Serendipity Book

Tax Freedom Day

April 30th marks Tax Freedom day in the United States, the date when the average American stops working for the government and starts working for themselves.

According to the Adam Smith Institute we don't get ours in the UK until 1st June!

Tax Freedom Day is calculated by taking the UK's net national income and calculating how much of that is taken away in taxes. These taxes include not just income tax, but VAT, inheritance tax, stamp duty, car and fuel taxes, excise taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, taxes on companies and employment, and many more. For technical stuff about how Tax Freedom Day is calculated click here.
Tax Freedom Day varies around the country for a description of why and how much, click here.

Ah well, we still get better holidays.

Where would you rather work?

Mercer have announced the results of their latest expat quality of life city survey and The Economist have kindly charted some of it for us. 

Mercer’s study is based on 39 measures grouped in the following categories:

• Political and social environment   (political stability, crime, law enforcement, etc)
  
• Economic environment (currency   exchange regulations, banking services, etc)
  
• Socio-cultural environment   (censorship, limitations on personal freedom, etc)
  
• Health and sanitation (medical   supplies and services, infectious diseases, sewage, waste disposal, air   pollution, etc)
• Schools and education (standard and   availability of international schools, etc)
• Public services and transportation   (electricity, water, public transport, traffic congestion,   etc)
• Recreation (restaurants, theatres,   cinemas, sports and leisure, etc)
• Consumer goods (availability of   food/daily consumption items, cars, etc)
  
• Housing (housing, household   appliances, furniture, maintenance services, etc)

The complete rankings can be viewed here. Interesting that almost half of the 30 top-scoring cities surveyed are in Western Europe and yet London ranks at 39.

The Trap - Whatever Happened To Our Dream of Freedom

I just finished watching the final part of Adam Curtis' latest documentary for BBC2, The Trap - What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?

Using only a voiceover, huge amounts of archive b-roll and the occasional interview, Curtis argues that the hegemony of the concept of freedom has underpinned all of the major ideological shifts in post cold war global politics.

Spiked provides a great synopsis:

The thesis of the series is quite straightforward. It is in fact stated clearly and often, and it is patently not a conspiracy theory. It is that we live today within a conception of freedom and of ourselves that is narrow and limiting. It is an ideology which views human beings as selfish, mistrustful, isolated individuals who are seen, and have come to see themselves, as simplistic beings who can be understood and directed through the application of scientific techniques. This diminished view of the self might have been of use in countering communist tyranny but it was a ‘trap’ and it has left us with ‘no positive vision in the face of all the reactionary forces’ that it has in fact helped to awaken around the world, says Curtis.

From a review by Charlie Brooker in The Guardian:

Curtis has an uncanny knack for hovering coolly above recent world history and spotting huge, sweeping, disturbing trends, then recounting them in a way that feels subversive and playful, thoughtful and entertaining, all at once. He has an incredible eye for archive footage, assembling one haunting montage after another, apparently from thin air. His programmes unfold like a series of revelations; watching one is like having all your slumbering suspicions about the world - suspicions so dormant you didn’t even realise they were suspicions - confirmed and explained for the very first time.

As with all of Curtis' recent work for BBC2 (Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self) The Trap makes for very seductive and stimulating television but somehow as I find myself getting drawn into his arguments I can't shake off the suspicion that I am being hoodwinked by a master storyteller. All the same this is must-watch television.

If you want to find out more about the themes featured in The Trap then the fabulous Intute: Social Sciences database can help:

The first programme looked at how mathematical models of human behaviour influenced security decisions in the Cold War and later the field of Economics as Game Theory sought to explain the economic choices made by people. It also looked at the ideas of R.D. Laing and his controversial work that challenged the role of psychiatry in the diagnosis in mental health disorders. Curtis brings these ideas together to explain the rejection of the idea that politicians and bureaucrats act in the public interest.

The second programme looked at the role of genes in determining behaviour and cited the Ax Fight anthropological study of the Yanomamo people, as well as, the work of Richard Dawkins. These ideas were brought together with the economic theories of Friedrich Von Hayek to produce governments obsessed with targets and measurable outcomes. Curtis argues that this obsession produced distorted outcomes, reduced social mobility and reinforced existing elites, causing economists to look again at the game theory / free market model and reassess the concept of behavioural economics.

The final programme saw how Isaiah Berlin’s work on liberty had shaped political theory and had been used to justify extreme economic deregulation in Russia, which produced a crisis in Russia’s economic transition. It concluded by looking at how neoconservative ideas about using military force to bring freedom to Nicaragua and Iraq had interacted with modern terrorism to end up restricting freedom in Western countries.

Sadly, if you want to get hold of a DVD of any of Curtis' work then you are out of luck. In response to the demand for DVD copies of The Power of Nightmares, Curtis has been quoted as saying:

The problem is that the films are full of archive film and music from a multitude of sources. The reason my series are normally not released on DVD is that it is prohibitively costly and a nightmare - no pun intended - to clear the rights.

Nonetheless his works are very easy to find on Google Video or YouTube and the BitTorrents are everywhere.

Earlier: The Power of Nightmares

Only 8% of UK adults consider web to be primary news source

These news media consumption numbers from KPMG surprised me - I expected more people in the UK to have switched to the web as a primary means of news by now ...

• Just 8 per cent of UK respondents named the Internet as their preferred source of news
• This figure rises to 26 per cent among 18-25 year olds in the UK.

Plus it's quite surprising (to me at least) that the UK lags Spain in terms of web news media consumption ...

• Use of internet news sites was significantly higher across all age groups in Spain than in the UK, the US, Germany and the Netherlands.
• Around 70 per cent of Spanish respondents under 25, and 60 per cent of Spaniards 25-35, said they get their news from the web.

Via: Press Gazette

The stuff that sells newspapers No.3

Photo credit: LinkMachineGo

Press manipulation

In a week where the British press leapt on details provided by police of an alleged plot to behead a soldier, Nick Cohen in the Observer appeals for more freedom for the press.

His argument is that defence solicitors should be given equal access to the media, thereby allowing them to represent their clients' interests.

Cohen advocates trial by media on the grounds of free speech and the public's right to know, conveniently forgetting that the press will never achieve a fair and balanced representation of the facts in any case.

Furthermore, as is often the case with these stories, it was not the police or the CPS that handed the press the details of the alleged plot but the government. As The Evening Standard reported:

"The senior policeman leading the investigation into an alleged plot to behead a Muslim British soldier believes the inquiry has been "hijacked" by the Government. Assistant Chief Constable David Shaw was "seething" when he discovered Whitehall officials leaked sensitive details of Operation Gamble to the media in an apparent attempt to divert attention from the problems engulfing Tony Blair."

They go on to note that "Conveniently for the government, [this story] replaced the prisons crisis as the story of the week - and took the sting out of the cash-for-honours row that saw Tony Blair questioned by police for a second time."

Those who wish to manipulate our press have never had it so easy.

The stuff that sells newspapers No.2

As one of the comments says: "I wonder if this headline is about crime or just the average price of bottled water in central london".

Photo credit: LinkMachineGo

There are no facts, only interpretations

I'm still reading Andrew Marr's 'My Trade' . Marr is a British TV presenter and has previously been the political editor of the BBC and before that was the editor of The Independent newspaper. 'My Trade' is a fantastic warts and all autobiographical take on the world of journalism.

Early on in the book, Marr spends some time reflecting on the anatomy of news and discusses why news bears so little relationship to fact ...

"What is a news story? This question confronts most hacks most days of their working life. Of course there are human events which interest almost everyone. We are perpectually intrigued by the extreme, the gruesome, the outlandish. But there is not a reliable supply of these events.

So journalists learn to take less extraordinary things and fashion them into words that will make them seem like news instead. Journalists reshape real life, cutting away details, simplifying events, 'improving' ordinary speech, sometimes inventing quotes, to create a narrative which will work.

It isn't only journalists. Everyone does it, most of the time, mostly unconsciously. We hear a piece of gossip and as we retell it, we improve it, smoothing away irrelevance and sharpening the point; we turn experiences of friends and relatives into bolder, more heroic or tragic episodes than they really are. Above all, we turn our own daily life into a chain of 'stories', always looking for shape and meaning in the cascade of experience. Journalism is the industrialisation of gossip.

He concludes that "news is not facts" and the job of a journalist is "not, I repeat not, to give a blandly  accurate account of an unremarkable moment, but to have found 'the story' or failing that 'a story'."

As Nietzsche said: "There are no facts, only interpretations".

I can't believe we still have to protest this crap

Seen at the United for Peace protest march in Washington DC on Saturday:

Photo Credit: Bill D'Agostino

More pictures from the march here.

The stuff that sells newspapers No.1

This picture was taken at an Evening Standard pitch in London by Flickr user LinkMachineGo on October 6th 2006. The Daily Mail also ran with that story on the same day. You've sure got to hand it to those guys down at Associated Newspapers. They really know how to stir up a bit of outgroup hatred to shift a few more newspapers.

Reading the reaction of that guide dog owner reminded me of the Disability Rights Commission's Disability Debate website. The site is being heavily promoted on posters near my house which urge me to take part in the debate using the lame tagline: "Are you taking the dis?". Anyway, before I saw that Daily Mail article I was struggling to understand what the debate could possibly be about. I mean, who could possibly be against advancing the interests of the disabled? Now of course I know. It's the bogeyman.