There is a major point missing from this argument: readers don’t care. Bad, “unpublishable” books are finding an audience. I cannot claim to have read many of the books on the Kindle self-published bestseller list, but without a doubt there are many books that some people would find totally inept, but are finding an audience with many honest 5-star reviews.

Read more

Marching from A to B to voice vague objections to government spending plans, marching behind Labour and union leaders who fail entirely to offer a coherent alternative, is no longer a sufficient response to these cuts. It is not sufficient because this government, like the previous government, is not at all worried by the prospect of hundreds of thousands of people marching from A to B. They are worried about the prospect of a truly popular people’s uprising. They are worried about losing the ideological argument over the necessity of destroying the welfare state. They are worried by the prospect of a run on the banks engineered by digital people power, as just occurred in Holland, and they are worried about the prospect of a general strike. It’s safe to say that the government has a lot less to worry about this week than it did last week- and activists, anarchists, unions and the Labour movement all need to be asking ourselves why.

Read more

ING customers mobilised on Twitter and other social networks to protest at bonuses paid to bosses at the bank, one of the biggest in the country. The threat of direct action raised the spectre of a partial run on ING, terrifying the Dutch establishment.

..Jan Hommen, ING’s chief executive, was due to receive a £1m bonus – a pittance when you consider that Stephen Hester, head of state-controlled RBS in the UK, is in line for up to £7.7m, Bob Diamond of Barclays is to collect as much as £6.5m, and some senior bankers at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are looking at windfalls of about £40m each…

So severe was the public reaction to Hommen’s bonus that within days he had agreed to waive the award and told other ING directors to do the same.

Now the Netherlands is going through a painful period of introspection and soul-searching. Politicians have voted to implement a 100% retrospective tax on all bonuses paid to executives at institutions that received state aid as a result of the financial crisis. In other words, no banker should get a bonus until the debt is cleared, and they should return payments made since 2008.

ING was thrown a €10bn (£8.7bn) lifeline to stop it going under, while ABN Amro was nationalised. Numerous other Dutch financial firms received capital support, including Aegon, SNS Reaal and ASR Nederland.

Read more

China now plans to raise the relative growth rate of real wages and to encourage increased consumer spending. There will also be more emphasis on expanding service industries and less on manufacturing. State-owned enterprises will be forced to distribute more of their profits. The rising value of the renminbi will induce Chinese manufacturers to shift their emphasis from export markets to production for markets at home. And the government will spend more on low-income housing and to expand health-care services.

All of this will mean a reduction in national saving and an increase in spending by households and the Chinese government. China now has the world’s highest saving rate, probably close to 50% of its GDP, which is important both at home and globally, because it drives the country’s current-account surplus.

A country that saves more than it invests in equipment and structures (as China does) has the extra output to send abroad as a current-account surplus, while a country that invests more than it saves (as the United States does) must fill the gap by importing more from the rest of the world than it exports. And a country with a current-account surplus has the funds to lend and invest in the rest of the world, while a country with a current-account deficit must finance its external gap by borrowing from the rest of the world. More precisely, a country’s current-account balance is exactly equal to the difference between its national saving and its investment.

The future reduction in China’s saving will therefore mean a reduction in China’s current-account surplus – and thus in its ability to lend to the US and other countries. If the new emphasis on increased consumption shrank China’s saving rate by 5% of its GDP, it would still have the world’s highest saving rate. But a five-percentage-point fall would completely eliminate China’s current-account surplus. That may not happen, but it certainly could happen by the end of the five-year plan.

If it does, the impact on the global capital market would be enormous. With no current-account surplus, China would no longer be a net purchaser of US government bonds and other foreign securities. Moreover, if the Chinese government and Chinese firms want to continue investing in overseas oil resources and in foreign businesses, China will have to sell dollar bonds or other sovereign debt from its portfolio. The net result would be higher interest rates on US and other bonds around the world.

Whether interest rates do rise will also depend on how US saving and investment evolves over the same period. America’s household saving rate has risen since 2007 by about 3% of GDP. Corporate saving is also up. But the surge in the government deficit has absorbed all of that extra saving and more.

Indeed, the only reason that America’s current-account deficit was lower in 2010 than in previous years is that investment in housing and other construction declined sharply. If Americans’ demand for housing picks up and businesses want to increase their investment, a clash between China’s lower saving rate and a continued high fiscal deficit in the US could drive up global interest rates significantly.

Read more

In 1966, the specialists at the Pentagon went to US President Lyndon Johnson – a thug prone to threatening to “crush” entire elected governments – with a plan to end the Vietnam War: nuke the country. They “proved”, using their computer modeling, that a nuclear attack would “save lives.”

It was a plan that might well have appealed to him. But Johnson pointed out the window, towards the hoardes of protesters, and said: “I have one more problem for your computer. Will you feed into it how long it will take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President?” He knew that there would be a cost – in protest and democratic revolt – that made that cruelty too great. In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard Nixon – and we now know from the declassified documents that the biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldn’t do it. Those protesters went home from those protests believing they had failed – but they had succeeded in preventing a nuclear war. They thought they were impotent, just as so many of us do – but they really had power beyond their dreams to stop a nightmare.

Read more

Economic inequality among nations and other factors have contributed to a global food system in which a billion people are hungry (lacking access to sufficient amounts of macronutrients such as carbohydrates, fats and proteins), another billion suffer from “hidden hunger” (lacking crucial vitamins and minerals from their diet), while yet another billion are “substantially overconsuming,” spawning a new public health epidemic involving chronic conditions such as Type 2 diabetes and widespread cardiovascular disease.

The report, which was prepared by the research firm Foresight on behalf of the British government, also predicts that the cost of food worldwide will rise sharply in coming decades, increasing the likelihood of food-based conflicts and migration, and that people won’t be able to feed themselves without destroying the planet—unless we can transform the global food system on the scale of the industrial revolution.

Read more

The country will reduce its nuclear capacity goal of 80 gigawatts, Ren Dongmin, the head of the economic planner’s renewable energy development, said at a Beijing conference today, without giving a new target. The goal for solar-power capacity will increase from the current target of 20 gigawatts, he said.

Read more

all, even the least religious, retain in their minds when they think of the future, an idea of the deus ex machina, of some transcendental, superhuman event which will, without their help, bring the universe to perfection or destruction. We want the future to be mysterious and full of supernatural power; and yet these very aspirations, so totally removed from the physical world, have built this material civilization and will go on building it into the future so long as there remains any relation between aspiration and action.

Read more

Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people’s resources, they will dump their waste in other people’s habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves and exploit those who are less powerful. The survival strategies that once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract.

The democratic challenge, which becomes ever more complex as the scale of human interactions increases, is to mimic the governance system of the small hominid troop. We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time, we must ensure that the state is also treated like a member of the hominid clan and punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.

I doubt that Ridley would be able to sustain his beliefs in a place where the state has broken down. Unless taxpayers’ money and public services are available to repair the destruction it causes, libertarianism destroys people’s savings, wrecks their lives and trashes their environment. It is the belief system of the free-rider, who is perpetually subsidised by responsible citizens. As biologists we both know what this means. Self-serving as governments might be, the true social parasites are those who demand their dissolution.

Read more

In place of an obvious indigenous militant group, and with scant evidence of organised al-Qa’ida activity, the regime has focused on Darnah. The city has a tradition of sending volunteers for jihad. In 2007, US forces in Iraq found a list of foreign fighters: of the 112 from Libya, Darnah, with its population of 48,000, supplied 52.

Abdul Hakim Al-Hasidi, who took over as ‘chief of security’ at Darnah at the start of the uprising on 17 February, spent five years in Afghanistan where he supposedly met bin Laden and frequented, according to US intelligence briefings at the time, a training camp used by both the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. Mr al-Hasidi claims he has 1,200 fighters, which would make his group one of the largest contingents among the revolutionaries, known as the Shabaab. He has personally led units into battles in Bin Jawad and Ras Lanuf where the action has been fierce.

It is, however, not easy to ascertain details of Mr Al-Hasidi’s links with Islamic militancy. During a recent meeting in Darnah, he was reticent to talk about his Afghan sojourn and his alleged meetings with bin Laden. He was not a member of al-Qa’ida, he stated, and did not follow its ethos. Mr Al-Hasidi refused to elaborate on a previous observation that bin Laden “had his good points” and described claims of his links with the head of al-Qa’ida as “just tales”.

He was keen to point out he was a member of the Benghazi regional council, which liaised with the administration now being recognised by a number of states as Libya’s de facto government and whose members are attending the summit in London.

The 45-year-old teacher insisted he did not want the Talibanisation of Libya. “Afghanistan is a different country,” he said. “We have got our own situation in Libya and I am a member of the council which has all kinds of people in it. If I wanted to have a state like the Taliban, would I belong to the council? We are already a Muslim country and we shall follow the path of Islam. We do not need to bring in foreign ideas on how to be Muslims. I am not even teaching religion in my job, I teach geography.”

While refusing to discuss who gave him lessons in arms in Afghanistan, Mr Al-Hasidi acknowledged: “Yes I was there. I did not like the attack by America (in 2001) because it was unjust. A lot of civilians, women and children, were killed by bombs dropped from the sky.” The Tripoli regime, he continued, was simply trying to demonise its opponents. “I was a political prisoner in Libya and all I want is justice for our community.”

Read more