tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89936159713335371732024-03-13T15:11:18.120+00:00plumbumThis blog is for anything I'm thinking about that might be worth sharing. If you like something here, please let me know. You can email me on pb204@virginmedia.com, replacing "pb" with the full Latin word.PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.comBlogger189125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-7623194783450258232016-01-21T03:47:00.000+00:002016-02-07T19:59:07.698+00:00Brobdingnagian Bagman<blockquote>
I prefer land to niggers...the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism...one should kill as many niggers as possible.</blockquote>
Thus a <a href="https://www.change.org/p/oriel-college-oxford-university-oriel-college-oxford-university-remove-the-cecil-rhodes-statue">petition</a> calling for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College, quoting Rhodes' words against him.<br />
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Or so it says. But I'm going to try to trace the source, or sources...<br />
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The first five words are quoted twice in Felix Gross's 1956 <a href="https://archive.org/stream/rhodesofafricafe002472mbp/rhodesofafricafe002472mbp_djvu.txt">biography</a> of Rhodes. The second time he gives a source: Rhodes is supposed to have made the remark to his then friend Olive Schreiner at the dinner table. It's not clear how Gross would have known that. Schriener herself puts the words in the mouth of her fictional character <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1431/1431-h/1431-h.htm">Trooper Peter Halket</a> (whom Gross refers to, and quotes, at the beginning of his book):<br />
<blockquote>
...but Cecil Rhodes, he'll keep their noses to the grindstone.' 'I prefer land to niggers,' he says. They say he's going to parcel them out, and make them work on our lands whether they like it or not. </blockquote>
The middle passage comes from a <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/glen-grey-act-native-issue-cecil-john-rhodes-july-30-1894-cape-house-parliament">speech</a> given by Rhodes, as Prime Minister, in the Cape parliament in 1894:<br />
<blockquote>
Now, I say the natives are children. They are just emerging from barbarism. They have human minds, and I would like them to devote themselves wholly to the local matters that surround them and appeal to them...
</blockquote>
The last eight words I can find only in various forms of the same synthetic quotation. The earliest of them seems to Adekeye Adebajo's <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2006-07-26-a-most-unsavoury-rehabilitation">Opinion piece</a> attacking Rhodes in 2006: there the three parts are separate quotations. When the same writer <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/saturday-star/mandela-and-rhodes-africas-saint-and-sinner-1.1106121">recycled</a> his work in 2011 it was a single quotation, with ellipses. By <a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/201504031372.html">2015</a> the second ellipsis had been replaced with '[and]'. This is not the work of a scrupulous scholar.<br />
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But I may have traced the original in Gordon Le Sueur's account in <a href="https://archive.org/stream/cecilrhodesmanhi00lesurich/cecilrhodesmanhi00lesurich_djvu.txt">his biography</a> of Rhodes:<br />
<blockquote>
...we saw the officer in charge of police, and he said that
a patrol was going out that very day to attack the
kraal on the kopje under which we had spent the
night. He spoke of a fight they had had a short
time before, and on Rhodes asking how many were
killed he replied, 'Very few, as the natives threw
down their arms, went on their knees, and begged
for mercy." "Well," said Rhodes, "you should
not spare them. You should kill all you can, as it
serves as a lesson to them when they talk things
over at their fires at night. They count up the
killed, and say So-and-so is dead and So-and-so is
no longer here, and they begin to fear you."</blockquote>
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Having found all this, I had the right search terms to discover that I <a href="https://mustrhodesfall.wordpress.com/">wasn't the first</a>. Madeleine Briggs points out that Adebajo assembled the three (mis)quotations from <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VbD_mokWhL8C&pg=PT25&lpg=PT25&dq=one+must+kill+as+many+niggers+as+possible+rhodes&source=bl&ots=w6cVB7HaTj&sig=kgHFqVp2myeHet_aFxvAQW4DJec&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-2-7c7bnKAhVH1hQKHYNxCrAQ6AEIRDAG#v=onepage&q=one%20must%20kill%20as%20many%20niggers%20as%20possible%20rhodes&f=false">Paul Maylam's biography</a>. Briggs reports that Schreiner apparently got her quotation from another of Rhodes' speeches in Cape House, misremembered by her.<br />
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None of this vindicates Rhodes. Schreiner fell out with Rhodes over his support for the "Strop Bill" which would have imposed a sentence of flogging on any native servant convicted of even a minor dereliction of duty: the Bill proved <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/23836458">too illiberal</a> for some Boers and did not pass:<br />
<blockquote class="">
Mr <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Hofmeyr_(Onze_Jan)">Hofmeyr</a>, leader of the Bond, opposed it with the remark that he was not going to vote for a bill which made the lashing of his old coloured servant woman compulsory if she should be convicted of bringing him his coffee half an hour late.</blockquote>
Rhodes' speech in 1894, horribly patronising but apparently benevolent, was in support of the Glen Grey Act, which replaced communal land ownership with smallholdings for a small number of natives, displacing the rest. The individual titles were small enough so that they failed to meet the property requirement of Rhodes' <i>Franchise and Ballot Act</i>, and land accumulation was prohibited. It was a progenitor of apartheid. <br />
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What then of the statue? I'd keep it. We should remember the past, and we should remember that we put up statues in celebration of it. But that's easy for me to say: if the members of Oriel want it gone, so be it.<br />
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(h/t <a href="http://www.timworstall.com/2016/01/15/is-think-progress-even-worse-than-salon/">Tim Worstall</a>) <br />
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<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-71239128880789701272016-01-13T02:39:00.000+00:002016-01-13T02:39:02.173+00:00Up for the cupLast weekend's third-round FA cup matches brought with them a seasonal outbreak of pundits complaining that Premier League clubs weren't taking the competition seriously enough, and proposing impractical or foolish ways to change that.<br />
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The reason why the Premier League clubs are not that interested is simple: it's the money. The reward for finishing in the top four places (out of 20) in the Premier League is entry to the <a href="http://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/season=2016/finance/index.html">Champions League</a>, where a team now receives €12m simply for playing in the group stage, and English teams roughly double that from their share of the 'Market Pool'. The penalty for finishing in the bottom three places is relegation from the Premier League, with a massive reduction in revenues for at least one year - the bottom club last year was paid £64.9m for its efforts, gate money aside: this year the same team, now playing in the Championship, will get a £24m '<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jun/02/parachute-payments-clubs-relegated-premier-league">parachute payment</a>' instead.<br />
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Even for a mid-table team, Premier League results are worth a lot of money. Last year, there was a '<a href="http://www.premierleague.com/en-gb/news/news/2015-16/jun/020615-premier-league-payments-to-clubs-in-season-2014-15.html">Merit Payment</a>' of £1,244,898 per place. The difference between 5th and 17th place in the final table has averaged 28 points over the last ten years — 2.33 points per place. That makes a Premier League win, worth 3 points, carry an expected financial reward of £1.6m .<br />
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Compare that with FA cup prize money. The reward for winning a third-round match is £67,500. The total payment for winning the cup — six matches — is £1,777,500 . It makes no financial sense for a Premier League team to tire its best players, and risk injuring them, in pursuit of such relatively small sums.<br />
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If you want Premier League teams to take the competition seriously, you have to pay them for it. A win bonus of £1.6m a match would be the right sort of sum. That's a lot of money: it would cost £100m to pay it to the winner of each of the 63 ties played from the third round onwards (some of the winners would be clubs outside the Premier League, who would surely appreciate the income). But the Premier League's annual television revenues under its <a href="http://www.totalsportek.com/money/premier-league-tv-rights-money-distribution/">latest deals</a> (starting next season) will be £2.8bn per year or so. By redirecting three and a half percent of that it could make the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FA_Cup_finals">FA Cup</a> — the world's oldest football compeition — into something worth watching. How about it? <br />
<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-70664311507421723132015-07-11T03:07:00.001+01:002015-07-11T03:07:53.643+01:00Question TimeI don't watch <i>Question Time</i>, because decades ago when I did I used to find myself shouting at the television. But last night, driving down the A1, I listened to it on the radio (and when at one point I turned it off, my daughter said she was interested in it so I switched it on again). You can watch it <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b061vh6h/question-time-09072015">here</a> (but you ought to have something better to do).<br />
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The panel was Conservative minister Anna Soubry, Labour shadow minister Chuka Umunna, SNP MP Tommy Sheppard, UKIP MEP Louise Bours, and journalist Rachel Johnson, with David Dimbleby as presenter.<br />
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The politicians seem better than I remember at seeming likeable, but the level of debate is no higher. The program started with a discussion of the effects of the "living wage" and tax credit measures in this week's budget. Umunna started by pointing out that Cameron promised, a few months ago on the same programme, not to cut tax credits. Soubry flatly denied it. Of course she was <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/budget-2015-watch-david-cameron-6033885">wrong</a>, and Dimbleby might have said so, since it was he who put the question to Cameron, but either he'd forgotten or he chickened out. None of the panel talked about the effect of the new minimum wage structure on employers and the patterns of employment they will now favour, or the effective marginal tax rate of <a href="http://www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/taxes-tax-credits-and-welfare-spending">78%</a> imposed on some claimants by the sharper taper of tax credits (it's OK to examine these things <a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/07/the-worst-of-left-right.html">from the left</a>).<br />
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Later, Bours and Johnson gave us their analysis of the Greek referendum. The proposed package, Johnson informed us, would be "a bailout for the bankers, again". "You're right, absolutely", Bours confirmed. Well, the 2012 package sorted out the debts to commercial banks, in return for their accepting a write-down of 53.5% of face value, together with reduced coupons and extended maturities. So that was a fraction of a bailout. This time the debts are owed almost entirely to the Eurozone and the IMF, so if a bailout benefits the creditors, those creditors are the people of the contributing countries. A member of the audience wanted to "tax the bankers" to pay for it, and Sheppard suggested specifically a levy on bailed-out banks: he didn't say if he would exempt Greek banks from that. Johnson and Bours agreed that Greece would have no great problems reverting to the Drachma (except, I say, that they'd have nothing to pay for imports with in the months it took for the new currency to find a foreign exchange level). Umanna then observed that "it's not as simple as...bankers against the Greek people" and he and Soubry spoke sensibly but vaguely.<br />
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Then there was a discussion of student grants and loans, the lowlight of which was Bours arguing with a nursing student in the audience about the content of her university course - not what the content should be, but what it is. Bours then repeatedly disparaged a degree in "David Beckham studies" - a <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/694451.stm">horror</a> largely of her own imagining.<br />
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At the end the panel discussed the next leader of the Labour Party, most of them expressing their disappointment that Umunna is no longer standing. Bours put her hand on his shoulder "we couldn't wait to see Chuka sitting in a working men's club drinking a pint of stout".<br />
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Two years ago I wrote a <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/could-they-be-worse.html">post</a> in response to Nigel Farage's question about his party's potential MPs "could we be worse?". Having listened to this programme, and watched the ending, I can add that, criminality and defections aside, the answer is "yes you are".<br />
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<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-64359780203066485872015-06-28T17:11:00.001+01:002015-06-28T17:11:05.496+01:00The end of the lifelineThree years or so ago I <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/greek-people-power.html">wrote</a> <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/latest-greek-bail-out.html">several</a> <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/exodus.html">posts</a> about the financial crises in Greece, in which my view of the bail-out was that "it can't work and it won't work". Well, it couldn't, but I was wrong to think that "this could break down very quickly." In fact, the Eurozone did an outstanding job of kicking the can down the road, keeping Greece afloat for three years without ever coming close to fixing anything.<br />
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The difficulty with this strategy was that the electorate in Greece hated the austerity imposed on it, and the electorates in the rest of Europe hated paying for Greek pensions. The beginning of the end was the election in Greece early this year of the anti-austerity Syriza party, which was committed not to accept the inevitable terms of the next bail-out package. Meanwhile, the rest of the Eurozone had successfully reduced the vulnerability of its banks and debtor nations to a Greek default.<br />
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The recent bail-out negotiations between the Eurozone finance ministers and the Greek government (represented by prime minister Alexis Tsipras and finance minister Yanis Varoufakis) have been a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_%28game%29">game of chicken</a>. Both sides know that a Greek default would be horrible for both of them, but the negotiations have failed because the Eurozone isn't quite scared enough of the consequences of default, and Tsipras is scared enough of the consequences from his party and his electorate of giving in to Eurozone demands. Tsipras has now fallen back on holding a referendum next Sunday to find out if the Greeks want him to give up the policies they elected him on, which would be admirably democratic were it not for the fact that the government needs to pay €1.5bn to the IMF on Tuesday, and apparently it hasn't got it.<br />
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Oh well, not paying the IMF is embarrassing — Greece is richer than most IMF members — and could be treated as a default by the Eurozone (page 33 <a href="http://www.efsf.europa.eu/attachments/efsf_greece_fafa.pdf">here</a>.) But neither the IMF nor the EU need rush to do anything about it. So in practice a Yes vote in the referendum could still result in a bail-out which enables Greece to meet its interest payments.<br />
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But there are more immediate problems. First Robert Peston for the BBC <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33303304">reported</a> that "the European Central Bank's governing council is expected to turn off Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) for Greek banks at its meeting later today", and later the ECB issued a <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2015/html/pr150628.en.html">statement</a>, saying that it would "maintain the ceiling to the provision of emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) to Greek banks at the level decided on Friday (26 June 2015)". Which is a gentle way of saying that it would not increase the ceiling — it would allow no new ELA.<br />
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ELA is necessary because there's a run on the Greek banks, whose depositors reasonably fear that the banks may run out of cash or the government may redenominate deposits into a new, rapidly depreciating currency. Withdrawals take two forms: cash or transfers to banks outside Greece, and both need bank reserves at the Bank of Greece, which the Greek banks haven't got, either to buy banknotes or to fund interbank transfers via the Eurozone's TARGET2 system.<br />
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However, contrary to many reports, ELA is not money supplied to Greece by the ECB. It's provided by the Bank of Greece; all the ECB does is to authorize it. And it doesn't cost the Bank of Greece anything either — the money it lends the banks is just an accounting entry, the banknotes it can print in exchange for owing money to the ECB, and TARGET2 is the same without the printing. The banks borrowing the money have to post collateral for the money they're borrowing, because it's suppose to help banks which are illiquid but not insolvent. I suppose the Greek banks are in fact solvent so long as their <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-28/draghi-s-greek-bank-options-present-bleak-choices-as-ecb-meets">billions</a> of Greek government T-bills are treated as sound (which is absurd, but the ECB hasn't said so up to now).<br />
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So what ELA means in practice is the Bank of Greece incurring increasing 'Eurosystem' debts to the ECB. But Eurosystem debts are not like ordinary debts: there is no requirement for them ever to be settled, and they carry currently a very low interest rate — I haven't found a clear statement from the ECB on interest charges, but <a href="http://www.karlwhelan.com/Papers/T2Paper.pdf">this</a> helpful paper says they pay the <i>Main Refinancing Operation</i> rate <a href="https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/html/index.en.html">currently</a> 0.05%, whereas <a href="https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2014/html/pr140605_3.en.html">this press release</a> says the <i>deposit facility</i> rate, currently -0.2%, is applicable to TARGET2 balances (presumably only if positive), and <a href="http://snbchf.com/2014/06/negative-rates-bundesbank/">this report</a> quotes an ECB spokesman denying that. (Frances Coppola <a href="http://coppolacomment.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/oh-dear-professor-sinn.html">says</a> the balance isn't even a debt: I don't quite agree, but the difference between her view and mine seems not very important in practice.)<br />
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I wonder what would happen if Greece chose simply to continue with ELA, without the ECB's permission. That would be a gross breach of <a href="https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/elaprocedures.en.pdf">the rules</a>, but when you're about to default, you might live with that. What would the ECB do? I suppose it would suspect Greek access to TARGET2, but it's not clear to me what it could do beyond that, other than promise future non-cooperation.<br />
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If it's not willing to defy the ECB, Greece can keep its banks afloat only by redenominating their liabilities into a new currency - Grexit. I suppose the government won't take that step before the referendum, so there would have to be severe limits on withdrawals and transfers, or simply bank closures, for the next week.<br />
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The other problem is that the Greek government has salaries and pensions to pay. Varoufakis <a href="http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/05/19/greek-finmin-varoufakis-wages-and-pensions-a-priority-hopeful-for-imf-payments/">said</a> a month ago that he'd rather pay the pensioners than the IMF, and my guess is that they've got the money somewhere for this month. If I'm wrong, they're faced with the same two choices: raise money by selling the banks T-bills paid for with money created and loaned by the Bank of Greece, all in defiance of the ECB, or pay the pensions in a new currency.<br />
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The Euro has been a remarkable experiment - a currency shared by dissimilar countries with independent governments, and run by independent national banks. I confess to being intrigued by the way in which it's in part unravelling. If only there weren't more at stake than entertaining bloggers...<br />
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<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-15989274943536971072015-01-06T22:13:00.000+00:002015-01-06T23:51:10.478+00:00Two-thirds of cancers - collected linksNews sites getting the meaning of "two thirds of cases" wrong: <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/cancer-causes-bad-luck--not-lifestyle-or-genes--to-blame-9953337.html">Independent</a> ,<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11320497/Most-cancers-are-caused-by-bad-luck-not-genes-or-lifestyle-say-scientists.html">Telegraph,</a> <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-2893675/Biological-bad-luck-blamed-two-thirds-cancer-cases.html">Mail,</a> <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/549764/Study-reveals-cancer-down-to-just-sheer-bad-luck">Express</a>, <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/cancer-caused-bad-luck-more-4902258">Mirror</a>, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/02/biological-bad-luck-cancer_n_6404184.html">Huffington Post</a><br />
News site getting it wrong in the headline but right in the text without one having to scroll down: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/01/health-cancer-luck-idUSL1N0UE0VF20150101">Reuters</a>.<br />
News sites getting it right: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30641833">BBC</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/01/two-thirds-cancer-cases-caused-bad-luck-lifestyle-genes">Guardian</a>.<br />
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The <a href="http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/bad_luck_of_random_mutations_plays_predominant_role_in_cancer_study_shows">press release</a>.<br />
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The <i>Science</i> <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6217/78.abstract">abstract</a>, with paywalled link to the paper<br />
Free <a href="http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/02_january_2015?folio=78#pg106">preview</a> of the paper<br />
<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/12/31/347.6217.78.DC1/Tomasetti_SM.pdf">Supplement</a> on the data and methodology<br />
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Long critical review of the paper and its reporting: <a href="http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-cancer-due-mostly-to-bad-luck/">David Gorski </a><br />
Discussion of the reporting: <a href="http://www.riskscience.umich.edu/bad-luck-cancer-media-get-wrong/">Andrew Maynard</a>, <a href="http://www.sciencepresse.qc.ca/actualite/2015/01/06/cancer-malchance-medias">Science-Presse</a> (in French)<br />
Criticism of the interpretation of correlation: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2015/jan/02/bad-luck-bad-journalism-and-cancer-rates">Guardian</a>, <a href="http://www.statsguy.co.uk/are-two-thirds-of-cancers-really-due-to-bad-luck/">statsguy</a>, <a href="http://www.antoniorinaldi.it/due-su-tre-non-per-sfortuna-ma-per-forzatura">Antonio Rinaldi</a> (in Italian), with his own model, <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/cancer-risk-analysis.html">me</a>, with a toy model <br />
Criticism of the correlation calculation: <a href="http://www.statschat.org.nz/2015/01/03/cancer-isnt-just-bad-luck/">StatsChat</a><br />
Criticism of the clustering methodology: <a href="http://understandinguncertainty.org/luck-and-cancer">Understanding Uncertainty</a> (with discussion of the reporting), <a href="http://ameyer.me/science/2015/01/02/vogel.html">statsguy</a>, <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/science-by-press-release.html">me</a>, with discussion of the methodology generally<br />
Criticism of the message: <a href="http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/01/05/cancer-mainly-bad-luck-an-unfortunate-and-distracting-headline/">Cancer Research UK</a> (with discussion of the reporting and the paper) <br />
Expressing doubts about the accuracy of the data: <a href="http://www.ipscell.com/2015/01/review-of-vogelstein-bad-luck-cancer-stem-cell-paper-in-science/">Paul Knoepfler </a><br />
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A few comments on the paper: <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/01/simple-math-explains-why-you-may-or-may-not-get-cancer">Science </a><br />
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Support for the paper: <a href="http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/cancer-risk-largely-bad-luck/">Steven Novella</a> <br />
Support for the message: <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/01/05/on-the-importance-of-luck/">PZ Myers</a>, expressing disdain for those reluctant to accept the role of random chancePaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-3535714453324179462015-01-05T12:43:00.001+00:002015-01-06T20:32:30.041+00:00Cancer risk - an analysis<br />
My <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/science-by-press-release.html">previous post </a>discussed <a href="http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/02_january_2015?folio=78#pg106">this paper</a>, and its claim that two thirds of cancer types are largely unaffected by environmental or hereditary carcinogenic factors. While I'm unimpressed by the paper, the idea behind it is interesting, so here's my analysis of its data. <br />
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The hypothesis is that "many genomic changes occur simply by chance during DNA replication rather than as a result of carcinogenic factors. Since the endogenous mutation rate of all human cell types appears to be nearly identical, this concept predicts that there should be a strong, quantitative correlation between the lifetime number of divisions among a particular class of cells within each organ (stem cells) and the lifetime risk of cancer arising in that organ."<br />
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So let's suppose that each stem cell division gives rise to cancer with a small probability <i>p</i>. Then if there are <i>n</i> lifetime divisions, the probability that none of them leads to cancer is (1-<i>p</i>)<sup><i>n</i></sup>, so the lifetime risk of cancer, <i>R</i>, is 1 - (1-<i>p</i>)<sup><i>n</i></sup>. We can rearrange that to find an expression for <i>p</i>, ln(1-<i>p</i>) = ln(1-<i>R</i>)/<i>n</i>. For very small <i>p</i>, ln(1-<i>p</i>) = -<i>p</i>, so <i>p</i> = -ln(1-<i>R</i>)/<i>n</i>. If we plot ln(1-<i>R</i>) against <i>n</i> we should expect to find that for all the organs where carcinogenic factors are absent the values fall on the same straight line through the origin.<br />
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However, the values of <i>n</i> range through several orders of magnitude, so we can't create this plot unless we're willing to make all the rare cancers invisibly close to the origin. Instead, let's take logs again, giving log(<i>p</i>) = log(-ln(1-<i>R</i>)) - log(<i>n</i>). So on graph of log(-ln(1-<i>R</i>)) against log(<i>n</i>), all the cancers satisfying our hypothesis should fall on a straight line with slope one crossing the <i>y</i> axis at log(<i>p</i>). (I've switched to base-10 logarithms for this step, to make the powers of ten easier to follow)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-0nQ48ei8WNs9OPBHEpfaW1kt6HZM5TPKDDPelFMFE5F2FGpeqKiCKuwwL4-2mB337ykHefqXuu0LMbAHNNw7ndjihyphenhyphendiOEpH1awQawjJb-Br83rHcrfmVOwQrkoiRaLAe5k8KQD3pEE/s1600/TwoThirdsScatter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-0nQ48ei8WNs9OPBHEpfaW1kt6HZM5TPKDDPelFMFE5F2FGpeqKiCKuwwL4-2mB337ykHefqXuu0LMbAHNNw7ndjihyphenhyphendiOEpH1awQawjJb-Br83rHcrfmVOwQrkoiRaLAe5k8KQD3pEE/s1600/TwoThirdsScatter.jpg" height="207" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
Here's the graph, which looks not unlike the one in the paper. The correlation between the <i>x</i> and <i>y</i> data series is 0.787, again not unlike in the paper. But the slope of a line through the points is not unity, nor is there a subset of points at the bottom of the envelope of points for which the slope is unity.<br />
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(I've arbitrarily given FAP colorectal a cancer risk of one millionth less than one, because the method doesn't allow a risk of exactly one. Its point could be moved vertically by choosing a different number.)<br />
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To explore further how well the data fit the model, I've backed out implied values of <i>p</i> for each cancer type.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq8G-Z7jTKo3UVH_r8J5zYjfN3upgNtFzBydxX-Qdf4ncGiZNh2udSRmdWK2CCAeGdC9ck13kkaJoT7dZw8mhNvEZx5H29OzS0-24dF5h-n4PPcNB5noyxU_kLGo3Ex4PZY1j2nvzOqTk/s1600/TwoThirdsProbs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq8G-Z7jTKo3UVH_r8J5zYjfN3upgNtFzBydxX-Qdf4ncGiZNh2udSRmdWK2CCAeGdC9ck13kkaJoT7dZw8mhNvEZx5H29OzS0-24dF5h-n4PPcNB5noyxU_kLGo3Ex4PZY1j2nvzOqTk/s1600/TwoThirdsProbs.jpg" height="195" width="400" /></a></div>
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Here's the problem. If the data matched the theory, there would be a group of cancer types at the left end of the chart with similar implied probabilities. It seems in particular that the risk of small-intestine adenocarcinoma is anomalously low.<br />
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[A commentator points out that there is a group of cancer types near the left end of the chart which do have similar implied probabilities (the same eight cancers lie roughly in a straight line in the scatter plot). But the theory in the paper is that there's a background rate of cancer in any tissue type, depending only on the number of stem cell divisions, because "the endogenous mutation rate of all human cell types appears to be nearly identical". This theory can't be casually modified to allow for a background rate of cancer in all tissue types except for in the small intestine. (Oncologists are of course aware that small-bowel cancers are <a href="http://www.cancernetwork.com/review-article/overview-adenocarcinoma-small-intestine-1">strangely rare</a>.)]<br />
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Let's try an alternative theory: that for every tissue type, some fraction of stem cell divisions, call it <i>α</i>, are affected by environmental or heriditary influences in a way which gives them a probability, call it <i>q</i>, of causing cancer. <i>q</i> is the same for all tissue types. The remaining divisions carry negligible risk by comparison. Somewhat arbitrarily, we'll assume <i>α</i> is one for the cancer with the highest implied probability in our previous analysis: that is, <i>q</i> is equal to the <i>p</i> implied for Gallbladder non-papillary adenocarcinoma. We can now back out a value of <i>α</i> for each cancer.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6-1ps4jLdwSft0sPxvYNjMkVzN2uya0z7XZh9Y0cvaU7XWvX1axsXtLlq20pggGeKQAi5UiOE3vn85hnk_gz6-uAO8b2MkeB9sQoYZshGLu9DJTSGY0xzQ3aM5Z0IkjBxQ_0iS_og3_4/s1600/TwoThirdsFractions.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6-1ps4jLdwSft0sPxvYNjMkVzN2uya0z7XZh9Y0cvaU7XWvX1axsXtLlq20pggGeKQAi5UiOE3vn85hnk_gz6-uAO8b2MkeB9sQoYZshGLu9DJTSGY0xzQ3aM5Z0IkjBxQ_0iS_og3_4/s1600/TwoThirdsFractions.jpg" height="196" width="400" /></a></div>
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Well, it's a simplistic theory, but it does have the advantage over our previous model that it fits the data.<br />
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It seems to me that picking out gallbladder cancer as high-alpha is a plus for this model, because that cancer has a peculiar geographic spread which can only be due to environmental or hereditary factors.<br />
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And I've been mischievous. In this theory, despite the correlation in the input data between stem cell divisions and cancer risk, every cancer is caused by environmental or hereditary factors.PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-38203304782291245172015-01-03T11:16:00.000+00:002016-02-07T01:19:00.373+00:00Science by press releaseYesterday's <i>Times</i> has a front page story "Two thirds of cancer cases are the result of bad luck rather than poor lifestyle choices...". (<a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article4312062.ece">paywall</a>)<br />
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That doesn't match my preconceptions, so I looked for the story online. The <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/cancer-causes-bad-luck--not-lifestyle-or-genes--to-blame-9953337.html">Independent</a> and the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11320497/Most-cancers-are-caused-by-bad-luck-not-genes-or-lifestyle-say-scientists.html">Telegraph</a> agree. So does the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-2893675/Biological-bad-luck-blamed-two-thirds-cancer-cases.html">Mail</a>. And the <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/549764/Study-reveals-cancer-down-to-just-sheer-bad-luck">Express</a>. And the <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/cancer-caused-bad-luck-more-4902258">Mirror</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/01/health-cancer-luck-idUSL1N0UE0VF20150101">Reuters</a>' headline agrees, but its story suggests something a bit different - that two thirds of an abitrary selection of cancer <i>types </i>occur mainly at random.<br />
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The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30641833">BBC</a> speaks unambiguously of "most cancer types" and so does <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/01/two-thirds-cancer-cases-caused-bad-luck-lifestyle-genes">The Guardian</a>.<br />
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The <a href="http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/bad_luck_of_random_mutations_plays_predominant_role_in_cancer_study_shows">press release</a> which must have given rise to this story features the phrase "two thirds of adult cancer incidence across tissues can be explained primarily by 'bad luck'". I can't make much sense of "cancer incidence across tissues", so I can't blame the journalists for stumbling over it likewise. But the reporters who got the story right must have managed to scan down to the paragraph where the press release explains that the researchers "found that 22 cancer types could be largely explained by the “bad luck” factor of random DNA mutations during cell division. The other nine cancer types had incidences higher than predicted by "bad luck" and were presumably due to a combination of bad luck plus environmental or inherited factors."<br />
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I emphasize that "two thirds of cancer types" is not at all the same as "two thirds of cancer cases". Two rare cancers apparently unrelated to environmental factors will count for far fewer cases than one common cancer in the other category.<br />
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So what of the paper behind the press release? <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6217/78.abstract">Here</a>'s the abstract, with a paywalled link to the whole paper. Or you can 'preview' the paper for free <a href="http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/02_january_2015?folio=78#pg106">here</a>, to the extent your conscience permits. Supplementary data and methodology descriptions are <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/12/31/347.6217.78.DC1/Tomasetti_SM.pdf">here</a>.<br />
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The hypothesis behind the paper is that cancer is to a large extent caused by errors arising during stem cell division, at a rate which is independent of the tissue type involved. The researchers therefore obtain estimates of the lifetime number of stem cell divisions various tissue types, and plot that against lifetime cancer incidence, obtaining a significant-looking scatter plot (Figure 1 in the published paper). So far so good.<br />
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But they've used a log-log plot, necessary to cover the orders of magnitude variations in the data. Now, if you think, as the researchers apparently do, that cancer risk is proportional to number of stem cell divisions, it follows that the slope of a log-log plot should be unity. It isn't, by eye it's more like two thirds. The researchers, busy calculating a linear correlation between the log values seem not to have noticed this surprising result. Instead they square the correlation to get an R<sup>2</sup> of 65%, which may (it's not clear) be the source of the "two-thirds of cancer types" claim.<br />
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If so, that claim is based on a total failure of comprehension of what correlation means. Imagine a hypothetical world in which cancer occurs during stem cell division with some significant probability only if a given environmental factor is present, and that environmental factor is present equally in all tissue types. In this world cancer incidence across tissue types is perfectly correlated with the number of stem cell divisions, but nevertheless all cancer is caused by the environmental factor.<br />
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It's simply impossible to say anything about the importance of environmental factors in a statistical analysis without including those factors as an input to the analysis.<br />
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However, the press release also features the paragraph I quoted about 22 out of 31 cancer types being largely explained by bad luck. Perhaps that's what they mean by two thirds. To get this number, they devised an <i>Extra Risk Score - ERS </i>for short. Then they used AI methods to divide cancer types into two types based on the ERS values. So what's the ERS? The Supplement describes it as "the (negative value of the) area of the rectangle formed in the upper-left quadrant of Fig. 1 by the two coordinates (in logarithmic scale) of a data point as its sides." That is, it's the product of the {base-10 logarithm of stem cell divisions} and the {base-10 logarithm of lifetime cancer risk}. (The cancer risk logarithm is negative (or zero) since lifetime risk is less than (or equal to) one.)<br />
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Shorn of the detail, it's the product of two logarithms. How does that make sense? Multiplying two logarithms is bizarre; for all ordinary purposes you're supposed to add them. For this analyis, a simple measure would seem to be the ratio of lifetime incidence to stem cell divisions, or you might prefer the log of that ratio, which would be the log of the incidence minus the log of the stem cell divisions.<br />
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(On further reflection, the number I'd use would be {log(1-incidence)/divisions}. That doesn't give a defined answer for lifetime incidence of unity, but you can get a number by using an incidence of just less than unity. Among the other cancer types, it picks out gallbladder cancer as having the highest environmental or heriditary risk, which is consistent with that cancer's unusual geographical variation of incidence.)<br />
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The Supplement attempts to justify multiplying the logarithms by explaining why dividing them woudn't make sense. Which is a bit like advocating playing football in ballet shoes because it would be foolish to wear stilettos.<br />
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Whatever ERS calculation you used, the clustering method would still divide the cancers into two groups, because that's what clustering methods do, but different calculations would put different cancer types in the high-ERS group. If you want, as the senior author does, to draw conclusions from composition of the high-ERS cluster, you need a sound justification for your ERS calculation.<br />
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To its credit, The Guardian has published a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2015/jan/02/bad-luck-bad-journalism-and-cancer-rates">piece</a> pointing out the correlation misunderstanding. <a href="http://ameyer.me/science/2015/01/02/vogel.html">This</a> piece is also highly unimpressed by the paper, and <a href="http://www.ipscell.com/tag/variation-in-cancer-risk-among-tissues-can-be-explained-by-the-number-of-stem-cell-divisions/">this</a> review of it has mixed feelings.<br />
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Me, I suppose the underlying idea has some truth in it. But the methodology is the worst I've ever seen in a prominently published paper.<br />
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Update: more commentary from <a href="http://understandinguncertainty.org/luck-and-cancer">Understanding Uncertainty</a> and <a href="http://www.statsguy.co.uk/are-two-thirds-of-cancers-really-due-to-bad-luck/">StatsGuy </a><br />
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Update: Bradley J Fikes, author of <a href="http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/jan/01/cancer-luck-vogelstein-tomasetti-hopkins/">this piece</a> in the <i>San Diego Union-Tribute</i>, complains in comments <a href="http://www.ipscell.com/2015/01/review-of-vogelstein-bad-luck-cancer-stem-cell-paper-in-science/#comment-30530">here</a> that the title of this post is ill-chosen. He points out that he didn't write his story simply from the press release, but checked it with John Hopkins before it was published. He's got a point about the title: more than half of what I say here is criticism of the paper not of the press release.<br />
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<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-61456161327982307562014-10-08T13:44:00.000+01:002014-10-08T13:44:04.674+01:00Income Tax Chart 2014-15This is an update to the charts I <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/uk-income-tax-chart.html">posted</a> three years ago.<br />
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Tax:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxaI4F38Rt2XiUqgWoScNdgzxKsuyTL3bQa9z8qlEp4d5iwt1KrkOImSAumzCXs0k1ULKv-6IHzorf_wIkjA7-LDVZ06BaNsELojcQCkXy0wYXzk1cNsOHRizT_nakIEWenE_krs_IBR8/s1600/Tax14-15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxaI4F38Rt2XiUqgWoScNdgzxKsuyTL3bQa9z8qlEp4d5iwt1KrkOImSAumzCXs0k1ULKv-6IHzorf_wIkjA7-LDVZ06BaNsELojcQCkXy0wYXzk1cNsOHRizT_nakIEWenE_krs_IBR8/s1600/Tax14-15.jpg" height="240" width="400" /></a></div>
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Tax + Employee's National Insurance:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpcDscKveuUVFb833miFYiaeKIeErSvsC5k2OnIpPUv1r9SL0ot0UNIdRhR54wgb5g5aVainxQABTWEcW7wqWgmxZkJpIhpLbBah7pHS21KxRbnioFpMICIc0_3C-lWKC9dJVLvWKOLFg/s1600/Tax+NI14-15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpcDscKveuUVFb833miFYiaeKIeErSvsC5k2OnIpPUv1r9SL0ot0UNIdRhR54wgb5g5aVainxQABTWEcW7wqWgmxZkJpIhpLbBah7pHS21KxRbnioFpMICIc0_3C-lWKC9dJVLvWKOLFg/s1600/Tax+NI14-15.jpg" height="240" width="400" /></a></div>
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The changes from three years ago are:<br />
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- The personal allowance has increased significantly, to £10,000. This has the side-effect of increasing the width of the trap at an income of £100,000, where the personal allowance rolls off. All the other income tax thresholds are unchanged (in cash terms) except that the 40% rate now starts a few hundred pounds earlier.<br />
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- The top ('additional') income tax rate has been reduced from 50% to 45%.<br />
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- The minimum income for NI contributions has not increased in line with the personal allowance, creating a kink at the left hand side of the Tax+NI chart.<br />
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I'll repeat what I wrote last time: In a rational world, we would abandon the artificial distinction between Income Tax and National Insurance. We would determine an appropriate shape for the marginal tax curve - preferably piecewise linear and non-decreasing. And we would apply a multiplier to that curve to raise what revenue the government deemed appropriate.PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-72199398140338395912014-10-06T21:40:00.000+01:002016-01-24T18:05:20.281+00:00Dies MaliEconomics is widely called "The Dismal Science", not least by its practitioners. The term seems to apply naturally to a field which treats avarice as the key motivator in human affairs, contrary to our sense of our own personal high-mindedness. <br />
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I've been aware that the phrase originated with Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century writer best known for his history of the French Revolution - he memorably and unflatteringly described Robespierre, known to his contemporaries as <i>l'Incorruptible</i>, and remembered today for his enthusiasm for political executions, as "the sea-green incorruptible". But recently I learnt from <a href="http://www.krannert.purdue.edu/faculty/smartin/ioep/dismal.pdf">Robert Dixon</a>, via <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/why-economics-is-really-called-the-dismal-science/282454/">Derek Thompson</a> and <a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2014/09/false-democracy.html">Chris Dillow</a>, the context in which Carlyle came up with the phrase. He introduced it, in contrast to the 'gay science'* of poetry, in his 1849 essay <i>Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question </i>(original <a href="http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000080778727;view=1up;seq=690">here</a>, more readably <a href="http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/carlyle/occasion.htm">here</a>, historical background <a href="http://cruel.org/econthought/texts/carlyle/negroquest.html">here</a>)<i>.</i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...the social science - not a 'gay science,' but a rueful - which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply-and-demand,' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a "gay science," I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the <i>dismal science</i>.</blockquote>
Carlyle's subject matter was not economics but the use of slave labour on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, which had been <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833">banned</a> in 1833. He was being intentionally provocative - the essay was originally published anonymously, purported transcribed in an elaborate fiction by a Dr Phelim M'Quirk, and evoked a vigorous riposte, <i>The Negro Question</i>, from John Stuart Mill (original <a href="http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044092641992;view=1up;seq=33">here</a>, more readably <a href="http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/mill/negro.htm">here</a>). (None of this old-fashioned debate is ancient history: Mill lived long enough to be briefly godfather to Bertrand Russell, who was the grandson of the Lord John Russell, then prime minister, upbraided by Carlyle in his essay.)<br />
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By 1849 British sugar plantations in the Caribbean were struggling: slave labour was no longer legal, and the 1846 Sugar Duties Act had started the process of removing the preferential tariffs protecting the plantations from competition from countries where slavery was still legal, and from European sugar beet. (At the end of his essay, Carlyle tacitly acknowledges the problem of competition by advocating the sending of gunships to stop shipments of African slaves to Cuba and Brazil.) The former slaves, Carlyle complains, were unwilling to cut sugar cane for the wages on offer, preferring to work growing pumpkins for themselves.<br />
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The economists' solution to the problem of insufficient labour was to increase supply. Plantation owners tried bringing in indentured labour from India - a practice strongly opposed by the anti-slavery movement - but Carlyle says the economists had recommended importing more (free) African labour. He points out that newly arrived Africans preferred growing pumpkins just as much as did the original freed slaves, and that the only way to make them work on the sugar plantations would be to bring in so many Africans that they would otherwise starve - he makes a comparison with the Great Famine then causing mass emigration from Ireland. But he doesn't admit the implication that the only thing that could make a man choose to work under the pay and conditions of a sugar plantation was starvation.<br />
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Carlyle's proposal was the Africans should be compelled to work on the plantations "with beneficient whip". The economist on the other hand would say that sugar should be grown on the plantations only if it were profitable enough that an attractive wage could be paid. The plantations might be protected by tariffs from competition from slave countries, but if they were unable to compete with European sugar production from beet, it would best to let the Europeans grow sugar for us and grow other crops in the Caribbean. Pumpkins, if nothing else, had shown themselves capable of paying their way. Whereas Carlyle seemed to be speaking for the owners of sugar plantations, the economist would have in mind the interests of humanity in general.<br />
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The true <i>dies mali</i> - evil days - were those of slave labour enforced by men with whips. Economics might well follow Carlyle in calling itself the 'rueful science', but it's Carlyle's racism which was dismal.<br />
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*The <i>Consistori del Gay Saber</i> - "Consistory of the Gay Science" was an academy of poetry founded in Toulouse in 1323 to perpetuate the lyric school of the troubadours. In the early 1840's Ralph Waldo Emerson described himself as "a Professor of the Joyous Science", and the term was revisited explicitly by E.S Dallas in his <i>The Gay Science</i> (1866). Nietzsche adopted it for his <i>Die fröhliche Wissenschaft</i> in 1882.<br />
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<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-45974101428301593842014-09-24T16:45:00.001+01:002014-09-24T22:55:22.155+01:00How to fund drug researchHealthcare costs money. To decide whether to spend that money, we have to go through the unattractive process of putting a price on life and health. In writing what follows, I remain painfully aware that I am talking about human beings who love and are loved.<br />
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We have a bottle of pills which will improve a particular patient's health by an amount we value at $10,000. The bottle of pills costs $100 to produce. One way or another the patient has $100 to pay for it. So he buys the pills, takes the pills, and the world is $9,900 better off.<br />
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But it doesn't work like that. It costs a lot of money to develop a new drug - $1bn is a round-number estimate. That cost is paid for through the price of the pills during the period of patent production. Patents in the USA and EU last for twenty years, but much of that period can be taken up with testing and licensing. (An extension of up to five years is available to compensate for the delay.) Let's assume that leaves ten years (another round number) for the drug company to make some money selling the drug. And let's suppose the drug could benefit 10,000 patients a year. That's 100,000 patients over the ten years; to get a billion dollars out of them you need to charge $10,100 for the bottle of pills. Unfortunately, for half the patients there's no chance at all of their paying that much. And you need to run a $1bn advertizing campaign to persuade the other patients and their doctors to use the drug. So now you need to charge $40,100 for the bottle. Which makes giving the drugs to the patient we started with a heavily losing proposition.<br />
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Sometimes we do unattractive, even inhumane things for sound economic reasons - devoting resources to where they can do most good. But this situation is economic madness. We have created a system where a transaction which would make the world $9,900 richer can't happen.<br />
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Let's clear our minds of any destructive obsession with the granting of patent monopolies, and think of a way to pay for the development of new drugs which will encourage the development of the new drugs we want without making it impossible to use them to best advantage.<br />
<br />
First, we abolish all patent restrictions on drug manufacture - we allow any manufacturer to make and distribute any licensed drug, subject only to regulatory controls on quality. Instead, we will award patent holders a share of a global drugs fund, according to how much good their patented drug is doing.<br />
<br />
What's should be the measure of the value of a drug? It should be how many people take it multiplied by how much they benefit. And we should assess that benefit relative to the previous best treatment. NICE in the UK uses the <i>Quality Adjusted Life Year </i>to measure as the basis for its decisions on what drugs to fund. Personally, I'm not comfortable with the assumption that one person's life is worth more than another's just because they're in better health, and I'd be content to use unadjusted life years. However, it's important that the measure we use should reflect the impact of side effects, so that a treatment which is as effective as another but with milder side effects can be properly rewarded. <br />
<br />
In any case we assume that a year of healthy life is worth the same for everyone in the world, rich or poor. <br />
<div>
<br /></div>
We establish an international body to assess the expected life-year benefit of each drug in each class of patient, using published data. We log the use of the drugs. And we award benefit years to each patent holder accordingly. <br />
<br />
There's one wrinkle, which is that the patent holder of the drug actually used gets only the marginal benefit value over the previous best treatment, and if that previous best treatment is still in patent its patent holder is assigned its marginal benefit over its previous best treatment, and so on. The point of this is that the developer of a slightly superior "me-too" drug gets paid only for the drug's slight superiority. (There's the complication that an alternative drug may be much better for a particular patient, perhaps because of idiosyncratic side effects: we would need a mechanism for the doctor to record this so that the benefits can be assigned appropriately.)<br />
<br />
Now we need a big pot of money to feed all those billions of dollars to the patent holders. That's not an impossible problem: global drugs spending is currently about a trillion dollars, of which about three quarters is spent on branded drugs, almost all of it in the developed nations. The price of the branded drugs will fall precipitously once all drug manufacturing becomes generic, freeing up perhaps $700 billion a year of healthcare spending. We just have to collect that up and distribute it to the drug companies according to their logged QALY contributions.<br />
<br />
Individual governments would be responsible for gathering the money by whatever mechanism works best for them. Initially, the amount would be assessed according to the savings in each country as prices fall. Over time we would transition to a specified share of GDP from each country.<br />
<br />
For distribution, either the money could either be treated as a pool to be distributed proportional to QALY contributions, or a price per QALY could be set, and funding managed to fulfil it. The latter would be require more financial structuring, but be simpler for drug developers.<br />
__<br />
<br />
Who would gain and lose out of this scheme? Marketing spending on drugs would fall dramatically - there would be little gain in promoting a drug unless its life-year contribution had been established, and little need to do so once it had. So it would be bad for the marketing guys.<br />
<br />
It would be very good for people in poor countries who are vulnerable to diseases not affecting the rich - sleeping sickness for example. Because their lives would become as valuable for drug development purposes as anyone else's.<br />
<br />
That implies that relatively less effort would go into developing drugs for the rich. But that needn't be the case in absolute terms, because of all the marketing money being saved. And the drugs being developed would at least be the ones with the biggest life-year benefits. (I suppose it would be possible for opponents of this scheme to point to some useful drug which might not have been developed under it: it's inevitable that making the best decision <i>a priori</i> will occasionally result in an inferior decision <i>a posteriori</i>.)<br />
<br />
Everyone everywhere would be able to get the drugs they need so long as they or their insurance or their national health service could cover the manufacturing cost of the drug. In the UK we would no longer be making hard decisions about whether to fund a drug costing tens of thousands of pounds to extend the life of cancer patients by a few months - if the drug worked, we'd use it.<br />
__<br />
<br />
The big weakness is that we would be creating a body of experts whose decisions would determine the destination of hundreds of billions of dollars. There could be a lot of money available to suborn them. To make that harder, its decision making process needs to be open - , all the quality-adjustments should be published, all the criteria for an acceptable drug trial should be published, and all the (anonymized) trials data should be published, so that every calculation is repeatable. <br />
<br />
This body could use its power for good: one of the major weaknesses of drug research is that unfavourable results get buried. By requiring all trials it considers to have been registered with it in advance, and by requiring all registered trials to report results, it can end the cherry-picking which bedevils drug research.<br />
<br />
One of the defects of the current licensing system is that a patent owner need not seek a licence for all uses of a drug, so long as it is licensed for one use, and so can suppress adverse findings for an 'off-label' use - notoriously GSK withheld results suggesting that Paroxetine should not be prescribed to adolescents. This scheme would end that - a drug's developer would not be rewarded for off-label uses, and would therefore be incentivized to seek to demonstrate the effectiveness of its drug for any widespread use.<br />
<br />
____<br />
<br />
Links<br />
<br />
For a change I've left links out of the main text: I'll gather them here instead.<br />
<br />
The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27340835">cost</a> <a href="http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-does-a-new-drug-cost/">of</a> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/08/11/the-cost-of-inventing-a-new-drug-98-companies-ranked/">a</a> new drug<br />
<a href="http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0050001">Marketing</a> <a href="http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/does-pharma-spend-more-marketing-rd-numbers-check/2013-05-21">spending</a> <a href="http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/05/20/but_dont_drug_companies_spend_more_on_marketing.php">compared</a> with development spending<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/painres/download/whatis/QALY.pdf">QALY</a>s<br />
Discussion of the <a href="http://www.nicedsu.org.uk/PDFs%20of%20reports/DSU%20EQ5D%20final%20report%20-%20submitted.pdf">EQ-5D</a> QALY measure used by <a href="https://www.nice.org.uk/search?q=eq-5d">NICE</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.imshealth.com/deployedfiles/imshealth/Global/Content/Corporate/IMS%20Health%20Institute/Reports/Global_Use_of_Meds_Outlook_2017/IIHI_Global_Use_of_Meds_Report_2013.pdf">Global spending</a> on drugs<br />
<br />
US <a href="http://olpa.od.nih.gov/legislation/109/pendinglegislation/medicalinnovation.asp">proposal</a> for a <i>Medical Innovation Prize Fund</i><br />
<a href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-05-21/news/31801096_1_drug-prices-drug-companies-life-saving-medicines">Joseph Stiglitz</a> on prizes instead of patents<br />
<i><br /></i>
GSK and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC343848/">Paroxetine</a><br />
<i><a href="http://www.badscience.net/books/bad-pharma/">Bad Pharma</a></i> by Ben Goldacre<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-5695909047243479742014-09-18T13:47:00.001+01:002016-02-07T01:21:51.077+00:00Hell and high waterVoting is <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-29238890">under way</a> in the independence referendum in Scotland. The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-29200793">media</a> <a href="https://www.scotreferendum.com/reports/scotlands-future-your-guide-to-an-independent-scotland/">and</a> <a href="http://www.bettertogether.net/">politicians</a> keep telling us how important a decision it is, so naturally I ask myself what they're lying about. Westminster politicians of all parties have promised more devolution if the answer is 'no', whereas the (devolved) Scottish government <a href="http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0043/00439021.pdf">intends</a> to "work in partnership with the rest of the UK" if the answer is 'yes'. What difference does it make which way the vote goes? If the vote is 'yes' (the bookies are quoting 4 to 1 against that) there will be 18 months of negotiations to decide what actually happens, so we don't know. But we can at least look at what the parties say...<br />
<br />
An independent country is responsible for its own foreign policy and defence. The Scottish government intends to stay in the EU and NATO: the only concrete change would be that
"we would make early agreement on the speediest safe removal of nuclear weapons a priority. This would be with a view to the removal of Trident within the first term of the Scottish Parliament following independence." There's <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28009977">no good alternative</a> to Faslane as a base for Trident-carrying submarines, so if the Scots sticks to this, the logical choice for the (rest of) UK government would be to abandon plans to replace the current system, and plan to phase out the system from 2016. They hate that option*, so they'll make continued use of Faslane a priority in the negotiations. It's less important to the Scottish government, so I'd expect the roUK to win this point.<br />
<br />
Scotland needs a currency: the Scots government says it will keep the pound. No one can stop any country using any currency it chooses, so that's certainly possible. Osborne says he won't agree to any sort of currency union, which means that Scotland would get no say in UK monetary policy, instead of almost no say as at present. It could try to negotiate a seat for itself on the BoE's <a href="http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetarypolicy/Pages/overview.aspx">Monetary Policy Committee</a> - I don't see why the roUK shouldn't agree to that, since the Scot could be outvoted 8-1. But much more importantly, the Bank of England would not act as a lender of last resort to Scottish banks. So if Scotland wants any sort of financial sector, it would need to set up its own central bank. However, the Scottish government blithely claims that "The Bank of England, accountable to both countries, will continue to provide lender of last resort facilities". I don't think Faslane is enough of a bargaining chip for it to win this one.<br />
<br />
Scotland would get most of the oil. That would make Scotland a bit richer than the rest of the UK.<br />
<br />
Scotland would get some of the debt, and it would find itself borrowing to fund the debt at a slightly higher interest rate.<br />
<br />
Sorting out the separation would be difficult and expensive. And in the end, there would be more politicians and civil servants, costing more money.<br />
<br />
Scotland would get its own team in the Olympics.<br />
<br />
Scotland would no longer send MPs to Westminster. The Conservatives won no MPs in Scotland in the 1997 election, and has won one in each general election since, with the result that Labour gets a net gain of about 40 MPs. Without Scotland, the Conservatives would have a majority in the House of Commons, and the Liberal Democrats would not be in opposition as usual. However, the overall result of most UK general elections would be unaffected. Over time, one might expect the political centre to shift a little to the right as Labour strives to improve its electoral prospects.<br />
<br />
Overall, independence would make some difference. Arguments for it are:<br />
- smaller states are more democratic<br />
- it's a cleaner constitutional settlement that increased devolution, in which the role of Scottish MPs in Westminster would be questionable.<br />
- if you don't want Trident renewed, you might get your way<br />
- if you're a Scottish athlete not quite good enough for the UK team, you get to go to the Olympics anyway<br />
- if you're a Conservative politician in the rest of the UK, you're more likely to get into government.<br />
- if you're Scottish, your country gets the government share of future oil revenues<br />
<br />
Arguments against it are:<br />
- separating two countries is difficult and expensive<br />
- if you want Trident renewed, you'll run into difficulties<br />
- the Olympic ceremonies will get that bit longer, and the roUK will win fewer medals<br />
- if you're a Labour politician in the rest of the UK, you're less likely to get into government.<br />
- if you're in the roUK, your country loses the government share of future oil revenues. And if you're Scottish, isn't it a bit tawdry to demand independence just because you've lucked into some mineral resources?<br />
- we'd need to think of a better name that 'roUK' for the rest of the United Kingdom,<br />
__<br />
<br />
* Because having nuclear weapons makes politicians more important globally. Or perhaps because they think Trident is needed to stop Putin invading. PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-49018566143644858642014-08-13T17:59:00.000+01:002014-08-13T17:59:48.633+01:00Mens sanaJessica Valenti, a feminist blogger, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/11/free-tampons-cost-feminine-hygiene-products">argues</a> in the Guardian that "feminine hygiene products should be free for all, all the time". I respectfully disagree that the best way to help poor people get what they need is to subsidize supply of some goods to everyone, but that's not what I want to write about.<br />
<br />
This is the bit that struck me:<br />
<blockquote>
Women in the UK are fighting to axe the 5% tax on tampons (it used to be taxed at 17.5%!), which are considered “luxuries” while men’s razors, for some baffling reason, are not.</blockquote>
It seems to imply that men's razors are VAT-free, which is simply not the case - they carry VAT at 20%. There are three VAT rates in the UK, the standard rate of 20%, the reduced rate of 5%, and the 0% rate. And some items are VAT-exempt, which is <a href="http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/start/introduction.htm#6">not quite</a> the same thing as being zero-rated. HMRC has a <a href="http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/forms-rates/rates/goods-services.htm">list</a> of goods and services in the non-standard categories: the list mentions sanitary protection but not razors, which therefore are taxed at the standard rate.<br />
<br />
EU VAT policy is discussed quite readably in <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDQQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fukbriefingpapers.co.uk%2Fbriefingpaper%2FSN02683&ei=Y47rU-3QJK3G7AaaoYHYDg&usg=AFQjCNHXHuf9DZNqLteaQXXIoiNvhUeeWA&sig2=YWahnZtbD2kil3P_WSQ7BQ&bvm=bv.72938740,d.ZWU">this</a> UK parliamentary document. In summary, the reduced rate of VAT applies only to items selected by the UK from an EU-specified menu, and the zero rate applies only to items which the UK zero-rated before the 1991 VAT harmonization - including food, books and newspapers, children's clothes and shoes, public transport, and drugs and medicines on prescription. The European Commission would like to abolish zero rating, and likes to see its continuation, principally in the UK and Ireland, as a temporary measure.<br />
<br />
The much less readable EU documentation is mainly in the <a href="http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2006:347:0001:0118:en:PDF">2006 VAT directive</a> : Annex III has the list of items eligible for reduced-rate VAT, and includes "protects used for sanitary protection", but has nothing about shaving. Title IX of the same document specifies what goods and services should be exempt from VAT. Chapter 4 of the document, containing "Special provisions applying until the adoption of definitive arrangements", contains Article 110 "Member States which, at 1 January 1991, were granting exemptions with deductibility of the VAT paid at the preceding stage ... may continue to grant those exemptions" ("exemption with deductibility" means a 0% rate).<br />
<br />
So where has Valenti, who, to be fair, is not European, got the idea that men's razors are zero rated? Searching the internet suggests that it's something that UK feminists just know, perhaps because they've read it on the internet, mostly in comments on online forums. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/.http://buzz.bournemouth.ac.uk/bloody-disgrace-why-is-being-a-woman-taxing/">This website</a> thunders "We’ve discovered that men’s razors do not carry any VAT at all. Lowered to 0% in 2001, they became exempt from any VAT." How can one discover something which is not just untrue, but legally impossible? <a href="http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/62628">This</a> ePetition simply notes that "men's razors are tax free". <a href="http://www.fabians.org.uk/stop-taxing-periods-period/">This</a> article ("men’s razors are not subject to tax") announces another <a href="https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/george-osborne-stop-taxing-periods-period?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=73140&alert_id=XstHXFVBTt_t7mK8RBYHEAxgFvRhXncPv1aTs4s9KFEOMx%2B10UvEic%3D">online petition</a>, these <a href="http://www.thedebrief.co.uk/2014/06/q-why-are-we-getting-taxed-for-tampons-but-not-crocodile-meat#.U-uRl_k7tcY">two</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ellie-slee/the-bloody-cheek-of-the-tampon-tax_b_5363720.html">articles</a> link to the petition ("the list includes men's razors"), but the petition itself, while having fun with the zero-rated status of crocodile meat (which is zero-rated because it's a food), doesn't mention razors at all. It seems that the authors of the petition discovered their mistake, and quietly deleted it.<br />
<br />
Nowadays it's quick and easy to check facts online - anyone who, like me, has in the distant past spent hours in libraries searching for some minor piece of information marvels at what one can discover. And yet the internet seems to be used much more to spread misinformation than to get things right.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, shouting at George Osborne about this is pointless: he doesn't have the power to change EU VAT law - that would require the agreement of all the EU governments. And most of the EU governments would like to abolish zero-rating altogether.<br />
<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-26220052412111822642014-08-10T23:12:00.001+01:002014-08-10T23:12:33.316+01:00Minimum Unit PriceA <a href="http://bma.org.uk/-/media/files/pdfs/news%20views%20analysis/cmj1404sheronembargoed000101aug.pdf">study</a> by researchers at the University of Southampton has come up with the dramatic result that the median heavy drinker is paying 33p a unit for alcoholic drinks, whereas the median low-risk drinker is paying £1.10, so that almost all the effect of a Minimum Unit Price of say 50p would fall on the heavy drinkers. That's encouraging for proponents of minimum pricing, but it doesn't address the question of whether heavy drinkers would respond to a price increase by cutting down how much they drink or by saving money on less important things such as food, clothes and lodging.<br />
<br />
I ask myself what they're actually drinking for 33p a unit or less. Since I last <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/minimum-alcohol-pricing.html">wrote</a> about this, the government has <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23346532">abandoned</a> its plans for a minimum alcohol price (in England and Wales), but <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/311735/Guidance_on_BBCS_3.pdf">banned</a> via the licensing laws the sale of alcoholic drinks below the level of duty+VAT.<br />
<br />
Duty on alcoholic drinks is not simple. <a href="http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31992L0083:en:HTML">EU rules</a> insist that whereas duty on beer and spirits should be proportional to alcohol content (or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_measurement">degrees plato</a>), duty on wine and cider should be proportional to the volume of drink (with provision for different levels of duty for various bands of alcohol levels, and for sparkling drinks). I don't know why this inconsistency has arisen, but I guess it's because they did what the Germans wanted for beer and what the French wanted for wine.<br />
<br />
Following these rules, the UK's current levels of duty per unit of alcohol are:<br />
- beer up to 7.5% ABV: 18.74 p<br />
- spirits: 28.22 p<br />
- cider 7.5% ABV: 5.288 p<br />
- cider 8.5% ABV: 7 p <br />
- wine 15% ABV: 18.22 p<br />
- fortified wine 22% ABV: 16.56 p<br />
<br />
For cider and wine, the duty per unit is higher if the strength is lower than what I've specified, because the duty is charged per volume of drink not per volume of alcohol.<br />
<br />
Adding in VAT at 20% gives the minimum permitted price per unit. I've compared these prices with the cheapest I could find in a few minutes' searching the internet:<br />
<br />
<table>
<tbody>
<tr><th></th><th>Lager </th><th> 7.5 cider </th><th> 13% wine </th><th> Whisky </th><th> Vodka </th>
</tr>
<tr><td>Duty+VAT per unit</td><td>£0.225</td><td> £0.064</td><td> £0.252</td><td> £0.339</td><td> £0.339</td></tr>
<tr><td>Cheapest price per unit</td><td>£0.325</td><td> £0.20</td><td> £0.307</td><td> £0.375</td><td> £0.381</td></tr>
<tr><td>Margin</td><td>£0.10</td><td> £0.136</td><td> £0.054</td><td> £0.036</td><td> £0.042</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
It's remarkable how cheaply it's possibly to make alcoholic drinks and bring them to market, so long as you spend no money on advertizing (the cheap drinks are all brands I'd never heard of), take the cheapest legal options in making them, and use the lowest cost retailers (Aldi, Iceland...). Cider seems to be the most expensive of these cheap drinks to make - the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2010/1914/pdfs/uksiem_20101914_en.pdf">regulations</a> (since 2010) require at least 35% apple juice, and apple juice - even if it's imported pomace from eastern europe - is not very cheap. However the duty on cider is so low that it's still easily the cheapest way to buy alcohol to drink.<br />
<br />
If the government wants to make very cheap drink more expensive, I have a simple suggestion for it: increase the minimum apple juice content of cider. Comparing the margins, I guess that at about 80% apple juice content cheap cider would cost as much as cheap lager (the experts can work out the exact level to achieve this). Manufacturers would then have a choice of making cider in the way television adverts imply it's made - out of apples - and getting the low rate of duty which, I suppose, was intended to support that traditional process, or making it, as they mostly do now, with less apple and plenty of added sugar, and have it taxed as "made wine" - at wine rates.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, the Scottish parliament <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-18160832">passed</a> a law imposing a minimum price of 50p a unit in May 2012. Following legal challenges by the Scotch Whisky Association the law has been <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-27219905">referred</a> to the EU Court of Justice, so it's still not been implemented, and isn't likely to be in the next year or so.<br />
<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-88741816876507315992013-12-06T01:57:00.000+00:002013-12-06T01:57:29.633+00:00Nelson MandelaNelson Mandela was the greatest statesman of my lifetime. I'm glad that he enjoyed such a long life.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, I learned in a bar tonight that the International Rugby Board retains the rights to BBC radio's commentary on Nelson Mandela awarding the 1995 rugby union world cup to Francois Pienaar, but will graciously allow the BBC to use it for the next 24 hours, or perhaps longer. Which is good, but why have we allowed such ludicrous extensions of intellectual property rights?PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-36630694584494891282013-12-05T03:19:00.000+00:002013-12-05T03:19:02.848+00:00Do markets improve healthcare?Tim Worstall's UKIP-supporting <a href="http://www.timworstall.com/">blog</a> is where I go to get a different angle on the news. He didn't disappoint me with <a href="http://www.timworstall.com/2013/12/02/its-the-wonder-of-the-world-it-is-2/">his spin</a> on a <a href="http://dehydration%20and%20malnutrition%20led%20to%202%2C162%20deaths%20in%20care%20since%202003/"><i>Guardian</i> story</a> from which he quotes "More than 2,000 people have died of dehydration or malnutrition while in a care home or hospital in the last decade". "Just shitty care" he concludes, "Wonder of the world." Which is his <a href="http://www.timworstall.com/2012/11/27/tghe-glorious-nhs-the-wonder/">stock sarcasm</a> about the NHS.<br />
<br />
My immediate reaction was that it's foolish to blame the NHS for this. It's not the hospital's fault if a usually elderly patient is too weak to be saved when admitted with dehydration or malnutrition. Nor is it the hospital's fault if a patient refuses to eat or drink. And, while there have reports of patients becoming <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2172642/Kane-Gorny-Coroner-blames-incompetence-NHS-staff-patient-dies-dehydration.html">dehydrated</a> or <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/grieving-son-peter-tulloch-calls-2847521">malnourished</a> while in hospital, I doubt that accounts for more than a few of these two thousand cases, if only because the doctor completing the death certificate will usually rely on the medical problems detailed in the patient's hospital notes. Hence this statistic tells one little or nothing about the quality of NHS care.<br />
<br />
So what did the original story have to say? The headline in the Guardian story is "Dehydration and malnutrition led to 2,162 deaths in care since 2003", wrongly suggesting that the deaths occurred in care homes, as most of them did not. Worstall must have read past this, since he's blaming the NHS. The body of the story is more careful about the statistic, but concerns itself entirely with care homes not hospitals. And it links prominently to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10487305/More-than-a-thousand-care-home-residents-die-thirsty.html">a story</a> in the <i>Telegraph</i>.<br />
<br />
Now, Worstall's usual choice of newspaper to link to is the <i>Telegraph</i>, so why has he chosen to use the <i>Guardian</i> for a story it's lifted from his favourite paper (and not even had a go at its misleading headline)? Because, I suppose, the latter's story doesn't mention hospitals at all. And Worstall wants to bash hospitals, which are mostly in the NHS, not care homes, which are mostly privately run.<br />
<br />
The source of the numbers in both newspapers' stories is <a href="http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/business-transparency/freedom-of-information/what-can-i-request/published-ad-hoc-data/health/november-2013/deaths-from-selected-causes-by-place-of-death-in-england-and-wales-between-1997-and-2012.xls">this spreadsheet</a> published by the Office for National Statistics, "following an ad hoc request by the Sunday Telegraph". (The spreadsheet notes that it does not distinguish between state and private provision of either care homes or hospitals.) Only 14% of deaths in the last year "where either malnutrition or dehydration were mentioned on the death certificate" took place in care homes, but the newspapers are quite right to concentrate on the role of care homes because they are unambiguously responsible in a way that hospitals are not.<br />
<br />
We should be cautious in assuming that poor care is likely to be involved in all these deaths. There may be cases in which dehydration or malnutrition are unavoidable. And it may something be better to keep a dying patient in familiar surroundings rather than dispatch them to hospital. But assuming, to oblige Worstall, that the statistic is telling us that some care homes are providing "shitty care", then what?<br />
<br />
Care homes in the UK are a mixture of private for-profit (72%), not-for-profit (14%), and local council or NHS provision (14%, numbers from <a href="http://www.laingbuisson.co.uk/Portals/1/PressReleases/CareOfElderly1112_PR.pdf">here</a>). A<a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2732"> meta-analysis</a> in the BMJ has reported that "the evidence suggests that, on average, not-for-profit nursing homes deliver higher quality care than do for-profit nursing homes". And an unscientific online survey suggests that most (but <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2327456/Grandmother-71-died-dehydration-care-home-gross-neglect-staff.html">not</a> all) cases of alleged neglect which reach the press occur <a href="http://www.suttonguardian.co.uk/news/9022157.Payout_to_family_over_care_home___s_neglect/">in</a> <a href="http://www.nottinghampost.com/Sad-death-child-refugee/story-17045309-detail/story.html">the</a> <a href="http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/bupa-care-home-scandal-son-2287214">private</a> <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2394451/WWII-bus-conductor-like-emaciated-skeleton-weighing-just-stone-left-starve-care-home.html">sector</a>. So we can't just blame poor care on state provision.<br />
<br />
Advocates of private provision of health care have achieved a massive shift from state to private provision of care homes in the last 30 years (<a href="http://www.cpa.org.uk/information/reviews/changingroleofcarehomes.pdf">page 13</a>). Even those sceptical, like me, about how well markets can work in healthcare provision can see potential for their application to care homes. Relatives of a potential resident can visit several care homes, talk to the staff, see the residents, and smell the air - I've done it. They can ask themselves whether they'd be content to live in the home if need be. They can choose to pay more for better care too - while local authorities cover the basic cost for many residents, that's at a standard rate which one can choose to top up. And if a care home proves unsatisfactory, you can move to a different one. All this should allow market mechanisms to work better than they can in the choice of doctors or treatments, where the patient has no good way to compare competing providers. So if in fact the care home market is not working - if care homes are killing their residents through neglect - then that calls into question the whole notion of markets in healthcare.<br />
<br />
Let's find out whether care homes are doing an adequate job, and if not why markets are failing to work their magic, before we spend any more money and goodwill on introducing competition to the NHS. <br />
<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-19092482054288862892013-11-19T12:04:00.000+00:002013-11-19T12:04:34.138+00:00National ServiceThe actor Hugh Grant <a href="http://bbb-news.com/blog/2013/11/17/hugh-grant-calls-for-return-to-national-service/">wants</a> Britain to reintroduce National Service, which was phased out at about the time he was born: he says that his "father and grandfather both served and it shaped them". Grant comes from a <a href="http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/SOUTH-AFRICA-EASTERN-CAPE/2006-01/1137713772">military family</a> of some distinction: his father was a Sandhurst-trained officer and his <a href="http://home.clara.net/clinchy/51st.htm">grandfather</a> was awarded the DSO following the Second World War. So neither of them was subject to National Service. Whereas I come from an unmilitary family, my father spent two years on National Service, and he describes it as an utter waste of time.<br />
<br />
Grant's proposal puts him in the unlikely company of Philip Hollobone, a Tory MP who has presented a <a href="http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2013-14/nationalservice.html">Bill</a> to implement the idea. But it's not going to happen - what would a modern army do with large numbers of unwilling, short-term recruits?<br />
<br />
All the same, mightn't it be a good thing if politicians at least had some experience of soldiering and its dangers before they became empowered to send soldiers off to war? Or would politicians-to-be find a way to avoid it? The thought has led me to look up the Vietnam War records of all the main-party US presidential and vice-presidential candidates who were of an age to be drafted. I present them in order of date of birth:<br />
<br />
John McCain, 29th August 1936: son and grandson of US Navy Admirals, naval aviator, shot down, badly wounded, tortured and held for over five years as a prisoner. Unaffected by the draft.<br />
<br />
Dick Cheney, 30th Jan 1941: awarded deferments while taking six years to complete four years' worth of study, and then because his wife was pregnant.<br />
<br />
Joe Lieberman, 24th February 1942: awarded deferments to attend college and law school and then because he had a child.<br />
<br />
Joe Biden, 20th November 1942: awarded deferments while studying at college and law school, and then reclassified as unfit due to asthma.<br />
<br />
John Kerry, 11th December 1943: pre-empted the draft by enlisting in the US Navy Reserve when his college deferments ended. Commanded a "swift boat" in Vietnam and was decorated for gallantry<br />
<br />
George W Bush, 6th July 1946: avoided the draft by joining the Texas Air National Guard<br />
<br />
Bill Clinton, 19th August 1946: avoided the draft by joining the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROTC">ROTC</a><br />
<br />
Dan Quayle, 4th February 1947: avoided the draft by joining the Indiana National Guard<br />
<br />
Al Gore, 31st March 1948: pre-empted the draft by enlisting when his college deferment ended. Spend only five months in Vietnam, where, as the son of a Congressman, he was kept well out of harm's way.<br />
<br />
John Edwards: 10th June 1953: only just old enough to have been drafted, awarded deferment to attend college.<br />
<br />
Of eight prominent politicians who might have been drafted (I'm leaving out McCain as too old and Edwards as too young), three avoided the draft by spending enough years in college, three avoided service in Vietnam by finding safer military options, one went to Vietnam but was kept out of danger, and one - John Kerry - actually fought. Following his experiences in Vietnam, Kerry became a strong opponent of the war. This made him enemies within the US Navy, who participated in a <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2008/06/john_kerrys_vietnam_crew_mates.html">smear campaign</a> against him when supporters of GW Bush wanted to muddy the comparison between Kerry and their man.<br />
<br />
So the conclusion, albeit from an inadequate sample, is that most politicians will avoid meaningful service, and the few who don't will be the relatively honourable ones. And those are the ones who lose elections.<br />
<br />
<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-69559008224920841792013-07-23T17:01:00.001+01:002013-07-23T17:01:15.037+01:00The pendulum swingsOn a long drive home last night, I was annoyed to find the airwaves filled with the not very interesting news that <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22767289">a baby had been born</a> in London - three or four hundred are born there every day, but this one gets particular hereditary privileges which I suppose make it worth a few seconds of one's attention.<br />
<br />
So I turned the radio off, and wondered - I like to exercise my critical faculties - what the news was lying about. The suspicious part was the claim that the sex of the baby had been a surprise to its parents. That could be true, but it doesn't follow that no one knew. Ultrasound scans will certainly have been performed as part of the mother's care, and the ultrasonographer will certainly have observed the fetus's genitals. <br />
<br />
The sex was of unusual importance (that is, fractionally more than none) in that the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/20/contents/enacted">Succession to the Crown Act 2013</a> makes "succession to the Crown not depend on gender". So, had the baby been a girl, it would have been likely eventually to become queen, and, contrary to long-standing practice, that would remain the case if brothers were later to be born. Which would make the ratification of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement">Perth Agreement</a> a matter of some urgency, at least in the minds of courtiers who care about such things. It follows that they would have strained to discover from the ultrasonographer the sex of the fetus, and, had it been female, to publicize the fact so as to concentrate the minds of the other Commonwealth Realms. Whereas had it been male, as it was, there would have been no hurry.<br />
<br />
It could therefore be deduced from the secrecy about the child's sex that it was male. I recognize that this analysis would be more impressive if I'd written it without knowing the result.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-16765069968703640002013-07-06T13:52:00.000+01:002013-07-09T00:08:52.745+01:00Foxy LadyThe women's final of a relatively important tennis tournament is being contested this afternoon in Wimbledon by Sabine Lisicki and Marion Bartoli. The English broadcast media have settled on pronouncing the former player's name as "Sabeena Lizikee". That sounds horribly wrong to me: Lisicki is a Polish name (meaning something like "foxy"), and 'c' in Polish is pronounced 'ts'.<br />
<br />
However, Sabine is a German name: she's a German with Polish parents, so perhaps the name is pronounced differently in Germany. I checked on <a href="http://www.forvo.com/word/sabine_lisicki/">Forvo</a>, which helpfully offers both German and Polish pronunciations: "Luzitskee" and "Leeshitska" respectively (I'm not sure about the first vowel in the German version). (The Poles are in fact pronouncing "Lisicka" which would be a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_name#Feminine_forms">feminine form</a> of the surname: I suppose the family has chosen not to use this variant.)<br />
<br />
Would the player herself prefer us to use a German or a Polish rendering? <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5TeNW0UFLA">Here</a> she is pronouncing her own name: she calls herself "Sabeen Lizikee". Evidently she is content to follow the local (US) pronunciation - this seems to be common practice among Eastern-European tennis players, cf. Navratilova and Sharapova.<br />
<br />
So what should the BBC do? If it wanted to please me, it would adopt the German pronunciation. I can understand its not caring about that, but I can't see why it should have chosen to pronounce her forename in German and her surname in American.<br />
__<br />
<br />
I suppose the name Sabine comes from the Italian tribe, remembered for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women">abduction of its womenfolk</a>, known to me and other admirers of Saki as the "<a href="http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/372/">shabby women</a>".<br />
__<br />
<br />
Update: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VjYm_ILOmo">here</a>'s a German chat-show host using the BBC pronunciation.PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-86085847089273956642013-06-20T19:53:00.000+01:002013-06-23T21:01:51.003+01:00PMQs<a href="http://weareunfinished.com/2013/06/20/respect-for-women-and-girls-and-caroline-lucas/">Charlie</a> has been watching Prime Minister's Questions (h/t Rebecca), which yesterday included a revealing reply to a question from Caroline Lucas, the UK's one Green Party MP.<br />
<blockquote>
<b>Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green):</b> The Government’s own research shows that there is a link between the portrayal of women as sex objects in the media and greater acceptance of sexual harassment and violence against women. That being the case, will the Prime Minister join me in trying to get our own House in order and calling on the parliamentary authorities to stop <i>The Sun</i> being available on the parliamentary estate until page 3 is scrapped, and will he have a word with his friend Rupert Murdoch about it while he is at it?<br />
<br />
<b>The Prime Minister:</b> I am glad the hon. Lady got her question asked after the dazzling T-shirt that she was wearing last week failed to catch Mr Speaker’s eye. I am afraid I do not agree with her. It is important that we can read all newspapers on the parliamentary estate, including <i>The Sun
</i></blockquote>
(Text from <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm130619/debtext/130619-0001.htm#13061976000010">Hansard</a>.) <br />
The contrast with Cameron's approach to other questions is striking. The political point-scoring from Labour members he answered with point-scoring of his own, but other questions he dealt with courteously. Here for example is his reply to a question for Labour MP Hazel Blears about unpaid internships:<br />
<blockquote>
<b>The Prime Minister:</b> The right hon. Lady is doing some important work in this area. It is a difficult area to get right, because we all know from our own experiences that some short-term unpaid internships—work experience—can be very valuable for the people taking part. On the other hand, unpaid interns should not be employed instead of workers to avoid the national minimum wage. That is the balance that we have to get right, and I commend the right hon. Lady for the important work that she is doing.
</blockquote>
It's as if he thinks that stopping exploitation of interns is important, but violence against women is an issue best addressed by making jokes about what one's questioner was wearing a week ago.<br />
<br />
Rather than read the text, one can watch PMQs <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2013/june/prime-ministers-questions-19-june-2013-/">on video</a>. That takes much longer than is merited by what is said, but one can enjoy the demeanour of the front benches. In this broadcast, Theresa Villiers, sitting four to the left of Cameron, is the one to watch when she comes into shot. She seems reasonably enough to think she's got better things to do than listen to boys calling each other names, but she does her best to listen politely. At 4:17 she smiles at Cameron's cutting remarks about Ed Balls. At 10:19 she smiles in support of his congratulations to Edward Leigh on his knighthood. At 16:49 she looks bored with Cameron's reply to a question about child poverty (he blames Labour and the Speaker cuts him off), and at 20:21 she's no more interested in an exchange about William Cash's <i>Gender Equality (International Development) Bill </i>(Cash invites Cameron to support the Bill, and Cameron does so, but not to the extent of encouraging anyone to vote for it). At 26:02 she's interested enough in a question about the Health Service to exchange a few words with Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary.<br />
<br />
Lucas asks her question at 26:10. At 26:56 Cameron steps back, having finished his reply, revealing Hunt and Kenneth Clarke smiling at his jest, and Villiers between them glowering stonily.<br />
<br />
I'd like to think that she had a quiet word with him after, pointing out that he could have expressed his abhorrence at violence against women while still supporting freedom of the press and the right of MPs to inform themselves by looking at the pictures in <i>The Sun</i>.<br />
<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-27445958982316364292013-06-05T13:03:00.002+01:002013-06-05T13:03:25.939+01:00Starbuck's ProfitAt the end of last year there was a <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/wage-and-profit-shares-and-coffeehouse.html">hoo-hah</a> about the Starbucks coffee chain, which doesn't pay corporation tax in the UK because its accounts say it makes no profits here. Kris Engskov, Starbucks' UK Managing Director, quieted the row by <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/06/starbucks-corporation-tax-uk">promising</a> that in future the UK company would reform its accounting practises such that profits made here would no longer be transferred to Starbucks' operations overseas by means of brand royalty payments, mark-ups on coffee beans and high rates of interest on intra-company loans.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Lisa Pollack at the FT published a series of articles on Starbucks' tax affairs, looking at its apparently <a href="http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/12/12/1304442/media-said-starbucks-said/">inconsistent statements</a> of profit and loss, its <a href="http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/12/11/1304382/losing-for-tax-purposes-a-diagram/">transfer payments</a>, and its <a href="http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/12/13/1307552/the-marketing-smackdown-and-that-very-odd-voluntary-tax-payment/#comment-3406872">offer to pay more tax</a>.<br />
<br />
Having examined the transfer payments, Pollack wrote that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So that’s a £33m loss less £26m of royalties less £2m of interest, which gets one to a figure of £5m… which is still a loss. Some of the mark-up from the Swiss bought coffee would have to go too to get the company near profitable in the UK.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Which makes the punchline — that Starbucks has agreed to pay £10m of ‘tax’ voluntarily over the next two years — even weirder.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
This analysis was seized on by commentators hostile to corporation tax in general. But Pollack, in an otherwise informative series, has made a mistake. The profit and loss for reporting purposes is not the same as the profit and loss for corporation tax purposes. (I started on a post about this at the time: real life supervened. But Tim Worstall has today <a href="http://timworstall.com/2013/06/05/this-isnt-actually-true-you-know/">repeated</a> the claim, so I'm going to try to put things straight.)<br />
<br />
The £33m is Starbucks' reported UK loss for 2010-11. Pollack's point is that even if it reported results £28m better it would still be making a loss, and so (she implied) not paying corporation tax. But as the <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45028756/Accounts-02959325.pdf">Financial Statement</a> makes clear on page 19, some of the items contributing to the stated loss - depreciation and impairment in excess of capital allowances, and non-deductible expenses - are not allowable for corporation tax purposes. They come to about £16m apiece. Adding these back in, Starbucks' UK loss is reduced to £1m. So with the £28m in royalties and interest payments the company would have a taxable profit of about £27m.<br />
___<br />
<br />
Two additional points for clarity:<br />
- the numbers on p19 are the affect of each item on corporation tax payable, which was 27% of the gross<br />
- Starbucks has got past losses available to set against future profits. So it may still not need to pay corporation tax.PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-70064862705959244782013-05-02T14:54:00.000+01:002013-05-04T12:55:28.206+01:00Could they be worse?Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP, is not lavish in his praise of his party's election candidates, but he does have <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/nigel-farage-have-you-met-the-cretins-in-westminster-our-candidates-cant-be-any-worse-than-them-8594647.html">one thing to say</a> in their defence: "Have you met the cretins we have in Westminster? Do you think we can be worse than that?".<br />
<br />
That's intended to be rhetorical, but it's a question I'm going to consider. UKIP has had only one MP, a defector from the Conservatives who apparently never paid his party subs and <a href="http://www.echo-news.co.uk/search/4179128.Tory__UKIP__Now_I_m_just_an_inde_says_MP_Bob/">changed his mind</a> after six months, so we can't say anything about the quality of its representatives in the Commons. But it has been much more successful in European elections. In June 1999 it had three candidates elected to the European Parliament, in 2004 twelve, and in 2009 thirteen. Altogether, there have been 22 different UKIP MEPs. How have they got on?<br />
<br />
Two of them have been sent to prison. Ashley Mote, elected in 2004, was immediately <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3899969.stm">suspended</a> from UKIP when it found out he was to be tried for benefit fraud. In 2007 he was <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6975627.stm">sentenced to nine months'</a> imprisonment. Tom Wise, also elected in 2004, had the UKIP whip <a href="http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news/628-tom-wise-mep-a-statement">withdrawn</a> in March 2007 over an expenses scandal, and was convicted in November 2009 of False Accounting and <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8354663.stm">sentenced to two years</a> in prison.<br />
<br />
Five others have left the party before the end of their terms as MEPs. Michael Holmes, at that time the party leader, was elected in 1999, but <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/684384.stm">resigned from the party</a> nine months later complaining of "bitterness and infighting". Robert Kilroy-Silk was elected in 2004 but <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3958273.stm">resigned the UKIP whip</a> after four months, and left the party soon after to <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4227921.stm">found another</a> more to his taste. Nikki Sinclaire was elected in 2009 but had the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8550698.stm">whip withdrawn</a> after nine months and subsequently <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12062884">won a sex discrimination case</a> against the party (there was a later <a href="http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news/2320-statement-on-ukip-and-nikki-sinclaire-mep">rapprochement</a>). David Campbell Bannerman, elected in 2009, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13518731">defected to the Conservatives</a> in May 2011. And Marta Andreasen, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21555727">followed him</a> in February this year: she described Farage as a "stalinist".<br />
<br />
So of the 28 occasions when European electors have chosen a UKIP candidate, there are seven - a quarter - on which their choice was frustrated by criminality or animosity between the candidate and the party.<br />
<br />
To put the criminality in context, I've attempted to count all the MPs and MEPs elected in the last three elections in England, Scotland and Wales who have been imprisoned. Excluding the UKIP MEPs, there are no MEPs and five MPs - David Chaytor, Eric Illsley, Jim Devine, and Elliott Morley. all Labour members convicted in 2011 of false accounting over the expenses scandal (Margaret Moran was unfit to stand trial), and Chris Huhne, convicted this year of perverting the course of justice. That's out of 188 non-UKIP MEPs elected (I'm counting per election rather than per distinct MEP), and 1902 MPs elected (ignoring by-elections). So 0.24% of non UKIP MPs and MEPs are jailbirds, compared with 7.1% of UKIP MEPs.<br />
<br />
(The Conservatives are not immune: three Tory peers have been to jail - Jeffrey Archer for perjury and Paul White and John Taylor for fiddling their parliamentary expenses.)<br />
<br />
It's harder to keep track of defections and other fallings out, but the immediate comparison is that there has been one defection to UKIP - Roger Helmer from the Conservatives. So UKIP now has <a href="http://www.ukip.org/page/ukip-meps">eleven MEPs</a> (who they describe as "the UKIP team of 12").<br />
<br />
To answer Farage's question - "do you think we can be worse?". Yes I do.PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-10245184745456484272013-04-23T15:50:00.000+01:002013-04-23T15:50:07.563+01:00UK downgraded, not much damage.Fitch has <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22219382">downgraded</a> UK sovereign debt, following Moody's <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21557646">lead</a>. Frances Coppola <a href="http://coppolacomment.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-real-meaning-of-fitchs-downgrade.html">explains</a> why they're wrong - I outlined <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/uk-credit-outlook.html">similar thoughts</a> over a year ago, but she is much more thorough.<br />
<br />
Coppola starts by explaining that "For sovereign debt, [a credit rating] is supposed to give investors an indication of the risk of loss due to default". Yes, but it's hard to imagine a single investor's mind being changed on Fitch's say-so. The real purpose of these ratings is to get featured in the news.<br />
<br />
The principal damage inflicted by the downgrade is on George Osborne and his colleagues, who undertook to "safeguard Britain's credit rating". And the only people helped by it are the ratings agencies, who have attracted a lot of respectful publicity. To sum up, a politician has failed to keep his promise, and a publicity seeker has successfully sought publicity.<br />
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<br />PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-3718229982159610852013-04-18T08:25:00.001+01:002013-04-18T08:25:33.749+01:00One YearOne year ago this morning <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.com/2012/04/helen.html">Helen</a> stopped breathing beside me. On Sunday I'll be running the London Marathon in her memory. Please <a href="http://tinyurl.com/ForHelenP">give generously</a> in her memory to <a href="http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserPage.action?userUrl=PaulBarden&pageUrl=3">Arthur Rank House</a> or <a href="http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserPage.action?userUrl=PaulBarden&pageUrl=2">Sarcoma UK</a>. Thank you.PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-3974499436376605712013-02-04T10:19:00.002+00:002013-02-04T10:19:39.422+00:00Read this blog and win the SuperbowlAstonishing as it may seem, the evidence suggests that Jim Harbaugh, coach of the San Francisco 49ers (an American Football team), does not read this blog. But he should.<br />
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Last night the Superbowl was played between the 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens, coached by Jim's elder brother John (I can't say whether he's among my readers). And the 49ers fell behind 28-6, before scoring a touchdown with <a href="http://scores.espn.go.com/nfl/playbyplay?gameId=330203025&period=0">seven or so minutes remaining</a> in the third quarter. <br />
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As <a href="http://pb204.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/numerate-coaching-in-sports.html">my readers know</a>, the best strategy in this situation is to attempt a two-point conversion. But the 49ers chose to kick for a single point - the possibility of a two-point attempt was briefly raised and dismissed by analysts on the channel I was watching. The 49ers went on to score two more touchdowns without reply: after the third they went for two points to tie the game, but failed. The Ravens then scored a field goal to go five points ahead. The 49ers drove close to the Raven's goal line in the last three minutes, but were obliged by the points difference to go for a touchdown on fourth down rather than kick a field goal, and failed.<br />
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Suppose instead that the 49ers had gone for two at 28-12, and failed. After their next touchdown they would attempt two points again. If they succeeded, they would try for another two after their third touchdown, leaving themselves either level or two points behind, and if they failed they would kick a point after their third touchdown. So in the last two minutes they would have been either three, five, or six points behind. Five or six would have been no different from in the game, but three would have allowed them to kick a tying field goal, with a good chance to win in overtime.<br />
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Reportedly Jim Harbaugh is paid $5m a year for his coaching skills, and may be <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8723176/jim-harbaugh-continues-biggest-bargain-football">worth more</a>...PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8993615971333537173.post-5023329462789270492013-01-21T22:59:00.001+00:002013-01-29T14:04:47.287+00:00False LightThere's been an <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2013/01/19/saturday-morning-breakfast-cereal-editon/">internet spat</a> between Anthony Watts, operator of "The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change", and Greg Laden, operator of the world's most viewed site written by Greg Laden.<br />
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Deviating from his usual subject of disbelief in anthropogenic global warming, Watts <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/14/claim-meteorite-discovered-with-signs-of-life-in-it/">posted an item</a> about a <a href="http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Polonnaruwa-meteorite.pdf">paper</a> reporting signs of extraterrestrial life in a meteorite. Unfortunately for Watts, the paper appears to be <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/01/15/life_in_a_meteorite_claims_by_n_c_wickramasinghe_of_diatoms_in_a_meteorite.html">completely</a> <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/16/diatomsiiiiin-spaaaaaaaaaaace/">wrong</a>, so when Laden read the post he wrote <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/01/15/whats-up-with-that/">one of his own</a>, mocking Watts, for not being "equipped to recognize this bogus science as bogus". Watts, <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/16/greg-laden-liar/">fired back a post</a> accusing Laden of being a liar, on the grounds that Laden's screenshot of Watts' post cut off the second line, which qualified Watts' enthusiasm. Laden <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/01/17/greg-laden-liar/">was unimpressed</a>. Watts <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/18/reader-poll-should-i-sue-the-pants-off-greg-laden">posted again</a>, asking his readers whether he should launch a "false light" legal claim against Laden. Laden <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/01/18/anthony-watts-is-threatening-to-sue-me/">laughed</a>.<br />
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I've got nothing to add about the identification of alleged extraterrestrial diatoms, but I'm interested in the notion that the law in some US states allows bloggers to sue each other over what they've written, especially in view of the way US law has been influenced by the First Amendment. I Am Not a Lawyer, but I can follow hyperlinks, so I followed <a href="http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/district-columbia-false-light">the link</a> Watts helpfully provides to a site discussing the "false light" law in Washington DC, where Watts proposes to sue.<br />
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The first, unsurprising point is that a false light claim requires "a false statement, representation, or imputation about the plaintiff". There doesn't seem to be any false statement in Laden's article. Laden has a screen shot of Watts starting his post with "This looks to be a huge story, the first evidence of extraterrestrial life, if it holds up", which of course is exactly what Watts did write. It was a bit rude of Laden to cut off his screenshot before Watts' further qualification that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", but that qualification is irrelevant to Laden's point, which is that the paper Watts cited doesn't constitute so much as ordinary evidence. The screenshot is not a false representation of what Watts wrote. Laden goes on to say that Watts "was not equipped to recognize this bogus science as bogus", but Watts in his follow up does not disagree, writing "I've never claimed to be an expert in meteors or diatoms".<br />
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The second point is that "false light" is a privacy tort. It's not intended to protect a person in the act of publicizing his views. I don't see that one can claim to operate a "most viewed site" and claim privacy protection for what one writes on it.<br />
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The third point is that, in so far as the plaintiff is a public figure, he has to prove "actual malice", which words carry a <a href="http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/proving-fault-actual-malice-and-negligence">special legal meaning</a> that the statement complained of was published knowing it was false or reckless about its truth. Whereas Laden seems to believe strongly in what he wrote. Is Watts claiming not to be a public figure when blogging?<br />
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The fourth point is that there are strong first amendment protections for <a href="http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/opinion-and-fair-comment-privileges">expressions of opinion and fair comment</a>. And Laden was expressing a critical opinion of Watts' writing.<br />
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So, to this lay reader, any legal action by Watts would seem to be beyond hopeless.<br />
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Introducing his threat of legal action, Watts wrote "I spent yesterday conferring with lawyers about the smear that Greg Laden made against me", but he doesn't actually say what advice the lawyers gave him, resorting instead to the formula "it seems that Laden’s actions in his original and follow up story meet the legal tests for "false light".<br />
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I predict that Watts will not sue.<br />
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PaulBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16861432701458977844noreply@blogger.com0