Continue reading »]]> Published in The Guardian
Thursday June 12, 2008

Ian Stewart asserts that his university’s mathematics students “earn more money, on average, than those studying any other degree subject” and that “their ability to handle technical ideas is highly prized, and rewarded” (Letters, June 7). His assumption, shared by most other contributors to the current debate about maths teaching, is that this reward differential can be projected on to the nation as a whole, with the conclusion that if we were to have more well-paid mathematicians we would all be much richer.

We should distinguish between two rewards – to the mathematicians, and to the rest of us. The mathematically trained “rocket scientists” in the City and Wall Street have been engaged in a financial arms race. They have been extravagantly rewarded for devising the clever financial “instruments” that are so clever that no one, themselves included, understands them.

Almost 20 years ago, in Does God Play Dice? – The Mathematics of Chaos, Ian Stewart observed: “because we are part of the universe, our effort to predict it may interfere with what it was going to do. This kind of problem gets very hairy and I don’t want to pursue what may well be an infinite regress: I don’t know how a computer would function if its constituent atoms were affected by the results of its own computations.”

The bubble of bad debt now distributed globally presents precisely the problem that Stewart does not wish to pursue. The rocket scientists are still absurdly well rewarded for playing war games with other rocket scientists – with other people’s money. But they are the constituent atoms in Stewart’s infinite regress. They have all become day traders trying to second-guess each other over the next move up or down of whatever it is they are betting on.

The current bubble may prove to be the biggest ever. But maths courses, as Simon Jenkins has observed, don’t do history.

For more on the subject of numbers and rocket science see – Risk Management: it’s not rocket science – it’s more complicated

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“Moral hazard” is a term used in the insurance industry to refer to the way in which behaviour alters when people acquire insurance. People with house contents insurance are less careful about locking up. Such behaviour in the eyes of insurers is “immoral”. The term stigmatizes human nature. We all adjust our behaviour in response to our perception of hazard – we all slow down when we come to a sharp bend in the road.

The term is now enjoying unprecedented popular exposure in discussions of the Bank of England’s rescue of banks and building societies. Might rescuing them from the consequences of foolish decisions encourage more foolishness? A good question but not sufficiently sharply focussed.

It is not the banks, and all their clerks, depositors and shareholders, who have been foolish. It is particular individuals, whose culpability is strongly correlated with the size of their salaries and bonuses during the boom years. Their behaviour merits the label immoral because they have been reaping their enormous, risk-free rewards in a system rigged in their favour.

The economy has come to a sharp bend in the road. Those responsible are still in their hummers, with bull bars, air bags and seat belts. Why should they care? Why should they behave differently in the future? Unless the rescue operation confronts the incentives to immorality built into the current system, they are unlikely to slow down.

Published in abbreviated form in The Guardian 24 April 2008

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Dear Sir

Simon Jenkins (4 April 2008) exposes the Achilles heel of all the proposed eco-towns: transport. But he is a trifle hard on the motives of the original proponents of the garden cities and new towns. Relieving the squalid, densely packed, inner city slums by providing houses in new settlements, with gardens, in which people would live within walking or cycling distance of jobs, shops, schools, doctors and friends was a noble vision. All these visionaries, including the eponymous author of the Abercrombie Plan, failed to anticipate the enormous increase in car ownership. The presumed local-scale functioning of these new settlements was destroyed by the car. Their inhabitants bought them, got into them, and roamed widely in pursuit of employment and supermarket bargains. They became car dependent.

The naiveté of the early visionaries is no longer excusable. The process has been going on for too long. John Prescott’’s vow to get people out of their cars and on to public transport has been overwhelmed by growing numbers of cars. Since Labour came to power the country’s motor vehicle population has increased by almost 8 million. To provide just one parking space for each of these extra vehicles would require a car park equivalent to a new motorway stretching from London to Edinburgh – 90 lanes wide.

The nation’’s vehicle population cannot be accommodated within a landuse pattern in which walking, cycling and buses are viable modes of transport for most of the human population. The Government’’s eco-town aspirations will be defeated by the Government’s transport policies.

An abbreviated version of this letter was published in the Guardian on 7 April 2008.

Continue reading »]]> Britain’s Liberal Democrat History Group provoked a mid-summer controversy with its search for the greatest British Liberal of all time. Its short list, to be voted on at the party’s annual conference in September, consisted of William Ewart Gladstone, David Lloyd George, John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes. The front runner for most of the summer has been Mill. Roy Hattersley disputed Mill’s pre-eminence in an article in the Guardian . His article persuaded me that Mill did indeed deserve to win the competition. Below my reply to the Guardian in which I conclude that Mill’s policies on seat belts and drugs are ones with which I would have agreed.

John Stuart Mill and the cream-bun theory of liberty
Saturday August 11, 2007

Roy Hattersley (Liberty is not what it was, 6 August ) argues that Gladstone, not John Stuart Mill, was the most important Liberal in British history. He quotes Mill’s famous dictum – “all errors which [a citizen] is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good” – and proclaims it out of date. He could not have chosen two better examples, compulsory seat belts and the prohibition of recreational drugs, to make the case for Mill…
Full letter here [PDF]
More on drugs here>

Continue reading »]]> Letter to the Guardian published 14 February, 2007
Published version at http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2012301,00.html
Sir

When Labour came to power 10 years ago John Prescott proclaimed “I will have failed if in five years time there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car. It’s a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it”.

He has failed. Since that proclamation the nation’s motor vehicle population has increased by 7.5 million. At parking meter distances (264 cars per mile parked nose to tail) these extra vehicles could be accommodated in a new car park stretching from London to Edinburgh 85 lanes wide. The owners of these extra vehicles expect not just somewhere to park at home but also the ends of their journeys, and roads on which to get there. Huge amounts of space are required to meet these expectations.

Congestion pricing is not the answer. It is symptom treatment that will make the problem worse. It will simply disperse the problem into those parts of the country currently least congested. It will encourage yet more sprawl and low-density, car-dependent land use patterns, hostile to pedestrians and cyclists and unserviceable by public transport.

The on-street car park in older urban areas has been full for some time. Overwhelmingly the extra cars added to the nation’s car population each year must find parking spaces out of town. Their new owners are choosing to live in areas where they have no choice but to depend on their cars.

You note (The Price of Pricing, 12 February) that motoring is now cheaper than it was 25 years ago. To discourage sprawl and increasing dependence on the car motoring costs should be increased most in the areas where the growth is fastest – the opposite of the congestion charging currently proposed.

An extended version of the argument can be found in Darling, meet the 800 pound gorilla!  and Hypermobility: too much of a good thing

Continue reading »]]> Letter to the editor of the British Medical Journal, 26 June, 2006, commenting on Unsafe driving behaviour and four wheel drive vehicles: observational study, by Lesley Walker, Jonathan Williams and Konrad Jamrozik.

EDITOR — Walker et al show convincingly that drivers and other occupants of heavy four wheel drive vehicles are safer in crashes than those in smaller or lighter vehicles and those on foot or cycle.¹ They also show that drivers of these vehicles use mobile phones more often and seat belts less often than drivers of other cars.

But by conflating mobile phone use (which distracts drivers) and non-use of seat belts (which makes drivers feel less safe) as equally important examples of illegal and dangerous practices they have sown confusion and undermined the prospect of a constructive approach to road safety.

Using mobile phones and not using seatbelts have opposing consequences for other road users. The distraction caused by mobile phones increases the threat to others, but the non-use of seat belts decreases it. As the authors note, deaths of pedestrians, cyclists, and rear seat passengers increased (by 8%, 13%, and 28% respectively) after laws mandating the use of seat belts in front seats were introduced in the United Kingdom.

To follow this debate on the BMJ website and to view the full article commented on see: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/333/7558/71