Conservative commitments - 46, 35 failures

Implement the recommendations of the Smith Commission, set up to consider new powers for Scotland after the independence referendum

I haven’t looked into this much. I’m not a Scot. But I do think it likely that a commission will have thoroughly investigated the issue, and in this case is unlikely to have been unduly swayed by one set of interests. The Smith Commission recommendations are therefore more trustworthy than any arbitrary set of choices, and implementing them is reasonable.

Conservative commitments - 44, 35 failures

Give English MPs a veto over matters only affecting England

See the last one; this is near identical.

Conservative commitments - 43, 34 failures

Introduce English votes for English laws

This is the problem with regionalism. Are we a union, governed by ‘The Conservative and Unionist Party’? Or are we a collection of regions, EU-style? I would expect the Conservative and Unionist Party to favour the former. If we want English votes for English laws, why not have Warwickshire votes for Warwickshire issues, such as whether they want HS2 barging through their countryside? How about Labour votes for laws in Labour regions? We can already predict that the Conservatives won’t help solidly Labour regions much; it’s not political sense to help people who will never vote for you.

I understand the frustration that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have additional representation in their own regions, and their MPs get to vote on English issues. I sympathise with cries for greater localism and small-scale representation, and I would be happy to consider a coherent plan for delegating more power to local government.

But we have central government for a reason, and it’s hypocritical of the Conservatives to pander to reactionary nationalism whilst also pretending to support the union. They would be better off explaining their side of a complex and difficult argument rather than just taking a different side when it’s popular. The Conservatives want English votes for English laws because it consolidates their central power, as they are hugely less popular in the devolved regions. If they wanted more local representation they’d be supporting local government, but they’re cutting local government even more than central government. This is about Conservative power.

Furthermore, the Conservatives expect us to trust the government with our privacy and data; they want vast new powers for the security services to snoop on citizens’ lives (see 49), and they like to create broad new crimes that need interpretation to be applied (see 50), and we must just trust the police to be nice to us. Why not trust elected representatives from the regions to vote honestly in the best interests of the entire country?

Conservative commitments - 42, 33 failures

Reduce number of MPs to 600

This is supposedly because Parliament can’t fit them all in and it’s too administratively burdensome to cope with 650. The cost savings of cutting 50 MPs are also trumpeted. The public sector as a whole employs millions of people, so unless MPs are paying themselves well over the odds, this won’t help public finances much. The effect on democracy is more important.

But all that is just spurious justification. The real reason is that the Conservatives want an excuse to re-draw constituency boundaries. They want to indulge in nationwide gerrymandering (a term borrowed from the US, which has long recognized this issue). By controlling boundaries, they can ensure that many constituencies have a small Conservative majority, and that Labour voters are all contained in large constituencies with very big Labour majorities. This will give the Conservatives more seats for the votes that they win and could well ensure a one-party state for a generation.

It is undeniable that our electoral system needs reform. Constituencies are based on very old boundaries, and some have far more people than others, which is indeed unfair. But the whole ‘first-past-the-post’ system is unfair, with the Conservatives and Labour needing up to 100 times fewer voters for every seat that they win. In the recent election, the Conservatives were best off from the current system, but for many years Labour has benefitted more.

It is disgusting that the Conservatives can find an important point of principle to get upset about when it benefits them to do so, but they ignore far bigger and more serious flaws in our system that work in their favour. It would also help if this policy admitted that it was about rigging the electoral system, not about reducing MP numbers.

Conservative commitments - 41, 32 failures

End taxpayer-funded six-figure pay-offs for the best-paid public sector workers

I can’t argue with this one. In almost all cases such pay-offs are wildly inappropriate, and not just in the public sector. It’s just that shareholders don’t exercise their power appropriately in companies, and here taxpayers have insufficient control. In an ideal world, we’d also legislate to give shareholders greater power, and might well ban all such pay-offs. This might involve requiring well-paid employees to have contracts that allow their removal without much compensation, just like the rest of us. Companies might want to do this, but if one company does it alone, it’ll struggle to keep good employees. We need to make it widespread.

There are some cases in which big pay-offs are appropriate, but as long as we specify that compensation for, for example, injuries, is not affected by this rule we won’t prevent genuinely deserving people getting justice.

Conservative commitments - 40, 32 failures

Guarantee those who work for a big company and the public sector entitlement to Volunteering Leave for three days per year

Paid for by whom? I know that businesses would have complained vocally if they were expected to pay, so this must be akin to maternity leave and be refundable by the state. I have a lot to say about the value of charity, and the basic conclusion is that it is less valuable than state aid, which is universal and better targeted at where there is real need. If the Conservatives really understood the problems (there can be no doubt that this policy is motivated by a genuine desire to help) they would be putting state money into helping the poor, rather than dismantling universal state mechanisms.

Since there’s so little to say directly about this policy, let’s consider why people feel the need to volunteer. Is it because of such obvious deprivation and need around them? Maybe it’s because so much work nowadays is mind-numbing and soul-destroying. Perhaps the Conservatives should offer to remove the need to volunteer. If you work all day just to make money for someone else, and your product is pointless tat, you are going to need fulfilment elsewhere in life. A lot of the modern economy is a merry-go-round of demand for products that only have value because of advertising allowing people to make money to spend on products they only want because of advertising. If this policy is about helping people to feel fulfilled, there are far bigger issues to address.

Some estimates have put the cost to the economy at £24bn, with a cost of more than £1bn directly to government. If government is to fund all volunteering, it will foot the full £24bn bill. I don’t believe that figure, but it shows the scale of this promise.

Conservative commitments - 39, 31 failures

Freeze the BBC licence fee

As the BBC is a high-quality, low-cost broadcaster it’s clearly terrible news for Sky, which costs a lot. Furthermore, the BBC’s charter that requires it to be unbiased means that it doesn’t give the flattering, right-wing coverage that online echo-chambers and less regulated media outlets do. The further someone gets from the truth, the more objectionable they will find an organisation that is committed to it.

I therefore take people’s dislike of the BBC as a convenient measure for how loony they are. There are perfectly good ways of complaining to the BBC about its impartiality, and complaints are investigated. The endless chorus of criticism serves three interlinked purposes: big media organisations put the boot into a major competitor that can’t fight back; it encourages people to distrust the truth and believe what the organisation is peddling; and it creates a marketing niche.

Given that inflation does indeed occur, a freeze is effectively a cut in income. The BBC is one of the most widely-recognised and widely-trusted media organisations in the world, with a global reach. When the Syrian government condemned western countries’ interference with the Middle East, it attacked America, because they have power, and Britain, because the BBC’s Arabic service was telling Syrians what was actually happening, in contrast with Syrian state propaganda. Similarly, Afghans liked to listen to the World Service. The Foreign Office has cut support for the World Service.

Advertising isn’t a perfect way to fund television instead: advertising does have costs. Beyond the insidious effects of advertising on programme quality, there’s the simple fact that this money doesn’t magically appear. We pay for it in consumer goods. I haven’t been able to find a relatively old article I once read that calculated the total cost to an average consumer of ITV, but it worked out that it was more than the license fee. And although the licence fee is regressive, a bit like a poll tax, advertising is no better. The poor spend a much higher proportion of their income on basic goods, so they’ll pay more for advertising than the rich.

The BBC might focus too much on ratings, because its executives have come from commercial broadcasters, and it might have a stupid interpretation of ‘unbiased’, in which science deniers get an equal platform with truth, but these are not complaints about its overarching purpose, nor any reason to cut funding.

Yes, as people give up on televisions and watch ‘television’ on numerous devices we will need to give up on the licence fee, which needed reforming anyway. But I see no proposal to replace the lost money for the BBC. This is simply business bias against competitors. It shouldn’t be the Conservatives’ job to do competitors’ dirty work by shutting down the BBC. Media organisations should just work hard to deserve their audiences.

The licence fee is currently worth £3.6bn to the BBC, so a freeze, preventing it rising with inflation, will be an effective cut of £377 million per year by the end of the Parliament, assuming inflation at the BoE target of 2%. A cut of 10% is important. Further news shows that the BBC has instead agreed to fund free licences for old people. I’m not sure why old people get free licences, but since this is worth £650m per year, it seems that the BBC has been pushed into a 20% cut right there. I’d like to see a business take a 20% cut and survive. Perhaps  the government should mandate that Sky charges 20% less for all services.

Conservative commitments - 38, 30 failures

Providing same-day GP appointments for over 75s

Yes, everyone likes good medical service. The questions here are: how much will it cost, and why only for over-75s?

GPs have been very unwilling to work on weekends, which is another government commitment, and are already very busy taking on extra work commissioning all healthcare, which the Conservatives forced them to do in their latest bull-in-china-shop escapade with the NHS. GPs complain about being overworked, and many chose to be GPs because of the work-life balance (hospital doctors have to work demanding shift patterns and be on-call, at least until they become senior consultants). If GP contracts do not already force them to work extra time they’ll extract a heavy price for being forced to do so, and even then it might actually have to be in the form of more GPs to do the extra work. It takes 10 years to train a GP, so the Conservatives probably won’t be delivering that part of the policy any time soon. As I predicted when first drafting this, GPs think this policy is bonkers.

The over-75s are presumably a priority group because they’re more likely to be in urgent need of care. But we already have a way to describe people in urgent need: we call them ‘emergencies’, or ‘people in urgent need’. Why would we limit it to old people? To make them realise that they’ll benefit when they think about who they’ll vote for. It helps a benefit impinge on people’s consciousness when it’s defined as being for them, rather than for a situation that they might find themselves in but hope not to.

In addition to excluding many urgent cases, this measure will help ensure inefficiency by giving 75 year-olds the ability to disrupt GPs’ schedules even if it’s just loneliness or hypochondria. This policy takes us back to the worst of Labour’s target-driven NHS.

Conservative commitments - 37, 29 failures

Scrapping the cap on higher education student numbers

This is only doable because the Conservatives have made students pay for their education through tuition fees. Students are, by definition, still in education and therefore unable to pay for education, making this an intrinsically regressive and socially unjust policy. If apprenticeships are worth funding, so is higher education, with all the externalities that I mentioned back then.

The more students who study anything defined as higher education, the less money there is for any one person. This policy will therefore help low-grade courses displace talented students on demanding degrees, including degrees that the Conservatives regard as worthwhile, such as engineering and mathematics.

I have been persuaded that a wide range of degrees is actually useful and beneficial to society, but that doesn’t matter here; the Conservative policy directly conflicts with their own stated preferences.

If we lifted the cap on university places and funded only the top few universities, such as by making Russell Group university places free, that would be good. Talented individuals from any background could get a high-level education, with merit deciding who got the funding.

It’s a shame the Liberal Democrats got such a bad reputation about tuition fees, when it was a Conservative part of a coalition deal. The Conservatives slyly escaped any repercussions for it when it was mostly their responsibility. This new policy will help ensure that another generation of young people gets heavily into debt. Student loans are no longer cheap debt at low interest rates; the students will pay dearly for the privilege of education. A large proportion of the additional students won’t be people converting their life prospects from meaningless, low-paid drudgery to being well-paid high-flyers. The correlations between educational attainment and pay are not (necessarily) causations, as any statistician will agree. I don’t have to rely on logic to make this point either: the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has issued a report noting that most graduates are not in ‘graduate jobs’, and that our conveyor belt of degrees is not leading to more high-skilled jobs. This is not a supply issue.

People who come from wealthy backgrounds tend to do well in life, and also tend to do well in education. Education is a sorting/signalling method, and we have underemployment in this country not because people need masters degrees to serve coffee but because there is not enough demand for their supposedly higher skills. Conservative thought shows a remarkable ability to believe that the markets/business can and will solve everything… except when they’re not solving things, in which case it must be because of some other limiting factor. We do not have a population with too few degrees holding back productivity. We have too few jobs that pay degree-holders well.

The extra degrees aren’t even likely to be high-quality ones. This policy will encourage impressionable young people to take on expensive debt in pursuit of an aspiration that this won’t help them achieve. It’s selling false hope and it’s wrong.

The cost of student loans is high; it has been estimated to be 43p for every £1 loaned. However, the effective state subsidy is much higher for low-paid graduates, which lifting the cap is likely to produce. At that point it’s more like 93%, or £36k per person. Further effects, such as not expecting such generous earnings growth, could increase the % level further. It’s hard to forecast student enrolments, but there are data about student numbers, which are already increasing. If this policy change only creates another 30,000 students a year (compared to the millions in higher education) it will still cost the government £1 bn a year. More students will increase that figure further.

Conservative commitments - 36, 28 failures

Protecting the schools budget; increasing the amount spent on schools as the number of pupils increases

‘On current pupil number forecasts, there will be a real-terms increase in the schools budget in the next Parliament.’ Let’s be fair: this is being very clear that the budget is only going to increase because there’ll be more children. They’re not selling this as an increase without letting us know that it’s not really. So although there’s not much here, I respect this policy as well-worded and honest.

           There is, however, more to their education funding than this. Free school meals for all infants makes perfect sense. It’s a good, healthy policy that will help with efficiency and prevent pointless paperwork. But then there is ‘We will not allow state schools to make a profit’. I know what they mean here: they mean that schools which are well-managed and try to run surpluses, perhaps to save up for much-needed investment, will have that money taken from them. It means that instead of empowered head-teachers and local and flexible planning there will be money wasted as heads spend their money wherever they can, no matter the priority, because they know it’ll be taken away if they save it. This is coming from a government keen on localism.

           Overall, let’s say it’s mostly alright, and we’ll accept this as reasonable.

Conservative commitments - 35, 28 failures

Investing £7bn over the course of the next Parliament to provide "good school places"  
By which they mean the investment they’ve already discussed. It’s not as if a political party will ever promise some money for schools and say that it’s going to provide bad school places or to cut places. This is just another phrase intended to stick in the minds of voters whether it is justified or not. As far as I can tell from the manifesto, this commitment is just the ‘build free schools’ policy re-hashed.

Conservative commitments - 34, 27 failures

Extend the "deport first, appeal later" principle to cover all immigration appeals and judicial reviews, apart from asylum cases

Seems reasonable to me. I guess Amnesty International might have a few concerns, but I do think that some of these organisations aspire to too much. Someone who comes here against our regulations is wasting our time and money. It might not be a crime, but it certainly doesn’t mean that such people should be rewarded even temporarily with the lifestyle they came here to achieve. Until I know more, I’ll say this is a good idea.

Conservative commitments - 33, 27 failures

Cap the level of skilled migration from outside the EU at 20,700

Why would we do this? What reason could there ever be for imposing such a tiny limit on skilled workers? This is here because the Conservatives have an overall migration target and skilled workers from outside the EU are an easy target. Sadly, they’re precisely the people we do want to be filling any migration quota we impose. Even people who are concerned about immigration are not too concerned about highly skilled doctors, nurses, engineers and others sharing their knowledge and expertise.

Universities are already struggling with recruitment as VISA restrictions hit. We can’t be internationally competitive in research, which is a Conservative aspiration, if we refuse the best people entry. There are other concerns as well, such as splitting families apart with arbitrary income thresholds.

242,000 skilled migrants came to the UK in 2013, of whom 94,000 were not from the EU. The numbers from the EU have increased as the numbers from the rest of the world have dropped. This is apparently Conservative policy: replace Commonwealth citizens, or international job recruitment, with European citizens who already have the right to come here and come in greater numbers when we keep out other people.

Despite already having no formal route for unskilled migration from outside the EU, we received 107,000 such migrants between 2010 and 2014 (although some might have been skilled migrants in low-skill jobs). If we get 27,000 a year with no cap at all, it seems that the Conservative plans to cap skilled migration at 20,700 will simply ensure that most foreigners in the country will be unskilled (skilled workers are more likely to obey laws and try formal migration procedures). That will help cultivate xenophobia, which will benefit the Conservatives.

This policy will be a disaster and will negate much of the investment promised elsewhere. Yet again, it is all about seeming to be tough on migration rather than working out what parts of migration matter, whether we want to be tough at all and whether there will be side effects. As well as the indirect negation of other investment, and the big effect on our international reputation, we have already seen a 40% drop in a £5 bn market, giving us a direct hit to the economy of £2bn.

Conservative commitments - 32, 26 failures

Insisting new EU member states' citizens do not have free movement rights "until their economies have converged much more closely with existing member states"  
I had a vague hope of getting to some important issues, but it seems that we’re stuck on EU migrants. If the previous policies are expected to be effective, we don’t need this: we’ll already have ensured that migrants don’t cost any money. If the previous policies aren’t expected to be effective, why have them? This is a waste of space and time that is only here to try to appeal to voters who believe migration to be a big issue. Again, it would be responsible to attack the big issues and inform people why, not to flail around wherever an opinion poll says might catch a few votes. But since this one is a bit different, let’s just note that immigrants contribute to Britain’s successful business. Without skilled EU graduates British business would not be competitive. The Conservatives have a dilemma. Do they want successful business or no immigrants?

Conservative commitments - 31, 25 failures

Requiring EU jobseekers who have not found a job within six months to leave

They have to support themselves (previous policies have removed their benefits) and we want them to leave? Why would we do that? If we were supporting them, that would make sense: if there’s no work for their skills, we’re not going to pay them forever. But if they’re bringing money into the country by supporting themselves, why would we have a problem? If we accept the previous policy, we ought to reject this one and vice versa. This policy is therefore a failure.

Conservative commitments - 30, 24 fails

 Ending the ability of EU jobseekers to claim any job-seeking benefits

Does this seem familiar? I think that it might be good to offer a month or two of job-seeking benefits. After all, it’s quite hard to engage in recruitment from another country, and we do quite legitimately have jobs that we might want EU migrants to fill. This policy might also be illegally discriminatory. Nonetheless, let’s move on before we never see a non-EU-migrant policy again.

Conservative commitments - 29. 23 fails

Introducing a four-year residency requirement for social housing for EU migrants

Same as before: this policy is a bit of a waste of time. But we have more limited housing than we do tax credits, so I suppose I’ll let this one slide. It’s right that people don’t just turn up and take money from us, so although this wouldn’t be my focus, I can’t complain about it.

Conservative commitments - 28, 23 fails

 Negotiating new EU rules so people will have to be earning in the UK for four years before they can claim tax credits and child benefits

Again, I don’t have a problem with this one. But there is a problem with both of these policies: they’re a waste of time. The amount of money that the government loses from EU welfare or paying £3,000 extra to people with numerous benefits claims is tiny. And by tiny, I mean in a government context. I’m sure any person would appreciate £3,000 extra, but the government spends billions. Government rounding errors are in the tens or hundreds of millions. Furthermore, civil servants identify over 1,000 legal changes a year that are needed and require parliamentary approval; Parliament gets through no more than 100. Every policy that takes ministers’ time pushes away long-standing needs in the backlog.

It is, of course, right to pursue justice even when implementing it might not seem cost-efficient. Justice is priceless. But negotiating with the EU has so many more problems: loss of international respect, a lot of time and money, possible withdrawal of benefits and tolerance for UK citizens abroad etc. That’s why this policy is a waste of time. It’s more public relations management, playing to voters’ fears rather than educate them about how important these things actually are. I can just imagine someone in Conservative head office thinking ‘we need to seem anti-EU and anti-benefits…. Hmm, let’s put the two together: we’re against EU migrants getting benefits!’ Yet again, the Conservatives have conflated a stroke of PR genius with sensible policy, which is unacceptable from the party claiming to be responsible.

Conservative commitments - 27, 22 fails

Lowering the benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000 (with exemptions for those receiving Disability Living Allowance or the Personal Independence Payment)

Although I do believe in social justice, unlike most people who are vocal about it, I don’t really care about this one. It’s perfectly possible to live off £20k a year, and it’ silly that individuals can farm benefits, gathering more and more until they have a very high income. A lot of this comes from paying people who have children, and I think that’s wrong. People who can’t afford children should get condoms or abortions, not extra money. And even though we give parents money, we still have deprived children; trusting parents to give children the care and attention that helps them thrive is not a good system, as plenty of people drop through the cracks.

We also hear complaints that poor people can’t live in the places they’re accustomed to living if they have less money. I’m not sympathetic to any complaints that people deserve any special government funding or attention to stay in place. The wealthy should move if they can’t afford a sensible land tax and own an expensive property, and the poor should move if they live in an expensive area and can’t afford it. Tough luck folks. You love your local area; I love high quality alcohol and chocolate. The government has no obligation to satisfy either of us.

The Conservatives said that this policy would save £135m a year although some people disagree.

Conservative commitments - 26, 22 fails

A freeze on working age benefits for two years from April 2016 (exemptions for disability and pensioner benefits)

In hard times when money is tight we really need to be mean to the poor while cutting taxes for the rich. And we definitely need to make sure that the poor who are getting the least are the ones who get no more. I really do struggle to understand why pensions should be protected. If a pensioner is disabled, there are disability payments. Where there is greater need, we already have a mechanism to provide it. So why should pensioners who are perfectly able to work and often have wealth get more money than the poor who can’t even find a job?

Pensioners might have paid NI all their lives, but they didn’t pay enough. The average age of death was 50 for men when pensions were introduced, giving many people no pension at all, as the pension age was 70. People also tended to be less healthy. We now have people living for almost 30 more years whilst perfectly able to work but getting money from younger people from 65… because the oldies voted to get money from young people. This doesn’t make it fair or right. It’s merely far-right.

The direct savings to government of not paying poor people enough money have been announced as £3bn per year. I suspect that might be an exaggeration, but someone else can do a detailed analysis.

Conservative commitments -25, 21 fails

Raising the threshold for the 40p rate of tax so that nobody under £50,000 pays the rate

Bad grammar annoys me. A person isn’t under £50,000 (unless he’s buried under a pile of cash). A person’s earnings might be under £50,000. This is a straightforward tax cut for the well-off. I understand that someone earning above £43k might not feel rich; an overpriced home, expensive children and a lot of travel costs can drain a decent income very fast. But the fact remains that both the average and median wages are in the £20ks. Individuals earning twice that are not the ones who need help from a limited government budget undergoing severe austerity. I’ll do rather well from this change, but I still think it’s wrong.

   The total cost to government is apparently ‘forecast’ to vary over the coming years. The first set of changes will cost £1.6 bn per year by the end of this Parliament, but that will only take us half-way to the manifesto commitment. It’s hard to predict what further changes would do, and I can’t find an attempt, but let’s just double the cost so far to be over £3bn per year.

Conservative commitments - 24, 20 fails

Passing a new law that would mean all those working 30 hours a week and earning the minimum wage will not pay income tax on earnings

This is the same commitment as raising the personal allowance to £12,500, just re-phrased: see 23. It’s a good policy, and I suppose it might be worth explaining and repeating, especially if by re-phrasing it you can make it sound as though there are more policies than there are. I'll call this a failure of a policy, as re-phrasing your best ones to make it sound like you've got lots of good ones is misleading.

Conservative commitments -23, 19 fails

Taking everyone who earns less than £12,500 out of income tax

Great news! The Conservatives should be genuinely proud of this one. It’s a shame that they stole it from the Liberal Democrats, but it’s good to recognize good ideas even when you didn’t think of them. It isn’t unalloyed brilliance, though.

           Firstly, this only affects people who were earning more than £10,600 a year (which was the previous personal allowance). People who can’t find a job aren’t helped, and people earning a lot are helped (up to £100,000, when people begin to lose the personal allowance). Helping the rich and not the most poor isn’t ideal, but it’s undeniable that there are a lot of quite poor people who will be much better off because of this.

           Raising the minimum wage to a living wage would also make people better off and put the costs in the right place: with employers who would otherwise be getting a state subsidy for low wages, which is effectively what lower taxes or tax credits are. I suppose things can’t be perfect.

           I would also prefer a universal income to a personal allowance. A universal income could replace pensions and jobseekers’ allowances as well as the personal allowance, making things much simpler, efficient and fairer. But that idea, despite its clear merits, is not going to happen any time soon. Until it does, the Conservatives are right to raise the personal allowance a bit more. They have repeated this point at 7 and 24.

           The current cost of the personal allowance to government is about £78 bn per year. I don’t know how valuable increasing it will be, but a straight proportional increase would be an additional £13 bn or so per year. Despite all this, I still think this is a good policy.

Conservative commitments - 22, 19 fails

Investing £6.9bn in the UK's research infrastructure up to 2021

Another one in the right direction! Three in a row is incredible. Overall, there shouldn’t be much complaint about protecting the science budget or investing in new major research facilities. Only government can fund major facilities, because the long-term benefits and capital involved are too much for most companies.

Other things in the manifesto on this subject aren’t so good. I will quibble with R&D tax credits, which are open to abuse without good monitoring and prosecution of offences, but let’s call that a different issue. I’d also quibble with the idea of university enterprise zones, another pointless gimmick. Finally, I take serious issue with supporting the car industry. The future lies in mass transit, remote working and on-demand self-driven cars, not in our current model of universal car ownership and congestion. Investment here isn’t research; it’s subsidy because of lobbying.

Nonetheless, the research strategy isn’t too bad. My own opinion is that research should be a central function of governments and should be funded far, far more than currently, but that’s definitely a matter we could debate and not a matter of fact. This is £1.15bn/year in the right direction. Let’s have more.

Leave corruption behind

Inspired by a conversation, and conveniently linked to this news story about how Americans don't take their annual leave:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34123906

          Although it’s clear that the USA does have more of a problem than the UK, we all need a clear re-think about our working practices. Americans might not be taking their annual leave, but we’re all expected to work long hours.

          Let’s take a moment to assess how this expectation might gradually develop. Obviously some unpleasant managers will want to work their underlings hard no matter what other social norms prevail, but this will only contribute to the process.

          To start with, an ambitious person might think that an extra half an hour until 5.30 will help get something done on time, or help him stand out from the crowd and get promoted. As more people do it, it becomes the people who merely fulfil their contracts who stand out, and extra work is a necessity. Job descriptions gradually change to include more work as expectations change and more ‘productivity’ becomes normal. Why would a company promote someone who was less productive? Why would it keep someone on who performed less well?

          This vicious circle of competitive people working harder and harder to stand out is a race to the bottom. Every bit of free time a person puts into work contributes to making that extra work less impressive overall. This is a standard economic problem that has been addressed in game theory; it benefits me most to put in extra time when no-one else does, and each increment of extra time is of negligible value compared to the promotion I want, or keeping my job. The same applies to everyone else, so everyone puts in the time, and then no-one gets the benefit.

          In our standard economic models, someone else working extra time wouldn’t matter. Jobs are created for the skills people have, and if I am good at my job then I will find a promotion no matter how much time I put in. Theoretically, I shouldn’t care if someone else is working harder; that person has made a different set of choices and is reaping the costs and benefits. But there isn’t really an infinite supply of jobs at every level; there is a limited supply. And, as our experience of training vastly more university graduates has shown, we don’t get more skilled jobs for a more skilled workforce; we get underemployment, with skilled workers in low-skill jobs. I am competing with others for promotion, and that means that I won’t get it if some of them work long enough to be more productive.

          Fundamentally, jobs and employment is a social ranking system. We long ago moved away from working to survive; a person can survive in this country without working at all, courtesy of our social welfare system. Not only is there a limited supply of any promotion, but at the top end of the scale jobs most certainly are limited. We only have 650 (currently)  MPs and that number will not increase even if many people want the job. There are only a few corporate CEOs. Even if I could get a promotion in the middle of the jobs market without working extra hours, these jobs of clearly limited supply will only take people who get the most work done. And they’re not just limited to people right at the top; making partner at a firm of accountants or lawyers, or publishing enough papers as an academic to be a lecturer now almost requires long hours.

          Far from making my own life decisions, unaffected by everyone else’s, I now need to work harder just to stay still, and my chances of getting a very top job are much lower, because other people’s choices have a bad effect on me. This situation, where others’ choices cause diffuse harm, is exactly what regulation is for. We regulate pollution because pollution is a bad thing that everyone suffers, but the benefit is something very specific to the polluter, who overall would benefit from polluting if he weren’t stopped.

          This system has a number of nasty side effects (negative externalities) beyond the immediate loss of free time or job opportunity. This is because the ability to devote time to a job isn’t evenly spread across the population. Some of us are single people who have to do all our own housework; some people have not only social lives that are leisure, but social duties that they are also compelled to fulfil. For example, some people need to care for children or elderly parents. Other people have supportive partners or parents who do all the work for them; youngsters in London might live with their parents, able to accept less pay but also work harder, with food and cleaning done for them.

          Because we allow a race to the bottom getting and keeping a good job is becoming not just about the decision to value it more highly than others, but about the ability to spend that time. Some people have demands on their time that others do not, and don’t yet have the money to pay to avoid it (for example by hiring a nanny). A system that allows free time to stand in as a proxy for ability allows the rich or those with social support to secure an unfair proportion of the better jobs, and thereby stay rich.

          The old social model of working men supported by helpful wives who do all the housework hasn’t entirely died, but nowadays there is a lot more variation in social structure. This is supposedly a good thing, but people doing things differently are silently penalized for their choice if it takes 1.5 people to make 1 great career.

          I have seen numerous feminist articles promoting the aspiration that women can ‘have it all’; that they can be properly involved with their children and have a great career. I don’t want to say categorically that you can’t succeed in a career if you spend a decent amount of evenings with your children, but I will say that it’s much less likely. It is the change in probability that matters for society as much as an absolute barrier.

          I think that the feminist articles that feed this aspiration are wrong. Yes, women in partnerships could have more than they currently do if men would do their fair share of housework. But to stand the best chance of a stellar career in today’s society requires an investment of time that directly conflicts with having the rest of ‘it all’. By focussing simply on negotiating a fair relationship feminists are missing a wider societal issue that currently affects more women than men, and are instead focussing only on where specifically women suffer.

          If women can convince men to be more fair in relationships they still won’t solve the problem, but since it’ll take a while for all men to be reasonable, feminists will be able to pursue this red herring for ages. But if we were to prevent people from overworking we would not only solve the problems affecting women with many commitments outside work, but also help men who have commitments outside of work. I disagree with encouraging women to work more hours by finding partners who will support them; I think that we should be tackling the problem that great careers need that support.

          As a brief aside, it’s nice to have a society which recognises people’s social connections, and I’m not suggesting that we ban such connections, even though I am promoting an ideal of individualism in which one person alone can achieve things. In fact, if we insist that a person is only allowed to do so much, we force people to have time for social connections. Social connections are unevenly distributed, and if we want those with the most merit to succeed, we need to ensure that social connections don’t interfere. I will admit I don’t like the nuclear family model of society, but this isn’t an attack on traditional values, as I am about to suggest.

          I’ve laid out what I think is a convincing argument so far, and included within it are some hints that money and time are interchangeable. Rich people can hire nannies to do childcare; almost everyone works in order to get money. Everyone knows that ‘time is money’. If you’re not convinced yet that we need to regulate working hours, let me describe things another way. Is it right for me to pay my manager to give me good reports and a glowing reference? Would you be upset if I paid a recruiter to give me a job you’d applied for?

          Those things are probably illegal. Yet what is working extra time except giving a free gift to a company in exchange for advancement? It is corruption, just as if it were a cash donation.

          An economist might complain that it’s simply negotiation; the effect is someone offering more for the money. But the point of corruption is that it’s hidden. I am sure that bribes to get your paperwork done first compete with each other, and the person offering a lower bribe doesn’t get his done fastest.

          You might say that you give your time to the company, but a bribe to a person. But your time goes towards your manager’s goals and objectives, and a bribe helps a person accept a lower salary, saving the company money. The difference isn’t that clear-cut here either.

          The effect of bribery is to allow the rich to gain an unfair advantage. We have banned that, but we still allow the time-rich to gain the same advantage. There’s a correlation between the rich and the time-rich, just as there’s a correlation between the time-poor and women, but these proxy categories don’t fully describe what’s happening.

          I understand that people want to help their family, and want to work hard to do the best for those they love. I’m not against that; I’m against people working harder and harder for the same wage afraid of losing out. I want to improve people’s social lives, not cut them out of life. But to improve people’s social lives, we need to cut their link to people’s work. Work can and should be individualistic, but life is so much more than work, just as a rich life is much more than individualism.

          I’ve argued elsewhere that we need to stop competing for social status through wealth, and I think that our current system of overworking people is genuinely corrupt. The EU Working Time Directive is an important step in redirecting people to spend their leisure time, rather than money, and we shouldn’t allow people to opt out, just as we don’t allow people to opt out of anti-bribery legislation. The next step is to go for 3 months off a year!