Holy Smoke!

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Today’s International Herald Tribune has nice piece by Ralph Blumenthal based on a visit to Le Thor, the village in Provence where Pierre Salinger, JFK’s Press Secretary, made his home. Concludes with this story, which will touch the heart of every cigar smoker:

Here in Le Thor, Mr. Salinger’s penchant for fine wine and cigars is fondly recalled. A centerpiece of the museum is a large wooden cigar box, all that remains of a gift that Nikita Khrushchev presented Mr. Salinger during a visit to Moscow in 1962. The 150 cigars had come from Fidel Castro and violated the newly installed embargo. President Kennedy was aghast, directing Mr. Salinger to surrender the cigars so Customs could destroy them.

Years later, Mr. Salinger reflected ruefully that he could have done that himself, “one by one.”

Sigh. In the Summer of 1968 I took an impoverished elderly friend to dinner at l’Epicure, a lovely French restaurant (now sadly gone) in Greek Street in Soho. After dessert, I asked my guest if he would like a cigar. His face lit up: yes, he said, very much. So I summoned the waiter and said we’d like to see a selection of his better cigars. He went off and whispered to his boss, when then approached us and, bending down, asked me in a confidential tone “Would either of you be an American gentleman, Sir?”. “Certainly not!” I replied indignantly. He smiled, bowed and withdrew, returning a few moment later with… a box of Cohibas. Bliss!

Too Much Email? Try this

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Quentin’s two tips for those who are overwhelmed by email.

Don’t have it on all the time, and for God’s sake don’t let it ping or beep at you whenever a message comes in. That way madness lies. For your loved ones as well as for you. I tend to check my emails in the morning and in the evening. Occasionally in the middle of the day…but don’t count on it.

Email isn’t instant messaging. If people need an immediate reply they should be using some other technology to contact you. And one of the best ways to ensure you get more email is to keep responding to it promptly! Besides, I often read emails in a spare minute on my phone, when replying isn’t really practical.

You know it makes sense.

How to reboot the economy (and fix some other problems on the way)

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I’m no economist (nor an Hungarian either, as Tony Benn once observed, in an age when Harold Wilson’s two main economic advisers were Tommy Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor), but I can’t help noticing that there’s a very strong correlation between economic activity and the housing market.

Every time someone buys a house, for example, in addition to the work the transaction provides for professionals (surveyors, estate agents, valuers, lawyers) there’s also work for plumbers, electricians, builders and DIY stores as the new owners set about imposing their personalities on their new dwelling. As homeowners embark on renovations or upgrades, finding an experienced electrician near me becomes a vital step in ensuring that all electrical work is completed safely and efficiently. Whether it’s installing new lighting fixtures, upgrading outlets, or rewiring spaces to accommodate modern technology, a skilled electrician plays a crucial role in helping homeowners achieve their vision. This collaboration not only enhances the functionality of the home but also adds value, ensuring that the electrical systems are reliable and up to code.

You can see this multiplier effect in action in any location (e.g. London, Cambridge) where the housing market is still buoyant. But you don’t see much of it in, say, Liverpool or other northern cities, which are indeed mired in recession. It’s not rocket science, therefore, to infer that one practical way of getting the economy moving again might be to loosen up the housing market by encouraging — indeed subsidising — housebuilding, and by tackling the structural deficiencies that is making houses so outrageously unaffordable for large swathes of the working population — including most couples in their twenties and thirties. Just as I was thinking this, I stumbled on a very thoughtful post by Tim Harford, who is an economist, and an insightful one at that. Tim had been going round asking economists what should be done to reboot the economy. The answer, they told him, is that the government has to find a way to get more houses built.

Could a house-building splurge make a difference? Surely. The UK has recently been building a little over 100,000 new homes a year, but the country is acquiring more than 200,000 new households annually, largely as a result of its internal demography, but with net immigration also playing a part. The shortfall has been substantial for many years; there is no reason to expect the UK couldn’t find a use for 300,000 or even 400,000 new houses a year for the next few years – and that means, very roughly, a million new jobs in construction, the entire number of unemployed people under the age of 25. Building houses is an occupation that could plausibly play a substantial role in creating useful jobs and stimulating demand for several years. How, then, to make it happen? The chief obstacle to house building in the UK is the planning system, which, 65 years ago, did away with the idea that if you owned land, you could build on it, and replaced it with a system where planning permission was required. Permission to build houses is severely rationed, and such rationing can be seen clearly in the gap between the value of agricultural land without planning permission (a few thousand pounds a hectare) and the value of such land once permission has been granted (a few million). The difficulty is that local authorities have the ability to grant planning permission but have little incentive to do so, because it tends to be unpopular with existing voters. The huge windfall from winning planning permission falls to whoever has managed to speculate on land and navigate the tangle of planning rules. These serve as nice barriers to entry for existing developers, while driving up the price of building land and so driving down the size of new homes. Tim Leunig, chief economist at CentreForum, a think-tank, has proposed a two-part system of land auctions to get around this problem. Local authorities would buy land at auction, grant planning permission on it and then sell the land on to developers – with some strings attached, if they so choose. The profits would be enormous, and enjoyed by existing residents in the form of lower taxes or better public services. This isn’t the only way to liberalise planning, but it retains local control and democratic accountability – while dramatically increasing the incentive to develop. The Department for Communities and Local Government said last year it would “pilot elements of the land auctions models, starting with public sector land”. That is like practising a dinner party with a doll’s tea set. The government has been in office since 2010; the financial crisis is five years old. A bit of urgency wouldn’t hurt.

Politicians: don’t mess with Shoreditch

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This morning’s Observer column on David Cameron’s obsession with ‘Tech City’.

Politicians are desperately keen on “innovation” for a variety of reasons. They think it’s cool and progressive and puts them on the right side of history. It promises to bring growth and prosperity either to their constituency, or to marginal ones, or to both. It impresses the prime minister. It gives rise to endless photo-opportunities. And so on.

In pursuing this obsession, politicians have two kinds of tool at their disposal. The first is area-focused and involves planning laws, tax-breaks, subsidies and other fiscal wheezes. The second approach is company-centred and aims to create incentives that will persuade technology entrepreneurs to carry out this mysterious activity called “innovation”.

There are a number of problems with this. The first is that most politicians – at least in Britain – couldn’t run a bath, never mind a company. The vast majority of MPs have no idea what it’s like to meet a monthly payroll, and only a tiny percentage (only one out of 650, according to a recent study) have experience of advanced research. So they have no idea of what’s involved in technology start-ups, which is why they have as much credibility with entrepreneurs as the aforementioned maiden aunts have with yobs.

The consequence is that most government policy in the field of technology is a combination of blissful ignorance and wishful thinking…

North-West Frontier v2.0

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From Dexter Filkins’s sobering New Yorker assessment of the prospects for Afghanistan after the American withdrawal in 2014.

After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished. Objectives once deemed indispensable, such as nation-building and counterinsurgency, have been abandoned or downgraded, either because they haven’t worked or because there’s no longer enough time to achieve them. Even the education of girls, a signal achievement of the NATO presence in Afghanistan, is at risk. By the end of 2014, when the last Americans are due to stop fighting, the Taliban will not be defeated. A Western-style democracy will not be in place. The economy will not be self-sustaining. No senior Afghan official will likely be imprisoned for any crime, no matter how egregious. And it’s a good bet that, in some remote mountain valley, even Al Qaeda, which brought the United States to Afghanistan in the first place, will be carrying on.

American soldiers and diplomats are engaged in a campaign of what amounts to strategic triage: muster enough Afghan soldiers and policemen to take over a fight that the United States and its allies could not win and hand it off to whatever sort of Afghan state exists, warts and all. “Change the place?” Douglas Ollivant, a former counterinsurgency adviser to American forces in Afghanistan, said. “It appears we’re just trying to get out and avoid catastrophe.”

Or this:

It may be that American officers, after eleven years of doing almost everything themselves, have created such a sense of dependency in the Afghan government and military that they must now see if their charges will stand on their own. And maybe they will. But the American strategy appears to be an enormous gamble, propelled by a sense of political and economic fatigue. The preparedness of the Afghan Army is only one of the many challenges that are being left unresolved: the Afghan kleptocracy, fuelled by American money and presided over by Hamid Karzai, is being given what amounts to a pass; and the safe havens in Pakistan which allow Taliban leaders and foot soldiers an almost unlimited ability to rest and plan remain open. After so many years, this is it. There is no Plan B. “I think it will be close,” a senior American diplomat told me in Kabul. “I think it can be done.”

Oh yeah? The Americans have discovered what every other Western government that tried to control Afghanistan has learned. It can’t be done. The funny thing is that the Brits could have told them. They tried — and failed — umpteen times between 1849 and 1947.

In praise of… Ryanair

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The shark, originally uploaded by jjn1.

This is one of those blog posts that lead people to cancel their subscriptions. I’ve just come back from an academic assignment at one of my almae matres (that’s plural of alma mater, since you ask) — University College Cork. As usual, I flew on Ryanair. Indeed, I had little choice, because I live near Stansted and Ryanair is the only carrier that has scheduled services between there and Cork.

The plane was full on both the outward and return trip. The flights departed and arrived on time. The boarding and disembarking processes were efficient and painless. And the fares were reasonable. And I suddenly fell to thinking: what’s not to like?

At this point, most of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances leap onto my shoulder, where they perch like a flock of cathecising parrots. They complain about, inter alia: Ryanair’s outrageously bumptious CEO, Michael O’Leary; the company’s crassly commercial website with its hidden (and pop-up) traps for the unwary (for example the one that makes the choice of travel insurance a default which can only be turned off by hunting though a drop-down list of countries; or by having non-optional pop-ups trying to flog you car hire or hotels); its fierce restrictions on cabin-baggage (and the brusque way they are enforced by staff); the way it charges extra for everything (speed-boarding, seat-reservation, even the mandatory online check-in); how it adds an “administration fee” for using a non-Ryanair credit card when booking; the intrusive (and idiotic) inflight audio ads for scratch cards, phone cards and coach tickets; the bumpy touch-downs it incentivises in order to achieve rapid turnaround of planes; the canned trumpet fanfare that announces “yet another on-time arrival”; and lots more complaints that I’ve heard but cannot at the moment recall. Listening to this chorus of disdain and disapproval it’s easy to slip into the cliched view of Ryanair as the company that everybody loves to hate.

There’s just one problem with this. How come that Ryanair’s planes are always full? Last year Ryanair carried 79 million passengers, operated 300 aircraft on 1,500 routes. It had fewer cancellations than any other carrier and mishandled far fewer bags than any of its competitors. (The worldwide average for mishandled bags is 9 per 1000; Ryanair’s is less that 0.5 per 1000). If people really hate the company, then they have an odd way of showing it.

I suspect that the cognoscenti’s distaste for Michael O’Leary’s enterprise has something to do with the fact that he stripped away the romantic and exclusive aura that surrounded air travel during the era when it was an expensive mode of travel available only to a tiny elite. When I was a child in the 1950s, for example, only the rich — or company executives who were not paying for their tickets — flew. The Irish national airline (state-owned Aer Lingus) was a glamorous outfit, and a career as an Aer Lingus “Air Hostess” was much prized. (My first father-in-law wanted his daughters to be Air Hostesses because he thought that this would provide them with a fool-proof way of landing rich husbands. Both girls grew up to be militant feminists, I am glad to report.) Every Autumn a fixture on Irish fashion-editors’ calendars was the show in which Aer Lingus displayed the new outfits — designed by some fancy couturier — that their airborne stewardesses would be wearing that year.

But it was much the same in most other countries. National airlines were national flagships. And passengers were treated like royalty. In 1968, as a result of a reservation error, I was once upgraded onto First Class on an Aer Lingus morning flight from London to Dublin, and was astonished to find myself being offered unlimited quantities of champagne. But of course this royal treatment never came cheap. The implicit deal was that you paid through the nose for the privilege of air travel, but that lots of extras — together with sycophantic service and champagne — came with the ticket.

Ryanair’s original sin was to call this bluff. It was the first European airline to recognise that air travel had become a routine commodity. And one of the first (after the sainted Freddie Laker) to realise that if air travel were realistically priced then ‘ordinary’ people would become frequent fliers. Michael O’Leary’s fixed strategy ever since has been relentlessly to pare away the romantic illusions and charge people on an itemised basis for anything over and above their seats. And although they might not like this, passengers recognise that the deal they are getting is at least an honest one.

Ryanair has changed my life for the better. It has made it immeasurably easier to keep in touch with my extended family — who live up and down the Western seaboard of Ireland. In the old days, a journey from Cambridge to there was a two-day affair, involving a long car journey to Holyhead, a three-hour ferry voyage, and then a four or five-hour drive from Dublin. Same story on the return journey. Not surprisingly, we didn’t go back very often. But when the regional airports in the West opened up — Knock in Mayo and Farranfore in Kerry — Ryanair immediately offered scheduled services to both. (Aer Lingus, needless to say, snootily declined to service such low-rent locations.) And where Ryanair went, my kids and I followed. As a result, the family dislocation that used to follow emigration was reduced or dissolved, something that IMHO has been an unmitigated blessing.

So you can perhaps see why I’ve begun to bristle when I hear the well-bred distaste for Mr O’Leary’s airline being endlessly rehearsed. You may not like his style, or how he does business, but at least Ryanair does what it says on the tin.