Minimum pricing is wrong

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22250584

As usual, I've been inspired by a news story. This one is a little argument over minimum pricing of alcohol. The Scottish government has apparently had inaccurate and biased submissions from the drinks industry, which opposes minimum pricing. This is hardly shocking. What is shocking is that governments continue to trust industry sources' information and opinions when looking into regulation of that industry.

That's not my subject for today. I want to express my revulsion for the concepts behind minimum pricing.
The argument is, as implied in the BBC news article, that low alcohol prices encourage drinking at home. People get hammered on their own, without the social pressure or regulation that they'd experience in a pub. Low alcohol prices supposedly also mean that people buy more alcohol (they have a set alcohol budget and buy as much as they can within that budget).
The correlation of negative effects with low alcohol prices are apparently indisputable, as is the direction of causation.

'Dr McCambridge said: "Our study showed that the alcohol industry, including both the producers and the big supermarkets, consistently oppose affective approaches to alcohol polices by misrepresenting strong evidence of what works. There is an international consensus in the research community that the approach of the Scottish government is the correct one." '

I suspect it's actually a spelling error, but the use of the word 'affective' is central to my point today. A minimum price may be effective (it has an effect), but it is also an emotional (affective) response that is incompletely thought-through.

I can't comment on the strength of the evidence over whether the harms of alcohol really are greater when it's cheaper. I do know that many alcoholics are relatively wealthy people who will continue to buy alcohol even if the minimum price is a bit higher, regulated by government. I suppose that minimum pricing is intended to hit the binge drinkers who stock up before a big night out.

However, these are not the only people who buy cheap alcohol. I know that binge-drinking is more prevalent amongst young people, but young people are also the ones who are poor and often buy cheap alcohol for moderate drinking; something to go with a meal with friends, or to have one drink whilst watching television in the evenings.
Minimum pricing will reduce these people's quality of life, not increase it. Meals with friends will cost more. Perfectly reasonable consumption will no longer be possible for their low level of income. Why should they be punished for the actions of others?

If we have a playpark that some children are drawing graffiti on, do we start charging an entrance fee? That will help keep away the poor children and the children with mean parents. No doubt children who wish to draw graffiti are mostly poorly supervised and are frequently from poorer backgrounds, and will not pay the entrance fee. So we will have protected the playpark, but at what cost? We will have rendered it a luxury for the rich and excluded legitimate use by poor or neglected children.

If a child in a class misbehaves and the teacher does not see who did it, he can hold the entire class behind. This neatly ensures that he does indeed punish the offender for the misbehaviour. But he also punishes the rest of the class for something that they did not do. This sort of injustice is called collective punishment and at an adult level is regarded as so offensive that it is banned by the Geneva Convention on Human Rights.
It is a fundamental part of law (both English and Continental, I think) that if the perpetrator of a crime cannot be identified or punished then the innocent shall not be punished as collateral damage. This I know because I recently listened to a very interesting discussion on the radio about prosecuting twins, and how they are often acquitted because of the inability to prove which of them comitted a crime.

So why, given this, do we think it perfectly acceptable to punish harmless purchasing of alcohol solely in order to make some alcohol abuse more expensive?

We should punish the offenders. When there is disorder in town centres, arrest and fine the offenders. When there is loud noise in residential areas, fine the offenders. Where a poor person is harmlessly drinking at home, fine the ... oh wait, why should this person pay more? An increase in price is collective punishment of those whose means do not stretch to casually consuming expensive products.
It's saying 'those poor people make all the trouble, so let's make them all pay for it'. It's based on grossly offensive tribal/class thinking, or possibly a simple lack of thought. Either way, it is unacceptable for researchers to recommend it, or for governments to implement it.

I do not care if utility is maximised by punishing the innocent. I do not care if the most solid economic research ever conducted shows that liver disease will be entirely eradicated by punishing the innocent. Economics and social science can show wonderful consequences for their interests (i.e the effect only on anti-social behaviour and alcoholic disease), but the consequences for others must be considered too, and must be given priority. An economist might say that this is an externality of the programme that must be internalised, but it's a specific type of externality. It does not affect just anyone else in society. This externality affects only poor drinkers. These sorts of discriminatory rules should be avoided, as it's impossible to recompense poor drinkers specifically.

This is not limited to minimum alcohol pricing. It's also relevant to the fat tax, which is even more pernicious because fat is healthy and necessary, and it's actually refined sugar that is more unhealthy. No matter which we tax, though, it's over-consumption that is the problem, not any form of consumption. Taxes punish those who do enough exercise to burn off their calories, or those who need the calories to power their exercise. By making exercising more expensive, a fat tax designed to promote health might reduce it, ensuring that the poor can only afford to be in mediocre health, not fit and active as is best.

Apart from a distinct inability to think of the wider consequences and escape the blinkers of thinking that a solution for a problem has no other effects, one cause of these ridiculous proposals is that the NHS must care for all people, but people's choices affect how much care they need. We have a destruction of accountability: we are not holding people accountable for their own health.
We need a safety net. Not all health issues are caused by the individual who suffers them, and a major function of society is to protect people from the mishaps and chance brutality of nature.

But some health problems are caused by the individual, and collective responsibility for such issues is wrong. By making the state pay for these problems, we encourage it to interfere with personal freedom in a bid to reduce its costs.
What we need is for these issues to cost a person money. We could charge people extra money for treatments of alcoholic liver disease and obesity-related heart disease. But we have made it a vital part of the NHS that it is free at the point of delivery (except dentistry, eye care, adult social care, sufficient physiotherapy and prescriptions).
There remains an alternative. We need an insurance system in which people pay for the risks they incur. Heavy drinkers would pay more as they drink, but not for the alcohol which can be consumed in moderation. They would pay for the 'heavy' part of heavy drinking. Obese people would pay for their over-consumption, rather than everyone paying for any form of consumption.
The only place where a tax works is smoking, because there is no safe limit. Smoking is always harmful, and so a tax is appropriate.

But where there are threshold effects, a blanket tax is unfair and disporportionately harms the poor. A minimum price only harms the poor. Neither is acceptable.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-20357131
I came across this truly shocking article some time ago. It's shocking for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's very sad that someone can lose his job over a comment made in a private setting, even if it was visible to others.
His freedom to think and say what he likes should be paramount and I'm glad that the court found that he was in the right. I am a little curious about what legal technicalities might prevent him from recouping the loss of earnings he must surely have had.

What is equally disgusting, however, is the self-righteous tone he takes over his bigotry. Something has indeed poisoned the atmosphere in Britain, and it's people like him who believe that all men are equal, but some are more equal than others. What on earth is equality too far? Is he only in favour of equality a bit, but not when others start getting the privileges to which he's entitled?
I'm also impressed at the euphemism of 'people who believe in traditional marriage' for 'sickening intolerant people'; these people are entitled to believe what they please, but I have no problem with them being outcasts from society if the vast majority of people find their views unacceptable.

It seems that society is a battleground, and this man is fighting to protect his right to be nasty to other people whilst claiming that others making him an outcast is terrible. Hypocrisy is the most terrible thing of all, and he needs to apply some thought to his opinions.

I saw today that the legal case brought against Lord Sugar by a winning Apprentice contestant (who by winning the television show was entitled to a well-paid job at Lord Sugar's company) has failed. Lord Sugar has been quite acerbic about it, saying that she is a liar and an opportunist who thought that she could blackmail him for money.

That is clearly what the court, on the whole, thought, although I was surprised to read that his witness evidence included a statement that he'd found her paranoid and suspicious. These two important qualities of people who are familiar with the world seem to me to have no bearing on the truth of the case at hand. This is character assassination and it's sad that it seems, from the news report, to be an important part of the legal system.

However, when we move away from the disputed facts of this one case we'll see that her position is very common. She has argued that she was recruited for a highly-paid job that required a skilled candidate and gave important responsibilities, but that she was instead a grossly overpaid secretary, doing menial labour when she had work to do at all.

This is what any suspicious person would have deduced of a job that was the prize of a gimmicky television show rather than a geniune opening with serious recruitment, but since the court case is over I can't demolish Lord Sugar's argument.
However, I do think that the same general situation applies to many jobs. My own job was preceded by a long recruitment process involving online application, online testing, two assessment days and a number of written tests. After this supposedly stringent selection process the intake of trainees was given secretarial work to do for months until the busy period of the year. For example, someone was asked to shred thousands of pages of documents, which, given the shredder's capacity for only a few pages at a time, took a few hours.

We were told that we were selected for a difficult training scheme, but the initial training was for multiple-choice assessments of rote memory. I will agree that learning stuff by rote is difficult, but I don't think it requires any great talent, as assessed during recruitment.
The training involved some maths, and we were taken over simple calculations that are taught before GCSE (e.g extrapolation and interpolation) as if they were works of genius rather than something any adult could deduce without any training at all.
I wrote at length about the more word-driven parts of the training, and how we were fed 'facts' without being allowed to question them, and required to reproduce them without comment; we were expected to regurgitate definitions in essays even when we had not only used the definition earlier in an exam, but obviously understood it through the context of what came next. Tools were actually lists of things to consider that common sense would make anyone think about, and we were expected to recite these tools (and their names) in preference over making insightful points about the situation being assessed. There's plenty more to write about it, but not here.

Outside of training, we are asked to collect data. We do Google searches and note what we find, and someone senior will do the analysis. I am, at the moment, collecting telephone numbers from websites. A senior analyst will do the data processing we want done; I will be sent off to collect more.

I heard a friend in consultancy say something similar; her work involves following checklists of things to do with the client and some basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel.

I am sure that many people find this, and there's certainly a problem. I would tend to say that we're not being given good enough jobs; that promotion is too slow, but there are other answers. If I, and presumably most of the other trainees in my job, were given training about the job, including doing the job, we would be able to be senior colleagues in half the time.
It rankles to see old men running everything when the expertise needed to run things differs from that (if any) required for the job, and can be quickly acquired. Waiting for 20 years until I'm old enough to have a go at a high-paying, responsible job looks like a form of indentured servitude that people usually condemn.

On the other hand, it could be that the experience of those years really is vital, and the intelligence and aptitude that we've been tested for is actually not important. In this case it seems a bit silly to waste our time on assessments, or even on university education itself (ignoring personal benefits, such as friendships or culture). Since we're supposed to be drones who don't think about how we'd do things ourselves, or question the opinions we're being taught as facts, why bother with a university education that, for the purposes of most graduate recruitment, is good only for transferable skills such as thought and insight?
Given that even people who study business at university get the same treatment as those with merely transferable skills, it doesn't look like this is the answer, although it could be that business studies is such a soft subject that its relevance is balanced by the general quality of the education or candidates.

I'm not sure which answer is correct, but I don't see that it can be neither. Either the complex selection of new graduates is necessary because their rapid learning will make them better workers, faster, in which case they need the opportunity to learn; or there's no need to provide rapid advancement for them because rapid learning won't be good enough: the experience of dealing with multiple situations is the only thing that counts.

At the moment I am, barring the occasional piece of work that goes unnoticed because I solve the problem so quickly, an overpaid secretarial worker. I don't understand how this suits anyone. Because I am doing simple work, I am not getting the training or experience I want. Because I am overpaid for the work I am doing my employer is not getting the efficiency it wants.

I do understand that all work, even at the highest levels, involves a certain amount of relatively unskilled work. No CEO can avoid walking the corridors to meetings, because they do not miraculously appear around him. Everyone must check e-mails and write responses, often relaying information that has already been decided.
However, I'm not going to get the experience I need to get better jobs by doing admin. work for other people. If others do analysis whilst I do data collection for them, how can I get experience of doing analysis (although I have plenty already, as it happens)?

This leads me on to wider questions. Is the population now over-educated for the work our economy gives us? Are we merely vastly inappropriately educated?
The indentured aspect of things enhances inequality; every difficulty anyone faces from a background with no support is a diffculty that someone with a good background can avoid. A rich person who jumps a few levels of the hierarchy by joining Daddy's company escapes the indentured servitude that anyone without such oppotunities seems to need to go through. Once this is accomplished, inevitably that person is more experienced at the best jobs, and no matter how much harder and better-paying jobs overall become, the top jobs will always be occupied by those who had a short-cut to avoid the long way round.
If we want true social mobility in a society which gives people from all backgrounds all opportunities and allows the best performers to get the top jobs, then we need to avoid big hurdles to promotion that the privileged will never experience. We can't artificially create hurdles for rich people only, which would be inefficient even if we could; we need to remove the barriers that affect everyone else.
A major barrier is any sort of investment of time. This applies to generic graduate recruitment jobs as well as research careers. A PhD is not vocational training: it is a price to pay in order to have a chance at a career in academia or other research. What training one does get from a PhD could easily  be completed in 6 months if it were distilled down to the training only.

It might be considered greedy of me to want better opportunities to get to positions of responsibility which are well-remunerated. But I think that one of the reasons these posts are so overpaid is the false belief that the people in them are rare and extraordinary people who are not easily replaced. If this is partly because of poor opportunities below them (and partly just hero-worship and good networking/PR) then the lack of supply is entirely correctable.
If we get more people wanting the top jobs and able to do them then wages will inevitably fall, and accountability will increase. If by running a company into the ground you render yourself unemployable because employers can trust plenty of new applicants for the role of running a company, you'll be less likely to do so and get away with it.

So if we were to make promotion faster, we'd pay less money and get better performance. We could even pay less money to the secretarial workers not in training. What's not to like?