Infallibility means never having to do the right thing

And so, as the Vatican’s treatment its own paedophile priests makes David Cameron’s and William Hague’s incuriosity about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status look like waterboarding, my mind is drawn to a recent study in Psychological Science, on the concept of ‘moral balancing’.

Sonya Sachdeva and colleagues “tested the idea that a sense of moral superiority might limit additional future moral behavior”. The results of their experiments “suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally”.

That is, if people feel “too moral,” they might not have sufficient incentive to engage in moral action because prosocial behavior is inherently costly to the individual. For example, people might not feel the need to donate blood or volunteer if they have already established their reputation as a moral person. This type of response can be thought of as moral licensing. People may be licensed to refrain from good behavior when they have accrued a surplus of moral currency.

I wonder.

The Green Budget: economy’s carbon efficiency doubles

While the Budget, such as it was, has grabbed the attention of most of us who find our thrills in politics and in numbers, there was another important set of national accounts published this week.

The latest figures on UK greenhouse emissions show an 8.5% drop in 2009 – the biggest on record, by far. But, of course, there was a bloody great recession going on last year, and less economic activity is bound to mean fewer emissions.

So I’ve charted the growth (or shrinkage) of the economy alongside changes in greenhouse emissions (the red and green bars, measured on the left-hand axis), as well as the economy’s carbon efficiency – the amount of GDP produced for a given level of greenhouse emissions (the blue line, using 1990 as a baseline of 100, on the right-hand axis):


Last year, emissions fell by a good deal more than GDP, and this follows a period of economic growth during which emissions fell almost every year.

In 18 years, the UK economy’s carbon efficiency has doubled.

However, the government’s target is to reduce emissions by 80% from the 1990 level by 2050. At the average rate of reduction over the decade to 2008, it would take 100 years to achieve this.

Redistribution and retrenchment

Two graphs from today’s IFS Budget briefing stood out for me.

First, the effects across the income distribution of all tax and benefit changes since 1997:


This is something I’m pretty pleased with. The Telegraph, hilariously, reports this as showing that “Ten million middle-income households have lost out because of Gordon Brown’s repeated tax rises”. This is the sort of comment that Chris Dillow might describe as “the Middle England error” and that I might describe as a steaming great lie.

Second, the scale of the tax rises and spending cuts to come:


This one, I’m not not so pleased with.

Given the looming fiscal tightening, it’s hard to see how as much direct redistribution as we’ve seen can be repeated any time soon. Clearly, anti-poverty measures over the next decade are going to have to be more focused on getting people into work and making that work pay.

2010 to be ‘Morse Code election’

The coming political contest is set to be fought as a Morse Code election, experts claimed yesterday.

A report commissioned by the British Society for the Promotion of Morse Code found that the number of Morse Code users is growing exponentially, after they took on a couple of work experience kids who couldn’t find proper jobs.

The claim follows earlier suggestions, mainly made on blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates, that 2010 would in fact be an ‘online election’.

However, a spokesman for the BSPMC said that Morse Code offered a unique opportunity for politicians to communicate with young voters in ways that were relevant, instant and “cool”.

But Tory attempts to capitalise on the medium came unstuck when their ‘-.-. .- ... .... / --. --- .-. -.. --- -.’ campaign was hacked to transmit ‘....- ----- ....- / . .-. .-. --- .-. / -.. --- - ... / .- -. -.. / -.. .- ... .... . ... / -. --- - / ..-. --- ..- -. -..’ instead.

And Labour’s so-called ‘M-launch’ was derailed when it emerged that former slightly relevant person Stephen Byers had been recorded claiming to have invented Morse Code for a fee of £5000. Gordon Brown’s earlier Downing Street MorCasts had to be abandoned after he somehow managed, even through the medium of dots and dashes, to appear randomly grinning like a serial killer’s dyspeptic uncle.

The subtle art of persuasion

I remember the exact moment when I realised the Tories had given up on the 1997 election and were just throwing campaign money around for the hell of it. It was when I saw one of their ads in the New Statesman – yes, the New Statesman. It said: ‘Trade unionists: if New Labour won’t have you, the Conservatives will’, followed by some sort of waffle vaguely attempting to justify this unlikely call to arms, and then it signed off with the line ‘The Conservative and Unionist Party’.

Wrong in more ways than I could count. Desperate, cavalier and pointless all at once.

Anyway, dear reader, I draw your attention to exhibit A:


This is a stunt involving eight self-respecting young men wearing specially designed masks to make them look slightly like a man that fairly few people have heard of and far fewer could recognise, who has close links to Gordon Brown and a trade union that supports Labour. Paid for by the Conservative and Unionist Party.

Obviously they haven’t given up on this election, but they do still seem to have more money than sense – and after the torrent of spoof posters, they’re not really sure how to spend it effectively.

Moody’s blues: social cohesion vs credit ratings

This week there was a commendably frank statement on the biggest political issue of the decade. It came from a credit-rating agency, and concerned public spending cuts.

There’s disagreement (recall those economists’ letters) about which is the bigger economic threat: cutting public spending and the deficit so fast that a still-feeble private sector can’t take up the slack and we fall back into recession; or letting borrowing stay so high for so long that the markets take fright, the government’s credit rating is damaged and public-debt servicing becomes much more expensive.

Both sides of the debate claim that their approach can achieve the aims of the other side: the cutters say that a lower deficit will improve business confidence and boost growth; the borrowers say that public spending will support a stronger recovery, which will lower the deficit.

FWIW my own view, at least at this stage, leans towards the borrowers:

• Private-sector weakness is likely to persist due to tight credit availability – the crunch hasn’t gone away, you know.
• Recessions caused by financial crises tend to have weaker recoveries, as do global recessions.
• The flipside of our relatively resilient labour market is the risk of a jobless recovery, at least for a while.
• Gilt yields are up, but despite the end of quantitative easing, they haven’t surged, so the cost of borrowing still isn’t anything like as much as in previous decades – and we’re pretty much getting to the peak of gilt issuance now.
• UK public debt is pretty long-dated, so we’re not needing to raise as much cash on the markets to replace expiring bonds as other countries with smaller deficits.
• And by international standards, our total public debt isn’t that large.

But timing matters. Last year, as the recession was raging, only crazy people were advocating immediate deficit cuts. Assuming continued growth, the economic case for cuts will become far stronger in the next year or two.

This year, as we’re just inching into recovery, the debate is more balanced. Neither a double-dip via over-hasty cuts nor a borrowing spiral is an outrageous fear, and any sensible approach will have to take both risks into account.

But there’s a third aspect to this, beyond any of the economics: spending cuts have social consequences. Let’s not imagine that deficit reduction on the scale that the IFS describes can be done via efficiency savings. Services that people – particularly but not exclusively poorer people – rely on will suffer.

And here’s where the credit-rating agency Moody’s comes in, this week grimly warning the UK and other countries:

Preserving debt affordability at levels consistent with AAA ratings will invariably require fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion… the severity of the crisis will force governments to make painful choices that expose weaknesses in society.

Moody’s, as you’d expect, treats massive deficit reduction as the sine qua non and everything else as an unavoidable shame that we’ll just have to get through somehow.

But is that right? It’s a political belief, not a mathematical fact, that the government’s AAA rating needs to be protected whatever the social cost, whatever the sacrifice, by fighting to the dying breath of every last teacher, nurse and constable. A credit-rating downgrade is neither necessary nor sufficient for raising the cost of borrowing.

The quality of public services should be treated as a factor – a really important factor – to be weighed alongside others (the cost of borrowing, the enfeebled private sector), not a sad but inevitable piece of collateral damage in the War on Debt. Intelligence reports suggesting that the ratings agencies possess weapons of mass destruction are deeply dodgy. And so is the argument that we have to inflict the mass destruction on ourselves to appease them.

What brain scans can’t teach us

(Cross-posted, with minor edits, at Liberal Conspiracy – they get rather more traffic than me, so feel free to post comments there instead.)

This month’s Prospect magazine has a section on neuroscience, and in particular its political implications. As well as being a political junkie, I find psychology and the brain really interesting, so this should have been manna from heaven for me. And there’s some decent stuff there, although most of the contributors don’t get the chance to make any extended arguments. There are also plenty of banal, incoherent and irrelevant points made.

But one thing came up in their roundtable discussion that always gets my goat: the idea that neuroscience is going to be a good way of telling what effects on people different policies will have. Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge, says:

For years we changed our education system again and again, but these changes weren’t based on evidence about how we learned. Instead, wouldn’t it be useful if we thought about how the brain really works, and how children learn best, and in turn formulated educational policy based on that?

And the RSA’s Matthew Taylor adds, in a similar but more nakedly political vein:

I am confident that, as we find out more about our brains, it will strengthen the progressive case, in the sense that children learn best when they are actively involved, not being passive.

No, no, no.

Think about it: how could you use neuroscience to tell which teaching methods promote the best learning?

Well, what you’d do is get a load of kids, try out different teaching methods on them and then test how much they’ve learned, and give them brain scans to see what neurological changes have taken place. This should let you identify the neural correlates of learning. So then, in the future, you can get another load of kids, try out another bunch of teaching methods on them, and use brain scans to see what the results are.

The only weakness here is that the brain scans are completely redundant. You’ve already got ways of testing how much children have learned – and however fallible these might be, bear in mind that the neurological method you develop is of necessity based on these already existing methods for its validity.

So, unless brain scans become quicker, easier and cheaper to administer than pencil-and-paper exams, there’s nothing being added here. Yet very many intelligent people are still drawn to neuroscientific evidence as something so much more impressively real then mere psychological or behavioural phenomena (i.e. what we say and do and think).

As Zoe Drayson, a doctoral researcher at Bristol, explains:

Getting back to the issue of why we think neuroscience is so compelling, there have been studies done that show if you give people explanations of behaviour on a purely psychological level, and then you add a bogus additional neurological explanation which is logically irrelevant, people still think that explanation is better. That’s not to say that there are no good neuroscientific explanations, but it does mean we must be careful.

As I say, I find neuroscience compelling. But I think its main practical benefits are going to be in medicine, not policy design.

And the reason there’s so little progress in the popular educational policy debate is that teaching is something we’re very ideological about while also thinking that our own experience and common sense have already given us the right answers. It’s not because the academic evidence that already exists isn’t of the right kind.

And there was me thinking he only had the one

Political Wife Swap

Justin McKeating argues:

If you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.

I completely agreed with this until I thought of an even better idea.

The position of Prime Minister’s Spouse should be directly, and separately, elected. So we could pair Gordon with Samantha, Dave with Sarah, or maybe even Nick (Clegg) with Nick (Griffin). The possibilities are as endless as the attention span of an ITV early evening news viewer.

The morons would vote for the spouse, and the rest of us would vote for the actual government. Everyone gets to engage with the election on terms that they can understand.

(Via Chris.)

Words, words, words

Three nice political quotes from the last week.

First, Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell responding to Tory criticisms that the government is setting long-term ‘pet projects’ into motion not long before the election:

Ministers are entitled to take decisions about the administration of the country's affairs.

Second, former Tory party treasurer Stanley Kalms on the Ashcroft affair:

Just because you can find a way of doing something that is not illegal does not mean you should do it.

Third, Paddy Ashdown on Lib Dem rules, introduced under his leadership, about whether the leader is allowed to take the party into a coalition without the consent of members:

“It was a long time ago”, he said, adding that some of those who were supposed to know what it meant were now dead. “One of them may have been me, but I can’t remember.”

Slogans that don’t work for you

The new Lib Dem slogan is, I think, even worse than Labour’s ‘A future fair for all’ and the Tory ‘Vote for change’. It is:

Change that works for you

Is that ‘works for you’ as in ‘sure, we can meet half an hour later, whatever works for you’ or as in ‘a dedicated local councillor who works for you’?

The former is too formal for a political party to get away with, and the latter is a category mistake: the change itself is the work that will be done, rather than the doer of the work. Unless we’re talking about some sort of high-interest bank account for people with very little money, so your 47p in change will work really hard for you.

Please let it all be over soon.

Latest sensational event probably poor guide to underlying long-term trend

(For Hopi…)

A NEWLY RELEASED statistic shows that the thing it measures has sharply and unexpectedly changed. The move takes the number index past the psychologically important level at which overexcitable fools gibber a bit.

The sheer oddness of the number, which has been met with gaping and shrieks aplenty, almost certainly means that it means very little. The index usually only changes gradually, and this latest statistic represents the biggest ever change since records began not all that long ago. The nearest comparison was the sudden shift a couple of years back, after which nothing much happened except that it later turned out to have been wrong.

Today’s statistic is the first provisional estimate for the number covering a period of time that did actually pass some while ago without anyone noticing anything unusual. It is still liable to be revised a few times as new data comes in, then encased in concrete and dumped in the sea, before being revised again in a very quiet voice in the dead of night.

A spokesman from the Institute For Stuff (IFS) said: “You got me out of bed for this?”

Normalisation vs business as usual

The Tory electoral alliance with the Ulster Unionists was part of an ambition to “normalise” politics in Northern Ireland, so that it isn’t dominated by issues of sectarian identity.

It’s a very noble ambition: it’d be great to see Catholics switching to the DUP because of their transport policies, or Protestants voting for Sinn Fein because of their plans for education.

But the Tories don’t want to risk the electoral chances of their historic allies in the UUP by standing against them – hence the joint ticket. And here’s where the risk comes in.

If the Tories become participants in NI politics as well as playing the more neutral brokering role of a UK government, such a pact could make things difficult.

Of course, if NI politics has indeed become ‘normalised’, then the government needn’t worry about neutrality, as there’ll be no political crises for it to negotiate through. So Cameron’s approach will only really work if the sectarianism it aims to bury is already much enfeebled.

And here’s where we get to this week’s devolution of policing to the NI authorities. The UUP’s insistence on voting against the move is a very clear statement that politics there is still too sectarian – something that holds true, in one way or another, whether their opposition is justified or not.

So the Tories’ electoral partners by their actions refute the very premise on which the pact was formed. A sticky wicket.

Couldn't resist it

Do you see what I did there?