'Is Modi a King of Good Times Only?'

 

In Broken Britain, even the statistics don’t work

 Tim Harford in The FT 

From the bone-jarring potholes to the human excrement regularly released into British rivers, the country’s creaking infrastructure is one of the most visceral manifestations of the past 15 years of stagnation. To these examples of the shabby neglect of the essential underpinnings of modern life, let me add another: our statistical infrastructure. 

In her new book, How Infrastructure Works, engineering professor Deb Chachra argues that infrastructure is an extraordinary collective achievement and a triumph of long-term thinking. She adds that a helpful starting point for defining infrastructure is “all of the stuff that you don’t think about”. 

Statistical infrastructure certainly matches those descriptions. The idea that someone needs to decide what information to gather, and how to gather it, rarely crosses our mind — any more than we give much thought to what we flush down the toilet, or the fact that clean water comes from taps and electricity from the flick of a switch. 

As a result the UK’s statistical system, administrative databases, and evidence base for policy are suffering the same depredations as the nation’s roads, prisons and sewers. Easiest to measure are the inputs: the Office for National Statistics faces a 5 per cent cut in real terms to its budget this year, has been losing large numbers of experienced staff, and is hiring dramatically fewer than five years ago. 

But it is more instructive to consider some of the problems. The ONS has struggled to produce accurate estimates of something as fundamental as the unemployment rate, as it tries to divide resources between the traditional-but-foundering Labour Force Survey, and a streamlined-but-delayed new version which has been in the pipeline since 2017. 

That is an embarrassment, but the ONS can’t be held responsible for other gaps in our statistical system. A favourite example of Will Moy, chief executive of the Campbell Collaboration, a non-profit producer of systematic reviews of evidence in social science, is that we know more about the nation’s golfing habits than about trends in robbery or rape. This is because the UK’s survey of sporting participation is larger than the troubled Crime Survey of England and Wales, recently stripped of its status as an official National Statistic because of concerns over data quality. Surely nobody made a deliberate decision to establish those curious statistical priorities, but they are the priorities nonetheless. They exemplify the British state’s haphazard approach in deciding what to measure and what to neglect. 

This is foolishness. The government spends more than £1,200bn a year — nearly £18,000 for each person in the country — and without solid statistics, that money is being spent with eyes shut. 

For an example of the highs and lows of statistical infrastructure, consider the National Tutoring Programme, which was launched in 2020 in an effort to offset the obvious harms caused by the pandemic’s disruption to the school system. When the Department for Education designed the programme, it was able to turn to the Education Endowment Foundation for a solid, practical evidence base for what type of intervention was likely to work well. The answer: high-quality tutoring in small groups. 

This was the statistical system, in its broadest sense, working as it should: the EEF is a charity backed by the Department for Education, and when the crisis hit it had already gathered the evidence base to provide solutions. Yet — as the Centre for Public Data recently lamented — the DfE lacked the most basic data needed to evaluate its own programme: how many disadvantaged pupils were receiving tutoring, the quality of the tutoring, and what difference it made. The National Tutoring Programme could have gathered this information from the start, collecting evidence by design. But it did not. And as a result, we are left guessing about whether or not this was money well spent. 

Good data is not cheap to collect — but it is good value, especially when thoughtfully commissioned or built into policymaking by default. One promising avenue is support for systematic research summaries such as those produced by the Cochrane Collaboration for medicine and the Campbell Collaboration for social science and policy. If you want to understand how to promote literacy in primary schools, or whether neighbourhood policing is effective, a good research synthesis will tell you what the evidence says. Just as important, by revealing the gaps in our knowledge it provides a basis for funding new research. 

Another exciting opportunity is for the government to gather and link the administrative data we all produce as a byproduct of our interactions with officialdom. A well-designed system can safeguard personal privacy while unlocking all manner of insights. 

But fundamentally, policymakers need to take statistics seriously. These numbers are the eyes and ears of the state. If we neglect them, waste and mismanagement are all but inevitable. 

Chachra writes, “We should be seeing [infrastructure systems], celebrating them, and protecting them. Instead, these systems have been invisible and taken for granted.” 

We have taken a lot of invisible systems for granted over the past 20 years. The Resolution Foundation has estimated that in this period, UK public investment has lagged the OECD average by a cumulative half a trillion pounds. That is a lot of catching up to do. The next government will need some quick wins. Investing in better statistical infrastructure might be one of them.

Salman Khan: How AI will Revolutionise Education

 

What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2024

 The experts at Good Judgment weigh in on the coming year thanks to The Economist

Nov 13th 2023

Journalists and commentators often make predictions about the future using ambiguous, carefully chosen words. Other forecasters prefer the more precise language of numbers. Good Judgment, a forecasting firm, has recruited many such people to its team of superforecasters, who work together to provide detailed, specific forecasts. Here are their predictions for events in 2024.

image: the economist

image: the economist

image: the economist

Forecasting winner

Congratulations to Zane Stucker, a legal professional based in the New York metro area, who has won The World Ahead 2023 forecasting challenge organised in collaboration with Good Judgment. Like previous winners, he has been invited to join Good Judgment’s professional superforecasting team.

Could you be a superforecaster, too? Test your own prediction skills in our 2024 forecasting challenge, which runs until October 2024 at gjopen.com/economist

A Level Economics 49: Market Failure

In a free market economy, the allocation of goods and services is determined by the forces of supply and demand. Producers decide what to produce and how much based on what consumers are willing to pay (demand), and consumers decide what to buy based on the prices set by producers (supply). The goal of a free market is to achieve an efficient allocation of resources, where goods and services are produced in quantities that match consumers' desires and preferences.

Efficient Allocation of Resources:

An efficient allocation of resources means that the available resources (such as labor, capital, and materials) are used to produce the right mix of goods and services that maximize overall welfare or satisfaction in society. In a perfectly competitive free market, the equilibrium price and quantity are determined where the demand and supply curves intersect. At this point, the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded, and there is no incentive for producers or consumers to change their behavior.

Explanation of Market Failure and Efficiency:

In a perfectly competitive market, the free market equilibrium output is determined where the demand and supply curves intersect. At this point, the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded, and there is no incentive for producers or consumers to change their behavior. This equilibrium results in allocative efficiency, where the resources are allocated to produce the quantity of goods and services that maximize overall social welfare.

Example of Efficiency at Equilibrium:

Let's consider the market for smartphones, assuming it is perfectly competitive. The equilibrium price and quantity are determined by the intersection of the demand and supply curves. At this equilibrium, both consumers and producers achieve the maximum possible welfare. Consumers benefit from purchasing smartphones at the equilibrium price, and producers benefit from selling smartphones at the same price.

However, market failure can occur due to various factors that prevent the free market from reaching allocative efficiency and maximizing consumer and producer surplus.

Examples of Market Failures:

1. Externalities: Externalities are costs or benefits imposed on third parties who are not directly involved in a transaction. If an activity generates negative externalities (e.g., pollution from manufacturing), the social cost exceeds the private cost, leading to overproduction and an inefficient allocation of resources.

Example: Suppose a factory emits pollution while producing smartphones, imposing health costs on nearby residents. The market equilibrium may result in a higher quantity of smartphones being produced, but the social cost of pollution is not reflected in the equilibrium price, leading to inefficiency.

2. Public Goods: Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, meaning individuals cannot be excluded from their benefits, and one person's consumption does not diminish the availability for others. Since private firms cannot exclude people from using public goods, they are typically underprovided by the free market.

Example: National defense is a public good. If left to the free market, firms may not invest adequately in national defense, as they cannot charge individual consumers for its use.

3. Information Asymmetry: Information asymmetry occurs when one party in a transaction has more information than the other, leading to adverse selection or moral hazard problems.

Example: In the market for used smartphones, sellers may have more information about the condition of the phone than buyers. This information asymmetry can lead to market failure, with buyers potentially paying more for a smartphone that is of lower quality than expected.

4. Market Power and Monopolies: When a single seller or a small group of firms have significant market power, they can set prices higher than the competitive equilibrium, leading to reduced consumer surplus and inefficiency.

Example: A dominant smartphone company may use its market power to set high prices for its products, limiting consumer choice and causing inefficiency in the market.

In conclusion, market failures occur when the free market fails to achieve allocative efficiency and maximize consumer and producer surplus. Externalities, public goods, information asymmetry, and market power are some of the factors that can lead to market failures. In response to these failures, governments may intervene through regulations, taxes, subsidies, or the provision of public goods to improve resource allocation and promote overall welfare.

One group of people can’t substitute their way out of inflation

Tim Harford in The FT

In a laboratory in College Station, Texas, in 1990, six lab rats pressed levers and lapped at tubes as root beer and tonic water were released. They were participating in the quest for an elusive quarry: the Giffen good. 

Robert Giffen was born in Lanarkshire in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s accession. He would become by turns assistant editor at The Economist, chief statistician at the Board of Trade, President of the Royal Statistical Society and co‑founder of the Royal Economic Society. An eminent Victorian indeed, even if one biographer sniffed, “He was one of those figures . . . whose not inconsiderable power and prestige appears to be disproportionate to their actual contribution to economic science.” Ouch. 

Yet Giffen’s name is known to every economics student. This is not because of the research he published, but because of a thought experiment which reached his contemporary Alfred Marshall, who put it in his inescapable textbook Principles of Economics. The idea is that certain goods might be consumed more when their prices rise, because the increased cost backs consumers into a corner. 

Here’s how I imagined it, as an impoverished student. My staple diet was jacket potatoes with cheese or tuna mayo, bought from a nearby kebab van. Imagine that the price of potatoes rose. Ordinarily, I’d be expected to buy fewer potatoes and more of something else. 

The problem is everything else was still more expensive than potatoes. With my budget squeezed, I couldn’t afford the luxury of the cheese and tuna topping. The missing calories would come from . . . more potatoes. 

In this example, potatoes are a “Giffen good”. Potatoes were a major part of my diet; when their price rose, I effectively became poorer and switched towards the cheapest foodstuff. The cheapest foodstuff was potatoes. 

Of course, this did not actually happen. I was never that destitute and never such a potatophage. For about a century, economists looked for real examples of Giffen goods and did not find them until 1990, when economists Raymond Battalio, John Kagel and Carl Kogut demonstrated Giffen behaviour in lab rats. (The lab rats, I am assured, were well looked after by Battalio’s neighbour, a vet.) 

The researchers offered the rats quinine-flavoured water, which the rats disliked, and root beer, which they loved. The effective prices of these drinks were changed by adjusting the volume of drink released each time the rat pressed a lever. Root beer was “expensive” because it was dispensed in smaller portions. And sure enough, it proved possible to provoke Giffen behaviour: when the cheaper quinine water became less cheap, rats still needed a drink and they cut back on the luxury of root beer, drinking more quinine water. 

So are Giffen goods little more than a theoretical curiosity? Not quite. Eventually, the economists Robert Jensen, Nolan Miller and Sangui Wang used both public health data and a field experiment to demonstrate that in the poorest parts of Hunan, China, rice was a Giffen good. As Jensen wrote in 2008, “It’s funny that people have looked in crazy places for Giffen behaviour . . . and it turns out that it could be found in the most widely consumed food in the most populous nation in the history of humanity.” 

Giffen goods also teach us something important about the impact of price rises on the poorest people. One of the most basic lessons of economics is that people respond to price hikes by finding cheaper options. If apples are expensive this week, buy oranges; when the price of oranges rises and the price of apples falls, switch back to apples again. Or just look for the bargain-basement option. If a West End show is too expensive, go to the cinema. If the cinema costs too much, watch television. You don’t have to pay higher prices; you can make do with a cheaper alternative. 

Inflation is always a little lower than it seems once you allow for such substitutions. But one group of people can’t play that game: those who are already relying on the cheapest staples have nowhere to run from price rises. 

So it wasn’t quinine water in a Texas laboratory, or rice in Hunan, that made me think recently of Giffen goods. It was the alarming rise in the price of a cheese salad sandwich. The latest data from the UK show that sliced white bread has risen in price by 29 per cent over the past 12 months, with tomatoes up 16 per cent, butter up 30 per cent, cheddar cheese up 42 per cent and cucumber 55 per cent more expensive. (Headline inflation, meanwhile, is just over 10 per cent.) 

I am not claiming that cheddar cheese is essential to life; it just seems that way. Nor is it a Giffen good. But basic foodstuffs are Giffen-adjacent. They are the last resort of people who cannot afford fancier stuff. 

Food poverty campaigners — most prominently Jack Monroe — have argued that the price of these basics has risen much faster than the general rate of inflation. As I’ve written before, it’s hard to be sure if that’s true. The Office for National Statistics tends to focus on the most popular products, not the cheapest bargains, and so the relevant data is patchy and experimental. 

Whether or not inflation really is higher for the poorest households, what is not in doubt is that inflation hits them hardest. That is both because they are more vulnerable, and because they have less room for manoeuvre as they ponder their options in the supermarket aisle. The Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, recently said that, “We’re all worse off.” Maybe so. But some of us are worse off than others.

Finally, the Tories are discovering the state can be a force for good

Martin Kettle in The Guardian


 

Illustration by Mitch Blunt


According to WH Auden, all good dramas consist of two contrasting acts: “First, the making of a mistake; then, the discovery that it was a mistake.” A similar corrective arc often also applies in politics. On the issue of the progressive role of the state, the late-20th-century Conservative party made a historic mistake. Now it is struggling with the dawning of discovery.

The single most obvious thing to say about the Tory party in autumn 2018 is that it is split over Brexit. But the significance of the Tory divide on Brexit, and its tendency to dominate all aspects of domestic political coverage, masks another internal argument – one that is more important in terms of the party’s history, and may hold the key to its future too.

This second argument is about the necessary role of government in shaping economic and social policy. One way or another, this is an issue that has woven its way through Conservative history since the late 18th century. Tory leaders from William Pitt the Younger to Theresa May have confronted it. Philip Hammond’s budget this week was a striking embodiment of why the issue is both enduringly important and still politically unresolved.

His budget was not the end of austerity. But it was unquestionably a decisive move away from it. If the austerity doctrine of 2010-18 had still been in full force, the £68bn windfall in government receipts over the next five years announced this week would have been overwhelmingly used to get the finances back in the black by the mid 2020s as planned. Instead, the normally cautious Hammond chose to spend the lot, mainly on the NHS, but also in a cluster of short-term giveaways and to pump another £15bn into the economy next year.

This would not have happened in the previous eight years. It has happened because May is trying to reposition her party more centrally on domestic policy in the aftermath of the Brexit deal she hopes to secure. May herself would probably have gone further this week.

May and Hammond are not trying to “out-Corbyn Corbyn”, as former chancellor George Osborne put it this week in an interview in which he offered a mea culpa on the EU referendum but not on austerity. But they see the need to counter the Labour leader. This was in many respects a holding budget, but it placed anti-austerity options in tax and spending and in the role of government back on to the Tory agenda.

May and Hammond are a bit like a couple circling a roundabout in their car, debating which route to follow, but clear which one they should no longer take.

This is where Auden’s point comes in. Many times in its pre-1975 history, the Conservative party found its way, often against its supporters’ instincts and interests, towards strengthening the role of government in rebalancing the economy in favour of the poor and the moderately waged. From Robert Peel’s reintroduction of peacetime income tax in 1842 onwards, the one-nation tradition was the key to the party’s famous ability to reinvent itself.

The problem the modern Tory party faces is not confined to the unpopularity of austerity. Its roots lie in the period after 1975, when Margaret Thatcher – massively aided by the press – captured the party with her rejection of postwar Keynesianism in favour of an agenda of privatisation, small government, tax cuts and individualism. It won the Tories four successive elections. But it was also massively destructive and divisive.

The Conservatives have not won a decisive general election majority since Thatcher did so in 1987. John Major, David Cameron and May have all led weak governments. In spite of efforts by all three, the party seems unable to move decisively beyond Thatcherism or to reconnect fully with its one-nation past at a time when it is needed. As one senior Tory put it bluntly to me recently: “We will never win a clear majority while we remain in thrall to Margaret Thatcher.”

  Harold Macmillan: many of today’s Conservative MPs relate to his approach. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

Brexit is tightly bound in to this problem. Most ardent Brexiteers are ardent Thatcherites, just as most Thatcherites are Brexiteers. Many of the most threadbare of the Brexit fantasies – those about easy free trade deals, a no-deal break with the EU, Singapore-style deregulation and Britain’s supposedly enhanced standing in the world – contain ghostly echoes of Thatcher.

But the central issue is political economy. In 1938, Harold Macmillan warned the Tory party: “Unless we can continue this peaceful evolution from a free capitalism to planned capitalism, or, it may be, a new synthesis of capitalist and socialist theory, there will be little hope of preserving the civil, democratic and cultural freedoms.” No Tory MP would write in such terms today. But the essence of this warning remains valid on many levels 80 years on.

Today’s party contains more MPs who relate to Macmillan’s approach than you would ever guess from the constant publicity given to the Brexiteers. The most prominent of these is May herself, with her repeated – but unfulfilled – commitment to the section in the 2017 manifesto that said “government can and should be a force for good – and its power should be put squarely at the service of this country’s working people”.

May is not alone. Justine Greening said this week that the Tories should “get into the centre ground” and that they had not properly connected with the public in more than 30 years. George Freeman wrote in September that aspirational professional voters under 45 are rejecting the old politics. “Unless the Conservative party reconnects with them, we risk becoming a rump party of nostalgic nationalists,” he claimed. Nicky Morgan wrote last month that “we cannot secure growth in the 21st century by following a 20th-century model”. Jesse Norman, in his recent book on Adam Smith, writes: “It is easy to forget the central importance of the state in his thought, as protector of the nation, adjudicator and enforcer of justice … provider of public works, infrastructure and local schools, and, yes, as regulator of markets.” Most of the 2010 and 2015 Tory intakes share these instincts.

These MPs do not have identical views. But they all share the crucial recognition that government is, as the US writer Garry Wills puts it, “a necessary good not a necessary evil”. If Labour people tend to be too starry-eyed about government, too many Tories, influenced by Thatcher’s aberrant period of power, tend to be unduly distrustful of it. The public, who depend on good government, do not share either view.

The most interesting current question in British politics is this: what comes after May’s Tories and Corbyn’s Labour? My guess is that a large part of the answer will depend on the road May and Hammond decide to take off the roundabout to which they have belatedly returned this week.

Carillion's Directors Ticked all the Good Governance Boxes

Kate Burgess in The Financial Times



Following the collapse this week of Carillion, with less than £30m in the bank and liabilities of more than £2bn, the board of the construction company has been accused of being either deluded or just plain inept. 

On paper, the directors looked well qualified to steer the outsourcer. As chairman, Philip Green was a former chairman of United Utilities, the UK’s largest listed water company. Not only had he run a large contracting company, he was also a fully paid-up member of the great and good as a former adviser to then prime minister David Cameron on corporate responsibility. 

The directors did not lack experience, sitting on boards from Royal Dutch Shell to Premier Farnell. 

Alison Horner, head of the remuneration committee, was formerly operations director at Tesco and a non-executive director of Tesco Bank. The head of the audit committee was an accountant, as were three other directors. 

And none were entrenched. The chief executive, Richard Howson, who joined Carillion’s board in 2009, was the longest-serving member. 

The board ticked all the boxes in terms of good governance. Carillion’s non-executive line-up included two women. The average age of directors was about 54 years, or 57 excluding Mr Howson (48), and Zafir Khan (also 48), the finance director appointed in January last year. 

Yet just a year ago, the board cheerfully signed off statements from Mr Howson that debt would be below £300m within months. 

With hindsight, the board fell into a series of textbook traps that have, over the years, felled many a construction and contract business: 

- Failing to halt acquisitions and the build up of liabilities 

-Signing off aggressive accounting policies that allowed revenues to be booked early and costs to be delayed 

-Not tapping shareholders for help and instead continuing to pay out dividends even as cash haemorrhaged out of Carillion 

- Signing off on hefty pay packets and bonuses for top executives even when they scored zero on key performance targets introduced to instil capital discipline 

-Allowing clawback conditions to be changed a year ago, striking out corporate failure as a reason to take back bonuses 

The board had seemed to be everything UK investors might want for a youngish business in a youngish sector. Carillion may have been formed from the construction divisions of Tarmac, Wimpey, Alfred McAlpine and Mowlem, which have been around for decades, but the company itself was formed in 1999. It engaged well with investors, even those who had shorted Carillion stock. Notably, shareholders approved directors’ elections without a murmur. 

It is worrying to think the construction company’s board was such a model of good governance. If the line up had been different, would another cast of characters have done any better? 

And how many other supposedly well-run boards are presiding over impending corporate disasters elsewhere?

Sky-gods and scapegoats: From Genesis to 9/11 to Khalid Masood, how righteous blame of 'the other' shapes human history

Andy Martin in The Independent

God as depicted in Michelangelo's fresco ‘The Creation of the Heavenly Bodies’ in the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo


Here’s a thing I bet not too many people know. Where are the new BBC offices in New York? Some may know the old location – past that neoclassical main post office in Manhattan, not far from the Empire State Building, going down towards the Hudson on 8th Avenue. But now we have brand new offices, with lots of glass and mind-numbing security. And they can be found on Liberty Street, just across West Street from Ground Zero. The site, in other words, of what was the Twin Towers. And therefore of 9/11. I’m living in Harlem so I went all the way downtown on the “A” train the other day to have a conversation with Rory Sutherland in London, who is omniscient in matters of marketing and advertising.

There were 19 hijackers involved in 9/11, where Ground Zero now marks the World Trade Centre, but only one person was involved in the Westminster attack (Rex)

I was reminded as I came out again and gazed up at the imposing mass of the Freedom Tower, the top of which vanished into the mist, that just the week before I was going across Westminster Bridge, in the direction of the Houses of Parliament. It struck me, thinking in terms of sheer numbers, that over 15 years and several wars later, we have scaled down the damage from 19 highly organised hijackers in the 2001 attacks on America to one quasi-lone wolf this month in Westminster. But that it is also going to be practically impossible to eliminate random out-of-the-blue attacks like this one.

But I also had the feeling, probably shared by most people who were alive but not directly caught up in either Westminster or the Twin Towers back in 2001: there but for the grace of God go I. That, I thought, could have been me: the “falling man” jumping out of the 100th floor or the woman leaping off the bridge into the Thames. In other words, I was identifying entirely with the victims. If I wandered over to the 9/11 memorial I knew that I could see several thousand names recorded there for posterity. Those who died.  

So I am not surprised that nearly everything that has been written (in English) in the days since the Westminster killings has been similarly slanted. “We must stand together” and all that. But it occurs to me now that “we” (whoever that may be) need to make more of an effort to get into the mind of the perpetrators and see the world from their point of view. Because it isn’t that difficult. You don’t have to be a Quranic scholar. Khalid Masood wasn’t. He was born, after all, Adrian Elms, and brought up in Tunbridge Wells (where my parents lived towards the end of their lives). He was one of “us”.

This second-thoughts moment was inspired in part by having lunch with thriller writer Lee Child, creator of the immortal Jack Reacher. I wrote a whole book which was about looking over his shoulder while he wrote one of his books (Make Me). He said, “You had one good thing in your book.” “Really?” says I. “What was that then?” “It was that bit where you call me ‘an evil mastermind bastard’. That has made me think a bit.”

When he finally worked out what was going on in “Mother’s Rest”, his sinister small American town, and gave me the big reveal, I had to point out the obvious, namely that he, the author, was just as much the bad guys of his narrative as the hero. He was the one who had dreamed up this truly evil plot. No one else. Those “hog farmers”, who were in fact something a lot worse than hog farmers, were his invention. Lee Child was shocked. Because up until that point he had been going along with the assumption of all fans that he is in fact Jack Reacher. He saw himself as the hero of his own story.

There were 19 hijackers involved in 9/11, where Ground Zero now marks the World Trade Centre, but only one person was involved in the Westminster attack (PA)

I only mention this because it strikes me that this “we are the good guys” mentality is so widespread and yet not in the least justified. Probably the most powerful case for saying, from a New York point of view, that we are the good guys was provided by René Girard, a French philosopher who became a fixture at Stanford, on the West Coast (dying in 2015). His name came up in the conversation with Rory Sutherland because he was taken up by Silicon Valley marketing moguls on account of his theory of “mimetic desire”. All of our desires, Girard would say, are mediated. They are not autonomous, but learnt, acquired, “imitated”. Therefore, they can be manufactured or re-engineered or shifted in the direction of eg buying a new smartphone or whatever. It is the key to all marketing. But Girard also took the view, more controversially, that Christianity was superior to all other religions. More advanced. More sympathetic. Morally ahead of the field.

And he also explains why it is that religion and violence are so intimately related. I know the Dalai Lama doesn’t agree. He reckons that there is no such thing as a “Muslim terrorist” or a “Buddhist terrorist” because as soon as you take up violence you are abandoning the peaceful imperatives of religion. Which is all about tolerance and sweetness and light. Oh no it isn’t, says Girard, in Violence and the Sacred. Taking a long evolutionary and anthropological view, Girard argues that sacrifice has been formative in the development of homo sapiens. Specifically, the scapegoat. We – the majority – resolve our internal divisions and strife by picking on a sacrificial victim. She/he/it is thrown to the wolves in order to overcome conflict. Greater violence is averted by virtue of some smaller but significant act of violence. All hail the Almighty who therefore deigns to spare us further suffering. 

In other words, human history is dominated by the scapegoat mentality. Here I have no argument with Girard. Least of all in the United States right now, where the Scapegoater-in-chief occupies the White House. But Girard goes on to argue that Christianity is superior because (a) it agrees with him that all history is about scapegoats and (b) it incorporates this insight into the Passion narrative itself. Jesus Christ was required to become a scapegoat and thereby save humankind. But by the same token Christianity is a critique of scapegoating and enables us to get beyond it. And Girard even neatly takes comfort from the anti-Christ philosopher Nietzsche, who denounced Christianity on account of it being too soft-hearted and sentimental. Cool argument. The only problem is that it’s completely wrong.

I’ve recently been reading Harold Bloom’s analysis of the Bible in The Shadow of a Great Rock. He reminds us, if we needed reminding, that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is a wrathful freak of arbitrariness. A monstrous and unpredictable kind of god, perhaps partly because he contains a whole bunch of other lesser gods that preceded him in Mesopotamian history. So naturally he gets particularly annoyed by talk of rival gods and threatens to do very bad things to anyone who worships Baal or whoever. 

‘Agnus-Dei: The Scapegoat’ by James Tissot, painted between 1886 and 1894

Equally, if we fast forward to the very end of the Bible (ta biblia, the little books, all bundled together) we will find a lot of rabid talk about damnation and hellfire and apocalypse and the rapture and the Beast. If I remember right George Bush Jr was a great fan of the rapture, and possibly for all I know Tony Blair likewise, while they were on their knees praying together, and looked forward to the day when all true believers would be spirited off to heaven leaving the other deluded, benighted fools behind. Christianity ticks all the boxes of extreme craziness that put it right up there with the other patriarchal sky-god religions, Judaism and Islam.

But even if it were just the passion narrative, this is still a problem for the future of humankind because it suggests that scapegoating really works. It will save us from evil. “Us” being the operative word here. Because this is the argument that every “true” religion repeats over and over again, even when it appears to be saying (like the Dalai Lama) extremely nice and tolerant things: “we” are the just and the good and the saved, and “they” aren’t. There are believers and there are infidels. Insiders and outsiders (Frank Kermode makes this the crux of his study of Mark’s gospel, The Genesis of Secrecy, dedicated “To Those Outside”). Christianity never really got over the idea of the Chosen People and the Promised Land. Girard is only exemplifying and reiterating the Christian belief in their own (as the Americans used to say while annihilating the 500 nations) “manifest destiny”.

I find myself more on the side of Brigitte Bardot than René Girard. Once mythified by Roger Vadim in And God Created Woman, she is now unfairly caricatured as an Islamophobic fascist fellow-traveller. Whereas she would, I think, point out that, in terms of sacred texts, the problem begins right back in the book of Genesis, “in the beginning”, when God says “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”. This “dominion” idea, of humans over every other entity, just like God over humans, and man over woman, is a stupid yet corrosive binary opposition that flies in the face of our whole evolutionary history.

This holier-than-thou attitude was best summed up for me in a little pamphlet a couple of besuited evangelists once put in my hand. It contained a cartoon of the world. This is what the world looks like (in their view): there are two cliffs, with a bottomless abyss between them. On the right-hand cliff we have a nice little family of well-dressed humans, man and wife and a couple of kids (all white by the way) standing outside their neat little house, with a gleaming car parked in the driveway. On the left-hand cliff we see a bunch of dumb animals, goats and sheep and cows mainly, gazing sheepishly across at the right-hand cliff, with a kind of awe and respect.

“We” are over here, “they” are over there. Us and them. “They are animals”. How many times have we heard that recently? It’s completely insane and yet a legitimate interpretation of the Bible. This is the real problem of the sky-god religions. It’s not that they are too transcendental; they are too humanist. Too anthropocentric. They just think too highly of human beings.

I’ve become an anti-humanist. I am not going to say “Je suis Charlie”. Or (least of all) “I am Khalid Masood“ either. I want to say: I am an animal. And not be ashamed of it. Which is why, when I die, I am not going to heaven. I want to be eaten by a bear. Or possibly wolves. Or creeping things that creepeth. Or even, who knows, if they are up for it, those poor old goats that we are always sacrificing.