The plight of my local hospital trust in Walthamstow shows just how debt is holding our country back. Could this be the time for a windfall tax?
Stella Creasey in The Guardian
Next time you have an appointment cancelled at hospital, or a headteacher tells you their school will be losing staff because of budget cuts, ask how much PFI debt they have – the answer may surprise you. My hospital trust, in north-east London, spends nearly £150m a year repaying its PFI debt – nearly half of which is on interest payments. If Theresa May is serious about taking on the unacceptable face of capitalism, she could save Britain a fortune if she goes after the legal loan sharks of the public sector.
New research from the Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) shows just how much these debts are hurting our NHS. Over the next five years, almost £1bn of taxpayer funds will go to PFI companies in the form of pre-tax profits. That’s 22% of the extra £4.5bn given to the Department of Health in the 2015 spending review, and money that would otherwise have been available for patient care.
The company that holds the contract for University College London hospital has made pre-tax profits of £190m over the past decade, out of the £725m the NHS has paid out. This alone could have built a whole new hospital as 80% of PFI hospitals cost less than this to construct. This is not just about poor financial control in the NHS – UK PFI debt now stands at over £300bn for projects with an original capital cost of £55bn.
It’s time to grasp the nettle and get Britain a better line of credit
Private finance initiatives are like hire-purchase agreements – superficially a cheap way to buy something, but the costs quickly add up, and before you know it the debt is crippling.
For decades, governments of both main parties have used them for the simple but ultimately short-sighted view that it keeps borrowing off the books – helping reduce the amount of debt the country appears to have, but at great longer-term expense. Its now painfully clear that the intended benefits of private sector skills to help manage projects have been subsumed in the one-sided nature of these contracts, to devastating effect on budgets.
No political party can claim the moral high ground. The Tories conveniently ignore the fact that these contracts started under the John Major government – and are expanding again under Theresa May, with the PF2 scheme. Labour veers between defensive rhetoric that PFI was the best way to fund the investment our public sector so desperately needed during its last government, and angrily demanding such contracts be cancelled outright, wilfully ignoring what damage this would do to any government’s ability to ever borrow again.
It’s time to grasp the nettle and get Britain a better line of credit. That requires both tough action on the existing contracts to protect taxpayers’ interests, and getting a better deal on future borrowing. Some have already bought out contracts – Northumbria council took out a loan to buy out Hexham hospital’s PFI, and in doing so saved £3.5m every year over the remaining 19-year term. But as the National Audit Office has shown, gains from renegotiating individual contracts are likely to be minimal – what is saved in costs is paid out in fees to arrange.
However, the CHPI research also shows up another interesting facet of PFI. Just eight companies own or appear to have equity stakes in 92% of all the PFI companies in the NHS. Renegotiating not the individual deals done for hospitals or schools, but across the portfolios of the companies themselves could realise substantial gains. Innisfree, which manages my local hospital’s PFI and others across the country and has just 25 staff, stands to make £18bn alone over the coming years. If these companies are resistant to consolidating these loans into a more realistic cost, then it’s time to look again at their tax reliefs, or – given the evidence of excessive profits in this industry that shareholders have received – resurrect one of New Labour’s early hits with a windfall tax on the returns made.
Longer term, we need to ensure there is much more competition for the business of the state. Despite interest rates being low for over a decade, these loans have stayed stubbornly expensive. The lack of viable alternatives – whether public borrowing or bonds – gives these companies a captive market. If the government wants better rates, it needs to ensure there are more options to choose between, whether by allowing local authorities to issue bonds, or reforming Treasury rules that penalise public sector borrowing in the first place.
As our public services struggle under the pressure of PFI, Labour must lead this debate to show how we can not only learn from our past, but also provide answers for the future too. The government has already spent £100bn buying the debt of banks through quantitative easing. With Brexit expected not only to add £60bn to our country’s debt but also affect our access to European central bank funds, taking on our expensive creditors is a battle no prime minister can ignore in the fight to stop Britain going bust.
Wednesday 30 August 2017
Tuesday 29 August 2017
Spin Bowlers - Going through life as an individual
Suresh Menon in The Hindu
Spin bowlers tend to be like French verbs — they follow rules peculiar to their type, and the exceptions to the rule are fascinating. Often exceptions have rules too. Shane Warne didn’t need to bowl an off-break; Graeme Swann didn’t bowl the leg-break, not even the fashionable doosra. Yet cricket’s great mystery bowlers have been the spinners, not the fast men who might threaten life and limb, but seldom leave the batsman feeling foolish.
It would have been nice to get into the heads of India’s leading batsmen Virat Kohli and K.L. Rahul after they were beaten and bowled in one magical over by Sri Lanka’s latest mystery spinner, Mahamarakkala Kurukulasooriya Patabendige Akila Dananjaya Perera.
It wasn’t the classical duel where the bowler teases and tantalises, torments and mocks over a period before the kill. There isn’t time for that in a limited overs game. Here, speed of execution is of the essence, and both batsmen were fooled by an apparently innocuous delivery. There was something gentle about it all. A slight drift, a final dip, and batsmen with a reputation for dominating spin bowling were done in, playing the wrong line.
Perhaps ‘mystery’ applies to spin bowlers in general. The flighted delivery bowled above the eye line works against the steady head and tricks the batsman into believing the ball will pitch closer to him than it actually does. Then there is the problem of figuring out which way it will turn.
To those watching from the outside it is a cause for wonder that a slow delivery, sometimes spinning, often not, hits the stumps ignoring the bat and pads. It is one of the most satisfying sights in cricket, to watch a Goliath, complete with protective gear fall prey to a bowler whose greatest deception sometimes is that there is no deception at all.
Dananjaya is an off-break bowler who also bowls leg-breaks, doosras and the carom ball. He will be studied with great care by batsmen who will work out where his shoulder and feet and hands are at the time of delivery.
In modern cricket, mystery spinners need to be able to beat both the batsmen and the coaches armed with their computers. The most artistic of deliveries can be reduced to their mathematical specifics. Before the advent of technology, the average spinner sometimes needed to develop ‘mystery’ deliveries to be successful. Now the ‘mystery’ spinner needs to get back to the roots of his craft, focusing on the traditional.
It is a lesson the phenomenally successful Test off-spinner R. Ashwin has to absorb if he hopes to be a permanent fixture in the one-day side.
‘Mystery’ spinners through history, from Jack Iverson to Johnny Gleeson to Ajantha Mendis have tended to have early success, and then faded out. Once the opposition worked them out, they lacked the control over their basic craft to take wickets.
Iverson’s bowling action was characterised as that of a man flicking out a burnt cigarette. That might have been the original carom ball, except that using his long middle finger and thumb he could turn the ball from off to leg. Some batsmen began to play him as an off spinner although he took wickets with his leg break and top spinner. He was sorted out in the inter-state matches in Australia by Arthur Morris and Keith Miller — in the days when players had to think for themselves, who recognised the top spinner as the one tossed up higher and went hard at the bowler.
Gleeson, who also had a long middle finger and could bowl the Iverson delivery in the 1960s, strengthened his fingers by milking cows. Despite their short stints, the game has been the richer for their presence.
Increasingly, cookie-cutter coaching tends to convert the unorthodox spinner into something more comprehensible. As David Frith says, “Every young spinner turned into a colourless medium-pacer constitutes a crime against a beautiful game.”
The one country where the unorthodox is not just accepted but actively encouraged is Sri Lanka. Think Muttiah Muralitharan, or Lasith Malinga or Mendis, bowlers who were allowed to remain themselves with no coach attempting to iron out so-called deficiencies.
It might sound counter-intuitive, but spinners with too many variations tend not to be as successful as those with a few, of which they are the masters. It is the fox versus the hedgehog theory all over again. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Sometimes in cricket, it is smarter to be the hedgehog.
“There seemed to be an absence of orthodoxy about them, and they were able to meander through life as individuals, not civil servants.” That is a line from the Australian spinner Arthur Mailey. He was speaking about spinners in general. It applies equally to Dananjaya and his special kind.
Spin bowlers tend to be like French verbs — they follow rules peculiar to their type, and the exceptions to the rule are fascinating. Often exceptions have rules too. Shane Warne didn’t need to bowl an off-break; Graeme Swann didn’t bowl the leg-break, not even the fashionable doosra. Yet cricket’s great mystery bowlers have been the spinners, not the fast men who might threaten life and limb, but seldom leave the batsman feeling foolish.
It would have been nice to get into the heads of India’s leading batsmen Virat Kohli and K.L. Rahul after they were beaten and bowled in one magical over by Sri Lanka’s latest mystery spinner, Mahamarakkala Kurukulasooriya Patabendige Akila Dananjaya Perera.
It wasn’t the classical duel where the bowler teases and tantalises, torments and mocks over a period before the kill. There isn’t time for that in a limited overs game. Here, speed of execution is of the essence, and both batsmen were fooled by an apparently innocuous delivery. There was something gentle about it all. A slight drift, a final dip, and batsmen with a reputation for dominating spin bowling were done in, playing the wrong line.
Perhaps ‘mystery’ applies to spin bowlers in general. The flighted delivery bowled above the eye line works against the steady head and tricks the batsman into believing the ball will pitch closer to him than it actually does. Then there is the problem of figuring out which way it will turn.
To those watching from the outside it is a cause for wonder that a slow delivery, sometimes spinning, often not, hits the stumps ignoring the bat and pads. It is one of the most satisfying sights in cricket, to watch a Goliath, complete with protective gear fall prey to a bowler whose greatest deception sometimes is that there is no deception at all.
Dananjaya is an off-break bowler who also bowls leg-breaks, doosras and the carom ball. He will be studied with great care by batsmen who will work out where his shoulder and feet and hands are at the time of delivery.
In modern cricket, mystery spinners need to be able to beat both the batsmen and the coaches armed with their computers. The most artistic of deliveries can be reduced to their mathematical specifics. Before the advent of technology, the average spinner sometimes needed to develop ‘mystery’ deliveries to be successful. Now the ‘mystery’ spinner needs to get back to the roots of his craft, focusing on the traditional.
It is a lesson the phenomenally successful Test off-spinner R. Ashwin has to absorb if he hopes to be a permanent fixture in the one-day side.
‘Mystery’ spinners through history, from Jack Iverson to Johnny Gleeson to Ajantha Mendis have tended to have early success, and then faded out. Once the opposition worked them out, they lacked the control over their basic craft to take wickets.
Iverson’s bowling action was characterised as that of a man flicking out a burnt cigarette. That might have been the original carom ball, except that using his long middle finger and thumb he could turn the ball from off to leg. Some batsmen began to play him as an off spinner although he took wickets with his leg break and top spinner. He was sorted out in the inter-state matches in Australia by Arthur Morris and Keith Miller — in the days when players had to think for themselves, who recognised the top spinner as the one tossed up higher and went hard at the bowler.
Gleeson, who also had a long middle finger and could bowl the Iverson delivery in the 1960s, strengthened his fingers by milking cows. Despite their short stints, the game has been the richer for their presence.
Increasingly, cookie-cutter coaching tends to convert the unorthodox spinner into something more comprehensible. As David Frith says, “Every young spinner turned into a colourless medium-pacer constitutes a crime against a beautiful game.”
The one country where the unorthodox is not just accepted but actively encouraged is Sri Lanka. Think Muttiah Muralitharan, or Lasith Malinga or Mendis, bowlers who were allowed to remain themselves with no coach attempting to iron out so-called deficiencies.
It might sound counter-intuitive, but spinners with too many variations tend not to be as successful as those with a few, of which they are the masters. It is the fox versus the hedgehog theory all over again. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Sometimes in cricket, it is smarter to be the hedgehog.
“There seemed to be an absence of orthodoxy about them, and they were able to meander through life as individuals, not civil servants.” That is a line from the Australian spinner Arthur Mailey. He was speaking about spinners in general. It applies equally to Dananjaya and his special kind.
'I am drowning and you are describing the water' - A critique of India's liberals
Javed Naqvi in The Dawn
“THEY have the president. They have the vice president. They have both houses of Congress. They have the supreme court too. But, wait a minute, we have the majority.” That was Michael Moore speaking to his audience recently in his one-man show at Broadway about the political equation in Trump’s America.
Moore’s reference was to an encouraging fact that Donald Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The equation applies to Modi’s India too, even if the opposition, rather mysteriously, I feel, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. What did Mr Modi’s fabled popularity in 2014 amount to? He got 52 per cent seats with 31pc votes! Will the Indian opposition heed Moore?
There are understated problems, of course. In America, the opposition comes from the people, militantly united if required or peacefully persevering where it works. The agitators in India are scattered into caste, regional and linguistic pursuits if they are not in the meantime falling at the feet of some fraudulent spiritual guru. As some say, it is a big failure for India’s left that the masses who should be better educated in the 70 years of independence are turning to spurious god men for false hope.
Another pervasive problem is that people almost religiously believe that a court of law can address all the challenges to democracy. “Court-aat bhetu ya,” is a familiar Maharashtrian challenge to an adversary. See you in the court. People are not listening to what Michael Moore knows otherwise.
Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars.
Kondratiev waves of high and low emotions have thus stalked too many of my friends over the years, nearly always to do with Indian courts and their rulings and the government’s response or absence of it. The legal defeat of the nefarious privacy bill brought joy beyond belief. Edward Snowden would be smiling. As he would see it, the state already knows far more about its subjects than it perhaps wants to know.
Moreover, how long would it take for an intrusive government to overturn any court ruling, say, by presidential decree? If it won’t do that, it doesn’t need to do that. The creeping fascist challenge comes from overwhelming street power where courts have little say and virtually no control.
Fascists can use instruments of law, of course, to torment their opponents — as they did with the legendary artist M.F. Husain. Recently they commandeered the law against student leaders of rare spunk, while putting a 90pc crippled professor in jail, convincing the courts that the wheelchair-bound man’s freedom was a threat to Indian security.
Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars. If they have their way with the constitution they will rewrite it. If not, they will subvert it anyway.
One doesn’t have to look too hard to divine the pattern. People gaping with disbelief at the government’s apparent connivance with a convicted rapist the other day forgot that the Babri Masjid was destroyed only after snubbing the supreme court. Remember how senior politicians thumbed their noses at the court’s restraining orders against changing the status quo in Ayodhya.
Nobody was punished for the outrage. In fact, stalwarts among the accused became powerful ministers. Recently, the supreme court ordered the expediting of cases against men and women involved in the destruction of the mediaeval mosque. The court has set a two-year deadline for a non-stop trial followed by an early verdict. That would roughly coincide with the 2019 general elections.
In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equation between Indian fascists and the opposition, the fascists will be inevitably heading the victory celebrations. They will either claim vindication of their false innocence or they would play the martyr. As the dice seems loaded, the opposition, including our liberal friends, doesn’t have a trick to give it succour. Their joy could come by turning a collective if scattered majority into a winning showdown with Prime Minister Modi in two years. The judicial route to retrieve democracy can at best be a palliative, not a cure. Even the judges know that.
Ideologues of fascism are running the government and they are running the parallel government through the lynch mobs. The violent ban imposed by right-wing groups with the connivance of the state on interfaith marriages they nefariously call love jihad, and their intrusion into people’s eating habits and so forth, became possible only by tossing the law books out of the window.
A recent decoy that sent the liberals brimming with joy was the supreme court’s ban on triple talaq, reference to instant divorce by Muslim husbands. Look again, triple talaq was banned in Pakistan in 1961. So why did Tehmina Durrani published My Feudal Lord in 1991? Read it. Among other searing challenges, in which triple talaq comes low down the order, married women in a feudal society struggle to even secure a divorce from a man they didn’t want to live with.
Ms Durrani’s marriage to an eminent political figure turned into a nightmare. Violently possessive and pathologically jealous, the husband cut her off from the outside world. When she decided to rebel, as a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, she signed away all financial support, lost the custody of her four children, and found herself alienated from her friends and disowned by her parents.
We are not even beginning to discuss bride burning and honour killings that stalk women in South Asia with impunity. Banning instant divorce was important, not the celebrations it triggered. “I am drowning, and you are describing the water,” complained Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He may have been critiquing the liberal Indians.
“THEY have the president. They have the vice president. They have both houses of Congress. They have the supreme court too. But, wait a minute, we have the majority.” That was Michael Moore speaking to his audience recently in his one-man show at Broadway about the political equation in Trump’s America.
Moore’s reference was to an encouraging fact that Donald Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The equation applies to Modi’s India too, even if the opposition, rather mysteriously, I feel, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. What did Mr Modi’s fabled popularity in 2014 amount to? He got 52 per cent seats with 31pc votes! Will the Indian opposition heed Moore?
There are understated problems, of course. In America, the opposition comes from the people, militantly united if required or peacefully persevering where it works. The agitators in India are scattered into caste, regional and linguistic pursuits if they are not in the meantime falling at the feet of some fraudulent spiritual guru. As some say, it is a big failure for India’s left that the masses who should be better educated in the 70 years of independence are turning to spurious god men for false hope.
Another pervasive problem is that people almost religiously believe that a court of law can address all the challenges to democracy. “Court-aat bhetu ya,” is a familiar Maharashtrian challenge to an adversary. See you in the court. People are not listening to what Michael Moore knows otherwise.
Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars.
Kondratiev waves of high and low emotions have thus stalked too many of my friends over the years, nearly always to do with Indian courts and their rulings and the government’s response or absence of it. The legal defeat of the nefarious privacy bill brought joy beyond belief. Edward Snowden would be smiling. As he would see it, the state already knows far more about its subjects than it perhaps wants to know.
Moreover, how long would it take for an intrusive government to overturn any court ruling, say, by presidential decree? If it won’t do that, it doesn’t need to do that. The creeping fascist challenge comes from overwhelming street power where courts have little say and virtually no control.
Fascists can use instruments of law, of course, to torment their opponents — as they did with the legendary artist M.F. Husain. Recently they commandeered the law against student leaders of rare spunk, while putting a 90pc crippled professor in jail, convincing the courts that the wheelchair-bound man’s freedom was a threat to Indian security.
Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars. If they have their way with the constitution they will rewrite it. If not, they will subvert it anyway.
One doesn’t have to look too hard to divine the pattern. People gaping with disbelief at the government’s apparent connivance with a convicted rapist the other day forgot that the Babri Masjid was destroyed only after snubbing the supreme court. Remember how senior politicians thumbed their noses at the court’s restraining orders against changing the status quo in Ayodhya.
Nobody was punished for the outrage. In fact, stalwarts among the accused became powerful ministers. Recently, the supreme court ordered the expediting of cases against men and women involved in the destruction of the mediaeval mosque. The court has set a two-year deadline for a non-stop trial followed by an early verdict. That would roughly coincide with the 2019 general elections.
In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equation between Indian fascists and the opposition, the fascists will be inevitably heading the victory celebrations. They will either claim vindication of their false innocence or they would play the martyr. As the dice seems loaded, the opposition, including our liberal friends, doesn’t have a trick to give it succour. Their joy could come by turning a collective if scattered majority into a winning showdown with Prime Minister Modi in two years. The judicial route to retrieve democracy can at best be a palliative, not a cure. Even the judges know that.
Ideologues of fascism are running the government and they are running the parallel government through the lynch mobs. The violent ban imposed by right-wing groups with the connivance of the state on interfaith marriages they nefariously call love jihad, and their intrusion into people’s eating habits and so forth, became possible only by tossing the law books out of the window.
A recent decoy that sent the liberals brimming with joy was the supreme court’s ban on triple talaq, reference to instant divorce by Muslim husbands. Look again, triple talaq was banned in Pakistan in 1961. So why did Tehmina Durrani published My Feudal Lord in 1991? Read it. Among other searing challenges, in which triple talaq comes low down the order, married women in a feudal society struggle to even secure a divorce from a man they didn’t want to live with.
Ms Durrani’s marriage to an eminent political figure turned into a nightmare. Violently possessive and pathologically jealous, the husband cut her off from the outside world. When she decided to rebel, as a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, she signed away all financial support, lost the custody of her four children, and found herself alienated from her friends and disowned by her parents.
We are not even beginning to discuss bride burning and honour killings that stalk women in South Asia with impunity. Banning instant divorce was important, not the celebrations it triggered. “I am drowning, and you are describing the water,” complained Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He may have been critiquing the liberal Indians.
Monday 28 August 2017
Labour's new clarity on Brexit
The Independent
After months of confusion, contradictory statements and embarrassing media interviews, Labour has finally brought some clarity to its opaque policy on Brexit.
Sir Keir Starmer, the Shadow Brexit Secretary, has announced that the Opposition wants the UK to remain in the single market and customs union during a transitional phase after it leaves the EU in March 2019. During that period, Labour would accept the rules of both arrangements, including free movement – a departure from the party’s manifesto at the June election, which said “freedom of movement will end when we leave the EU”.
Significantly, Starmer does not rule out permanent membership of the single market and customs union after the transitional phase, if the EU agreed reforms on issues such as migration.
Labour’s move is overdue but welcome. Remaining in the EU’s main institutions for the transition is common sense. Such an “off the shelf” arrangement would provide the certainty and stability that business desperately needs, probably reducing the loss of investment and jobs. Despite that, Theresa May seeks a more complicated “bespoke” transitional deal, and insists the UK must leave the single market and customs union in 2019. The time and energy wasted on securing such an agreement would be much better spent on forging a long-term UK-EU partnership.
Although the Chancellor Philip Hammond would probably support an “off the shelf” transitional deal, Ms May seems worried that hardline Brexiteers would then accuse her of not implementing last year’s referendum decision. The Prime Minister should start to do what is right for her country rather than her party.
If she does not, it will fall to Parliament to ensure a sensible transition in line with Labour’s new approach. House of Commons arithmetic means that several of the 20 pro-European Conservatives would need to vote with opposition parties to secure single market and customs union membership for the transition. When MPs return to Westminster next month, these Tories will come under enormous pressure not to hand Jeremy Corbyn a landmark victory. But they should act in the national interest, even if Ms May does not.
Mr Corbyn, a long-standing Eurosceptic, should be applauded for his pragmatism. Although many working-class people in the North and Midlands voted Leave last year, voters did not endorse Ms May's hard Brexit vision in June. Labour is now unmistakably the party of soft Brexit.
Mr Corbyn has also acknowledged the support for close EU links among his MPs, party members and the trade unions – not to mention the adoring crowds at Glastonbury. Probably he senses that Labour’s new stance will enable it to make trouble for Ms May in Parliament. What he wants above all is another election; after his performance in June, who can blame him?
The Opposition now offers more clarity on the biggest issue facing the country than the Government. In a series of position papers in the past two weeks, ministers have set out to replicate much of what the UK currently enjoys after Brexit – on issues including customs, the Northern Ireland border, civil judicial cooperation and data protection. Which, of course, begs the question: why not stay in the single market and customs union, at least during the transitional phase?
Although Boris Johnson has been virtually silent on Brexit over the summer, the Government’s papers show that it has adopted his totally unrealistic “have-cake-and-eat-it” approach. This has naturally gone down badly with the 27 EU members. They have not fallen for a naked attempt to switch the focus on to a trade deal before “first round” matters are settled on citizens’ rights, Northern Ireland and an inevitable divorce payment on which the UK refuses to engage.
When negotiations resume in Brussels on Monday, David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, will urge his counterpart Michel Barnier to show more flexibility. Yet it is time for the Government to do just that. It would also do well to display the same clarity and pragmatism as Labour.
After months of confusion, contradictory statements and embarrassing media interviews, Labour has finally brought some clarity to its opaque policy on Brexit.
Sir Keir Starmer, the Shadow Brexit Secretary, has announced that the Opposition wants the UK to remain in the single market and customs union during a transitional phase after it leaves the EU in March 2019. During that period, Labour would accept the rules of both arrangements, including free movement – a departure from the party’s manifesto at the June election, which said “freedom of movement will end when we leave the EU”.
Significantly, Starmer does not rule out permanent membership of the single market and customs union after the transitional phase, if the EU agreed reforms on issues such as migration.
Labour’s move is overdue but welcome. Remaining in the EU’s main institutions for the transition is common sense. Such an “off the shelf” arrangement would provide the certainty and stability that business desperately needs, probably reducing the loss of investment and jobs. Despite that, Theresa May seeks a more complicated “bespoke” transitional deal, and insists the UK must leave the single market and customs union in 2019. The time and energy wasted on securing such an agreement would be much better spent on forging a long-term UK-EU partnership.
Although the Chancellor Philip Hammond would probably support an “off the shelf” transitional deal, Ms May seems worried that hardline Brexiteers would then accuse her of not implementing last year’s referendum decision. The Prime Minister should start to do what is right for her country rather than her party.
If she does not, it will fall to Parliament to ensure a sensible transition in line with Labour’s new approach. House of Commons arithmetic means that several of the 20 pro-European Conservatives would need to vote with opposition parties to secure single market and customs union membership for the transition. When MPs return to Westminster next month, these Tories will come under enormous pressure not to hand Jeremy Corbyn a landmark victory. But they should act in the national interest, even if Ms May does not.
Mr Corbyn, a long-standing Eurosceptic, should be applauded for his pragmatism. Although many working-class people in the North and Midlands voted Leave last year, voters did not endorse Ms May's hard Brexit vision in June. Labour is now unmistakably the party of soft Brexit.
Mr Corbyn has also acknowledged the support for close EU links among his MPs, party members and the trade unions – not to mention the adoring crowds at Glastonbury. Probably he senses that Labour’s new stance will enable it to make trouble for Ms May in Parliament. What he wants above all is another election; after his performance in June, who can blame him?
The Opposition now offers more clarity on the biggest issue facing the country than the Government. In a series of position papers in the past two weeks, ministers have set out to replicate much of what the UK currently enjoys after Brexit – on issues including customs, the Northern Ireland border, civil judicial cooperation and data protection. Which, of course, begs the question: why not stay in the single market and customs union, at least during the transitional phase?
Although Boris Johnson has been virtually silent on Brexit over the summer, the Government’s papers show that it has adopted his totally unrealistic “have-cake-and-eat-it” approach. This has naturally gone down badly with the 27 EU members. They have not fallen for a naked attempt to switch the focus on to a trade deal before “first round” matters are settled on citizens’ rights, Northern Ireland and an inevitable divorce payment on which the UK refuses to engage.
When negotiations resume in Brussels on Monday, David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, will urge his counterpart Michel Barnier to show more flexibility. Yet it is time for the Government to do just that. It would also do well to display the same clarity and pragmatism as Labour.
Economists have started to take morality seriously
Ben Chu in The Independent
“We don’t do God,” Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alistair Campbell, once famously remarked. Similarly, economists don’t “do” morality.
They are a breed concerned with economic efficiency not spiritual uplift; human choices and incentives, not human values. They believe questions of morality can be left to philosophers and theologians.
There’s an element of truth in that stereotype. Economists have indeed tended to leave aside issues of morality. In some cases that’s because they think, on ideological grounds, that it has no place in the discipline.
But even more thoughtful and less dogmatic economists have tended to shy away from the question on the grounds that moral values are tricky to pin down, much less quantify.
That’s not to say that their research agendas have not supported “moral” agendas. They often expose market failures which harm the less well-off. And they defend the right of governments to intervene in markets in ways that might reduce short-term economic efficiency, such as by fining polluters.
They argue for the responsibility of governments to provide public goods like education. And there are also plenty of mainstream economists who justify progressive taxation on the grounds that high inequality is socially undesirable.
Yet their theoretical models themselves have generally had no place for morality.
But things might be changing. Two economic Nobel laureates at a meeting on the German island of Lindau last week outlined a bold attempt to put morality into theoretical economical modelling.
Oliver Hart, a 2016 Nobel winner, presented a paper, co-authored with Luigi Zingales, in which he looked at how the personal morality of shareholders might affect the behaviour of the companies in which they invest, in particular whether those firms will behave in a way that will maximise profits or whether they sacrifice some profit for the sake of behaving in a socially responsible manner.
To give an example, it’s perfectly legal for the American supermarket giant Wal-Mart to sell automatic weapons. But its executives could, in theory, choose not to do so. So what determines the corporate decision?
The Hart model raises the possibility that the incentives in the system of stock-market listed companies – the psychology of shareholders and the pressures on managements – might be behind an “amoral drift” in corporate behaviour.
In a similar vein, Jean Tirole, who won the Nobel in 2014, outlined at Lindau a theoretical framework in which he, along with Armin Falk, tries to model behaviour taking into account how certain popular “narratives” can inhibit people from doing what they would normally consider the right thing. A good example of such a narrative in the British context might be popular opposition to the admittance of Syrian child refugees on the false belief, pushed hard by the right-wing media, that they are all really adults pretending to be children.
“Economics is fundamentally a moral and philosophical science, embedded in the larger social sciences,” Mr Tirole said, urging other economists in the audience to join in the project of trying radical new approaches.
It remains to be seen whether this particular research agenda gets anywhere. There are plenty of holes that one can pick in the very simple models presented by Hart and Tirole and the broad-brush assumptions they make about people’s decision-making processes – something they both readily acknowledged.
It may turn out that the particular value that economics adds does indeed lie more in analysing the behaviour of broadly self-interested individuals in markets (whether competitive or not) rather than trying to build models that factor in more complex human motivations.
Yet those who criticise the “dismal science” for assuming that we are all self-interested robots should at least acknowledge these efforts by some of the luminaries of the field.
And this work is also a useful rebuke to the charge that by analysing human behaviour as narrowly self-interested the economics profession is implicitly encouraging people to behave in that selfish way, that the axioms of classical economics have a “normative” impact on society.
They are a breed concerned with economic efficiency not spiritual uplift; human choices and incentives, not human values. They believe questions of morality can be left to philosophers and theologians.
There’s an element of truth in that stereotype. Economists have indeed tended to leave aside issues of morality. In some cases that’s because they think, on ideological grounds, that it has no place in the discipline.
But even more thoughtful and less dogmatic economists have tended to shy away from the question on the grounds that moral values are tricky to pin down, much less quantify.
That’s not to say that their research agendas have not supported “moral” agendas. They often expose market failures which harm the less well-off. And they defend the right of governments to intervene in markets in ways that might reduce short-term economic efficiency, such as by fining polluters.
They argue for the responsibility of governments to provide public goods like education. And there are also plenty of mainstream economists who justify progressive taxation on the grounds that high inequality is socially undesirable.
Yet their theoretical models themselves have generally had no place for morality.
But things might be changing. Two economic Nobel laureates at a meeting on the German island of Lindau last week outlined a bold attempt to put morality into theoretical economical modelling.
Oliver Hart, a 2016 Nobel winner, presented a paper, co-authored with Luigi Zingales, in which he looked at how the personal morality of shareholders might affect the behaviour of the companies in which they invest, in particular whether those firms will behave in a way that will maximise profits or whether they sacrifice some profit for the sake of behaving in a socially responsible manner.
To give an example, it’s perfectly legal for the American supermarket giant Wal-Mart to sell automatic weapons. But its executives could, in theory, choose not to do so. So what determines the corporate decision?
The Hart model raises the possibility that the incentives in the system of stock-market listed companies – the psychology of shareholders and the pressures on managements – might be behind an “amoral drift” in corporate behaviour.
In a similar vein, Jean Tirole, who won the Nobel in 2014, outlined at Lindau a theoretical framework in which he, along with Armin Falk, tries to model behaviour taking into account how certain popular “narratives” can inhibit people from doing what they would normally consider the right thing. A good example of such a narrative in the British context might be popular opposition to the admittance of Syrian child refugees on the false belief, pushed hard by the right-wing media, that they are all really adults pretending to be children.
“Economics is fundamentally a moral and philosophical science, embedded in the larger social sciences,” Mr Tirole said, urging other economists in the audience to join in the project of trying radical new approaches.
It remains to be seen whether this particular research agenda gets anywhere. There are plenty of holes that one can pick in the very simple models presented by Hart and Tirole and the broad-brush assumptions they make about people’s decision-making processes – something they both readily acknowledged.
It may turn out that the particular value that economics adds does indeed lie more in analysing the behaviour of broadly self-interested individuals in markets (whether competitive or not) rather than trying to build models that factor in more complex human motivations.
Yet those who criticise the “dismal science” for assuming that we are all self-interested robots should at least acknowledge these efforts by some of the luminaries of the field.
And this work is also a useful rebuke to the charge that by analysing human behaviour as narrowly self-interested the economics profession is implicitly encouraging people to behave in that selfish way, that the axioms of classical economics have a “normative” impact on society.
And in a sense this is a return to older ways of thinking. Seventeen years before he wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776 Adam Smith produced The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it,” wrote the revered father of economics.
Some of Adam Smith’s successors, at least, are taking those insights seriously.
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it,” wrote the revered father of economics.
Some of Adam Smith’s successors, at least, are taking those insights seriously.
Thursday 24 August 2017
Two cheers for the Supreme Court
Gautam Bhatia in The Hindu
On the 4th of November, 1948, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar rose to address the Constituent Assembly, and proudly stated that “the... Constitution has adopted the individual as its unit”. On Tuesday, this constitutional vision, under siege for much of India’s journey as a democratic republic, came within a whisker of destruction at the hands of the Supreme Court. But when all the dust had cleared in Courtroom No. 1, it finally became evident that Chief Justice J.S. Khehar had been able to enlist only one other judge, out of a Bench of five, to support his novel proposition that the religious freedom under the Indian Constitution protected not just individual faith, but whole systems of “personal law”, spanning marriage, succession, and so on. This view would not only have immunised instantaneous triple talaq (talaq-e-biddat) from constitutional scrutiny, but would also — in the Chief Justice’s own words — have ensured that “it is not open for a court to accept an egalitarian approach, over a practice which constitutes an integral part of religion”.
Had the Chief Justice managed to persuade one other judge to sign on to his judgment, we would have found ourselves living under a Constitution that sanctions the complete submergence of the individual to the claims of her religious community. A reminder, perhaps, of how even the most basic constitutional values, often taken for granted, hang by nothing more than the most fragile of threads. But if the relegation of the Chief Justice’s argument to a legally irrelevant dissenting opinion narrowly averted disaster, the separate opinions of three judges invalidating the practice of talaq-e-biddat gave us something to cheer about — but not much. By a majority decision, instantaneous triple talaq is now invalid, a significant victory that is the result of many decades of struggle by the Muslim women’s movement for gender justice. That is something that must be welcomed. However, the value of a Supreme Court judgment lies not only in what it decides, but also in the possibilities and avenues that it opens for the future, for further progressive-oriented litigation. In that sense, the triple talaq verdict is a disappointment, because even the majority opinions proceeded along narrow pathways, and avoided addressing some crucial constitutional questions.
The majority
Justice Rohinton F. Nariman, writing for himself and Justice U.U. Lalit, held that the 1937 Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act had codified all Muslim personal law, including the practice of triple talaq. This brought it within the bounds of the Constitution. He then held that because talaq-e-biddat allowed unchecked power to Muslim husbands to divorce their wives, without any scope for reconciliation, it was “arbitrary”, and failed the test of Article 14 (equality before law) of the Constitution. The practice, therefore, was unconstitutional.
Justice Nariman’s reasoning, while technically faultless, avoided the elephant in the room that had been ever-present since the hearing began. Under our constitutional jurisprudence, codified personal law — that is, personal law that has been given a statutory form, such as the Hindu Marriage Act — is subject to the Constitution. However, uncodified personal law is exempted from constitutional scrutiny. In other words, the moment the state legislates on personal law practices, its actions can be tested under the Constitution, but if the state fails to act, then those very practices — which, for all relevant purposes, are recognised and enforced by courts as law — need not conform to the Constitution. This anomalous position, which had first been advanced by the Bombay High Court in a 1952 decision called Narasu Appa Mali, and has never seriously been challenged after that, has the effect of creating islands of “personal law” free from constitutional norms of equality, non-discrimination, and liberty.
By holding that the 1937 Act codified all Muslim personal law, Justice Nariman obviated the need for reconsidering this longstanding position, even as he doubted its correctness in a brief, illuminating paragraph. As a matter of constitutional adjudication and judicial discipline, he was undoubtedly right to do so. However, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that the court missed an excellent opportunity to review, and correct, one of its longstanding judicial errors. It seems trite to say that in our polity, there should not exist any constitutional black holes. The basic unit of the Constitution, as Ambedkar said, is the individual, and to privilege state-sanctioned community norms over individual rights negates that vision entirely.
In a separate opinion — which turned out to be the “swing vote” in this case — Justice Kurian Joseph did not go even that far. He simply held that talaq-e-biddat found no mention in the Koran, and was no part of Muslim personal law. Effectively, he decided the case on the ground that talaq-e-biddat was un-Islamic, instead of unconstitutional — begging the question whether secular courts should be adjudicating such questions in the first place. If Justice Nariman’s opinion was narrow and technical, Justice Joseph’s was narrow and theological. Therefore, in a case that involved, at its heart, issues of the intersection between personal law, the Constitution, and gender discrimination, there is no majority view on any of these topics.
The dissent
This brings us back to the dissent. Not only did the dissenting opinion privilege community claims over individual constitutional rights, it also conflated the freedom of religion with personal law, thereby advancing a position where religion could become the arbiter of individuals’ civil status and civil rights. Here again, it had been Ambedkar, extraordinarily prescient, who had warned the Constituent Assembly on the 2nd of December, 1948: “The religious conceptions in this country are so vast that they cover every aspect of life, from birth to death... if personal law is to be saved, I am sure... that in social matters we will come to a standstill. I do not think it is possible to accept a position of that sort. There is nothing extraordinary in saying that we ought to strive hereafter to limit the definition of religion in such a manner that we shall not extent beyond beliefs and rituals as may be connected with ceremonials which are essentially religious. It is not necessary that the sort of laws, for instance, laws relating to tenancy or laws relating to succession, should be governed by religion.”
Ultimately, what separates religious norms and personal law systems — and this includes all religions — from the laws of a democratic republic is the simple issue of consent. This is why the Chief Justice’s conflation of religious freedom and personal law was so profoundly misguided: because, in essence, he took a constitutional provision that had been designed to protect an individual, in her faith, from state interference, and extended it to protect a personal law system that claims authority from scriptures — scriptures whose norms are applied to individuals who had no say in creating them, and who have no say in modifying or rejecting them. The Muslim women challenging triple talaq invoked the Constitution because there was no equivalent within their personal law system; the Chief Justice would have denied not only them that possibility, but would have denied to every other individual, who felt oppressed and unequally treated by her religious community, for all time — and told them, as he did in this case: “Go to Parliament, but the Constitution has nothing for you.”
At the very least, the Majority judgments did not close that window. For that, we must say: two cheers to the Supreme Court.
On the 4th of November, 1948, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar rose to address the Constituent Assembly, and proudly stated that “the... Constitution has adopted the individual as its unit”. On Tuesday, this constitutional vision, under siege for much of India’s journey as a democratic republic, came within a whisker of destruction at the hands of the Supreme Court. But when all the dust had cleared in Courtroom No. 1, it finally became evident that Chief Justice J.S. Khehar had been able to enlist only one other judge, out of a Bench of five, to support his novel proposition that the religious freedom under the Indian Constitution protected not just individual faith, but whole systems of “personal law”, spanning marriage, succession, and so on. This view would not only have immunised instantaneous triple talaq (talaq-e-biddat) from constitutional scrutiny, but would also — in the Chief Justice’s own words — have ensured that “it is not open for a court to accept an egalitarian approach, over a practice which constitutes an integral part of religion”.
Had the Chief Justice managed to persuade one other judge to sign on to his judgment, we would have found ourselves living under a Constitution that sanctions the complete submergence of the individual to the claims of her religious community. A reminder, perhaps, of how even the most basic constitutional values, often taken for granted, hang by nothing more than the most fragile of threads. But if the relegation of the Chief Justice’s argument to a legally irrelevant dissenting opinion narrowly averted disaster, the separate opinions of three judges invalidating the practice of talaq-e-biddat gave us something to cheer about — but not much. By a majority decision, instantaneous triple talaq is now invalid, a significant victory that is the result of many decades of struggle by the Muslim women’s movement for gender justice. That is something that must be welcomed. However, the value of a Supreme Court judgment lies not only in what it decides, but also in the possibilities and avenues that it opens for the future, for further progressive-oriented litigation. In that sense, the triple talaq verdict is a disappointment, because even the majority opinions proceeded along narrow pathways, and avoided addressing some crucial constitutional questions.
The majority
Justice Rohinton F. Nariman, writing for himself and Justice U.U. Lalit, held that the 1937 Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act had codified all Muslim personal law, including the practice of triple talaq. This brought it within the bounds of the Constitution. He then held that because talaq-e-biddat allowed unchecked power to Muslim husbands to divorce their wives, without any scope for reconciliation, it was “arbitrary”, and failed the test of Article 14 (equality before law) of the Constitution. The practice, therefore, was unconstitutional.
Justice Nariman’s reasoning, while technically faultless, avoided the elephant in the room that had been ever-present since the hearing began. Under our constitutional jurisprudence, codified personal law — that is, personal law that has been given a statutory form, such as the Hindu Marriage Act — is subject to the Constitution. However, uncodified personal law is exempted from constitutional scrutiny. In other words, the moment the state legislates on personal law practices, its actions can be tested under the Constitution, but if the state fails to act, then those very practices — which, for all relevant purposes, are recognised and enforced by courts as law — need not conform to the Constitution. This anomalous position, which had first been advanced by the Bombay High Court in a 1952 decision called Narasu Appa Mali, and has never seriously been challenged after that, has the effect of creating islands of “personal law” free from constitutional norms of equality, non-discrimination, and liberty.
By holding that the 1937 Act codified all Muslim personal law, Justice Nariman obviated the need for reconsidering this longstanding position, even as he doubted its correctness in a brief, illuminating paragraph. As a matter of constitutional adjudication and judicial discipline, he was undoubtedly right to do so. However, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that the court missed an excellent opportunity to review, and correct, one of its longstanding judicial errors. It seems trite to say that in our polity, there should not exist any constitutional black holes. The basic unit of the Constitution, as Ambedkar said, is the individual, and to privilege state-sanctioned community norms over individual rights negates that vision entirely.
In a separate opinion — which turned out to be the “swing vote” in this case — Justice Kurian Joseph did not go even that far. He simply held that talaq-e-biddat found no mention in the Koran, and was no part of Muslim personal law. Effectively, he decided the case on the ground that talaq-e-biddat was un-Islamic, instead of unconstitutional — begging the question whether secular courts should be adjudicating such questions in the first place. If Justice Nariman’s opinion was narrow and technical, Justice Joseph’s was narrow and theological. Therefore, in a case that involved, at its heart, issues of the intersection between personal law, the Constitution, and gender discrimination, there is no majority view on any of these topics.
The dissent
This brings us back to the dissent. Not only did the dissenting opinion privilege community claims over individual constitutional rights, it also conflated the freedom of religion with personal law, thereby advancing a position where religion could become the arbiter of individuals’ civil status and civil rights. Here again, it had been Ambedkar, extraordinarily prescient, who had warned the Constituent Assembly on the 2nd of December, 1948: “The religious conceptions in this country are so vast that they cover every aspect of life, from birth to death... if personal law is to be saved, I am sure... that in social matters we will come to a standstill. I do not think it is possible to accept a position of that sort. There is nothing extraordinary in saying that we ought to strive hereafter to limit the definition of religion in such a manner that we shall not extent beyond beliefs and rituals as may be connected with ceremonials which are essentially religious. It is not necessary that the sort of laws, for instance, laws relating to tenancy or laws relating to succession, should be governed by religion.”
Ultimately, what separates religious norms and personal law systems — and this includes all religions — from the laws of a democratic republic is the simple issue of consent. This is why the Chief Justice’s conflation of religious freedom and personal law was so profoundly misguided: because, in essence, he took a constitutional provision that had been designed to protect an individual, in her faith, from state interference, and extended it to protect a personal law system that claims authority from scriptures — scriptures whose norms are applied to individuals who had no say in creating them, and who have no say in modifying or rejecting them. The Muslim women challenging triple talaq invoked the Constitution because there was no equivalent within their personal law system; the Chief Justice would have denied not only them that possibility, but would have denied to every other individual, who felt oppressed and unequally treated by her religious community, for all time — and told them, as he did in this case: “Go to Parliament, but the Constitution has nothing for you.”
At the very least, the Majority judgments did not close that window. For that, we must say: two cheers to the Supreme Court.
Silicon Valley siphons our data like oil. But the deepest drilling has just begun
Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian
What if a cold drink cost more on a hot day?
Customers in the UK will soon find out. Recent reports suggest that three of the country’s largest supermarket chains are rolling out surge pricing in select stores. This means that prices will rise and fall over the course of the day in response to demand. Buying lunch at lunchtime will be like ordering an Uber at rush hour.
This may sound pretty drastic, but far more radical changes are on the horizon. About a week before that report, Amazon announced its $13.7bn purchase of Whole Foods. A company that has spent its whole life killing physical retailers now owns more than 460 stores in three countries.
Amazon isn’t abandoning online retail for brick-and-mortar. Rather, it’s planning to fuse the two. It’s going to digitize our daily lives in ways that make surge-pricing your groceries look primitive by comparison. It’s going to expand Silicon Valley’s surveillance-based business model into physical space, and make money from monitoring everything we do.
Silicon Valley is an extractive industry. Its resource isn’t oil or copper, but data. Companies harvest this data by observing as much of our online activity as they can. This activity might take the form of a Facebook like, a Google search, or even how long your mouse hovers in a particular part of your screen. Alone, these traces may not be particularly meaningful. By pairing them with those of millions of others, however, companies can discover patterns that help determine what kind of person you are – and what kind of things you might buy.
These patterns are highly profitable. Silicon Valley uses them to sell you products or to sell you to advertisers. But feeding the algorithms that produce these patterns requires a steady stream of data. And while that data is certainly abundant, it’s not infinite.
A hundred years ago, you could dig a hole in Texas and strike oil. Today, fossil fuel companies have to build drilling platforms many miles offshore. The tech industry faces a similar fate. Its wildcat days are over: most of the data that lies closest to the surface is already claimed. Together, Facebook and Google receive a staggering 76% of online advertising revenue in the United States.
An Amazon Go ‘smart’ store in Seattle. The company’s acquisition of Whole Foods signals a desire to fuse online surveillance with brick-and-mortar business. Photograph: Paul Gordon/Zuma Press / eyevine
To increase profits, Silicon Valley must extract more data. One method is to get people to spend more time online: build new apps, and make them as addictive as possible. Another is to get more people online. This is the motivation for Facebook’s Free Basics program, which provides a limited set of internet services for free in underdeveloped regions across the globe, in the hopes of harvesting data from the world’s poor.
But these approaches leave large reservoirs of data untapped. After all, we can only spend so much time online. Our laptops, tablets, smartphones, and wearables see a lot of our lives – but not quite everything. For Silicon Valley, however, anything less than total knowledge of its users represents lost revenue. Any unmonitored moment is a missed opportunity.
Amazon is going to show the industry how to monitor more moments: by making corporate surveillance as deeply embedded in our physical environment as it is in our virtual one. Silicon Valley already earns vast sums of money from watching what we do online. Soon it’ll earn even more money from watching what we do offline.
It’s easy to picture how this will work, because the technology already exists. Late last year, Amazon built a “smart” grocery store in Seattle. You don’t have to wait in a checkout line to buy something – you just grab it and walk out of the store. Sensors detect what items you pick up, and you’re charged when you leave.
Imagine if your supermarket watched you as closely as Facebook or Google
Amazon is keen to emphasize the customer benefits: nobody likes waiting in line to pay for groceries, or fumbling with one’s wallet at the register. But the same technology that automates away the checkout line will enable Amazon to track every move a customer makes.
Imagine if your supermarket watched you as closely as Facebook or Google does. It would know not only which items you bought, but how long you lingered in front of which products and your path through the store. This data holds valuable lessons about your personality and your preferences – lessons that Amazon will use to sell you more stuff, online and off.
Supermarkets aren’t the only places these ideas will be put into practice. Surveillance can transform any physical space into a data mine. And the most data-rich environment, the one that contains the densest concentration of insights into who you are, is your home.
That’s why Amazon has aggressively promoted the Echo, a small speaker that offers a Siri-like voice-activated assistant called Alexa. Alexa can tell you the weather, read you the news, make you a to-do list, and perform any number of other tasks. It is a very good listener. It faithfully records your interactions and transmits them back to Amazon for analysis. In fact, it may be recording not only your interactions, but absolutely everything.
Putting a listening device in your living room is an excellent way for Amazon to learn more about you. Another is conducting aerial surveillance of your house. In late July, Amazon obtained a patent for drones that spy on people’s homes as they make deliveries. An example included in Amazon’s patent filing is roof repair: the drone that drops a package on your doorstep might notice your roof is falling apart, and that observation could result in a recommendation for a repair service. Amazon is still testing its delivery drones. But if and when they start flying, it’s safe to assume they’ll be scraping data from the outside of our homes as diligently as the Echo does from the inside.
Silicon Valley is an extractive industry. Its resource isn’t oil or copper, but data. And to increase profits, Silicon Valley must extract more. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Amazon is likely to face some resistance as it colonizes more of our lives. People may not love the idea of their supermarkets spying on them, or every square inch of their homes being fed to an algorithm. But one should never underestimate how rapidly norms can be readjusted when capital requires it.
A couple of decades ago, letting a company read your mail and observe your social interactions and track your location would strike many, if not most, as a breach of privacy. Today, these are standard, even banal, aspects of using the internet. It’s worth considering what further concessions will come to feel normal in the next 20 years, as Silicon Valley is forced to dig deeper into our lives for data.
Tech’s apologists will say that consumers can always opt out: if you object to a company’s practices, don’t use its services. But in our new era of monopoly capitalism, consumer choice is a meaningless concept. Companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon dominate the digital sphere – you can’t avoid them.
The only solution is political. As consumers we’re nearly powerless, but as citizens, we can demand more democratic control of our data. Data is a common good. We make it together, and we make it meaningful together, since useful patterns only emerge from collecting and analyzing large quantities of it.
No reasonable person would let the mining industry unilaterally decide how to extract and refine a resource, or where to build its mines. Yet somehow we let the tech industry make all these decisions and more, with practically no public oversight. A company that yanks copper out of an earth that belongs to everyone should be governed in everyone’s interest. So should a company that yanks data out of every crevice of our collective lives.
What if a cold drink cost more on a hot day?
Customers in the UK will soon find out. Recent reports suggest that three of the country’s largest supermarket chains are rolling out surge pricing in select stores. This means that prices will rise and fall over the course of the day in response to demand. Buying lunch at lunchtime will be like ordering an Uber at rush hour.
This may sound pretty drastic, but far more radical changes are on the horizon. About a week before that report, Amazon announced its $13.7bn purchase of Whole Foods. A company that has spent its whole life killing physical retailers now owns more than 460 stores in three countries.
Amazon isn’t abandoning online retail for brick-and-mortar. Rather, it’s planning to fuse the two. It’s going to digitize our daily lives in ways that make surge-pricing your groceries look primitive by comparison. It’s going to expand Silicon Valley’s surveillance-based business model into physical space, and make money from monitoring everything we do.
Silicon Valley is an extractive industry. Its resource isn’t oil or copper, but data. Companies harvest this data by observing as much of our online activity as they can. This activity might take the form of a Facebook like, a Google search, or even how long your mouse hovers in a particular part of your screen. Alone, these traces may not be particularly meaningful. By pairing them with those of millions of others, however, companies can discover patterns that help determine what kind of person you are – and what kind of things you might buy.
These patterns are highly profitable. Silicon Valley uses them to sell you products or to sell you to advertisers. But feeding the algorithms that produce these patterns requires a steady stream of data. And while that data is certainly abundant, it’s not infinite.
A hundred years ago, you could dig a hole in Texas and strike oil. Today, fossil fuel companies have to build drilling platforms many miles offshore. The tech industry faces a similar fate. Its wildcat days are over: most of the data that lies closest to the surface is already claimed. Together, Facebook and Google receive a staggering 76% of online advertising revenue in the United States.
An Amazon Go ‘smart’ store in Seattle. The company’s acquisition of Whole Foods signals a desire to fuse online surveillance with brick-and-mortar business. Photograph: Paul Gordon/Zuma Press / eyevineTo increase profits, Silicon Valley must extract more data. One method is to get people to spend more time online: build new apps, and make them as addictive as possible. Another is to get more people online. This is the motivation for Facebook’s Free Basics program, which provides a limited set of internet services for free in underdeveloped regions across the globe, in the hopes of harvesting data from the world’s poor.
But these approaches leave large reservoirs of data untapped. After all, we can only spend so much time online. Our laptops, tablets, smartphones, and wearables see a lot of our lives – but not quite everything. For Silicon Valley, however, anything less than total knowledge of its users represents lost revenue. Any unmonitored moment is a missed opportunity.
Amazon is going to show the industry how to monitor more moments: by making corporate surveillance as deeply embedded in our physical environment as it is in our virtual one. Silicon Valley already earns vast sums of money from watching what we do online. Soon it’ll earn even more money from watching what we do offline.
It’s easy to picture how this will work, because the technology already exists. Late last year, Amazon built a “smart” grocery store in Seattle. You don’t have to wait in a checkout line to buy something – you just grab it and walk out of the store. Sensors detect what items you pick up, and you’re charged when you leave.
Imagine if your supermarket watched you as closely as Facebook or Google
Amazon is keen to emphasize the customer benefits: nobody likes waiting in line to pay for groceries, or fumbling with one’s wallet at the register. But the same technology that automates away the checkout line will enable Amazon to track every move a customer makes.
Imagine if your supermarket watched you as closely as Facebook or Google does. It would know not only which items you bought, but how long you lingered in front of which products and your path through the store. This data holds valuable lessons about your personality and your preferences – lessons that Amazon will use to sell you more stuff, online and off.
Supermarkets aren’t the only places these ideas will be put into practice. Surveillance can transform any physical space into a data mine. And the most data-rich environment, the one that contains the densest concentration of insights into who you are, is your home.
That’s why Amazon has aggressively promoted the Echo, a small speaker that offers a Siri-like voice-activated assistant called Alexa. Alexa can tell you the weather, read you the news, make you a to-do list, and perform any number of other tasks. It is a very good listener. It faithfully records your interactions and transmits them back to Amazon for analysis. In fact, it may be recording not only your interactions, but absolutely everything.
Putting a listening device in your living room is an excellent way for Amazon to learn more about you. Another is conducting aerial surveillance of your house. In late July, Amazon obtained a patent for drones that spy on people’s homes as they make deliveries. An example included in Amazon’s patent filing is roof repair: the drone that drops a package on your doorstep might notice your roof is falling apart, and that observation could result in a recommendation for a repair service. Amazon is still testing its delivery drones. But if and when they start flying, it’s safe to assume they’ll be scraping data from the outside of our homes as diligently as the Echo does from the inside.
Silicon Valley is an extractive industry. Its resource isn’t oil or copper, but data. And to increase profits, Silicon Valley must extract more. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Amazon is likely to face some resistance as it colonizes more of our lives. People may not love the idea of their supermarkets spying on them, or every square inch of their homes being fed to an algorithm. But one should never underestimate how rapidly norms can be readjusted when capital requires it.
A couple of decades ago, letting a company read your mail and observe your social interactions and track your location would strike many, if not most, as a breach of privacy. Today, these are standard, even banal, aspects of using the internet. It’s worth considering what further concessions will come to feel normal in the next 20 years, as Silicon Valley is forced to dig deeper into our lives for data.
Tech’s apologists will say that consumers can always opt out: if you object to a company’s practices, don’t use its services. But in our new era of monopoly capitalism, consumer choice is a meaningless concept. Companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon dominate the digital sphere – you can’t avoid them.
The only solution is political. As consumers we’re nearly powerless, but as citizens, we can demand more democratic control of our data. Data is a common good. We make it together, and we make it meaningful together, since useful patterns only emerge from collecting and analyzing large quantities of it.
No reasonable person would let the mining industry unilaterally decide how to extract and refine a resource, or where to build its mines. Yet somehow we let the tech industry make all these decisions and more, with practically no public oversight. A company that yanks copper out of an earth that belongs to everyone should be governed in everyone’s interest. So should a company that yanks data out of every crevice of our collective lives.
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