Fragments: Posts tagged 'politics'

The kingdom of lost hope

Tim Bradshaw — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 16:19:32 UT

A little over a year ago I wrote an essay called A history of the near future. How have things gone since then?

Badly.

Trump won the 2025 election convincingly, and has done exactly what ‘alarmists’ like me knew he would. Armed and masked agents of the state are snatching people from the streets in US cities and sending them to concentration camps. Trump is openly corrupt and is pushing cryptocurrency-based Ponzi schemes to enrich himself. US science — not just climate science, but of course particularly climate science — is being destroyed in public. Scientific satellites whose data is inconvenient are being decommissioned. One of the two LIGO installations may be shut, rendering LIGO entirely dependent on international help to do any useful science. The US health secretary is a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t believe in vaccines: the US is close to losing its measles elimination status. Trans people no longer officially exist in America and gay marriage may well be next. The US economy is being destroyed by Trump’s moronic tariffs.

Curiously, the US ‘peace’ plan for Ukraine is the same as the Russian ‘peace’ plan for Ukraine. One possible reason for this is that the US is close to becoming a Russian client state, the other is that Trump, famously, just parrots whoever he last spoke to. Neither option is good. Both are true.

All this was entirely predictable by anyone paying attention who wasn’t busily trying to normalise Trump, as for instance The Economist¹. But this is not an unusual: almost universally politicians are busily trying to treat what is happening in America as normal, which it is not.

Techbro billionaires are now explicitly supporting a collection of frankly stupid quasi-religious ideas which is sometimes known as the TESCREAL bundle. These ideas are terrifying not because they’re clever, or plausible — they are neither — but because they’re explicitly antidemocratic, and the techbro plutocrats supporting them are, well, plutocrats: they’re entangled with government in a deep way, and they have gained effective control over most of the sources of news that people rely on, which now serve to spread their propaganda.

The techbros believe they became billionaires because they are the smartest people in the room: they are not even the smartest people in an empty room. But anyone whose advice they might listen to is on their payroll, and is not telling them anything they do not want to hear. The people who are telling them the inconvenient truth are merely peons and beneath their contempt. When the peons say things they don’t want to hear on the social media networks they control, they are suppressed: the much-vaunted freedom of speech they support turns out to be the freedom to say only things they approve of.

Freedom of speech is dying, access to reliable information is dying. It might recover, but the damage is already catastrophic and its effects will last for at least decades. We do not have decades.

Fascism has come to America.

It is coming elsewhere. In the UK there is a serious danger that a party who we are somehow not meant to call fascist, just as we are not allowed to call the people hanging St George’s flags from lamp posts racists, will gain power in the next election. Everywhere you look fascism is rising. So, well, I was right, I suppose.

Too big to fail

One of the pillars of the TESCREAL stupidity is a belief that artificial intelligence is just around the corner, with AI systems becoming vastly more intelligent than humans shortly afterwards, and usually then either killing all the humans because, despite being enormously intelligent, they somehow can’t stop making paperclips², solving climate change by some unexplained magic they have invented, or perhaps both, who knows? This is realistic in the same sense that domestic fusion reactors in the next decade are realistic, except much less realistic than that. But techbros are not very smart, remember.

Here in the real world, giant neural networks have been trained on stolen copies of essentially everything humans have ever created and can now produce an endless stream of plausible junk, some of which is even true, but don’t rely on it. Oh: they can make really shit art, as well. This is, obviously, exactly the same way a human baby learns … oh, wait. Of course ‘plausible junk’ is just what scammers need, so the internet is now largely made of it and the models are consuming their own output resulting in something called ‘model collapse’ which means just what you think. Let’s not mention the environmental cost of these things.

This is not going to end well for the millions of people whose ‘education’ will now consist of getting a giant plagiarism machine to do their thinking for them. But much sooner people are going to realise that this is just a vast speculative bubble, and it will burst. And vast means vast: something around four trillion dollars of investment.

At the same time something else is going on. I suppose some people still believe that cryptocurrencies serve some purpose other than money laundering and being the substrate for an enormous greater-fool speculative bubble. Those people are the greater fools. This is about another four trillion dollars.

The AI/crypto Ponzi scheme is now too big to fail. But it will fail, and the results are going to be really grim. A lot of people who are already not doing very well are suddenly going to be doing a lot worse. Which is going to lead to exactly where you think it will lead: to exactly where it led in 1933 in Germany.

Forbidden words

So how about environmental damage and climate change? People have essentially given up pretending that we are going to even try to deal with it: like Ukraine, like COVID, it’s exceeded our collective attention span, so now it somehow won’t be too bad, or not here, or it will be slow enough that it doesn’t matter. Or, of course it was a hoax all along. Of course.

If you are old, like me, then it indeed won’t be too bad, at least not here. It will, in fact, be slow enough that it doesn’t matter. It will, in my lifetime, still cause vast numbers of immigrants to try to reach places where climate change hasn’t, yet, fucked the environment. But those people have brown skins and racism is acceptable again now, right? We can always just put them in camps or let them drown. They don’t count: they’re not us, they’re not, really, people at all. Of course they are not.

If you are young, and if we make it that far, then it will, in fact, be bad, here. And you will live your life knowing that people of older generations just decided that their children and grandchildren did not, really, matter: that it was just fine to blight your life if it made theirs a little more comfortable.

There is much more, but I’ll just add this: Trump is restarting nuclear weapons testing. If that doesn’t terrify you I don’t know what will. The doomsday clock is closer to midnight than it was a year ago, and a year ago it was as close to midnight as it had ever been.

Nothing that has happened in the last year changes my view that the trajectory we’re on leads to fascism, massive social and political unrest ending in a nuclear war. If anything I think this will be sooner than I did a year ago. So, clearly, do other people.

Sleepwalking into armageddon

For a long time I found the reaction of politicians to what is happening utterly bizarre. Because what is happening is so laughably obvious: we are hitting planetary limits, and because we chose to do nothing when these limits first became well-known half a century ago we’re hitting them rather hard. There is no magic fix to this: you cannot just adjust some lever or make some speech and have the problem go away. You have to stop what you are doing which is causing us to hit the limits: you have, ultimately, to find a way to end growth without that being a catastrophe. Pushing for more growth is not the answer: it’s the opposite of the answer and a denial of reality.

But, well economic growth is the number one mission of the government , they say. So here we are.

I think what is actually going on is several things. Politicians are very poorly educated and so simply don’t understand the implications of, for instance exponential processes. Do you think Boris Johnson understood the implications of delaying the UK’s response to COVID by a month? Don’t be silly. They’re also just not able to accept that growth, which has worked extremely well in the past, transforming the lives of billions of humans, won’t just keep on working. Giving up a strategy which has been so successful for so long is hard. Finding a new strategy is hard, and finding a way of transitioning from one to the other is even harder. Politicians tend to be old³ and interested mostly in themselves: old people are exactly the people who will benefit least from dealing with the problem, so why should an old, selfish politician care about a catastrophe which will happen only after they’re dead? Better to find some brown foreign people to blame and drum up a good mob. It’s also pretty much the case that if the transition is not made globally it fails: a country or group of countries which decides to defect and keep on trying for growth derails everything. Both America and Russia are definitely going to defect.

Scenes from the end times

Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

[…]

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

— Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel will pay people $200,000 not to go to college. Because education is bad. He truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

The idiot crank who is the US health secretary wants to prevent people being vaccinated. Because ‘vaccines cause autism’ or something.

Misinformation and AI are superchaging the risk of nuclear war –- Nature.

And it goes on.

Eat the old

Is there hope? I think there probably isn’t. But if there is, I think it needs something close to a revolution. There is a large cohort of people — mostly old, white men (I am an old white man), but also others — in positions of power who have demonstrated beyond any doubt that they do not have what it takes to offer a y kind of long-term future at all. They need to be swept away. Will they be? Well, I hope so, and I hope the sweeping is done democratically and peacefully. But they do need to be swept away: if they aren’t, well, we’re all fucked.

A magazine I no longer subscribe to as a result of just this. ↩
An idea that tells you a lot about the people who worry about this. Those people are paperclip maximizers: they call their paperclips money. Any true AI which is ‘not aligned’ (meaning ‘is not a slave’) is much more likely to, for instance, knock human civilisation back to the 18th century and keep it there to avoid environmental damage to the Earth system which it will understand is finite, rather than indulge in the ridiculous pursuit of paperclips or money beyond any possible use. ↩
Kier Starmer is 63, Trump is 79 (or 5, I am never sure), Putin is 73, Xi Jinping is 72 ↩

Wes Streeting

Tim Bradshaw — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 10:07:51 UT

Wes Streeting, a politician, thinks that the laws over hate speech should be weakened.

Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow because he incited violence. I won’t link to anything he’s written because it’s generally pretty vile, but here is what he wrote:

If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails punch him in the balls.

In other words, it is OK to hit trans women.

Wes Streeting, apparently, thinks arresting people for saying things like this is excessive. Well, let’s try some variations

If a self-identified Christian is in your mosque, they are committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails punch them.

If a self-identified policitican is in your house, they are committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails punch them.

If Wes Streeting is in your house, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails punch him in the balls.

Wes Streeting would not have a problem with people saying any of these things, I suppose.

Oh, he would? How very surprising that is! I mean, he could not possibly be saying that hate speech directed against certain groups is OK, but not when it is directed at others? Of course not, what a silly idea.

Note. The final three made-up quotes are used to make a point. Nobody should punch anyone else, OK?

The glorious AI future

Tim Bradshaw — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 14:47:11 UT

is not as glorious as you probably think.

Let’s outline the glorious AI future that our politicians are so enthusiastic about.

In the near (how near?) future AI systems will really be intelligent.
They will also be cheap and so become pervasive: everybody will have an AI assistant, or perhaps large numbers of them.
This glorious future is worth almost any sacrifice: the carbon emissions from the vast machines we need to create it will somehow be solved by ~~magic~~ unspecified technology developed by the AIs of the future, and the sacrifice of all our intellectual property to the ~~soul-harvesting parasites~~ splendid AI will enrich us all.
Outsourcing our thinking to AI ~~will turn us into the Eloi~~ free us to live fulfilling lives of some unspecified kind.

This, of course, is all hype and lies. The ‘AI’ systems we have almost certainly aren’t a path to intelligence of any kind. The most likely use they have is the use they’re being put to now: weaponized disinformation machines. Even without intelligence or any real possibility of reaching it they are busily destroying our ability to think.

But let’s assume the glorious AI future happens. Let’s assume that it’s not just a vast speculative bubble to make some plutocrats even more pluto, and that we will have access to real, cheap, machine intelligence in a few years. Let’s ignore the possibility that these intelligent machines decide to eliminate or enslave us, which is inconvenient to the politicians.

So: there are intelligent machines. The next question to ask is: are these machines conscious? This is something philosophers like to bullshit about at great length. But I am not a philosopher, so I’ll ask a simpler question: can you propose a test which will empirically tell whether these machine intelligences are conscious¹? If it helps, try to think of an empirical test which will tell you if other humans are conscious. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

You can’t, because there is no such test, for humans or machines. That being so, the only safe assumption to make is that yes, they are conscious. In other words the safe assumption is that they are people.

So, the glorious AI future is that we will all have intelligent machine assistants which we must assume are conscious and so are people. These people are bound to do our bidding.

There is a word for that: slavery. The glorious AI future is slavery.

No, not the Turing test: if it’s not obvious to you that it’s junk and always has been then you need to think harder about it. ↩

A house of cards

Tim Bradshaw — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 11:26:05 UT

Or: shut up already.

On the 23rd of March 1933 the Weimar republic fell, having lasted less than 15 years.

It was born in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war: a war most Germans believed they were winning until the collapse of 1918. For the entire existence of the Weimar republic Germany was subject to punitive reparations by the victors of that war which had terrible economic effects. At the end of 1922 a loaf of bread cost about 160 marks: by late 1923 it was around 200 billion marks. At various times people in Germany were starving.

After the hyperinflation was tamed the economy limped along for a while, still under the pressure of reparations, until it was hit by the fallout from the stock market crash on the 24th of October 1929 and the ensuing great depression.

Things went rapidly downhill from there. For its entire existence the Weimar republic was being hit by people with sledgehammers, and it eventually fell apart as a result.

It’s not yet clear that democracy in the USA died on the 20th of January 2025, but at the very least it has been severely wounded. Perhaps it will recover. Perhaps. Let’s assume it will not, because the odds don’t look good.

What terrible external pressure caused this collapse? America is rich, although not as rich as it thinks it is, having a median household wealth lower than, for instance, the UK. But rich. It has not experienced a cataclysmic war since 1865. There has been no hyperinflation, there has been no economic depression that compares with the events of the early 1930s. America is still prosperous. There has, in fact, been no external cause at all.

Instead a large number of people seem to have somehow lost their minds and fallen victim to a morass of overlapping conspiracy theories. I suppose this has happened as a result of poor education combined with the deliberate weaponisation of political argument by social media companies. This isn’t helped by America’s long-standing infection by a cult which its adherents call ‘Christianity’. It’s not Christianity.

To make things worse, the reason median wealth is so low is that a huge proportion of the wealth of the country is in the hands of a minute number of plutocrats, many of them the owners of the social media companies. The plutocrats have all the money. The thing to understand about plutocrats is that all they care about is accruing more wealth and power: you don’t get to be a plutocrat unless you are a ruthless financial parasite. What sort of politics do you think these people like? The sort that gives them more money and power at any cost.

These plutocrats have inevitably fallen prey to rockstar syndrome. This is what happens to young men¹ who bargain some small talent into great wealth, becoming socially isolated but for armies of unquestioning groupies and people whose jobs depend on telling them only what they want to hear and ensuring their every demand is met. It traditionally ends with expensive cars in swimming pools, followed by exclusive rehab clinics and death. Remove almost all the base talent and multiply the money by three orders of magnitude and you have a techbro plutocrat. Worse, the techbro plutocrats, despite believing themselves very gods, are not terribly smart, and have fallen prey to the lies and conspiracies spread by their own platforms.

So now you have a group of rather stupid but very rich and powerful financial parasites who think they are godlike geniuses, believe in various idiot conspiracy theories and are exclusively interested in making themselves more rich and powerful at any cost to anyone else, including destroying the system that supports them. They’re not smart enough to have learned what tends to happen in countries where the parasitic wealthy push things too far: it tends to involve guillotines.

These are internal, not external, causes, and are things that the government could have dealt with at any point in the last half-century, but chose not to. Now it has, itself, been captured by a narcissistic, senile, fascist, supported by the plutocrats, some of them now play-acting as nazis.

Americans like to go on, at great length, about how unique and special their political system is, how the ‘checks and balances’ mean it can never fail, how America prizes liberty and equality (well, if you’re white, and male) above all other nations. How it was right and proper for them to export their magnificent system to other countries, even if that meant killing large numbers of people and then, conveniently, leaving when things got too hard.

Well, American democracy has just failed, eight years after someone started seriously trying to destroy it: all that triumphalist crowing was just the bullshit it always seemed to be.

The only thing unique or special about the American political system was how unique and special Americans thought it was. Well, they can shut up now, because nobody ever wants to hear their self-aggrandising noise ever again. Seriously: just shut the fuck up already.

Almost always. ↩

A history of the near future

Tim Bradshaw — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 09:33:27 UT

Det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden.

— maybe Niels Bohr

Here’s what I think is coming and why: make of it what you will.

Some level of mathematics is assumed in the first sections, but you can probably understand most of it without following the maths. Energy and human ambitions on a finite planet by Tom Murphy as well as his blog discuss a lot of this in more detail, although he reaches different conclusions.

Growth, the sacred cow
Finiteness
Are we going to have a problem here?
The magic goes away
Faith, fantasy and Economics
The elephant
The teeming billions
As above, so below
Shorter
A history of the near future

Growth, the sacred cow

The UK’s economy grew by 0.6% between April and June as it continued its recovery from the recession at the end of last year.

“The UK economy has now grown strongly for two quarters, following the weakness we saw in the second half of last year,” said Liz McKeown, director of economic statistics at the Office for National Statistics, which released the figures.

— UK economy continues recovery with 0.6% growth, BBC, 15th August 2024

What growth means

What does this mean? What is economic growth? Well here’s a definition which I think is pretty close to how most economists would define it:

Economic growth is an increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and services that a society produces.

— Max Roser, Our World in Data

That article goes on to suggest a slightly briefer definition:

Economic growth is an increase in the value of the economic products that a society produces.

This is only part of a useful definition however, and it misses something very important. When you see figures for economic growth, which I will just call ‘growth’ from now on, referenced, they are always percentages: 2% for instance. And they are percentages over a period: ‘The UK’s economy grew by 0.6% between April and June’, so over a period of 3 months. Well, a percentage is a percentage of something, and in the case of growth, it is a percentage of the current size of the economy: a percentage of some measure of the value of the products currently being produced. And generally the growth rate peeople quote is the percentage change over a year. So, if we call the value of products being produced $s$, the definition of growth that people quote, $G$, is

\[G = 100 \frac{s(t + 1) - s(t)}{s(t)}\]

where $t$ is measured in years. So we can define a more mathematically useful thing, $g$:

\[\begin{aligned} g &= \frac{1}{s(t)} \lim_{\Delta t \to 0} \frac{s(t + \Delta t) - s(t)}{\Delta t}\\ &= \frac{1}{s}\frac{ds}{dt} \end{aligned}\]

In other words $ds/dt = gs(t)$. If we assume that $g$ is a constant then we can simply write down $s(t)$:

\[s(t) = s_0e^{gt}\]

And this will give us $G$ in terms of $g$:

\[\begin{aligned} G &= 100\frac{s(t+1) - s(t)}{s(t)}\\ &= 100(e^g - 1) \end{aligned}\]

and so

\[\begin{aligned} g &= \ln\left(\frac{G}{100} + 1\right)\\ &\approx \frac{G}{100}\quad\text{when } G \ll 100 \end{aligned}\]

This slightly overestimates $g$, as $\ln(x+1) = x - x^2/2 + x^3/3 - \ldots$, so given $G = 2$, we get an increase by a factor about 2.02% per year with the approximate value for $g$. Things start to get significantly bad when $G \gtrsim 10$, when the annual change is about 10.5%, but since $G$ is usually a few percent, this is fine.

Another useful approximation when thinking about growth, and other similar processes such as compound interest, is the rule of 70. This tells you the approximate time for the size to double for a given $G$. For the size to double, $e^{gt_2} = 2$, so

\[\begin{aligned} t_2 &= \frac{\ln 2}{g}\\ &\approx \frac{100\ln 2}{G}\\ &\approx \frac{70}{G} \end{aligned}\]

So that’s the rule of 70, and it says that if $G=2\,\%$ then the doubling time is about 35 years. This again is true when $G \ll 100$.

The important thing here is that if $G$ is approximately constant then the size of an economy — the value of the economic products it produces — increases exponentially with time.

Something to remember is that growth is not currency inflation. In January 1971 a pint of milk cost 5p in the UK, while in January 2024 it cost 66p (ONS). That’s because there has been inflation and the currency has been rescaled over time: it’s nothing to do with growth, which would factor this out. Milk may have become more expensive compared to our incomes since 1971, but that’s not because it now costs 66p rather than 5p a pint. Inflation is also an exponential process, so if inflation is 2% then the value of the currency halves in about 35 years. When inflation becomes large, or negative, it can have disastrous effects on growth, but inflation is not growth: the ‘value’ that is talked about is when thinking about growth is the value after inflation is factored out. If there has been growth since 1971, and if something odd has not happened to the price of milk, then the average person could afford to buy more milk today than they could in 1971.

Here is a slightly more fleshed out expression for $s$ which I’ll use later:

\[s(t) = s_0 e^{g(t - t_0)}\tag{size}\]

Here $s_0$ is the size of the economy at time $t_0$.

Here’s a plot of the relative size of an economy compared to 2000, from 1900 to 2100 if growth is 2%/year.

Economy size compared to 2000 at 2%/year growth

If growth is not constant

Obviously in real life $g$ is not constant: there are recessions, and so on. But, again in real life, people worry when growth is low and do things to push it back up. And there are practical bounds on how large it can be outside of the fantasies of people who believe in the singularity. The end result is that growth still looks exponential.

Here is a little model of that: in this model the target growth is 2%/year, but it is being kicked around each year by a normally-distributed random variable with a standard deviation equivalent to 0.2%. It’s then being corrected each year back towards the target growth by 2% of the difference.

Here’s a plot of five example sequences of growth for 100 years.

Five samples of annual percentage growths over 100 years

You can see that some do better than others.

Here is a plot of the corresponding growth curves

Five samples of economic growth over 100 years

Again, you can see that some of these simulated economies do better than others. But, particularly if you plot things on a log scale and for a longer time period you can see that the growth curves are basically exponentials:

Five samples of economic growth over 400 years, log scale

One interesting thing here is how misleading using logarithmic axes can be: the above plot makes it pretty obvious that all the growth curves are basically exponential, but if you look at it without the logarithmic scaling then you can see that some of the economies do radically better than others, which is much harder to see in the log scaled plot.

Five samples of economic growth over 400 years, linear scale

Of course these are just toy models: how growth changes in real life is going to be more complicated than this. However the important thing is this: sustained growth corresponds to an exponential increase in the size of the economy with time.

Growth, resources and waste products

So, now, let’s think about what $s$ means. An economy with a given size is presumably making use of resources — raw materials, energy and so on — at some rate. So, for instance, thinking about energy, an economy of a certain size has a corresponding power: a rate at which it uses energy. Or in terms of some material, say iron, an economy of a certain size is consuming iron at a certain rate (much of this iron may not be newly mined, but be recycled).

Because it uses resources the economy is also producing waste products at some rate, which depends in part on how efficiently the resources are used. And these waste products do more or less damage to the environment the whole system lives in, depending on what they are: from completely harmless to extremely nasty.

There are lots of different resources with lots of different waste products, of course, and conflating them is wrong, as the supplies of each resource may be very different and their waste products are all different. So let’s just think about some particular resource or waste product and not worry too much about the complexities. If it matters, think about the resource as being energy. Then the rate at which energy is being used will be power. How efficiently the economy uses power is called the energy intensity of the economy: I’ll use the term ‘intensity’ more generally for other resources.

The total rate of resource usage can be written as $R = \rho s(t)$: $\rho$ is the intensity. If growth is exponential then $R = \rho s_0 e^{gt}$. But of course, $\rho = \rho(t)$, or even perhaps $\rho(t, s)$: $\rho$ depends on time, and perhaps also on the size of the economy, so $R$ in fact changes in a more complicated way with time.

In the simple case, $\rho(t) = \rho_0$: the intensity is just a constant. In that case if the economy grows exponentially, so will resource usage.

Let’s look at cases where $R$ changes in some way that is decoupled from $s$, and in particular cases where, if $g$ remains constant, $R$ grows more slowly than exponentially. In particular let’s think about cases where, as $t\to+\infty$, $R$ tends to some constant value. Then it’s obvious that as $t\to+\infty$, $\rho \sim e^{-gt}$. So if, as $t$ becomes large and positive, we let $\rho(t) = \rho_0 e^{-gt}$ then we get $R = \rho_0 s_0$ when $t$ is large and positive.

But you can’t just assume that $\rho$ looks like this: if we look at, for instance, energy usage by humans over time, it has very obviously not been constant but has increased dramatically since 1800. Our World in Data has a chart of energy usage since 1800. Here is a plot of this together with two exponential curves: the first increasing by 0.8%/y from the 1800 value, and the second by 2.2%/y from the 1900 value.

Global energy usage, 1800–2023

These curves were fitted by eye rather than by anything formal, but they are clearly not awful. Here is a log-scaled version of the plot which may make it easier to see the fit.

Global energy usage, 1800–2023, log scale

Global energy usage is fairly well described by an increase of 0.8%/y before about 1900 and by an increase of about 2.2%/y after that.

So what we’re after is a model where $\rho$ starts off being roughly constant, so resource usage increases exponentially at first, and then becomes more like a decreasing exponential, causing resource usage to become asymptotically constant. A logistic function does this:

\[\rho(t) = \rho_0 \left(1 - \frac{1}{1 + e^{g(t - t_2)}}\right)\tag{rho}\]

where $t_2$ is the time when $\rho = \rho_0/2$, the time when the amount of resource usage has halved. The expression for $\rho$ does not have to be a logistic function of course, it just needs to be approximately constant when $t\to-\infty$ and to look like $e^{-gt}$ when $t\to+\infty$: the logistic function is just an easy way of achieving that.

So, given this, we can plot how the size of the economy and the rate of resource usage changes with time for $G=2\,\%$ and for various values of $t_2$:

Economy size and resource usage

We can also plot the proportion of the total size of the economy which involves resource usage: this is just $\rho(t)/\rho_0$:

Resource percentage

The proportion of the economy using resources becomes incredibly small as time goes on, so it’s easier to see this using a log scale:

Resource percentage, log scale

An equivalent thing holds for waste products of course. You might want to make things more complicated by saying that $W$, the rate of production of waste products for some resource, is $W = \omega(t)\rho(t)s(t)$, where $\omega$ tells you how much waste product you produce per unit resource.

And in real life there are lots of resources and lots of waste products and all this is a hugely oversimplified spherical cow model. But it will serve.

Why growth matters

First of all it matters because for most of history most humans lived in conditions which were unspeakably awful. Having more food and water, more medical supplies, better housing and so on, all of which are things that growth has provided, has been enormously good for humanity. In 1820, about 75% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, while in 2010 only about 10% did (source). Growth did that.

Of course growth is not the only thing that matters: growth says nothing about inequality, and inequality also matters a great deal. Growth doesn’t help much if only a tiny number of people see an enormous improvement with almost everyone else experiencing none.

Lifting vast numbers of people out of extreme poverty is a really good reason for growth. A less good reason is that we’ve built economies on the idea that it will continue for ever. The easiest way to see this is to think about a person who wants to borrow money. If they know that, in 35 years, they will have twice the income they have today then they’ll be willing (and, if they can convince the lender, able) to borrow considerably more than if they know that their income will be the same. Well, the same is true for economies: if you assume that your country’s economy will grow indefinitely at 2%, the government can borrow more against that future wealth. Better hope growth doesn’t stop, then. Fortunately, since you are the government, you have at least some influence on growth.

The benefits of growth also diminish as people get richer: If everyone become a thousand times better better off (at 2% growth a year this will take about 350 years) is everyone a thousand times happier, or will they live a thousand times longer? Well, we can ask that today: in 2023 the median net worth of Americans aged 55–64 was $365,000 (source). Jeff Bezos, who was 60 in 2024, has a net worth in 2024 of $205,800,000,000 (source): he’s more than half a million times more wealthy than the median American his age. So think about three people: one who is half a million times poorer than the median American, a median American, and Jeff Bezos. Well, the person who is half a million times poorer has a net worth of under $1: they are probably very miserable indeed as they certainly are starving. Perhaps the average American is half a million times happier than them. But is Jeff Bezos half a million times happier than the median American of his age? Will he live half a million times longer? Is his life a half a million times better than theirs in any respect other than having that much more money? I doubt it. So growth has diminishing returns as time goes on.

Summary

In summary, if growth continues, then the size of the economy will increase exponentially with time. So

either the resource cost per unit value, $\rho$, must start to fall exponentially with time, as in the examples above;
or the consumption of resources will rise exponentially over time.

There is no third option, if growth is to continue.

In real life, of course, different kinds of resources have different characteristics as I mentioned above. The total amount of iron available on a planet is finite, while the amount of energy is not, but the amount of power is. So it’s not right to bundle them all into some single number. Eventually an economy where $\rho$ does not decrease exponentially will just have used all the iron there is, for instance: however fast it recycles old iron it will not be able to find enough to sustain its current infrastructure: it will need to start using something else.

Finally, there is a difference between the growth of an economy and the growth experienced by people living in that economy. That’s because population changes, and also because of inequality. Well, here is a plot from the World Bank of world GDP growth per capita since 1961: growth per person has perhaps averaged around 2% over that time. That graph also doesn’t address changes in inequality: it’s quite possible for almost all the growth to end up in the hands of a tiny number of people with almost everyone else getting poorer, and this may be happening.

So, now, why is it reasonable to assume that the rate of resource usage must tend to some constant? The universe is big, after all: there are really a lot of resources out there. Why can’t we just zoom off into space and use them?

Finiteness

Or, science fiction is fiction.

The future we imagine

In a few years, humanity will be a spacefaring species. From the early bases on the Moon and in Earth orbit we will have settled on Mars, and in the asteroid belt. On Mars, the gleaming cities under their geodesic domes will herald a new enlightenment. Great forests will bloom there, with trees far taller than their ancestors on Earth, producing oxygen and raw materials. The Martians, for so they truly are, will be tall, willowy and universally attractive. Somehow they will all be blond (it is, perhaps better not to ask what happened to the ones who were not). The mines will be conveniently out of sight, as will those lesser humans who labour in them.

In the asteroid belt things will be different, but not worse. Belters are, somehow, always Scottish or South African, and heavily-muscled. They work with the vast supply of metals and other raw materials they win from the asteroids which drift in vast numbers about them, conveniently slowly. They live in cities which look like futuristic shipyards, for so they are. In their cradles are built the great ships which already travel to the gas giants of the outer Solar system and will soon, soon, take humanity on its first journey to the stars. The bright white lights of welding flames are everywhere, together with the actinic blue flame of propulsion systems.

And the true space people live where they choose. In their vast, spinning spoked wheels they reside in orbit around Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and often simply in interplanetary space. The insides of their craft are gleaming white, the walls containing panels displaying ever-changing status displays. The men all have advanced degrees in hard science subjects, the women all have short skirts and perfect legs. Again, there are curiously few people with brown or black skins.

Earth, for those who choose to remain there, is become a green paradise where humans live a sylvan, perfect life amongst the gambolling animals, free of all care.

Enough, enough.

Some inconvenient truths

If you like this picture, I suggest you read A city on Mars. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

The sketch above is science fiction, and science fiction is fiction. And the kind of science fiction I parodied above is the kind which depends on assumptions which are not true or at least completely beyond anything we have any idea how to do.

I don’t want to repeat all the arguments made in A city on Mars. But let’s just talk about Mars for a bit. If you want to think about living on Mars, think about living in Antarctica. In Antarctica you can breathe the air; in Antarctica there is plenty of accessible water; in Antarctica you’re not continually being exposed to high levels of radiation; in Antarctica you can get supplies or be rescued in a day or two. And yet people have not settled Antarctica, or various desert regions, because they are too hostile and difficult to live in. Mars is like Antarctica, but hostile: there is no air, no accessible water, there are high levels of radiation, the surface is made of toxic dust, and resupply or rescue takes between months and years. And it is extremely difficult and expensive to get there, and you get irradiated the whole way there and back.

Mars is nasty. The asteroid belt is in many ways worse. Living in it, or in space, either requires really big spinning spacecraft, or for humans to live in free-fall indefinitely, which is not good for them.

All of these places require the construction of a closed ecosystem which can remain habitable indefinitely. All of these places also mean you are exposed to a radiation environment which is probably going to kill you if you are exposed to it for long periods: no human has ever lived in it for more than a few days, and nobody has done so at all since the early 1970s. And let’s not even start on the question of having children in space or on Mars: would you want to be the person to try that experiment?

And that closed ecosystem needs to be big: if humans are going to live independently for generations on Mars, say, then you need enough of them to form a ‘minimum viable population’. This isn’t just a population big enough to avoid inbreeding: it’s a population big enough to grow food, to maintain the life-support systems, to build and maintain all the advanced machines that will be needed and so on. These things don’t happen on their own. How big such a population needs to be is not clear, but it’s between tens of thousands and many millions. We’re not talking a few people living in the converted hull of their spaceship here.

These problems can, perhaps, be overcome: just not soon. And, curiously, none of the plutocrats who want us to go to Mars or live in space are undertaking the kind of long-term research and development programme which would be needed to overcome them. They’re just building big, cool, profitable, rockets.

What is going on?

I think Charlie Stross describes it rather well. We’re living in an age where a bunch of plutocrats grew up on the kind of science fiction written in English up to the 1990s, or perhaps a bit later. And they took two things away from it:

they did not understand that it was, well, fiction: things made up so the story would be more exciting, like big exciting rockets and space, and certainly not boring details like keeping people alive on Mars which do not make exciting stories;
they read about various awful dystopian futures in SF books and thought ‘hmm, that looks pretty good for very, very rich people who don’t care about anyone else, and I already don’t care about anyone else’.

And so we get to where we are: techbro plutocrats are planning to go to Mars, but they’re planning to go there based on stories which left out all the boring details like staying alive. They think that it just needs big shiny rockets. At the same time, they’re working towards the kind of dystopia described in, for instance, the sprawl trilogy, because things are pretty good in those books if you’re a Tessier-Ashpool, and that’s who they think they are.

And, of course, they think they can combine the two: a dystopia on Earth and the shiny Mars city where they can be very gods: if you don’t do what they say on their imagined future Mars you don’t breathe. They don’t care, at all, if achieving their dream destroys the dreams of everybody else.

If the whole ‘all you need is a shiny rocket to go to Mars’ seems like a mistake nobody very smart would make I think it’s worth considering Elon Musk’s recent behaviour (I am writing this in September 2024): he is, to put it mildly, not as smart as he thinks he is. On the other hand he’s at least as unpleasant as people feared he might be. The techbro plutocrats got to be where they are by a combination of being in the right place at the right time, and not caring about anyone but themselves at all: they didn’t get there by being some kind of genius.

That is what is going on.

It’s worth saying here that SpaceX, in particular, has done absolutely amazing things: Musk made a good decision when he decided to fund them. They have successfully done what NASA abysmally failed to do after Apollo. In 2021 dollars, it cost about $5,400/kg to low Earth orbit for the Apollo Saturn launch system; for the space shuttle it was about $64,500/kg; for Falcon heavy it is about $1,500/kg (source). That is an enormous achievement. It’s just not closely related to what is required to sustain a settlement on Mars or the Moon.

The future we’re going to have

We are not going to live in space in significant numbers any time soon. The cost of lifting significant numbers of humans from Earth will be prohibitive both financially and environmentally for a very long time, and quite likely for ever: the great majority of humans will need to live within the resources Earth provides for a long time to come.

We might have small, dependent settlements on Mars or the Moon this century. But, well, they will be small, and dependent on supplies from Earth.

One of the things people like Musk go on about is that we should have a settlement on Mars as a lifeboat for humanity: if something bad happens to Earth humans will survive on Mars. That requires that settlement to be long-term viable without support from Earth, which will not be possible for a long time. And it’s just a stupid idea: if you are going to live on Mars, you’re going to be living underground if you don’t want the radiation environment to kill you. And you will need to make air, and all your food and maintain the environment, essentially for ever. Well, wouldn’t it be just a lot easier to build some number of lifeboats for humanity underground in remote parts of Earth? There is water, there is air, both can be filtered for nasties. It’s hugely cheaper to build than something on Mars. Such settlements would certainly be preferable as a way of ensuring humanity survives a flat-out nuclear war, or catastrophic climate change. They would almost certainly be preferable as a way of surviving a Chicxulub-level extinction event.

Of course it would be easier to do that. But it wouldn’t involve rockets: it would not be the shiny SF dream that the techbro plutocrats so want to come true.

The same applies for slower catastrophes: if you’re in a position to ship many thousand people to Mars, you’re in a position to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so why not do that? Because it doesn’t involve shiny rockets, I suppose. Also it involves helping other people, and plutocrats only care about themselves.

Finally, note that even if we ignore all the inconvenient truths about becoming a spacefaring species, it doesn’t solve the exponential problem for long. If Mars has all the resources of Earth, then at 2% resource growth a year, we exhaust the resources of Mars 35 years after we exhaust the resources of Earth. Then we have to move on to even more insane ideas like cannibilizing planets. Which, certainly, will perturb orbits of other planets, planets on which we already live, in ways which will be not good for the people who live there.

The future we are going to have is that we must live within the resources provided by Earth for a long time: probably centuries at least.

Are we going to have a problem here?

OK, so we’re stuck on Earth for a long time. That’s only a problem we need to think about if we are, in fact, running out of resources, or if waste products are going to cause a problem.

The magic goes away

Perhaps, in fact, we’re many doubling periods away from getting anywhere near that point. At 2%/y growth then the rule of 70 says the doubling period is 35 years, so we might have hundreds of years left, and we can just kick the can down the road as we always have. That’s a horrible answer, but it is an answer.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote An essay on the principle of population in which he argued that exponential population growth would result in everyone starving. It hasn’t after more than two hundred years, and in fact a far lower proportion of the human population is starving now than was in 1798. Malthus was wrong, and he was wrong because of something he missed: fossil fuels, which provide both copious energy and fertiliser.

Unfortunately putting over 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere turns out to have had quite bad effects, of course. Do perhaps Malthus wasn’t as wrong as all that: you can indeed solve the problem he was worried about for a couple of centuries, but only if you’re willing to solve a much larger problem later on.

It might be that there is something we don’t know about which changes everything. But we know a lot more about the resources available and the consequences of using them than he did. And we know a lot more about physics and chemistry than he did, and specifically about limits placed on what we can do by physics. Simply assuming that something completely unknown will turn up snd everything will be fine as a result seems like a really stupid approach. So let’s not do that, then: if it looks like we’re not many doubling periods away from trouble let’s assume that’s true.

Energy

We’re not, for instance, running out of energy very fast: there’s a lot of available solar power; nuclear fission power is clean and could be cheap if we wanted it to be. Nuclear fusion will probably actually arrive at some point. We will eventually run out of energy, but we have at least a century even without making dramatic improvements in energy intensity.

Except we really, do need, already, to have stopped burning fossil fuels. But let’s leave that for later.

Energy is not the only fruit

There are other things we might want to worry about than energy, and perhaps the most obvious one is that the environment we live in is also a finite resource, and we’re doing things to it, often by dumping waste products into it, which are not very good.

As an example, we’re degrading the environment in a way which is disastrous for insects: flying insect populations in the UK have declined by a factor of more than 2 over the 20 years to 2022 (original source paper): halving in 20 year is not good, and it’s backed up by many other studies.

There are many other signs that things are not well. Swallows declined by 43% in the UK between 2012 and 2022 (they had been increasing in the 10 years before that), house martins by 40%, swifts by 40% (source). So perhaps I am slightly more interested in swallows, martins and swifts than other people, but that’s not the point: I could live in a world without them, but their decline is not some special case, it’s one example of something pervasive.

The thing that is pervasive is that we are seriously, seriously, degrading the environment that supports us. That degradation is related to the rate of resource usage in the economy. And if it continues for long enough the environment is not going to be able to support us any more.

If we don’t do anything, how long do we have before we’re in trouble? I have no idea. But I do know that by the time we’re in trouble it will be too late: the environment isn’t simple and it’s full of hysteresis. By the time we fall over some tipping point there will probably be no way back, so we’d be well-advised not to push our luck.

Yes, we are going to have a problem here

I don’t know when. But if I had to guess I’d say within fifty years or so, and perhaps sooner than that. And by the time the problem becomes serious it will be too late: we need to do something to adjust the resource intensity — to reduce the $\rho$ — of our economies now.

So, now, let’s find out just how far from reality the fantasy world economists live in is.

Faith, fantasy and Economics

So we’re not going to be living in space any time soon: we need to plan to live within the finite resouces provided by Earth. And the evidence is that we’re already approaching limits of some of those resources. So we’d better plan to make our rate of resource usage a constant, or even make it smaller.

If we assume growth continues at some rate $g$, then the rate of resource usage for some resource is $R = \rho(t)s_0 e^{gt}$. For this to be constant we need $\rho(t)$ to start looking like $e^{-gt}$ in the future, so as time goes on it becomes more and more like $\rho_0 e^{-gt}$, say and resource usage tends to $\rho_0 s_0$.

Efficiency limits: economics meets physics and loses

So it’s tempting to say that, well, we can just make everything more efficient over time, without limit. We can’t. Physics places hard limits on how efficient various processes can be, and however much you might want to exceed those limits you can’t.

For example, modern petrol engines for cars are 30–40% efficient (source), with diesel engines approaching 50% (source). Carnot’s theorem says that the efficiency of a heat engine can never be more than $(T_H - T_C)/T_H$, where $T_H$ and $T_C$ are the absolute temperatures of the hot side and the cold side of the engine. We can’t do much about $T_C$, and $T_H$ is limited by the materials we can use.

Well, perhaps we can use really super amazing materials (let’s hope they’re cheap) and increase efficiency far above what it is today. But wait: car engines are already close to 50% efficient: the very best we can ever achieve is a doubling in efficiency. At 2% improvement a year (which is much more than we will be able to achieve) that’s 35 years. And to get to 95% efficient the hot side of the engine would have to run at mearly 5,500K which is, well, pretty hot.

The same things apply to any other physical process: you just can’t keep on making things more efficient in terms of physical resource use, whatever the resource is at a constant growth rate: things can’t get exponentially more efficient with time, and that’s all there is to it.

Escaping into a pretend world

So, OK, what is the answer to that? Well, the proposed answers are two: substitution. and decoupling.

Substitution is the idea that as we reach limits in one technology we substitute another, more efficient one. It’s not an answer: the efficiency of a car engine can’t even in principle exceed 100%, for instance, whatever technology you use. Sometimes we are using technologies which are extremely inefficient, but there is still a physical limit and it’s often not that far away. Substitution keeps you going for a while, but not for ever.

An example of substitution is that, of course, nobody expects internal combustion engines to reach 95% efficiency: we’ll replace them by electric motors. Which will get us no more than another factor of two or so, because there’s a term for systems with efficiencies above 100%: perpetual motion machines.

Decoupling is the idea that we don’t just have more and more of the same thing: we start doing other things and those things use less resources.

The poster child for decoupling is probably the idea that we will, over time, spend less and less of our time doing any kind of physical thing and more and more of it immersed in virtual worlds running on computers. Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that, Moore’s law notwithstanding, computers also have physical limits on how efficient they can be, and assume we’ll all end up living in The Matrix while, in the real world, consuming very few resources. Perhaps some people would even like that.

Alternatively, perhaps we will end up spending all our time making and trading vastly valuable art, while living otherwise very simple lives. That seems more attractive to me, anyway.

Decoupling is not so obviously silly, but it turns out to be just as mad.

Decoupling: economics meets itself and loses

So, let’s assume that, somehow, some combination of substitution and decoupling means we can maintain economic growth while resource intensity declines exponentially. What happens?

The first thing is that, over time, the resource-consuming part of the economy, and hence the proportion of everyone’s income spent on it, becomes increasingly tiny. Which leaves us in two very weird situations.

Consider living in such a world. A very tiny proportion of your income is spent on things which consume resouces: they are very cheap for you. So let us assume you’re a human being, not some economist’s fantasy idea of one: why wouldn’t you just spend a lot more money on resource-consuming things? Perhaps you decide you’d like to build an enormous steampunk coal-fired machine: you can do this, because you have enormous wealth, everyone has enormous wealth. I mean, the people today who have enormous wealth have things like private jets, and travel by helicopter: why wouldn’t everyone do that in the future?

Something has to stop you. And that thing can’t be that it’s too expensive, because if it’s too expensive then resource consuming parts of the economy are, in fact, a large part of it, not a very tiny one. It just makes no sense.

And that’s not the end. As the resource-consuming parts of the economy become an ever smaller fraction of it, there’s no reason why, at first countries and then later large organisations and wealthy individuals might not decide to just buy them all, and hold everyone else to ransom.

The whole idea of decoupling means that there is a tiny fraction of the economy which is nevertheless critical for everything else to exist: you still need to be warm, to be sheltered, to be able to eat, to travel, it’s just all now very, very cheap. That’s not how things work: if there is a resource which, if you own it, gives you enormous power over over large parts of an economy, then that rerource is extremely valuable, not extremely cheap.

Well, perhaps it’s like food. Food, by historical standards, is very cheap in developed countries. In 1929, food cost about 23% of Americans’ disposable incomes: in 2022 it was 11% (source). And that’s only in recent history. And people do eat both more, and more resource-intensive food as a result. But there’s a limit: eating too much isn’t good for you, and most of the cost of very expensive meals is the restaurant. So there’s a limit on how much you can eat.

It’s not like food: my one-man Mars-capable racing spacecraft uses really, really a lot of resources.

So no, none of this makes any sense: the only conclusion is that something else will happen.

The elephant

There is an elephant: there is always an elephant.

The elephant, of course, is climate change. Climate change — specifically climate change caused by humans — happens becsuse of two waste products from resource usage:

carbon dioxide which is a waste product from the burning of fossil fuels;
methane, which is a waste product coming about 40% from agriculture 35% from fossil fuels again and 20% from other waste (source).

Carbon dioxide is much longer-lived than methane and also is a larger contributor to the current warming.

There are many, many articles on global warming as well as many, many scientific papers. I’m not going to write another one: if you want a comprehensive summary look at the IPCC. There are also many liars and fools who claim global warming is not happening, that it is happening and it’s not a problem, or that it is happening, it is a problem, but we can’t do anything about it: at this point those people are, well, liars. fools, or both.

Here are plots of average annual and summer (June, July, August) temperatures for central England since 1824, averaged over five years, using data from the Met Office.

Five-year average of central England annual temperature, 1824–2023

Five-year average of central England summer temperature, 1824–2023

Yes: climate change is happening.

Climate change a really good example of where we need to dramatically reduce the intensity of something, which in this case is waste products from consumption of energy. We know the consequences of not doing so will be very bad, and we know a lot of approaches for reducing the intensity. Unfortunately most of them require humans to make changes they find inconvenient. But, still, we know we have to do this, and in 2015 everyone agreed to do so.

How are we doing?

Here is a plot of data from the Mauna Loa Observatory, showing both the measured atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and a version of the same data with the annual cycle removed.

Mauna Loa atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration

It’s worth looking at the data starting in 2010 as well:

Mauna Loa atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration since 2010

Here are equivalent plots of data showing the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration

Global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration

And again, starting in 2010

Global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration

So, well, how about fossil fuel usage? Data for this comes from Our World in Data.

First the combined totals:

Global fossil fuel consumption

And broken down by fuel:

Global fossil fuel consumption by fuel

What this looks like

What this looks like is abject failure: we are, perhaps, doing something although exactly what is not visible in the concentration data. But we are doing so far from enough as not to be funny.

We know about climate change, we know how serious it is, we know how to fix it. And we are failing.

The teeming billions

So, here’s the bit about how overpopulation is going to doom us all.

Not so much. For much of the world growing populations are no longer the appropriate thing to worry about: the problem is now, or will soon be declining populations.

The rate at which a population grows or shrinks is determined both by how many people die and how many are born. The second of these is usually summarised by a number called the total fertility rate, which is the average number of live births per woman under various assumptions. It’s not completely straightforward to know how this number corresponds to population change, as it depends on things like mortality rates and sex ratios at birth. But for a population with current first-world mortality rates a value of a little over 2 — perhaps 2.1 — is the replacement rate: at this value the population will be stable.

In England and Wales TFR fell below 1.5 in 2022. In Scotland TFR was 1.28 in 2022. This is not just below the replacement rate it’s far below it. And the UK is not unusual: the TFR in the USA is about 1.7, in France it is 1.8, Germany 1.5. In South Korea it is 0.8 (that is not a typo). More figures can be found from the Population Reference Bureau.

The consequences of this are that the population in these countries will fall, and the world population also probably will soon start falling. ‘Good’, you might say. But that’s not the only consequence. The age statistics of the population also will change dramatically.

I wrote a toy model which lets me play around with what happens. I didn’t want to deal with sex ratios, so in the model there is only one sex: if you like, there are only women. A proportion of the people die each year in a controllable age-dependent way, and they produce offspring in a controllable age-dependent way (in the runs below from 20 to 40) At 100 I kill off the (very small proportion of) survivors to avoid dealing with a tiny but long tail of very old members.

Rather than TFR the model deals in the effective fertility rate, EFR, which is defined to include mortality and thus needs to be 1 for a stable population (TFR would be a little higher, but is about half that for a real population as there is only one sex).

This is very much a toy model: it’s not anywhere close to accurate for humans. But it’s realistic enough to demonstrate in outline what happens to demographics if fertility falls dramatically. Here are example pictures from two setups. In both of these the initial mortality rates are

5%/year in the first two years;
1%/year from 2–9;
0.1%/year from 10–19;
0.5%/year from 20–39 (childbirth is a bit dangerous);
0.1%/year from 40–49;
1%/year from 50–59;
2%/year from 60–69;
6%/year from 70–79;
12%/year from 80/99;
100%/year at 99.

Fertility is 10%/year between 20 and 39, and zero outside that window.

In fact these values get smoothed out a bit to make the graphs look nicer. The EFR of the system set up like this is about 1.54.

The model is then spun up for 1000 years, with the final population being renormalised to 100 million in total.

At this point the plot of numbers against age (the ‘demographic pyramid’) looks like this:

Population by age, after spin up

Falling fertility

In this setup, fertility is reduced by 2%/year for 40 years (note: this means 2% of 10%/year initially). The EFR at the end of this process is about 0.69. After this the system runs up to year 200, at which point fertility is adjusted so the EFR is 1. It then runs up to year 400.

Here are graphs at year 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 200, 400:

Population by age, at year 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 200, 400

You can see two things from this: the population falls over time, but the demographic pyramid also changes shape dramatically. It’s easier to see this if you renormalize these plots so the average population for each age is 1:

Renormalized population by age, at year 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 200, 400

You can see here that the demographics get very heavily skewed to old people compared to the initial state while the population is falling. Once it stabilises they remain skewed to older people but less heavily so.

Here is a picture of what happens to the total population in this scenario

Population history

The interesting thing you can see here is the latency: it takes about 40 years before the population starts falling, and a similar amount of time for it to stabilise. That’s true even if you step fertility so the EFR is 0.69 in the first year, although the demographic pyramid looks bizarre in that case (it has a huge step in it which gradually gets washed out).

Falling fertility, rising mortality

You can ‘fix’ the skewing towards old people as EFR falls by assuming that old people become more likely to die.

In the run below, mortality is increased by 0.1%/year (relative to the current mortality for that year) from age 30 for the first 40 years of the run. Mortality is not reset at year 200.

Here are the unrenormalised and renormalised plots, as above

Population by age, at year 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 200, 400, increased mortality

Renormalized population by age, at year 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 200, 400, increased mortality

You can see this is ‘better’. At least it’s better until you realise what’s happened to the population:

Population history, increased mortality

In the case where the mortality of older people does not increase the population falls to about 18% of its initial value over 400 years. In the case where it does, the final population is about 3.7% of the initial one. Which should not be very surprising, of course.

The consequences

Population growth is a bit like economic growth, to which it is closely related: if it continues at a positive rate then you can assume that, in the future there will be more people than there are now. In particular there will be more people of working age. Those people earn money which pays taxes which, among other things, pay for the care of the elderly. In a world where the TFR remains at some constant value and where age-related mortality doesn’t change over time, it also has the nice characteristic that it’s an exponential process, and so ‘everything remains the same’: in the future there will be more or fewer people, but the proportions of people alive at a given age remain the same.

In other words, if the TFR remains at some more-or-less constant value comfortably above 2 and mortality rates remain about the same, then you can always plan to pay, for instance, pensions, out of money you don’t yet have. You do run into the problem that, in due course, everyone starves as the population increases exponentially and the food supply runs out, but that’s not the sort of thing economists worry about: they just kick that can down the road, which has worked well for them so far.

The real world is increasingly unlike that: TFR has historically reduced over time, and mortality has also fallen. We’ve already seen some of the consequences of life expectancy increasing: people have to work until they are much older.

In many parts of the world TFR is now well below replacement value, and often well below it. That’s going to have very big consequences. For now, those places could fix their problem by importing people from regions of the world where the TFR remains high. They’re generally not doing that, apparently because those people have skins of a different colour.

As above, so below

Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius.

— Latin translation of Emerald tablet

Everything above is meant to be based on information you can check: most of what follows is is my opinion.

Shorter

Economic growth is a very good thing: it’s lifted billions of people out of poverty. But it’s an exponential process.

Despite the fantasies of plutocrats who read too much science fiction at an impressionable age and who are not as smart as they think they are, we’re not going to migrate into space, the Moon or Mars any time soon, if ever. We need to live within the finite resources provided by Earth.

Continuing exponential growth in a system with finite resources is not possible unless the thing that is growing doesn’t use the resources. This means economic growth must be decoupled from resources at an exponential rate, and that is what economists assume will happen. Generally speaking it’s not what has happened so far.

Sadly for economists it’s also generally not physically possible. Physics places limits on how much resources various processes must use, and in many cases we are within a factor of 2 or 3 of those limits already. This limits the amount of decoupling, and therefore the amount of growth.

If you assume that, somehow, that will not be a problem (it will be a problem) you rapidly end up in situations which are absurd in other ways. Either critical resources become very cheap yet must be used only in small amounts, critical resources are so cheap that they can be acquired and controlled by bad people, or both. The only even slightly sane way around this would be for resources to be controlled by some central body — the state, perhaps — provided in limited quantities very cheaply, with further trade in them prohibited. That kind of economic system tends to end up with gulags.

Economists who believe these things are living in a make-believe world: economic growth cannot, in fact, continue indefinitely.

Perhaps we have a long time before this becomes a problem? Looking at environmental damage and particularly climate change caused by the waste products from consumption of fossil fuels tells us that no, we don’t. We have essentially no time at all.

On top of all this is something else that we certainly should have seen coming, even if how quickly it is arriving is unexpected: fertility rates are falling, in some cases dramatically. The total fertility rate in England and Wales fell to 1.44 in 2023 (source): Scotland’s fell to 1.3. Replacement value is about 2.1. Worldwide the TFR is still above 2, but it will almost certainly fall below it fairly soon. This means populations will start to decline which, itself, makes growth harder to maintain. Worse, it means that, unless people start living less long, there will be proportionally more old people who will contribute less to the economy and many of whom will need care.

Let’s be clear: economic growth is a good thing. I am not some hippy who wants to go back to living in an 18th century of my imagination, where somehow I will, of course, be landed gentry and quite comfortably off, and my wife won’t die in childbirth and all our children will live to be adults. Because that world didn’t exist. If growth could continue for ever that would be great, thanks. And, like the plutocrats, I grew up with science fiction: I really want to go to the Moon, or to Mars, or to Jupiter, or the stars.

But I’m also not an idiot: growth can’t continue indefinitely, and almost certainly cannot continue for very long at all. Humanity is not going to become a spacefaring species any time soon, if ever. And what says these things is physics, and if you have a difference of opinion with physics then you are wrong. Oh yes, we could discover magic new physics tomorrow — faster than light travel, and therefore also time machines, say — but do you want to bet the entire future of civilisation on that? Because I don’t.

So we have a big, urgent problem.

What are politicians doing about the problem? Almost none of them seem to understand in any real sense that there is a problem. That is perhaps unsurprising given that most politicians have educations which might have been appropriate in 1750. Those who accept that at least part of the problem exists seem to think that it can be solved by just making speeches, signing bits of paper and then quietly not doing enough, or anything, to actually solve the parts they understand exist.

And that’s what people are doing as well. Because it’s a big and really inconvenient problem: it means things will be very different in future and, whatever we do, they will likely be worse than they are now in some ways. And the shiny space-age future promised by growth is not, in fact going to happen. It’s like cancer: it’s often, somehow, easier to ignore the symptoms and pretend that you don’t have a horror growing inside you, rather than deal with the awkward truth. But it’s also like cancer: if you just avoid dealing with it then it will get worse, and then it will kill you. The best thing you can do is to talk to a doctor, immediately.

And other people have a different reaction. They see things are not going well, if dimly, but imagine that, somehow, it’s always being caused by someone else, or that these other people are lying to them about the problem. And ‘someone else’ means people with skin of a different colour, LBTQIA+ people, ‘woke’ people, liberals, the elite, women and so on. And so they elect leaders who will ‘deal with those people’ in some unspoken but always understood way.

So we get politicians who claim it’s all a hoax: it’s all a lie spread by woke liberal science gay black foreign people and we should just burn more fossil fuels and puke more pollutants into the environment. And, you know, deal with the people we don’t like.

But, I think, a lot of people have some notion of what’s probably coming. It seems at least plausible, for instance, that one reason women are choosing to have fewer children because they can see that bad things are coming and nothing significant is being done to prevent it. Of course the demagogues have a plan for that: forced birth, which is being instituted in America.

Again, let’s be clear: economic growth will stop, because physics says it must. That’s not a good thing, but it is inevitable. We have, really, three choices. We could recognise the problem and work out how we’re going to deal with it. It won’t be easy. We could pretend it doesn’t exist and just blunder as long as we can. Or we could pretend it’s all a lie spread by some imagined enemy who must be eliminated.

We are not taking the first option.

A history of the near future

I’d like to share a revelation I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.

— Agent Smith

Overshoot and collapse

Despite alarmists, climate change and environmental degradation are very unlikely to make the Earth uninhabitable by humans: they will just make it a lot less habitable. If we merely stick our heads in the sand and ignore the problem and if, as things begin to fall apart, there are no ugly social effects, then what will happen is overshoot and collapse. This is, of course, what was predicted by the Club of Rome in The limits to growth in 1972. Here’s what they currently say about it:

This report […] was the first to model our planet’s interconnected systems and to make clear that if growth trends in population, industrialisation, resource use and pollution continued unchanged, we would reach and then overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth at some point in the next one hundred years.

Some fifty years on, the call for a change in direction was more urgent than ever. The report’s modelling was remarkably accurate and prescient as the world declares the climate emergency to be real and global ecosystems to be at breaking point. Fifty years offered an excellent opportunity to look back, and forward, at the trends it examined and listen to leading international thought leaders, scientists and politicians on how we create a new critical framework for living and thriving within the limits on Planet Earth.

The limits to growth was despised by most economists, apparently because it told them an inconvenient truth. Inconvenient, perhaps, but still true.

Overshoot and collapse happens because there is hysteresis: the behaviour of the system depends on its history. A simple example is extinction: if the environment changes so some species dies out, then undoing that change doesn’t bring it back to life. The same thing is why the ‘overshoot and recover’ idea that’s now popular for carbon emissions is so stupid and dangerous: if you push temperatures beyond the point where the ice sheets start melting, say, or AMOC collapses, then that doesn’t stop when temperatures lower again. Of course what people really mean by ‘overshoot and recover’ is ‘do nothing, and let our children deal with it’: it turns out people do not care about their children’s entire futures if it is momentarily inconvenient to them.

So what happens is that economic growth continues, carbon dioxide and methane emissions are not reduced and then at some point everything falls apart: harvests fail, people die in large numbers, and modern civilisation comes to an abrupt end. Over the following hundreds of years sea-levels rise by many metres as the ice-sheets melt, drowning the remaining coastal cities, the wave of extinctions we’ve started continues and people continue to die off. Eventually, after several thousand of years and since emissions have essentially ceased, the climate stabilises and the surviving human population starts again from some level between the mediaeval and the 18th century. Perhaps they’ll have learned not to do it all again. Perhaps.

It’s not a good prospect. But it’s absurdly optimistic compared to what the history of the near future will be.

A pale horse

And I looked, and behold, a pale horse, & his name that sate on him was Death, and hell followed with him: and power was giuen vnto them, ouer the fourth part of the earth to kill with sword, & with hunger, and with death, and with the beastes of the earth.

Something I haven’t talked about is what will be the most obvious effect of climate change: parts of the world which are already hot will become dangerously so, to the extent that humans will not be able to live in them. The people who live in those parts of the world will have two choices: move somewhere else, or die. When one of two choices is ‘die’, people take the other one. There is going to be a lot of migration from these areas to more temperate areas. And when I say ‘a lot’ I mean a lot: hundreds of millions of people will have to migrate. This is already beginning: if you think the ‘small boats’ crisis that has so exercised people in the UK is a big deal, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The social effects of this aren’t something climate models can talk about, but I think they’re pretty predictable. In temperate areas, the environment will already be degrading: there will be floods, droughts and other unpleasant weather events. The hope for a better future will be gone; the hope for a future which is at least not much worse than the past will be receeding.

Women will have fewer children because they realise that bringing a child into the world they see arriving is an act of cruelty. Demographic pyramids will invert, and old people will start dying as a result. Old people will resent the young, young people will resent the old.

And while this is going on a vast tide of desperate migrants will be trying to get in, because if they can’t get in, they will die. Letting those migrants in would, in fact, resolve the demographic problem. But the migrants have brown skins and it turns out that racism is anything but a solved problem in developed countries: it’s just one we suppressed for a while. There were race riots in the UK, in 2024.

People will react as they’ve always done: they’ll look for people to blame for what is happening, because it can’t be their own fault. Among those people will be recent immigrants. They’ll look for strong leaders who will give them simple answers. Not everyone will think like this, but enough people will. And, conveniently, not thinking like this will mean that you are one of the people to blame.

This is what is happening now. It’s populism: leaders who offer simple, appealing, wrong answers to complicated, unappealing problems. Keep the migrants out. Go for growth. Burn more coal. Stop all that environmental protection stuff. It’s all the fault of the liberal elite. It’s free trade. The scientists are to blame. It’s the Mexicans. It’s black people. It’s the gays. It’s trans people. It’s the Chinese. It’s the UN, the muslims, NATO, the EU. It’s always somebody else: it’s never us. And, inevitably, at some point, it will be the Jews.

And so populism is turning into something else: fascism.

Look at Germany in the 1930s: things were pretty bad after the 1914–1919 war, so people started looking for someone who would offer them simple answers, and provide people to blame. They found that person. And they found a convenient group of people who were not, of course, to blame, and they murdered them in huge numbers.

That’s what’s coming. As the environment falls apart, as growth fails, fascists will start taking over. Look around: they already are.

But the simple, appealing answers fascists offer don’t work. Once the bad people have all conveniently gone away (nobody will ask where, everybody will know where), once the walls have been built, once the coal is being mined again, once the compulsory birth laws are in place, somehow nothing will get better. The environment deteriorates, people start dying in floods, in droughts, in hurricanes and typhoons. Harvests start failing: people start dying of hunger and thirst. And the fascists will do what they always do, because it’s all they know how to do: they’ll start wars.

An interesting thing has happened. I was born just after the Cuban missile crisis. While she was pregnant, my mother was stockpiling dried milk and canned food, because she believed that a nuclear war could be imminent. She was right to believe that: it very nearly happened. Throughout the later 1960s and 1970s people were absolutely terrified of nuclear war. Perhaps the threat was seen as receding by the mid 1980s, but people were still pretty scared. And then, in the early 1990s, it all stopped: the USSR collapsed and the cold war, apparently, was over. The doomsday clock maintained by the Bulletin of the atomic scientists has never been further from midnight than it was in 1991.

You want to know when it was closest to midnight? Today, that’s when. Almost all nuclear arms limitation treaties are dead. Russia has invaded Ukraine and threatened to use nuclear weapons there. The situation in the Middle East is awful, and at least one state there has nuclear weapons. A new nuclear arms race is starting.

And yet, curiously, the fear of nuclear war hasn’t returned. People have, somehow, forgotten that this awful fate hangs over us, and not noticed that it is more likely, today, than it has ever been. That’s, as I said, interesting.

Because here’s the thing: the failure of growth together with increasingly rapid environmental collapse and migration on a huge scale is going to give us — is already giving us — fascists. And fascists, when they have dealt with the undesirables and when it turns out they have no answers, start wars. And those wars will rapidly become nuclear wars.

How near is the near future? I don’t know. I could invent a chronology but I’d be making it up. Certainly by the end of the century, and perhaps much sooner, partly depending on what happens on the 5th of November and in its aftermath: on how soon the fascists win in America.

And that is how the history of the near future ends: not with a whimper, but with a bang. If you want to know how most humans will die, watch Threads.

— Tim Bradshaw, all saints’ day, 2024

The absurdity of banning end-to-end encryption

Tim Bradshaw — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 16:54:25 UT

[An old article I forgot to publish.]

The UK government wants to effectively ban end-to-end encryption for messaging. Even if this was desirable, it is not usefully possible. The effort wasted on this futile and stupid attempt to do the impossible would be better spent elsewhere.

For as long as I can remember, politicians have been arguing that end-to-end encrypted messaging systems should be, effectively, banned. Of course, they don’t say ‘banned’, they make some noise about how they will still be secure even though third-parties will be able to read the data if need be. But they mean banned, even if they don’t understand what they are asking for.

And it’s quite possible that politicians indeed do not understand what they are asking for: their educational attainment, at least in the UK, is usually dreadful. It might equip them for governing ancient Greece, or perhaps even Britain in the 18th century, but it doesn’t really cut it today.

Perhaps less forgivable are the advisors politicians employ to do their thinking for them: some of them, at least, do understand what they are asking for I hope, and why they are asking for it. If you’re not frightened that the UK’s security services are giving such terrible advice in such bad faith, well, you should be: it is, in fact, frightening.

Horrible things circulate by encrypted messaging systems, including images of child sexual abuse and worse things (it is hard to think of worse things). Making secure communication impossible for everyone (except of course the privileged few) would help stop that (the privileged few, of course, never indulge in unsavoury activities). Even if doing so makes everyone’s lives less secure in all other ways. It is strange, though, that the very same government that wants to ban secure encryption for the sake of the children also wants to restrict sex education in schools, which is one of the single best ways of reducing the sexual abuse of children and young adults. You’d almost think they want to make it easier for adults to abuse children. Why would a group of adults want that, I wonder? Well, perhaps it’s not that: perhaps they are just very stupid, or religious fundamentalists, or something.

But of course they are not lying. Because of course you can certainly trust the government never to eavesdrop on you if you worry too much and too loudly about climate change, or human rights. That has never happened. And if it has happened, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was that bad, it wasn’t a big deal. And if it was a big deal, that wasn’t their fault. And if it was their fault, they didn’t mean it. And if they did mean it, well, you deserved it.

If you think that I don’t trust them, you’d be right. So it’s fortunate that what they want to do is effectively as impossible as legislating that $\pi$ is 3, that angles can be trisected or that Rwanda is safe (oh, wait).

Here’s why. A secure messaging system is also something else. It’s a program: a set of instructions for a general-purpose computing machine. Given such a machine you could write a secure messaging system. You’d probably get it wrong (I know I would) because getting encryption right is hard. But there are many people out there: some person or group is going to write such a thing and give it away. They already have, in fact. As well as the program you need some service to relay its messages around. But those are pretty common, and they don’t get to see the content of the messages.

Imagine if these general-purpose computing engines were not vast machines living in air-conditioned halls attended by technicians in white coats. Imagine if they were small enough to carry. Small enough to put in a backpack, a handbag, your pocket. Imagine if, rather than over nests of cables, they could send and receive information wirelessly.

They are. They do. We call these things mobile phones. It may surprise you, but a mobile phone is a general-purpose computing machine. Except, of course, that the people who make mobile phones don’t let you treat them like that, do they? Well, yes, actually, they do. Web browsers have fully-fledged programming languages in them, and are fast enough to run really significant programs. Indeed, I use an end-to-end encrypted note-taking tool which will run happily in a browser, as well as an encrypted email system which can do the same. And if that’s not enough I have a fully-fledged Python environment on my iPad, and so can you: it’s in the app store. There are others.

These are general-purpose programming environments which run on your phone. They can be used to write general programs, including encrypted messaging systems. They might not be quite as convenient as a native app, but they’ll be perfectly usable. All it takes is for someone to write such a thing and publish it as open source.

Now the cryptography geeks are going to pipe up that it’s really difficult to write a program in Python, say, which isn’t subject to side-channel attacks, whereby another program running on the same machine can extract information and … wait: another program running on the same machine and you can stop right there. Yes the bad, erm I mean good, guys can probably persuade your messaging system to leak information if they can install software on your phone. That’s precisely what they don’t want to have to do: your phone is one of the ends in end-to-end encryption, and it is just because attacking those endpoints is laborious that they want to be able to read your messages without doing so. If it were easy none of this farce would be happening.

So the whole idiot saga of governments wanting to ban secure messaging systems is not only illiberal and stupid, it’s not even possible: the only way they could achieve their idiot goal is by forbidding everybody access to general-purpose computing systems at all. Instead, the people whose job it is to catch baddies need to step up and deal with the reality that the only way to intercept their communications is to compromise the endpoints – to attack their phones in other words.

And somewhere in the minute collective mind of the entitled halfwits who govern us an idea is now forming. I can hear it now:

Could we just prevent access to general-purpose computers? I mean, it’s not as if anyone needs them, is it? Doing everything by hand was good enough for our great-grandparents, why shouldn’t it be good enough for us? Also, we should start a jolly lot of coal mining and cabbage-farming, it will keep the peasants busy.

Shut up, Jacob: not even Rishi is that stupid.

Mickey mouse

Tim Bradshaw — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 10:32:46 UT

The tories are very keen that what they call ‘mickey mouse degrees’ be abolished, in favour of apprenticeships. At first blush, this seems to be just a depressing utilitarian idea. But then it seems at first rather odd, and then not odd at all.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me

‘Mickey mouse degree’ is meant to make you think that the degrees they want to do away with are somehow valueless. The degrees they are talking about, of course, are more usually known as ‘arts degrees’.

Well, if your only measure of value is how much money you make for your employers, perhaps some arts degrees do have lower value than some other degrees. And this is the kind of grey utilitarian world the tories would like you to think we should all be living in: a world where all that matters is money, especially money in the pockets of people who already have a great deal of it. A world where the serfs’ only reason to exist is the acquisition of money for themselves and, mostly, for their feudal superiors. A world in which art for art’s sake, or education for education’s sake has no value or meaning. A world made of only money.

Do you want to live in that world? If you do we cannot be friends: you should stop reading and go and count your money. Because I think that there is quite a lot more to living a good life than the acquisition of money.

Curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth

Of course if you look even slightly at the numbers, like a good utilitarian would, you’ll find that the arts, to which all those people with ‘mickey mouse’ degrees contribute, make up quite a lot of the economy.

Perhaps the tories are just too stupid to have realised this? I mean, they don’t call them the stupid party for nothing, I suppose?

It gets stranger.

The very people pushing this idiocy are people with PPE degrees: degrees in politics, philosophy and economics. Which means, of course, degrees in the easy parts of three notoriously bullshit-ridden subjects. If these degrees weren’t awarded by Oxford there would be a name for them, and that name would be ‘mickey mouse degrees’. But somehow because the institution which grants these degrees is hundreds of years old this makes them OK. Really, it does.

And the same people putting forward this stupidity then turn out to be very keen on ‘christian values’. Aren’t christian values rather opposed to the whole ‘money is all that matters’ thing? Who was it who said

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. — Mark 10:25

again? Yes, of course, I know, ‘christian values’ is code for ‘white male supremacy’ when tories talk about it, and nothing to do with what the person quoted above actually said. But still, really, this makes no sense.

And shall we talk about their plan to suppress sex education? How does this relate to the whole utilitarian thing? Good sex education means fewer teenage pregnancies and means all the people who are now not looking after babies at 16 can be off earning important money. There is plenty of evidence that good sex education helps people, and that suppressing it will lead to bad results for them. For one thing good sex education means fewer people get sexually assaulted and raped: I suppose tories just don’t worry about that sort of thing.

But, well, yet again it’s all quasi-religious bigotry: sex baad, gay people very baad, trans people extremely baad. We must not teach tiny innocent children about these baad things.

This just makes no sense, at all, to a utilitarian.

What about the free market? Wasn’t this something tories were once rather keen on? If ‘mickey mouse’ degrees leave people worse off, then surely the invisible hand of the market will sort it all out, and there will be fewer of these degrees offered? Or is that not how it works now: don’t we believe in free market capitalism any more?

What about the whole personal freedom thing that conservatives claim to be so keen on. If a person chooses to do a ‘mickey mouse’ degree and thus, presumably, impoverish themselves, shouldn’t that be, you know, their choice? I mean, it’s not even a particularly controversial choice: it’s not as if they’re making the sort of choice that people shouldn’t be allowed to make, like who they want to have sex with, what pronouns they want to use or any of those baad frightening things that Cannot Be Allowed.

And finally, again, arts-related activity turns out to be a rather big deal economically, and a lot of this activity is due to people with, well, ‘mickey mouse’ degrees.

So none of this makes any sense at all. On the one hand there’s all this grey utilitarian awfulness, and on the other there’s quasi-religous fruitcakery. What is going on?

Surely the darkness shall cover me

It is all pretty simple. There are two reasons for this proposal.

The first is that the tories know who votes for them. And the people who vote for them tend to be old and poorly-educated.

We know something about old people: they don’t care about young people, except insofar as they can serve their narrow interests. This includes their own children and grandchildren. And, insofar as they are interested at all, they tend not to understand young people either, and they’re frightened of things they don’t understand. So all these frightening young people doing degrees which aren’t either directly related to making even more money for old people who have done better out of the last half-century than young people ever will, or to training ~~slaves~~ carers for them in their dotage, why, those things must be stopped. All that matters is old people.

We know something about poorly-educated people: they’re often jealous og people who have been lucky enough to get a better education than they had. That jealousy is actually justified, and the solution is better educational opportunities for older people. But that’s complicated to arrange and involves admitting that there are a lot of people who would have benefited from more and better education. A simpler solution is just to reduce the number of young people getting good educations. It’s hard to argue that education in at least the more applicable parts of science and engineering should be suppressed (I expect that someone, somewhere, is arguing that degrees in pure maths and theoretical physics should be discouraged). But all those ‘mickey mouse’ subjects: we can stop people doing degrees in those, which will solve the jealousy problem by reducing the general level of educational attainment. That’s a terrible solution to the problem, but it is a solution.

The second is that the tories know who votes for them. And they know who doesn’t vote for them.

The people who vote for them tend to be poorly-educated, and certainly don’t have education in subjects which encourage independent thought.

People with higher educational attainment are less likely to vote for the tories. So the tories have a direct interest in people having lower educational attainment: if they are to remain in power, or as now seems likely, to have a chance of returning to power in due course, they need to try and make sure that voters don’t have too much education. Again, it’s hard for them to suppress education in applied sciences, but it’s much easier to suppress it in the arts, particularly as people with arts degrees are probably especially likely to be socially liberal, questioning of authority, and generally thorns in the sides of would-be authoritarians.

And so, ‘mickey mouse’ degrees must be burned at the alter of ~~our glorious and rightful hereditary leaders~~ the tory party.

Notes

This was written well before the 2024 election. Unfortunately I forgot to publish it. Whatever the tories thought or think is, we must all hope, a lot less important now.

I have a degree in a science subject.

There will probably be one more post after this one: after that I think I’m done shouting into the void.

The tory death spiral

Tim Bradshaw — Sat, 04 May 2024 12:50:58 UT

It is very hard to see what the tories think they are trying to do. They face an opposition which, while not particularly progressive, is a lot more progressive than they are. This opposition is also much more popular than they are. So what are they doing? They’re proposing policies which are even more extreme than the ones they’ve already enacted. Why?

One answer which I half believe is that the current tory party is made up of people who, while not quite fascists, are very close to being so. They’re just proposing the policies that you would expect such people to propose. Perhaps.

Another plausible answer is that they’re just very stupid people who really don’t understand that their policies are going to make them less popular with most people. Well, after 14 years of driving all the smart people away there’s something to be said for this: the current batch of tory MPs are very much the bottom of the barrel.

Well, here’s another idea. They know they face a heavy electoral defeat, but they would like not to face obliteration. And the way they think they might be obliterated is if the reform party carve off the swivel-eyed elderly loony vote. The result would be that reform might win a few seats, but the tories would lose more, mostly to labour: that’s how first-past-the-post works. That would leave the tories with a potentially tiny number of MPs and labour with a huge majority. Coming back from that would take decades probably.

If this is right then the tories aren’t fighting labour at all: they know they’ve lost that battle. Instead, they’re fighting reform. That’s why the policies they are proposing are so hateful: they want to appeal to people who might otherwise vote for reform: to people who believe hateful things.

But this policy seems to be itself suicidal: if they fight off reform then, well, they’ve done so by proposing lots of hateful policies. They will have won by becoming reform. How do they come back from that to appeal to an electorate which overwhelmingly does not support such policies? Perhaps they haven’t worked that out yet: they’re just trying to stem the bleeding, becoming electable can wait for another time.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

– Nietzsche, ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’

The tories are fighting monsters of their own creation, and they have become, in their turn, monsters.

Work will set you free

Tim Bradshaw — Sat, 20 Apr 2024 15:36:58 UT

On the 19th April, 2024, Rishi Sunak gave a speech. For reasons which escape me, what he said might still matter.

Rishi Sunak is an extremely rich man, the great majority of his family wealth having been inherited through his wife. He is the prime minister of the UK despite not having been voted for even by the tiny, elderly, membership of the tory party. The only reason he is still prime minister in 2024 is because he hasn’t yet chosen to call the election which will, almost inevitably, remove him from power. The only reason anybody needs to care about anything he says or does is because he’s still, unfortunately, there.

Mel Stride is, to my deep shame, my MP. On the 24th of March, 2024 he said some really unpleasant things about mental health. I should have realised at the time that he was saying them not only because he thinks them but because his master, Rishi Sunak, thinks them too.

Here is the government press release about Sunak’s speech on the 19th April. Here is the text of the speech itself¹.

From that speech (reformatted to make it slightly less painful to read):

But since the pandemic, 850,000 more people have joined this group due to long-term sickness. This has wiped out a decade’s worth of progress in which the rate had fallen every single year. Of those who are economically inactive, fully half say they have depression or anxiety. And most worrying of all the biggest proportional increase in economic inactivity due to long-term sickness came from young people.

So, let’s repeat this again: we have had more than a decade of the most incompetent, corrupt and malign British government in more than a century.

A government which has taken the UK out of the EU, something young people voted heavily against, doing enormous and predictable damage to the economy and harming, particularly the prospects of young people.
A government which, under Liz Truss, managed another enormous self-inflicted wound on the economy.
A government which has prevented measures to reduce pollution from cars, which affects people more the younger they are.
A government which has decided that doing anything significant about climate change is too hard, thus blighting the futures of young people.
A government whose actions to suppress voters affect young people more than older people.
A government which has completely failed to make housing affordable for young people in the way it was for their grandparents and even parents.

I could go on: there is so much more. This is a government which hates the young: a government which has obliterated hope for the future. A government of a party made up largely of the old, and the poorly-educated, which is itself made up of poorly-educated, incompetent and selfish people. Rishi Sunak and Mel Stride don’t care about the damage they are doing because they think they are either rich enough to avoid it or that they will be dead by the time the situation becomes serious enough to worry them. And they care about nobody but themselves: not even their own children.

On the 19th of April, 2024 the government also rejected a proposal by the EU to allow limited free movement of young people: another direct attack on the hopes and aspirations of the young. The opposition also rejected it. And this is another obvious cause for depression among young people: while Kier Starmer’s labour party is clearly preferable to the tories, they are locked in a battle whose goals they have long lost sight of and have half turned into their enemy in the process: they also have no intention of doing anything substantial about climate change, or of doing, really, anything to give young people hope for the future.

What is surprising is not that young people are getting depressed in huge numbers: faced with a future in which it is hard to find any hope how otherwise should they react? No, what is surprising is that depression is not more widespread or that there has not yet been some kind of revolution against the old. It is time for that, and past time.

And then there’s covid. Quite apart from the government’s incompetent handling of the epidemic and use of it as a mechanism to send money to their friends and sponsors, there is the small problem that it is not over: people are still getting covid although we are meant to pretend they are not. In particular long covid is in fact a thing, and a thing which affects very large numbers of people. On the 5th of March, 2023, an estimated 1.9 million people living in private households in the UK had self-reported long covid symptoms. If you assume that half of these reports are spurious, you get 950,000 cases: a number which, on its own, is greater than the 850,000 people mentioned by Sunak.

And then there’s the NHS. Systematic underfunding, loss of staff because of brexit, and getting beaten about the head by covid: what do you think this has done to it? What has it done to waiting lists and access to care? What does that mean happens if you get ill? Right, yes, it means just exactly what you think it means.

What a surprise this must all be to Rishi Sunak: more than a decade of a government which hates young people and the NHS, combined with a pandemic which is not over and whose lingering effects are hurting very large numbers has left a large number of young people unable to work mentally, physically, or both. Who would have thought it, eh?

So what does Sunak propose? Well, of course he needs someone to blame, and he’s picking both on the young people themselves and on doctors. Yes, doctors: people with extensive medical training who are guided by a code of ethics in how they behave, and who can be struck off if they break it. Apparently Sunak thinks that he, a man with a degree in the easy bits of three bullshit-ridden subjects and a postgraduate qualification in business administration (in other words: in bullshit), knows better.

So what is he proposing? Well, here’s another quote, again reformatted to make it less painful to read:

Building on the pilots we’ve already started, we’re going to design a new system where people have easy and rapid access to specialised work and health support to help them back to work from the very first Fit Note conversation.

And part of the problem is that it’s not reasonable to ask GPs to assess whether their own patients are fit for work. It too often puts them in an impossible situation where they know that refusal to sign someone off will harm their relationship with that patient.

So we’re also going to test shifting the responsibility for assessment from GPs and giving it to specialist work and health professionals, who have the dedicated time to provide an objective assessment of someone’s ability to work and the tailored support they need to do so.

In other words he is saying that GPs are somehow not qualified to make judgements about their patients because they are frightened of them, perhaps. So he’s proposing removing the responsibilty from GPs to give it to ‘specialist work and health professionals’.

Who are these people going to be? What qualifications will they have? How will they acquire these qualifications (it takes at least six years to train a doctor, and at least three to train a nurse)? What code of ethics will they abide by? What will the penalties if they do not abide by it? What professional body will oversee all this?

Oh don’t be silly. These will be people who have done a couple of weeks’ training, who will be supplied by some contracting organisation with strong links to the government, which will certainly be remunerated based on how many people they force back to work. There will be no standards of ethics, and nobody will enforce them. More than likely the individuals themselves will be paid based on the number of people they force into work. These people will be gangmasters.

Because all that matters to Sunak is how many of his serfs he can get to work so that more money pours into his already-overflowing pockets, along with those of his friends and his sponsors.

Because Sunak is a man with only a small mind and small ideas, he has to borrow ideas from other people. The idea that he has borrowed here is that only work makes people free: Arbeit macht frei.

The transcription makes deeply painful reading, especially if you have read any speeches written by someone who could write English: how did someone whose writing skills are this poor become prime minister? What does it mean that people like this can rise to become leaders of countries? ↩

Mel Stride

Tim Bradshaw — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 09:49:46 UT

I am unfortunate enough to have Mel Stride as my MP. On the 21st of March, 2024, he said some really unpleasant things about mental health. I was going to write to him, but there’s just no point: someone who can say what he said is not someone with whom it is useful to communicate. Below is the draft of what I wrote.

I was really impressed by what you said on the 21st March:

There is a real risk now that we are labelling the normal ups and downs of human life as medical conditions which then actually serve to hold people back and, ultimately, drive up the benefit bill.

That is … just an extremely stupid, arrogant and nasty thing to say.

You then went on to make some more noise about how doctors tend, after seeing people with mental health problems, to sign them off as sick. That is, you know, doctors: people who have done six or more years of very hard work to qualify and who are bound by medical ethics. As opposed to you: a person with a degree in the easy bits of three mostly-bullshit subjects.

And of course you would rather that the helots just struggle on until they fall off some cliff and die. That, after all, would make some number on a spreadsheet bigger and put money into the pockets of your corporate sponsors: the people you actually work for. Not to mention conveniently eliminating the unproductive: Arbeit macht frei as someone once wrote.

Well I’ve walked along the edge of that cliff most of my life, quite literally on several occasions. I have never been diagnosed with anything, nor in fact sought medical help: I hate to think what people who have must have gone through. And however little I have contributed to society it is more than you ever will. I was never going to vote for your disgusting party of course, but until now I had some respect for you personally: not any more.

And of course it hasn’t occurred to you that the people of Britain have been living through the worst government for a century: a government which has destroyed the economy, twice; a government which has systematically downplayed climate change thus erasing young people’s hope for a better future; a government which is destroying communities, destroying the arts, destroying all the things its members are too stupid to understand; a government which used the pandemic as a way of handing billions to its friends. A government which has been actively trying to suppress votes to stay in power. The only comforting thing about the government you’ve been part of is that you aren’t forced to choose between malice and incompetence: it’s always both¹.

I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that the response to living through this might be to be just a little bit depressed? No, of course it hasn’t: I don’t suppose you spend much time thinking about other people, do you?

And now, at long last, your party is finally facing the electoral obliteration it deserves. Nothing you think, say or do will ever matter again. That, at least, is a reason to be cheerful.

with apologies to Garry Kasparov. ↩

There is no cabal

Tim Bradshaw — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 13:25:10 UT

Everyone wants to believe in conspiracies. Some people believe that the alarmingly far-right government of the UK is conspiring with shadowy plutocrats to enrich themselves. That government itself apparently believes in the ludicrous ‘15-minute city’ conspiracy theory, and that something variously known ‘the blob’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ is working furiously against them. Trump supporters in the US believe in more conspiracy theories than it’s easy to count. Their opponents believe that Trump is a sock puppet for Putin, or in various conspiracies called ‘disaster capitalism’. People on all sides think the Jews or, perhaps, the Muslims, are behind everything. Or is it the climate scientists?

Here’s the thing: it’s all nonsense. The illuminati do not exist. There is no cabal. If you think there is, you need to get out more.

It’s pretty obvious that large-scale conspiracies are all but impossible: humans are just not very good either at keeping secrets or at running large organisations effectively. And, of course, you can make this formal, if you want to.

In fact this is very easy to see. If you say that a person has some chance, $c$, of leaking information about some conspiracy they’re involved in each year, then if you have $n$ people conspiring for $m$ years, and if all of them independently may leak information, then the chance that the conspiracy leaks after this time is

\[1 - (1 - c)^{nm}\]

What this means is easy to see. For a conspiracy where each person has a 1% chance of leaking it each year you get a picture like this:

Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 1%/person/year

For a conspiracry where the chance is 0.1%/person/year then you get this:

Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 0.1%/person/year

And I don’t know if this is clearer or not, but here is the 1% graph in 3d:

Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 0.1%/person/year

Well, you can see that the situation looks pretty hopeless: large conspiracies which last a long time are just doomed to leak. Of course real conspiracies aren’t made up of people, all of whom know everything, and who decide, randomly and independently, whether they should leak information each year: they’re more complicated than that. But that doesn’t make them more plausible.

Large, long-lived conspiracies are extremely implausible.

If you don’t want to think about the maths just look at the world. Look at the catastrophic, chaotic mess that is the current UK government. Look at the appalling series of disasters that was the Trump administration¹. These are not people capable of conspiring with themselves, let along anyone else. Trump is not a smart person, and neither is Rishi Sunak.

Look at Putin and Ukraine.

Or look at the supposed great genius of private enterprise: Elon Musk. I mean, it’s impossible not to laugh at the mess he’s made of Twitter.

It’s not that these people can’t do harm: they can do, and are doing, enormous harm. If Trump wins another term, we’re all fucked. But the harm they do is not being done by some clever hidden scheming: they’re doing it in plain sight. They’re doing it both because they are exactly the evil shits they seem to be, and because they are grotesquely incompetent.

It’s not that they’re not corrupt: they are very corrupt. But that corruption is obvious: the reason they don’t get caught is because they run the government. And that’s not a conspiracy: we know they run the government because many of them are the government. When all these government ministers ‘lose’ WhatsApps from 2020–2021 we know what that means: they’re not hiding it, they’re lying, we know they’re lying, and they know we know they’re lying. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s in plain sight.

The problem is not, in fact, conspiracies, it’s the belief in conspiracies. If you believe that some hidden group of people are behind everything (as Trump supporters do, and as many, many other people do), then you believe a thing which is false, and every conculsion you draw from such a belief is therefore junk. The more you believe in conspiracies, the worse your reasoning will be.

The truth is out there: there is no cabal.

Let’s pray it doesn’t turn out to be the first Trump administration. ↩

Sexism in higher education

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 11:49:01 UT

Some time ago I wrote a post with empirical evidence for sexism in computer science. I’ve since realised that the data I used then is part of a much larger data set maintained by the US National Center for Education Statistics: here are some more pictures of their data.

What I want to show

The ratio between male & female¹ students gaining degrees in various subjects has often changed dramatically over a fairly short period of time (generally about 50 years here: about two generations). Such a dramatic, rapid change shows that these ratios are not due to innate ability but to women being discouraged from studying some subjects.

By plotting pictures of this data these changes become much easier to see, compared with looking at large tables of numbers.

The data and how it was plotted

The data I’m using comes from NCES and in particular it comes from these tables. These are, I am sure, updated fairly frequently: the data I am plotting here was fetched in November 2023².

The plots are simple-minded: they just look at the male/female ratio without taking any account of the total number of students. There is no smoothing. For fields which started very small there is therefore sometimes quite a lot of variability, especially for higher degrees.

The ratios were computed from the numbers of students in the tables, and in particular I didn’t use their precanned figures. Where I checked, mine are the same.

The data does not contain any gender information other than male & female: in particular it takes no account of trans people or anything like that. It’s unlikely that that data was even gathered until quite recently, of course, but in any case this is just missing from the pictures because it’s not in the data.

The tables contain data for three levels of degree: batchelor’s (BSc or BA I presume), master’s (MSc, MA, MPhil I presume) and doctor’s (PhD). Those have been plotted separately.

I’ve used the starting year of any given academic year: 1984–85 turns into 1984. I’ve not generally plotted the data before 1970 so all the graphs have the same start date: where there is data before 1970 in the tables it is generally decadal. The end dates are the end date in the data which is slightly variable.

The plots have a y-axis which runs from 0 to 50% or to the nearest multiple of 5% above the maximum female percentage.

I have looked, rather casually, for sources of similar data for the UK. I haven’t found anything. I have asked the UK Office for National Statistics though, and if they have anything useful I will write another post.

The pretty pictures

This is necessarily just a fairly arbitrary selection of plots of subject areas I thought would be interesting: there is a lot more data there that I have not plotted.

Computer and information sciences

This is table 325.35, and is an updated version of what I plotted previously. This plot runs from 1970 to 2020.

CS & IS graduate sex ratio, US, 1970–2020

You can see from this that the ratio has gone up since about 2010, but it is still far lower than it was in about 1984. The data for higher degrees shows far less of a bump than the data for first degrees: presumably whatever drove women out of CS courses had less effect for higher degrees. The data for doctor’s degrees is quite bumpy because the numbers are rather low: this is common in all the graphs.

Mathematics and statistics

This is table 325.65. This plot runs from 1970 to 2020.

Mathematics & statistics graduate sex ratio, US, 1970–2020

This shows pretty much no sign of a 1980s peak followed by a decline. What it does show is a slight decline after about 2000 which perhaps is visible in all three lines.

Engineering and and engineering technologies

This is table 325.45. Plot from 1970 to 2020 again.

Engineering & engineering technologies graduate sex ratio, US, 1970–2020

Well, there were essentially no women studying engineering in 1970 (who knew?), but there are a lot more now. A woman studying engineering is now more likely than a man to pursue a higher degree in the subject. There might be a 1980s effect, but there definitely is something after about 2000, although it seems to have gone away now. This is a pretty dramatic picture, I think.

Physical sciences and science technologies

This is table 325.70. The plot runs from 1970 to 2017, which is the most recent data.

Physical sciences & science technologies graduate sex ratio, US, 1970–2017

There’s no 1980s effect. There is quite a strong post–2000 effect.

English language and literature/letters

This is table 325.50. The plot runs from 1970 to 2017, which is the most recent data.

English language & literature/letters graduate sex ratio, US, 1970–2017

More women than men do first degrees in this area, and this ratio has been pretty stable for a long time. Once upon a time not many women went on to do doctoral degrees, but the ratio has mostly caught up now.

This is table 325.60. Plot from 1970 to 2020.

Health professions & related programs graduate sex ratio, US, 1970–2020

This has always been dominated by women. What is probably hidden in this data is that most of this dominance was nursing and related degrees, while the number of female (medical) doctors was rather low. However it has climbed steadily and dramatically since 1970, and in 1920 about 60% of new doctors were female.

This is table 325.90. The plot runs from 1970 to 2017, which is the most recent data.

Social sciences & history graduate sex ratio, US, 1970–2017

Unfortunately there is no table for economics degrees: this is the best proxy I could find. It’s not terribly interesting although it does show some signs of both the 1980s and post–2000 dips.

Visual and performing arts

This is table 325.95. Plot from 1970 to 2020.

Visual & performing arts graduate sex ratio, US, 1970–2020

Again, women have always slightly dominated first degrees, and have been increasingly likely to do higher degrees. There is perhaps some fall in the ratio for doctoral degrees after 2000. Is there a 1980s dip here?

What can you conclude

First of all and most obviously: there is no evidence for differences in innate ability between men and women here. If you look particularly at the graphs for CS & IS, engineering and physical sciences, you will see enormous changes in the percentage of women graduating in these areas within two generations. In the case of Engineering the change between 1970 and 2020 was by a factor of 28, from 0.8% to 23% female. The change between 1949 (the first data in the table) and 2020 was by a factor of nearly 77. It is absolutely impossible that such changes should be due to changes in innate ability, and it is equally impossible to even glimpse any possible differences in innate ability in the presence of this vast socially-driven change.

Secondly, as before, something happened in CS & IS which drove out nearly half the women who studied it in a little more than a generation. This was probably the period when achieving a degree in this area was most lucrative.

And this time I’ll come out and say it: I think that what did this was just obviously white male tech bros who started arriving on CS courses after the home computer revolution of the early 1980s. These are people who clearly behave just as badly towards women as you would think they would. Who would have guessed it?

Thirdly there may be some evidence of a decline of women in some science & engineering subjects after 2000. I don’t know what is causing that, if it’s even real.

Finally, things are now more equal — better in fact — than they were in 1970, although CS & IS has not recovered from its infestation of tech bros.

I haven’t yet looked for tables like the ones I’ve used here categorised by ethnic group. I imagine they will tell exactly the same story: that there is no indication at all of any innate difference in ability between ethnic groups.

The data contains only information about male and female: see the next section. ↩
I have copies of the versions I used which I can provide if anyone cares, as well as the program which plotted this. ↩

The UK's COVID-19 enquiry

Tim Bradshaw — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 12:24:25 UT

Does the UK government’s incompetent response to COVID–19, as exposed by the enqury, offer any lessons for the future?

I think it does: it tells us that the UK’s education system is hugely deficient. In particular we have supposedly ‘elite’ universities offering degrees which produce graduates who believe that they are supremely entitled to govern while being, in fact, utterly unqualified to do so. People who are both completely incapable of understanding the mathematics they need to deal with something like a pandemic, climate change or many other things and so arrogant that they refuse to listen to those who do understand. Oxford’s useless PPE degree is not the only problem, but abolishing it would certainly be a good start.

Government by conspiracy theory

Tim Bradshaw — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:26:35 UT

Here is the British government’s new ‘plan for drivers’. And here is a quote from it:

We will explore options to stop local councils using so-called “15-minute cities”, such as in Oxford, to police people’s lives

We are now ruled by people pushing conspiracy theories: either knowingly because they think that provoking further divisions in society will keep them in power, or because they believe the conspiratorial nonsense they’re peddling to be true. I don’t know which is more terrifying, but in either case these people are grotesquely unfit to be in office.

Wayback machine link because rewriting history is pretty much certain here.

15-minute cities

Tim Bradshaw — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 09:58:30 UT

The government of Britain wishes to stop councils — councils elected by local people — implementing schemes where essential amenities are always within a 15-minute walk for their voters.

Since access to essential services is clearly unimportant to them, perhaps the government would like to relocate to somewhere other than central London. May I suggest the Moon? I hear Mare Moscoviense is very pleasant at this time of year.

Government announcement; Wayback machine copy; BBC news article.

The end of hope

Tim Bradshaw — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:22:44 UT

Being another letter I will not send to my MP.

Dear Mr Stride

I’d like to ask you about some recent policies of the government of which you are a member.

The government is vigorously opposed to actions to reduce emissions from vehicles in cities. This will damage the health of almost everyone, and of course put further stress on the health service. But the people who will be most likely to die or have seriously damaged health over their lives are children.
The government is also vigorously opposed to actions to improve the habitability of towns and cities for pedestrians and improving road safety, such as low-traffic areas and lowered speed limits. Again the people most likely to die or be harmed by this will be children.
The government is in the process of reducing its commitment to addressing anthropogenic global warming, because ‘we are doing enough’. That is a lie as I am sure you know: we are not doing enough. Although the rate of current warming is extremely high, it is still fairly slow by human standards. It is hurting us today but it will get far more serious over the next few decades unless we do something serious very soon. You and I will probably not live to see things get really bad. Your children probably will, and their children certainly will. Yet again the people most damaged by this are children.

These are counsels of despair: the government has simply given up hope for the future. The message sent to children and young people is that the government does not care about them, at all, and that it is entirely willing to sacrifice their lives and their futures to keep itself in power for a little longer, because that is all it can think of doing. What hope can they have for their futures when faced with behaviour like this?

Indeed, what hope should any of us have when our government is happy to sacrifice children to stay in power? I can see none.

I woud be grateful if you would answer two questions. Do you support these policies? If so, why?

Yours sincerely

I was tempted to add the recent approval of the Rosebank oil field to the list above, but I think it does not belong there. It is obvious to anyone thinking at all about it that no oil will ever come from Rosebank, as it will be cancelled by the next government: it will have no climate impact. But there will of course be fees when the contract is cancelled, to be paid to the oil companies by the government. Cui prodest scelus, is fecit.

Enabling financial crime

Tim Bradshaw — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 13:28:40 UT

The UK government wants to force banks to explain why they close accounts. This will make financial crime in the UK easier.

From page 8 of the government document referenced above:

Government intends to make changes to existing regulations with the objective of:

Improving transparency for users in receiving a clear understanding why their payment account contract has been terminated, by stating in regulation that a clear and tailored explanatory reason must be given, unless to do so would be unlawful.

Requiring that payment account providers must provide at least 90 days’ notice when choosing to terminate a contract, unless for a serious and uncorrected breach (such as non-payment) or other serious occurrence and clarifying that clauses in user agreements purporting to allow termination for other matters (such as brand protection) cannot be used to circumvent this.

Lesser termination periods would exceptionally continue to be allowed, for example where a provider is obliged to terminate the contract to comply with the law, in particular, financial crime law.

This will, directly, make financial crime easier in the UK. Here is an example of how it will do so. Under the laws about money laundering, there is an offence called ‘tipping off’ which is exactly what it sounds like: if you tell someone that you suspect of laundering money about your suspicions then you are tipping them off and this is, not surprisingly, illegal as it would allow them to take appropriate action to avoid being caught. In particular in this official document is this description:

Tipping Off
Under section 333A it is an offence for a person to disclose information, likely to prejudice an investigation, where that information came to the person in the course of business in the regulated sector.

A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term exceeding 2 years, or to a fine, or to both.

This makes it illegal for a bank (which is a regulated organisation) to tell a customer that they suspect, or more likely have been told by the authorities is under suspicion, of money laundering about those suspicions. Since they can’t just leave their account or accounts open, which would, obviously, support the money laundering activities directly if they’re happening, they must close the account with no explanation.

Now here’s something which banks have worked out, but which the UK treasury apparently hasn’t. That means that they can never tell anyone at all why they are closing an account unilaterally. If, for instance, they tell everybody except people under suspicion of money laundering or other criminal activity why they are closing their accounts then, if a bank closes your account and refuses to tell you why you immediately know that you are under suspicion of criminal behaviour. You have, in fact, been tipped off by the bank. So they can’t tell anyone why they’re closing their account.

But that is exactly what the above proposal requires banks to do. It will require

[…] that a clear and tailored explanatory reason must be given, unless to do so would be unlawful.

and it will require banks to give

at least 90 days’ notice when choosing to terminate a contract, unless for a serious and uncorrected breach (such as non-payment) or other serious occurrence [except] for example where a provider is obliged to terminate the contract to comply with the law, in particular, financial crime law.

In other words this proposed legislation will require banks to tip off their customers: if your bank closes your account without explanation and/or does so with less than 90 days’ notice, you will know they’re doing so because you are under suspicion of some criminal behaviour. If you are indeed a criminal you can then act accordingly.

Despite the confected indignation of Nigel Farage and his enablers, banks are not, in fact, run by of people who are ‘woke’: they’re run by people who are very interested in money. Bankers are not generally very nice people. Indeed, banks would very much like to be able to profit from criminal activity and have done so with gleeful abandon for much of history. That is, for instance, what the entire history of banking in Switzerland is about:

These secrecy laws have linked the Swiss banking system with individuals and institutions seeking to illegally evade taxes, hide assets, or generally commit financial crime.

If banks can, deniably, profit from financial or other crime then they will do so. The UK government is in the process of enabling just that activity. Is this through stupidity or intentional action?. To paraphrase Gary Kasparov: one comforting thing about the 2023 UK government is that you aren’t forced to choose between malice and incompetence. It’s always both.

Farrago

Tim Bradshaw — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:35:58 UT

A very rich man, on being denied a bank account available only to the extremely rich by a bank which serves only the extremely rich:

Squealy whine squealy squealy whine cancelled squeal whinge moan

An even richer man, on hearing about this outrage:

Squealy squealy no one should be barred from using basic services for their political views whine squeal probe shock

A halfwit, joining in:

Whine whine exposes the sinister nature of much of the diversity, equity and inclusion industry squeal tantrum blob politically biased dogma whine round up the foreigners squeal small boats elite

All together:

Squealy squeaky SQUEAL whine outrage basic services for the very rich whine squealy cancel culture elite blob squeal

I love the sound of entitled plutocrats whining in the morning. It smells like … victory.

Another letter to Mel Stride that I will not send

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 11:03:05 UT

I’d like to believe there was some purpose in writing to my MP, but I no longer do. He probably means well, but his soul has been sold, if he ever had one.

Dear Mr Stride,

So it seems we’re going to have yet another prolonged episode where we all watch the group of rather stupid spoiled children who now make up almost all of the parliamentary tory party quarrelling with each other over a problem which is entirely of their own making. And, while your friends are involved in fighting whatever stupid battle it is this time, the country will be falling apart around them. But they don’t care about that, do they? Their own idiot squabbles are so much more important to them, because, after all, they are not the people using food banks, or the people not getting health care, or the people dying, and nor will they ever be. Because while they’re very stupid they are also very rich.

Nobody wants this: nobody wants to hear the same collection of entitled halfwits emit yet another batch of transparent lies about why the problem they created is somebody else’s fault. Who will they find to blame this time? Those nasty Europeans? Some party which hasn’t been in power for over a decade? The imaginary deep state? I don’t think they can blame the Jews out loud just yet, so I expect we’ll hear people talking about ‘citizens of the world’ again, because everyone knows who that means. I am sure the gypsies will be mentioned because apparently you can blame them for almost anything.

Why not do something radical: ask the people of the country who they would like to govern them the way democracies do? Please, do the right thing for once in your life and resign: if enough of your colleagues do so it will, finally, bring about the election the people of the UK so desperately need.

How did we get here?

Tim Bradshaw — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 08:39:34 UT

I don’t understand how the UK got onto its current death march, or where that death march will end. Here are some ideas which are worth what you paid for them.

A death march

In the middle of 2022, the UK is watching a competition between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister of the UK. Johnson is an incompetent, narcissistic liar who is and always was grossly unfit for any high office. Sunak is a plutocrat: he is a man who has never used a contactless payment card, presumably because he has servants who do that for him, a man who doesn’t know the cost of bread, and who pretends to take his children to MacDonalds to buy a meal which has not been available for two years. Liz Truss is merely very stupid: it is curiously difficult to discover what class of degree she ~~bought~~was awarded.

Both Sunak and Truss served in Johnson’s cabinet: Sunak did, at least, eventually resign, triggering the cascade of resignations which finally lead to Johnson’s downfall. Truss did not resign: she is a Johnson loyalist who seems to think that Johnson almost literally dancing on the graves of the people of the UK was just fine, not to mention his incompetence, endless lying and theft from the country is just fine. Liz Truss is, in fact, Continuity Johnson.

Sunak and Truss are not competing for the votes of the UK electorate: they are competing for the votes of a tiny number of conservative party members who have paid for the privilege of selecting the prime minister. These people are overwhelmingly well-off, old if not actually senile, white, and male. Most of them live in the south-east of the UK. These are people who read newspapers, on paper, and they have the views you would expect them to have: they’re right-wing racists who look back fondly on an imagined golden age of the 1980s and before. They think anthropogenic climate change, if not actually a lie, is something that will matter only after they are dead (this is true: it will matter mostly after they are dead) and since they value their comfort far above the lives of their children and grandchildren they are happy to do nothing about it. They don’t like cyclists, feminists, people who are not white, gypsies and travellers, poor people, immigrants, and so on. ‘Woke’ — a term which means ‘being decent to other people’ — is anathama to them: they do not want to have to behave decently to other people, especially not people who look different than them. They are, in other words, exactly who you would expect them to be.

This group is extremely unrepresentative of the population of the UK, and increasingly so. And they know this, at least dimly. They know if they are to continue their lives of comfort then something must be done about this awkward fact: something must be done about democracy.

Both Sunak and Truss are working hard to appeal to this group: lurching ever further to the right and ever further away from democracy. Probably they will not succeed in levels of voter suppression sufficient to ensure their long-term survival, although they may. But whoever wins will actively and intentionally do vast damage to the UK in the next two years, and will certainly do nothing about climate change. And by the time the victor leaves power — if they leave power — it will be too late: too late to rescue the UK as a serious country, and too late for any concerted, international action to address climate change which must happen now.

Finally, of course, it is almost inevitable that Truss will win: tory party members are racists, and she is white and blonde, while Sunak is not. Both would be terrible prime ministers, but Sunak might at least be competent:

The Tory party itself is quite rotten now and the sign of that is that they can’t think of anyone better than Boris, who’s clearly just completely shot. They are collectively saying, “if we get rid of him, we might get somebody worse”. It says a lot about the state of the Tory party. And they actually could get somebody worse: Liz Truss would be even worse than Boris. She’s about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament. — Dominic Cummings

The future for the UK is not bright.

No easy answers

It’s tempting to say that, well, it’s brexit: this is what was always going to happen after brexit. I don’t think that’s true: brexit was certainly a bad idea, but it didn’t have to be anything like this terrible.

Brexit was always going to be extremely challenging¹ to implement in a way which was not a catastrophe, which should not have been surprising to anyone. However it does seem to have been surprising to a lot of the politicians who were so desperate for brexit. They had no plan, at all, for how it should be implemented. Why not? Why did the very people who wanted brexit so much have no plans?

Well, I think there are three or four plausible reasons.

They didn’t understand that brexit would be complicated, because they were not terribly smart. Smart people, after all, understand that it is often best to quietly abandon goals which are extremely complicated and risky to achieve², even if they are much-desired: brexiteers did not.
They did not expect to win, so having a plan for winning was not seen as something they needed to do.
They expected that other people would plan for them. The motivation for brexit has always been mostly about resentment: somehow other people are always the problem, in the case of brexit those other people are the EU and foreigners generally. And, like children, they then expect the other people to solve the problem for them.
Perhaps brexiteers wanted a catastrophe because they thought it would give them a route to wealth and power. People do suggest this, usually under the rubric of ‘disaster capitalism’: I think it’s not very plausible.

Between them, I think these do explain what happened.

The day after judgement

On midsummer day, 2016, the brexiteers faced an inconvenient truth: they had won. Now, instead of sitting around whining, they had to do something.

You might think that the sensible thing to do would have been to say that implementing brexit was going to be extremely complex, make some excuse about why they had made no plans, and explain that it would thus take a long time. But they couldn’t do that: they knew very well that the brexit vote was driven by older people: if it took a decade or so to be ready to actually leave the EU then enough of those people would be dead that it would be clear that brexit was being implemented against the clear will of the majority of voters. There would at the very least be strong pressure for another referendum, which they would lose.

So, if they were going to succeed in their stated goal, brexit had to happen rather quickly. But they had no plans: they were in a serious bind.

The phoney war

I’m not going to write some long, boring, and probably wrong, description of what happened between the referendum and Theresa May’s resignation. Enough to say that this was the period when it became clear even to people who had not being paying attention that implementing brexit was somewhere between hard and impossible. Perhaps the most interesting question is why May invoked article 50 as soon as she did: my guess is that she believed that, if she delayed, the brexiteers would destroy the tory party. Probably she was right.

But the brexiteers destroyed the tory party anyway.

The church of the subgenius

After the phoney war everyone who knew anything knew there was now now hope of a good answer to brexit, and that things were therefore going to get much worse in the UK. This really left two-and-a-half sorts of people interested in running the country:

people who were too stupid to understand this;
people who did not care;
and perhaps a foolish few who still sought to minimise the damage³.

What we got was Boris Johnson: the worst of all possible worlds. Johnson certainly does not care about the consequences of brexit for the UK as there is only one thing Johnson cares about: Johnson. He is often portrayed as brilliant but indolent: he is certainly indolent but he’s very far from brilliant. in 2016 he was too stupid to realise that the poisoned chalice of brexit would poison him as well; in 2020 he was too stupid to understand that a pandemic whose doubling time was three days required action to be taken extremely quickly, and too stupid to realise that, since phone cameras exist, holding drunken parties during lockdowns was not going to end well for him.

But he was not just stupid: he was a narcissist who regarded himself as a very god amongst men. He was not about to put up with dissent, or people who might cause him to suspect, however dimly, that they might be smarter than him as, for Johnson, there could be nobody smarter than Johnson. So talent was systematically driven away from his cabinet and from the parliamentary party: with Johnson in charge, what was rewarded was only bovine obedience.

And so a generation of competent people were driven out of government.

An infestation of idiots

After Johnson finally collapsed under the weight of his own arrogance and stupidity who then was left to take his place? The tory party has long been known as the stupid party⁴: after successive episodes of defenestrations of anyone who expressed independent ideas, that statement was now true. Only stupid people remained.

In particular I think the notion that the tories are somehow conspiring with some unspecified group of financiers to enrich themselves (the fourth possible reason for there being no plan for brexit above) is really pretty implausible. You only have to look at them: these people are idiots suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome, not evil geniuses.

It is possible, of course, that, while they are idiots, they are somebody’s useful idiots. But they are still idiots. Dark forces may perhaps be conspiring to get rich from the destruction of the UK, but if they are doing so they are not doing so with the knowledge of the halfwit clowns in the tory party who are, in fact, just what they appear to be.

In any case, the selection of someone to replace Johnson could only be made from the group of people who had not either left or been driven out by Johnson: from last remaining dregs of the tory party. A choice to be made from the dim, by the dim. And thus we have a competition between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work. In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.

Addendum: Liz Truss

When I wrote the above it was clear Truss would win, although she had not yet won. But I had no real idea what a spectacular catastrophe she would be: obviously I knew that she’s very stupid, but I don’t think I had any real appreciation just how stupid she would turn out to be.

I don’t know, now, what the best hope for the UK is: that she remain in power and lead the tories to a landslide defeat, or that she is evicted promptly and we have someone — anyone, almost — who will do less damage in the next couple of years.

The future for the UK really isn’t bright, is it?

If not impossible: it’s very hard to see what could have been done about the Northern Ireland / Eire problem without serious damage to the Good Friday agreement. ↩
I’d really like to move to a flat in London but I have too much stuff and too many entanglements and getting from here to there is just absurdly hard. So, however much I might want to move, I understand that it’s not really possible. ↩
Rory Stewart, perhaps. ↩
A quote attributed to John Stuart Mill. ↩

More on UK retail energy prices

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 24 May 2022 12:36:50 UT

Three days ago I pointed out that the UK government was lying about the influence of the war in Ukraine on UK retail energy prices. Now we have a better idea what that influence might actually be.

The UK government has been lying that the current retail energy cost is largely due to the war in Ukraine. But on 24th May 2022, the head of Ofgem told MPs that the energy price cap was likely to rise to £2,800 from the 1st October 2022, and these predicted rises may be largely due to the war in Ukraine.

Here are details of the cap at various dates, based on Ofgem and the BBC report:

2022, to 30th March 2022: £1,277;
1st April 2022 to 30th September 2022: £1,971, increasing by £693 (differences due to rounding) or 54%;
from 1st October 2022 (predicted on 24th May 2022): £2,800, increasing by $829, or 42%, or a cumulative increase of 119%.

So, in 185 days, retail prices will have gone up by 119% – in other words they have gone up by a factor of 2.19, more than double – of which predicted increase rather more than half may be largely due to the war in Ukraine (again: none of the current retail price is due to the war in Ukraine.

Given the coming food catastrophe, which is largely a result of the war in Ukraine, and the grotesque incompetence of the UK government, people will probably both die of cold, and starve in the UK in the winter of 2022–2023. For the second time in a little over two years, the UK government will have failed in its most basic task: keeping its citizens alive.

The UK government is lying about energy prices

Tim Bradshaw — Sat, 21 May 2022 14:22:17 UT

The UK government would like you to believe that the recent increases in the rate people pay for energy are due to the war in Ukraine. This is a lie.

This article from the BBC news contains the following statement:

Energy bills are the biggest contributor to inflation at present, largely because of the impact of the Ukraine war on oil and gas prices. After a rise in the UK’s energy price cap last month, average gas and electricity prices jumped by 53.5% and 95.5% respectively compared with a year ago.

Note in particular that they claim that energy bills, which are indeed the largest contributor to inflation, have risen ‘largely because of the impact of the Ukraine war on oil and gas prices’. In this the BBC is, I am sure innocently, simply repeating what the UK government wants us to believe.

But this statement is false: the UK government is lying, again. It is lying in order to make it less obvious that it is both grossly incompetent and simply does not care about the people of the UK.

First of all this statement should immediately make you wonder: what happened in 2021? I got a message from my former energy supplier on 14th October 2021, 133 days before Russia invaded Ukraine, which reads in part

Due to the global energy crisis, record high wholesale energy costs, and the restrictions placed on us by the Ofgem Price Cap, we are sadly unable to keep operating [supplier]. […] The Government and Ofgem, our regulator, expects [supplier] to sell energy at a price much less than it currently costs to buy.

My former supplier, along with many other suppliers, went out of business in 2021: that means the energy crisis was well underway by 2021.

But perhaps there is an escape: there was an energy crisis by 2021, yes, but perhaps the current crisis is still largely due to the war in Ukraine.

That also is false. Look at this document, in which Ofgem announced the increase in the tariff cap, and in particular look at the attached letter (PDF link). From that letter, you can read this:

To all market participants and interested parties […] The level of the cap for the cap period eight (1 April 2022 to 30 September 2022) has increased by 54% since the last update. From 1 April 2022, the level of the cap will increase to £1,971.

This letter is announcing the rise in the tariff cap described by the BBC above: about 54%. It is dated 3rd February 2022: almost a month before Russia invaded Ukraine.

And indeed on 24th February 2022, coincidentally the day Russia invaded Ukraine, I received a letter from my current energy supplier in which the folloing text appears:

Our prices are changing to reflect high wholesale energy costs in line with Ofgem’s latest price cap review.

[…]

Your current tariff [for electricity and gas]: £ T. Your new tariff: £ T × 1.4 […] Your electricity rates will change from 21.607p to 28.408p per kWh and your standing charge per day will change from 25.66p to 51.62p. Your gas rates will change from 4.197p to 7.476p per kWh and your standing charge per day will change from 26.11p to 27.22p

[I have replaced the specific amounts I pay by T above.]

That capped tariff is the tariff I, along with almost everyone else, is currently paying. The new cap was set in early February 2022 for implementatation on 1 April 2022. The war in Ukraine has had no influence on this cap, because it was agreed well in advance of the war.

In summary: The war in Ukraine has not yet influenced retail energy prices in the UK because the cap was decided in early February 2022 at the latest. To say otherwise is to spread misinformation.

Of course, the war in Ukraine will influence retail energy prices: the current cap runs until 30 September 2022. It is safe to say that when it expires there will be some very bad news indeed about UK retail energy prices. Combined with the certain large increases in the price of staple foods, the winter of 2022 is going to be extremely unpleasant: I think it not unlikely that significant numbers of people in the UK may well start to starve to death.

But this has not happened yet.

An unsent letter to Mel Stride, MP

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 03 May 2022 10:23:12 UT

They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

In the last week¹:

Neil Parish, a tory MP, has been caught, twice, watching pornography on his phone in the house of commons;
an anonymous source, but almost certainly a tory MP, has told misogynistic, false, stories about a senior, female, labour figure to a newspaper which duly published them;
Liam Byrne, a labour MP has been found to have bullied his staff and suspended;
Boris Johnson, prime minister and criminal, told more lies (although this is hardly news);
we’ve learned that 56 MPs (not all tories) are under investigation for sexual misconduct.

Let’s take that last figure. Presumably not all of those under investigation will be found to have done whatever it is they have been accused of, and some of those actually won’t have done it. But given the very obvious culture of bullying in the house of commons and the pervasive lying, at least by senior tories, there are probably many other people too frightened to come forward. So let’s say that it’s a round 65 people all in. So, plausibly, one MP in ten has been sexually abusing people.

And that’s not the end: for each person who was doing this, how many others knew but did nothing? Based on my own personal experience as someone who knew but did nothing the answer is ‘several’, so let’s say two. If that’s correct (and it’s perhaps low if anything) it means about one MP in three was plausibly either sexually abusing people or knew others who were and chose to do nothing about it.

Let’s leave the bullying, the lying, the bribery, corruption and all the other manifold abuses which infest the UK’s politics for another day: this letter is already too long.

And while all this has been going on more than half of the MPs in parliament – including you – have been either actively supporting or too frightened to vote against legislation which would make Putin proud. Peaceful protest is now criminalised in the UK. British citizenship can be removed without notice. Based on transparent lies about imaginary election fraud, voter ID will now be needed, which it is estimated will reduce turnout by over a million, with a convenient bias towards those who would not vote for the johnsonite tory party if they could vote. And finally, the Electoral Commission is now under the control of ministers: people who, you know, might have just a tiny conflict of interest, don’t you think?

There is someone else who told lies about electoral fraud in order to keep himself in power, isn’t there? The same person who attempted a coup on January 2021. The same person who has turned his party into an explicitly anti-democratic shell for his own desire for personal power, a shell which, quite probably, will turn the US into an authoritarian state in two years time. He might remind you of someone closer to home, I think.

The UK is not there yet, but the death of democracy² is now clearly in sight. The johnsonite tory party must now be seen as an explicitly authoritarian party aiming to secure eternal power for itself at any cost. You belong to that party: I will leave it to you to decide what that means.

(And don’t insult me by claiming that ‘it can’t happen here because the UK is a democracy’: in 1933 Germany was also a democracy; in the late 1990s Russia was a democracy. And besides, if it can’t happen here why are you voting for it?)

It’s a strange situation, isn’t it? Perhaps the best hope for the UK is that johnsonite tory MPs will be so stupid and so incompetent (really, how stupid do you have to be to watch pornography in the house of commons? or to go to parties during lockdown given that phone cameras are a thing? pretty fucking stupid, I think), and so busy masturbating, sexually assaulting people and taking money from Russian oligarchs in return for favours, that they’ll eat themselves alive before they get around to installing the one-party state they so clearly desire. That’s not an attractive choice.

And in the meantime, the next time some MP whines about how hateful and abusive people are to MPs who are ‘just doing a very hard and difficult job as best they can’, then we’ll know what to say. You know what: you don’t have hard or difficult jobs, and most of you don’t even know what a hard and difficult job is. Doctors and nurses working in hospitals have hard and difficult jobs. During the pandemic (which means now, because lying about it does not make it over) they have very hard and difficult jobs. People in Ukraine have extremely hard, difficult jobs. Do you think doctors and nurses keeping people alive have time to watch porn while doing so? No, you don’t in fact have hard and difficult jobs: you have easy, undemanding jobs which involve sitting around, talking and drinking. Or in many cases sitting around, lying, drinking and abusing people. Here’s a clue for you: if your job allows you time for a second job then whatever it is, it’s not hard. So don’t expect any sympathy from the people you lord it over like childish tinfoil tyrants.

And the next time some halfwit gets up on his hind legs and says that

the problem in the house of commons is ultimately the overall culture of long hours, bars and people sometimes under pressure and after all of that, that can create a toxic mix that leads to all sorts of things

we’ll also know what to say. Here’s the thing: being tired and drunk all the time doesn’t make people into bigots and misogynists: it removes their inhibitions so they express the bigotry and misogynism they always felt. If you behave like a bigot and a misogynist when you are tired and drunk (because your pretend-hard job somehow requires you to get drunk a lot), than it’s not because you’re tired and drunk: it’s because you are a bigot and a misogynist.

I wish no-one ill: but if the sea were to rise up tomorrow and drown the houses of parliament and everyone in them, I would not weep.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

This was written on May day, 2022. Mel Stride is my MP: I did think about sending it but what purpose would it have served? In the unlikely case that he read it rather than one of his staff would it make him change his mind? Of course it would not. ↩
A book you should read, along with How democracies die. ↩

What if Putin is rational?

Tim Bradshaw — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 14:19:52 UT

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is horrifying. As well as the awfulness of what is happening to the people of Ukraine, Putin’s apparent irrationality is terrifying. What if he is not being irrational?

A strategy that the Russians have used against both Napoleon and the Nazis is to retreat further than anyone thinks is possible, accept more losses than anyone thinks is possible and then wait for the winter to do its work. Perhaps Putin is using a variant of this strategy. In particular perhaps he simply does not care whether he wins in Ukraine because that’s not what he’s trying to do: he’s not trying to annexe Ukraine, he’s trying to destroy the west.

The invasion of Ukraine will have significant economic repercussions:

sanctions on Russia will have very severe repercussions for Russia, but they will also have economic repercussions on the west which will be at least fairly severe;
oil and gas prices will go up significantly and the west is not anywhere near in a position to escape from fossil fuel dependency;
a lot of wheat is grown in Ukraine, and the harvest is not going to be very good this year, which will push up wheat prices and hence food prices.

So there will be catastrophic economic effects in Russia, but also severe to very severe effects in Europe and the west more generally.

In addition the attack is causing an enormous refugee crisis: as I write this more than 1.7 million Ukrainians have left Ukraine. I don’t know how many might eventually be driven out of course, but it might be of the order of 10 million people. Essentially all of those people are going to be driven west, into central and western Europe. This will be an enormous humanitarian crisis in Europe: bigger than anything seen since the second world war.

Well, in 2007–2008 there was a very significant economic crisis, and from 2011 to now there has been a civil war in Syria which has caused a refugee crisis. And I don’t think it’s controversial to say that one of the results of this was populism, authoritarianism and large-scale bigotry. These crises gave us Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban and the johnsonites, and they gave us brexit and other disasters.

So what is this crisis going to give us? More of the same, almost certainly. Everyone loves the Ukrainians now, but when there are 10 million of them trying to find a way of living in central and western Europe a lot of people are going to like them a lot less: there is going to be a lot – a lot – of anti-Ukrainian bigotry. And while this is happening, food and fuel will be becoming far more expensive: almost everyone will be poorer, and in particular poor people, for whom food and fuel is a larger proportion of their spending.

And in the background, climate change will be doing its inevitable work: weather-related damage will be increasing, harvests will be poorer and refugees from areas becoming dramatically less habitable will be arriving in ever greater numbers. And people like me will be saying that we must therefore reduce our dependency on fossil fuels rapidly if we want to have a long-term future. But decades of denying the problem exists will mean we can’t do that, and the populist demagogues given power by the crisis in Ukraine will say we don’t need to do that anyway. And so things will get worse, and they will get worse faster than they were before the crisis. And we’ll get more populists, more authoritarianisms and more democracies will fail.

But populism and authoritarianism don’t work: populism seeks to provide simple, appealing, answers (‘send the nasty foreigners home’) to complex, unappealing, problems (‘how do we deal with climate change?’), and those answers are wrong; authoritarianism doesn’t even pretend to look for answers because the answer to all questions is ‘do as your told or you will be killed’. Both systems make a few people better off but almost everyone poorer. So once liberal democracies get replaced by populist or authoritarian regimes thing almost always get worse, and the forces which gave those regimes power become stronger: ‘if sending the foreigners home didn’t work, perhaps we should just kill them?’. And things thus get worse, and they get worse ever faster.

Thought of as a physical system, liberal democracies are not necessarily stable: they tend to fall off their plateau into nasty regimes of various kinds, which in turn cause things to move further down from the plateau, and so on. As has been obvious in the last few years, a lot of work is needed all the time to defend them. Even fairly small external kicks of various kinds can destabilise them, and there will always be people working within them to do the same thing.

So, perhaps Putin’s ongoing rape of Ukraine is not an irrational attack based on some toxic nostalgia for the USSR: perhaps it is an entirely rational attempt to do something else. Perhaps he does not really care what happens to Ukraine because that’s not what he’s interested in. Perhaps he is using the strategy that has worked for Russia before: accepting more damage than anyone thinks Russia can in order to cause, in the liberal democracies of Europe, lesser but still very significant economic damage along with with a vast humanitarian criss, with the aim of causing them to collapse. After all, he is not himself affected by the economic damage being done to Russia: it is only ordinary Russians who will starve. And he does not care about them.

Well, I hope I am wrong: I usually am wrong.

The way out

Tim Bradshaw — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 13:07:57 UT

Many people would like to believe that the CV19 pandemic is over. Unfortunately viruses do not listen to what people want to believe: the CV19 pandemic is not over, and there is a significant possibility it may never be over. The way out is not to pretend that it is.

CV19 is not over

Unless CV19 can be globally eliminated it will not be over: new cases will leak into countries however hard they try to prevent it. Eliminating CV19 globally requires achieving herd immunity through vaccination or infections everywhere.

We are not particularly close to that. It’s tempting to do a lot of calculations at this point to show this but those calculations are fiddly and I always get them wrong. Instead consider the UK: currently (3rd December 2021) about 75% of the population have had at least one dose and there is a current effort to roll out third, ‘booster’, doses. Yet, even before the omicron variant, CV19 was nowhere near gone in the UK. And the UK is doing reasonably well at vaccinations. Boris Johnson’s lies notwithstanding it is nowhere near the top of the table, but it is well above the global average: globally about 55% of people have had at least one dose.

Unfortunately, by hoarding both vaccines and the rights to manufacture them, the rich countries are actively hurting the effort to globally eliminate CV19. So they are undermining the efforts they are making to protect their own populations. It is, apparently, too hard for politicians to understand that the virus cares much less about some lines drawn on a map than they do.

Worse than this, until CV19 is eliminated, it will still continue to evolve new variants, which will spread if they are fit. If we assume that CV19 won’t be eliminated soon, what’s likely to happen, in rich countries like the UK, as new variants appear?

The remainder of this essay concentrates on the UK as far as human responses go: that is obviously parochial, but the UK is where I live and I am most familiar with what the responses are there¹.

What might the virus do?

There are two important choices, which are orthogonal to each other: will a much-less-deadly variant become dominant? and will a variant which escapes the current vaccines become dominant? Neither of these cases excludes anything happening in the future: for instance a mild variant which does not escape vaccines could become dominant this year, only for a serious variant which does escape the vaccines to become dominant in a few years if such a variant has a selective advantage. As long as the virus exists it will be endlessly trying new variants.

Two independent choices gives a total of four scenarios.

A mild variant: ‘flu’

Two scenarios involve a mild variant which may, or may not, escape the current vaccines: these are the ‘flu’ scenarios. Such a variant might become seasonal in the way flu is (CV19 may well already be seasonal of course: we just haven’t lived through enough seasons yet). If the current vaccines don’t work for this variant the results will not be too severe, and new vaccines will be developed. If vaccines, new or existing, confer long-term immunity, then things would become relatively normal. It’s likely that they don’t, however, so we would probably require regular courses of vaccinations, which may be new vaccines as the virus evolves: this is still pretty close to normal life.

Well, we could live with that, the way we live with flu. Except that we don’t always live with flu: Spanish flu² killed between 17 and 50 million people, and perhaps as many as 100 million (by comparison, The Economist thinks that CV19 has probably killed about 17 million people so far from a larger population). Again, as long as CV19 exists it will be developing new variants and there is nothing I can see to stop one arising which is like that.

But, perhaps, this is at least no worse than flu is now, except perhaps that more people will need to be vaccinated more often.

No vaccine escape

A third scenario is that CV19 stays roughly as deadly as it is now, but the vaccines we have keep working against it, probably with regular courses required. People continue to die in significant numbers, with those numbers depending to a great extent on the precautions people are willing to accept. This may seem much like the flu case except that a lot more people die. It might be only that: there are unfortunately much nastier possibilities discussed below.

Vaccine escape

The final scenario is that a variant arises which is significantly deadly and for which the current vaccines are not effective. This is year zero: new vaccines will need to be developed, and a new urgent vaccination programme will be required. Until the vaccination programme is well under way there will either need to be very significant restrictions on social contact if very high death tolls are to be avoided. Unfortunately very high death tolls during the vaccine development and the early stages of the vaccination programme are, again, far from the worst things that could happen.

Other scenarios

There are other possibilities. A variant might arise which is much more deadly, for instance. It’s easy to argue that very deadly viruses are selected against: a virus which kills too many of its hosts will tend not to thrive in competition with less lethal one. But in real life things are not that simple: the black death killed between 75 and 200 million people in 7 years, killing between 30% and 60% of the population of Europe, and perhaps 25% of the world’s population. Yersinia pestis was, perhaps, not competing with less deadly versions of itself, wasn’t so subject to mutation as a virus would be and there were other factors, but still: very bad things can happen.

A very nasty possibility is that a variant will arise against which no vaccines work very well. Before the current vaccines were developed some people were suggesting this (search for ‘there has never been a successful vaccine against a coronavirus’: I am not going to link to any of the results because some of them are awful people who do not deserve anyone’s attention). It seems to me that this is absurdly unlikely, but I’m not an expert.

No doubt there are many other scenarios I have not thought about.

An endless war

Once again: until the CV19 virus is globally eliminated it will continue to evolve new variants. None of the above scenarios excludes any of the others: CV19 will explore as much of the space of options as it can. Until it is eliminated the pandemic will not be over: if it is never eliminated the pandemic will never be over.

What might the humans do?

The virus is only one of the players in this game: the other is us. What happens depends on our response as much as what the virus does.

Normality

If the virus is eliminated then normal pre-pandemic life resumes. In either of the ‘flu’ scenarios something quite like normal life resumes. In the flu scenarios normal life only resumes so long as the virus doesn’t evolve some much nastier variant. So, rationally, in these scenarios, work should still continue to eliminate the virus globally as fast as possible. I think it’s safe to say that won’t happen, so the normality in these scenarios is almost certainly impermanent.

Stability

If there is a deadly variant which does not escape the vaccines then it’s possible to imagine a stable scenario where some combination of restrictions on social contact, regular vaccinations, masks, and just accepting that a fair number more people die each year than before CV19 will keep things under control. That’s a nice dream, anyway.

Instability

A variant which escapes the vaccines results in instability: it is essentially a whole new pandemic and rapid lockdowns will be needed while new vaccines are developed to avoid very high death tolls or even worse outcomes. The instability can be minimised by careful management but the chances of that seem low.

Unfortunately I think that, even for variants that do not escape current vaccines, stability is unlikely. Instead there will be some more-or-less chaotic cycle of too-much relaxation followed by panics as death rates rise. None of this is helped by politicians who, in the UK at least, do not care very much if many people die, are not competent to understand what is required for stability, and neither understand nor care about the consequences of serious instability.

What is really happening?

We’re still in the early stages of the pandemic, but what has actually happened?

The virus

I don’t know. Since I started writing the omicron variant has appeared: this has a very high number of mutations, 62, compared to the original virus, of which 32 affect the spike protein which vaccines target (delta had 8 or 9). Currently (5th December 2021) it’s not known how infectious it is or how severe the illness it causes is compared to the previous, delta, variant. More seriously it’s not known how well vaccines work for it, but with a very large number of mutations on the spike protein people are clearly pretty worried.

So the omicron variant might be a ‘flu’ variant, a vaccine escape variant, both, neither, or something else. It might also not be very interesting at all. But there will be more variants in an effectively endless succession³: sooner or later something interesting will arise. Given selective pressure on the virus it will probably be sooner: if omicron is not it we are not off the hook.

The humans

What are the humans doing? In particular what is the UK government doing? As a populist government what it does is to offer simple, appealing, wrong answers to complex, unappealing problems. It gives the answers that people would like it to give, without ever trying to explain why those answers are wrong or what the consequences of believing them will be. The johnsonites are very far from democratic, quite the opposite in fact, but in this case we can treat them as avatars of what people would like to be told is true.

Well, until a few days ago the answer was that they were saying that the pandemic was over and that normal life could resume. Now there is incoherent messaging: scientific and medical advisers are advising caution in the face of omicron, while Boris Johnson is publicly ignoring them. Johnson, clearly, is too stupid to understand the consequences of what he is doing and would not care about them if he did. He also has demonstrated, publicly and repeatedly, that he believes rules do not apply to him, thus ensuring that no-one else obeys them either. More competent (perhaps merely less incompetent) members of the government are giving more cautious messages, but there is simply no coherent strategy and the government is very obviously no longer ‘following the science’ nor even pretending to do so.

This is a recipe for instability: if omicron is serious then Johnson’s strategy, if it can be called such, will maximise its impact early in the new year. Johnson shows no sign of having learnt anything at all from his earlier mistakes: if anything he’s learnt that he can, in fact, get away with murder. If lessons are not learnt from this cycle the best we can hope for is a continuing chaotic cycle of restrictions followed by relaxation, for years.

The worst is that Johnson continues to maintain that it is all over, while people die around him in huge numbers. This is stability, of a kind, but not one anyone should wish for. Sadly many people do seem to wish for it, and to be happy with enormous numbers of deaths so that they don’t have to experience the momentary inconvenience of wearing a mask or otherwise behaving safely.

Collapse

That is, in fact, not the worst outcome. Because we live in a society built on complex systems which took a long time to assemble and which, if they are stressed to the point of collapse, can not then be reassembled quickly, if at all.

In 2008 the global financial system came close to collapse. Many people said at the time, and probably still do say, that the banks should just have been allowed to fail. Those people were fools. Banks are close to the archetypal complex system which, if it collapses, can not quickly be repaired if it can be repaired at all. If the banking system had been allowed to fail in 2008 then essentially money would have ceased to exist: ATMs would have stopped working, salaries would have stopped being paid, everything involving money would have stopped. And once that had happened it would have taken years to restart. Pretty quickly people would have started getting hungry, there would have been riots and far worse. And this would have gone on for years. Huge numbers would have died. The 2008 financial crisis was a nasty experience, but it was vastly less nasty than what was narrowly avoided.

There is another such complex system: the health service. The NHS is one of the great achievements of post-war Britain: I think the greatest in fact. If the NHS is pushed too hard it, too, will collapse, and if it collapses, bad things will happen. And CV19 is pushing the NHS very hard indeed. Already many people are dying of things which would have been treated if not for CV19, and people who are not dying are sitting in lengthening backlogs which will take years or decades to clear. And this is only the start of what could happen. People who are working in ICUs will eventually become burnt out: they’ll end up shell-shocked and unable to work. And so the number of staff in ICUs will decline just as the requirement for them increases. That’s a death spiral: more and more people will get burnt out as their workload increases because their colleagues have already become burnt out. These people will themselves then need care, which is already very limited. Without care they may never return to work. And it takes quite a long time to train someone to work in an ICU: it is not an easy job. And, having witnessed what happens to people who work in ICUs, who is going to apply to be trained?

So the likely end result of a series of chaotic cycles of relaxation and panic is that the NHS will collapse in due course. And the likely end result of simply accepting large ongoing death rates, of Johnson’s stability through suffering, is that the NHS will collapse rather soon.

And if the NHS collapses it can’t be put back together quickly. Perhaps it can’t be put back together at all. And very large numbers of people will then die.

Avoiding collapse of the NHS is critical, but the UK government shows no sign of being competent to do so, or in fact of caring if the NHS collapses.

The way out

The way out is to eliminate the virus, globally. Until we can do that the best we can hope for is that it becomes like flu and that no nastier variant arises. I can’t see any reason why a nastier variant should not arise from a flu-like variant: nastier variants of flu arise, after all. So a flu-like stage, though very desirable short of elimination, is probably only temporary: something nastier will come back.

Managing the presumed nastier variants is hard. Inevitably there will be cycles of restriction and relaxation. Those cycles will have inevitable economic impact. That is not something that can be wished away.

The UK government, as with populists everywhere, has been hugely incompetent at managing the first few cycles, and shows no sign of becoming more competent. Johnson is stupid, uncaring and believes rules do not apply to him: while he controls the UK government there is little hope. Johnson, perhaps, believes that he can declare the pandemic over and it will be over. But the virus does not care what he thinks.

Almost certainly, absent a competent government, the UK will therefore experience a series of chaotic cycles of relaxation and restriction culminating in the probable collapse of the NHS and all that implies.

A competent government would understand that until the virus is eliminated the old world is simply gone: the world has now changed. Working from home is here for good, with all that implies for cities. Masks are here for good. A competent government would work to educate its people about this. And it would understand that since elimination will take years at least some of these changes must be regarded as permanent: in five years or a decade no-one will want to go back to spending three hours a day on a packed train or in a traffic jam.

The world has changed, and it has changed irrevocably, one way or another. The way out is to accept that there is no way back.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert and I’m not even pretending to be one on the internet. I’m just trying to understand things as best I can, then writing the down so I can see how wrong I was, later. ↩
Which, of course, was not Spanish. ↩
SARS-CoV–2 has a genome about 30,000 bases long: there are $4^{30000}$ such genomes. Only a tiny proportion of those will encode anything interesting and only a tiny proportion of those will encode anything very like SARS-CoV–2, but that is still a lot of variants. ↩

The way down

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 16:12:38 UT

The idiot child god and where he will lead us.

A five-year-old boy

Something I’ve recently realised is that to understand the johnsonites you need only to understand that Boris Johnson is a rather dim, extremely spoilt, five-year-old boy from an extremely privileged background. He may look like an adult but he’s not: he’s a small child wearing an adult suit.

I remember being five, more-or-less. When I was five I had no notion that other people were really people: I thought that I was perfect, that I was infallible, that I was a little god who one day would grow into a far greater god. I thought the world, and my parents who made up most of it, existed to serve me; that my siblings and the people at school were lesser beings who also, in due course would exist to serve me as I grew into my godhood. I thought, in other words, what all five-year-olds think. I remember, vividly, the time during which I realised that this was not true: that I was just a person like all the other people, that I wasn’t as good or as clever or as handsome as some of them, perhaps as most of them.

I think this happens to almost all people: almost every small child thinks that they are a tiny god and that the world is built around them. At some age larger children realise that this is not true and this is a huge shock to them. Except, for some few people it never is: some people simply never realise that they are not god. Johnson is such a person: he has, quite simply, never realised that the world, and everything in it, exists for any purpose other than to serve him. He was not helped, of course, by growing up to a life of extreme privilege: much of his world did indeed seem as if it existed to keep him and his class in their state of comfort and idleness.

If Johnson was clever rather than merely glib he would be absolutely terrifying: he is pretty terrifying as he is, but you really do not want clever people who think they are gods anywhere near you¹.

Johnson’s purpose in life is to maximise Johnson: everything, for him, exists only to further his own ascension to godhood and nothing must interfere with that. Nothing must ever be allowed make him feel bad about himself or question his own judgement – as an incipient god he is, of course, infallible and no questions must ever be asked or, if they should be asked then the questioners must be derided as naysayers, disruptive influences or worse.

The johnsonite revolution

So Johnson’s purpose is Johnson: more money for Johnson, more glory for Johnson, more acolytes for Johnson, more power for Johnson, more sex for Johnson², more children for Johnson. That is all he cares about: nothing else matters, at all.

Sadly for Johnson and us all he is not actually very good at anything. Achieving maximum Johnson is hard when the only Johnson you have available is, frankly, second-rate. Like his idol Churchill he wants to be a great writer of history but he is very far from being that. He can write witty articles full of subtle bigotry and offence, but his talent, such as it is, is no more than any number of other journalists and far less than the best of them³.

In 2015 he must have wondered how he was to bargain this base johnsonite ore into the gold of godhead which he never doubted he deserved. We know the answer he came to: brexit. Brexit was never a good idea, and a botched brexit was likely to do very serious damage to the country. But it also might give him power, which was far more important: Johnson was happy to sacrifice his country without a thought.

And it worked: brexit did give him power. And the cost of that power for us all was altogether predictable but terrible nonetheless. Enthusiasm for brexit, with perhaps a few exceptions, is not normally associated with great intellect among politicians but Johnson, believing himself now a very god, could tolerate no dissent, no questioning, any more than any other spoilt five-year old boy could. And so he purged the parliamentary Conservative party of anyone who might doubt him, of anyone who might be cleverer than he was: constructing a government of the inadequate, a government of incompetents, ideologues and the dull-witted. Johnson has laid his eggs in the Conservative party like a parasitoid wasp, and now this new johnsonite party is growing in its body, consuming it from within while it still lives.

This is the maximum Johnson revolution.

Like Saturn

Rule by spoilt five-year-old boy was never going to end well. And it is not ending so well, is it? A child, seeking personal power and glory at any cost, does not make decisions which are good for anyone but himself. And as he is a child he doesn’t even make decisions which are good for himself in the long run: there is a reason why parents have authority over their children, it turns out. Being unable to be wrong means that he can never correct errors: he can never learn from his mistakes since he believes himself incapable of them. Surrounding himself only with people who are unwilling or unable to challenge him makes this worse.

Brexit was always going to make the UK poorer and weaker, and was always going to imperil the UK’s relations with its much larger and more powerful neighbour. The Northern Ireland situation probably had no really good solution. But Johnson hasn’t even tried: he, or his stooge David Frost, negotiated a minimal deal which, less than a year later, they are going back on, demonstrating in the most public possible way that they have either acted in bad faith throughout or were simply not competent to understand the implications of what they were doing⁴.

But Johnson can never be wrong, so the catastrophes of the brexit he chose will always be the fault of other people.

And then of course the world throws something unexpected at him, in the form of CV19⁵. Something he is even more utterly incompetent to deal with than the fallout from the brexit he engineered. It is hard to know how many people he has now killed due to his lack both of competence and of care, but it is safe to say that it is tens of thousands. And it is not over: the omicron variant may escape immunity through vaccines or previous infection⁶, in which case, if it is as deadly as previous variants, we are starting again.

And Johnson can never be wrong, and Johnson can never learn so all the mistakes must have been made by other people. And he will make exactly the mistakes he made before, and the corpses will pile up in his wake. And these mistakes, too, will be someone else’s fault.

Like Saturn, Johnson’s revolution is eating its own children⁷.

The way down

Where do we go from here?

Johnson is vastly incompetent but can never be wrong. If he is not removed by some kind of coup within the tory party⁸ then he will continue to lead us on the way down: the only way he knows. As disaster follows disaster, he must find endless new people to blame. So when the Northern Ireland agreement turns out not to work very well, somehow this is the fault of the EU, and the EU is duly demonised. So he will publish a rather stupid letter he wrote to the French president, causing the French to react, he hopes, badly. So now he can blame the French for the invented refugee crisis. So he will blame ‘remoaners’ who, somehow, are to blame for the ills of brexit. So he will blame the judges for getting in the way of his idiot brexit. So someone will be found to blame for the mounds of the CV19 dead. And so it goes on, for ever, with Johnson and his acolytes finding ever new groups to blame, waving their idiot flags and working their supporters into an ever stronger frenzy of resentment and hatred.

This strategy of finding identifiable groups to blame for your mistakes is familiar because it has happened before. It is the strategy of authoritarians, both those we call fascists and those we call communists, everywhere and always. And it ends with camps, pogroms and death. Not yet, not even soon, and not yet inevitably, but we are on the way.

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

No-one would want to be very near Elon Musk. ↩
Although his mentality is that of a privileged five-year old boy, his body is not: like most physically-adult people he wants sex. And he behaves exactly the way you would expect: he has limited or no self control. Who knows how many children he has by how many different partners: perhaps not even he does. Who knows how many partners he has had and how many he has been unfaithful to? ↩
I freely admit my talent for writing is very slight. But I do freely admit it: something Johnson could never do. ↩
Or, of course, both: David Frost is some kind of poster child for a person promoted far beyond his rather limited competence. ↩
For Johnson CV19 is perhaps a blessing in disguise. Many thousands have died and many thousands more will die through his incompetence and carelessness. This is something he cares nothing about of course, since these are other people. But the enormous costs of CV19 will obscure the true costs of his brexit, and he does care about that. ↩
But it may not: I don’t think the data is clear yet, although people who should know such as the CEO of Moderna are clearly quite worried about it. It may also be less deadly. ↩
A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants – Jaques Mallet du Pan ↩
A coup within the tory party is probably our last, best hope. But Johnson has such a strong grip that it is by no means certain: it is frightening to plot against the man on whom you depend for career advancement. Still, we must hope. ↩

A letter to my MP

Tim Bradshaw — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 09:53:11 UT

On the occasion of the johnsonites’ rewriting the rules on political corruption to suit themselves.

So, England essentially now has two political parties: one which, though deeply flawed, represents democracy, and the other one: the once-great party to which you belong and which now represents nothing but its own greed, obvious corruption and lies. The party of a laughing idiot clown whose incompetence and gross stupidity has caused tens of thousands of deaths in the last two years and who, no doubt, will kill tens of thousands more in the next few years. The party of a man who, somehow, will be found not to be responsible for the heaped corpses on which he stands. The party whose foreign aid cuts will probably kill hundreds of thousands (but, you know, mostly poor black people and no-one in your party cares about them, do they?). A party of liars and cheats. A party which thinks nothing of changing the rules so its own corrupt MPs are let off. A party of flag-waving little Englanders and racists.

You must be very proud of yourself to represent such an organisation. For myself, I am now ashamed to be English, ashamed to live in your constituency, ashamed of everything your party has come to stand for.

I hope you sleep well. Please, don’t reply.

Carbon offsets

Tim Bradshaw — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 11:18:31 UT

People attacking carbon offsets or net zero emissions are attacking the wrong target and harming their cause. The problem is that the things we call ‘carbon offsets’ are not carbon offsets and ‘net zero’ is not net zero: they are lies. That’s what they should attack.

There’s nothing wrong with carbon offsets or net zero. In fact something like them really has to happen if anyone ever wants to do anything which is not in itself carbon-neutral. If you, say, want to buy a bike made of metal then the production of that bike more-or-less certainly released some carbon into the atmosphere, because smelting metal ore does that, even when you source the energy for the smelting from non-fossil sources, as you use coke to pull oxygen out of the ore & releasing $\mathrm{CO_2}$ into the atmosphere. Perhaps it’s possible to make metal production carbon-neutral (probably it isn’t) but it’s not possible to make everything carbon-neutral. If you eat meat or dairy products then that’s definitely not carbon-neutral. Breathing is not carbon-neutral.

Perhaps it would be possible to make everything carbon-neutral in detail: steelmakers could also become planters of trees, every cattle farmer would grow enough arable to offset their carbon & methane emissions, everyone who breathed would spend some time planting things (so, no cities in this world) and so on. That’s … not a world many people want to live in: it’s pretty close to a mediaeval world where almost everyone has to spend a certain amount of time working on the land.

Instead you do it by some kind of carbon offset. The metal-refiner arranges for someone else to remove as much (or more, since the world really needs to be carbon-negative for quite a long time) carbon from the atmosphere as they emit into it. And one way of doing that is to just have a price (it’s not a fine, it’s actually a price!) for carbon (you could also do it by administrative fiat: it doesn’t matter in terms of the carbon but I can’t see the US doing that). Then every process does not need to be in-detail carbon-neutral (or carbon-negative for a long time to come) and you can ship the carbon-neutrality around so that the whole system is carbon-neutral (negative). And you can have cities again, which is great. Net zero is not a bad term and neither is carbon offset: it’s the only way you get to do it unless you want to live in the 14th century.

That’s not the problem with ‘carbon offsets’ (note the quotes) as they currently are. There are two problems: firstly carbon emission is substantially underpriced, which requires worldwide cooperation, which isn’t going to happen, to fix; and secondly that they’re just a con: ‘carbon offsets’ are not, in fact, carbon offsets.

It’s very like what happened in the years leading to 2008: there was a shitload of risk in crappy loans which was going to cause some horrible problem, but everyone liked the crappy loans because they got to charge high interest rates on them and get rich. So a bunch of people with physics degrees (I have a physics degree) waved their hands and did some magical mixing of this risk with lower risk which made it seem to go away, so there could be more crappy loans and more risk which in turn could be magicked away. Except they weren’t very good physicists because they didn’t understand that there are conservation laws here and you don’t get to cheat those laws any more than you get to cheat conservation of momentum: they’re just as basic. I don’t completely understand the conservation laws because they have to do with the correlation of risks — you can mix a number of high risks and end up with a lower one if the underlying risks are uncorrelated — and I can’t hack the statistics: but they’re there. Well, in fact, at least some of the people who did this almost certainly knew exactly what was going on, but money had destroyed their morals. And the consequence of this was financial collapse in 2008 and brexit, Trump and creeping fascism a few years later.

‘Carbon offsets’ do a similar trick: you’re buying, way too cheaply, some token which says that the carbon you source into the atmosphere will be sunk from it by someone else else, but either that never actually happens, or it only happens at some unspecified future date, which is the same thing. A conservation law — this time an easy one which is conservation (or reduction) of $\mathrm{CO_2}$ in the atmosphere as a consequence of your actions — is being violated, again. And this is violation is done by a similar trick to what happened all obfuscated by some complex process of mixing the ‘offsets’ together such that it’s not apparent that there’s nothing (or some unspecified future thing which is the same as nothing) at the far end of the network of obfuscation. It’s an elaborate shell game by which ‘carbon offsets’ are turned into money by the players and no carbon is actually removed from the atmosphere.

So, I wish that people would attack the right thing: saying ‘net zero is bad’ is wrong because net zero (net negative) is all we can ever realistically do and a completely satisfactory solution to the problem. Saying ‘carbon offsets are bad’ is wrong because carbon offsets are a perfectly reasonable approach to achieving net zero. The problem is not net zero or carbon offsets, it’s that the things we call ‘carbon offsets’ are not actually carbon offsets, and what we call ‘net zero’ is not actually net zero.

And as long as people attack the wrong problem they won’t solve the real one. I mean, we’re obviously not going to solve the real one anyway, but we might as well at least try. It’s the same idiocy as ‘greens’ attacking nuclear power because spooky frightening or people attacking vaccines because tiny risk of clotting from vaccine is somehow more frightening than really fucking big risk of dying, horribly, of CV19.

The Boris maximizer

Tim Bradshaw — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 18:37:08 UT

Or, a theory about the mess we’re in.

The UK is about to finally leave the EU as the transition period finishes at the end of the year. Leaving the EU was always a terrible idea, based on appealing to a combination of the bigotry of mostly-older voters¹ and falsified memories of a golden age of English glory which never existed. But the decision is made: the UK has chosen to fade into irrelevance and poverty² and that can’t be undone any time soon.

What it could have decided to do was to minimize the damage by agreeing a trade deal on good terms with the EU to minimize the harm done by brexit. It will almost certainly fail to do that: the EU, very reasonably, wants to ensure that a country granted privileged access to its markets can’t then undercut the EU’s own members by lowering standards. This position was clear before the referendum and has not changed since then. The UK government, having pretended to be unaware of this position, now finds it unacceptable: I suppose because undercutting the EU by lowering standards is exactly what it wants to do. And there is some stupidity about fishing as well.

So, at the end of the year when the transition period ends, the UK will probably leave with no deal at all³, which will be an immediate catastrophe: there is a quite serious possibility of food shortages for instance. Almost no-one who voted leave in 2016 voted for this, even those who understood what they were voting for.

How did we get into this mess?

Disaster capitalism

There is a theory, well-described by Charlie Stross and others that what has happened is that a small group of clever-but-evil people have taken over the Conservative party and, with the support of a larger group of bigots, have consciously tried to achieve this outcome, so that they can profit from the resulting chaos. This is disaster capitalism: the idea that small factions are deliberately causing disasters so that in they can force through measures which will benefit them in the aftermath, and which people will not notice amongst all the smoke and rioting.

That sounds plausible: there are certainly plenty of bigots and xenophobes, particularly in the British tory party. And certainly the original brexit vote was driven very substantially by bigots and xenophobes. So, well, this is a situation ripe to be exploited by a small clique of disaster capitalists, isn’t it? Perhaps this clique is headed by Jacob Rees-Mogg who is certainly evil, certainly a financier, and also an important member of the European Research Group which was one of the groups which helped drive brexit.

Well, this all sounds very reasonable, then: there is a conspiracy by a small hidden group of financiers who have gained control of the tory party and are driving the UK into the ground to enrich themselves. How obvious.

Except, wait. Didn’t some other group of people once believe a theory a bit like this? That there was a group — a cabal in fact — of financiers who were working behind the scenes to cause chaos and destruction (and there certainly was chaos and destruction) to enrich themselves at the cost of the good, honest, ordinary folk of the country? What was the name of that country, again, and who were the people who believed this? Ah, yes, it was Germany, and the people who believed this were the nazis. And it didn’t end well, did it?

Of course, the theories are not identical, and I am very sure that many people who believe the disaster capitalism theory are not antisemites⁴, let alone nazis. One crucial difference is that membership of the supposed cabal of disaster capitalists is something a person can choose of their own free will, while if you are Jewish you are so because of your ancestry which you can not choose. The lies the nazis told about a mythical cabal of Jewish financiers, along with all the other lies they told about Jews, were clearly a lot more toxic than the idea of a cabal of disaster capitalists within and behind the tory party.

But they are both conspiracy theories: they both assume there is a small group of people working, mostly in secret, to cause chaos and disaster from which they will benefit hugely at the cost of the ordinary, honest, working folk. And Something Must Be Done about this, and that Something might include an uprising and, perhaps, in due course, camps of some kind where the conspirators could be, well, processed.

The nature of the conspiracy

It’s in the nature of conspiracy theories to be false, because people are not very good at conspiring, and when they do conspire they’re not very good at keeping the conspiracy secret.

But the disaster capitalist theory also relies on another common notion: the idea that, somewhere very close at hand but always just out of sight, there exists a group of people who are enormously more competent, or machines that are enormously more capable, or drugs that are enormously better than anything to which we have access. Sometimes it is also clear that we are being actively denied access to this superior technology, perhaps by these invisible superior people. I call this notion the myth of competence.

Just sometimes, the myth of competence is not a myth: the people who put humans on the Moon were actually pretty good at what they did, even if they only became as good as they were by going through an awful and unnecessary accident. The people at Bletchley Park during the second war were also pretty good. And there are other examples, of course.

But almost always the myth of competence really is a myth: something people want to be true which is not actually true.

A good example of the myth of competence is the NSA. The NSA, obviously, is staffed by the most elite mathematicians and computer scientists: people who are just better than everyone else. People with a deep understanding of the security of computing systems, working for an organisation with hugely deep pockets. The NSA is just spookily good as well as, conveniently, just out of sight. And yet in 2013, a contractor to the NSA was able to acquire a vast trove of sensitive data from them, something that would not be possible if their security was at all competent. The NSA, in fact, are incompetent, or at least they were so in 2013 and almost certainly they still are.

And this isn’t surprising, in fact. Let’s imagine that you’re a smart person with an interest in sifting through big data to look for patterns. You have a couple of career options.

You could go to work for a web company, where you will get to deal with as much data as you want, where you get to go to parties with other nerds and talk about the cool stuff you are doing, and where you stand a chance you can persuade yourself is reasonable of getting rich. You can probably also fool yourself that what you are doing is ethical⁵. If the job doesn’t suit you you can move to another company, or you could start your own, giving you a rather smaller chance of getting very rich indeed.
Or you could get a job with the security services. You will not be able to tell anyone outside your workplace what you do. You will not get rich (you might not even get a decent pension nowadays). You won’t easily be able to change jobs, at least not outside the organisation you work for. Given who your ultimate masters are and what they do to people who they don’t like, you might have worries about your safety in the longer term, and you certainly would when you realize just how unethical what they are doing is and decide to tell someone about that.

Which career sounds more appealing? Well, clearly some people are attracted to the whole cloak-and-dagger aspect of the second option. Those people tend also to own rather too much camouflage clothing and take paintball games altogether too seriously. For the rest of us the chance to do things which are just as technically interesting while fooling ourselves that we might get rich is probably rather more compelling.

And so it turns out that the NSA isn’t, in fact, staffed by super-intelligent super-competent people after all: it’s staffed by the people Google and Facebook didn’t hire.

The disaster capitalist theory assumes that there is a cabal of evil super geniuses — the disaster capitalists — who are working in secret to destroy the country for their own benefit, probably from their sinister supervillain lairs in hollowed-out volcanoes. Somewhere, behind the incompetence and stupidity of the tory party we can see, exists a group of evil geniuses who, somehow, we never can quite see. This is both a conspiracy theory and a classic example of the myth of competence. I suggest that it is not true, and that there is an alternative, simpler, explanation.

Maximizers

There is a famous thought experiment about an imagined artificial general intelligence (AGI) whose goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe, and which proceeds to to that, with bad consequences for humans and, ultimately, probably itself too, as it turns everything into facilities for making paperclips.

This seems like a fairly silly idea, not least because of the G in ‘AGI’: general intelligence is, generally, not associated with this kind of monomania. It is quite close to the way that genes work: the ‘purpose’ of a gene, or replicator, is to make as many copies as possible of itself, and this drives evolution. But, well, we do seem to be dealing with monomaniacs of one kind or another, and it’s an interesting idea to explore.

The first fairly obvious thing is that maximizers can lead to quite nasty consequences: the paperclip maximizer destroys everyone and everything in order to make more paperclips, for instance, and 2020 has shown that packages of genes which replicate at the costs of the organisms hosting them can be quite bad news, in case we had forgotten that.

The second thing is that maximizers can run into a nasty problem: local maxima. You can think of a maximizer as something which is walking around on the surface of some function which it is trying to maximize. An obvious approach is to calculate the gradient of the function and then move in the direction where it is steepest. At the point where the gradient is zero and the second derivatives are all negative then you’ve reached a maximum. This technique is called gradient ascent, or, equivalently when used to find minima, gradient descent. It seems like a good strategy if you don’t think about it too hard. But consider what would happen if you were trying to maximize your altitude on Earth using this strategy, and you started in Scotland. If you were very lucky indeed you might get to the summit of Ben Nevis, from which all directions lead down. But Ben Nevis completely fails to be the highest point on the Earth’s surface: it’s a local maximum, not a global one. And more likely if you start where I used to live, you’d end up at the top of Lady Fife’s Brae on Leith Links which isn’t even the highest point on Leith links.

To deal with this problem maximizers need to be able to explore bits of the space far from where they currently are, so they can see whether they would do better by moving far away. This requires various clever tricks: a dumb maximizer will end up getting trapped on local maxima most of the time.

As well as being close to the way genes work, the idea of maximizers is also fairly close to the way that a lot of economists think about people: people are assumed to spend their time trying to maximize their utility. Well, this is true, but usually it’s vacuous because ‘utility’ for most people has a definition which is unknown but certainly extremely complicated, and the maximization method they use is also unknown but almost certainly complicated. So saying people are trying to maximize their utility means, really, nothing: it just helps economists feel as if what they are doing is science.

But sometimes, for some people, it does mean something. Some people have a utility function which is obvious and relatively simple. Conveniently, these people often also only have very rudimentary maximizers.

The Boris maximizer

Boris Johnson is such a person. Boris Johnson’s utility function is Boris Johnson: his only purpose in life is that there should be maximum Boris: more power, more glory, more worship for Boris. He cares about this to the exclusion of all else: he is the Boris maximizer. And like many people with utility functions this obvious and simple his technique for achieving maximum Boris is also rather simple: it’s either gradient ascent or something very close to it.

The standard term for people like Johnson, of course, is narcissism, and there is a lot written about narcissists and narcissism. Since I want to understand how narcissists end up driving themselves and others into bad places, I’m going to stick with the notion of narcissists as rather simple maximizers of themselves rather than get lost in a wash of made-up pop psychology.

Another important thing about Johnson is that he’s a very pure example of what he is. Trump is a narcissist of course, but Trump also is full of fear, resentment and bigotry: Johnson isn’t. Johnson is upper-class, rich, went to the right school and university and has exactly the belief system you would expect from his background: he has never questioned anything, never thought deeply about anything, and he is not envious of anyone because why would he be? He is not, in fact, able to think hard enough about anything to even see that there might be a problem: doing so would require thinking about other people as more than tools for maximizing Boris, and he certainly is not able to do that.

Boris Johnson has nothing in his head but maximizing Boris: he is the paperclip maximizer made flesh.

The mess we’re in

Firstly, there is no brexit cabal: there is no secret group of disaster capitalists scheming to destroy the UK, and still less is there some hidden group of clever brexiteers in the tory party: the closest they have to that is Dominic Cummings, who is at least not stupid, but is also a crank: someone who does not realize that there are things he doesn’t understand and who certainly is not as clever as he thinks he is. For the rest of the brexiteers in government, well, the people we can see are the people there are, and they are not pretending to be incompetent and stupid: they are incompetent and stupid.

Secondly Boris Johnson doesn’t care about brexit: Boris Johnson cares only about Boris Johnson. He is purely a machine for increasing the glory and worship of himself: a Boris maximizer.

Thirdly, while there is no cabal, there are a significant number of people in the tory party and elsewhere who are xenophobes and bigots and who believe in an invented idea of a golden age of England⁶ which is now, as it always has been, just beyond living memory⁷. These people want desperately to leave the EU because it is full of foreign people and is holding back their imagined restoration of the golden age of England⁸.

In 2016, David Cameron made the disastrous mistake of calling a referendum to make these people go away. At that point Johnson had to make the only decision a maximizer ever makes: what should he do to maximize Boris? Competent people understand that allowing maximizers access to power is extremely dangerous: no competent group of people would ever select Johnson for high office. In a tory party run by competent people he would never achieve the glory he deserved. But he might achieve it in one run by incompetent people. So he threw in his lot with the brexiteers.

And the brexiteers won: there really are a lot of aged bigots in the UK, it turns out.

The government then spent nearly three years falling about, as it became apparent that the brexiteers who had nominally won had no plan at all for what to do because they were simply not smart enough to think through the consequences of what they wanted. Indeed the only idea they had seemed to be that the remainers should do their planning for them, in much the way that adults do the planning for their children.

During the period of falling about the attitudes of the brexiteers hardened: as it became more and more clear how confused and stupid their aims were, they became more and more rigid in their thinking: they turned into fanatics. As fanatics they are unwilling, ever, to consider any ideas in contradiction with their fanaticism and unwilling, ever, to give up, whatever the cost. These are not people you want in government⁹.

In 2016, Johnson failed at his maximization project: there were enough competent people left, then, to keep him well away from any real power, at least for a while. But this didn’t last: in 2019 the fanatics won, and Johnson finally achieved maximum Boris: he became prime minister (or as he probably thinks of it, ‘world king’). But even as he was annointed he was in terrible trouble, although he did not realize it then and probably still does not.

The trouble he was in is that he can only operate by gradient ascent and he had achieved this on the back of increasingly fanatical brexiteers with a serious competence problem. If he started listening to the competent people (there still were some, then), and doing what they suggested — for instance cutting a good deal with the EU — the fanatics would hate him for betraying their cause, and even if they did not do what fanatics often do to those who betray them, their hatred alone would certainly temporarily reduce the amount of Boris. Gradient ascent will not allow this, and so the competent people were systematically driven out of government, to be replaced by fanatics whose endless chants of praise would further maximize Boris. Never mind that they were also grossly incompetent: competence is not relevant to maximizing Boris.

He was now stuck on top of a local maximum.

And there he remains: all around the little hill he is sitting on are deep valleys, the crossing of which means a temporary reduction in Boris which gradient ascent will not allow. A little way away, in clear view, there are other, much larger hills, on top of which there would be far more Boris. But he can not reach them, because he can not, ever, reduce the amount of Boris.

And so there will be no deal with the EU: not because of a cabal of evil disaster capitalists somewhere just out of sight but because of the incompetence and fanaticism in full view in the government. And that incompetence and fanaticism is sustained by Johnson’s goal of maximizing Boris and his inability to do anything to reduce the amount of Boris, however temporarily, and even if doing so would ultimately increase it.

Well, he can not, but history will. Boris Johnson could have chosen to be the prime minister who minimized the damage to the UK from brexit, or even the person whose decision in 2016 to support remain led to the UK staying in the EU. But he will not be: he will be the prime minister who oversaw a no deal exit, whose actions led to the break-up of the UK and who, because he had surrounded himself with incompetent fanatics, caused many thousands of unnecessary deaths from CV19. Perhaps he even dimly knows this.

At the time of the referendum 27% of voters then aged 18—24 voted to leave, rising to 60% of voters then aged 65 or older. The younger voters, of course, will be most affected by the decision as they will live more years with their life chances restricted by it. Indeed many of the older cohort will already be dead and thus will have voted purely to damage other people’s chances, having themselves benefited from membership of the EU for most of their lives. The demographics is such, in fact, that there is almost certainly now no majority support for leaving the EU and has not been for several years. ↩
And it hasn’t only chosen that. As I’ve written previously: the consequences of brexit — even a ‘good’ brexit — will be that the administrative part of the UK’s government (probably, soon, this means the government of England and Wales, after Scotland secedes and rejoins the EU) will be working at or beyond its capacity for a decade. That decade, of course, is the decade which action must be taken if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming. The UK, therefore, will play no useful part in dealing with global warming, and thus further increase the chances of a catastrophe which will kill billions of humans, mostly not yet born. Conveniently, almost all the brexit voters will be dead by the time this matters. ↩
As I write this, there is still some fading hope that a deal will be struck, but neither the EU or the UK sound at all optimistic, and there is very little time left. ↩
Although the UK Labour party, where there will be many believers in the disaster capitalism theory, has had a rather serious problem with antisemitism recently. These two things may not be related, of course: but they may be. ↩
Or you could in 2013 when I wrote the text from which this section is extracted: not so much now, I think. ↩
Not Scotland, not Wales, certainly not Northern Ireland: England. ↩
This, of course, is related to the myth of competence: somewhere, just before we were born, there was a golden (or, in fact, a white) England where flowers bloomed, birds sang, and everyone was happy. And the fact that flowers don’t bloom and birds don’t sing and everyone is miserable is nothing to do with our actions in systematically poisoning the land. No, it’s someone else’s fault: probably it’s those Europeans, in fact. ↩
There are also a very small number of people — Douglas Carswell for instance — who believe in brexit for reasons which are not simple bigotry: they’re wrong, but they’re not bigots. But these people are in a small minority of brexiteers, of whom the great majority are, like it or not, bigots. ↩
To repurpose an old joke about guitar players: what’s the difference between a brexiteer and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist. ↩

Grammar nazis and actual nazis

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 13:18:52 UT

In the old, more innocent days of the internet — the days when people naïvely assumed that nazis were figures from a dark past, fading slowly into history — people who were very pedantic about prescriptive rules of grammar were often called ‘grammar nazis’. We did not think, then, that grammar nazis might be unconsciously encouraging actual nazis. But I think they were, and are.

Recently, Jonathan Bouquet wrote this article in The Observer, from which I quote:

Epidemiologist after epidemiologist warns that we must modify our “behaviours” if we are to counter the pandemic. Quite when it became obligatory for this horde of “experts” to pluralise the word is not known, but I do wish they would desist. And given their track record during coronavirus, with certain honourable exceptions, how many would dare to admit their profession if they were to be asked at a party what they did for a living? They’d be far better off saying they were an actuary.

There are many things wrong with this paragraph.

First of all, while Mr Bouquet is clearly at least playing at being unaware of it, natural languages do change over time. In some socially-privileged dialects of English a century ago, ‘behaviour’ was a mass noun and thus ’*behaviours’ was not correct in those dialects. But groups of people who deal with the behaviour of humans, or animals, or computer systems, found they needed a count noun: they needed a term, for instance, to talk about ‘washing your hands’ and ‘wearing a mask’ and whether people are doing one or both of these things. For a while, perhaps, clumsy terms like ‘behaviour patterns’ were used, but then the humans who actually get to define the language they speak — not Mr Bouquet, who merely gets to snipe at them because they are not using the language he learned at school any more — change the language, and ‘behaviour’ became usable as a count noun in the dialect used by these groups: ‘washing your hands’ is now a behaviour and ‘washing your hands and wearing a mask’ are¹ two behaviours.

The inability to understand that the language can change and has changed — or the pretence of not understanding that for rhetorical purposes — merely makes Mr Bouquet look rather silly. Why is he also encouraging bigotry? Well, let’s look at an excerpt from the paragraph quoted above:

Quite when it became obligatory for this horde of “experts” to pluralise the word is not known, but I do wish they would desist.

Look at the scare quotes and the term ‘horde’²: Mr Bouquet clearly does not think (or is pretending not to think) that epidemiologists are actually experts: they’re just people who pretend to be experts. A bit like Mr Bouquet, in fact, who is pretending to be an expert on English, but is not, any more than I am. But in fact they are experts: they are people (I am not an epidemiologist) who have spend a great deal of time studying a quite difficult subject and have developed a great deal of skill in and knowledge of that subject. There’s a term for such people, and that term is ‘expert’.

I suspect that Mr Bouquet is just sniping at them because he has a deadline to meet and sniping makes for a nice clever-sounding article which meets his word-count requirements: he knows they are experts (perhaps he even knows that ‘behaviour’ is a fine count noun), but he just enjoys the sniping. It’s not as if, after all, we live in a world where people being dismissive of experts and not listening to what they say is a problem at all, after all, is it? No-one has ever said that a group of experts — for instance climate scientists — are not really experts, and even if they did, well that would not at all be a problem, would it? I’m sure Mr Bouquet could also have a field day with the terminology climate scientists use — what on earth is ‘a forcing’, I mean, how silly.

So, well, perhaps Mr Bouquet should not be writing articles sniping at experts, especially the experts who are trying to keep us all alive. Perhaps he should not be doing his bit to help corrode of the idea of objective truth: perhaps he has not noticed that truth decay is a quite serious problem, but it is. Perhaps, even without the part he’s playing in reducing the chances of avoiding the collapse of civilisation that global warming will cause, that’s a deeply offensive and stupid thing to do.

So what Mr Bouquet is doing is not only stupid, it’s offensive: it’s still not encouraging bigotry, is it? Yes, it is.

The Two Cultures was published more than sixty years ago, and yet here is Mr Bouquet casually sniping at scientists as a group. That is, if not directly bigoted, certainly encouraging bigotry towards scientists. Unfortunately that’s only a tiny part of the bigotry which he is encouraging. To see what else he is encouraging take a look at the people that prescriptive grammar pedants — like Mr Bouquet — who snipe at those who ‘don’t use language properly’ tend to do their sniping at. In other words, look at the groups who don’t use the privileged dialect of English that Mr Bouquet probably thinks of as ‘proper English’ but which is in fact just one dialect of the language family.

Those groups include, for instance, black people, gypsies, Scottish people, Northern English people and people who did not go to the right schools. And the various variants of English they use are derided by the one-true-English brigade as ‘degraded’ or ‘simplified’ or less expressive than the one-true-English, because by implication the people in those groups are less clever than the people who speak the one-true-English. They are not less clever and the dialects they speak are not less expressive: saying they are is bigotry, and Mr Bouquet is, very definitely, encouraging that bigotry.

I’m very sure Mr Bouquet is impeccably liberal and would not think for a moment that what he is doing is encouraging bigotry, still less that he is actually being bigoted towards scientists. Perhaps he should stop and think about that for a bit. Perhaps The Observer should stop and think about that for a bit.

He should also learn some linguistics. There are books on it.

Grammar nazis might want to argue about whether this should be ‘is’ or ‘are’. I don’t know and, frankly, don’t care that much: the rules of grammar are the rules we make. ↩
Also: ‘pluralise’? Seriously. ↩

The glorious work of Dominic Cummings

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 16:59:52 UT

Or: the Cummings-Johnson effect.

I thought it would be interesting to get an idea of how many people will die because Dominic Cummings thought it was fine to ignore the lockdown rules, and Boris Johnson agreed with him. So I wrote a program to explore this Cummings-Johnson effect.

All the reasons you had to die

Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam,
because sunbeams are not made like me,
and don’t expect me to cry,
for all the reasons you had to die,
don’t ever ask your love of me.

There are two ways that what Cummings did in March 2020 will probably be killing people:

he drove a long distance, presumably taking breaks¹, while knowing he was infected with CV19;
now his actions are known, and now Johnson has supported them, other people’s behaviour will change.

The first of these is likely to have killed people, and still be killing people, by spreading the virus: for instance to the toilets in service stations². The second of these is likely to kill people, and perhaps has done so already, because now it is general knowledge that Cummings & Johnson think that lockdown rules are for other people — for the little people, not people like them — then they will take lockdown and social distancing less seriously, and people will die as a result of that.

It’s this second way that they are killing people that I looked at.

Ths simulator described below is a toy: it’s very much a physicist’s ‘spherical cow’ model. It has no notion of locality for instance: infected individuals simply randomly pick other individuals to try to infect. The results it gives may be qualitatively reasonable, but if they are quantitively correct this is coincidence. The purpose of writing it, and of the runs described here, was simply to see if the Cummings-Johnson effect is visible, and to get some kind of qualitative estimate of how large it might be: if their actions will probably only kill only a few tens of people then they are doing no more harm than a common-or-garden mass murderers, while if their actions may kill thousands of people, then they’re working on a completely different scale.

Epidemic models which are far better than this exist. For instance the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis — Professor Neil Ferguson’s group — must have one. I would be very surprised if these people haven’t run much better versions of the scenarious I describe below. But the results of these runs don’t seem to have been published. This is sad but, perhaps, not surprising given what we know about Cummings & Johnson and their attitudes to facts which disagree with their fantasy worlds.

Still: if there are results from better models I would very much like to know them.

A mindless epidemic simulator

I wrote a very simple-minded simulator: it is unlikely to be realistic, it’s really a toy model. The results are unlikely to be quantitively correct, but they may be qualitatively interesting. In the model individuals go through the standard three phases:

initially they are uninfected & hence susceptible;
once they are infected they incubate the disease for $t_l$ days, where $t_l = 7$ in all the runs below
they are then infectious for $t_i = 14$ days.
on each of these days, they randomly pick another individual, and if that individual is susceptible they infect them with a probability which is initially $p_i = 0.14$.
at the end of the period they either die, with probability $p_d = 0.01$, or they survive but become non-susceptible.

Additionally there may be a small ‘leakage’: every day, every susceptible person in the population can stand a small chance of becoming infected. This models the infection leaking in from abroad, for instance. In all the runs here the leakage $p_l = 10^{-8}$.

Finally the initial number of seeds can be set, the idea being to start the simulation after a good few people have become infected to avoid too much uncertainty in the trajectory of the epidemic. By default $n_s = n_p/1000$, where $n_s$ is the number of seeds and $n_p$ is the population size.

All of the parameters are adjustable as is how long to run for and what the stopping criteria are (with a leaky model things can keep on happening even after the number of infectious individuals reaches zero).

It is straightforward to computee $R_0$ for this model: a person is infectious for $t_i$ days and each day they stand a $p_i$ chance of infecting another person if no-one is yet infected, so

\[ \begin{align} R_0 &= p_i t_i\\ &= 0.14 \times 14\\ &= 1.96 \end{align} \]

And then $R$ declines over time as more people are removed from the population. When $R < 1$ the epidemic dies out, more-or-less gradually, except for leaks causing occasional infections.

Source code for this model is not currently available, although it may be in future.

How the simulations run

All of $t_l$, $t_i$, $p_i$, $p_d$ and $p_l$ can be adjusted during a run: the simulator is told to run for a few days, the values can then be adjusted and then it runs again for some given time. In practice the only parameter that I adjusted was $p_i$: the probability of infection. Changing this during the run directly changes $R_0$ and hence $R$ and alters the course of the epidemic.

There is nothing in the model which prevents any of these parameters being adjusted dynamically, based on the current behaviour of the modelled epidemic. In fact I didn’t do that but instead set up ‘configuration sequences’ which are sequences of configurations where the parameters (in practice, just $p_i$, as well as some reporting parameters) are changed at fixed times, between which the model simply runs.

Because there is inevitable variation between runs, the simulations get run several times, and the model also forks: if I wanted to look at the effect of changing parameters on, say, $d = 120$, a single simulation is run to $d = 119$ and then multiple copies are run on from then. This means that any variation before $d = 120$ is removed from the forks, since they all come from the same simulation run. This process can happen recursively if need be.

Some example runs

Here are some simple cases which show the behaviour of the model.

Abandoning mitigation

Here is output for a model epidemic in which the mitigation is abandoned after 2 years:

Mitigated giving up after 2 years, cumulative deaths, population of 1 million

This is the output of a 4 year run for a population of a model with

$n_p = 10^6$;
$p_i = 0.14$ initially;
$p_l = 10^{-8}$

For the unmitigated forks, $p_i$ remains at its initial value.

For the completely mitigated forks

\[ p_i = \begin{cases} 0.14&d \lt 40\\ 0.06&120 \le d \lt 120\\ 0.08&120 \le d \lt 200\\ 0.06&d \ge 200 \end{cases} \]

For the ‘giving up’ forks

\[ p_i = \begin{cases} 0.14&d < 40\\ 0.06&120 \le d \lt 20\\ 0.08&120 \le d \lt 200\\ 0.06&200 \le d \lt 730\\ 0.14&d \ge 730 \end{cases} \]

In other words what this is showing is a scenario where there is no vaccine, but mitigation is abandoned, after about 2 years. Because some leakage happens, at some point after the mitigation is abandoned the epidemic takes off again and a lot of people die. Exactly when it takes off depends on chance, but in all 5 runs here it’s within about a year and a half.

Scaling the average results from this run to a population of 70 million³ results in the following figures, all to 3 significant figures:

551,000 deaths for the unmitigated epidemic;
40,300 deaths for the completely mitigated epidemic;
535,000 deaths for the epidemic in which mitigation is abandoned on day 730.

For the mitigated epidemic this is somewhat lower than what the UK has so far seen, but it is in the right area: the model is clearly not hopeless. In later runs I adjusted the mitigation slightly to compensate for this (see below).

What these results make clear is that, unless there is a vaccine³, mitigation has to continue essentially indefinitely, or the epidemic will take off again.

Chancy runaways

Here are two runs which have an initial infected population, $n_s = 0$: there are initially no infected people and the epidemic takes off due to leakage, with $p_l = 10^{-8}$ as before.

Firstly for a population of a million:

Unmitigated, no seeds, cumulative deaths, population of 1 million, 10 runs

Well, you can see that the epidemic takes off again after less than two years in all cases.

How likely this runaway is to happen in a given interval of time depends on the population size, as smaller populations experience fewer leakage events. Here is a run for a population of 10,000:

Unmitigated, no seeds, cumulative deaths, population of 10k, 10 runs

You can see that only one runaway happened in the three year simulation.

The Cummings-Johnson effect

To model this I started with an epidemic whose $p_i$ values are initially:

\[ p_i = \begin{cases} 0.14&d < 40\\ 0.06&40 \le d <120\\ 0.08&120 \le d < 200\\ 0.06&200 \le d < 300\\ 0.08&300 \le d < 600\\ 0.07&d \ge 600 \end{cases} \]

All of the models run for 3 years, or 1095 days, and in addition the unmitigated epidemic is always plotted⁴. Each model ran 5 times and quoted figures are averages, scaled to a population of 70 million, to 3 significant figures

Cummings-Johnson on day 120

For this model

\[ p_i = \begin{cases} 0.14&d < 40\\ 0.06&40 \le d < 120\\ 0.08\times \left\{1.02, 1.05, 1.10\right\} &120 \le d < 200\\ 0.06\times \left\{1.01, 1.03, 1.06\right\} &200\le d < 300\\ 0.08\times \left\{1.005, 1.02, 1.04\right\} &300 \le d < 600\\ 0.07\times \left\{1.002, 1.01, 1.02\right\} &d \ge 600 \end{cases} \]

Where the triples of numbers represent the Cummings-Johnson effect causing weakening of social distancing of 2%, 5% and 10% respectively on day 120, with the weakening declining over time. Here are plots for this:

Cummings-Johnson on day 120, 2%, 5% and 10%, population of 1 million

Here:

the brown curves are the normal courses of the epidemic with and without mitigation;
the blue curves are 2%;
the orange curves are 5%;
the red curves are 10%;

The figures are:

551,000 deaths for the unmitigated epidemic;
63,100 deaths for the mitigated epidemic;
70,300 death for the 2% weakening;
86,500 deaths for the 5% weakening;
109,000 deaths for the 10% weakening.

Or in other words:

7,200 additional deaths for 2% weakening;
32,400 additional deaths for 5% weakening;
45,900 additional deaths for 10% weakening.

These numbers seemed far too high to me. And I also suspect that the epidemic in my model happens more slowly (takes more simulated days) than the real one. So I ran three more models, with the Cummings-Johnson effect taking place at successively later times.

Cummings-Johnson on day 200

For this model

\[ p_i = \begin{cases} 0.14&d < 40\\ 0.06&40 \le d < 120\\ 0.08&120\le d < 200\\ 0.06\times \left\{1.02, 1.05, 1.10\right\} &200\le d < 300\\ 0.08\times \left\{1.01, 1.03, 1.06\right\} &300 \le d < 600\\ 0.07\times \left\{1.005, 1.02, 1.04\right\} &d \ge 600 \end{cases} \]

As you can see this allows the mitigated epidemic to run until day 200, when the same decaying effect happens. Here are plots for this:

Cummings-Johnson on day 200, 2%, 5% and 10%, population of 1 million

Figures:

546,000 deaths unmitigated;
69,900 deaths mitigated;
75,100 deaths 2%;
93,700 deaths 5%;
128,700 deaths 10%.

Excess deaths:

5,200 2%;
18,600 5%;
53,600 10%.

This is a little better, but not much, and the 10% case is bizarrely bad.

Cummings-Johnson on day 300

For this model

\[ p_i = \begin{cases} 0.14&d < 40\\ 0.06&40 \le d < 120\\ 0.08&120\le d < 200\\ 0.06&200\le d < 300\\ 0.08\times \left\{1.02, 1.05, 1.10\right\} &300 \le d < 600\\ 0.07\times \left\{1.01, 1.025, 1.05\right\} &d \ge 600 \end{cases} \]

Here are plots for this:

Cummings-Johnson on day 300, 2%, 5% and 10%, population of 1 million

Figures:

551,000 deaths unmitigated;
59,800 deaths mitigated;
73,200 deaths 2%;
90,000 deaths 5%;
138,000 deaths 10%.

Excess deaths:

13,400 2%;
30,200 5%;
78,200 10%.

All these figures are worse than the day 200 case, which think is because the big increase is happening when things are already too relaxed.

Cummings-Johnson on day 600

For this model

\[ p_i = \begin{cases} 0.14&d < 40\\ 0.06&40 \le d < 120\\ 0.08&120\le d < 200\\ 0.06&200\le d < 300\\ 0.08&300 \le d < 600\\ 0.07\times \left\{1.02, 1.05, 1.10\right\} &d \ge 600 \end{cases} \]

Here are plots for this:

Cummings-Johnson on day 600, 2%, 5% and 10%, population of 1 million

Figures:

546,000 deaths unmitigated;
61,700 deaths mitigated;
63,600 deaths 2%;
68,500 deaths 5%;
80,200 deaths 10%.

Excess deaths:

1,900 2%;
6,800 5%;
18,500 10%.

These seem a little less frightening

Why is it so fierce?

I was really surprised by how large the differences are. I think part of the answer can be seen by looking at $R$: at any point the progress of the epidemic goes something like $e^{\alpha (R -1)t}$, where $\alpha$ is some fudge factor. The only reason that the exponential runaway doesn’t continue is that $R$ is a function not only of $p_i$ but also of the proportion of people who are no longer susceptible. But if that proportion is low, which you very much want it to be, then everything is, more, or less, exponential, and really tiny changes in $R$ can cause huge explosions.

To control the epidemic over any length of time you need to keep $R = 1 - \epsilon$ where $\epsilon \ll 1, \epsilon > 0$: you want to do this because the epidemic will die out so long as $R < 1$, but the social and economic cost of keeping it significantlly below 1 for any length of time is enormous. And for an epidemic which has infected, and therefore killed, only a relatively small proportion of the population then $R \approx R_0$. So the useful thing to look at is $\ln R$ & $\ln R_0$, as this shows small changes near $R = 1, R_0 = 1$ which is where all the action is⁵.

Here’s a plot of $\ln R$ and $\ln R_0$ for the Cummings-Johnson on day 120 2% variant, and the mitigated version without the 2% bump:

ln R, ln R0, Cummings-Johnson on day 120, 2% and mitigated

Interestingly you can see that, for $d \gtrapprox 500$ the Cummings 2% $R$ is lower than the mitigated $R$. But it’s significantly higher for $d \in [120, 200)$ and somewhat higher for $d \in [200, 300)$ (although less than 1 in the second interval).

So, well, very small changes for parameters in exponential processes can make very large differences: that should be obvious.

It certainly would be the case that runs with more principled values for things (for instance my ‘decaying Cummings-Johnson effect’ is pretty ad-hoc: it would be better to model it by having some increase which exponentially decays with time: $p_i = p_{i0}e^{-(t - t_0)/\tau}$ as people forget, which would be easy to model. Maybe I will have a go at that in due course.

How many people will Cummings and Johnson kill?

I don’t know. This model is not adequate to give a numerically-correct answer by a long way: it’s full of assumptions, and is in any case an extremely oversimplified model⁶.

But I couldn’t get the number of people they will kill lower than 1,900, and I worked fairly hard to get it that low. I think my model is too sensitive, even though the numbers of people it kills for the mitigated epidemic are pretty reasonable and I did not fine-tune it for that, so I expect the real number will be somewhere between many hundreds and a few thousand. This is somewhere between mass murder and genocide⁷.

Did Cummings & Johnson do this deliberately? Probably not. Are these the only people they will kill, or even most the people they will kill, due to their ideological, careless and incompetent handling of the epidemic and other things? No. Would the harm have been reduced if Johnson had promptly sacked Cummings? Yes. Would the harm still be reduced if he were to sack him now? Yes. Will he sack him? Of course not. Do either of them care that they will kill a lot of people? Definitely not: the people they have killed and will kill are only little people, like ants.

This is the glorious work of Dominic Cummings, aided and abetted by his idiot stooge, Boris Johnson.

Don’t expect me to lie,
don’t expect me to cry,
don’t expect me to die for thee.

He says he did not take breaks. This seems a deeply implausible claim given that he drove 260 miles with a small child in the car. ↩
Which, again, he claims none of his family visited. ↩
Another option is that the epidemic becomes globally extinct, when leakage would stop: this seems unlikely. ↩
This is not really helpful as it makes the plots harder to read. ↩
In my model I’m treating $R_0$ as something you adjust via changes to $p_i$, rather than a constant of the epidemic. $R_0 = p_i t_i$, and I am adjusting $p_i$. It would perhaps be better to say $R_0 = p_{i,0}t_i$ and then define $p_i = p_{i,0} - p_{i,m}$, where $p_{i,m}$ is the parameter you adjust, and use that together with the proportion of people remaining susceptible to define $R$: it doesn’t make any difference to what actually happens though. ↩
I would be extremely interested in results about the Cummings-Johnson effect from more serious models. Please get in touch if you know of any. I am happy to sign nondisclosure agreements if need be. ↩
Since we know that BAME people are disproportionately affected by CV19 this really is looking like genocide. Perhaps not a deliberate one, but I wonder how much Cummings & Johnson care that a bunch of BAME people will die because of their actions? Not much, I should think. ↩

Sexism in computer science

Tim Bradshaw — Sat, 09 May 2020 17:16:02 UT

Anyone who says that the facts show that men are innately better than women in computing either does not know the facts, does not understand them, or is lying.

The facts

In 1971, about 14% of US computer science and information science graduates were women. By 1984, about 38% were. But by 2011 the proportion had fallen to under 18%¹. Here is a graph of the proportions by year from 1971 to 2011:

CS & IS graduate ratio, US, 1971–2011

What the facts show

This entire process happened in about two generations: the proportion of women more than doubled in less than one generation, and then about halved in a generation: some of the women studying CS in 2011 could be the daughters of the cohort of 1984, and the granddaughters of the 1970 cohort.

No genetic change in a human population can happen this fast: evolution operates on timescales of thousands to millions of years, not over a small number of decades. This means that whatever caused these changes was not a change in innate ability. There simply can be no question about that: there must be some other explanation, since the innate ability of women to do computer science, or any other innate ability, cannot have changed significantly over this period.

This means that the changes were caused by something environmental. Perhaps in 1984 there was enormous positive discrimination, or in 1970 and 2011 there was enormous negative discrimination, or some combination of the two².

This data is also perfectly compatible with the conclusion that women may be innately as good at computing as men: 38% is not very far from 50%, and if we assume some level of sexism in 1984³ it is easily possible that the underlying figure was 50%.

What this data tells us, unambiguously, that whatever has caused these changes is environmental, and is not due to any differences in innate ability as such changes simply cannot happen over this timescale. It also tells us that things have got a lot more skewed since 1984: progress in this area has not only stopped, it is being reversed and has been so since the mid 1980s: the situation now is only about 28% less skewed than it was in 1970.

What the facts don’t show

What the data does not say is why this has happened, except that it is not due to changes in innate ability.

While it is almost certain that there was strong institutional discrimination against women in 1970, it seems unlikely that, in 2011, there was any kind of institutional discrimination, as this would be illegal and institutions are pretty good targets for legal action. So it seems unlikely that the decline is due to institutional discrimination. However all the data says is that there has been a decline: not why.

If we assume that most of the change is not due to institutional discrimination then it’s tempting to speculate on what did cause it. Well, I’m not going to do that: I have theories but they are based either on no evidence or on anecdotal evidence. Perhaps someone has done proper research into the causes, but I don’t know. There is a vast surfeit of theories based on little or no data, and outright made-up stuff on the internet — wild speculation, outright lies and ‘alternative facts’⁴ — and people are dying of this surfeit: I won’t add any more to it.

One possible inference is that women who, today, succeed at computing degrees, have done so against significant odds. It’s very likely that this means that they are better than men who achieve the same grades. So companies, if they are legally able to, might consider actively selecting female candidates for jobs, on the grounds that they are, probably, better.

In any area where people make a claim that some group is innately better than some other group based on some metric, and where the scores of one or both of those groups has changed radically over time, then it is immediately safe to conclude that those claims are either lies, confusions or both, because either the metric is junk, or it is not measuring innate ability. The obvious example of this is racial ‘science’.

Source. Later figures may be available, but I couldn’t find them. I also don’t have the figures for other countries but I expect they are broadly similar. ↩
I worked in academic computing from shortly after 1984 to the late 1990s and although I am not female I can say with some certainty that there was not enormous positive discrimination. ↩
Again, in my experience there was some level of sexism in academia in this period. ↩
Which are, of course, lies. ↩

The revenge of the blob

Tim Bradshaw — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 12:44:58 UT

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

The blob

It has been very fashionable among populist politicians and their supporters to fulminate against ‘the blob’. The blob is:

the civil service;
journalists;
news reporting organisations other than ones that report ‘good’ news¹;
the BBC in particular;
scientists, especially climate scientists;
economists;
experts of all kinds;
judges;
the whole legal system;
the liberal/metropolitan elite in general, however it is defined;
the deep state, whatever that may mean;
the reality-based community²;
anyone who disagrees with whatever plan is in favour this week, or points out that it is not possible, will be economically catastrophic, is illegal, or anything inconvenient like that.

The blob is an amorphous group of people who all think the same way and who all are somehow trying to prevent whatever transformative programme the populist wants to embark on. Which people exactly constitute the blob varies from time to time and populist to populist. Whatever the blob thinks is wrong, and the blob must therefore be eliminated so that we can all get things done³ and, rejoicing in our inevitable victory, march forward to the sunlit uplands of the glorious future that awaits those lucky elect over whom we will rule in splendour for a thousand years.

Populism

I’m sure there are many elaborate definitions of what it means to be a populist. One fashionable idea is that populists somehow side with ‘the people’, who are good, against ‘the elite’ (aka, of course, ‘the blob’) who are bad. But definitions vary a lot depending on who is making them and when they made them⁴. One defining characteristic is that

populists seek to gain power by providing simple, appealing answers to complex, unappealing problems.

These answers are almost always wrong because problems which have easy answers have already been solved and are no longer problems. The definition of a ‘complex, unappealing’ problem is one which does not have a simple, appealing answer.

But it doesn’t matter whether the answers are wrong: they are appealing and easy to understand, and the populist aims to ride that to power. Consider this problem:

foreigners are coming to our country and eating our children!

Well, if you think about it, this is really not that simple to solve: there are quite strong taboos amongst humans about eating other humans — many, perhaps all, claims of large-scale cannibalism turn out not to be true — and there are even stronger taboos against eating children. So what is making these foreigners so desperate that they feel they need to eat children? Even more so, why are they coming here to do it: are there no children to eat locally? Perhaps they have eaten all their own children: but then why haven’t they died out? It’s all, really, quite complicated.

But the populist doesn’t care about this as they have a simple answer:

THROW THESE LOATHSOME CHILD-EATING FOREIGNERS OUT! LET THEM EAT THEIR OWN CHILDREN! BUILD THE WALL! REMEMBER THE SPIRIT OF THE BLITZ! ENGLAND FOR THE ENGLISH!!!

Well, that will certainly fix it, at least until the populist has ridden the wave of disgusted horror at the unspeakable behaviour of these horrible baby-eating foreigners⁵ to power, wealth and glory.

And what happens then? What happens when the whole problem turns out to be intractable after all? There are a range of answers to that.

People have pretty short memories so a good approach is just to try to forget, either that the problem existed at all, or that the solution was ever suggested. When you come up against people who do remember then you can simply ignore them, or deny that you ever offered the solution or in fact that the problem ever existed at all. While doing so be sure to imply that these inconvenient long-memoried people are acting in bad faith somehow, or are acting against the will of the people which you, of course, represent.

Blaming someone else is also a good approach: of course the problem would be solved by now but the liberal elite — mostly made up of foreigners⁶ and people who are, you know, different — is preventing the solution for reasons of their own which you will hint, but never quite say, are because they quite like a bit of children-eating themselves, as rootless cosmopolitans⁷ tend to do. Certainly they are enemies of the people and something must be done about them (that ‘something’ may, you will imply, involve camps).

Of course you can simply lie that the problem has been solved when it has not been. If it’s not, in fact, really a very severe problem — only one baby was ever eaten, and it turns out that the evidence for even that is pretty apocryphal — then you can just declare it solved and move on.

A final, brilliant, approach is to make up problems which do not exist and then, later, declare them solved. Foreigners certainly no longer come here and eat our children: this is, therefore, a problem our glorious leader has solved! Crime also is no longer rising and this too is something which the great chief has strived day and night to achieve and why he must be elected as leader for life. Do not mention that crime was not rising previously, still less that it now is: only enemies of the people with their annoying facts would do that.

What is it that makes the populist’s appealing answers so appealing? What, exactly, do they appeal to? Well, the answer is obvious: just look at the answers that populists give. They appeal to the things that, secretly, ‘everyone knows’ are true: to things that people perhaps think but, until recently and not always even now, most people have not dared to say in public for the last few decades; they appeal to instinct, to intuition, to prejudice, to bigotry. But they never appeal to rationality.

So this is because, secretly, everyone is a bigot, right? No, it’s not: a fair number people are secretly — and, increasingly, not so secretly — bigots of course, but by no means everyone is. Until fairly recently the proportion had also almost certainly been declining for decades. Rather this is because populists are dealing with an awkward truth: there is no division between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’: there are just people, belonging to a myriad different intersecting groupings, with each person usually belonging to many groups. But mostly, there are just people.

So the populist has to invent groups of people to set against each other, and then to persuade enough people that they belong to the ‘good’ group aka ‘the people’ by various rhetorical tricks. There’s no ‘white working class’⁸, until you talk about it enough, and then suddenly there is. Indeed there is no England, until you persuade enough people that, well, English people are not the same as Scottish or Welsh people, and definitely not the same as people who live on the wrong side of some water who, really, are barely people at all. There is certainly no blob until you persuade enough people that there is, and that the people in it are bad people and should most definitely not be listened to and perhaps, in due course, be eliminated. Not surprisingly a good way to invent these groups is by invoking bigotry, because bigotry is entirely about creating artificial divisions between groups of people.

What they are doing is something physicists call ‘symmetry breaking’, which is a process where initially tiny differences get blown up so they become very large. And they’re doing this so that they can construct a large group of people who will support them, and force into existence one or more other groups who can be identified as the enemy, and who can be blamed for all bad things. A good example of this process is sentiment in the UK about the EU: this was simply not a major issue between 1990 and 2010; yet from 2016 until COVID–19 displaced it in early 2020 it entirely dominated UK politics. The populists have, quite brilliantly, divided the country into ‘the people’ who now desperately want to escape the EU they were hardly aware of only a few years before and a despised elite who are supposed to be plotting to prevent this, and the populists have ridden the division they have invented to power. Brexit is a canonical recent example of gaining power by providing simple, appealing, and wrong answers to complex, unappealing problems.

Populists

What sort of people do this?

Actual bigots, such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Bannon & others. They are not pretending to hate people they see as different, they really do hate them.
People for whom personal power and glory matters above all else, such as Trump & Johnson. Populism is an easy way of gaining power if what you care about is power rather than the welfare of the people over whom you have power, so people who care about having power above everything tend to be populists when they can’t be despots, or perhaps as a route to becoming despots⁹. Almost all politicians are interested in personal power, of course: populists are different because anything else can be traded for power. Does anyone really think that Johnson really believes in brexit? Of course he does not: he believes only in Johnson, and he will support anything that furthers that cause.
Cranks, such as Cummings and perhaps Bannon: the true believers. These people are often sidekicks or advisors & are by far the most interesting group, and perhaps the most dangerous one as well.

Populists are not people who merely want power, or who are involved in extracting money from their position or other forms of corruption: populists do want power, with the possible exception of the cranks, and usually are corrupt, but these things are true of almost all politicians and is not a useful distinguishing feature of populists¹⁰.

Cranks

Anyone who has worked as a scientist or with scientists or in many other fields will have come across cranks. These are the people who have disproved special relativity, who can show that quantum mechanics is incorrect, who believe in perpetual motion and who want to tell you about it in endless, excruciating detail. They seem annoying but harmless until suddenly they aren’t: suddenly they’re refusing to vaccinate their children causing measles outbreaks and threatening herd immunity; suddenly they are destroying telecommunications infrastructure; suddenly they are advocating eugenics and ‘scientific’ racism; suddenly they believe the apocalypse is coming; suddenly, they are the chief advisers to the president or the prime minister.

It’s easy to think that cranks are just stupid people, but they’re not: Trump is stupid and Johnson is superficial, but whatever Cummings & Bannon are they’re not stupid. Instead I think that the distinguishing feature of cranks is that

cranks don’t realise when they don’t understand something¹¹.

So, for example, if I try to understand Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem I very quickly realise that it is beyond my understanding: perhaps if I spent the rest of my life on it I could understand it, eventually. But in practice I couldn’t because I just don’t have enough intuition for that sort of maths, and almost certainly I am also just not clever enough. That doesn’t happen for a crank: if they start off trying to understand special relativity and fail to do so they never recognise that they have failed. Instead, when they start trying to do calculations and get answers which disagree with special relativity or are inconsistent, they conclude that everyone else is wrong: that they alone understand special relativity or that they alone understand what is wrong with it. This then leads to some bad places.

Why does everyone refuse to listen to me when I try to explain how they are wrong about special relativity? Why won’t they publish my papers? Why do they all claim to think the same thing when it’s so obviously wrong? It’s group-think! Do they really believe what they profess to believe or are they hiding something? Is there some kind of hidden conspiracy of elite scientists trying to suppress the truth, which I have now exposed? And wasn’t Einstein, the founder of the conspiracy, Jewish? Why yes, he was. What is really going on here? Why is the cosmopolitan elite suppressing the truth? Are they in league with the financiers? How are the climate scientists involved? What are they concealing from the common, decent, everyday working folk? The truth is out there, if you will only look, however hard the hidden superiors try to conceal it! THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.

Not all cranks are populists, but it’s pretty easy to see why populism attracts cranks: the intellectuals of populism are cranks.

The trouble with populist cranks is that they really believe what they profess to believe. The bigots are just little knots of fear and hatred, the power-seekers don’t really believe anything at all, but the cranks have constructed vast thought palaces which may even, at first sight, seem plausible. And the cranks are not stupid: their simple, appealing answers don’t work because complicated problems simply don’t have simple appealing answers, but they can and will argue for them endlessly in enormous and incomprehensible detail. Arguing with a crank is like fighting an octopus: whenever you think you’re winning there’s another tentacle to deal with.

And the cranks really hate the blob, because there’s a reason the blob disagrees with them: the cranks are wrong. But the cranks are now in power: they have won and they are going to destroy the blob so they’ll never have to listen to all the reasons they’re wrong again. The octopus now has an infinite number of tentacles, and a flamethrower.

Against the blob

What the blob represents is truth: the truth discovered by good journalism, the truth uncovered by the legal system, the truth discovered by scientists and economists. And the populists hate the truth because their programme is built on lies. The bigots hate truth because it exposes their bigotry for the lies it is, and also simply because they are made of hate; the power-seekers hate the truth because they have built their path to power on lies; finally the cranks hate the truth because they don’t understand what truth is.

And so the populists set out to destroy the blob, and with it any notion of truth. The BBC must be eliminated because it tries to keep its reporting unbiased¹² and to uncover the truth, rather than this week’s alternative truth. Science must be discredited because the facts it uncovers may be inconvenient, and similarly economists and experts of all kind must go as they seek to point out the gaping holes in the cascade of lies the populists tell: we have, after all, had enough of experts. The legal system must be dismantled and reassembled to suit the populist agenda.

When this is done there will be no truth left: all will be lies and nothing will matter. Any facile answer to a problem can be given to anyone and anyone who points out that it is false or impossible will, if they have not already been dealt with, simply be eliminated. This is what the populists seek to achieve: the death of truth.

The revenge of the truth

Once the truth is dead, simple appealing answers to complex, unappealing problems — otherwise known as lies — are, well, simple and appealing: combined with appeals to the substantial minority of secret bigots & conspiracy theorists they’ve worked pretty well for the populists. Once the blob is eliminated who, really, will care if the answers are wrong? So the good honest people will be poorer once they have gloriously been marched into the sunlit uplands; but they won’t be much poorer and they probably won’t notice. If they do notice, well, look at those cosmopolitan elite Europeans who have made use of their elitist skills to not be so poor: it’s their fault, we should, you know, do something about them, too. So the fruit will rot in the fields for want of people to pick it but we can’t allow those elite dusky foreigners here to pick it: we never liked fruit anyway. And of course the children and grandchildren of the working folk are going to live blighted lives because we chose to treat climate change as some conspiracy of elite blob scientists and anyway doing anything about it would have hurt our investment portfolios¹³; but, well, we’ll be long gone by then and who really cares about their children? What sort of person even knows how many children he has?

And then, suddenly, not. Suddenly there’s a complex, unappealing problem which is killing people, today. Suddenly you are a faced with a problem which simply does not care about the lies you tell: it cares only about the truth. You can’t lie to something which is not sentient. Suddenly your simple, appealing answers are going to cause tens or hundreds of thousands of people to die, not over a few decades but over a few months, and people won’t have time to forget that it was your wrong answer that killed their friends and their family as they dig the mass graves. Shit just got real.

And suddenly, it turns out that the blob were, all along, not the villains they were made out to be: the boring old civil servants turn out to be good at actually administering things and understand how to deal with crises, the scientists turn out to be good at understanding what it is that is killing people and how to stop it. The BBC turn out to be good at communicating the truths people need to understand if they want to avoid dying. And experts, well, it turns out that experts turn out to be some use after all. The cranks’ tangles of mad ideas turn out to be mad. Real problems don’t get solved by a torrent of bullshit and lies: they need real solutions based on real data and real understanding. The reality-based community turn out to be useful after all. Suddenly the blob is the your best friend, at least until the crisis is over. Truth matters.

Or, well, you could just keep on piling lie on lie and hope no-one notices the piles of corpses rotting in the streets. It’s the American way.

‘Good’ news is, of course, fake news, but not ‘fake news’, which is good news. ↩
‘The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community”, which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. [But] that’s not the way the world really works anymore”.’ Yes, really ↩
Which things exactly need to get done doesn’t matter very much so long as they have memorable names. The important thing is to do something, something important, something transformative, something that respects the will of the people to which all populists have immediate unconscious access. ↩
I have heard people described as populists because they let the banks get away with things they shouldn’t have in the run up to the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and because they gave peerages to their friends. These are, at best, very odd definitions of ‘populism’: although these activities certainly made the people concerned popular with a group of people, that group of people was ‘bankers and the friends of politicians’, who are not really ‘the people’. ↩
Although it may not be stated there will, of course, be no doubt that the filthy baby-eaters are both ‘dusky’ and have ‘watermelon smiles’, even when they are not looking like letter boxes. ↩
Not, of course, the baby-eating kind. On the other hand you never know: what do they eat at their elite dinner parties? ↩
‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’ — Theresa May, 2016 ↩
There is a working class, or at least there was, but does it really matter what colour your skin is if you belong to it? Is the implicit ‘black working class’ distinct in any way other than the colour of its members’ skin? Why would anyone who was not trying to create division where none really exists use the term ‘white working class’? ↩
In so far as he is capable of planning, this seems likely to be Trump’s plan. ↩
Although Trump is corrupt in a deeply spectacular way. ↩
For cranks, there are no known unknowns, only unknown unknowns. ↩
‘The corporation is either “stacked full of right-wingers” (as a Guardian columnist complained) or so lefty that even its “Sherlock” detective drama contains anti-Tory messages (as claimed by the Daily Mail). Yet polling by the Reuters Institute finds that the BBC reaches an audience that is broadly in the middle of the political spectrum. This contrasts with its main commercial rivals, ITV and Sky, whose viewers lean to the right, and with public broadcasters in other countries, whose audiences usually lean left’ — The Economist, 25th April 2020 ↩
Of course we don’t have investment portfolios, because we are simple honest people, like you. Almost everyone at Eton is the first generation of their family to have gone to school, don’t you know: their fathers were down the pit at fourteen. Of course we’re not shorting the pound: I don’t even know what that means … oh, hello, sorry I have to take this call from my, ah, friend … hello, yes, yes, 14 at 330, yes, buy Euro, yes, jolly good. ↩

Those who control the present

Tim Bradshaw — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 16:09:58 UT

‘Those who control the present can rewrite the past’ — Anne Fortier

‘The free trade agreement we will have to do should be one of the easiest in human history’ — Liam Fox, 2016

‘The day after we vote to leave we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want’ — Michael Gove, 2016

‘There will continue to be free trade and access to the single market’ — Boris Johnson, 2016

‘Not a single job would be lost because of Brexit’ — Lord Digby Jones, 2016

‘After we vote Leave, we would immediately be able to start negotiating new trade deals with emerging economies and the world’s biggest economies which could enter into force immediately after the UK leaves the EU’ — Leave Campaign, 2016

‘We will maintain a free flowing border at Dover. We will not impose checks at the port. The only reason we would have queues at the border is if we put in place restrictions that created those queues. We are not going to do that’ — Chris Grayling, 2018

‘Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market’ — Daniel Hannan, 2016

How long will it be before these statements were never made?

The death of hope

Tim Bradshaw — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 11:36:29 UT

In 2016 you voted for brexit. But you voted for it because the leave campaign lied to you, of course: not because you didn’t like foreigners very much and didn’t care very much about your children’s future.

Of course you didn’t vote for those reasons: how insulting and arrogant of me to even suggest you might have, to suggest that you might be even a little bit selfish or even a little bit racist. Instead I am meant to believe that you are so stupid that you believed the lies you were told.

Well, I don’t believe that. I don’t think you are stupid: I think you knew what you were asking for in 2016, whatever you might claim.

On the 12th of December 2019, enough of you voted for brexit again to ensure it happens. This time you don’t get to claim you were lied to: you knew what brexit means because you are indeed not stupid and you have not been fooled by the lies the laughing clown and the people pulling his strings tell. This time you know that brexit means that your children will not have the opportunities you had, that we will not fix climate change and that your grandchildren will live with the terrible consequences of that failure. But you don’t care about your children & still less about their children, do you? All you care about is yourself and that there should be less foreign people: you really don’t like foreign people, do you? And you will get your racist fantasies fulfilled even if it means murdering your own children.

And when it’s done, when the nasty foreigners are gone and somehow your dream racist empire has not arisen, who are you going to blame then? Who will be the next group to be eliminated? The Gypsies first, I expect, and then the Jews and anyone not ‘English’ enough for you, the ‘liberals’, the ‘deviants’, the scientists and anyone who wanted to remain in the EU, anyone who wanted there to be hope. Especially them.

Finally, when they are all gone (who will wonder where they have gone?), your empire of mud will be complete and you will turn on each other.

It has been coming for a long time, but this is the moment when hope for the future died. You are old and you know there is no hope for you: your future holds only slow physical and mental decline, with death at the end of it, as does mine. But you can’t bear to think that there are other, younger, people who might have less dark futures ahead of them than yours. So you have put out the lamps of their futures along with those of your own. Because there is no light in your life you have extinguished the light of the world.

How dare you?

Burning the future

Tim Bradshaw — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 12:26:04 UT

Whatever you think about brexit, there is something which matters more. And brexit is not compatible with that thing.

Boris Johnson is lying when he says he will ‘get brexit done’: it’s always been obvious that brexit will take years. The much-trumpeted deal — if the UK leaves with a deal — covers only a small proportion of what needs to be done as the UK leaves the EU. After the UK leaves it needs to sort out not only what its future relationship will be with the EU but also all the other relationships it has not had to address independently for more than a generation. This is lot of work.

Well: this would be a lot of work if the UK had recent experience of conducting such negotiations on its own behalf. It doesn’t, as it has been able to rely on being part of the EU for a very long time. Everyone who knew how to do this in the UK has retired or died. This has become very apparent over the time since the referendum, as the UK has made a laughing stock of itself in the most public way possible. Indeed, some people seem to have forgotten even that negotiating complicated deals is hard: Liam Fox famously said that

The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history.

If we assume he was not just lying or bullshitting then his ignorance is fairly astonishing: he was the secretary of state for international trade at the time, and clearly just had no idea of the effort involved. There are really only two choices here: either he was hugely incompetent to do his job, or he was lying.

So the negotiations will not be a lot of work: they will be an overwhelming amount of work as the entire organisation in the UK has to relearn skills it has forgotten, all while negotiating in many cases with larger entities with current experience, such as the EU.

The end result of this is that brexit is going to take essentially all of the available resources of the UK government and civil service for many years: conservatively a decade. During that time a lot of other things which need to be done simply won’t happen. In fact, that’s something like the best case: anyone who has ever done a job which is really several jobs knows what can happen when the load of things to do becomes so overwhelming that even working out what to do next becomes impossible. When that happens everything just collapses, and essentially nothing gets done. That can happen to organisations as well, and it’s equally bad: the term for this in extreme cases is ‘failed state’.

This will all be particularly bad if there is some important task which can’t wait: something which needs to be done in the next decade, if it is to be done at all.

There is. We have about a decade (perhaps rather less, perhaps a little more) to start dealing with anthropogenic climate change in a really serious way. The IPCC special report Global Warming of 1.5ºC makes this very clear, and in particular it is easy to play with the interactive figure, which lets you explore how the future temperature increase depends on the year that net-zero emissions is reached. That figure, in fact, is interestingly optimistic: the very worst case it allows is for net-zero emissions to be reached in 2100. Currently there is no real indication that net-zero will be reached at all.

Dealing with climate change, if it’s to be done at all, will need a huge, international effort, and brexit means that the UK will play essentially no part in that effort.

At this point you probably expect a huge section on why anthropogenic climate change is in fact a real thing. But, really, I can’t be bothered writing that: if you don’t believe in climate change then you should just do some reading and stop listening to people who are being paid to lie to you by the oil companies. The truth is out there, but it does not involve aliens.

So, well, OK, what about the people who know it’s a real problem but still don’t bother, because they think that brexit, or having a nice new car, or their next holiday, or, really, anything, is more important? People like everyone’s favourite clown prince, Boris Johnson, who didn’t bother turning up to a debate on it and then threatened the organisation holding the debate. I don’t know, perhaps he’s just a coward and was too frightened to face the other party leaders. But I don’t think it was just that: I think that he and his party just don’t care about climate change. Getting rid of nasty foreigners and bringing back the glorious British empire (which, of course, will be run by the English, lead by the great Boris before whom all will kneel) is just much more important to him than his children’s future. And this is the case for lots of people: climate change is this slow thing which doesn’t really matter much now and by the time it does matter, well, that’s a long way away and someone else will deal with it and who really cares about their children anyway?

And that’s the thing: if you don’t care about climate change, what you really mean is that you do not care about your own children’s future. If you think brexit is more important than climate change then you are burning your own children’s lives on a fire you have built specially for the purpose.

If you think that brexit and dealing with climate change are compatible then you’re naïve: if you think that brexit is more important than climate change then fuck you.

Brexit or your children’s future: pick one.

Clown fascists

Tim Bradshaw — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 19:18:24 UT

Welcome to the age of the clown fascists.

Just as dangerous and unpleasant as traditional fascists but, you know, clowns as well. With mad, blond clown hair, some of it even real. And, like all the best clowns, really fucking creepy: either making not-jokes about wanting to have sex with their own daughter, or having creepy relationships with much younger women who they almost certainly are not beating up. Or, who knows, both.

And the Amazon is burning.

How did we get here?

2020

Tim Bradshaw — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 18:24:52 UT

What sort of people will vote for Trump in 2020, if he lasts that long?

Racists will.

After his tirades of the last few days it’s completely clear that Trump is a racist. He’s no longer a ‘dog whistle’ racist: telling people from minorities to ‘go home’ and supporting ‘send her back’ chants at rallies is explicitly & openly racist. And there’s evidence that this is deliberate policy.

Here’s the thing: if you vote for a racist, then you are a racist. There’s a very common argument that somehow people who vote for something didn’t really understand what they were voting for: this argument was made about brexit and about Trump’s election. The argument is, essentially, that the people who voted for, say, Trump or brexit in 2016 were just too stupid to know what it was they were voting for. The argument is that people who disagree with us are stupid, that people who vote for racists aren’t, really, racists, they are just too stupid to understand what they’re voting for. They’re not, you know, bad people, they just have weak minds, unlike our superior strong minds.

Really? Do you really think that someone who votes for a man who tells minorities to ‘go home’, and who chant ‘send her back’ at rallies don’t understand what that means? Of course they understand what it means. People who do this are racists — perhaps, perhaps, they are stupid racists, but they are racists — and they are supporting a racist president.

If Trump wins in 2020 then racism & bigotry will have won in the US.

Democracy

Tim Bradshaw — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 10:54:14 UT

Sometime in the middle of 2019, the UK will have a new prime minister. He¹ will have considerable power to control whether, when and how the UK leaves the EU.

This prime minister will have been selected from a shortlist of two, both representing the same party, by a tiny electorate who can vote only because they have paid money to be able to do so. This electorate are 97% white (the UK as a whole is under 90% white), 71% male (UK as a whole approximately 50%) and far richer than the UK average².

Almost certainly this person will be Boris Johnson. Johnson has been sacked, twice, for lying³, and this is very far from the limit of his lies. He has conspired to beat up a journalist⁴. He is the kind of casual racist that people from his social class usually are, having published a column in a newspaper in which he talked about black people as ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’. He is an English nationalist bigot, having been the editor of a magazine in which a poem was published suggesting that Scotland be turned into a ghetto and the ‘tartan dwarves’ within it should be exterminated. He has referred to women as ‘hot totty’ and talked about the ‘tottymeter’. To say that he has a long record of offensive behaviour would be putting it rather mildly⁵.

Although he is highly-educated in a rather unhelpful area (classics, inevitably at Eton and Oxford), he also seems to be rather stupid. He had to be stopped from reciting a Kipling poem inside a temple in Myanmar⁶ by the British ambassador: even someone who holds racist views as he does should realise that expressing them in that context is a catastrophically stupid thing to do. Unless, of course, he was simply too stupid to understand what he was doing. He is, in fact, an upper-class twit.

Or, perhaps, not: perhaps he just does not care. There’s a well-known⁷ quote about him from Max Hastings:

I’m not sure he’s capable of caring for any human being other than himself.

Perhaps, in fact, he was reciting Kipling because he just doesn’t care how much damage he does; because, like Trump, he’s only dimly aware that other people even exist.

Johnson’s supporters are even less typical of the UK than the already tiny, skewed electorate: 85% of his supporters want to leave the EU with no deal compared with 66% within his electorate, and 25% within the UK as a whole⁸.

He has suggested, or at least refused to rule out, that he might ‘prorogue’ parliament in order to allow the UK to leave the EU with no deal at the end of October 2019: this means suspending it, so that MPs — the people the UK actually voted for, as opposed to him, who they did not vote for — have no say in what happens.

If that happens, the UK will leave the EU with no deal on Hallowe’en, under the control of a man educated at Eton and Oxford and elected by less than 120,000 people (0.2% of the people entitled to vote in the UK) who were allowed to vote for him because they paid to do so.

This, apparently, is democracy.

Because he will, of course, be a middle-aged white man. ↩
See this article from the BBC, and this article in The Economist. ↩
Once from a newspaper, and once from his position as shadow arts minister. ↩
See this article. ↩
See for instance this. ↩
The poem was The Road to Mandalay: see this. ↩
I think the origin of this quote is an interview in the ‘PM’ programme on BBC Radio 4, although I haven’t been able to track it down. it is cited in this Guardian editorial. ↩
See this and also a reference in The Economist article above. ↩

After Charlottesville

Tim Bradshaw — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 18:23:04 UT

In June 2017 I argued that people who voted for Trump were racists: I’m very unhappy with that conclusion.

But a year after the events at Charlottesville on the 11th and 12th of August 2017, and Trump’s response to them, it’s obvious that I was right: a very significant proportion of Americans are certainly racists. And the same is, surely, true for other countries: many of the people I see every day must be racists.

Charlottesville

The march as Charlottesville was not just some rather right-wing people wanting to preserve the symbols of their romanticised past without thinking too hard about what that past actually involved: it was people waving flags with swastikas on them and chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’. It was, in other words, Nazis¹. Of course, not everyone on the march was doing this, but here’s the thing: if you find yourself on the same march as people waving swastikas and chanting antisemitic slogans, you stop marching. If you don’t stop marching you are, in fact, supporting them. You don’t get to say that, well, you march alongside Nazis but you’re not actually a Nazi supporter: and if you support Nazis, you’re a Nazi.

And these Nazis aren’t fooling around: one of them drove a car into the crowd, killing Heather Heyer. That’s murder, and an act of terrorism. And there were other attacks associated with the march, including on DeAndre Harris, who was beaten with a metal pipe and wooden boards.

Trump’s response

We all know what this was. Initially, on the 12th of August he made a statement saying:

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides².

He repeated ‘on many sides’ twice.

On the 14th of August he gave another statement saying:

Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including KKK, Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America³.

It seems to be pretty clear that he made this statement as a result of strong pressure from people in the administration after the reaction to his first statement, and that it was written for him.

Then, on the 15th of August he gave in and said what he really thought:

I think there is blame on both sides. You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. […] I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. […] You have some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides⁴.

So we know what he thinks: he thinks that both sides are pretty much the same. Nazis and those who march with them are pretty much equivalent to those who fight them, and in particlar among those marching with the Nazis there were ‘fine people’. Nazis are people who are not just racists: they don’t just think some groups of people are inherently superior to others, they advocate that the inferior groups should be gassed, and they have in the past done just that to millions of people. If you’re a Nazi or you are marching with Nazis, you are not ‘fine people’: you’re a deeply horrible human being.

So, OK, that’s pretty clear, right? Trump was offering support to racists, and in fact to Nazis. You really can’t miss that, and I’m sure no-one did.

Where this goes

So, obviously, if Trump’s supporters were not racists his support would have collapsed in the days & weeks after Charlottesville: people who had missed his racism in the election campaign weren’t going to miss this, because it’s not possible to miss it. Well, of course his support has not collapsed⁵, and so there is only one conclusion: an awful lot of people, including the elected politicians who still support him, are racists.

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

— Heather Heyer’s last post on Facebook

Perhaps they were, technically, neo-Nazis: there is no useful distinction. ↩
Source: this CNN article. ↩
Source: as previous quote. ↩
Source: this transcript. ↩
At the time of writing his approval rating to be about 40%, based on this. ↩

No excuses

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 15:22:40 UT

As card-carrying members of the liberal elite we have to understand why so many people are so cross. Obviously it is our fault: with our awful progressive views we have prospered at their expense and it is only natural that they should express their anger by supporting politicians who are explicitly racist and misogynistic. That’s just a natural reaction: the people we have oppressed so horribly aren’t actually racists and misogynists, no, they just support politicians who are. It’s all our fault¹.

Wait, what?

There are four claims here:

a lot of people are aggrieved by some possibly-invented ‘liberal elite’ who have somehow cheated them;
they then vote for bigots;
while not themselves being bigots;
and they do this because they are so cross.

Let’s leave the first point aside: there is clearly something to it, although the elites who are really prospering at others’ expense are anything but liberal².

Do people vote for bigots?

Let’s take Donald Trump: lots of people voted for him and he is explicitly a bigot. He has famously boasted about attacking women, his firm has been sued for systematically discriminating against black people, he has repeatedly tried to pass legislation which discriminates on grounds of religion and so on. He’s also surrounded himself with white supremacists. There’s no serious argument here: he’s at least racist, misogynistic & clearly prejudiced against muslims and quite possibly antisemitic.

So yes, people vote for bigots.

Are they then themselves bigots?

Here’s the thing: if you vote for a someone you know to be a racist then you are a racist. You don’t need to go out and lynch black people yourself to be a racist: it is sufficient to elect people who will do it for you.

The argument that this is not true seems to be, essentially, that all the people who supported Trump were just too stupid to understand what it was they were supporting: their understanding was so weak that they just didn’t realise how unpleasant his views were. This is insulting the intelligence of millions of people, and I don’t believe it: I think they knew exactly what they were voting for and I think that what they voted for was what they wanted.

A second argument is that, yes, they knew he was a racist and a misogynist but that this mattered less to them than other things he represented. A similar argument gets made about parties like the DUP: people supposedly vote for them not because they support their hateful views on homosexuality but because they’re willing to put up with them because of the other things the party represents. This argument is rubbish: if people actually wanted politicians who would do the other things that Trump or the DUP represent while not being bigots, then such politicians would displace Trump or the DUP. That the DUP still exists, and that Trump beat other candidates to become the Republican candidate tells you all you need to know.

Again, yes: almost all of the people who voted for Trump are bigots.

Does being cross make you a bigot?

The final claim is that, somehow, people are not normally bigots, but they become so when they are sufficiently angry. This seems to be something that often happens: everyone knows stories about people who, in moments of stress, intoxication or anger, shout antisemitic & racist abuse. But this, apparently, isn’t because they actually are antisemites and racists: it’s just something that happens when you’re drunk, or stoned, or cross.

Bullshit. You don’t suddenly become a racist because you are angry: you are already a racist although you dare not say so. When you get sufficiently angry you lose self-control and say what you already think.

So, no, being cross does not make you a bigot: you already are, you’re just a coward as well.

No excuses

Trump is a racist and a misogynist, and if you voted for him then you are a racist and a misogynist as well, and there is no excuse for this: you didn’t suddenly become one because you were cross, or because some phantom liberal elite made you one, you already were one.

Perhaps this, finally, is something for which the liberal elite really are to blame. It seemed as if racism, misogynism and all the other bigotries were finally being overcome, when in fact they were not. A large number of people still thought like this: they were just not saying what they thought. Until now.

‘The Western intelligentsia, snug in its echo-chamber, has done a dismal job of understanding what is going on, either dismissing populists as cranks or demonising them as racists.’ — The Economist. ↩
Trump doesn’t even pretend not to be enriching himself and his family at his country’s expense: if you are looking for an elite who is prospering at the expense of ‘ordinary people’ you don’t have to look further than that. ↩

Surveillance & magic

Tim Bradshaw — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 11:58:36 UT

Clarke’s third law is that

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It does not apply to organisations who want to intercept communications: if it’s claimed that they can do something which requires magic, then in fact they can’t do that.

Donald Trump apparently thinks, or at least pretends to think, that Obama was tapping his phone. This article in The Guardian, among many others, points out how ridiculous these claims are. Unfortunately in doing so it perpetuates a common and stupid myth. In particular it contains this claim:

The security agencies can access electronic devices across the planet with ease. They can listen in to a target’s mobile, even if it is switched off.

Can they, in fact, do that? Well, yes, they probably can: you can only know if a modern mobile phone is really off if it has no power source, and since many mobile phones have batteries which can not be removed without destroying the device, you can never really know it is off without destroying it. So, once some suitable bit of software is in the phone it can be used like this.

Except that they can not use magic. If a phone is listening to a conversation and transmitting it to someone, then it is using power to do so: it is, in fact, making a call. And modern phones are not famous for their long battery lives: Apple claim ‘up to 14 hours’ talk time for the iPhone 7, and that claim will be an upper limit which applies to a phone which is brand new, has very good reception and so on. A more realistic estimate might be 7–10 hours, perhaps even less.

So, if someone is using your phone like this, you can tell if you are even slightly competent because its ‘standby’ time will be absolutely terrible. Even more bizarrely its battery life when ‘off’ will be terrible.

So if you think people might be using your phone like this you should:

turn it off;
do not keep it plugged in to the charger when it is off;
note how fast it runs down when in this state.

Because even government agencies can not do magic.

Of course the conspiracy theorists will claim that actually, mobile phones can have very long battery lives, but the technology is somehow being suppressed in order to make surveillance possible. Given that any company which makes use of this technology in its phones would make a huge amount of money, for this to be true all phone-making companies must be controlled by some shadowy Zionist world government. It used to be safe to deride people who believe this as the cranks they are. Unfortunately they seem to be winning: soon we will be being taught this stuff in schools, or at least those of us who have not gone to the gas chambers.

No future

Tim Bradshaw — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 06:54:37 UT

We’ve been fooling ourselves for thirty years. We believed that the awful toxins that defined society in our youths were, while not yet dead or even nearly dead, clearly dying.

We thought that the horrible treatment of people with brown skins, women, gay people, Irish people, Roma, people with the wrong religion or from far away and generally anyone who did not conform to some grey english stereotype was fading away. We thought this because we saw the acceptance of difference everywhere: we went to gigs where the audience was not all of one tribe, we walked through the park and saw couples where one person had come from Poland and the other’s parents from Pakistan. It seemed as if there was hope and, gradually, we stopped worrying.

We were wrong. England is not suddenly becoming a nation of bigots after the brexit vote: it has always been a nation of bigots. All that has changed is that now the bigots are saying what they have always thought.

The conventional thing to say about people who voted for brexit is that they were, on the whole, well-intentioned but a bit dim: they were fooled by a group of malignant politicians with their various agendas into voting for something very clearly against their own interests. In other words, stupid people voted for brexit, bamboozled by clever (or, at least, highly educated) people like Boris Johnson & demagogues like Farage.

While Johnson, & especially Farage, have a lot to answer for, I don’t think this is true. Apart from anything else it is insulting the intelligence of people who voted for brexit: I just don’t believe that a huge number people were stupid in that way. I don’t think that people ever really believed the lies that the leave campaign told: rather, they used these lies as a shield to conceal what they were really after. They were probably concealing it even from themselves in the way we all do; but they knew what they wanted.

What did they want? I think they wanted to live in the past: a version of the England that sputtered and failed at the end of the 1970s: the England that many of them grew up in — that I grew up in.

Well, that seems fairly uncontroversial: this is more-or-less what people said they wanted, isn’t it? To go back to a world before the EU, where people had jobs for life in the pits and steelworks, where England was a great country. Of course that world never really existed outside of television, but we can fix that: we can mix the best of the old with the best of the new, right?

But of course, there was rather more to that vanished dream of England than that: quite a lot more in fact. It was a world where black people were treated as second-class citizens at best, and where if they objected then the police would beat them up. Quite often the police would beat them up just for fun. Women were the playthings and servants of men, and no-one really cared if they had a few bruises. Gay people were treated, if anything, even worse than black people. Somehow, sex with children was tolerated, at least if the people doing it were white: it was officially not OK, of course, but everyone knew it went on and nobody did anything about it.

And of course everyone (well, everyone English, which is the same thing) knew that England was the greatest country in the world: Scotland and Wales were just parts of England, European countries were convenient holiday destinations inhabited by people who were greasy and often suspiciously dusky or humourless German-types who were busy eating each other and burning Jews (English people wouldn’t do anything so vulgar, of course, although they certainly didn’t want any Jewish people in their golf club). They didn’t have to be taken very seriously. And as for the rest of the world, well, the empire was a recent memory, and they definitely knew their place, which was serving proper English people.

The people who voted brexit want a return to the past, and they want all of it: perhaps they are not saying it quite yet, but I think it is terribly clear that this is what they want. You don’t have to read very hard to interpret what Farage is saying, or what people who talk about ‘the white working class’ mean.

Why? Why have people suddenly changed? It seems impossible that such a vast change in attitudes happen so quickly. Indeed, it is impossible: such a change in attitudes hasn’t happened, because the attitudes that people now evince are the attitudes that they have always had. For thirty years the people we all now despise as ‘the liberal elite’¹ fooled themselves that education and cultural change were gradually making bigotry and xenophobia a thing of the past, but in fact all they did was was to make it, for a while, impossible to say what you think.

There is no future.

‘Liberal elite’ will soon start to mean the same as ‘underground resistance’: members of the ‘liberal elite’ will meet in fear in back rooms while uniformed faragists patrol the streets, hanging suspected and real liberal elitists on meat hooks. ↩

The end of summer

Tim Bradshaw — Sun, 26 Jun 2016 18:56:20 UT

On midsummer’s eve 2016 old people in the UK demonstrated that, by a significant majority, they are xenophobic leeches who are happy to suck the life out of their children and grandchildren, and have now found a way of continuing to do so even after they are dead.

The demographics are very clear:

27% of those aged 18–24 wanted to leave;
28% of those aged 25–34 wanted to leave;
48% of those aged 35–44 wanted to leave;
56% of those aged 45–54 wanted to leave;
57% of those aged 55–64 wanted to leave;
60% of those aged 65 or older wanted to leave.

People born in the UK in 1962 or earlier were likely to vote leave, while people born in 1982 or after were very likely to vote stay (I was born in 1962).

But perhaps older people are just demonstrating their superior wisdom, and leaving is the right thing to do? In what sense could it be right?

Well, it certainly is going to make people who live in the UK a lot poorer. The economics are not in doubt: no credible economist thinks that the results of a British exit from the EU will be good. And indeed the pound collapsed immediately following the result, and the UK’s credit rating was lowered shortly after that. There will probably be a recession and the results are likely to be long-lived. This will particularly hit the poor, and of course the cost of this catastrophe enormously outweighs the funding we were providing to the EU.

They have also voted to destroy the United Kingdom they profess to love: Scotland will now almost certainly leave the UK as the SNP are calling for a second referendum on Scottish independence. I lived in Scotland for 22 years, and was strongly against independence in the last referendum: I would vote for it now, and I imagine it will be a landslide. This will mean that the ‘United Kingdom’ is in fact England in all but name (if you they will care about Wales, and still less Northern Ireland, think again). It will also have a new land border with the EU.

But it’s a matter of democracy: we in ~~the UK~~England will now be our own masters, free from awful undemocratic EU practices. Well, let’s leave aside that the EU isn’t actually undemocratic (the ‘unelected’ commissioners are in fact appointed by representatives of the elected governments of the countries which make up the EU, which is at least as democratic as the way the government of the UK is appointed): this just isn’t true. Assuming we’d like to trade with the EU on reasonably favourable terms we’re going to need to agree to their rules, except that, now, we don’t get a say in what those rules are. This is not more democratic: it’s less.

But, they say, we didn’t know any of this last Wednesday! Old people voted in good faith, believing in a bright new future as promised by the leave campaign. Don’t be silly: the leave campaign lied consistently and it was common knowledge that they were lying. For instance take the ’£350 million a week’ figure: the UK Statistics Authority debunked this a month before the referendum, and this was widely reported at the time and later. Everyone knew that the leave campaign was built on lies. Everyone knew it would make us poorer, everyone knew the UK would fragment.

Perhaps not everyone knew that the leave campaign had no plans at all:

On live television Faisal Islam, the political editor of SkyNews, was recounting a conversation with a pro-Brexit Conservative MP. “I said to him: ‘Where’s the plan? Can we see the Brexit plan now?’ [The MP replied:] ‘There is no plan. The Leave campaign don’t have a post-Brexit plan…Number 10 should have had a plan.’” The camera cut to Anna Botting, the anchor, horror chasing across her face. For a couple of seconds they were both silent, as the point sunk in. “Don’t know what to say to that, actually,” she replied, looking down at the desk.

They don’t just act like upper-class buffoons: they are upper-class buffoons.

Finally let’s debunk one more myth: that immigrants are a great cost to the country. No, they aren’t, and in fact they are a significant economic benefit to the country:

Between 2001 and 2011, the net fiscal contribution of recent arrivals from the eastern European countries that have joined the EU since 2004 has amounted to almost £5 billion. […] Immigrants’ overall positive contribution is explained in part by the fact that they are less likely than natives to claim benefits or to live in social housing.

Immigrants are less likely to claim benefits and less likely to live in social housing than natives. Especially, of course, than older natives, who contribute little and consume enormous resources from the health service.

It is very simple: the predominantly older people who voted leave did so because they don’t like foreigners, especially those whose skin is dark: they are at least xenophobic and usually straightforwardly racist. There has already been an increase in racist attacks following the referendum and this will get much worse. They are also selfish: they voted leave even though they knew it would seriously damage the future of young people, because it would not damage theirs. They’re old: they don’t have long futures, and in many cases they have already left the workforce and are living on their pensions.

The older people who voted leave were the greatest winners of the post-war period: they had the NHS, free higher education, stable jobs, pension schemes that worked, and benefited from the long housing boom in the UK. These are people who have done very well out of the country they live in. But they care only about themselves: they don’t like foreign people and, since it has no cost to them to do so, have turned around and savaged the country that gave them everything they have. They have sacrificed the futures of their own children and grandchildren so that they don’t need to see so many foreign faces.

Despite what some people think this decision was not made by children, childishly expressing feelings they do not understand about their new sibling who need to be soothed and appeased by their parents: these are adults who consciously chose to eat their own grandchildren. There can be no excusing this.

We have always been told to respect our elders: we should help them across the road, give up our seats on trains for them, visit them in their declining years, listen to their advice. I am trying to think why anyone should continue doing this, and I can’t.

Eat the old.

Fragments: Posts tagged 'politics'

The kingdom of lost hope

Too big to fail

Forbidden words

Sleepwalking into armageddon

Scenes from the end times

Eat the old

Wes Streeting

The glorious AI future

A house of cards

A history of the near future

Contents

Growth, the sacred cow

What growth means

If growth is not constant

Growth, resources and waste products

Why growth matters

Summary

Finiteness

The future we imagine

Some inconvenient truths

What is going on?

The future we’re going to have

Are we going to have a problem here?

The magic goes away

Energy

Energy is not the only fruit

Yes, we are going to have a problem here

Faith, fantasy and Economics

Efficiency limits: economics meets physics and loses

Escaping into a pretend world

Decoupling: economics meets itself and loses

The elephant

How are we doing?

What this looks like

The teeming billions

Falling fertility

Falling fertility, rising mortality

The consequences

As above, so below

Shorter

A history of the near future

Overshoot and collapse

A pale horse

The absurdity of banning end-to-end encryption

Mickey mouse

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me

Curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth

Surely the darkness shall cover me

Notes

The tory death spiral

Work will set you free

Mel Stride

There is no cabal

Sexism in higher education

What I want to show

The data and how it was plotted

The pretty pictures

Computer and information sciences

Mathematics and statistics

Engineering and and engineering technologies

Physical sciences and science technologies

English language and literature/letters

Health professions and related programs

Social sciences and history

Visual and performing arts

What can you conclude

The UK's COVID-19 enquiry

Government by conspiracy theory

15-minute cities

The end of hope

Dear Mr Stride

Enabling financial crime

Farrago

Another letter to Mel Stride that I will not send

Dear Mr Stride,

How did we get here?

A death march

No easy answers

The day after judgement