What makes you so strongly attached to the OBR (given it was established in 2010 and so is hardly part of the constitutional bedrock)? It's not my professional area -- perhaps I am missing something -- but as with many on the right I have a natural suspicion of bodies which seem to subcontract the proper democratic duty of government to take long-term decisions to some nebulous notion of all-knowing apolitical expertise.
More particularly: I do not believe that being (say) a Treasury economist gives anyone special insight into the political settlement required for long-term human flourishing. I would wager good money that if the equivalent of the OBR had been asked to predict the relative long-term economic impact of the American and Soviet revolutions, it would have got these spectacularly wrong -- and likewise with the economic divergence of North and South Korea after the Korean war.
Why should I trust the OBR to make better long-term judgements of the impact of Brexit, Covid lockdowns, the current war in Iran etc than the electorate who choose a government to take decisions?
I like the OBR because unlike some of these bodies, it doesn't make any binding decisions but simply scores the government's fiscal plans with a very narrow remit. It is true it doesn't take dynamic effects into account, but in practice overall it has been much more over-optimistic rather than under-optimistic about its forecasts, so I don't think we can blame it for being unduly negative and deterring good policies.
Osborne set it up so that future governments would be bound into fiscal responsibility, and since then almost every government has tried to push the bounds of borrowing as far as it can, with the OBR seeming like one of the few restraints.
I think the strongest argument against would be that it manifestly has not stopped our debt getting worse. Maybe there's a peculiar second order effect, where having an independent body mark the homework allows politicians to push things right up to the line, whereas if they were guessing how the bond markets will react they'll be more cautious? I'd be sympathetic to a fiscal hawk who wanted to make that argument and set themselves a really tight fiscal rule (e.g. debt as a share of GDP must fall by at least 2% each year). But in practice the main politicians who want to abolish the OBR seem to be Trussite or Corbynite loons, so my core hypothesis that without it things would be a lot worse is undented.
Given that the survey is now closed and not even viewable read-only, it'd be helpful to have a link somewhere listing the summaries you provided of the various laws. It feels silly to have to go and google Hubble's, Pournelle's etc Laws just to be able to make sense of the discussion in the silly paragraphs.
How would you propose to abolish Murphy's Law? Especially when teamed with O'Reilly's Corollary? (Murphy's Law - Anything which can go wrong will go wrong, at the worst possible moment. O'Reilly's Corollary - Murphy was an optimist.)
I don't think the ones in that section (or the previous - how would you abolish gravity or entropy?) were meant to be serious proposals, just "would you prefer if this were the case or not?"
"though there [are] unsurprisingly some right-wing remainers"
In your analysis you appear to regard Conquest's second law as "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." However Wikipedia believes this is O'Sullivan's first law, incorrectly ascribed to Conquest by John Derbyshire, and that Conquest's second law is actually "Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents." Might this explain left wing opposition to it?
As we discussed, yes, this should have been called O'Sullivan's law (which I ideally would have called it), but Conquest's Second Law is usually understood now to mean this.
However, the summary in the survey was the 'not explicitly right-wing...' one so that wouldn't have confused them.
I have always disliked being asked if I like or approve of the Monarchy. I strongly support their constitutional role, and consider the history and buildings create a valuable USP for the country. On the other hand I intensely dislike their secretive wealth and mixing with the 0.1%ers. The revelations in the Epstein files just magnify this. And I have no view on the soap opera they provide.
My point is that none of this is covered by a simple yes/no question.
I continue to be impressed by how many left-wing people comment on your right-leaning blog. You must be doing something to avoid the filter bubble effect.
"those considering voting for populist parties on the left are often driven by economic grounds (levels of tax and spend, opposition to billionaires) or, in some cases, foreign policy (principally Gaza), neither of which would show up in this survey." I infer from context that you're counting the Greens as a populist party on the left, and at least traditionally they're supposed to be about environmental issues, which *are* represented in the survey (although I agree that in practice the Greens these days are more about Gaza and anti-billionaires than the environment).
A couple more typos in addition to the ones Neil reported:
"both still enjoy over 60% report" -> support?
"the Online Safety Act - despite being passed by a recent Tory Government is deeply unpopular" - need another dash after "Government" to close the parenthetical aside
Yes, I do consider the Greens to be primarily a left populist party now, with environment just one of several issues they consider important, rather than primarily an environmental one (I think looking at Polanski's recent speeches or interventions, or their newest MP's campaign literature and maiden speech, backs this up).
Re: left-wing / right-wing balance: I think my readership as a whole is about 50:50, and for non-surveys/contests it is more often my more explicitly right-wing posts (e.g. 'For the 98%') that get shared, by other right-wing people. But on surveys like these, which are non-partisan I think there are two things going on:
- The base rates of likely blog readers (politically interested, educated, under 60) favour the left.
- BlueSky doesn't nerf links and Twitter does, so someone sharing it on the former leads to more people taking it than the latter.
But I am pleased I'm not just writing to a filter bubble!
I’m surprised you’re surprised about the results on the Office of Budget Responsibility.
I suspect that most people on the right (like me and you) are in favour of fiscal responsibility. (Actually I suspect that most people on the left - with some exceptions - are in favour of fiscal responsibility too.) But the OBR is a very New-Labour-shaped solution to the problem (‘let’s set up a quango and outsource good judgement to them’).
So although the OBR’s effect is probably directionally positive, it feels like an offensively unconstitutional feature (compared to our pre-Blair constitution). It fits with what I think is my criticism (probably a common one on the right?) of the Cameron governments: Tory ends but New Labour means. So I’m not surprised that your right-wing respondents want it away with the rest.
What makes you so strongly attached to the OBR (given it was established in 2010 and so is hardly part of the constitutional bedrock)? It's not my professional area -- perhaps I am missing something -- but as with many on the right I have a natural suspicion of bodies which seem to subcontract the proper democratic duty of government to take long-term decisions to some nebulous notion of all-knowing apolitical expertise.
More particularly: I do not believe that being (say) a Treasury economist gives anyone special insight into the political settlement required for long-term human flourishing. I would wager good money that if the equivalent of the OBR had been asked to predict the relative long-term economic impact of the American and Soviet revolutions, it would have got these spectacularly wrong -- and likewise with the economic divergence of North and South Korea after the Korean war.
Why should I trust the OBR to make better long-term judgements of the impact of Brexit, Covid lockdowns, the current war in Iran etc than the electorate who choose a government to take decisions?
I like the OBR because unlike some of these bodies, it doesn't make any binding decisions but simply scores the government's fiscal plans with a very narrow remit. It is true it doesn't take dynamic effects into account, but in practice overall it has been much more over-optimistic rather than under-optimistic about its forecasts, so I don't think we can blame it for being unduly negative and deterring good policies.
Osborne set it up so that future governments would be bound into fiscal responsibility, and since then almost every government has tried to push the bounds of borrowing as far as it can, with the OBR seeming like one of the few restraints.
I think the strongest argument against would be that it manifestly has not stopped our debt getting worse. Maybe there's a peculiar second order effect, where having an independent body mark the homework allows politicians to push things right up to the line, whereas if they were guessing how the bond markets will react they'll be more cautious? I'd be sympathetic to a fiscal hawk who wanted to make that argument and set themselves a really tight fiscal rule (e.g. debt as a share of GDP must fall by at least 2% each year). But in practice the main politicians who want to abolish the OBR seem to be Trussite or Corbynite loons, so my core hypothesis that without it things would be a lot worse is undented.
Given that the survey is now closed and not even viewable read-only, it'd be helpful to have a link somewhere listing the summaries you provided of the various laws. It feels silly to have to go and google Hubble's, Pournelle's etc Laws just to be able to make sense of the discussion in the silly paragraphs.
Neat to hear you worked with Ed Davey! :)
Good point, I'll add that tonight.
At one point I had worked for almost half of the Lib Dem MPs - admittedly this was at a point when they had rather fewer than they do now. :-)
Were there summaries in the survey? I thought there weren't and I'd have to Google all the laws I didn't recognise in order to answer it.
There were!
How would you propose to abolish Murphy's Law? Especially when teamed with O'Reilly's Corollary? (Murphy's Law - Anything which can go wrong will go wrong, at the worst possible moment. O'Reilly's Corollary - Murphy was an optimist.)
I don't think the ones in that section (or the previous - how would you abolish gravity or entropy?) were meant to be serious proposals, just "would you prefer if this were the case or not?"
"they typical population" has a bonus y
"though there [are] unsurprisingly some right-wing remainers"
In your analysis you appear to regard Conquest's second law as "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." However Wikipedia believes this is O'Sullivan's first law, incorrectly ascribed to Conquest by John Derbyshire, and that Conquest's second law is actually "Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents." Might this explain left wing opposition to it?
As we discussed, yes, this should have been called O'Sullivan's law (which I ideally would have called it), but Conquest's Second Law is usually understood now to mean this.
However, the summary in the survey was the 'not explicitly right-wing...' one so that wouldn't have confused them.
I have always disliked being asked if I like or approve of the Monarchy. I strongly support their constitutional role, and consider the history and buildings create a valuable USP for the country. On the other hand I intensely dislike their secretive wealth and mixing with the 0.1%ers. The revelations in the Epstein files just magnify this. And I have no view on the soap opera they provide.
My point is that none of this is covered by a simple yes/no question.
I continue to be impressed by how many left-wing people comment on your right-leaning blog. You must be doing something to avoid the filter bubble effect.
"those considering voting for populist parties on the left are often driven by economic grounds (levels of tax and spend, opposition to billionaires) or, in some cases, foreign policy (principally Gaza), neither of which would show up in this survey." I infer from context that you're counting the Greens as a populist party on the left, and at least traditionally they're supposed to be about environmental issues, which *are* represented in the survey (although I agree that in practice the Greens these days are more about Gaza and anti-billionaires than the environment).
A couple more typos in addition to the ones Neil reported:
"both still enjoy over 60% report" -> support?
"the Online Safety Act - despite being passed by a recent Tory Government is deeply unpopular" - need another dash after "Government" to close the parenthetical aside
Yes, I do consider the Greens to be primarily a left populist party now, with environment just one of several issues they consider important, rather than primarily an environmental one (I think looking at Polanski's recent speeches or interventions, or their newest MP's campaign literature and maiden speech, backs this up).
Re: left-wing / right-wing balance: I think my readership as a whole is about 50:50, and for non-surveys/contests it is more often my more explicitly right-wing posts (e.g. 'For the 98%') that get shared, by other right-wing people. But on surveys like these, which are non-partisan I think there are two things going on:
- The base rates of likely blog readers (politically interested, educated, under 60) favour the left.
- BlueSky doesn't nerf links and Twitter does, so someone sharing it on the former leads to more people taking it than the latter.
But I am pleased I'm not just writing to a filter bubble!
I’m surprised you’re surprised about the results on the Office of Budget Responsibility.
I suspect that most people on the right (like me and you) are in favour of fiscal responsibility. (Actually I suspect that most people on the left - with some exceptions - are in favour of fiscal responsibility too.) But the OBR is a very New-Labour-shaped solution to the problem (‘let’s set up a quango and outsource good judgement to them’).
So although the OBR’s effect is probably directionally positive, it feels like an offensively unconstitutional feature (compared to our pre-Blair constitution). It fits with what I think is my criticism (probably a common one on the right?) of the Cameron governments: Tory ends but New Labour means. So I’m not surprised that your right-wing respondents want it away with the rest.
You're probably right - though see my comment above on why I support it.