I'm going to yell at the BBC. They won't take much notice, but I need to do it anyway. The fools at Radio Four need to be reminded of the mistake they're making on The World at One (WATO). After the untimely death of the wonderful Nick Clarke, they put the wrong person in front of the micrphone. They should have given the job to the man who stood in for Nick Clarke during his illness—Shaun Ley; instead they threw the job open and after a very deliberate selection process, finally gave the gig to the Newsnight stalwart and Woman's Hour veteran, Martha Kearney.
Now, I'm a fan of Martha. Along with John Cole, she was one of the best lobby correspondents the BBC has ever had, and Newsnight (where she was political editor) is the poorer for her absence. But unfortunately she just doesn't fit at WATO; she never sounds quite comfortable. Martha's a TV person, not a radio person (and vice versa for Shaun Ley, who I think is a much stronger presence on radio than he ever was on TV). There's often an edge to her voice that to my ear betrays some anxiety—that she's only just on top of things. Now, reporters and presenters can and do grow into new roles very nicely sometimes. Take the BBC's Matt Frei, for example, who was a solid if somewhat anonymous reporter until they sent him to America, where he fell on his feet. His masterly coverage of Hurricane Katrina won him various awards and lifted his game. Frei is now thought of as one of the best Washington correspondents the BBC has had since Charles Wheeler. But in Martha's case, after several months in the job, it looks as if she just isn't winning. Her considerable strengths lie in analysis and precis, in reading the runes, not thinking on her feet while sounding relaxed and keeping the listener reassured. The WATO job demands above all else a steady-voiced, steely-nerved, interviewer, and while Martha struggles with this, Shaun Ley has excelled. He's the right person for the job, as he shows every Friday and Sunday.
This matters to me for several reasons, not the least of which is that I think the BBC is one of the best things about Britain—present phone-in scandals and other idiocy notwithstanding. And when it comes to BBC Radio Four, I'm with Stephen Fry, who described it as one of the best cultural inventions of the 20th century.
I also have something of a Pavlovian relationship with WATO. Since I was a small boy, lunch and WATO have combined in such a way as to almost make me drool; even if I'm listening in from the other side of the world, on the Internet, at midnight, the mere words "...thirty minutes of news and comment this xday lunchtime" cause me to put the kettle on and reach for the fridge door. Call me a radiophilic Hannibal Lecter, but Shaun Ley is simply better with food than Martha Kearney.
***
Dollars & Oil
An idle, ugly thought: we have made such a basket-case world that American military action is now motivated almost entirely by economics. Our leaders might talk about good and evil, freedom, and all the rest of it, but when it comes down to it, wars cost, and whatever moral principles or national interests might be cited, what counts above all in the neo-con corridors of Mammon, is cash.
Now, I'm not talking about Naomi Klein's Disaster Capitalism thesis here—wars may cost but they are also very good for (your friends') business—nor do I mean that the bean-counters are running the Pentagon (hardly!). Rather, I mean that American military action is now principally an instrument of monetary policy management, not physical defence.
The case, in a nutshell is this: The US economy, for better or worse, has long been mired in debt, kept afloat by massive and continuous foreign investment (which is now drying up as the dollar falls and capital flows to safer shores). In fact US debt is now so high the occupant of the White House may feel obliged to embark on another war—probably against Iran, possibly Venezuela—solely in order to drive up the price of oil further (an inescapable result of conflict in either country).
And why would the world's largest user of oil want to double or treble its fuel cost? Well, what else could save the drowning dollar? For where once the dollar was backed by gold, now it floats on oil.
Almost all the world's oil, and half the world's entire trade, is currently bought and sold in US dollars. Accordingly, central banks and commercial banks need to keep a substantial supply of dollars at hand to cover the business of government and commerce—more dollars are held overseas than in the US. But despite this economic bonus (that no other country enjoys), the astonishing level of debt in the US (public and private), is causing the dollar to fall in value, and this is a decline that threatens to deepen much further, much faster. Not surprisingly, no one wants to hold dollars if they don't have to: why own assets that are falling in value? Why own assets that everyone else might be dumping tomorrow?
But the real danger for the US government is if one or two of the larger oil producing countries decided to start selling oil in Euros instead of dollars. The effect of this on the greenback could be devastating, as trillions of dollars came on to the market at once. And if oil, of all things, starts to be traded in other currencies, many other commodities would likely follow, increasing the pressure on the dollar further. The world would be full of dollars no one wants—a disaster for America, to be sure. The calculation is obvious: better to live with gasoline at $4 or even $5 a gallon than $10 or $20.
And as things stand, while oil is expensive, and US soldiers stand guard over oil wells in the Middle East, everyone needs dollars, which keeps their value relatively high.
Trouble is, because of this international demand for dollars, the US has been printing money like mad for years—so much so, that even with oil at $80 a barrel and heading north, the dollar is slipping. Everyone can see that US spending is wildly in excess of its income, and that much of that spending is not investment in social and physical infrastructure, but on "defence" (the Iraq war is costing nearly a billion bucks a day, or about $1 trillion so far).
It would seem that the inevitable crunch must come sooner or later—as it must for all who spend beyond their means. The rest of the world isn't going to fund American excess forever—it simply can't. Even if the consequences of cutting off the cash are painful for other countries—and they will be—the costs of not doing so will, sooner or later, be worse. One brutal afternoon good old market forces will do their thing.
May
Hostage
Remember the Beirut kidnappings in the 1980s? John McCarthy and Brian Keenan and the others? It seems there's more to come, in Gaza this time. I can't imagine who could possibly stand to gain from abducting and holding a BBC reporter, but it seems someone thinks there might be some profit in it. Alan Johnson was taken on 12 March. Click on the banner for more.
Back to more familiar turf this month: our obsession with drugs.
A thought: as more and more of us quit smoking tobacco, I wonder when we'll see the headline: "Cannabis more popular than cigarettes"?
I mention this because the Independent on Sunday—a supposedly sensible and moderate paper here in London—has recently launched a minor Crusade against cannabis (their rather tired story can be found here, here, here, here, and here, with more to follow no doubt). Amazingly, this nonsense comes in the wake of their previous, and rather more vigorous campaign a few years ago to legalize cannabis—led by the redoubtable editor of the day, Rosie Boycott (who famously cried "it's good to get high" in Trafalgar Square ref). Lots of water has sloshed under the bridge since then, they would argue, and it seems even Ms Boycott herself is now back-pedaling like mad (ref).
Their case, it must be said, is very thin. It is the latest—perhaps the last—charge of the "cannabis-isn't-really-cannabis-anymore" brigade. The IOS claims that specially bred strains of cannabis are now so strong the stuff is sending users mad. They claim that "skunk"—modern day moonshine—is wrecking the sanity of users.
Embarrassingly for the IOS, not only does their blatant lack of research hint at the moral agenda behind their campaign, but their timing could hardly have been worse too. Several highly reputable studies into drugs and drug policy have been published in the last few weeks and they rather cut the rug from under the paper's feet. Far from supporting the IOS's case, these reports only serve to underline the fact that a major overhaul of UK drug policy is badly needed. As we shall see, the picture of drugs and drug use that we have been spoon-fed for the last twenty years or more is mostly a chimera.
One study, conducted by the RSA's Drugs Commission (ref), recognizes that drug use is unstoppable, and flatly declares that "the law as it stands is not fit for purpose." In an interview one of the authors condemned UK drug law for being "driven by moral panic", and declared current policy "broke". (ref)
And in case you're suspicious, as I was, that the members of this commission might have come from the Cannabis Appreciation Society, or suchlike, it turns out the RSA managed to retain the services of an Assistant Commissioner of Police, an MP, and even a former editor of the Daily Telegraph—hardly a bunch of pot-smoking hippies.
One of the first, and boldest, points this sober group make is that "The use of illegal drugs is by no means always harmful any more than alcohol use is always harmful." They go on to say that "a majority of people who use drugs are able to use them without harming themselves or others", and conclude that the only way to counter the harm that drugs do sometimes cause is by addressing the demand side—helping and educating users—rather than simply trying to prevent supply and consumption (prohibition). They say:
In our view, the success of drugs policy should be measured not in terms of the amounts of drugs seized or in the number of dealers imprisoned but in terms of the amount of harms reduced. The fight against the supply of illegal drugs should not stop, but it should be refocused so that it concentrates on organized criminal networks rather than on largely futile efforts to interdict supply. ref
Another study, published in the Lancet (ref), is, if anything even more august—and problematic—for the IOS. Conducted by two eminent British scientists (Professor David Nutt, from the University of Bristol, and Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council), the paper makes it clear that the current classification of drugs—supposedly based on the harms they cause and risks they carry—is a nonsense. (see graph below - BBC report here)
Nutt and Blakemore consulted various experts in various disciplines to arrive at a new classification of harm, based broadly on a substance's toxicity, its ability to cause dependence, and its involvement in wider social harm. This is the result:
This cuts against the grain of 30 years' worth of policy on street drugs, and potentially embarrasses politicians of every stripe, many of whom have repeatedly tied themselves to the mast of prohibition. The findings are eminently sensible, not to say obvious. Almost all the papers picked up the story (ref, ref) even the Independent (ref), though not, as far as I can see, the IOS.
Next, a new report prepared for the new UK Drugs Policy Commission, chaired by the unimpeachable Dame Ruth Runciman (BBC story here)—a study that again calls current policy into question. The report, "An Analysis of UK Drug Policy" (written by Professor Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland, USA, and Alex Stevens of the University of Kent, England), links Britain's "unusually severe drug problem compared with that of our European neighbours" to issues such as social and economic deprivation, and notes that Britain's ever more punitive laws on drug use, possession, and supply have had little effect: drug use has never been so popular.
When asked what the government’s response was, a spokesman brushed the question off by claiming that drug use has actually fallen by 16 per cent since 1998. And to underline the government's utter paralysis on the matter, Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker thrust his head firmly into the sand by announcing: "We have no intention of reviewing the drug classification system.” (ref) Well, what else was he going to say? "Yes, we've got it hopelessly wrong all these years—fancy a spliff?" I think not. Like prisons, there's no votes in drugs. Or at least, that's the political perception.
But what a perception this is! Never mind that almost all the experts are now saying what drug users themselves have long known: that the government's drug classification system is arbitrary, and that prohibition actually contributes to the very harms it is supposed to stop. Never mind that UK drug policy is in thrall to US Drug-War sensibilities (even the EU is starting to plough a new furrow on this - see here), you don't need to be a brain surgeon to see that alcohol, in the wrong hands, can be every bit as dangerous as any class A drug... But why do I let myself get bothered by this? I ought to know by now: industries to protect, media owners to placate, Americans to obey.
It looks as if the government, like the IOS perhaps, finds itself obliged to take a particular moral stance—one that it hopes will play well with the thin-lipped voters (or subscribers, or advertisers) of Middle England. Ministers boast about policy being “evidence based” but in light of studies like these this claim looks increasingly ridiculous. All the evidence suggests that the politicians’ favourite answer—good old-fashioned prohibition—only makes matters worse, yet in spite of the harshest penalties users and dealers have ever had to face, drugs have never been so cheap, or popular. As Professor Colin Blakemore, co-author of the Lancet study (and member of the Runciman commission) puts it:
[Drugs] have never been more easily available, have never been cheaper, never been more potent and never been more widely used. . . . The policies we have had for the last 40 years . . . clearly have not worked in terms of reducing drug use. So I think it does deserve a fresh look. ref
The IOS's ridiculous campaign still bothers me though, for two reasons: firstly, because I am someone who likes to smoke cannabis now and then (my own, organically-grown, I might add), and would rather not be considered a criminal for doing so (and after all, I am a grown-up, and it is my own mind and body I'm messing with). But secondly, and what really gets up my nose like a fizzy drink, is the intellectual position behind the IOS campaign: it's so partisan as to be dishonest. The current editor of the IOS, Tristan Davies, appears to have gone out of his way to avoid any decent science. The "arguments" the IOS musters are essentially personal anecdotes, unjustified assumptions, and tired old cliches that might sound good if you buy their moral line, but leaves much to be desired from the point of view of establishing scientific facts or reducing harm. For example, one of the IOS's central claims in favour of prohibiting cannabis is the much-trumpeted "fact" that the herb available today is very much stronger than the gentle weed smoked back in the 1960's summers of love—so much so that it can scarcely be called the same stuff any more. If the IOS are to be believed the new demon "skunk" turns lovable boys into violent, car-thieving maniacs.
This looks like Reefer Madness all over again—the notorious 1936 film that portrayed cannabis (marijuana in the US) as a dangerous drug that caused suicide, assaults, and madness. So, seventy years later, here we go again: cannabis isn't really cannabis any more. It's been turned into something different; something much more malign; something that really deserves the title Dangerous Drug. The IOS cites various anecdotes in support of this claim, including those of a failed pop star and a psychologist, but none of this is in the least scientific or rigorous.
Ben Goldacre, in his excellent "Bad Science" column in the Guardian, reminds us that cherry-picking data to fit a waiting headline or policy vacuum is not only common practice (even Tony Blair "fit facts to policy" in order to get the green light to invade Iraq), but in the case of the IOS it is also laughably wrong-headed. He wrote:
Last week's Independent on Sunday splashed with the headline: Cannabis - An Apology. It went on: "In 1997 this newspaper launched a campaign to decriminalise the drug. If only we had known then what we can reveal today ... record numbers of teenagers are requiring drug treatment as a result of smoking skunk, the highly potent cannabis strain that is 25 times stronger than resin sold a decade ago.
Twice in this story cannabis is said to be 25 times stronger than it was a decade ago. For Rosie Boycott, in her melodramatic recantation, skunk is "30 times stronger". In one inside feature the strength issue is briefly downgraded to a "can". It's even referenced. "The Forensic Science Service says that in the early nineties cannabis would contain around 1% tetrahydrocannabidinol (THC), the mind-altering compound, but can now have up to 25%."
Well I've got the Forensic Science Service data right here, and the earlier data from the Laboratory of the Government Chemist, the UN Drug Control Programme, and the EU's Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
. . . The LGC data on mean potency goes from 1975 to 1989. Resin pootles around between 6% and 10% THC, herbal between 4% and 6%, with no clear trend. The Forensic Science Service data takes over to produce more modern figures, showing not much change in resin, and domestically produced indoor herbal cannabis doubling in strength to between 12% and 14%.
The rising trend of cannabis potency is gradual, and driven largely by the increased availability of intensively UK grown indoor herbal cannabis. You could argue that intensive indoor cultivation of a plant that is easy to cultivate outdoors is the cannabis industry's reaction to illegality. It is dangerous to import in large amounts, dangerous to be caught growing a field of it. So perhaps it makes more sense to grow it intensively indoors, producing a more concentrated product. There is little incentive to produce a perversely strong skunk product for the mass market, since most people tend not to pay any more for unusually strong skunk.
There is exceptionally strong cannabis to be found in some parts of the UK market today: but there always has been. The UN Drug Control Programme has detailed vintage data for the UK online. In 1975 the LGC analysed 50 seized samples of herbal cannabis: 10 were from Thailand, with an average potency of 7.8%, the highest 17%. In 1975 they analysed 11 samples of seized resin, six from Morocco, average strength 9%, with a range from 4% to 16%.
To get their scare figure, the Independent compared the worst cannabis from the past with the best cannabis of today. But you could have cooked the books the same way 30 years ago: in 1975 the weakest herbal cannabis analysed was 0.2%; in 1978 the strongest was 12%. Oh my god: in just three years herbal cannabis has become 60 times stronger. This scare isn't new. In the US, in the mid 1980s, during Reagan's "war on drugs", it was claimed that cannabis was 14 times stronger than in 1970.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,,2041749,00.html
So much then for the "cannabis isn't really cannabis anymore" school of thought. (More on the origin of this myth here.)
There is, however, another, more serious thread to the IOS's bow, and that is that cannabis sends people mad. The data aren't brilliant on this, to say the least, but there does seem to be something to this claim. It appears that a small percentage of teenage boys, in particular, are susceptible to chemically-triggered psychotic episodes, and some of these cases have been linked to cannabis. See these stories:
Again, we must take care with this data because the facts are likely to be massaged to suit the story. If someone is perched on the edge of a cliff, a push from almost any direction could be enough to send him over. As any user will attest, cannabis simply does not agree with some people. The same can be said of many other substances, legal or otherwise, and I have seen no evidence to suggest that cannabis is any more likely to induce psychosis than many other drugs. Alcohol, for instance, is also implicated in adolescent psychosis (and unlike cannabis, alcohol kills thousands every year), but no one is suggesting that alcohol should be banned, or even more tightly controlled.
It may be an inconvinient truth for the banners and floggers at papers like the IOS and Daily Mail, but there is not one documented case, ever, anywhere, of a death directly caused by cannabis. Even the indirect causes (driving while stoned etc) are astonishingly low in comparison with those associated with alcohol. ref, ref, and ref. (Addendum: OK, so there might be one death attributable to cannabis...one....maybe... see here). We might note also that cannabis is much less toxic than alcohol, or even aspirin. RefRef
But all this is, or should be, by the by, because Britain's biggest drug problem—by far—is our deepening love affair with alcohol.
Britain has "lost the plot" when it comes to regulating alcohol, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) (BBC story here). Britain's galloping epidemic of so-called binge drinking has led to an enormous increase in alcohol consumption among the young, to the point where it is now considered quite acceptable to drink so much on a Friday night that you collapse unconscious in a pool of vomit and have to taken to hospital. As a solution, the IPPR suggests raising the drinking age to 21. This, by the way, comes after much debate about so-called 24 hour drinking (which really means supermarkets don't have to close their booze sections for certain hours during the day, as they used to), and much agonizing as to how to restrict youth access to alcohol.
Talk about avoiding the obvious: alcohol has never been so cheap. You can get utterly slaughtered on a pocketful of change.
If we want people to drink less, we should make alcohol more expensive, by taxing it, like the scandinavians do, and stop worrying about distractions like opening hours and the drinking age (unless, of course, we raise the drinking age to a sobering 35 or so...). Tobacco taxes have (rightly) risen inexorably over the years, while alcohol taxes have fallen in real terms. Many more people die from alcohol-related issues than any other drug, barring tobacco, yet the "fight" against "killers" such as Ecstasy, and now it seems even cannabis, continue apace.
What all this shows, beside the fact that governments just can't help restricting our liberty, is that human beings like to get high. We love our drugs. According to UN estimates we spend, globally, some $400 billion on illegal drugs (Ref). Add to that mountain of cash the legal drug trade—another $100 billion or so on booze, and as much again on tobacco and caffeine—and you can see that we spend quite a bit of money on psychotropic substances; about the same as the USA spends on defence in fact, and more than all human spending on iron and steel, or even motor vehicles.
What is needed, surely, is a new framework in which people can enjoy their favourite tipples legally and safely. But this is a discussion unlikely to take place any time soon; to your average politician the very prospect must be about as attractive as getting caught in bed with Osama Bin Laden.
EU Report on alcohol consumption (from Irish Government) - Here European Road Safety Observatory Data on alcohol - here AIM (Alcohol in Moderation) study - here Greenfacts alcohol website - here
As an afterword, I am in San Diego, California, as I write, and the Blacksburg shootings have just happened. As the aftermath-jamboree gets under way, a strangely American thing is happening: with a few notable exceptions no one seems to be interested in understanding why this kind of tragedy happens so regularly here, and how these disasters might be prevented in future. Granted, there is a bit of hand-wringing from a few columnists about the state of morality, mental health, and personal responsibility in America, but nothing much. Shrugs all round and calls to beef-up security seem to be the order of the day. The almost unfettered access to guns that Americans have is simply not up for discussion—you might as well ask them to give up meat. Only foreigners and traitors advocate restricting access to firearms, such is the cult of the gun here. American gun enthusiasts—horrified at the suggestion that any kind of gun control should result from a tragedy like this—typically respond by asking why one madman should stop the fun of many other law-abiding people. The comparison with libertarian arguments for legal access to drugs is irresistable. If only guns weren't designed to kill people, they'd almost have a point.
March
After a spate of fatal teenage shootings in south London a few weeks ago, the Tory leader David Cameron promptly declared British society "badly broken". Almost on cue, and as if to emphasize his point, a few days later a witless young offender made shooting gestures at Mr Cameron while he visited a deprived neighborhood in Manchester. The picture made all the front pages but the brou-ha-ha was as predictable as it was short-lived. The Prime Minister talked it down by insisting that these shootings (of teenage boys, in their own homes) were merely a series of unfortunate tragedies, not a symptom of some deeper national malaise. The press briefly screeched otherwise: the country is going to the dogs, they yelled, and our self-deluding, messianic leader either can't or won't deal with reality. All the familiar suspects were fingered: absent fathers, single mothers, the erosion of the "respect culture", you name it. Charges were laid, cases made, and then something happened on Big Brother, or something, and that was that.
The story has stayed with me, however, because I've just spent a couple of weeks as a commuter in and out of London, and I can unequivocally say that short of a sudden onset ice-age, or a re-run of the plague, or perhaps even a thermonuclear attack, Britain is indeed about as broken as it could be. And I don't just mean the horrendous state of the rail network and tube system, or the piles of rotting rubbish everywhere, or even theatmosphere of hostility and menace—the result of too many people pushed too close together—that seems to lurk beneath the surface in most public spaces. No, I'm talking about a deeper mindset: that peculiar set of cognitive patterns that comprise and define our collective nature and character. Psychologically—even spiritually—I think Britain is very fucked-up. We just don't care about anything—probably because we're too worried about the mortgage, and whether there will be any cash to pay for it this time next year. Moreover, I think the unpleasant state of the country is directly connected to the unpleasant state of affairs in Westminster, and the boardrooms that run Westminster: Britain is as much broken from the top down as the bottom up.
If you're growing up in a deprived corner of a British city; if you're one of the majority of kids who leave school barely able to read and with no qualifications to speak of; if you're looking at a life of low pay, or no pay, and almost certainly of no home ownership; a life, in other words, of permanent, and declining, state help, it must be more than a bit galling when the richest in the land—footballers, city traders, CBI members, and the like—are not only getting richer all the time, but are actually assisted in accumulating their sometimes rather dodgy wealth by those who run the country. Not since Rowntree first drew the poverty map of Britain has the gap between the richest and poorest been so great. Never mind that the poorest are richer in absolute terms than they were; as the economists and psychologists now know, fairness matters more than reward; more sometimes than survival.
And if you're bumping along near the bottom, is it any surprise that the idea of politics, or even "the democratic process"—so geared to the lives of others—seems faintly ridiculous, especially when it makes little or no difference who wins? The South London killings look a little different in this light. Whether it's £20 for a wrap of heroin, £2 million for a peerage, or a £20 million backhander for an arms contract, in one sense the concerns of the very rich aren't so different from the concerns of the boys in Moss Side or Lambeth. We're all trying to get on.
Britain is of course not alone in having problems—even social ones—but when it comes to social fabric, ours does seem to be rather frayed. Until the idea of government means something more to the poorest and most disaffected than simply rule by one privileged, remote interest or another, I don't see how "British Society" can be improved, or mended. This is a big job, to be sure, but there is an obvious starting point: justice. From whatever angle you look at it, justice, as fairness, matters to us all. But the expanding wealth gap must suggest to many that they are forgotten, an inconvenience; that they simply don't matter at all. Worse, they, we, are constantly exhorted to delude ourselves that fame, or riches, or some other fortune, is there for the taking, when the reality could scarcely be more different: social mobility is going down, not up. And yet, ironically, more and more of our TV is predicated on the democratic principle; you can vote for the best, or worst, contestant in all sorts of reality TV shows—with instant and real results—while the votes that really matter seem increasingly irrelevant. As the ever brilliant Mark Lawson says: "many voters [realize] that politics is a kind of talent-show in which they can't affect the result no matter how often they push their buzzers". Ref
The Commons vote the other night that supported a fully elected upper chamber is a promising move: social justice must begin with a meaningful mandate to govern. Let's hope it's followed through. But what would be most welcome is a commitment to a voting system in the lower house that is fair and that delivers members more representatively. Until and unless all votes are worth the same, many of our most pressing social problems will continue. And until every vote is fought for, only a lucky few—those who live in marginal seats—will be courted by politicians.
Edward Pearce on the New Right, Poverty, and the State - here
February
In his Timescolumn this week, top Tory boffin Daniel Finkelstein takes the psychologist Oliver James to task over his new book Affluenza(excerpt here). James's claim is a strong one: that "citizens of English-speaking nations are twice as likely to suffer mental illness as ones from mainland western Europe", and that we're going bonkers, in part at least, because of the "virus" of materialism that is fostered so assiduously in these lands (the US especially, where apparently more than a quarter of the population are affected by mental illness). James argues that the growing gap between rich and poor is one of the central drivers of our increasing unhappiness—a harsh corollary of which is that social mobility in Britain and the US is going down, not up. As things stand, a child born into a poor family is more likely to remain poor than used to be the case—especially in America. James's data come from impeccable sources such as the World Health Organization, so he can't be dismissed solely on the grounds of (undoubted) political bias. His hypothesis, however, which unquestionably has something to it, gets up the nose of a Tory like Mr Finkelstein worse than a dose of smelling salts. Finkelstein can barely contain his ideological contempt. You'd think his holy book had been desecrated—which, in a way, I suppose it has. But James's thesis is hardly the first to call classical economic orthodoxy into question.
Two centuries after Adam Smith's mighty Wealth of Nations first appeared, one of the sacred assumptions underlying classical economic theory—that humans are essentially simple, selfish, profit-maximizing brutes (and that we are thus being "irrational" when we turn down low pay)—has at last been shown to be wrong, or at least woefully incomplete.
As the Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith have shown, human beings are a bit more complicated than this worn-out old stereotype. In particular, they showed that economicinequality matters, as if we didn't know, not least because it enflames our sense of justice like little else: we feel humiliated and get upset when we're paid less than someone else for doing the same work. If you doubt this, just ask a few women. And it's not just humans either; the ethologist Frans de Waal has shown that even primates get upset if they are "paid" unequally for work they do (see "How Animals Do Business", April 2005, Scientific American - available here). James's claim that inequality is a cause of emotional disorders is thus hardly a radical one, and from an evolutionary point of view the principle of behavioral economics makes perfect sense: allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited is very unwise—even fish know this it seems. Besides, in a world where millions of children starve while a lucky few swan about in Ferraris, is it any wonder that some people—rich or poor—find themselves distressed? Shouldn't we all be?
I was fortunate enough to be in San Francisco last week. I say "fortunate", because the weather was unusually kind, the food unexpectedly spectacular, and, as it happened, America's answer to the Glastonbury Rock Festival was on. I refer, of course, to the week long Apple Computer-fest known as MacWorld. Anoraks everywhere, as you can imagine, and I fear I might have become one of them: you see, jamborees like this matter to me these days, now I am the proud new owner of an Intel-chipped MacBook Pro. This machine is by far the most powerful computer I have ever owned, and after more than twenty years of the Windows environment, my first Apple too. I love it. The OS X environment is fast and smooth and stylish, and the machine is packed with all sorts of features that are irresistible to a technophile like me.
All the same, I am writing this in Windows—on my new Mac... I installed Apple's Boot Camp, which allows me to run Microsoft's Windows alongside Apple's OS X operating system, and it works like a charm. But why run Windows when you have OS X? Isn't the Apple supposed to be better? Yes, well, unfortunately it isn't quite as simple as that.
The software I have long used for web work is dear old Dreamweaver—now owned by the supposedly Apple-friendly Adobe. Accordingly, I downloaded the latest Mac version and set it up, only to find that it ran so slowly I couldn't use it. Obviously I must have made some kind of mistake somewhere—after all, I do have the latest, hottest computer there is. I tried again. Same thing. It felt like trying to swim through treacle. A quick search online to see if anyone else had encountered the same problem showed me that I was far from alone—Dreamweaver and Apple do not get along it seems. I had to decide: learn a new piece of software in Mac, or do my web stuff in Windows. To the disgust of Macanistas everywhere, I'm sure, here I am in clunky old Windows. (Note to Apple aficionados—nothing's perfect, and this works.)
At MacWorld, the biggest corporate rock star on the planet, Steve Jobs, reminded his adoring fans that half of all Macs are now being bought by people who have never had one before, like me. I'm not surprised: it's a very friendly piece of kit. I even plugged in my old two-button PC mouse to see if right-clicking would work (Apple mice only have one button), it does—even in OS X. Perhaps computers are at last getting to the stage where they really can do what their makers claim, and what users want, without needing a PhD in computer science. I like having both major operating systems available to me, but I suspect I'll be spending most of my time on the Mac side.
There are one or two serious niggles with this machine though, and by all accounts I'm far from alone in feeling angry about one of them—which is to do with the DVD drive in the MacBook Pro, and in particular the region coding.
Apple have fitted a drive that asks you to choose a DVD region when you first insert a disc. It also informs you that you can only change this setting four more times. After that the drive is forever locked to the last region you choose. Quite why this silly restriction is in place I do not know. The putative reason—to do with film release dates—sounds ridiculous to me and obviously owes more to corporate sensitivities than to consumer rights. Needless to say there is no fix available—from Apple or anywhere else.
Now, given that many people—more every year I should think—buy DVDs in various parts of the world and will want to play them on their own machines, wherever they live, without limitation or restriction, why on earth does Apple Computer prevent them? Many stand-alone DVD players are region-free and will happily play any disc without any fuss. Even my old Windows computer plays anything I put in it. But not an Apple it seems. If you own DVDs from different parts of the world and want to play them on a MacBook Pro, you will have to buy an external DVD drive that ignores region coding. This is stingy, mean, and stupid of Apple, and does little to endear me to them. If some bright spark finds a simple way to put OS X on a PC (it seems they have but Apple don't like it - see here), my next machine may well not be an Apple. Come on Steve, be a sport, unlock my drive.
