Thinking about the imposition of interpretations, something that keeps coming back to me is the difference between the relatively few, but influential, people who actually supported the distinctive content of Blairism and the much bigger subset of Labour people who saw it as a set of pragmatic concessions, which might be rolled back if that…
Read More The Great DisinhibitionSomething I’ve been thinking about lately is the relationship between the Leave/Remain split and the Labour Party’s spectrum from left-of-centre through soft left to hard left. There is a great German word that comes in handy here: Deutungshoheit, or “interpretative superiority”. Something – some inchoate and contingent historical event – happens, and then politicians struggle…
Read More Why Corbyn is the only effective RemainerKeeping on with the Coasian hell series, what about Capita? Like everyone else I was watching the shares melt down of a morning and read their Operation KITCHEN SINK trading statement. This quote stuck out at me: We have reallocated our previously centralised business development capability to the divisions, bringing it closer to the markets…
Read More Coase Study: CapitaAs a follow-up to this 8,000 pageview hellbeast, here’s an effort to dissect its central argument a bit more. I see maybe three points within it. First, there is an argument from transaction cost. This is simply that all those contracts need some lawyering. In itself this is probably the weakest of the three, and…
Read More A bit more on Coasian hellsWhat have US healthcare, British railways, the shipwreck of Carillion plc, and the F-35 got in common, and why should you care? Well…none of them work terribly well, they all cost vastly more than expected, and nobody can put their finger on why. Cash seems to leak out of them by a thousand cuts, without…
Read More In The Eternal Inferno, Fiends Torment Ronald Coase With The Fate Of His IdeasFrom Marwood Lennox’s post: Someone reading a draft has pointed out that this proposal is to make the whole of the UK into Northern Ireland. Just as well then the DUP are now close to the government, they are the experts in building up a bureaucracy to its advantage using other people’s money You know,…
Read More GFI The GFAThis, rather good, post from Simon Wren-Lewis brings up what has become a trope – the distinction between people who are “pro-market” and those who are “merely pro-business”. The idea is that some people believe that economic problems are best solved through the market mechanism, while some other people pretend to believe this but actually…
Read More Pro-market, pro-business, or just pro-wealth?I’ve had various feedback about the Two Cultures 2017: Merit vs. Brilliance post – ranging from “Yes…yes…now I see it” to “How dare you call these people brilliant?!” However, over Christmas, events gave us something better than another wall of text. They gave us a visceral object lesson, like so: Langan was kidnapped by the…
Read More Merit vs. Brilliance: A Brutal DemonstrationThis story is fascinating. So there’s this e-commerce company that basically asks second- or third-tier Chinese manufacturers to do their worst, and advertises it to you. If you’re willing to wait 14 days for delivery, it’s dead cheap. This suggests they may even be manufacturing on demand and air freighting, eliminating inventory as far as…
Read More Cat blindfolds, salted caramel, and algorithmic kitschDavid Davis’ sensational confession that he hadn’t done the Brexit impact assessments and in fact hadn’t bothered to read the halfbaked document pulled together after it became clear he couldn’t get away without releasing something gave me an insight. There is a huge cultural divide in the country between two forces we could call the…
Read More The Two Cultures 2017: Merit versus Brilliance