The 1859 Situation

'In the present age . . . the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society. There are, it is alleged, certain beliefs, so useful, not to say indispensable to well-being, that it is as much the duty of governments to uphold those beliefs, as to protect any other of the interests of society. In the case of such necessity, and so directly in the line of their duty, something less than infallibility may, it is maintained, warrant, and even bind, governments, to act on their own opinion, confirmed by the general opinion of mankind. It is also often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practice.

'This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness, and flatters itself by that means to escape the responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions.'

-JSM

More About Growth

A couple of days ago I argued that economic growth was an ethical good because at a certain level growth was equivalent to an increase in human security. Grinding poverty is not decorous, it is desperate, degrading and above all dangerous. Getting out of that poverty is a Good Thing.

It's a powerful argument, because it doesn't just apply when it's about Chinese peasants escaping subsistence agriculture. It applies in Britain too: when the Corus steel plan at Redcar was mothballed earlier this month, 1,700 people, plus all who depend on them, discovered themselves more vulnerable than they'd ever expected. My guess is they'd understand the link between growth and security.

But we can't just say "as long as there's one person for whom economic growth can provide security, then it's justified". The are different types of growth, and different types of security, which matter, and which contradict such a simple conclusion. Not all growth promotes security.

Britain's recent economic experience illustrates this all too well. We are told we've gone through a period of 'debt-fuelled growth', and for the sake of argument, let's say this is true. If so, then it's obvious that a pattern of behaviour which involves taking on more and more debt simply in order to keep buying things isn't going to end in a net gain in 'security.' Rather the reverse. And similarly now, if we're going into a period when debts are repaid, albeit at the cost of reduced consumption (recession), then we can surely say that there are gains in personal 'security' as the debts are paid down. If that's the case, then on a net basis, the argument for security would have argued against at least some part of the 'growth' of the last decade. And I think it would be right, Redcar workers notwithstanding.

But not all economic growth is fundamentally 'debt-fuelled' - and what's more, I've got much less against credit as a concept than you might assume. So, strip away the excess of debt argument, and can we reassert that growth always will increase personal security and, more widely, wellbeing?

We cannot. I'll start with an observation: once the initial excitement is past, bull markets are horrid experiences for all concerned, even for its chief beneficiaries. By the end of most major bull markets, its participants (an ever-widening breed) breath their self-disgust with every breath. I once resigned from a Wall Street investment bank at the top of a bull market because of the ridiculous amount of money they proposed to pay me (ah! happy, younger, days). And I remember visiting Indonesia in 1996 at the very peak and apogee of Suharto's boom, and being bewildered and alarmed by just how angry everyone was. 'If that's how they're feeling now, when they're getting rich, what are they going to feel like when things get tough' I asked.

And on the contrary, the nicest times and places are those which are deep, deep, into bear markets and recessions. Ever since the Bubble burst in Japan in 1990, it's been a truly beautiful place to be. Even Hong Kong became an almost tolerable place after the financial crises of 1997/98.

Dickens had it right: it's the best of times, and the worst of times. . .

I think there's something systematic about this, and it's not just that things get 'irrational', or that the distribution of rewards during sharp business cycle upswings and/or bull markets is 'unfair' - though both these may be true. Rather, it is something measurable, urban and specifically a-human. It is that at a certain time-density of transactions , a certain speed' of economic activity, then the "rewards to agglomeration" become the driving factor. Why? Because when put under a certain economic and monetary pressure, a certain agglomeration of different talents itself becomes a decisive factor in the innovation and creativity which drives the cycle. And as a consequence, economic benefits are distributed not just to labour and capital, but also to the physical agglomeration itself - the city.

This sounds complicated, but what it means is that you end up living in a smaller flat, because even though the business cycle means you're getting rich, the value of the city itself is getting rich faster. The beauty of this theory is that you can actually see it, and measure it, as it happens.

But then parlay it back to the people involved: what it means that for almost everyone,their ability to stay in the city, or the terms on which they stay in the city, deteriorates just as the rewards to staying in the city are at their greatest.
In a word, they watch their security disappear in direct proportion to the strength of the bull market or economic upswing. For the 'winners' its an enervating experience. For the 'losers' - well, they simply get driven out of the city, like peasants driven off the commons. No, a severe bull market, or extremely rapid growth, is no contributor to human security.

Sadness and Impiety of the Sage

Probably the Tyne's biggest and certainly its highest-profile venture - The Sage arts complex. As if an arts centre can flourish on the grave of the society and economy on which it is visited. I doubt they can even cover the lighting bill.

The Virtue of Economic Growth

It seems strange that I need to argue for the virtue of economic growth, but it is so. There's a strain of ethical thought which, though it usually doesn't feel it needs to articulate itself clearly, can speak and think comfortably about the evils of growth, and the desirability of limiting it. I don't want to dismiss it entirely, because there are circumstances in which I'd go hand in hand with this strain of thought. But when I do, I know the circumstances are exceptional. The 'benefits of no-growth' arguments are a very special subset, and embracing them too easily provides easy access to a broad and well-populated highway to what almost always turns out to be someone else's hell.

So I'll admit it - I love economic growth. I love its effects, and I love its means. Show me an industrial town in the back of beyond, and I feel at home. I'll deplore the pollution along with the rest of you, but secretly, my heart is at ease. Show me round a Chinese factory, and where you might see a sweatshop, I see work, and growth, and hope. It's probably in the blood.

But if so, it's there for a reason. One day in the early 1990s, I was being shown round the Pearl River Delta, Guangdong. China was still in a post-Tiananmen deep freeze, though the scariest black-is-white period of repressions was easing. I worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review at the time, and my tour of the Pearl River Delta was probably part of the process of thawing - six months after my tour, Deng Xiaoping turned up in Shenzhen, and kick-started China again. Anyway, I was being shown round someone's house - an Asia boom-town villa, with aircon, sofa and the beginnings of a a garden, complete with concrete moongate. I like gardens, so I was poking around, and I saw his compost heap over in the corner - a pile of straw beginning to moulder nicely. 'What's that?' I asked via the translator. 'Oh, it's where I used to live'.

His straw hut. The alternative to growth.

In my bones, I think people who find it easy to oppose economic growth have no experience, even at second-hand, of what poverty does. Of how poverty grinds and enslaves, degrades and dehumanizes. I don't think they really know that at a certain level, economic growth is an unmitigated ethical good. I don't think they really appreciate that the attainment of a certain level of material decency is just A Good Thing. Indeed, if you haven't got it, it's almost The Good Thing. I have no doubts about this at all: the story of my career has been watching economic growth haul hundreds of millions in Asia out of desperate grinding poverty, and into a level of material decency which empowers them in ways unimaginable to generations of their forefathers.

I was standing on the footbridge spanning the Tyne just below the Sage a few months ago, watching the sun go down. In its way it was beautiful, and I'd been reading about how the salmon have returned. But actually to me, it was a dead river - a river which all the urban geography told you was meant to be a hard-working river. Now it's got no shipyards, just the money-pit Sage arts complex and somewhere down there, some salmon. Honestly, I don't think it's progress. I'd rather sit and watch the loaded barges churn up the smelly old Huangpu.

And of course, I remember paddling in the River Holme at the bottom of the valley, which turned blue or green or purple depending on what DP Dyers were working on at the time. I remember the steam and smoke drifting down the valley. Childhood memories, yes, but also memories of a town which was once prosperous, and is now quite obviously less so.

At bottom, the point about economic growth is that for most people most of the time, it equates to increased security. And for all too many people is the bedrock need upon which all hopes and dreams, and most human relations, are either built, or founder. Certainly I can feel this deep down, because there's what - probably only three generations of ancestors? separating him from me. My ancestors' acts of bastardy on the factory floor. And there's less than a generation needed to link his industrial dreams to mine - less than a generation, masked only by absolutely necessary ship-of-Theseus multiple mental/emotional replacements.

The pursuit of security, then, is my argument for growth.

Next time I'll destroy it.

To the Messiah

The last time I heard Messiah sung in full was in a most elegant new concert hall in Tokyo, who's precise acoustics suited The Sixteen's precision immaculately. Last night we packed hugger-mugger into Huddersfield Town Hall to hear the Choral do it.

Huddersfield Town Hall is ground zero for the Huddersfield Choral Society singing the Messiah. It is to the Messiah what Bayreuth is to Wagner. But with this difference: that Wagner chose and created Bayreuth, whilst it was the men and women of Huddersfield that chose and created this Messiah. It is their expression of themselves, of their communality, and of their faith (though in what need not be too closely investigated).

The place is, of course, packed, though tickets are expensive. Black tie is common for the men, and in the Mayor's Box some johnny has got himself up in white tie and medals - a foreigner, we all agree. The choir troops in, great solid phalanges of sonic potential, stretching up to the highest blocks at the back. A bald and very solid looking elderly man sits at the organ. The surprisingly small orchestra comes on, and you wonder how they'll cope with the forces ranged behind them. The soloists, serious and self-regarding as they should be, though they are not the stars of the show, as will become clear soon enough.

It starts with a hymn - everyone on their feet, and this is not a place for holding back, so the hymn is sung. Back down again, squeezing into your seats, and we wait for it to start. 'Comfort ye, my people!'

And then the tenor starts in on 'Every valley shall be exalted' and it strikes me for the first time ever, that, of course, this includes the Colne and Holme valleys in particular. That what's being sung here is an affirmation and a promise, of present worth and future prospects. Every valley shall be exalted, even these grim and raining valleys where the mills are (or were) running lights into the night. And then the moment arrives, and the Huddersfield arise en masse, suck in great tides of air, and sing 'And the glory, the glory of the Lord, shall be revea - ee -ee-ee-led'.

And they could be said to be proving their point. Listening them sing, the first shock is of the huge and (you think) potentially inexhaustible power they are keeping in reserve. Later, as things go on, there's something more - the quite extraordinary nimbleness and sheer amazing skill and vocal dexterity on display. 'He trusted in God that he, would deliver him, let him deliver him, if he delight in him' is taken at a lick that I seriously doubt even the Sixteen would have contemplated, and it's a breathtaking slalom run, riotous and mischeivous and deadly serious.

If listening to the Sixteen do the Messiah was like watching a Ferrari tackle the swerves and curves and power-straights of a Grand Prix circuit, listening to the Huddersfield do it is like watching a massive and muscular racing Bentley do it at the same pace.

And so the evening passes. Each time the chorus rises, there's a thrill of anticipation, almost always rewarded with something jaw-dropping. Up we all go for the Halleluyah Chorus. We listen, critically (for this is, among other things, probably the most critically aware audience in the world - there are people here who've heard in 20, 30 times, and still bring in the score to check all is being done properly), as the soprano tries to sink into the utter quiet and simplicity of 'I know my Redeemer liveth' which, it strikes me, is the emotional and spiritual core of the whole work. She manages it, just about, by the end. And then it's on, on, willingly carried away on the tied of sound that is Part III.

By the time we get to 'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain' we have resolved all complexity, and it's now time for solid muscular declaration. All this stuff about the Lamb, of course, is lapped up here in the mill towns, the wool towns - maybe another reason this is Ground Zero for the Messiah.

We have reached the Amen chorus. After all, it starts tentatively, wanderingly, only to build up in confidence, complexity, volume and density until - and the morning after, this barely seems like an overstatement - you feel you are listening to the voice of heaven itself. The audience is on its feet, clapping and cheering, even whilst the voices are sustaining the last Amen.

This is the triumph of the common man, the little man, us, who've built this town out of these valleys, out of these outcrops, against the weather and reason. The women don't for the most part look glamourous in their unflattering blue dresses. The men in black tie look solid, but older and weatherworn - you know them because they pass every day on the street, hat down, collar up against the weather. Yet tonight they have pulled off, as every year, another miracle, another triumph, another mighty affirmation of themselves. We stand and cheer, and its ourselves we're cheering. The soloists and conductor come back on, and of course, it's their job to be cheered, but it's the chorus we're here for, and they've done us proud. For one night, every year, they've turned this hall into a communal rite, a triumph all can embrace, and we are rightly grateful.

This is a musical experience as authentic as any anywhere. As we crowd out into the raining night, I wonder 'Is Huddersfield Town Hall, with its wonderful acoustics, modelled on the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, perhaps?' And outside, in the carpark, as we swap notes and raptures with strangers, just now friends, I point my children to the hulks against the skyline: the old mills, their shapes still clear, if not their purpose. 'That's what did this' I tell them.

I am the Woolman's Son

Four years ago in March my father died. He'd worked to try and keep a West Yorkshire mill afloat, and finally threw down the struggle in autumn 1987, just before the market collapsed. He was a smoker, and they put 'emphysema' on his post mortem, but it's more likely he died of a particularly bad panic attack.

I was brought up counting the factory chimneys, and waiting for the mills to close. My father loved his golf, and his clubhouse happened to be the house of Richard Oastler, factory reformer and abolitionist. In my teens I read his testimonies. I also read the volume of Hayek my father gave me when I was 16 - the only, and right book I needed at the time.

Now I work my family's passage analysing Asian economies for money managers of various degrees of aggression and success. And I attend my local Quaker meeting. Earlier this year I attended a Quakers in Business meeting in Manchester, and came away largely dissatisfied with the comfort and ease with which a consensus of the virtue of the public and 'third' sectors was assumed, as was the evil of the financial sector. 'We don't get many Quakers from the financial sector' I was told.

I didn't agree then, and I don't agree now. Finance is a weighty matter, and the early Quakers knew it. But if you take it seriously, as you should, because it will certainly take you seriously, and if, moreover, you have Libertarian instincts, then there's some thinking to be done. What's more, I have the legacy of John Bellers, Quaker and economic thinker, to wrestle with.

Here's where I'll do it. I am the woolman's son.