Beyond the personal costs of being NEET, each young person not in employment, education or
training bears a cost to public finances (through benefit payments, lost tax revenues, and
healthcare and criminal justice costs), and a public resource cost (due to loss of economic
productivity from un- or underemployment, lost personal income and the effects of lost
opportunity).
• Each 16-18 year old who is NEET has been estimated by Godfrey et al to have an
average total public finance cost to society of £52,000 (in 2002 prices) over the course
of their lifetime.9 Recently this average societal unit cost of NEETs has been updated
to £56,000 per 16-18 year old NEET. The current estimated aggregate public finance
costs of 16-18 year old NEETs range from £12bn to £32bn.10
• In 2002 the average unit resource cost of 16-18 year old NEETs was estimated at
£45,000. The 2009 estimate is much increased, to £104,000, with an aggregate
resource cost range of £22bn to £77bn. This increase is largely due to lost potential
wages, resulting from growing wage differentials, and big differences in benefits and
in-work wages between 2002 and 2009.

Now immediately someone is going to start saying, well, look, there’s a £52,000 loss to the taxpayer for each Neet so we must create jobs for them!

And maybe we ought to, this is true. But note, this is a lifetime cost. Perhaps £2,000 a year.

So, anyone got any bright ideas about how to create a job for £2,000 a year? Quite, not all that simple, is it?

As to the rest of the report I’m afraid that it’s total bollocks.

The second driver has been falling youth employment rates. The employment rate for 16-17 year
olds in the UK has been falling steadily since the late 1990s – and has halved over this period to
24 per cent.19 However, the employment rate for 18-24 year olds in the UK was stable until 2004,
and has since been in decline. The recession exacerbated this trend (falling from 65 per cent in
the final quarter of 2007 to 58 per cent in the last quarter of 2009).2

What’s important in a report is often not what they do discuss but what they don’t. We’ve had something of a major change in the labour market for young people since the late 1990s. The National Minimum Wage. Now, if you or I were to try and unravel why there has been a rise in youth unemployment at a time of rising legally mandated minimum wages for young people we would at least raise the point. Perhaps we’ve the evidence to reject it as the cause of anything, perhaps we’ve not.

But we would at least mention it, wouldn’t we? Theory predicts that the NMW will have an impact upon employment. Maybe not much of one, but it will be there. Theory also predicts that said impact will be greatest upon the young and untrained: a theory which even those who propose and support the NMW acknowledge when they agree that there should be a lower NMW for the young and untrained.

We have a disproportionate rise in unemployment for the young and untrained: worth at least testing theory against reality to see whether theory might have something to do with reality, yes? Even if to reject it?

But no, the Work Foundation does not even mention the NMW.

No, really, not even a sniff of it in the whole report.

So it’s bollocks, innit?

Tell everyone that the NHS is not very good at preventing mortality amenable to health care?

There is no evidence for this, envy of the world it is!

http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7424/1129.full

2003 report in the British Medical Journal. The NHS comes 18 th out of 19 systems studied in the prevention of mortality amenable to health care.

How dare those tax dodging bastards tell the truth!

NHS Scotland:

A summary of the key findings are provided below:

• During 2000-2004, there were 34,000 deaths in Scotland (around 6,800 per annum) categorised as amenable to health care, representing approximately 10% of all deaths annually.
• Ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, malignant neoplasm of colon and rectum, malignant neoplasm of breast, and pneumonia accounted for the largest numbers of amenable deaths, and caused 82% of all amenable deaths in Scotland during the 5-year period.
• Greater Glasgow NHS Board has the highest age and sex standardised amenable mortality rates for both males and females, with significantly high standardised rates also observed for Argyll and Clyde and Lanarkshire.
• The overall standardised death rate for amenable mortality in Scotland was 123.6 per 100,000 population compared to 130.0 for the UK.

Tax dodging bastards!

Neoliberalism is grounded in the “free, possessive individual”, with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in particular, is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern society, dictate to free individuals how to dispose of their private property, regulate a free-market economy or interfere with the God-given right to make profits and amass personal wealth. State-led “social engineering” must never prevail over corporate and private interests. It must not intervene in the “natural” mechanisms of the free market, or take as its objective the amelioration of free-market capitalism’s propensity to create inequality.

As an analysis of neoliberalism that’s a pretty good coq au vin recipe. That is, it has entirely fuck all to do with the subject under discussion.

All good little neoliberals, myself for example, are entirely signed up to the idea that the State must intervene at times. That markets must be regulated, that profit making not only might be but should be justly and righteously limited. Yes, even that “social engineering” should prevail over corporate and private interests.

Our arguments with “social democracy” (to give one possible name to the system which neoliberalism is fighting against) come in three flavours.

1) The areas where private interests prevail over State are much larger than social democrats declare they are. To take one trivial example  from the current news: salt in HP sauce. If a company wishes to market and consumers which to purchase and consume a sauce which is higher in salt than the State thinks is wise then the State can bugger off. Nothing to do with the State at all. On yer bike matey.

2) We do not move from “this must be regulated” to “the State must regulate this” quite so easily as the social democrats. Should the freshness, taste, ingredients and general potability of Heinz Tomato Soup be regulated? Yes, most certainly: but the interesting question is by whom? We neoliberals would note that actually, it’s become the world’s best selling brand of the stuff (well, I assume it is anyway) because Heinz has a reputation to maintain, a brand, and consumers do very well at regulating, through their purchase or not of such a product, the quality of such repeat purchases. Heinz gained this reputation by poisoning fewer consumers than the competition back in the early days of canning.

There are areas where consumers are not so good at such producer regulation. One time purchases with long term payoffs for example: there’s no neoliberal out there who doesn’t think that the pensions industry needs a goodly bit of State oversight.

3) We don’t think that the welfare state should be abolished either. Nor that there should be no redistribution, no intervention in market outcomes or market distribution of consumption. Indeed, we’re all usually far more radical about how to do these things than the social democrats are. It’s us, people like Uncle Milt, Charles Murray, who argue that bugger it, just give everyone enough to live on. Go on, do it, stop buggering about with 50 p a week here, a tenner there. Just send everyone £6,000 a year or whatever and leave them alone. Negative income taxes, the EITC in hte US, tax credits in the UK, these are neoliberal ideas you must recall. So is the London Congestion Charge (no, really, Alan Walters).

However, what we do argue is that much of the time you do want to let the market rip: then do the balancing and redistribution after that. Rather than cripple the market to get to your desired goal, use the market to create the wealth to get there. Further, that subtle adjustments to markets to cure their imperfections are better than bureaucratic dictats. For example, a Pigou Tax on carbon emissions is better than 3,500 pages of rules and regulations on who may emit what, when and how.

In the end though, what you’ve really got to remember is that us neoliberals are in fact liberals. In fact, we’re the only people in the political arena who are consistently liberals. On the conservative side there are most certainly those who would regulate which adults you can voluntarily exchange bodily fluids with. Over on the left, socialist and green, side there are most certainly those who would regulate which adults you can voluntarily exchange economic goods with.

We’re the only people who are arguing that who you fuck and who you trade with is no damn business of the State at all. The only people arguing that you’re an adult, you’re a free adult living in a free country and, well, have fun, eh?

You know, liberals arguing for liberty.

Which is why we get such stick from both left and right of course: both groups being insistent that the proles have to be told what to do by the proper, edumacated, enlightened sort of people who make up said lefts and rights.

And we liberals are out there shouting, as we have been for three centuries now, shouting that aristocracies, whether by birth, self-selection or political power, can simply fuck right off out of the lives of free adults.

You’ve got to admit the logic is delightfully pure and simple.

were obtained by non-profit-making investigations company Spinwatch,

Non-profit making?

Seems so:

Spinwatch is an independent non-profit making organisation

The choice of language there shows idiot leftism at its best.

Not making a profit is actually quite easy. General Motors managed it for years.

What they mean is “not for profit”, that is they don’t seek to make profits rather than they don’t make profits.

But this linguistic trip up is illustrative of a mindset. That if you seek to make profits then you will: capitalism is just that easy, y’kno? Just no awareness of the fact that four out of five new organisations that attempt to make profits fail to do so.

In 2010, Labour actually increased its vote in raw terms among those ranked as AB on the social grade [NRS]. Labour’s vote also held up well among those at the bottom of the social grade [DE]. The real loss for Labour actually occurred among their skilled & semi skilled workers. They lost practically all their votes in the C2 category. As you can see from the graph, Labour lost a combined 1.3 million votes in the C grade.

     So what does this mean? Well the concept of chasing middle England is surely daft when you consider that  it is C2s who are most disgruntled. I think the leakage points in a party’s support gives a clue as to why they are losing voters. If one readily accepts that a C2 is typically more likely to embrace ordinary Labour policies, then by inference you may deduce that these types of concerns must not have been heard in the Labour party manifesto. If one by inverse logic considers that the ABs stood by Labour then perhaps you can surmise that cosying up to the filthy rich pleased this group of voters. In conclusion, if Labour wishes to increase its share of the vote, reconnecting with working class voters is a greater priority than chasing Middle England.

The graph above shows the percentage increase in the number of NEETs by region from Q2 2010 to Q2 2011. The North East of England experienced a 21% increase while the North West suffered a 28% increase. The East of England also suffered a 21% increase in NEETs. We should draw breath there. These figures in themselves require sober reflection about the state of our economy. The abolition of EMA and the tripling of tuition fees are to these young men and women hammer blows to their life chances.

But the key finding of this research is that the South East of England and the South West of England have escaped a significant rise in their NEET problem. Of course, this is to be cheered. But why the regional disparity? Should we be concerned when one part of the UK excels while another languishes? At the very least one would hope that common agreement could be secured that the NE, NW and East of England require specially tragetted assistance to combat this problem.

In the 120-page study, co-authored by academics at the University of York and Heriot-Watt University, Crisis highlights figures released over the summer that show councils have reported 44,160 people accepted as homeless and placed in social housing, an increase of 10% on the previous year and the first increase in almost a decade.

Last year another 189,000 people were also placed in temporary accommodation – such as small hotels and B&Bs – to prevent them from becoming homeless, an increase of 14% on the previous year.

There’s two directly contradictory ways of reading these numbers.

1) My word, homelessness is a really serious problem, we’d better spend lots more money on it.

2) My word, aren’t we doing well in dealing with homelessness?

Here’s what most would think of as true homelessness:

In London, rough sleeping, the most visible form of homelessness, rose by 8% last year. Strikingly, more than half of the capital’s 3,600 rough sleepers are now not British citizens: most are migrants from eastern Europe who cannot find work and, unable to get benefits or return home, are left to fend for themselves on the streets.

That’s not, by the way, the number sleeping rough on any one night. That’s the annual total:

3975 people slept rough at some point in London during 2010/11, an increase of 8 per cent on the previous year’s total of 3673 and of more than a thousand since 2005/06.

Note that I’m using the numbers that Crisis themselves report, as with the original news piece.

So, we’ve some 225,000 people who were at risk of becoming what we would all agree is truly homeless over the year and all of those bar some few thousand (half of whom are not citizens and thus not eligible for help) are helped by the system to avoid this true homelessness.

Yes, I’m sure we could make this system better but perhaps the first point to be made is how well the system is in fact dealing with matters. A 1% failure rate is truly miraculous for anything government run after all.

And as anyone who has ever even looked into those rough sleeping numbers knows, absent booze, drugs and mental illness there would be hardly any of that at all.

The charity says that the government needs to reverse cuts to housing benefit and invest urgently in new housing.

No, this does not follow. What does follow is that if swathes of the population cannot afford housing then the government should be trying to make housing cheaper. Making housing cheaper does not necessarily mean spending more money on housing: it implies making housing cheaper.

Which is simple enough to do, the government could just stop doing some of the things that it is already doing. Like liberalise the planning system. The right to build on a specific plot of land is the most expensive part of a house in the south after all. Reduce that cost and you’ll reduce the cost of housing.

People in Scotland and Wales will want to know why their chances of accessing a life extending cancer drug are so much lower than their neighbours in England.

You have noted that Wales and Scotland do not charge rich bastards for their prescriptions? Whereas English rich bastards do have to pay for their prescriptions, thus increasing the funds available to pay for cancer drugs?

No, you haven’t noted this? The idea that resources are limited, that there are opportunity costs to spending money in one manner, those costs being that you can’t then spend the dosh again on something else nice?

No, apparently you haven’t. How sad.

Certainly not letting you have control of the public coffers then matey.

More than 40,000 people sleep on our streets every night.

Hmm. When people actually go out and count it it seems that they come up with quite different numbers.

The Government’s official figures for June 2010, based on snapshot street counts, show that 1,768 people were sleeping rough on any given night in England ^[5] with the vast majority being in London. Outside London, the largest concentrations of rough sleepers in England are found in Cornwall, 65; Herefordshire, 42; Bradford, 23; Maidstone, 27 and Peterborough and Exeter, both 21.

Only out by a factor of 20.

Just how tough is it to get a Ph.D. these days?

Currently, 1.7 million families are on housing waiting lists. In the meantime families survive in private rental accommodation that nets landlords profits of £31 billion per year.

Oh dearie me.

Income is not net profit, net profit is not income.

No, I don’t know what the figures is for gross private rent paid but I think we can take a stab at it.

Private rented housing is a vital and growing part of the housing market comprising almost 14 per cent of all households, or nearly three million homes in England.

So, some 3 million properties, to reach our £31 billion we’d need the average rent to be around £10,000 a year. Seems about right to me.

So, yes, I do feel comfortable in stating that Eoin, the cheeky wag, has just declared that gross rental income is in fact net profit to landlords.

He’s not included any costs at all: not depreciation, not renovation, not agency fees, not even financing costs.

About par for the course really, our academic specialist in feminist history not seeming to be all that good with numbers.

By building 100,000 Co-Operative homes we argue that you could switch these families from private rental accommodation that currently costs on average £8,000 p.a. to Co-Op homes costing the dwellers half that.

Yup, that is what he’s doing, using gross income to mean gross profit. He’s even shown that he’s wrong in his own numbers: the Co-Op won’t be making a profit on this but the costs are still, to the tenants, £4,000 a year….he’s also leaving out financing costs as his plan starts off with a grant which doesn’t need to be financed.

This is amusing too:

In Britain we have 17 billion tonnes of coal which can be used for the Carbon Capture Storage process.

Yes, we know we’ve got lots of coal. What we don’t have is a CCS technology that works, making the amount of coal we have something of a redundant calculation.

That curse being that even when they do manage to get the analysis of the problem correct (a rare enough occurence) they then veer off into entirely insane proposals for the solution.

Here they manage to get correct that the major cost of housing in this country is the piece of paper that says you can build a house on a certain plot of land. Because planning permission is artificially restricted in supply it costs a lot of money.

Excellent, well done.

So, what do they propose? Granting more planning permission? You know, taking the thumb off that supply and demand scale thingie?

No, they propose taxing the granting of planning permission and the restriction to a monopoly of social landlords the ability to gain large scale planning permission.

Loons, just loons.

For the correct response to a supply shortage really isn’t the creation of a monopoly of supply plus taxation of supply. It’s umm, a loosening of supply restrictions which will increase supply and thus reduce prices.

Obama has made some mistakes, to be sure, but at least he ended the wars and has the government on a sound financial footing.

There currently exists a loophole whereby businesses can offset this year’s profits against last year’s losses. This should stay for SMEs as they struggle through these difficult times, but the government have craftily neglected to tell us that the banks who returned to profit this year are exempt from paying taxes due to last year’s losses. We would close this loophole for large companies.

It’s not a loophole you ignorant tosspot. Companies are charged tax on their cumulative profits for a very good reason. For, when you start a new business adventure, either as a stand alone company or a new project within an extant one, you make losses for the first few years as you get it up and running. So, you only start paying profit taxes once you’ve recouped the losses you made on starting the business.

Virgin Media and other telecoms businesses make rapid profits for minimum fuss. Their quick growth model gives nothing back. Too often, they make their profits from those who cannot show restraint when building up large telephone bills. Added to this they manage to avoid paying large amounts of corporation tax due to the use of various accounting practices. In GEER, we think get rich quick companies have a duty of care to the state. For this reason a telecoms tax is a good way of recouping some ill-gotten profits for the benefit of the nation at large.

What? So if you grow the company quickly, providing more jobs to people, providing services that the consumers want, thus you should pay more tax?

This GEER thing, this new “left Labour think tank”: is it actually any more than Eoin and his vaseline filled tube sock?

‘Such essays cannot await the permanence of
the book. They do not belong in the learned
journal. They resist packaging in periodicals.’
Ivan Illich

D’ye think they were just a tad embarassed to put the “Lenin” in there?

In addition to Sir David Frost, documents released by the Monitor Group, reveal that Anthony Giddens, a former director of the London School of Economics (LSE), who was ennobled by Tony Blair, was also on the payroll.

Yet, if the crisis of 2007-08 taught us one thing, it’s that we need a more diverse banking system for stability, resilience and to work for people. That means more mutuals, co-ops and innovative, smaller local banks, not more risk-takers wanting to gamble unaccountably with other people’s money.

Jeebus Simms!

Innovation equals risk taking!

‘Coz, you know, you dunno whether this new thing you’re doing is going to work or not.

Here.

And seeing as it’s friday, that afternoon when we’re all looking for something to do to while away the hours until the pub, why not actually go and tell them what you think the Good Society is?

My glimpse of the good society:

That I can walk down near any street in the country and get a decent cup of coffee from a myriad of willing suppliers. All of them competing as best they can to please me in the hope of thereby making a profit.

And what the good society means to me:

One that remembers that Smith was right: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”

This could be a fun game couldn’t it? So, Tweet this around, blog it, direct people to it.

And do let us know here what you tell them.

Growing a Better Future.

Fails on two levels.

The first will seem a little technical but it’s summed up here:

It should be emphasized that the model does not capture potential increases in
agricultural productivity that are likely to result from increased research and
development efforts incentivized by the price increases for agricultural output.

That’s from the supporting report which gives us their estimates of the price rises to come. So everything they’re saying about said future prices rises ignores everything we know people will do about such future price rises.

Yes Virginia, people really do change their behaviour in the face of changing prices.

Then, when they get to looking at the impact of climate change on crop yields, we get this:

The low-productivity scenario presented here depicts a world with rapid
temperature change, high sensitivity of crops to warming, and a CO2 fertilization
effect at the lower end of published estimates.

So we’ve the worst case in terms of temperature change, the worst case in terms of crop sensitivityand the worst case in terms of the effects of CO2 itself on crop growth.

This is known as stacking the deck in favour of your (alarmist) case. A useful thing to have done would be to have played a little with these assumptions. What about taking the mid range of each of the predicted possibilities? Or mixing and matching?

Now, no, I don’t know, this isn’t an area I’m really up with (perhaps one or more of you are?) but from the dim recesses of memory aren’t some people saying that the extra CO2 effect is likely to boost crop yields substantially?

Is it possible that by not taking the worst of every factor, but say, as seems more reasonable, the mid levels, that prices might not even rise at all?

As I say, I don’t know, but I’d certainly have more trust in a report that actually looked at these points rather than just presented the results of the worst.

Still on the technical points, in the main report we get something that I’m sure most will miss. From this subsidiary one we can see a bit of it:

With the exception of South Asia, real per capita
food consumption generally expands despite the strong domestic food price
increases, since average real income per capita is projected to rise. However, the
food price increases relative to other commodities means that the share of
income that households spend on food remains higher than it would be in the
absence of these price increases.

They’re not, note not, saying that food per capita is going to be declining. Nor are they even saying that the percentage of household income spent on food is going to rise. They’re not even saying that a shortage of food is what is going to raise food prices. What they are in fact saying is that as people get richer, as diets change, then food prices will rise because people are getting richer and diets will change.

This is much less a report about the iniquities of the international food system and the perils of climate change than it is a report about what happens to food prices as we abolish absolute poverty and destitution.

You know, a good problem to have, not a bad one.

And now on to the second problem, the conceptual one.

There are good things in the report, yes. Absolutely biofuels are an idiocy we should stop yesterday. Bomb the idiots in Brussels to get that one sorted. Yes, clearly, rich world agricultural subsidies should have stopped last week at the latest. Hang the corpses of those we’ve just bombed on that one. For both are bastard children of the European Union.

But then we come to their analysis of the food system itself. They appear to have cobbled together every trendy left wing nonsense without quite understanding how they interact.

Just as a minor detail they seem to think that Bunge, Cargill and ADM control 90% of food commodity trade. That’ll surprise the likes of Louis Dreyfus (claims to be world’s leading rice trader) and Glencore: so there’s a bit of detail lacking in the research.

But more importantly, they claim to want the following:

1) More food stocks to be held against emergencies.

2) Better transport systems for food crops.

3) Better access to modern farming inputs in poor areas and countries.

4) Better protection agains price volatility for farmers.

OK, these are all good things to want. But then they say that there should be a financial transactions tax to pay for governments to do all of these things.

What?

It’s the commodity traders, the commodity markets, which provide 1 through 4. It’s the traders like Bunge, Cargill, ADM (and Glencore and Louis Dreyfus etc) who actually hold food stocks. It’s exactly that system of commodity markets, traders, that supports the whole set of grain elevators, transport systems and the like which enable rich world farmers to get their crops to market. It is exactly and precisely the system of pre-selling a crop to such traders that allows the purchase of the inputs, such as fertiliser, better seed and so on. In fact, when you go around areas like Brazil’s Cerrado, it’s exactly those commodity traders who are supplying the fertiliser etc to the farmers. For they know that it increases yields and thus gives them more to sell in 6 month’s time.

And finally, it’s the entire system of speculative froth (yes, all those people playing in offices with money) in the futures and derivatives markets which reduces price volatility for the farmers. Indeed, it’s that which removes the price risks from the farmers altogether, from the consumers as well, and places risk squarely where it can best be bourne, with the speculators.

And a financial transactions tax will kill that system stone dead. Recall what happened in the Swedish example. An FTT imposed, the bond futures market declines in volume by 93% and the options market diappears altogether.

So in terms of what we do about what they diagnose as the problem, they’ve decided that in order to reduce price volatility, gain better transport, gain better access to inputs, hold stocks against emergencies, they’re going to destroy the system which does all of those things in order to pay for doing it.

To repeat. The policy prescription from this report is that we should kill the system that already gives us the things we claim to want.

They’re cretins at this point.

And finally finally, there’s a moral error at the heart of their reasoning.

They consider, then explicitly reject, the large farm method for Africa. They plump instead for “smallholders”. They talk about efficiency, of course, but miss the most important part of that. Yes, productivity of land is important, so too is productivity of inputs. But the most important part of productivity, the one that actually determines life as it is lived, is productivity of labour. And they go for that “smallholder”, meaning “peasant” form of farming. The one where while, in places and at times, the productivity of land and inputs can indeed be high, the productivity of labour is by definition low.

For that’s exactly what this type of farming does, substitutes labour for those other inputs, land, fertiliser, tractors and so on. And what does low productivity of labour mean? Yup, that’s right, low wages for those providing the labour.

And that’s appalling. Morally detestable. For the real problem with peasant farming is that it means that the farmers have to live as peasants. With the income of peasants.

None of us pinkish people in Europe are willing to go back to being peasants so quite why Oxfam thinks 500 million black Africans will be happy to remain peasants I’m not sure. Other than vague accusations of racism, that the grinning picanninies are happy to sing while scraping the fields with a stick: something we happily gave up centuries ago, I can’t actually think of a coherent explanation.

But in the end, that is the real problem I have with this report. Oxfam are trying to design a system whereby 500 million Africans get to be peasants for evermore.

Tell me, how did they ever get described as “progressive”?

So, what should that radical reform be?

The truth is, we won’t get a banking system that is socially and economically useful until we harness public anger at what banks have done – and continue to do – with a determined political class that asks banks what measures they are putting in place to avert another catastrophe. This determined (and as yet mythical) political class should also tell the banking sector that its job first and foremost is to be a public utility. One which looks to long-term investment, which nurtures its customers and its local economic bases and does this through offering a real choice of banking (another reason Northern Rock should be kept either as a mutual or as a publicly owned bank with clear objectives, including support for our ailing local economies) and which is far more transparent about what it does with our money.

Umm, that’s it? We really ought to do something?

So, what was the financial markets training of the one who brings us this pearl of wisdom?

Lindsay Mackie is a consultant for the New Economics Foundation. She is on the board of English PEN and chairs its Readers and Writers Programme.

OK, so it’s a numptie from the nef.