British Politics Guide

[Linguoboy]

96 people died in the construction of the Hoover Dam. The death toll during construction of the Big Dig was one.

[Raphael]

First, the effects of deregulation take time to appear. While Reaganomics and Thatcherism has been going on for nearly four decades now, their impact (impoverishment of a section of the population) took a full generation to appear in the radars.

I haven't lived in Thatcher-era Britain, but from all I've heard about the time and place, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people back then and there noticed the impoverishment of parts of the population., and it was talked about a lot.

[Raphael]

(speaking of Britannia Unchained) I've never understood how deregulation advocates can exist outside the United States. All they need to do is look at the arch-deregulators across the Atlantic to see that it isn't a good idea. It's as if they're watching someone die slowly of lung cancer, and advocating everybody smoke more cigarettes. Surely the failure of the United States should demonstrate to the world the weakness of laissez faire economics.

Well, a lot of people here - a minority of the total population, but probably still a lot in absolute numbers - are big fanboys and fangirls of the USA, or more accurately, their fantasy version of the USA, which is even more cartoonishly right-wing than the real thing. I don't agree with that lot on much, but I'll grant them that their position requires more willingness to go against the grain than the left-wing position if you live on this side of the ocean.

And, if you don't care about individual lives, but about abstract economic indicators, there's still the fact that the USA has the biggest economy in the world, and one of the highest GDP-per-capita numbers.

And then there's the mathematically illiterate people who say, basically, "Look how rich tax havens can get! Our country should be a tax haven, too!"

[dhok]

96 people died in the construction of the Hoover Dam. The death toll during construction of the Big Dig was one.

Sure. But like I said, there's a very easy way to bring the death toll of construction to zero: just don't build anything.

Or, put another way, there's an obvious and well-intentioned reluctance to compare human lives to monetary sums. But the Big Dig cost $24.3B, as compared to the Hoover Dam's (inflation-adjusted) $670M. In other words, if we compare them directly--and I think we can do this to within an order of magnitude or so--we spent $248M on the Big Dig for every live saved. That seems excessive! Hoover Dam's payroll peaked at 5,251 men in 1934; some probably left and were replaced, so let's round this up to a work force of 6,000, which is probably low. 96/6000 is a 1.6% chance of death.

Would you play a lottery in which you (or your family, in the event of your death) receive 248 million dollars--or 24.8 million, because, as I said, up to an order of magnitude--in exchange for a 1.6% chance of dying? I would. I think almost everybody would. And it can't be that human life is so precious that we'll do anything to save it, because we do still choose, as a society, to engage in construction. But in the name of chasing after an increasingly small risk that was already pretty low, we're spending sums of money that are frankly astronomical. And that's before you even count in the extra society-wide utility of all that infrastructure and development that doesn't exist because it's too expensive!

Or, another analogy: car crashes kill over 30,000 people a year in the US. Suppose you found that the US could go carless, eliminating the risk of car crashes, at a personal cost to you of $10,000 a year. Would you take it? (If you think this is excessive, experts reckon US GDP/capita is half of what it would be if we didn't have zoning laws.)

[Raphael]

(If you think this is excessive, experts reckon US GDP/capita is half of what it would be if we didn't have zoning laws.)

I don't see why I should trust that particular brand of experts any farther than I can throw them.

[dhok]

Even if you don't care about GDP per se, consider the family that pays $3000 a month (36K yearly) in rent in the Bay Area that would be paying, oh, a third of that in the absence of Euclid v. Ambler. That's $24K a year right into their pocket--and more than that, given the lower cost of goods and services--that vanishes into thin air merely due to regulatory capture by homeowners lucky enough to buy in 1973. We're not even talking about the inability to build a slaughterhouse or an industrial cement factory in the neighborhood; we're talking about the inability to build six-story walkups and subway stations.

[Moose-tache]

OK, if we can get those goal posts to stand still for one second. Let's leave aside the obvious fact that we are still building skyscrapers all the time, and we stopped building dams when we ran out of rivers, not when the nanny state made us stop. And let's leave aside the anti-regulation body's claim that half our GDP has been lost to zoning (wouldn't that make Houston twice as rich as any other city? Whatever; we're leaving it). Let's only kick in the general direction of where the goal has most recently been placed and talk about rent control. Placing restrictions on developers for the benefit of poor people seemed like a great idea at one time, and has since proved to be either a mixed bag or (in some cases) not really a good idea at all. That's a really good reason to not have rent control. But is it a good argument against all regulation, as if it were a viscuous substance that you could spread over an economy like cream cheese? Jerry Davis as Democratic mayor of Oakland opposed certain regulations on developers because it would discourage new construction. Later as equally Democratic governor of California he supported all kinds of housing regulations, at one point signing 15 housing-related bills on a Friday morning. Did he take leave of his senses? Or did he just have a better stack of regulations in front of him that time? Time will tell, since some of those bills are very recent. But we can learn by studying the differences between different regulatory approaches, in a way that we cannot if we separate the world into two homogeneous columns Regulation and Not Regulation.

[dhok]

I'm not arguing against all regulation or even a majority of regulation. I do think certain sectors of the economy, particularly housing (but also transport and education, and perhaps healthcare in some instances) are mostly on the downward slope of some local maximum of regulatory efficiency, and that some intuitive sense of this is informing most good-faith devotees of deregulation.

Basically, where rent-seeking interests like homeowners or well-heeled contractors can get their paws on the regulatory code, the result is very likely to be worse (once you get beyond the really obvious regulations like "don't put lead in children's toys") than if you didn't have anything at all. The low-hanging fruit is mostly picked--and the stuff that isn't picked tends not to be picked because somebody has an interest in it not being picked. But all regulations put some sort of compliance cost on the people and businesses they apply to. With the low-hanging fruit the costs are small, and the social gains extremely large; with zoning requirements and the like you're more looking at very large compliance costs for relatively small or even negative social gains (but often somebody's private gain).

(Also, note that Houston does have zoning-like ordinances like minimum parking requirements. There are really two variables in this equation: you need a reasonable regulatory touch, but you also need competent, impartial and flexible governance--which the post-Gingrich GOP has no interest in, at least on the national level. And you nearly always need a government that can competently, efficiently and cheaply build the required supporting infrastructure--if you have a bad regulatory code, you can just end up self-crippling state capacity. Cf. New York City's recent debacles trying to refurbish subways and build new ones.)

Note also that sometimes you can achieve a result similar to regulation without handing down a decree, and we should move towards this where we can. Good tax policy and the use of insurance mandates are particularly powerful tools; naturally, the first is rarely talked about on the national level (except for the secondary question of rates), and the latter is almost never talked about except as it pertained to the ACA.

Probably the use of insurance mandates is preferable to regulation where you risk spending enormous sums of money trying to drive down increasingly tiny risks, as in construction above, or where political pressure is especially likely to misalign the regulator's incentives. Insurance companies are cold and lack the human touch, but they're much harder to hijack, compared to regulatory codes, if the mandate is set up correctly. For example, the US has an approaching problem with municipal and corporate pension-fund default. Why? In part, because companies, unions and other parties responsible for pensions were in many cases successfully able to lobby government watchdogs to relax investment rules for their funds. Instead, they could have been allowed to invest in anything they wanted, but with a requirement to get the value of the fund insured (admittedly probably more workable with corporate funds than with state ones, which tend to be gigantic). No insurance company will allow itself to go out of business simply as a concession to a municipal pension fund if it can help it, but plenty of state regulatory commissions have done exactly this.

[Frislander]

NGL it's kinda telling how you respond to a general point asking how deregulation advocates can exist outside the US by only referring to American examples.

[Vijay]

NGL it's kinda telling how you respond to a general point asking how deregulation advocates can exist outside the US by only referring to American examples.

Welcome to Murka!

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

First, the effects of deregulation take time to appear. While Reaganomics and Thatcherism has been going on for nearly four decades now, their impact (impoverishment of a section of the population) took a full generation to appear in the radars.

I haven't lived in Thatcher-era Britain, but from all I've heard about the time and place, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people back then and there noticed the impoverishment of parts of the population., and it was talked about a lot.

Was the general population that aware of it? While any deregulation and austerity policy will affect those already in a dire situation, those more well off are not automatically affected.

In a democracy, the largest plurality is the most important group to consider. That plurality is the classic and infamous "middle class", and it took a generation for them (of revenue devaluation through real estate speculation and lack of wealth transfer) to get affected.

And you can't beat current (just reelected) Canadian PM Trudeau with his new hilariously sad ministry position : Middle Class Prosperity. For real, when I heard it I felt I had not enough hands and faces to make enough facepalms of disapproval... But it shows where we are now.

[MacAnDàil]

In Scotland at least Thatcher was certainly a bugbear, and they lost much support. Tories had only recently (2017) recovered in Scotland under Ruth Davidson, now replace by Jackson Carlaw.

Part of the reason middle classes got to be so numerous, in contrast to previous centuries, was thanks to socialist policies implemented in a democratic context.

[Raphael]

Part of the reason middle classes got to be so numerous, in contrast to previous centuries, was thanks to socialist policies implemented in a democratic context.

At any rate, thanks to left-wing socioeconomic policies; whether it makes sense to call these policies "socialist" is a different matter.

[Travis B.]

Social democratic is almost certainly a better description of such policies than socialist, if one considers the key feature of socialism the collective ownership and management, in some fashion, of the means of production.

[Raphael]

Completely agree.

[chris_notts]

Part of the reason middle classes got to be so numerous, in contrast to previous centuries, was thanks to socialist policies implemented in a democratic context.

At any rate, thanks to left-wing socioeconomic policies; whether it makes sense to call these policies "socialist" is a different matter.

The other reason was that in the mid-20th century the pie was growing so quickly that everyone could have a bigger slice. Now that the economy has slowed a lot, the growth of the rich is increasingly parasitic on the rest of us, generally via exploitative financialisation of everything. The direction we're heading, debt serfdom awaits a lot of working and lower middle class people just to get the essentials of life.

And the reason this isn't clear is because of smoke and mirrors: inflation is low because luxury items like electronic goods keep getting cheaper, but at the same time essentials like food and housing regularly go up much faster. Officially we're at record low unemployment, but there are a lot of games played to exclude the unemployable by ignoring those in low value "training" and counting those on zero hours contracts with no income security or the self-employed out of desperation.

The economy on paper looks good, but the reality is that it doesn't work for normal people, and that's why everyone is pissed off.

[chris_notts]

According to the Guardian, there's hope of a consolation prize or two even if the Conservatives get their expected majority:

Chingford and Wood Green has been a safe Tory seat since it was created in 1997, and was once held by Iain Duncan Smith. But with demographic changes and other local factors the comfortable advantage they had has changed. Current results now show a two-point lead for the Conservatives (47% versus Labour’s 45%).

In 2017, Dominic Raab won Esher and Walton with a majority of over 23,000. This constituency also voted Remain at the 2016 EU Referendum. The model shows that tactical voting is producing a shift towards the Lib Dems, with the party now on 44% and closing the gap on the Conservatives (46%).

Getting rid of Raab and IDS would cheer me up a bit even in the face of five more years of Boris. Of the two, IDS has probably done the most damage, being possibly second only to Failing Grayling in destroying previously functional bits of the state, but Raab is the most obnoxious. And to be fair to Raab, the only reason he hasn't done more damage personally is that his previous "job" was to keep a seat warm while the PM and civil servants did the actual work of negotiating Brexit.

[MacAnDàil]

Yeah, that would be a silver lining, like I mentioned about Johnson losing his seat. The Tory victory is not so clear though: tactical voting seems to be alive as are new registrations and polls generally underestimated Labour in the last election: the Tories had an average of a 6-point lead in the polls that included the 7 June (the day before the election) and got a 2.5 lead in the actual election. Right now, they are at the same 6-point lead without any polls having yet been published concerning today or yesterday. So I think the main difference between this election and the last one in terms of seats will be more SNP and Lib Dems, with one or two SDLP or Alliance in Northern Ireland. But of course it all depends people getting out there and voting.

[chris_notts]

The Tory victory is not so clear though: tactical voting seems to be alive as are new registrations and polls generally underestimated Labour in the last election: the Tories had an average of a 6-point lead in the polls that included the 7 June (the day before the election) and got a 2.5 lead in the actual election.

We'll see what happens, but I'm not feeling amazingly optimistic myself. I think this time might go a bit worse for Labour than last time, but I'd like to be surprised. It all really hinges on how many Lib Dems are willing to vote tactically in seats where the LD candidate doesn't stand a chance. They're polling at about 12% so I think we need somewhere around 1/6 - 1/4 of remaining Lib Dem voters to tactically switch to be in firm hung parliament territory.

[chris_notts]

Another wildcard: Turnout seems to have been unexpectedly high, with queuing at a number of polling stations. I asked when I went to vote and there was queuing in the morning there as well. Who it'll favour is hard to guess, although I'm crossing my fingers for it to hurt the Conservatives since many of the Labour leave voters they've been chasing are unreliable voters.