Tuesday 22 April 2014

UKIP. Prejudiced? Yes. Illiberal? Certainly. Racist? No. Should you vote for them? Absolutely not.

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UKIP launched some posters. As cynical political campaigning goes they are premier league. Indeed, they have achieved exactly what UKIP wanted - best captured by Dan Hodges, top grumpy, lefty cynic:

It would be wrong to call Ukip’s brand of racism subliminal. There’s nothing subliminal about giant billboards claiming 26 million “Europeans” are about to arrive on our shores in the hope of stealing the jobs of every honest, hard-working Brit.

Now I'm pretty sure there's a fair smattering of racists supporting UKIP. But then I met a couple of ex-BNP Labour supporters recently. They were pretty racist.

The reality here is that, just as has always been the case with effective political communications, there is no room for nuance or subtlety. We 'say it like it is' meaning that we strip out any qualification, remove any caveats and say that there are 26 million unemployed Europeans and they could come and get your job.

This is rubbish, has no evidence to support it, is prejudiced and reveals again that (like all our political parties these days) UKIP see illiberalism as the way to get votes. The posters are only 'racist' if you believe that wanting to reduce levels of immigration is 'racist'. I simply don't accept that argument and Hodges' secondary argument that we'd think it was racist is the posters said Asian or African is equally daft - the posters are for an election to the European Parliament so focusing on things that are, in part, a consequence of EU membership seems reasonable (even when what is said is utter twaddle).

UKIP is a prejudiced party - making sweeping judgement and generalisation about EU residents coming to work in the UK. I think they're wrong but I don't think their policy is racist.

UKIP is an illiberal party - for all the tabloid libertarianism of Farage's rhetoric, UKIP's immigration policy, response to same sex marriage and economic policies are deeply illiberal. But they are not racist.

I detest the EU. It is anti-democratic, controlling, interfering, unaccountable, lying and unjust. I will vote to leave with enthusiasm when I get the chance to do so. And I will argue the case against from an absolute belief in free trade, free speech and free enterprise. So I won't tack along with UKIP's prejudiced illiberalism. Indeed, if we want that referendum, that chance to leave, then the very last thing we should do is vote UKIP.

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Monday 21 April 2014

Note on the causes of health inequality...

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This is from the ONS statistical bulletin entitled "Life Expectancy at Birth and at Age 65 by Local Areas in the United Kingdom, 2006-08 to 2010-12". It talks about possible reasons for health inequality - including this one:

One factor that has received less attention is the selective migration of healthy individuals from poorer health areas into better health areas or vice-versa. This type of migration has been shown to play a significant role in increasing or decreasing location-specific illness and mortality rates, which then consequently impact on life expectancy figures. Norman, Boyle and Rees (2005) demonstrated that the largest absolute flow within England and Wales between 1971 and 1991 was of relatively healthy people moving from more deprived into less deprived areas. The impact of this migration was to raise ill-health and mortality rates where these people originated from and lower them in the destination areas. The authors also noted that the benefit to less deprived areas was reinforced by a significant group of people in poor health who moved from less to more deprived locations.

Migration explains a lot of the variation it seems. So area-based approaches to reducing 'health inequality' may be addressing entirely the wrong target problem.

H/T Tim W

The good of community and the bad of government - in one paragraph

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From a blog post entitled  "How Africa Works":

This is Ronald Ngala Street Nairobi, it 6.00 in the evening, multitudes on their way home, buses honking their way through the city. The hawkers in coordinated chirrups as they sell their wares, from; vests to Chinese watches, handkerchiefs to exotic Kiwi fruits, they trade their ways. All of a sudden hell breaks loose, the hawkers dis-assemble their small table top shops within seconds and run, run they must from the dreaded City council police. Some hawkers with their tiny toddlers, some pregnant they disappear among the multitudes, they will be back. Much, much later in the night they will sit together, each will contribute to the benevolent fund and each will contribute their savings and credit scheme, one of them will walk with five thousand shillings today.

Community and freedom works, government tries to stop it working. Sadly 'twas ever and everywhere thus.

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Sunday 20 April 2014

Food poverty is a failure of government. Capitalism is the solution.

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I'm a capitalist. A proud capitalist. I believe that, without capitalism, we'd be poorer, less healthy, shorter lived and less happy. The evidence of the past two hundred years tells me this is so.

The thing about capitalism, about those free markets, that neoliberalism is that it celebrates everything that is good about people. I know you've been told by your teachers and by the man on the telly that capitalism is all about greed and rapacious exploitation. But they are wrong - capitalism is about exchange, cooperation, creativity and, above all, foregoing something now in the anticipation of more tomorrow.

I am always curious when people seek affirmation of their mistaken belief about capitalism in what they term 'market failure'. By this, they don't mean that the market actually stopped working (markets just don't do this) but that the market didn't deliver the outcome they desire. So it is with food banks. We are told that these little local institutions are a consequence of capitalism's failure because it has failed to put food on the table of some families.

Except this isn't the case at all is it. Food banks are a consequence of the failure of government not the failure of capitalism or the market. Look at those figures from the Trussell Trust - over half of those arriving for support are doing so because the benefits system has failed them in some way. So the market (a generous, charitable market in this case) steps in to provide - for we should be clear about charity, it is a private matter driven by the energy of people who want to help not by the direction of the state.

The second important lesson in this is that people's generosity is made more effective by the success of capitalism. All those people can afford to forgo something in order to help others have dinner - if we'd not had that neoliberalism we would still help but the help would not be enough. Children really would go without rather than getting food.

We have still got poverty - and be clear that poverty is absolute material lack not some abstract measure of inequality. But we are able to respond to that poverty both by urging the government to act and also by doing something ourselves. Even if that something is as little as giving some tins of beans and a bag of pasta to the food bank. However, if we want to eliminate that poverty - not just through relief but forever - we need to support capitalism because that is the best, we could say the only effective, route from poverty to comfort.

In an inverted way the wealthy and powerful can afford to reject capitalism - they're already on top of the pile. For the poor, the market and its freedoms should represent the route out from not knowing where tomorrow's dinner will come from. Sadly, some of those wealthy and powerful protect their wealth and power by telling the poor their state is due to freedom and the market rather than the reverse. Yet every exchange in that free market adds value whether it's a gift freely given, a bartered exchange or a cash transaction. Those who try to stop this liberty are the true creators of poverty, people who have the good things using their power to prevent others using capitalism to getthose good thing.

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Saturday 19 April 2014

So what is the point of peer review then? Bias and the European Journal of Public Health

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Richard Grant reports that the European Journal of Public Health (EJPH) has become the latest academic publication refusing to publish research that is wholly or partly funded by the tobacco industry. As Richard points out, the publication is, in essence, admitting that the peer review process doesn't work.

By banning research funded by one particular industry the Journal is demonstrating that its review process it is not just the research that is assessed but the author or the funder of the research. And that the Journal is not confident that its reviewers will be able to spot research from tobacco-funded sources in a blind review. The journal doesn't operate a blind review process that would give greater assurance of research quality and reduce risk of reviewer bias.

This indicates that either the tobacco-funded research is mostly sound or else that the carefully selected reviewers for the Journal are not competent (I guess it could indicate both of these things too).  If it is the latter then perhaps the editor and managing editors need to improve the editorial board (it is listed here although the specialisms and institutions of its members aren't clear).

It seems that the Journal, rather than operating a proper peer review system aimed as ensuring quality is instead through an 'open' process effectively institutionalising confirmation bias. As an independent outsider, I find this quite disturbing - the editorial board is effectively positioning itself to refuse any research (however funded) that challenges the board's ideology. I do not need to read every article published in EJPH (or indeed any of them) to know that what is published is selected, partial and probably biased.

In one respect this doesn't matter a jot. The Journal is a private institution published by another private institution. However, because its pronouncements on public health are given weight in the wider world, the fact that we cannot be confident of its objectivity makes it dangerous. And the decision to exclude research on the basis of its funder alone (regardless of the validity or quality of that research) illustrates why I am right to be concerned.

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Friday 18 April 2014

Sorry Lord Turner but it's planning not technology that's driving up urban land values

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It does make me rather cross when the great and good - doubtless living is a splendid multi-million pound home that benefits from rising urban land values - completely fail to understand that it is planning restrictions that causes the problem. Just that, nothing else.

Here's Adair Turner doing just this:


In many countries, the majority of that wealth – and the lion’s share of the increase – is accounted for by housing and commercial real estate, and most of that wealth resides not in the value of the buildings, but in the value of the urban land on which it sits.

That might seem odd. Though we live in the hi-tech virtual world of the Internet, the value of the most physical thing – land – is rising relentlessly. But there is no contradiction: The price of land is rising because of rapid technological progress. In an age of information and communication technology (ICT), it is inevitable that we value what an ICT-intensive economy cannot create.

This is arrant nonsense. Land is expensive in London because it is scarce and it is especially scarce because we've put all sorts of restrictions on using that land including identifying large tracts of land around the city where you can't build. Another bunch of folk want to make it even worse by stopping tall buildings, banning basements and preventing changing use from commercial to residential.

Planning reforms won't make London's land cheap but it would stop that mad rise in values Lord Turner speaks of. For sure you could 'fix' the problem his way - put up interest rates, make it harder to buy and beyond the means of all but folk like Adair. Except that wouldn't solve the problem because the problem is planning. It really is that simple.

If you want to read a better written, better informed and thoughtful piece on this problem turn aside from Turner's ignorant wibble and read this piece by Kim-Mai Cutler about San Francisco's housing problems. I don't entirely agree with Kin-Mai's assessment but at, unlike Lord Turner, she appears to know what she's talking about.

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In many countries, the majority of that wealth – and the lion’s share of the increase – is accounted for by housing and commercial real estate, and most of that wealth resides not in the value of the buildings, but in the value of the urban land on which it sits.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThat might seem odd. Though we live in the hi-tech virtual world of the Internet, the value of the most physical thing – land – is rising relentlessly. But there is no contradiction: The price of land is rising because of rapid technological progress. In an age of information and communication technology (ICT), it is inevitable that we value what an ICT-intensive economy cannot create.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/adair-turner-explains-how-a-fresh-wave-of-automation-is-transforming-employment-and-much-else#krA8CFrE7IHDSafr.99

On the marketing of politics...

In the 1950s, with the expansion of television into every household, mass marketing was born. Clever blokes at companies making what became known as fmcg (fast moving consumer goods) found that they could pull customers into demanding brands using TV to advertise bold, brash and colourful brands.

Before this time marketing was as much directed to the shopkeeper as to the consumer. What marketers did was get the shop to display the brand and, in many cases, provide a financial incentive for the store to push the brand to shoppers. If you want to understand how this works, look at how pharmaceuticals marketing works today - the company can't use direct-to-consumer brand marketing and relies instead on direct sales efforts targeted at doctors.

Brand marketing helped transform our society (for the better I would argue), contributed to better quality, greater choice and lower relative prices. And along the way, it also provided a load of pleasure - we reminisce as much about the ads of the '60s and '70s as we do about the TV programmes those ads were wrapped around. Promotion was broad, sweeping and general rather than precise and targeted - ads reached out to broad chunks of the population: "C1C2 women in the Granada TV area". The once dominant sales people became mere order takers as the heroes of fmcg became marketers.

Looking in awe and wonder at this brand marketing was the world of British politics. It's not stretching the metaphor to say that, until 1979, British politics was stuck with that pre-war model because the law wouldn't let political parties advertise on TV. Politics worked at the local level where professional agents organised local parties to push the party message - that familiar method of canvassing to identify support and 'get-out-the-vote' to make sure that support materialises. In 1979, two young ad men (and brothers) changed how we campaigned with one poster.

Today this approach - a big, bold brand message poured repeatedly into promotional channels - dominates our political campaigning. That old 'sales-led' approach has atrophied - we still canvass, we still ask people for voting intentions and we still knock up on the day but these activities are marginal to the outcome of a general election. And it is the general election that matters - it is to politics what Christmas is to turkey breeders and Easter is to chocolatiers.

So political parties have turned to the marketing men for inspiration - to get the message honed to perfection, to get that message constant and consistent in every promotional channel. The party machine has been replaced by a team of experts pulled together so as to direct those channels. The leadership doesn't put its effort into policies and ideas that would improve the nation but into enforcing the message.

Politics is beefing up its brand management just as brand marketing begins to falter, as marketers respond to the challenges of a fragmented media market, to aggregation and choice-making systems. We are watching political parties applying the ideas of a past marketing age - relying solely on the power of their brand to achieve success. And it will work (for one or other of the parties) since the heuristic of those big party brands (we often call it 'tribalism' but it's essentially the same as always buying Persil) means that most people will vote for one or the other. Plus, of course, Britain's electoral system makes it hard for new parties - there hasn't been a successful, sustained new party since the Labour Party overtook the Liberals in the 1920s.

The problem (and people from all sides and none in politics have noted this) is that the fastest growing 'brand' in the market isn't a political party but what we might call 'anti-politics'. We watch as brand marketing is used to promote what are essentially hollow shells - things painted to look like large, thoughtful and ideological political organisations but in reality contain little but but ambition.

This isn't to say that there aren't thoughtful, creative and ideological people in politics or to suggest that there isn't a critical and fundamental difference between the politics of 'centre-right' and 'centre-left'. Rather it's to point out that the marketing of politics remains a child of 1950s mass marketing, something done to the public not with the public. And, as Douglas Carswell quite bluntly points out, 'anti-politics' is here to stay:

It's just a phase, many MPs think. Voters are angry over expenses or Iraq or more expenses. But the mood, they presume, will pass.

No, my friends, colleagues and opponents. This anti-politics thingy is not just a phase. It will not abate. We are witnessing a permanent change in the relationship between the governed and the governing.

The big brand politics will carry on for a while - our electoral system guarantees that - but at what moment do we start to worry? When turn out in a general election falls below 50% maybe? In 2010 that already happened in Glasgow NE, Leeds Central and Manchester Central - plus there are another 120 constituencies with turnout below 60%. And none of this accounts for the estimated 20% of the population that don't even bother registering to vote in the first place. Or do we wait until other parties and independents soak up a third or more of the vote in return for a handful of seats? In 2010 in England the two big parties got less than 68% of the vote and all but 57 of the 616 seats.

When I learnt about marketing all those years ago, they told about the 4Ps - promotion, price, place and product. Our political marketers - fresh from running campaigns in Australia or America - seem to have lost sight of these fundamentals and especially any attention to the politcal product. Marketing has become mere promotion leaving behind an etiolated, weak political product. Sound and fury has replaced the idea that politics is a shared enterprise between politicians and the people they represent.

For now nothing will change except that a few more disillusioned folk will turn away from politics. But something will give in the end. With luck what will emerge from that change will be a more conversational politics, one not shaped by the demands of a big brand and its message but by a desire to create the best possible political product.

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Thursday 17 April 2014

Forget housing problems - it's tombs we're short of!

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Britain's cities are running out of burial places:

There’s been concern for some time that the UK might be on the verge of running out of burial space, particularly in large cities like London. A combination of population growth, existing cemeteries which are at or nearing capacity, the custom in the UK (unlike some of our continental neighbours) that graves are considered to be ‘occupied’ in perpetuity and development pressure are at the root of the problem.

And the problem has, of course, been added to by the arrival of adherents to religions that insist on burial (rather than the altogether tidier and less land intensive cremation). Still worse when those religions also oppose 'stacking' (where each grave can hold 3 or 4 burials).

However, compared to a lot of other uses, cemeteries are planning friendly. And with burial charges running at up to £3000, what better use for a three acre site:

Back in 2001, a couple in North Wales had been trying to develop the 3 acre plot next to their house for years. After numerous rejected planning applications for the site, proposing everything from a caravan park to a fish farm, they finally lighted on the idea of a cemetery. The planners were initially surprised, but went on to grant permission. The couple are now looking for further investment to support the construction of the necessary access roads, parking and planting.

Now, about that large garden of mine!

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Wednesday 16 April 2014

So much for equality, eh!

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Paul Krugman, lefties favourite Nobel laureate economist, has a new source of income - researching inequality. And a nice little earner it is too:

According to a formal offer letter obtained under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, CUNY intends to pay Krugman $225,000, or $25,000 per month (over two semesters), to “play a modest role in our public events” and “contribute to the build-up” of a new “inequality initiative.” 

Yes folks, quarter of a million bucks moaning about how the world is unequal. There's a word for this sort of hideous explotiation - hypocrisy. Krugman is getting ten times what poor Americans pull in a month simply to turn up to a few events and help with the PR.

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Are 20mph limits the right approach to reducing injury accidents?

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As a local councillor I have been bombarded by emails from campaigners calling for blanket 20mph limits on urban roads. The campaign run by a City of York councillor has this to say:

We quite simply campaign for 20mph to become the default speed limit on residential and urban streets. This can be done on most streets without the need for any physical calming and we accept that on some streets it may be appropriate to have a higher limit based on the road, vulnerable road users provision, etc. But any limit above 20mph should be a considered decision based on local circumstances.

This is very different from the introduction of 20mph zones (usually accompanied by traffic calming measures) in particularly high risk places such as village centres and outside schools. What the campaigners call for is a change to the default speed limit in urban areas.

While I have supported 20mph zones (we have one in Harden, for example, that not everyone is keen on), I am sceptical as to whether the introduction of a general lower speed limit will work as the campaigners suggest. The core argument appears to be the 'laws of physics' - essentially that there will be fewer casualties as a result of slower speeds and where collisions occur they cause less harm.

Campaigners also point to the case of Portsmouth where casualties reduced by 22% in the three years following the introduction of 20mph limits. However, the evaluation report (where the 22% figure is found) also showed that 'killed and seriously injured' figures rose during this period. And the reports authors also concluded that:

...overall, improvements in casualty rates were not demonstrably greater than the national trend, and that 20 mph zones were more effective at reducing average traffic speeds.

 This suggests that 20mph limits might not be the best way forward and that the current approach where zones (supported in most but not all cases by physical intervention as well as signage) are targeted to high risk areas is a better option. This reflects the fact that most of our urban roads are pretty safe with very low - even zero - rates of injury accident.

To help us understand this, if we look at the map of Cullingworth's RTAs from 2000-2010, we find that they are entirely (bar one outside the school gates) on the main roads through the village. This indicates a case for looking a 20mph zones in the village centre (although only five of the accidents involved either pedestrians or cyclists) but does not support a general 20mph limit. Looking in more detail at Bradford, we see that the inner city and especially main roads through the inner city are the most lethal for pedestrians. I would take the view that safety cameras are perhaps a more effective means of managing speeds than 20mph limits without accompanying traffic calming measures.

The proposal for 20mph limits seems to me an honest attempt to develop what we might call an 'all-population' solution to injury accidents on our roads - reduced speeds mean fewer accidents and less deadly accidents therefore reduced speed limits everywhere would achieve this end. However, the RTAs are concentrated not spread evenly across the network. So there is no need for the general reduction. Instead, we should use targeted interventions (easily enforceable, local 20mph zones with physical calming measures) in the most high risk locations. And we know these work.

A bit like minimum pricing for alcohol, blanket 20mph limits have an initial appeal. However, they do not address the problem directly and act to reduce speeds where speed reduction isn't needed and don't provide the active calming measures we know are most effective in high risk locations. Lastly, we need to consider who is causing the injury accidents and wonder whether our current enforcement system is entirely adequate:

For every fatal collision, there is a one in two chance that the driver responsible has a criminal record, according to preliminary research by South Yorkshire police.

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Monday 14 April 2014

On research and policy...

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This is a comment on research in education (from Tom Bennett) but it could apply across the whole of social policy:

I'm sure these people are engaged in the most rigorous of science, but the area that it addresses is devilled with darkest, emptiest aspects of bad educational research: small intervention groups, interested parties, cognitive bias, short term studies, conclusions that don't necessarily follow from the data, an aversion to testing a theory to destruction, etc. This matters, because huge and enormously expensive wheels are turning in education ministries around the world. Children's lives are chained to this wheel. Poor children can't afford to fix the mistakes of state education, as middle-class children can, through tutoring and familial support.

Yet we persist with allowing ideological bias and personal preference to be presented as research by social scientists. As we keep saying, if you really want evidence-based policy you need to start with robust evidence not ideological bias.

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Sunday 13 April 2014

How advertising works...

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Here from Rory Sutherland (who knows a thing or two about advertising):

There is no prospect of anyone paying me to advertise mattress toppers, however life-changing they may be. You see, one of the problems of hyper-efficient market capitalism is that copying products is now so fast and easy that every new market category rapidly fragments into hundreds of competing manufacturers. There is no interest in any one of them promoting the category, since their own share of any resulting growth in sales of the item would be so small. 

It would be good if the Naomi Klein fans and all those public health agitators read this and commited it to memory.

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Michael Rosen, snob.

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He's feted by the left-wing bien pensants, quoted and tweeted and shared by all those people who like their thought processed and precooked. And he loves to pen polemics castigating those who don't share his bigoted, judgemental world view. But worst of all, Michael Rosen is a snob.

This will come as a shock to Michael. I'm guessing he feels his inherited socialism, steeped in the world of a Marxist educational mafia, means that he is connected to the ordinary bloke. But this, a typical piece of his prose (not a patch on his poetry), reveals the truth - Michael's a snob, a cultural snob:

Perhaps you're mad keen on culture. Perhaps in between making all that money you were hanging around galleries, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, comedy clubs, libraries, dance studios, painting classes. Perhaps you've seen how people manage on a shoe string, perhaps you've seen the awful conditions backstage in many theatres, perhaps you know about the crap wages most people in the arts work with. Perhaps you know about the terrible crisis we have in libraries, depriving people of access to knowledge and culture.

You see - the man he's writing about was busy 'making money' so wasn't able to consume any of that 'culture' that Michael is so keen on. Nasty, unappealing, noveau-riche money-grubbing mean you can't 'get' culture. Instead you should eschew all that for some sort of bohemian hair-shirt. Only then, in Michael's arrogant painting, will you qualify to speak of culture.

Like many from comfortable, middle-class origins, Michael Rosen is utterly dismissive of anything that looks like trade. There'll be lots of fine hand-wringing about how artists struggle and special pleading about The Arts. But the truth is that the business of culture that Michael holds out to us is a privileged, exclusive and incredibly snobbish world.  It's a world filled with judgement, with sneering and with a puffed up disdain for people who do the jobs that make it possible for us to fund what Michael calls "my sort of culture".

It's not Michael's ignorance that makes me despair (although he parades it in style every time his writes). We're all ignorant in our own way. Rather it's the way in which he assumes the superiority of his sort over the sort who work in banks. Yet everything Michael has, everything, comes from those bankers and businessman he loathes. The sense of entitlement, the demanding way in which Michael thrusts his collecting box under the noses of taxpayers, this is the truly shocking part.

Michael didn't write the hatchet job on Sajid Javid because he was a banker and a Tory. No he wrote the nasty little open letter because Sajid is a working-class lad made good. And that, in Michael's snobby little world makes him the worst sort of Tory banker.

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Saturday 12 April 2014

New Puritans revisited

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Here is Lord Macaulay on the Puritans:

"It was a sin to hang garlands on a Maypole, to drink a friend's health, to fly a hawk, hunt a stag, to play at chess, to wear lovelocks, to put starch into a ruff, to touch the virginals [a predecessor of the piano], to read the Fairy Queen.--Rules such as these, rules which would have appeared insupportable to the free and joyous spirit of Luther, and coutemptible to the serene and philosophical intellect of Zwingle, threw over all life a more than monastic gloom. The learning and eloqueuce by which the great reformers had been eminently distinguished, and to which they had been, in no small measure, indebted for their success, were regarded by the new school of Protestants with suspicion, if not with aversion. Some precisians had scruples about teaching the Latin grammar because the names of Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo occurred in it. The fine arts were all but proscribed. The solemn peal of the organ was superstitious. The light music of Ben Jonson's masques was dissolute. Half the fine paintings in England were idolatrous, and the other half indecent."

So those people who condemn, would limit and even ban so much pleasure simply to enforce their belief that it's for our own good - what else could we call them but New Puritans. These are the voices of the anti-consumer, the dry and pleasure free health fanatics, the people who see sex as a threat not a joy. Every day we are regaled with the patest dire warnings and every day a new call is made to the government for something to be done about these sins. Even harmless activities that look like the sin are condemned - recalling those who covered chair legs so as not to be reminded of the female form.

All these doctors, campaigners and activists who wish to order our lives for the benefit of our health are just worldly echoes of those old Puritans. We are reminded of this by Irma Kurtz:

Are health educators the new puritans? Yes, of course they are. They would cleanse and purify the new religion. The new religion is a paltry faith. It is worship of self. Religions get the puritans they deserve, and the new puritan is not much more than a rather fussy housekeeper who doesn't want cigarette ash on the carpet. Some of the new puritans, that is the medicos, are also the new priests. They are expected to intervene between mankind and the supernatural...

Since our health is placed on the highest pinnacle in this new religion, those charged with care for that health are not to be challenged even when they step beyond their knowledge. Thus, a doctor's opinion on the packaging of cigarettes is granted more value - because he is a 'priest' - than the opinion of those who understand the role of packaging or have studied its actual effect.

Those who contest these ideas, who challenge the New Puritians are condemned as the followers of Satan - in thrall to Big Tobacco, The Drinks Industry or Big Sugar. Even non-smoking, teetotal opponents are condemned as the New Puritans search for the tiniest justification for their condemnation.

Now, the New Puritans have adopted an ideology of total control - rejecting democracy and preferring instead the authority of the public health priesthood:

An urgent transformation is required in our values and our practices based on recognition of our interdependence and the interconnectedness of the risks we face. We need a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society and a new principle of planetism and wellbeing for every person on this Earth - a principle that asserts that we must conserve, sustain, and make resilient the planetary and human systems on which health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all. All too often governments make commitments but fail to act on them; independent accountability is essential to ensure the monitoring and review of these commitments, together with the appropriate remedial action.

The voice of public health and medicine as the independent conscience of planetary health has a special part to play in achieving this vision.

These is little difference - other than reference to god - between this and the Puritan justification for banning the celebration of Christmas:

'More mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides ... What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used ... to the great dishonour of God and the impoverishing of the realm.'
Such is the sad, drear, judgemental world the New Puritans would have us live in: rationed celebration, the condemnation of unlicensed pleasure, the placing of contentment - wellbeing if you must - as the primary virtue. These are the tenets of New Puritans, tenets that cannot be revoked by either the choices of individuals or the exercise of democracy - they are statements of faith in the religion of self proclaimed by that religion's priesthood - the public health profession.

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Friday 11 April 2014

Quote of the day: on role-playing games

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"The view of roleplaying games has changed over time," says Smith, "mostly because the predicted 'streets awash with the blood of innocents as a horde of demonically-possessed roleplayers laid waste to the country' simply never materialised."

Go read the article - good read about one of those awful moral panics that the USA seems to specialise in.

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Speaking up for better schools in Bradford...so Labour's education chief attacks him

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The Principal of Bradford successful family of academies has said some wise things about education in the city - he does so from the position of being in charge of some of the best schools in the District:

Every school should become an independent academy, says a Bradford principal, because Council schools cannot match their results.

Nick Weller, head of the five Dixons academies in the city, said local authorities lacked “democratic accountability” and should not oversee schools. Instead, they should all be run by academy chains, which had proved – in Bradford and elsewhere – that they could turn around failing schools more quickly.

And to make his point, Mr Weller describes how the Dixons approach has transformed one of Bradford's worst performing secondaries:

 “For 15 years it had been on the slide and had been in special measures for the longest time of any school in the country – from 2002 all the way through to 2006. It was a very, very different school. There’s no evidence that a local authority would have that impact.” 

The City's education leadership should be sitting down with Mr Weller, talking about how to spread the success and achievement of his schools. Instead Ralph Berry, the children's services insider Labour has put in charge, chooses the approach of insult:

Mr Weller has a puritanical, ideological streak on this one. 

Seems Ralph's membership of 'The Blob' is now assured!
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Friday fungus: do mushrooms cause Alzheimers?

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OK, we're not talking about mushrooms really but there seems to be some correlation between fungal infections and Alzheimer's Disease:

Researchers said their findings offer “compelling evidence” to suggest that people with the form of dementia have species of fungus in their blood that may have invaded the central nervous system.

Different species of fungus were present depending on how advanced the disease was, according to research published in the ‘Journal of Alzheimer's Disease’ by scientists from Barcelona's Severo Ochoa Centre for Molecular Biology and the Carlos III University of Madrid.

Interesting stuff.

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Thursday 10 April 2014

A Manifesto for Health Fascism

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The Lancet, once a respected medical publication but now a cheerleader for New Puritanism, has put out what it calls a 'manifesto for planetary health'. It is a comprehensive presentation of Health Fascism and we should thank The Lancet for publishing since we are now much clearer what we are fighting against.

This manifesto for transforming public health calls for a social movement to support collective public health action at all levels of society - personal, community, national, regional, global, and planetary. Our aim is to respond to the threats we face: threats to human health and wellbeing, threats to the sustainability of our civilisation, and threats to the natural and human-made systems that support us.

The authors move on to present the usual litany of 'progressive' political tenets - overconsumption, environmental catastrophe, inequality and rejection of 'unconstrained progress'. And we get the most bizarre of paragraphs capturing the mission of this Health Fascism:

An urgent transformation is required in our values and our practices based on recognition of our interdependence and the interconnectedness of the risks we face. We need a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society and a new principle of planetism and wellbeing for every person on this Earth - a principle that asserts that we must conserve, sustain, and make resilient the planetary and human systems on which health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all. All too often governments make commitments but fail to act on them; independent accountability is essential to ensure the monitoring and review of these commitments, together with the appropriate remedial action.
What we have here is a proposal that denies any individual or personal choice - it is subsumed into the 'wellbeing of all', a well-being that isn't determined through markets or even government but via an unspecified 'independent accountability'. We can only assume that the "special part to play" that our authors ascribe to 'public health' is to provide that 'independent accountablity' and 'remedial action' - regardless of the democratic choices made by people and the politicians they elect.

Others have pointed out that better health is a consequence of our civilisation - we live longer, happier and healthier lives because of that evil capitalism and wicked neoliberalism. For me there is a much more fundamental issue here - I am not (and neither are you) a part in some societal machine run by great minds. I am a free man with free will and the chance to make my own choices, good or bad. This manifesto would deny me that choice.

It is truly the Manifesto for Health Fascism.

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Wednesday 9 April 2014

Food banks, poverty and welfare - a confused debate

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The other day the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published its latest work on the impact of welfare reform. And not surprisingly, JRF paint a depressing picture:


...welfare reform may end up making tenants more, not less, dependent, and certainly more vulnerable. Cutbacks in support make people on low incomes, in work and out, more vulnerable to debt, risk of eviction and shortage of necessities, necessities, so they rely on food banks and other emergency support. 

This is not the place to criticise JRF's methodology - it repeats what I see as an approach that places being well-informed above quantitative accuracy. However, the research reminds us of an ongoing debate around the impact of welfare reforms on our society, specific groups within welfare recipients (e.g. the disabled, social housing tenants) and whether poverty has increased.

We saw another report - some research into food banks (I'll point out that the methodology here is a great example of presenting opinion as research). Again the criticism is telling:

...Lambie-Mumford's new study...says the rise in demand for charity food is a clear signal "of the inadequacy of both social security provision and the processes by which it is delivered".

It seems to me that the subsequent debate (and I'm with the DWP, asking the opinion of 25 people, however well-informed they might be, doesn't help understand the nature or scale of a problem) is conducted by a process where I say 'yep' and you say 'nope'.  Or more precisely, one set of folk are saying; 'these reforms are working', while another set claim they're making things worse.

It remains a fact that food aid provision in the UK has grown over the past decade and that this reflects a growth in need for this kind of aid. However, when some people suggest that the 'need' might be in part created by the provision of food aid they should not be dismissed out of hand. It seems possible that this might be the case and it doesn't detract from the observation that much of the need is entirely genuine.

Part of the problem here is that (again this is entirely understandable) we have focused on what we see as a problem rather than on the somewhat secondary issue of evaluation - Lambie-Mumford et al acknowledge this:

At the time of the research there was no systematic peer-reviewed evidence from the UK on the reasons or immediate circumstances leading people to seek food aid 

So, in the lack of real evidence of what drives demand for food aid (and food banks specifically), we fall back on the views of the well-informed - those working in the food banks:

The factors identified by these organisations as important drivers leading people to seek food aid include both immediate problems which had led to sudden reduction in household income (two examples often cited by these organisations were job losses and problems associated with social security payments), and on-going, underpinning circumstances (such as continual low household income and indebtedness) which can no longer support purchase of sufficient food to meet household needs.

In our debate therefore we need to distinguish between the two types of 'need'. Short-term need (anecdotally this seems to be the biggest part of demand) goes away - we shouldn't defend the bureaucratic uselessness that sits at the bottom of the issue but it should resolve itself.  And we should also recognise that food aid represents an admirable response from the wider society to need within its midst.

When we discuss whether welfare reform works, this short-term problem, shouldn't be our focus. Rather we should look at the persistence of low income amongst food aid recipients. If the problems relate to welfare reform - most commonly changes to housing benefit or the benefits cap - then we need to understand why this is so. On one level the best response is to get a job since this ends the cap and 'single room supplement' but this isn't always as easy as it sounds especially for someone who hasn't worked since god knows when.

Another option is to reduce other outgoings (getting rid of debts is a good start but again rather easier said than done) such as housing costs. But again this is not as straightforward as it seems. What appears entirely missing is the support to get these families from their current unsustainable poverty to a more sustainable, directed future. The stress on human intervention (mostly aimed at moving people from welfare dependence to work) ignores the impact that short-term financial intervention might produce.

I've said before that we need to have a better debate about poverty than the one we're having right now. This debate is confused by the lack of clear statistical analysis of the problem's scale (made worse by the unquestioning reporting of qualitative work as if is absolute proof) as well as by a continued confusion between 'poverty' and 'inequality'. I'm more bothered about the fact that some in our society lack for food - real poverty - than by contested measures of inequality or questionable arguments claiming inequality lies at the root of all societal sins.

Our response to poverty is made worse - much worse - by our inability to agree that poverty is absolute material deprivation not some economic assessment determined by the Duke of Westminster's wealth. We rightly include things in our meaning of 'absolute material deprivation' that wouldn't have been there in times past (or indeed in a similar assessment in Nigeria or Bangladesh) and depriving people of pleasures - TV, beer, cigarettes - is as much as aspect of poverty as depriving them of food, shelter or clothing. But poverty - as JRF show with their minimum income calculation - isn't something we assess relative to the earnings of others but something we determine by describing what people shouldn't go without.

I'd like some more research - rigorous, quantitative research - that starts to answer the questions we all ask - what's driving the need for food aid, how many people are in a state of absolute material deprivation and whether changes to welfare benefits are making matters worse. Right now this information seems (other than the ever creative DWP figures) lacking resulting in the debate being more about anecdote and political knock-about than a search for ways to eliminate the need for food aid.

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Tuesday 8 April 2014

How to make me believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming...

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This is brilliant - the fourteen steps:

  • Step 1 – Stop making predictions that don’t come true.
  • Step 2 – When you make a prediction, don’t just say something “might” happen.
  • Step 3 – Don’t live your life like you don’t believe a word you’re saying.
  • Step 4 – Stop the hate.
  • Step 5 – Stop avoiding debate.
  • Step 6 – Answer questions.
  • Step 7 - Stop enjoying catastrophes.
  • Step 8 – Don’t use invalid arguments.
  • Step 9 – When you are wrong, admit it and apologise.
  • Step 10 – Stop claiming that 97% of scientists agree that humans are warming the globe significantly.
  • Step 11 – Stop lying.  If you think it is okay to lie if it’s for a good cause, you are wrong.
  • Step 12 – Rebuke your fellow Warmists if they act in an unscientific way.
  • Step 13 – Stop blaming everything on Global Warming.
  • Step 14 – Why are the only solutions always big-government “progressive” policies?
 Go read the rest - it's worth your while.

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The Guardianista solution to food waste - reintroduce rationing!

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There are times when the Guardian reads like a parody of itself. So part of me wants to roll about laughing at the woman who is so concerned about food waste she wants rationing back.

But then I stop and think - a national newspaper (with a growing international reach) has given this person space to write an article that opens with this:

Nobody does as they're told unless they're forced to...

And this wasn't just some sub-editor getting carried away - the writer, one Michele Hanson, really means it:

Don't they realise that hardly anyone does as they're told unless they're forced to? Especially if it means less money and less of what they like. I long for a strict nanny state, to bring back rationing, so no one would be allowed to over-stuff themselves with great slabs of meat daily, or waste their crusts or peelings, reject twirly cucumbers or knobbly fruit and veg.

The whole (blessedly brief article) reeks of that smug superiority the Guardian does so well. Telling the proles out there that they are victoms of something called 'consumerism', that they are fat and greedy, and that they would be better off if people like Michele Hanson stood over them to make sure they rendered down bones for stock.

As it happens I was brought up to dislike wasting food. But that's my choice. If another person wants to buy loads of food and then throw it away that's there prerogative - the secret is in the word 'buy'. This amazing innovation means that the food becomes the property (another term foreign to Guardianistas) of the buyer. And if they want to sit and watch it rot in a bowl, they can do just that. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with the EU, the House of Lords, the Guardian or Michele Hanson.

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Monday 7 April 2014

A different kind of housing crisis...

There are some 3.4 million empty homes in Spain, the consequence of the construction boom and subsequent economic crash. Nearly one-in-five homes in Andalucia are empty reflecting the scale of Spain's crisis - not just that the Spanish economy crashed but that the buyers, a fifth of who were ex-pats, simply vanished.

The result of this is that property is pretty cheap in Spain - prices have fallen:

Andalucian properties are going at 73% of their 2007 value and the Comunidad Valenciana is seeing houses sell for 68% of 2007 prices; the third and eighth highest on the list, respectively.

Not so Cataluña. Prices have dropped to 55% of their 2007 level for the Catalans, despite that overall reduction in the number of empty properties.

Any bets that some of those pension pots newly liberated by the UK government will end up buying these homes?

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How come the super-rich back Democrats then?

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We're repeatedly told by the leftist comentariat that the super-rich are corrupting politics through their crony capitalism and support for 'neo-liberalism' (whatever that may mean). So it is odd to discover that the mega-bucks aren't flowing rightwards at all:

Among the .01 percent who increasingly dominate political giving, three of the largest contributions, besides the conservative Club for Growth, backed by Republican oligarchs, went to groups such as Emily’s List, Act Blue and Moveon.org. Liberal groups accounted for eight of the top 10 ideological causes of the ultra-rich; seven of the 10 congressional candidates most dependent on their money were Democrats.

In one respect this should suggest that big money donations are rather less corrupting (in an 'everything-right-wing-is-wicked' meaning of the word corrupt) than many people would suggest. But what it also suggests is that big government is no threat to the super-rich and even that the regulation, high taxes and intrusion into the lives of ordinary folk rather supports the business interests of the 0.01%. Moreover, since the super-rich are able to move so as to avoid regulation and taxation, they can use these things as tools to protect their business interests without having to suffer the personal consequences of big government.

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Sunday 6 April 2014

Less policy, more poetry please.

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"Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies in a box on Beasley Street"

John Cooper Clarke is a great poet. I don't share his politics but I appreciate the poetry of his passion, an almost anger captured by the quote above. And, unlike too much modern poetry, Clarke's is accessible and appealing beyond the usual pretentious circles of the literary world. It's a reminder that, like a great song, a poem cuts right to the very core of something. It communicates.

So I was struck by Clarke's comments about today's politics:

 
I suppose if I had to I would vote Labour but only out of blind class hatred, nothing else. That's what keeps these bastards coming back. To be honest, the only one whose language I even remotely understand is Nige [Farage]. Shoot me down in flames. Everyone else: they talk about nothing that seems to matter. It's beyond satire. And even satire has become PR, you know, since someone told politicians they will get more votes if they join in with the piss-taking themselves.

This comment from Clarke isn't an endorsement of UKIP but rather a recognition that most of our political leaderships fail to break through to the audience, to get them to pay attention, to really listen. Take a few minutes and read the tweets of politicians - with just a couple of exceptions these are boring, banal and entirely forgettable. All wrapped up in caveats, conditions and the avoidance of confrontation, today's political communication mostly fails to communicate. Or rather it communicates the message that we are patronising, out-of-touch and unable to hold a conversation with a voter.

One thing Nigel Farage seems to understand is that it's perfectly fine to attack your opponents - there's no chance of getting 100% support so spending time trying not to alienate people who will never vote for you is a thoroughly stupid idea. Yet politicians do this, carefully crafting their words to be inclusive and the views to be moderate. We peer down our noses at the likes of Farage, talking of extremism and division - as if it's impossible to present a moderate view in polemic.


If the public simply don't grasp our language then all those hours of policy wonkery, the backroom chats and the market research will be wasted. We fail if we think it's enough for our political tribe to like, retweet or forward the latest banality. We don't breakthrough if our policies are presented in press releases with all the wit and charm of one explaining a vending machine. Or where those policies trickle out in speeches to selected audiences and are couched in the language of those chosen few not words a shop assistant or sales rep would use. No-one cares, no-one's listening.

Clarke's Beasley Street captures a place and the idea of a place in a few sharp words - you've an image of that Salford street instantly as he delivers the words. And politics can do this too:

It's morning again in America.

It didn't matter much about the words that came after this opener in Hal Riney's ad - he'd got your attention with that image, those few words said more than all the statistics we politicians play our games with. And it worked.

Our words are guided by audience analysis, filtered through focus groups and derived from the policy brief not the benefit on offer. We list initiatives and policies with each one design to tick a communications box. Speeches and announcements are made according to a framework rather than because we've anything to say. And we make the grand assumption that it's the detail of policy that matters rather than the positive image of the place we're in or the place we want to get to.

Here's the opening paragraph of the 1945 Labour Manifesto - this is how it's done:

Victory is assured for us and our allies in the European war. The war in the East goes the same way. The British Labour Party is firmly resolved that Japanese barbarism shall be defeated just as decisively as Nazi aggression and tyranny. The people will have won both struggles. The gallant men and women in the Fighting Services, in the Merchant Navy, Home Guard and Civil Defence, in the factories and in the bombed areas - they deserve and must be assured a happier future than faced so many of them after the last war. Labour regards their welfare as a sacred trust. 

Bang - straight to the point. We've won the war, now let's make the country a great place for the men who did the winning for us. If you read that manifesto - and for good or ill it changed the country forever - it's not filled with statistics or analysis, just a narrative describing the Britain a Labour government would create.

For balance read the 1979 Conservative Manifesto - again it makes a clear call from the start:

THIS ELECTION is about the future of Britain - a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands. It is rich, too, in human resources, with professional and managerial skills of the highest calibre, with great industries and firms whose workers can be the equal of any in the world. We are the inheritors of a long tradition of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.

Yet today, this country is faced with its most serious problems since the Second World War. What has happened to our country, to the values we used to share, to the success and prosperity we once took for granted? 

Today's politics with its media and message management does not allow for great narrative, let alone poetry. The popular response to most of our words is 'so what'. We don't paint pictures with words or tell stories, we relate a barrage of 'facts' and a torrent of policy hoping some of it sticks.

So let's remember that, come the day that matters, the politicians aren't in charge - we are. Election day as John Greenleaf Whittier put it is everyone's day and politicians should remember this:

The proudest now is but my peer,
The highest not more high;
To-day, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
To-day alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known
My palace is the people’s hall,
The ballot-box my throne!

Who serves to-day upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong to-day;

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Local government rent-seeking - the case of the car pool

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In New York a taxi licence costs getting on for $1m. And the taxi businesses like it that way because it means they have the pitch to themselves. Plus, of course, they get the government to kick any competition that crops up. Such as ridesharing - using mobile technology to manage a car pool.


Ridesharing -- also known as carpooling -- involves members of the public contacting each other via a smartphone or PC internet networking service and arranging to ferry each other to various destinations for fees. 

It's clear that this is a threat to the taxi business. And they don't like it:

On Saturday, SideCar was the target of an orchestrated sting operation conducted by the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA), which regulates taxis. Three everyday drivers in our community were given hefty citations and had their cars impounded, leaving them alone in the dark and cold in need of a ride home.

That's right folks, the local council seized private cars because their owners made a private arrangement with another private citizen to give them a lift in exchange for a small fee. In city after city the rideshare operators are being harassed and banned by local authorities acting to defend their financial interest in the current limited and managed marketplace.

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Ridesharing -- also known as carpooling -- involves members of the public contacting each other via a smartphone or PC internet networking service and arranging to ferry each other to various destinations for fees. - See more at: http://www.dailytech.com/Cities+to+Carpoolers+Sharing+Your+Car+is+Illegal+We+Will+Seize+Your+Cars/article34659.htm#sthash.sSCHNeqb.dpuf