the courageous, the bold, with pioneers, with heroes. I see a room filled with those who have said, emphatically, we will not accept passively what we have been handed, the givens are not good enough, we will create anew. We have come together, all of us, as founders.
Ours is a revolutionary institution—revolutionary in the proper sense. False revolutions propose only the tearing down of the established order; they are an exercise in nihilism. Yet the word revolution—in its original sense, revolvere—means to revolve, to turn back to a point of origin, with the purpose of renewing an original spirit or ideal.
To what are we returning? Not to some pallid vision of what universities looked like a decade or two or three ago, before their current malaise. Not to some nostalgic notion of ivy-covered quads and fusty dons. Our return is even more radical, radical in the sense of radix, roots, in that we are returning to the very roots of the Western intellectual tradition, to the very roots of the civilization that brought forward these extraordinary institutions called universities.
We are returning to a time when living the life of the mind was itself a bold adventure, when the world was afire with contending and clashing ideas, when everything under the sun was scrutinized, and measured, and queried, which gave birth to a civilization that was restless, and curious, and risk-taking, a Promethean civilization that sought the light of truth, even when that light was searing or sometimes even blinding.
Higher education is often referred to blandly as the “academy” or “academia.” This occludes how extraordinary the original Academy actually was. In 387 BC, Plato, very much like we are doing today, founded a school, which took its name from the place where it met, an olive grove on the fringes of Athens called the Akademia. Here, the great philosopher gathered students who were passionate about pursuing the fundamental human questions: What is justice? How do we acquire knowledge? What is the source of beauty?
There were other schools in Greece that coalesced around such figures as Empedocles, Epicurus, Thales, Democritus, and many others, all of whom believed that the world could be understood through sustained rational inquiry, and each of whom offered particular answers to the mysteries of the cosmos.
What distinguished Plato’s Academy, however, was doctrinal pluralism and a variety of intellectual approaches. There were no easy answers. Every discussion branched outward with ever-greater complexity. The Academy did not commit to a particular school of philosophy, but was a place where knowledge was comprehensively debated, analyzed, and advanced; it was, in the words of Shakespeare, the “quick forge and working house of thought.”
The range of topics was vast, the curiosity of the students ardent, their appetite for ideas voracious. From just a selection of the works of one of Plato’s students, Aristotle, we can come to understand how wide-ranging were the intellectual concerns of the age: On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, On Memory, On Sleep, History of Animals, Movement of Animals, On Colors, The Situations and Names of the Winds, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, Economics, Rhetoric, Poetics. Plato and his students were not narrow specialists, not pedants, not ideologues; they were rather propelled to dispute, to discover, everything there was to know, and to test the boundaries of knowing itself.
The animating spirit of the Academy was Plato’s great teacher, Socrates. Socrates was famous, perhaps infamous, for engaging the citizens of Athens in frank conversations about philosophical topics. He was restless, persistent, infuriating. He cornered his fellow Athenians and pressed them to answer his questions: Is virtue taught or does it come to us by nature? What is the purpose of love? Is the soul immortal?
As each would offer a response, Socrates would push harder, “Is this truly the best answer?” His persistence did not make him popular, and he was ultimately put to death after trial by his fellow Athenian citizens. Yet his mode of inquiry, the Elenchus or Socratic Method, is the fountainhead of the entire Western intellectual tradition.
“Is this truly the best answer?” This turn of mind, this unalloyed commitment to truth-seeking, which takes both humanity’s passion for understanding along with the realization that, as individuals, our capacity to apprehend what is true is limited, this is the very reason we create these collective enterprises known as universities; it is why this university is dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.
Sacred institutions rest upon the revelation of settled truths, truths from the mouths of prophets and from the pages of hallowed texts. For human institutions engaged in human matters, however, given that, as Kant opined, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made,” our confidence in received opinion ought to be tempered. Our work is to stir up settled ideas, not as puerile exercises in contrarianism, but to see if, once they settle back into place, they have the same shape as before.
The term education derives from the Latin educare, and means “to lead out of.” To lead us out of what? Out of ignorance. A liberal education is one that presumes that human beings have freedom and agency, and that in liberating us from ignorance we will learn how to use our freedom well. Its purpose is not simply knowledge, but wisdom.
The great cautionary tale in the West is that of Doctor Faustus, who sold his soul to master every area of knowledge—law, medicine, theology, philosophy—but who, with all the power in the world at his fingertips, could think of nothing better to do than to satisfy his most trivial desires, and he surrendered his life at the allotted time in despair. His tale is tragic. Knowledge without wisdom is enslaving. Faustus had limitless knowledge in every domain. But he failed to come to know himself, and in the end was struck down by his own pride.
This is the great insight of the Western tradition, that all knowledge begins with self-knowledge. “Know thyself”—Γνῶθι σαυτόν—proclaimed the Oracle at Delphi. We must brush away the veils, dispel the shadows, unshackle ourselves from the chains of ignorance, beginning within and working ever outward.
Francis Bacon, the great Renaissance statesman and father of the scientific method, understood the manifold ways that humans compound our ignorance. He identified four “idols,” or false images, that distorted our understanding of the world. Looking at each in turn, we can come to understand the mission of a liberal education and perhaps come to understand some of the pathologies that afflict our own culture and society.
The Idols of the Tribe represent our tendency to leap to conclusions that accord with our desires, to ignore evidence that countermands our prejudices. To remedy this, we should seek objectivity, to see the world as it really is.
The Idols of the Cave reflect our limited, often warped, perspectives; what we know of the world is circumscribed by our narrow experience and often arbitrary circumstance. To remedy this, we should seek to be intellectually expansive, to search for sources of authority outside ourselves or those we have inherited.
The Idols of the Marketplace are those that arise from confusion in human communication, largely out of the imprecise nature of words and symbols and our failure to agree on common meaning. To remedy this, we should lead with empathy and grace, seeking to master the art of dialogue.
Finally, the Idols of the Theater are those errors that arise from the totalizing theories and abstract formulations that we construct to explain the human experience. To remedy this, we should embrace intellectual humility, rightly sizing the scope of human ambition, and be wary of those who claim to have found all the answers.
Universities, like Plato’s Academy, are the places that we have dedicated to these very ends: Seeing the world clearly, seeking to be intellectually expansive, learning from one another through conversation, asking fundamental questions. The word university comes from the Latin universitas, or a community convened toward a common end. As we pursue this common end, a quest for clarity that is often elusive, we must remember that each of us has only a fragmentary understanding of the world, that each of us, at best, adds a small piece to the great mosaic of learning.
Intellectual humility is not fashionable. Nor is the passionate pursuit of truth. We live in a schizophrenic age. On the one hand, this is the Age of I, an age of solipsism, of narcissism; we are so ensorcelled by the idea that the self is primary and inviolable that we have collapsed into nihilism. On the other hand, this is the Age of Ideology, a time when a regnant and totalizing system of thought, grounded in the fundamental error that all human relations are exclusively relations of power, is ascendant; we find ourselves stranded in a stark landscape, where the bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all, rages, only to be mitigated, we are told, by the imposition of a technocratic, censorious, and absolute Leviathan. Our institutions, including our institutions of higher learning, have been overwhelmed by both the relativism of the Age of I and the absolutism of the Age of Ideology. They are shaken, unsteady, adrift.
So let us begin again. Let us be revolutionaries, radicals, returning to the headwaters of our tradition, reviving the spirit of curiosity, of courage, following the great chain of conversation across the ages, where orthodoxy and heterodoxy contend, carried out in books, in works of art, in the progression of the sciences. Our university, like Plato’s Academy, is a sort of sacred grove, a place set apart, from which we can observe the vicissitudes of our times, but not become enslaved to them. Let us ask, again and again, “Is this the best answer?”
From these humble beginnings, if we embrace the simplicity of our purpose and the clarity of our mission, becoming ourselves pioneers, founders, mavericks, and heroes, bringing into to the world not only this institution but also the remarkable things that we will each build, create, fashion, and forge, we will indeed look back at this moment, at this occasion, as truly historic.
So let us begin. Convocatum est!
Good morning. It is a sincere pleasure and profound honor to welcome you to the inaugural Convocation of the University of Austin.
We often hear of occasions referred to as historic. Usually this is a sort of feeling or sense that a particular moment or event is elevated or heightened, that something noteworthy or novel is occurring—a new this, a first that. This to me seems a rather tepid use of the term historic.
What is truly historic is that which sends the trajectory of history, and lives lived within the stream of history, shooting in a direction other than that toward which they were tending. History is not a story unfolding; it is an epic being written. And its authors are those bold enough to exercise their agency in the pursuit of higher things.
As I look across this room, I do not see students or faculty or staff or loved ones. I see a room filled with the courageous, the bold, with pioneers, with heroes. I see a room filled with those who have said, emphatically, we will not accept passively what we have been handed, the givens are not good enough, we will create anew. We have come together, all of us, as founders.
Ours is a revolutionary institution—revolutionary in the proper sense. False revolutions propose only the tearing down of the established order; they are an exercise in nihilism. Yet the word revolution—in its original sense, revolvere—means to revolve, to turn back to a point of origin, with the purpose of renewing an original spirit or ideal.
To what are we returning? Not to some pallid vision of what universities looked like a decade or two or three ago, before their current malaise. Not to some nostalgic notion of ivy-covered quads and fusty dons. Our return is even more radical, radical in the sense of radix, roots, in that we are returning to the very roots of the Western intellectual tradition, to the very roots of the civilization that brought forward these extraordinary institutions called universities.
We are returning to a time when living the life of the mind was itself a bold adventure, when the world was afire with contending and clashing ideas, when everything under the sun was scrutinized, and measured, and queried, which gave birth to a civilization that was restless, and curious, and risk-taking, a Promethean civilization that sought the light of truth, even when that light was searing or sometimes even blinding.
Higher education is often referred to blandly as the “academy” or “academia.” This occludes how extraordinary the original Academy actually was. In 387 BC, Plato, very much like we are doing today, founded a school, which took its name from the place where it met, an olive grove on the fringes of Athens called the Akademia. Here, the great philosopher gathered students who were passionate about pursuing the fundamental human questions: What is justice? How do we acquire knowledge? What is the source of beauty?
There were other schools in Greece that coalesced around such figures as Empedocles, Epicurus, Thales, Democritus, and many others, all of whom believed that the world could be understood through sustained rational inquiry, and each of whom offered particular answers to the mysteries of the cosmos.
What distinguished Plato’s Academy, however, was doctrinal pluralism and a variety of intellectual approaches. There were no easy answers. Every discussion branched outward with ever-greater complexity. The Academy did not commit to a particular school of philosophy, but was a place where knowledge was comprehensively debated, analyzed, and advanced; it was, in the words of Shakespeare, the “quick forge and working house of thought.”
The range of topics was vast, the curiosity of the students ardent, their appetite for ideas voracious. From just a selection of the works of one of Plato’s students, Aristotle, we can come to understand how wide-ranging were the intellectual concerns of the age: On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, On Memory, On Sleep, History of Animals, Movement of Animals, On Colors, The Situations and Names of the Winds, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, Economics, Rhetoric, Poetics. Plato and his students were not narrow specialists, not pedants, not ideologues; they were rather propelled to dispute, to discover, everything there was to know, and to test the boundaries of knowing itself.
The animating spirit of the Academy was Plato’s great teacher, Socrates. Socrates was famous, perhaps infamous, for engaging the citizens of Athens in frank conversations about philosophical topics. He was restless, persistent, infuriating. He cornered his fellow Athenians and pressed them to answer his questions: Is virtue taught or does it come to us by nature? What is the purpose of love? Is the soul immortal?
As each would offer a response, Socrates would push harder, “Is this truly the best answer?” His persistence did not make him popular, and he was ultimately put to death after trial by his fellow Athenian citizens. Yet his mode of inquiry, the Elenchus or Socratic Method, is the fountainhead of the entire Western intellectual tradition.
“Is this truly the best answer?” This turn of mind, this unalloyed commitment to truth-seeking, which takes both humanity’s passion for understanding along with the realization that, as individuals, our capacity to apprehend what is true is limited, this is the very reason we create these collective enterprises known as universities; it is why this university is dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.
Sacred institutions rest upon the revelation of settled truths, truths from the mouths of prophets and from the pages of hallowed texts. For human institutions engaged in human matters, however, given that, as Kant opined, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made,” our confidence in received opinion ought to be tempered. Our work is to stir up settled ideas, not as puerile exercises in contrarianism, but to see if, once they settle back into place, they have the same shape as before.
The term education derives from the Latin educare, and means “to lead out of.” To lead us out of what? Out of ignorance. A liberal education is one that presumes that human beings have freedom and agency, and that in liberating us from ignorance we will learn how to use our freedom well. Its purpose is not simply knowledge, but wisdom.
The great cautionary tale in the West is that of Doctor Faustus, who sold his soul to master every area of knowledge—law, medicine, theology, philosophy—but who, with all the power in the world at his fingertips, could think of nothing better to do than to satisfy his most trivial desires, and he surrendered his life at the allotted time in despair. His tale is tragic. Knowledge without wisdom is enslaving. Faustus had limitless knowledge in every domain. But he failed to come to know himself, and in the end was struck down by his own pride.
This is the great insight of the Western tradition, that all knowledge begins with self-knowledge. “Know thyself”—Γνῶθι σαυτόν—proclaimed the Oracle at Delphi. We must brush away the veils, dispel the shadows, unshackle ourselves from the chains of ignorance, beginning within and working ever outward.
Francis Bacon, the great Renaissance statesman and father of the scientific method, understood the manifold ways that humans compound our ignorance. He identified four “idols,” or false images, that distorted our understanding of the world. Looking at each in turn, we can come to understand the mission of a liberal education and perhaps come to understand some of the pathologies that afflict our own culture and society.
The Idols of the Tribe represent our tendency to leap to conclusions that accord with our desires, to ignore evidence that countermands our prejudices. To remedy this, we should seek objectivity, to see the world as it really is.
The Idols of the Cave reflect our limited, often warped, perspectives; what we know of the world is circumscribed by our narrow experience and often arbitrary circumstance. To remedy this, we should seek to be intellectually expansive, to search for sources of authority outside ourselves or those we have inherited.
The Idols of the Marketplace are those that arise from confusion in human communication, largely out of the imprecise nature of words and symbols and our failure to agree on common meaning. To remedy this, we should lead with empathy and grace, seeking to master the art of dialogue.
Finally, the Idols of the Theater are those errors that arise from the totalizing theories and abstract formulations that we construct to explain the human experience. To remedy this, we should embrace intellectual humility, rightly sizing the scope of human ambition, and be wary of those who claim to have found all the answers.
Universities, like Plato’s Academy, are the places that we have dedicated to these very ends: Seeing the world clearly, seeking to be intellectually expansive, learning from one another through conversation, asking fundamental questions. The word university comes from the Latin universitas, or a community convened toward a common end. As we pursue this common end, a quest for clarity that is often elusive, we must remember that each of us has only a fragmentary understanding of the world, that each of us, at best, adds a small piece to the great mosaic of learning.
Intellectual humility is not fashionable. Nor is the passionate pursuit of truth. We live in a schizophrenic age. On the one hand, this is the Age of I, an age of solipsism, of narcissism; we are so ensorcelled by the idea that the self is primary and inviolable that we have collapsed into nihilism. On the other hand, this is the Age of Ideology, a time when a regnant and totalizing system of thought, grounded in the fundamental error that all human relations are exclusively relations of power, is ascendant; we find ourselves stranded in a stark landscape, where the bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all, rages, only to be mitigated, we are told, by the imposition of a technocratic, censorious, and absolute Leviathan. Our institutions, including our institutions of higher learning, have been overwhelmed by both the relativism of the Age of I and the absolutism of the Age of Ideology. They are shaken, unsteady, adrift.
So let us begin again. Let us be revolutionaries, radicals, returning to the headwaters of our tradition, reviving the spirit of curiosity, of courage, following the great chain of conversation across the ages, where orthodoxy and heterodoxy contend, carried out in books, in works of art, in the progression of the sciences. Our university, like Plato’s Academy, is a sort of sacred grove, a place set apart, from which we can observe the vicissitudes of our times, but not become enslaved to them. Let us ask, again and again, “Is this the best answer?”
From these humble beginnings, if we embrace the simplicity of our purpose and the clarity of our mission, becoming ourselves pioneers, founders, mavericks, and heroes, bringing into to the world not only this institution but also the remarkable things that we will each build, create, fashion, and forge, we will indeed look back at this moment, at this occasion, as truly historic.
So let us begin. Convocatum est!
Norway Wealth tax
Seeing a wealth tax being discussed a lot in the US now.
Here's a cautionary tale of how the Wealth Tax in Norway has made it a real life Atlas Shrugged story
Many countries in Europe have taxed unrealized gains, but later removed it because all of its harmfull side effects. Norway is one of the few countries that still has a wealth tax, and it has been a total disaster.
Since the left wing government increased the wealth tax to ~1,1% and dividend rates to 37,8% two years ago ~80 of the top 400 tax payers have left the country. Representing ~40% of the wealth of those top 400. And it's *not* because of high marginal taxes in general, it's basically only because of taxes on unrealized gains.
Earlier stage entrepreneurs are now also preemptively moving or considering moving even *before* they start companies. I left Norway after we had raised a Series B and I was about to got a wealth tax bill many times my net salary, with no other options for dividend or liquidity on my startup shares.
Outside of oil the Norwegian economy is now stagnating with no productivity growth.
Norway is now very close to Ayn Rand's dystopian Atlas Shrugged society. Anyone that wants to innovate or start a company should obviously do it outside of Norway because you get an impossible tax bill on your lottery ticket startup "wealth".
Politicians and left wingers do not engage in intellectually honest debate when one points how this tax is impossible in practice but simply comes with hand-wavy general "inequality is bad" and "the rich should pay their taxes" arguments.
America is an amazing story of entrepreneurship and also admirable productivity growth over the last few decades. I hope the Politicians don't shoot everybody's wellbeing in the foot by introducing taxes on unrealized gains. Look to Norway if you want evidence on how bad of an idea this is.
Fredrik Haga in Twitter
Here's a cautionary tale of how the Wealth Tax in Norway has made it a real life Atlas Shrugged story
Many countries in Europe have taxed unrealized gains, but later removed it because all of its harmfull side effects. Norway is one of the few countries that still has a wealth tax, and it has been a total disaster.
Since the left wing government increased the wealth tax to ~1,1% and dividend rates to 37,8% two years ago ~80 of the top 400 tax payers have left the country. Representing ~40% of the wealth of those top 400. And it's *not* because of high marginal taxes in general, it's basically only because of taxes on unrealized gains.
Earlier stage entrepreneurs are now also preemptively moving or considering moving even *before* they start companies. I left Norway after we had raised a Series B and I was about to got a wealth tax bill many times my net salary, with no other options for dividend or liquidity on my startup shares.
Outside of oil the Norwegian economy is now stagnating with no productivity growth.
Norway is now very close to Ayn Rand's dystopian Atlas Shrugged society. Anyone that wants to innovate or start a company should obviously do it outside of Norway because you get an impossible tax bill on your lottery ticket startup "wealth".
Politicians and left wingers do not engage in intellectually honest debate when one points how this tax is impossible in practice but simply comes with hand-wavy general "inequality is bad" and "the rich should pay their taxes" arguments.
America is an amazing story of entrepreneurship and also admirable productivity growth over the last few decades. I hope the Politicians don't shoot everybody's wellbeing in the foot by introducing taxes on unrealized gains. Look to Norway if you want evidence on how bad of an idea this is.
Fredrik Haga in Twitter
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