House of Comments - Episode 103 - Full House

Episode 103 of the House of Comments podcast "Full House" is out. This week I am joined by Labour PPC Uma Kumaran and Max Wind-Cowie an associate at the think-tank Demos to discuss the budget including pensions and inevitably bingo, student loans and whether there is nepotism in parliament.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 103 - Full House’ on Audioboo

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us. We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

The "Lump of Criminality" fallacy

There is a widely understood and recognised fallacy within economics known as "Lump of Labour".

The rebuttal to it essentially says that the amount of work available within an economy is not fixed (as the fallacy would have us believe) but rather changes as the economy grows and changes. This can be as a result of organic growth or can also be as a result of other factors such as legislative and technological changes and things like immigration etc.

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This fallacy is highly reminiscent of an argument I have heard put forward to justify the retention of the current laws on drugs. It goes along the lines of: "Do you really think that if we legalised drugs, the drug dealers and barons would suddenly become nice people and stop being law breakers? Of course they wouldn't, they'd simply find other nefarious activities to replace the lost drugs revenues.".

This argument seems plausible on a prima-facie basis. If someone has got themselves involved in drug dealing they are likely to be something of a wrong-un and it does not take much of a leap of imagination to conclude they might get up to other dodgy behaviours were the drugs option taken away from them.

But this is very similar to "Lump of Labour". It's assuming that there is a fixed amount of criminality in the economy and that nothing we do can change that. Is it presupposing that all of those people involved in the black market drugs world would have progressed to crime anyway and they just happened to choose drugs, as if a criminal lifestyle is somehow predetermined outside of any cultural, legal and economic factors.

We might want to call this the "Lump of Criminality" fallacy. It is surely pretty self-evidently not true. Drugs at the moment are a highly lucrative activity. There are various estimates but one recent study puts the drug trade in the UK as valued at £7 billion per year. That is a huge amount of money currently available to the black market and even a tiny slice of those sort of revenues will make getting involved in criminality a more attractive option for some people. If you bring currently illegal drugs entirely within the legal economy those monies disappear. Yes I am sure some of those dodgy characters will find other illegal ways of funding their lifestyles but it is also likely that a fair number of them will move into the legal economy.

It is also worth bearing in mind that some of those who will decide to remain in the criminal world will be doing so because it's probably all they have ever known. They will have found themselves drug dealing to e.g. fund their own drug habit and now all of their friends and their entire lifestyle is on the wrong side of the tracks. But if drugs had been legal from the get-go they would have been much less likely to be in a situation like this. Hence as time goes on the chances of people in marginal situations turning to crime will be reduced too.

I'm not claiming legalising drugs will be a panacea. Of course it won't be. Drugs can be dangerous and even under a legalised framework some addicts will commit crimes. But the idea that changing the drugs laws will not do anything about the level of criminality in our society is a knee-jerk reactionary fallacy that does not really bear more than a few minutes scrutiny.

House of Comments - 100th Episode Extravaganza!

Episode 100 of the House of Comments podcast "100th Episode Extravaganza" is out. This week Mark is joined by Emma and Nick as well as former House of Comments co-host from way back Stuart Sharpe and our first ever guest from back in 2009, LBC presenter Iain Dale to celebrate our 100th episode. Topics discussed this week are the Harriet Harman and Jack Dromey NCCL/PIE story, Labour's special conference (which Emma spoke at) and the move to One Member One Vote and also whether the Conservatives and Labour would be wise to rule out potential coalition in 2015 as a manifesto commitment.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 100 - 100th Episode Extravaganza’ on Audioboo

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us. We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

Ed Davey's 24 hour energy switching? - Try 24 weeks

Let us all bask in gas's warm
 glowing warming glow

Back in November following the whole "energy price freeze" political ding-dong I thought it would be a good idea to look into whether I was getting the best deal for my gas and electricity. This was partly to potentially save a bit of money if possible and also as an experiment to see how straightforward the process is.

I had fixed my prices several months earlier and as since then they had gone up across the board for variable rate tariffs I had assumed I would be on a better deal than was available in the market. That turned out not to be the case. There were lots of deals that would have saved me money, in some cases well over £100 per year. I had found this out by going through the uSwitch website (which is one of the main recommended ways to do this I noticed when looking into it).

So I called up uSwitch on a Saturday afternoon in early November and went through a protracted conversation where I explained all my current tariff information which I had had to collate from my existing bills. We went through all the options and I finally decided to go with one of the independent suppliers (i.e. not one of the big six). But just when they tried to progress the switch during the call the woman I was speaking to told me there was a problem and that for that particular supplier they did not have the rights to use the pipeline that supplies my estate. I was a bit irritated by this as I had liked the idea of going with a smaller company but there was nothing I could do about it so instead I arranged to switch to one of the other big six suppliers and was informed soon after by e-mail:

Hi Mark,
We received your energy switch details and want to let you know it is now being processed.
This email contains all the details of your new plan, and can answer any questions you may have.
Congratulations on saving £127.19 a year on your energy!

I was told over the phone that it could take between 6 and 8 weeks so I made a mental note not to think any more about this until the new year.

When January came around and my direct debits for my existing supplier went through again I just thought we were only just outside the 8 week boundary and we'd had Christmas and New Year in between so gave it the benefit of the doubt and assumed it would happen soon.

When February came around and my direct debits for my existing supplier went through again I did start to wonder what was happening but I do know that these things often take longer than hoped for so I told myself to wait a bit longer.

But when yesterday I saw that the direct debits for my existing supplier were going to go through again this week and we are now 4 months on from when I set the switch in motion I called uSwitch to see what was happening and why my switch was delayed.

I was astonished to discover that they had no record of me at all on their system. My name and postcode yielded nothing and looking up my e-mail address also returned no record from their database. They were as perturbed about this as me are still trying to work out what went wrong but it is clear I have been sitting around waiting for a switch that was never going to happen.

I am sure this is not everyone's experience with switching and this will probably just turn out to be a clerical or computer error but I wanted to highlight how difficult this process can be in spite of all the high flown rhetoric from both government and opposition politicians and irrespective of how high up the political agenda the issue of energy prices is. I had to spend a good couple of hours in November getting all the information together and going through a very long phone call. And I have no doubt that when the fixed deal had run out in April 2015 I'd have to have done exactly the same all over again.

Of course irritatingly something went wrong with my switch and I suspect the deal I wanted will no longer be available. But when you have so many deals available from so many different companies to the extent that an intermediate body such as uSwitch is a recommended route for switching things are bound to go wrong. The fundamental problem is that the current system is too complicated to make transparent and straightforward comparison and switching possible.

If my experience here is anything to go by, we've got a very, very long way to go before Ed Davey's "24 hour energy supplier switching" can become a reality.

In my case it looks like it's going to be around 24 weeks.