A trio of thoughtful pieces in my morning reading today: this, and Matthew Parris ("And of government, we have very little") & Jonathan Haidt (on the spaffing of social capital) in the Times (a reduced version of his Atlantic article). In relation to the windfall tax, there ...

https://twitter.com/iainmartin1/status/1527877446032400384

... is no major principle of economic liberalism at stake: the notion that 'economic rents' are a potentially attractive base for the levying of taxes has a long pedigree in classic liberalism. The issues are to do with the practicalities, which are always governed by context....

Very disappointed not to have been with you (these bloody viruses are like the Spanish Inquisition). Belatedly, let me add my nomination for the most important bullet point in the NG ESO presentation from which this slide was taken: "We think it is credible to implement...

https://twitter.com/guynewey/status/1527197718036336640

... nodal pricing and central dispatch within 5 years. There are some key questions that need to be answered, such as what are the additional market reforms required to complement nodal pricing, and *to what extent should consumers be exposed to locational price signals*." ...

In figuring out what to do in the face of the new variant of the virus, there is one thought to hold first in mind: *general lockdowns don't work for an endemic virus*. If they did, the massed, worldwide ranks of public health professors and officials would by now have been ... ... able to produce convincing evidence of their effectiveness. Scientists have done that for the vaccines via extensive trialling, but the now extensive trialling of highly restrictive, one-size-fits-many-contexts policies has produced nothing remotely equivalent.

The new variant of the virus *is* becoming dominant in London & surrounding areas said Sir Patrick Vallance. *Has* become dominant would have been more appropriate (>60%): we now discover it had a major presence in London (>20%) in mid November, and that is cause for concern. Why? I have recently been raising questions about hospital admissions numbers, pointing out that there has been no explanation for their pattern. Thus, after a period of decline, admissions turned upwards around 27 Nov, which is odd given that cases had been falling ...

1/5 Panic & shrillness tend to increase as a contagion nears its peak. Prof Spector is right: the spread is not spiralling out of control. It *is* beyond the capacity of the test & trace system, but that's no reason to make the same mistake twice. telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/3… Last time it was Lockdown to help the NHS cope. Lockdown to help a dysfunctional test & trace system cope would be even more questionable. There is a limit to how much suffering the public should be asked to bear to cover up the failures of senior public health management.

I think it goes well back before devolution. Living not far south of the border, with a muggleblood pedigree & fond of golf and whisky and mountains and sea, I was a very high frequency visitor in the 1970s. When watching the TV news on those trips I'd invariably get irritated.

https://twitter.com/DMcWilliams_UK/status/1322095622594461696

I put it down to personal prickliness from the pedigree until one evening, watching the BBC after a long day on the course, I noticed that my oldest friend, Uni colleague & golf partner, was getting a bit agitated. He turned to me and said "It's as if Scotland doesn't exist".

1/4 Economics 101 again. Even starting from a goal of 'protecting the NHS' (which IMO is not a good place to start), strategic logic should lead a policymaker fairly directly to giving very high priority to 'focused' or highly targeted responses. The problem is a prospective imbalance between the demand for and supply capacity of healthcare services. Obviously, capacity expansion can close the gap, but so can demand reduction, usually more quickly. So, how to reduce demand? That requires demand-side analysis.

What a ridiculous man Chris Whitty is. He now compares his efforts to those of campaigners for seat belts in cars and for prohibition of child labour in chimney sweeping, and speculates that future historians will reach a favourable judgment on those efforts. Let's examine. Try a few, Janet and John diagnostic questions (yes/no answers suffice):
Did the introduction of seat belts seriously disrupt the normal functioning of motor cars?
Did the prohibition of child sweeps seriously disrupt the lives of millions of children?

1/4 One of the potential long-term effects of the quite mad social experiments to which we are being subjected is that they will convert a nation of relatively assiduous compliers with the rule-books into a nation that is much more comfortable with non-compliance, ... ... living in a land where compliance is viewed as an individual choice rather than a duty owed to others.

This is just one aspect of the general de-socialisation entailed by the pursuit of restrictive and oppressive policies, but it is one that carries very high risks.

1/4 The aim of Covid policy should not be to suppress or to control the virus (aims which all nations who were not able to do that at the very outset are now finding it very difficult to achieve), but to find a new equilibrium (in the vernacular, to learn how to live with it). 2. As always for complex socio-economic ecosystems, we don't yet know what such an equilibrium might look like. It can't be deduced, it has to be discovered. Myriad individual adaptations/experiments are a normal part of such a discovery process, but there is a major problem...

1. This is a long citation from a great Scottish scholar (Adam Smith), but please bear with it. It could almost have been written for this hour and it is relevant in relation to more than one contemporary political faction. 2. " The leaders of the discontented party seldom fail to hold out some plausible plan of reformation which, they pretend, will not only remove the inconveniencies and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, ...

1. The chart below updates the new CV19 case numbers to include today's. As before, the general picture is of flatness, though with a slight upward drift of around 92 cases per day. The drift has got me wondering. What might it show? One possible hypothesis follows. 2. Up until yesterday 269,598 people had been tested yielding 78,991 cases. That's an average case rate of 29.3%. We know the testing is not random & is biased toward finding a +ve result, relative to a random sample. We know also that the rate of testing has been increasing.

1. An interesting thread raising impt. qus. Adam Smith described the Wealth of Nations as "a very violent attack I have made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain", a radical, liberal critique of the status quo that predates Marxism & is highly relevant today.

https://twitter.com/willbott4/status/1190567826295316480

2. The 18th century status quo was a system in which vested interests (the East India Company & merchants on the N. American trades being prime examples) procured legislation from venal politicians which established market-rules biased/rigged in favour of those interests.

1/7 A reminder of the root causes of Brexit, which lie in a divergence in political objectives & traditions. It was there from the start, but for as long as EEC/EU objectives were mostly aspirational & not translated into operational policy, the divergence was tolerable. 2 The 'operational' divergence has increased over time, particularly from Maastricht onwards, with its prioritisation of monetary & fiscal union by the EU, & it is still increasing. Parties to an international treaties typically sign up to shared objectives, to shared purposes.

1/6 Interesting thoughts this a.m. from the Times's Matthew Parris on the 'columnist as political leader'. On BJ: "Ducking something for which you are not equipped is calculation, not cowardice. Acts of sudden boldness are just as likely with this man - and as calulated." 2/6 A problem with acts of sudden boldness is that they are very often misdirected & very costly, the detailed calculations having been inadequately done. Think the Boris Island Airport and the Garden Bridge. But what if the detail has been extensively examined over many years?

1. The EU's response to any UK extension request will, I suspect, be the crunch moment in the Brexit negotiations. There is an opportunity to lay the basis for long-term comity, rather than leaving the poisoned chalice of a coerced agreement, and the chance may not come again.

https://twitter.com/RupertDarwall/status/1113722908399034369

2. The EU has got itself into a strategic dead end by insisting that Withdrawal issues be settled first, and only after that will the future relationship be considered. But the issues are inextricably entangled & can only sensibly be resolved simultaneously.

1/4. It is time for another application of the visiting alien's test. What, looking only at conduct and the effects of of that conduct (i.e. not at explanations/ accounts of things), might a visiting alien infer about the intentions of the ERG? 2. 1st they have not reached outto other leavers, let alone to remainers, to build a coaltion of support for an agreed approach to Brexit. They have helped push the PM first to the 'vassal state' sections of the draft WA, then to the longer term dependency of the Chequers plan.

1/n @iainmartin reports that the Cabinet believes the EEA does not 'deliver' the referendum result. There seem to be three possibilities here: (a) they have not read the EEAA, (b) it's been read, but with zero understanding, (c) they're insane. Any 2 or all 3 is also possible. 2. On a strict reading of the ref. question, the EEA delivers 100%: Norway & Iceland are not in the EU. But it also delivers on the main motivations for the Leave vote, sovereignty & immigration: e.g. every EEAA competence that now falls to the EU would transfer to the UK.

1/4 The first release of a bit of the Alternative White Paper (AWP) draws attention to nature of the gulf in thinking between the ERG and the rest. It is not that an MRA approach is wrong, rather that it is a long slow process that would take years & years & years. 2/4 Aside from the more technical, administrative issues, that it because it relies on a high degree of trust, and trust can take a long time to build. The approach does not therefore address issues that require urgent attention and require actions with more immediate effects.

1/5 Nearing the 2nd anniversary of the referendum, a piece of advice to the PM. Following the June Council meeting: (1) remove the red-line on the EEA, (2) announce a project to design an EEA-compliant immigration policy that maximises govt control over aggregate migration flows. 2 Political sectarians try to cast FoM as a binary issue: either you have it or you don't. But it's not. Freedom is a relative concept: it's a question of more or less, not all or nothing. E.g. we can see and read international rankings of 'freedom of the press'.