UKIP or the Greens: Who are really saying the unsayable?

Amidst their recent popularity, the United Kingdom Independence Party has tried to encourage the perception that they stand outside the established political consensus, offering arguments and perspectives neglected by mainstream political debate. This of course, is at odds with the fact that support for most UKIP policies can be found in the mainstream rightwing press every week. There is nothing daring about talking about exiting the EU, or transgressive about plotting to reduce immigration.  UKIP might have other radical concerns or proposals, but they certainly haven’t told anybody yet: Nigel Farage disowned his 2010 General Election manifesto, and has failed to disclose any updated domestic policies. It’s only with his recent comments on Romanians that Farage has said anything genuinely controversial, and he has expressed ambivalence since.

By contrast to UKIP’s flimsy policy platform, it is the Green Party, the other lot outside the mainstream party system, who have genuinely consensus shaking ideas. To take a few examples:

• On Migration (note that it is ‘migration’, rather than immigration; not just an issue of coming, but leaving), the Greens turn the standard debate on its head, challenging the assumption that rich countries have a right to exclude foreigners, and framing the debate around global inequality, rather than the economic self-interest of the UK

• On Economic Inequality, the Greens argue for a Citizens’ Income, an unconditional sum of money for all citizens to prevent destitution and allow them a degree of freedom from the pressing imperative for a job and income, allowing them to develop their education, family life etc. This is a radical policy with prominent historic advocates on the left and the right, yet one which is unknown to most Britons today

• On International Trade, the Greens express a degree of scepticism about free trade uncommon among major parties or the mainstream media. There is a general acceptance in the UK that the free movement of goods and services (though not labour) is an unmitigated boon. Even UKIP, for all their mistrust of the European common market, want to set up a Commonwealth Free Trade Area. By contrast, the Greens oppose the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, seeing it as undemocratic, and emphasise ‘fair trade’ over ‘free trade’

• On Public Services, the Greens are committed to nationalising railways, water and energy, policies that are highly popular, but rejected by the other big parties.

The position of the Greens highlights the benefits and dangers of genuinely defying consensus. On some issues, like nationalisation, you are likely to hit a position that has widespread appeal, and find yourself speaking for the ordinary man against an out of tough elite. On other issues, like, immigration, you’ll be voicing a fringe viewpoint that will likely get you written off as lunatic. And in some cases, as with the basic income, the idea will be so untested that you just won’t know how people will respond until you test it.

However they are received, greater acknowledgement of Green positions would stimulate and enhance what are often stale political debate.

A tax on conspicuous consumption?

In a recent Vox article, Matthew Yglesias argues for punitive income and inheritance taxes. His logic is that these taxes can have benefits beyond just raising government revenue – by deterring the high pay and large bequests that encourage socially harmful inequality, they can be beneficial even if nobody pays them.

Yglesisas repurposes the reasoning that underpins excise taxes, such as those on tobacco or gambling, and applies it to income and inheritance:

Tax T discourages behaviour B, which contributes to social problem P

Where T can be tax on cigarettes, behaviour B smoking and P the public health cost of smoking-related disease. Or in Yglesias’ argument, T is income tax, B is high corporate pay and P is income inequality.

An interesting question is whether this line of thinking can be used to justify rises in other existing taxes. I have previously discussed the possibility that income tax could be used as a means to reduce working hours – Rupert Read claims that “high tax rates are a good thing inasmuch as they discourage the culture of overwork which grips societies like ours”.

Another interesting application would be to increase sales tax (eg VAT) on ‘positional goods’, such as luxury fashion items and jewellery, which are bought primarily to increase the owners’ social status. Besides the direct negative effects for those who have to endure the other people’s wealth being shoved in their faces, the purchase of these goods also leads to an ‘arms race’, where households spend more and more in an effort to best each other, with more of their money diverted from things that they will genuinely enjoy. Higher sales tax on luxury items would mean fewer purchases of positional goods, lower status anxiety and help defuse the consumption arms race.

Robert Frank has gone further and advocated scrapping income tax and replacing it with a progressive consumption tax for these very reasons. Under Frank’s scheme, households would have to disclose their incomes and savings to the tax authorities, and would be taxed on the remainder. This is an interesting idea, but I have a couple of reservations. First, this seems an unnecessarily bureaucratic system involving a lot of paperwork and scope for errors. Secondly, it is clearly the case that not all consumption is on positional goods. Frank would tax spending on food and rent, money spent on meeting basic needs. By contrast, a positional goods tax can be targeted at more expensive goods that are more likely to be for display, rather than being intrinsically valuable.

However reformed, income tax and sales might just be the tip of the iceberg in terms of Yglesias’ argument – what other existing taxes can be reconsidered as excise duties?

The Misleading Rhetoric of the ‘Global Race’

The idea that Britain is involved in a ‘global race’ which it will ‘lose’ to other countries unless the necessary reforms are undertaken has been a staple of Conservative party rhetoric for the past 18 months. Numerous commentators have reviewed and ridiculed the phenomenon, with critics typically returning to two objections. Firstly, there is the lack of precision around what exactly the race is for:

This race, we are told, is economic. Our opponents are usually specified: the rising countries of Asia and South America such as China, India and Brazil. Yet the prize is vaguely and promiscuously defined: ‘jobs’, ‘wealth’, ‘growth’, ‘trade’, ‘talent’, ‘technology’, ‘skills’, ‘capital’,  ‘competitiveness’, ‘big ideas’,‘influence’, innovation’, ‘investment’, ‘investment opportunities’, ‘recovery’

This lack of clarity leads to the suspicion that the argument is not the result of any analysis of global economic and social trends, but is rather an exercise in creating a foreign bogeyman to threaten those who object to Tory policies.

The second common objection to the metaphor of the global race is its implication that economic trends are zero-sum, that for every winner there must be a loser

Countries get richer together. If China carries on reforming and growing, there will be more opportunities there for Britain

Yet Chancellor George Osborne’s article with his German counterpart Wolfgang Schauble in Thursday’s Financial Times continued to display these confusions and worse. In a single paragraph, they list four domains in which they believe European countries are at risk of losing the global race – economic growth, patent applications (presumably as a proxy for innovation or technological development), youth unemployment and social welfare spending:

Recovery in Europe is vital. But our continent is falling behind. Over the past six years the European economy has stalled. In the same period the Indian economy has grown by more than a third, and the Chinese economy by almost 70 per cent. Europe’s share of world patent applications almost halved in the past decade. A quarter of young people looking for work cannot find any. Europe accounts for just over 7 per cent of the world’s population but 50 per cent of global social welfare spending. Reform is the key.

But in each of these domains the metaphor of a race is misleading – either because they are focusing on the wrong metric or because a competitive approach is inappropriate

Though Osborne and Schauble do not explicitly refer to the idea of a global race, this is clearly the image they are trying to invoke when they worry that “our continent is falling behind”. But who is Europe falling behind, and in which race?

The first race, it becomes clear, is the race for higher economic output. In this race, Europe is falling behind China and India, as they have seen higher growth in the past six years. Stated so clearly, the absurdity of the claim should be apparent – rich Europe cannot be falling behind much poorer countries like China and India – it is clearly ahead of them.* Rather, what is happening is that China and India are catching up to the EU.

Being caught up might not be as bad as falling behind, but it’s still almost always a bad thing. Yet there are a couple of salient facts required to put that in context. The first is that this is a race where it is harder to lead than to chase. The economic principle of convergence means that poorer countries will tend to grow faster than rich ones, essentially because they can trade with and copy technologies from them. The GDP race is one that it is hard to lead – the EU is like a cyclist which must accept that other riders will benefit from their slipstream. Thus lower growth than India or China is not a tragedy to be bemoaned, but the almost inevitable consequence of having a bigger economy. The real problem for Europe is its lack of growth in absolute terms.

The second critical fact is that this is not a case of Europe needing to fend off immediate rivals in a close race Rather, Europe, in seeking to extend its lead over India and China, is like a runner sprinting to lap straggling laggards in the race. Depending on the source, average EU income is 20th-30th in the world. By contrast, China is placed in the 90s and India in the 130s. Stepping out of the metaphor, there is something deeply unpleasant about Europe seeking to out-grow poor countries like India and China. If Osborne and Schauble want faster growth than India and China, then by implication what they want is a more grossly unequal world where the rich are even more distant from the global poor than before.

The second race that Osborne and Schauble want to win is the competition for most patent applications. They are correct that Europe’s share of global patents has declined, but again, they fail to provide the relevant context. First, in absolute terms, patent applications are around 50% higher than a decade ago, according to World Bank data. Second, this seems like another area where convergence has occurred – the EU still has more patents per capita than average, with 10% of global applications, despite (as Osborne and Schauble later observe) having only 7% of the global population.

The third point made is around youth unemployment. However, there is no comparative metric used to illustrate this, so it’s not clear who Europe is supposed to be ‘falling behind’.

Osborne and Schauble’s fourth indicator is the most pernicious – social welfare spending. This is one race where it is particularly unclear what constitutes ‘winning’. I personally would have thought that out-spending other countries would be beating them, but it is clear that the finance ministers see Europe’s high spending as a failure. But I can only presume that they do not see having the lowest social welfare spending in the world as a desirable goal, either.

The fact that Osborne and Schauble offer the context of Europe’s population suggests they see this as some sort of odd ‘race to the middle’ – in their view Europe should be closer to average global social spending. The implication is that social spending is a ‘goldilocks good’ – some is desirable, but too much is a bad thing. But if this is the case, why should we take the global average to be the best indicator of the ideal level? Being above the global average for social spending could just mean that other countries spend too little on social welfare. And in this case that is almost certainly what it means. Why should we care about an average that is clearly pulled down by developing countries lacking the finances to develop welfare states of their own?

There are almost certainly some domains where competitive global comparison is the appropriate way to think about them. But Osborne and Schauble’s letter suggests the Conservatives still haven’t found them

* Even is the race is in terms of absolute GDP (ie not adjusted for China and India’s larger populations), the EU remains clearly ahead of India and just ahead of China

Can cosmopolitans vote for Scottish independence?

A cosmopolitan nationalist is a contradiction in terms. Yet I want to suggest that in some cases consistent cosmopolitans may be justified in supporting nationalist causes – in particular, voting ‘yes’ in independence referenda like the ones anticipated in Scotland and Catalonia in 2014.

Cosmopolitanism is the moral or political theory that insists that nationality is morally arbitrary – that we have no greater reason to promote or care about the welfare of our compatriots than people of any other country. This is, almost by definition, antagonistic to nationalism, which insists that we woe at least some loyalty to our nation and its inhabitants. Cosmopolitanism means, literally, citizenship of the world. Nationalism seeks to carve out a slice of the world, and put it above others.

So cosmopolitans and nationalists are certainly unlikely comrades, but if circumstances conspire in the right way, I think they can end up on the same side.

The first point to make is that while cosmopolitans embrace global citizenship in a moral sense, few major cosmopolitans have called for its institutional corollary – a world state. Thomas Pogge offers perhaps the most prominent discussion of an ideal cosmopolitan global order, and maintains an important role for nation-states, as part of a ‘multi-layered’ order, with power diffused down to regional institutions and up to global organisations. Moreover, Pogge sees secessionist referenda, as in Scotland or Catalonia, as part of the “cosmopolitan ideal of democracy”:

“The inhabitants of any contiguous territory of reasonable shape, if sufficiently numerous, may decide-through some majoritarian or supermajoritarian procedure-to form themselves into a political unit of a level commensurate with their number”

Even commitment to a world state does not necessarily entail opposition to secession. After all, voters are being asked to choose between Scotland and the UK, or Catalonia and Spain – ‘World State’ is unlikely to appear on any ballots. On the face of it, World Staters are likely to oppose secession as it represents a move further away from a World State – greater fragmentation, rather than unity. But it could be that a more indirect route to global unification seems more likely – for example, if one of the new states is more open to multi-national institutions (as Scotland appears to be more supportive of the EU than the rest of the UK). More likely, neither option will make a World State substantially more likely, in which case the World Stater is in the same position as other cosmopolitans, forced to fall back on other considerations.

So what considerations should guide a cosmopolitan voter? While Pogge suggests that cosmopolitans should accept the decisions of referenda, he does not offer any guidance on how to decide which side to support once a referendum is called. One possibility is that this falls within the legitimate sphere of compatriot preference that some cosmopolitans accept – that this is one area where it is OK to give voice to nationalist sympathies. If this is the case, then the decision is simple - the cosmopolitan is free to vote for whichever country they feel most emotional attachment to.

But suppose we want to deny it is ever legitimate to show compatriot preference, or perhaps that we genuinely have no emotional preference? In that case, there are three relevant considerations that a cosmopolitan needs to account for:

1. Will secession leave the new country (ie Scotland/Catalonia) better off?

2. Will secession leave the rump/original country (ie ‘rUK’/Spain) better off?

3. Will secession be better for those from other countries (eg Spain, Romania, Somalia, Niger)?

This might seem trivial, but it is important to bear all three considerations in mind when reviewing the arguments for independence. For starters, notice that the vast majority of the debate addresses only consideration 1.

The cosmopolitan must therefore be indifferent to any zero-sum nationalist claims. If Catalonia claims it will be richer with independence because it will have to share less of its wealth with Spain, then the cosmopolitan will not see this as positive, since it will make Spain worse off. Moreover, they must be alert to knock-on effects. If an independent Scotland would be a fairer, more equal place than rUK, this good must be balanced against the harm to the rest of Britain of losing Scotland’s moderating influence (and, for example, embracing neo-liberalism more fully). Cosmopolitans are also likely to pay particular attention to domains like foreign and immigration policy which impact people of other nationalities. Thus an independent Scotland’s more pacific stance in international relations and greater openness to immigration is likely to strengthen the cosmopolitan’s appetite for independence (assuming, of course, that this does not significantly affect rUK’s policy).

Thus a cosmopolitan’s reasoning on the independence question is likely to be more complex and more pragmatic than most. other voters. There are more interests to be considered, certain arguments that must be thrown out, other arguments that must be given greater emphasis. But it is entirely possible that independence may be the course that best promotes cosmopolitan values.

Privatised Healthcare: What Would We Lose?

Contrasting the different challenges facing British and American healthcare, Janet Daley attacks the “anachronistic and unsatisfactory” arrangement of a “state-owned-and-run monopoly of medical provision”. This throws up a number of obvious issues around the equity, efficiency and sustainability of these different models. But even aside from the questions of whether state run healthcare is cheaper, more equal or produces better health outcomes, I think Daley accidentally touches upon a couple of underappreciated benefits of the NHS style system: the limitation of unpleasant choice, and avoidance of the distrust of the market.

“Note to politicians: there is a new generation of adults out there who buy their holidays and their electronic equipment on the internet, who purchase their insurance on price-comparison websites”

Daley makes the automatic assumption that because they live in a consumerist society and are constantly making consumer choices, people must desire and enjoy these choices. We do live in an era where most people purchase their insurance on the internet. But that doesn’t mean that they like doing so – in fact, the majority of people see it as an unpleasant chore. The ubiquitous adverts for price comparison websites are intended a) to motivate people to exercise their consumer choice and b) to convince people that acting the consumer is less unpleasant than they expect.

So why then does Daley assume that the NHS deprives people options they want to take, rather than preserving them from having to go through tedious and time consuming decisions? I can’t be the only one to look at the process of Obamacare and be extremely grateful that I don’t have to worry about health insurance, don’t have to sit down on my hard-earned weekend and run through the different plans, however nicely they are laid out. I can’t be the only one grateful that I don’t need to worry about anything, and can still know I will receive care when I need it.

“A system that is absolutely, unconditionally free at the point of use with no questions asked and no exceptions made”

Daley sees this as an outdated principle which can only cause problems. But one benefit this principle brings is obvious. It means that the unwell and their families never need to worry about money at a stressful and difficult time. Even if the money can be claimed back, even if the excess is small, the fact of needing to have money free to pay for care just adds another potential headache at a difficult time.

But, more subtly, the fact of money changing hands alters the social dynamic between doctor and patient. For example, psychologists have shown that ‘priming’ people with the idea of money alters their outlook: it makes them more individualistic and less socially-oriented, a worrying trait to encourage in doctors.

Moreover, the exchange of money creates a more ‘transactional’ relationship between doctor and patient, and potentially erodes trust between doctor and patient. The doctor’s job is no longer to make me better, but to get the most money out of me. How do I know they are prescribing that drug because it is the most effective and not because it is the most expensive?

Now I’m sure Daley would respond that those willing to take the time and effort to work out their optimal health insurance plan will receive better care at a lower cost. And she would probably say that a bit more mistrust between doctor and patient might make doctors less complacent, and force them to improve standards to meet the challenges of their patients. I have my doubts, but they are not implausible claims, However, she cannot deny that something has been lost, that people would be in these ways worse off, without the NHS. And so a lot depends on showing that cost and effectiveness would be clearly higher with greater privatisation.

Are opinion polls bad for democracy?

Ahead of today’s general election, the German broadcaster ZDF has broken with convention and published an opinion poll in the final few days before the vote. Previously, it had been agreed that surveys would not be released fewer than ten days before polling day for fear of influencing voters. This is a worrying development because it conflicts with three of the most prominent theories about why democracy is valuable: aggregative, epistemic and deliberative theories.

According to the aggregative theory, democracy is fundamentally a procedure for reconciling the different interests and preferences of citizens. On any given issue, citizens will come with ready-formed preferences, based on their personalities and circumstances. It does not matter why people want to criminalise cannabis or ban the burqa – the only salient question is whether more people are for or against these proposals. The more popular policies are the ones that should be enacted.

However, aggregative democracy depends on people accurately reporting their preferences. If we cannot rely on voters to vote for the policies they actually want, then the vote will not reveal which proposal is genuinely more popular, the one which satisfies the most preferences. Opinion polls make it more likely that people’s votes will not reflect their true preferences. If my favoured party or policy is far behind in the poll, I may believe it is pointless to vote for them, or even to bother to vote at all. Opinion polls make tactical voting more likely – I may cast a positive vote for a policy or party that I don’t like to stop a worse one succeeding. In other words, opinion polls help to mess up the clean aggregative interpretation of elections.

A second major theory of democracy is the epistemic view. Epistemic theories see democracy as trying to find the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ answers to political questions, such as ‘What is the best set of policies to encourage economic growth?’ Epistemic theories take their inspiration from ideas such as the wisdom of crowds – the notion that the more views are canvassed on an issue, the more likely they are to converge on a correct answer.

This basic principle is formalised in the Condorect Jury Theorem. However, one of the key assumptions of the theorem is that votes must be independent – person 1 voting for A should not make it any more likely that person 2 will vote for A. Imagine if you ask two separate people for directions, and they both advise you to go right. This would ordinarily give you reasonable confidence that this advice is sound. But if you knew the second person was only copying the first, you would be more likely to seek further verification.

Opinion polls may flout the independence criterion valued by epistemic theorists of democracy, because of the momentum they create. If my instinct is to vote Pirate, but everybody else appears to be voting CDU, I am bound to wonder if I have missed something incredible in the CDU platform. Conversely, the lack of support for the Pirates is likely to make me reconsider their competence. The Asch conformity experiments show that people are susceptible to peer pressure even on beliefs they have a great deal of confidence in – these effects are liable to be even more acute in politics.

A third perspective on democracy emphasises deliberation. According to this view, democracy is as much about forming opinions as aggregating them. Thus deliberative democracy emphasises free, open and rational debate, whereby citizens attempt to criticise and refine their own views, as well as understanding those of others, in the hope of achieving consensus. 

Deliberative democrats have reason to fear opinion polls because they distract from the process of debate. They distort media coverage and public attention by encouraging passive spectatorship of a competition, rather than engagement with ideas and policies. This creates a ‘horse race’ model of politics, where tactics, strategies and who’s winning draws more focus than substantive discussion of different platforms. Moreover, deliberative democrats are wary of excessive focus on voting rather than other elements of the political process (such as deliberation), a trend exacerbated by polling.

These arguments may give opinion polls too much credit – it could well be that they have much less influence on voting behaviour than suggested here. However, if opinion polls are in fact this powerful, they may indeed be damaging for democracy.

Nigel Farage: Defender of Immigrants?

Among the many outraged voices at the the use of vans to tell illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest”, perhaps the most surprising was that of the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who called the message “nasty, unpleasant”. Farage’s position on the issue was unexpected, given UKIP’s fiercely anti-immigrant stance at present. Yet if Farage is wily enough, his intervention could mark the start of a more nuanced position on immigration, with major strategic benefits for the party.

The argument I envisage UKIP making, basically, is that these desperate and illiberal measures are a consequence of the UK’s membership of the membership of the European Economic Area, which compels Britain to allow entry to all EEA citizens. Since visitors from the EEA account for 70% of arrivals to the UK, the Conservatives are forced to squeeze the remaining 30% as hard as they can – too hard, even for UKIP’s liking – to meet their targets on reducing net immigration to the “tens of thousands”. By contrast, UKIP, Farage can say, would simply pull out of the EEA, restrict migration from Europe, and do away with the heavy-handed approach of this current government towards other immigrants. If he is bold enough, Farage would criticise policies such as immigrant bonds, spot checks and requiring landlords to be informants. In sum, Farage could stand against the idea that Britain should be the “hostile environment” for immigrants that the current government seems to envisage, with the promise that UKIP offer a more humane way to keep immigrant numbers down.

The big advantage of this position would be to give UKIP some defence against the accusations of racism that are bound to pursue a right-wing party by showing a willingness to stand up for vulnerable minorities. If UKIP are to break into the mainstream, they need to be seen as a respectable and non-racist – these sorts of positions would go a long way to making them credible. They would also strengthen their claim to be an alternative to an increasingly out of touch and broken political elite.

Of course, the strategy brings risks. If Farage and the UKIP leadership do not really believe the position I am sketching out, then it is likely to ring hollow. Moreover, this strategy would require UKIP to defend predominantly non-white (non-EU) immigrants at the expense of predominantly white (EU) immigrants. Insofar as their support genuinely is racist, it might abandon the party. But then, it might be in the long-term interests of UKIP to trade some of these core backers for a more moderate audience.

A more interesting question is whether such a shift would be good for British politics. On the one hand, any move that tries to make the immigration debate less toxic and which tries to move beyond demonising migrants is bound to do some good. Further, it could encourage some interesting and productive coalitions between left and right, much needed in an area that doesn’t cleanly divide left and right. Then again, I can’t help but revolt against anything that gives UKIP  and their brand of unreconstituted  conservatism and libertarianism more influence.But it would certainly be compelling to watch…

On the basic liberty to eat what you like

Contrary to popular reports, the recent School Food Plan for England and Wales does not call for packed lunches to be banned. However, the idea of a ban, mooted by Henry Dimbleby – one of the report’s authors – is interesting because of the response it has provoked. Dimbleby suggests that a blanket ban might be unwise because “There's a strong libertarian streak in the English”. Sure enough, ‘Fleet Street Fox’ raises the spectre of totalitarianism in the Mirror, describing the idea in the following terms: “So [packed lunches] must be banned, he says. Not improved. Not guidelined. Not discussed. Just banned, like thought in China.” The frothy outrage is reminiscent of the common objections to the proposal of ‘Meat Free Mondays’ in certain dining halls – presented as a matter of freedom and rights.

In general, the idea that people should have the ability to decide for themselves what goes in their own mouths is surely uncontroversial. This is a fairly clear example of the sort of autonomy that anybody with any sympathy for liberalism is bound to respect. Yet at the same time, there are very few freedoms which are entirely unconditional or unconstrained, if for no other reason than to avoid them restricting other valuable freedoms. On what grounds might it be morally legitimate to override this freedom?

The most obvious argument is the paternalist one – where a freedom is likely to be misused in a way harmful to the agent, it is sometimes right to require them to act in a more prudent way. This is the logic behind requiring people to wear seatbelts, or prohibiting them from taking harmful recreational drugs. In the case of compulsory school meals, the government or school would be taking away children (or parents’) freedom to choose their own lunches, because the negative consequences of these actions for their health are too great.

A second argument posits that compulsory school lunches are legitimate because children are incapable of full autonomy, and so infringing their freedom is less morally significant. Because children are generally less informed, not fully educated and perhaps not capable of full rationality yet, their choices are less worthy of respect and protection. In most countries, children below a certain age – usually 16 – are not judged capable of deciding that they don’t want to go to school.

This argument is complicated by the fact that most children don’t have much control over their diet anyway – their parents decide what they eat. In this case, the question is the more contentious one of whether the state or parents should have control over children. The most plausible response is that both should have a role to play – the state should not dominate child rearing, but nor should it treat children as the property of their guardians, free to treat them as they wish. Just as children cannot unilaterally decide to quit school before they reach an appropriate age, nor can their parents decide to pull them out. This is because in certain cases it is necessary for the state to protect the interests of children from their parents.

Finally, compulsory school lunches can be defended on the grounds that they enhance freedom in the long term. For a start, improving a person’s physical health means that they are likely to be able to do more physically strenuous things for longer as they get older. Moreover, there is the possibility that school meals will introduce children to different tastes, ingredients and styles of food, and alert them to different food cultures, or ways of relating to food, thus expanding their set of options.

These arguments are not at all mutually exclusive – indeed, they feed off one another. The paternalistic argument is all the stronger for the diminished autonomy of children and if its benefit involves greater freedom as well as better health. The paternalistic argument gives a justification for overriding parents’ desires for their children.

Together these arguments suggest that a ban on packed lunches is not a clear infringement of liberty. However, it still remains up for debate whether these are good enough reasons with positive enough effects to justify such a heavy-handed measure.

Nationalise energy?

Thinkers and politicians have been debating the limits and failures of markets since the beginning of capitalism. However, the question of which spheres of society are appropriate for free markets is increasingly pertinent, given the current economic and political context. Since the financial crisis, there has been greater awareness of the fallibility of the neo-liberal model, leading to curiosity towards, if not embrace of alternatives. Politically, the Red Tory and Blue Labour movements have revealed major currents of anti-market thinking within both major UK parties.

Against this backdrop, the work of social psychologists like Barry Schwartz, Sheena Iyengar and Dan Gilbert is deserving of close attention. Among the various problems with free markets that they identify are three observations:

1. Economic interactions have a fundamentally distinctive character, and require us to relate to people in a different way. The relationship between buyer and seller  is a fundamentally antagonistic one: the salesman is trying to squeeze as much money out of their customers as possible, while the buyer is trying to get away with paying as little as possible for their goods. This creates an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion – can you believe the advice from the shop attendant, or be sure that they aren’t trying to cheat you? This, in turn, is likely to colour our attitudes and behaviour in non-economic contexts.
2. The very act of consumer choice can be overwhelming and reduce welfare. To be confronted by the wide array of options in many modern markets is disconcerting, and often unpleasant. It demands time and energy to establish all your options, to research them and to reach a decision. Often, this can seem more effort than it is worth, and lead to paralysis, or decisions being postponed. I go into a shop looking to buy a new laptop and discover there are twenty different brands that meet my specifications. So I have to go home, look them up on the internet and read all the reviews. By the time I get round to going to the shop again, I’ve had to struggle for two extra weeks with my old laptop, and spent much longer than I wanted to worrying about it
3. Moreover, once the choice is made, the options foregone are likely to continue to haunt us. Every time our purchase falls short of perfection, we are likely to be reminded of the fact that there might be a better option out there, which we have given up.

What are we supposed to do with these arguments? The clear implication is that liberalisation has gone too far, and that some markets ought to be restricted. But which ones? How much choice is enough?

These are big questions, and broad-brush answers will inevitably ignore the vast diversity of different markets. The best way forward is to take the social psychologists’ criticisms as a general set of considerations against free markets, and to take different markets in turn to see if the freedom they involve is worth the psychological cost.

I think that the British retail markets for gas and electricity exemplify many of the problems identified by Schwartz et al, and where the anti-market theory can produce some concrete policy prescriptions.Since the late 1990s, the government has sought to encourage a competitive market for consumer gas and electricity, with the idea that the fear of losing customers to nimbler rivals will incentivise energy companies to keep prices down for everybody.

The question of whether this project has been successful in reducing energy costs is a difficult one to answer. Prices fell after the privatisation of energy companies, but this coincided with a period of global excesses in energy supplies. It has also been suggested that initial savings came as a result of ‘asset sweating’, resulting in under-investment, and storing up higher energy bills for the future. UK consumers pay less for their energy bills than the rest of Europe, but again this comparison may be misleading. Different tax systems make like-for-like comparison extremely difficult. Britain’s offshore gas reserves have also been a factor in keeping energy prices lower.¹

All this means is that it is an extremely technical question, beyond my knowledge or expertise, whether a liberalised, competitive market means cheaper energy. However, the evidence is ambiguous enough to suggest that the benefits may not be that great. What I want to suggest is that there are other considerations that should be taken into account when we decide how to structure our energy market besides the question of how to make energy as cheap as possible. A competitive energy market may have costs which outweigh the minor, perhaps non-existent benefits it brings.

The current market in energy exemplifies the flaws identified by the psychologists above. In the first place, it is a market riven by deep mistrust. The vast majority of energy consumers believe that energy companies are keeping prices unnecessarily high, or are deliberately complicating the information they give to consumers. Now, there are probably few markets where consumers genuinely believe that companies have their best interests at heart. However, in the energy market there is an unusual sense that suppliers are trying to exploit the ignorance of their customers.

On the second point above, switching energy company is among the more unpleasant consumer processes facing people in the UK. The options available are notoriously complex, and difficult to compare. Even if the government and the regulator Ofgem succeed in their attempts to simplify this system, this will not mean that it will be obvious to each household which is the best supplier and tariff for them. There is still the problem that a proper comparison of energy tariffs requires consumers to accurately predict how much energy they are likely to use in the future. Moreover, choices between fixed and variable tariffs involve an element of gambling on how much prices will rise or fall by. Inevitably, then, people refuse to participate in the market – having to take higher energy prices because they cannot face the hassle and time investment of switching. An Ofgem report classified 80-90% of consumers as ‘passive’ or ‘disengaged’ from the market.

The British energy market typifies the third great vice of modern markets, too – it is a choice that never goes away. Given the volatility of the energy market, with deals constantly hovering in and out of view, consumers are increasingly expected to be thinking about their energy provider all the time. This is not an unpleasant decision that you can grit your teeth and get through once every few years. No, for an energy consumer to properly participate in the market, they need to be ever-vigilant – for example, by signing up the ‘Cheap energy club’, which exhorts them to “Constantly monitor your tariff”.

Perhaps these psychological ill effects are outweighed by the price benefits of the current system. Or perhaps there are ways of reforming the market to reduce or improve the choices faced. However, given expressed public support for re-nationalisation, these issues seem worthy of discussion.

¹ For more of an overview of the benefits and failures of privatisation see this Which? report, or this article by James Meek

Should fewer people be encouraged to go to university?

The obvious conclusion to draw from Allister Heath’s claim that the fastest job growth over the next few years will be in occupations that that don’t require university degrees is that fewer people should be encouraged to go to university. That’s certainly the spin put on it by Heath’s sub-editor, who headlined the piece, “Tell youngsters the truth: the UK needs you to work not go to university”. That also seems to be Heath’s view, judging from his swipe at Tony Blair’s target of getting half of school leavers into university. However, I can think of three possible objections to such an inference. The first is that we cannot depend on these projections as fixed, unchangeable constraints as policy. The second is that a skills mismatch may help drive economic efficiency. The third is that universities should be judged on their merits beyond just preparing people for jobs.

Economic projections are fairly dubious at the best of times, but it would be an obvious mistake to assume that nothing can be done to alter the relative growth rates of different types of jobs. After all, higher education teaching is listed among the fastest growing professions, but that is unlikely to remain the case if student numbers are significantly cut. Though he cautions against top-down planning, it is clear that Heath believes the list of policies he suggests at the end, including lower taxes, less regulation and improving infrastructure will create more graduate jobs. Thus one response to the projections is for the government to undertake the policies it believes can contribute to the development of more jobs requiring university degrees. So the first reason to continue to keep encouraging school leavers into university is because you believe that jobs can be created for them.

The second reason is to promote the meritocratic ideal that most capable person for a job should fill it. If student numbers are contracted to near enough the exact level of graduate jobs, there is no guarantee that the least academically capable will be the ones squeezed out. For one thing, risk aversion and a lack of information or social precedent mean that those from poorer backgrounds are more likely to be deterred. For another, many students do not reveal and develop their aptitudes and abilities until they are at university. Meritocracy is obviously a moral ideal – may people believe it is necessary for fairness. But it is also likely to bring about greater productivity and efficiency.

What of the ‘extra’ graduates that are unable to find jobs to match their skills? It is at least possible that they will be more productive in whatever job they end up in than someone who didn’t go to university. After all, beyond the direct technical knowledge imparted by university courses, there are a number of transferrable skills beneficial in almost any workplace, things like communication and time management. There is some evidence that this is the case, but it has also been suggested that these advantages can be wiped out by the lack of motivation of workers who lack job satisfaction because they feel over-qualified.

Of course, even in those cases where attending university is not economically beneficial, either for the individual or the economy at large, there are still a host of reasons why we might encourage people to go to university. The social, cultural and political benefits of a university education have been discussed by at length. It has been suggested that universities help breed a more cultured, moral and democratic society. These benefits are surely not restricted to educating those who stand to get a job at the end of the process.

More radically, for those who accept that the current level of economic development is ‘enough’, university may be seen as playing a role in ‘leisure smoothing’, giving young people an important period of freedom from the demands of paid employment. This fits Robert Skidelsky’s vision that “We shouldn't be aiming to extend the domain of work into old age, but to extend the domain of non-work into young age”. Thus universities might be seen as a sort of retirement community for the young, where they are given the opportunity to be active and social without the demands of making an economic contribution to society.

Now it might well be that these arguments are insufficient to take the sting out of Heath’s critique of the present ideology around higher education. It might be enough to show that is beneficial to have a bare minimum level of university graduates, but not enough to show that the current level is justified. That depends on the empirical facts and the weight given to the different considerations set out here.

However, I think that this debate raises a couple of very important issues for how we should think about higher education, wherever you stand. Firstly, how should the option of higher education be presented to young people? Heath’s indignation in the article comes from the belief that many university graduates are likely to feel disappointed and betrayed, believing their degrees to entitle them to better jobs than they expected. If going to university does not guarantee a graduate job, then Heath is almost certainly correct that it is wrong to mislead school leavers with false promises. Perhaps a better alternative is to present it as a calculated gamble, with a good chance of bringing about a certain type of job and lifestyle, but no guarantee. Moreover, if the economic benefits of university are smaller than we previously believed, perhaps there should be more focus on the non-economic advantages it brings? (If these messages are successful they might increase the job satisfaction of disappointed graduates, and so contribute to productivity)

The second issue this raises is the question of funding. If it turns out that much of the benefit of a university degree doesn’t accrue directly to the individual, but involve the more diffuse goods of economic efficiency through meritocracy and socio-cultural goods, this might be an argument for a greater public funding of higher education, taking  more of the burden off individuals.

Improving Germany’s model democracy

Germany has one of the best electoral systems in the world. If I were writing a constitution, I think only New Zealand could serve as a better model. I’ve briefly discussed the advantages of mixed member proportional representation (MMPR) before, but here are some of the main benefits:

1. The question of which person you want to represent your local area and the question of which party you want to govern the country are separated.
2. Each voter has equal influence over the ultimate distribution of seats – unlike systems which give rise to '’swing states’ or ‘marginal constituencies’, where voters have more power
3. There is less incentive for tactical voting, as proportional representation ensures that votes for smaller parties are not ‘wasted’

I think these three features – less ambiguity over what people are voting for, equalising the influence of each voter, and ensuring that voters’ genuine preferences are considered – mean that MMPR is more democratic than other systems.

However, recent events in Germany show that it can still fall short of these lofty democratic principles. In the January 20th Lower Saxony election, it has been suggested that a number of CDU supporters voted for the FDP. Why would they do this? Because the FDP is more likely to cooperate with the CDU than other parties, and it was in danger of falling short of the 5% share of the vote necessary to win any seats in parliament. It has been suggested that the general election later this year might witness a similar phenomenon.

The election was analysed mostly in terms of its implications for the fortunes of the CDU, but more troubling are its implications for democracy as a whole. CDU supporters voting FDP violates principle 3) above, that democracy should aggregate authentic, and not falsely stated preferences. Less obviously, it also violates 2) – that each vote should have equal bearing on ultimate electoral result. The CDU supporters misrepresented their preference because they believed that voting FDP would give them more influence on the distribution of seats. Voting FDP gave them more power because they had the chance not only to be the marginal voter who decided the destination of a single seat, as all other voters did, but additionally gave them the chance of being the marginal voter whose vote carried their party over the threshold, and decided a hatful of extra seats.

The flipside of the extra influence wielded by voters whose party is close to the parliamentary threshold is the disenfranchisement of those whose favoured party fails to meet the threshold – their votes effectively count for less than the rest of the electorate, raising the spectre of the ‘wasted vote’, another phenomenon MMPR is supposed to avoid.

These problems are minor niggles compared to the inequity of voting systems like the US or the UK, but the undignified scenes in Lower Saxony let the German system down. If Germany is to live up to the high democratic standards it has set itself, it would do well to lower the threshold for entry to parliament (at 5% it is amongst the highest in the world), or better yet, abolish it entirely.

Should votes be for sale?

Ahead of Tuesday’s U.S. Presidential election, Stephen Levitt, citing the work of Glen Weyl, has made a provocative suggestion for improving the electoral process – people should be permitted to vote multiple times, paying increasingly higher fees for each additional vote. I’m attracted to this idea because it addresses one of the major drawbacks of ‘one man, one vote’, that every vote counts the same, regardless of how strong the preference expressed is. It is problematic (to me, at least – others may have different intuitions) that a vote cast by a fervent anti-Republican, who fears that a Romney victory would be as calamitous as a zombie apocalypse should be cancelled out by the vote of someone who thinks the candidates are much the same, but that Romney just has the edge. To be clear, the objection is not that the former voter is better informed or qualified to vote, just that they feel stronger about the issues – the opinionated but ignorant would still be likely to buy plenty of votes.
 
A trivial example should make my intuition clear. Suppose a group of people are trying to decide what topping to get on their pizza. Four people have a weak desire to get prawn, while two have a weak desire not to get prawn. Meanwhile, one person is strongly against prawn because it will cause them to have a severe allergic reaction, and require them to go to hospital. If the decision is put to a simple majority vote, the group will opt for prawn, 4-3. Yet it seems wrong to me that the preferences of those who gain so little from having the prawn should be counted equally with the person who is allergic. For a more clearly political example, perhaps the views of those enjoying a modest tax cut should not be counted equally alongside the person who loses vital services to pay for the cuts.

The obvious objection to the vote buying proposal, which Levitt discusses, is that it gives disproportionate political power to the rich. His response is unconvincing – he points out that such a transparent system would be better than the status quo, where the rich exert greater influence through campaign finance. But that is just an argument to reform campaign finance, not to create an alternative way to perpetuate the inequity.

Moreover, the objection is deeper than Levitt appreciates - insofar as the vote buying scheme gives greater power to the rich, it fails in its attempt to reflect the strength of voters’ views, because it fails to account for the law of diminishing marginal utility. The logic behind the vote buying scheme, as I understand it, is that it forces people to put their money where their mouth is. In buying $50 worth of votes for the Republicans, I am showing that a Republican government is worth $50 to me. The trouble is that that $50 is a much more powerful statement when it comes from a poorer person, involving a more significant sacrifice on their part. If $50 pledged to the Republicans means giving up a meal at a nice restaurant, and person A dines at nice restaurants regularly, while for B it is an annual treat, then it is clear that B wants the Republicans to win more.

The obvious way to reflect this would be to make voting fees progressive i.e. proportionate to income. So the richer you are, the more you have to pay to vote.

Even with this amendment, there are two types of concern I have about the scheme. On one hand, I am sceptical as to whether this measure would be successful in achieving its own stated goal - to successfully reflect public opinion. On the other hand, I wonder whether this goal is the only desirable one to have.

The first reason for scepticism about vote buying accurately capturing people’s real views is that it depends on people being able to provide an accurate and meaningful valuation of how much an electoral outcome is worth to them. Yet as behavioural economists such as Dan Ariely have shown, this is something most people struggle to do without a set of reference prices for context (do you have a clear idea, right now, how much you would be willing to pay for a certain number of votes in the next election?) This is further complicated by the fact that people wouldn’t be buying a Romney or Obama victory, but just the mere possibility of being decisive one way or the other.

Even if people could accurately gauge how much their vote is worth, the market for votes might still be distorted. Just because a person is willing to  pay $100 to vote for Obama, this might not fully be a reflection of their endorsement of the president. People might pay a voting fee for all sorts of reasons, just as people vote for all sorts of reasons just now – out of a sense of civic obligation, to express gratitude for the historical sacrifices of their forebears, out of a sense of power. Each of these motivations means that the amount they pay for their vote will fail to track their enthusiasm for the candidates.

A more fundamental objection to the vote buying scheme is that it fails to understand hat voting is really about. It could be argued that it is not just about taking a snapshot of public opinion, but that it has some other function, which is subverted by vote buying. For example, political theorists have long argued that democracy has an educative value – by giving citizens the responsibility of a say in how the country is run, they are encouraged to live up to that faith by engaging with politics, developing and trusting their own judgement. If engagement with politics becomes a prerequisite of voting, then those who are not inclined to involve themselves in politics will simply shrug off this responsibility, and opt not to develop these faculties.

Whatever you think about the vote buying proposal, it offers an illuminating challenge to the way democracy proceeds just now – does it really expose an important problem with the status quo? And if so, what is wrong with its proposed solution? In answering these questions, we get a clearer idea of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, and why (if at all) we value it.

The difficulties of a ‘coalition of the rational’ on immigration

One of the intriguing ideas to emerge from the Labour party conference earlier this month is shadow immigration minister Chris Bryant’s proposal of a non-partisan ‘coalition of the rational’ in favour of immigration. The idea is attractive and interesting because it raises the ideological complexity of the issue. However, it is this very complexity that threatens the feasibility of the hope.

What Bryant appears to recognise is that immigration is an issue that cuts across the traditional left right divide, pitting libertarians against conservatives on the right, and liberals against egalitarians on the left. If those in favour of migration are to prevail, they are of  course going to have to reach out to those on the other side of the spectrum.

However, it is important to recognise how difficult this diversity of opinion makes forming and maintaining such a coalition. I think it’s generally true that the inherent difficulty of coalitions stems from the fact that people agree on something, but do so for different reasons. Immigration is unusual because of the extremely high number of different ways in which people can be in favour of it: because it promotes economic prosperity, because it helps businesses, because it reduces state regulation, because it brings cultural benefits, because it atones for historic injustices, to name but a few.

Both Bryant and Don Flynn of Migrants’ Rights Network, who has also discussed the idea, appear to be too optimistic about the scale of the differences between potential coalition partners. Bryant’s moniker for the group suggests that all unprejudiced ‘rational’ people will inevitably come to the same conclusion. Meanwhile, Flynn seems to suggest that there are only two necessary conditions for the project to be a success: transcending party tribalism, and establishing the facts about immigration.

Both these views seem to suggest that a common appreciation of ‘the facts' is all we need to establish common ground on immigration. But this is a gross oversimplification of the diversity of possible positions on the topic. For a start, how would we even know what the relevant facts are? Is it about the effects of immigration on growth, unemployment, Gini coefficients, or what? Different facts will seem salient or irrelevant to different people, and I would suggest that no set of facts will convince people of all perspectives.

Even more threatening to the vision of a coalition of the rational is the fact that the same set of facts may be received in diametrically opposite ways by different people. Let’s say immigration doesn’t significantly affect the bargaining power of labour, or cause wages to fall. That might encourage egalitarians to favour immigration, but equally it could alienate pro-business types from the cause. If it were to emerge that immigrants are overwhelmingly high skilled, the news might be taken as positive by those who see immigration as an engine of growth, but it is unlikely to be cheered by cosmopolitans concerned by brain drain in developing countries.

The point is that the very diversity of values and assumptions that make a wide pro-immigration coalition possible also make it inherently fragile, especially to new facts. And frankly, that is what makes the idea so interesting.

Does Obama believe in determinism, left-libertarianism or justice as fair reciprocity?

Dylan Matthews has made an interesting attempt to reverse-engineer part of Barack Obama’s political philosophy, based on some remarks he made in Roanoke, Virginia a couple of weeks ago:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me —because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.  Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

This point was immediately leapt upon and misquoted in a Romney attack ad, suggesting that the Republicans at least want to present this as a key point of philosophical difference between the two presidential candidates.

Matthews sees the debate as tracking the old philosophical dispute about the existence of free will and moral desert. On one hand, you have Obama sympathisers, who are sceptical about free will, and so whether people can ever be held ultimately responsible for their own success. This means that the rich cannot use the argument that they deserve their wealth to defend it against redistribution. On the other hand, those on Romney’s side of the debate are relatively credulous of the existence of free will, and so more likely to believe that the successful deserve credit for their success and deserve to keep their wealth. 

Now this is certainly a plausible reading of the dispute, and I think Matthews is right to connect Obama’s comments to luck egalitarianism, but I think this is only one of a number of ways to frame the argument. Even if it is a debate essentially about desert, the two sides might not map neatly onto the opposing sides of the free will debate. For example, someone who believes in free will might be in full agreement with the claim that the rich do not deserve full credit for their own success. All that the rejection of hard determinism entails is that it is possible that some people are sometimes morally responsible. But of course, this does not entail that people are always morally responsible. Thus it is likely that many Obama sympathisers believe it is possible (though perhaps unlikely) for rich people to deserve their wealth, but that as a contingent fact, in the present society, most or all do not.

In any case, it is far from clear that Obama’s point is about moral desert at all. Notice that in the quote above he makes only factual claims – there are no explicitly moral arguments at all.* I think this means, whether by accident or design, that Obama’s argument has ecumenical appeal across different moral perspectives. As I see it, Obama’s argument goes something like this:

Empirical Premise: The rich are not solely responsible for the own success, they were dependent on others in society.

Normative Premise:?

Conclusion: Some of the wealth of rich ought to be shared with the rest of society.

Obama’s argument can be filled out with the normative premise of luck egalitarianism: that inequalities can only be justified if they result from responsible choices. This seems to be Matthews’ assumption, which explains his focus on free will – without free will, there can be no responsible choice, and so no legitimate inequality. But there are other normative premises which can serve the argument just as well. I think the two most interesting, and the ones that are most likely to capture Obama’s point, are justice as fair reciprocity and left-libertarianism.

The basic normative premise of the position I call justice as fair reciprocity is that we have special duties to other members of our society because they are necessary contributors to what John Rawls calls “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” without which we could not prosper. Elements of this position are sketched out in the work of Rawls and Brian Barry. However, perhaps the clearest contemporary proponent is Andrea Sangiovanni, who argues that “those who have submitted themselves to a system of laws and social rules in ways necessary to sustain our life as citizens, producers and biological beings are owed a fair return”. Notice that questions of free will, luck and desert are not immediately relevant on this account. What matters is that success was dependent on the efforts and actions of other people, and so these others are owed a share of the rewards. Whether Obama is pumping the intuition about luck or the intuition about dependence on others is unclear – I can see the argument for both.

Another thing that Obama seems to be doing in the speech is subverting orthodox libertarian notions of property. In this he echoes left-libertarian political philosophers. As Matthews notes, Robert Nozick saw questions of free will and desert as irrelevant to distributive justice – he was against redistribution as he believed it to infringe individual rights. On the Nozickian view, the rich (like the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain in his famous example) get rich as the result of “capitalist acts between consenting adults”. That is, the free exchange of property. Left-libertarians accept the principle that there should be no restrictions on how people use their property. However, they argue for a more complicated view of who initialy owns what. On the left libertarian view, everybody has an equal claim to the natural resources of the Earth, and so anybody that has got rich by exploiting more than their fair share of these resources owes rent to the rest of humanity. Thus they combine the libertarian respect for property rights with relatively egalitarian proposals.

Obama follows the left libertarians in pointing out how supposedly self-made men like Robert Nozick’s idealised basketball player utilise the property of other people, and society in general to achieve their successes. The implication is that they owe rent in the form of redistributive taxation. Thus left libertarianism, too, can provide the normative promise Obama needs to complete his argument. In the context of current American politics, given that his argument is clearly aimed against libertarian defenders of the status quo, the left libertarian interpretation seems like a plausible reading of Obama, too.

Barack Obama’s Roanoke speech is so interesting from a philosophical point of view because of the variety of perspectives he could be appealing to. In its ambiguity it underlines the fact that effective political interventions often lack the rigour and precision of good philosophy.

 

*Whether normative propositions can be derived only from empirical facts remains a controversial question in moral and political philosophy, but I can’t see how Obama’s argument here can work without a normative premise.

My Experiences of the British Citizenship Test

With Theresa May recently announcing plans to revamp the British citizenship test, focusing more on culture and history, and less on practicalities, the whole citizenship process has been back in the spotlight. Having gone through it myself, I think it might be interesting to offer my experiences, frustrations and comments. So here’s how I found it.

The first thing I should probably explain is why I had to sit the citizenship test at all. I was born in the UK to Indian parents, and have lived in this country for all but a year of my life. This means that I received Indian citizenship by default, but that I was always eligible to apply for British naturalisation. If I’d had the sense to apply before I turned 18, I wouldn’t have had to sit the test. But I put it off too long, and by the time I finally got around to applying I was 19.

The first thing to say about the Life in the UK Test (the existing ‘syllabus’) is that it is not as hard as people make out. Newspapers and websites like to shock people with how low their scores are on sample tests – only 14% passed in one facebook survey. But why would you expect to be able to pass the test without any revision or preparation? The information you need to know to pass the test is clear enough, and if you learn it, the test is straightforward. I think you get 45 minutes to do the test – I only needed five. In terms of difficulty, the Life in the UK Test is about as hard as the driving theory test: if you take it seriously, it should only be a formality.

The big debate at the moment concerns the content of the test. In my opinion, the “stuff on rights” and “practical info” that the Home Office is so quick to impugn is the best bit of the test, the only information that seems genuinely worthwhile to learn, independent of just passing the test. I can totally see the point of making sure that new immigrants (or indeed any citizen) know their rights as workers, how to make use of the health service, how to buy a house, the law on things like drugs and alcohol. On the other hand, the bits of the test that I personally found most objectionable were the bits of trivia – like what proportion of the country is under 18, or how many Christians there are. With these sorts of facts and figures, the impression you get is that you are being made to jump through hoops, doing nothing more than showing that you are willing to make some sort of an effort to win citizenship.

The biggest concern I have with the process of applying for citizenship, one that doesn’t tend to get a lot of public attention is the sheer cost of the process. The naturalisation fee for a single adult is £851, plus an extra £80 to pay for a citizenship ceremony. Even with discounts, that means that an average family seeking citizenship will have to pay nearly £2500 for the privilege. This worries me because fees this high are likely to be beyond the reach of many people, or at least put many off. The idea that you need to be rich to be British is surely a troubling one. Then again, it’s a principle which seems to ground a number of elements of current immigration policy. 

As it happens, I wrote to the Home Office to give them some feedback, saying more or less what I’ve said here. To my concerns about the content of the test, they responded that the curriculum had been drawn up by “leading experts in the fields of English language testing, citizenship training, employment of migrants and community development and integration” (I wonder how that compares to the architects of Theresa May’s curriculum?). As for my complaints about the cost of the process, they admitted that fees are “set above cost recovery levels”, in part to contribute “to the cost of doubling our enforcement resources” (charging current immigrants to keep out future immigrants!). However, they also argued that because “British Nationality brings many benefits that applicant’s [sic] value very highly”, it is right to levy a high charge for this valuable service. In other words, they charge high fees because they can, because applicants are willing to pay them. If this is correct, I guess it addresses my worry that high fees put off applicants. However, there remains a question about whether citizenship should be such a money making exercise.

I should probably discuss my citizenship ‘ceremony’ too. None of the official ceremonies on offer were convenient for me, since they all took place while I was away at university. I couldn’t receive citizenship without taking the pledge of allegiance, so I had to pay a little extra and have a personal ceremony, one-on-one with the registrar. While politicians like to describe how moving and emotional these ceremonies are, mine was at best a formality, and at worst a bit farcical. Having vowed my loyalty to the country, we reached the stage of proceedings where they play the national anthem. Of course, the registrar’s office doesn’t typically have an orchestra, so we had to make do with a tinny CD player, trying to maintain solemnity and not look each other in the eye. I’m just glad he only insisted on the one verse.

If I’m honest, this last episode seems to me like an apt metaphor for my feelings towards the citizenship process, taking something that ought to be a formality, trying to inject it with some patriotic fervour, and creating something pompous, preposterous and a bit wearing.

…Please don’t deport me. 

Philosophy and Public Engagement

Political philosophy, almost by its very nature, demands public engagement. There is something contradictory about a person who espouses a certain conception of social justice, or a vision of a good society, but is indifferent as to whether these are realised.[1] And for political philosophers to realise such goals, they will almost certainly need to engage non-philosophers. While it is more plausible for moral philosophy to be a solipsistic activity – I might only want to discover what is morally right so that I can put it into practice, and be indifferent as to the morality of your behaviour – it is still likely that moral philosophers will want to use their insight to influence non-philosophers.

Ingrid Robeyns and Jacob Williamson discuss the difficulties of such public engagement in a couple of recent blogposts. In so doing they rehearse many of the issues raised by Jonathan Wolff in his book Ethics and Public Policy, which recounts his experiences representing philosophy on various government advisory committees.[2]

The central problem is this: philosophers are regularly called upon to provide an ‘ethical perspective’’ on certain issues. But usually there is no settled wisdom, no accepted consensus that the philosopher can impart. They thus have two options. Either they can present their own view as though it were fact, which would seem to be an abuse of their position representing their discipline as a whole. Or they can present an overview of the different positions and arguments around the issue. But without providing any guidance on how to choose between the competing perspectives, the philosopher is liable to confuse more than they help.

The essential problem, as both Robeyns and Williamson recognise, is working out what exactly philosophers are good for. In a modern democratic society, philosophers are reluctant to proclaim themselves philosopher-kings with special access to moral truth. Even if they did, they probably wouldn’t be taken seriously. On the other hand, what is the point of consulting a philosopher if they are going to tell you that your opinion is as valid as theirs?

The answer they both alight on, and I think this is quite a standard response, is to say that the role of philosophers is to help others work out what they think – to be ‘philosopher-guides’ rather than philosopher-kings’. Presumably this involves things like pointing out inconsistencies, asking probing questions, and demonstrating challenging alternatives. Philosophy, this view would seem to imply, is something that anyone can do, coaxed on by skilled philosophers. The difference between philosophers and the general public, on this view, is just a matter of training and experience.

I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with this drawing of the role of philosophers, but I think that Robeyns and Williamson make it sound simpler than it really is. I think the major difficulty with their view is that they underestimate how much better philosophers are at philosophy than the general public (Which, if I am right, is a good thing for professional philosophy, but problematic for democracy). I don’t need to take a stand on whether this is because people who are ‘naturally’ better at philosophy are likely to become philosophers, or because becoming good at philosophy is not a quick and straightforward process, and requires a lot of training and practice. Either will do for my argument.

If philosophers enjoy a significant advantage over the laity in addressing the sort of questions they are consulted on, this presents two possible difficulties for the Robeyns/Williamson view. The first is that the philosopher-guide will find it hard to maintain the neutrality their role requires. I think a lot of people who have studied philosophy will relate to the experience of having an argument presented so convincingly that it seems impossible to argue against, even though it is really controversial. Given that this is what philosophers do this for a living, isn’t it possible that philosophers will bewitch their audiences without even intending to? After all, it is very difficult to present views you strongly agree and disagree with as if they were the same.

Just as worrying as the possibility that those who seek philosophers’ views will pay too much attention to their substantive positions is the danger that they will give them too little credence. Philosophy would be embarrassingly easy if dilettantes with only a few days’ consideration of an issue could form positions as plausible as professionals devoting their careers to it. If, as I presume, it is not, why should we pretend that the half-baked ideas of non-philosophers should carry as much weight as those of real philosophers? Why should philosophers continue to refine views that they will never have time to properly clean up (without turning their subjects into philosophers), when they have fully-formed ones to offer?

What I want to suggest here is that the role of the philosopher-guide is one that is extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible to carry out well. On the one hand, the philosopher risks putting forth their own ideas too strongly. On the other, there is the danger that they fail to provide the full benefit of their expertise. My worry is that the middle course between these two dangers is extremely narrow indeed.

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[1] Although Adam Swift makes the valid point that at least one function of the political philosopher is ‘epistemological’: improving understanding of morality and justice, which does not require the philosopher to change the world.

[2] You can find my review of Wolff’s book here.